Once, while teaching a class of environmental science students in China’s Hebei University of Science and Technology, I asked who knew what a laughing kookaburra was. There were many blank faces. Then I tilted my head, much like a kookaburra does, and opened my mouth: “kok-kak-KAK-KAK-KAK-KOK-KAK-KOK-kook-kook-kok, kok, kok”. I became the “bushman’s alarm clock”.

Students burst out laughing. Hands waved in the air. They knew. They all knew. The call of the kookaburra is known worldwide.

Why do kookaburras “laugh”? It’s a declaration of territory. “I am here. This is my space.”

How long has it been part of the Australian landscape? Indigenous Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay and Wiradjuri people named the “guuguubarra”, so for at least 65,000 years.

Genetic analysis suggests its ancestors can be traced back roughly 16.3 million years. So we can be sure kookaburras have been laughing for a very, very long time.

It is shocking, then, that the laughing kookaburra is now in trouble. A combination of human-driven factors – climate change, bushfires and land clearing – is rapidly driving down numbers of this iconic kingfisher species across its range along Australia’s east coast.

Why Are Kookaburra Numbers Falling?

In 2003, the New Atlas of Australian Birds listed the laughing kookaburra as abundant. By 2015, The State of Australia’s Birds report noted them as being in major decline.

What changed? Recent research shows worsening fires are adding to the woes of kookaburras, on top of land clearing, removal of old trees with nesting hollows, state permits to control local numbers and being regarded as an exotic species in Western Australia and Tasmania, where they were introduced more than a century ago.

The tree hollows kookaburras need to breed can take a hundred years to develop. Every forest patch felled means hollows are lost.

Over the past 200 years, nearly 50% of our forest cover has been felled. Urban development all along Australia’s east coast has continued.

Fire Is A Growing Threat

Increasing fire frequency and severity due to climate change are having damaging impacts on kookaburras across south-eastern Australia. Megafires – those that burn more than 10,000 hectares – used to occur about once a decade. Now they are happening more often.

The 2019-2020 “Black Summer” fires were not confined to one state or season. From September 2019 through to March 2020 they burnt more than ten million hectares of native vegetation. The impacts on wildlife were huge.

In the years after fire, the dense regrowth of vegetation gives many birds a flush of abundant resources for food, nesting, cues for breeding and protection from predators.

However, dense new ground growth could hinder the kookaburra’s hunting by making it harder to spot prey. This species sits high in a tree from where it pounces on its prey, which is mostly taken on the ground.

Research has also shown dense post-fire vegetation has less prey, such as basking lizards, a vital part of the kookaburra’s diet.

Research shows laughing kookaburras leave areas of dense post-fire growth. They prefer areas that haven’t burnt for decades.

Kookaburras also compete for prey with other birds, such as the currawong. A currawong forages both on the ground and in the canopy. In denser vegetation, this gives it a competitive advantage over the kookaburra.

If trees with hollows are burnt down, kookaburras also cannot nest. Kookaburras forced to move to new unburnt or uncleared areas must compete for hollows with other highly territorial kookaburras and species such as parrots, owls and possums.

State Policies Aren’t Helping

The Victorian government has issued permits to remove kookaburras from their territories in certain areas. These included three “Authorities to Control Wildlife” by lethal means in 2022 and another in 2023.

The government website says these permits can be issued when wildlife causes damage to property, poses a risk to human health and safety, or is harmful for biodiversity. It is hard to imagine which of these categories justifies permits to kill kookaburras in their native habitat.

The maximum number for lethal control across 2022 was four, and three in 2023. However, kookaburras are highly social birds. They live in family groups of about a dozen individuals with a dominant pair, juvenile helpers and young. If the dominant pair has been dealt with “by lethal means”, it’s devastating for the group.

Two Australian states, Tasmania and Western Australia, treat the laughing kookaburra as an introduced species. In Tasmania (but not WA), the species is unprotected because of its status as an exotic species.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the “first pair” to breed successfully was taken to Tasmania around 1906. But this assumes kookaburras, which are found on other Bass Strait islands, were not already there and could not fly across Bass Strait.

In Tasmania, kookaburras are much maligned and it’s legal to kill them – despite this being the one state where the species isn’t in trouble. One concern is that, as a carnivorous bird, its impact on small reptiles and birds is immense. But other birds, such as the two species of currawong on the island, hunt the same prey as kookaburras.

We Can No Longer Take Common Species For Granted

As climate change results in more bushfires and we continue to clear-fell old habitat trees, the fate of the laughing kookaburra – our icon of the ages – could be sealed. That once-ubiquitous call will be heard no more.

While considerable resources necessarily go to threatened species programs, it is imperative, too, to give more resources and attention to species we have long thought of as common. If species such as kookaburras and koalas are disappearing, then the threatened species have no hope.

Diana Kuchinke, Lecturer in Ecology, Federation University Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Set aside the apple and the snake. Set aside the unforgiving God. The loss of Eden is a story about the consequences of monumental folly and needless greed. Having soiled paradise, we live now in a harsher, bleaker world.

In The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown, the South African author and naturalist Adam Welz shows we are repeating those errors, sowing and reaping our despoilation. His book is a thoughtful, perceptive, empathetic and sorrowful account of the consequences of our increasing subversion of the natural world that gives us life.

Review: The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown – Adam Welz (Bloomsbury Sigma)

By now, we are all aware of the devastating losses brought by increasingly frequent environmental catastrophes: the Black Summer bushfires, the floods, the coral bleaching, the droughts, the mass fish kills, the retreat of glaciers, the loss of polar ice, the days of unbearable heat.

Most people recognise that, as the creators of climate change, we are the responsible agents; we have put ourselves on a pathway that is rushing us towards destruction. Many of us have been directly affected; all of us will be indirectly affected.

In End of Eden, Welz describes some of the myriad losses of nature caused by such disasters. One of his examples is the impact of Hurricane Maria on the Puerto Rican parrots known as Iguacas. Following a long history of clearing of its habitat, its remaining wild population became restricted to a single national park in highland rainforest. By 2017, following decades of care by conservation agencies, this remnant population was at last seemingly secure, and the population had built to about 650 birds.

In vivid prose, Wenz describes what then happened when the hurricane tore through and destroyed this forest. Through radio-tracking, scientists were able to establish that maybe only one bird survived the onslaught. But after a few days lost in the devastated landscape, that single bird succumbed too.

In this case, happily, not all was lost for the Iguacas. Although the entire wild population was wiped out, some individuals in a captive breeding facility survived, providing a tenuous thread for the ongoing existence of the species.

It is a story with many lessons, but preparedness for inevitable disaster is an important message.

Subtle Entangling Impacts

End of Eden does much more than count the environmental toll of individual catastrophes. The effects of climate change are more subtle, more pervasive. Much of its effect is nuanced and gradational, and hence less obvious but more insidious.

Welz’s approach is to paint intricate portraits of plant and animal species, and of places. He gives us insights into how flora and fauna are woven into their ecological setting, then describes how that weave is unravelling.

Some of these accounts are heartbreaking. Millions of years of finely tuned evolution has perfectly adapted the biology of species to their environments. These adaptations are being rendered fragile and increasingly incapable of dealing with the rapid and unremitting changes we have wrought upon the world.

The cheetah is one such case. Exquisitely designed for speed, and hence so successful at hunting in the open plains, its habitat is being crowded out by increasing tree cover, a consequence of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.

The cheetah’s specialised adaptation is now a failing, and the species is rapidly heading for extinction.

There are many comparable examples. Welz gives accounts of decline and loss of plants and animals, of the gathering emptiness. In some cases, we can decipher the cause, as scientists have – painstakingly, lovingly – learned to see the world from the perspective of a plant or animal, understand its weak points and define the chain of causality.

The Southern Yellow-billed Hornbill of the Kalahari is part of the fabric of that place, but populations are dwindling. Climate change is the root cause, as rising temperatures now often exceed the physiological tolerance of the males, leaving them unable to gather enough food to deliver to their dependent young and brooding females. They starve, and nesting now fails, year after year.

Even more intricately layered is the case of the Red Knot. For one subspecies of this shorebird, the mudflats of northwestern Africa are a key staging point along their migratory route, because within the mud there is a rich resource of small clams. In the 1980s, more than half a million birds congregated there.

But the population has now fallen by at least 80%. The problem lies thousands of kilometres away in the breeding grounds of northern Siberia, where warmer temperatures mean the snow covering melts earlier each year. The Red Knots now arrive too late to coincide their breeding with the pulse of insects that follows the melting snow.

Their young are now malnourished; breeding success has collapsed. Food limitation in infancy has also resulted in shrinkage of their bills. These increasingly shorter-billed birds cannot so readily access the clams hidden below the mud in their non-breeding area. Their bodies, formerly tuned to remarkable migrations, are failing them. Further decline seems inexorable.

There are many other examples of such losses in this book. Each plays out in a different area, at varying pace or magnitude. In each case, a species has its existence cruelled by one or more of the many manifestations of climate change.

These natural history narratives – of species struggling with new regimes of heat or fire or the chemical composition of their environments – illustrate the pervasiveness and multiplicity of climate change’s effects. Individually, they are saddening; collectively, they are devastating.

Change, Chaos And Causality

Welz writes that “climate change” is too gentle a phrase. He suggests “climate breakdown” is more apt, as it better conveys the likelihood there may be no recovery from this transformation and the multiple, complex and interactive processes that follow from our greenhouse gas emissions.

A characteristic and strength of this book is the counterpointing of its wildlife narratives with explanations of the workings of these causal factors. There are mechanistic descriptions of the processes of fire, thermoregulation, migration, wind, vision and evolution. Through Wenz’s accounts, we see the receding wildlife, but also understand the factors that have subverted their lives.

Much of the collapse of nature – the extinctions, the population crashes of previously abundant species, the losses which we barely perceive – can be attributed to our ongoing destruction of natural habitats, our resource use, the effects of invasive species, and other factors. Climate change is not the only concern.

But climate change compounds these effects. It pervades all natural systems. It has rapidly become the primary driver of much of this decline. And of course the causal factors are, ultimately, due to us.

The End of Eden is a harrowing, necessary book: it shows that we are now witnessing, and causing, the destruction of Eden. We are sentencing our descendants to a less bounteous, less wonderful world. Much of nature has been lost; much more will disappear.

Welz’s concluding chapter does, however, offer a little hope, a frail pathway to recovery. There are no new or startling solutions proposed. Indeed, the final section is cursory. Wenz’s argument is essentially that as we increasingly come to recognise what we are losing – the kinds of losses he documents so well in this book – our society, all of us, will eventually recognise the need to take the actions required to save our future.

We have a limited opportunity to prevent the fall.

John Woinarski, Professor of Conservation Biology, Charles Darwin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The fourth global coral bleaching event, announced this week, is an urgent wake-up call to the world.

While the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s announcement is not unexpected, it’s the second global mass bleaching in the past decade. It heralds a new reality in which we can expect more frequent and severe bleaching events as ocean temperature records continue to be broken.

Cycles of decline and recovery are normal for coral reefs, but the windows for recovery are now shorter. Stress events such as marine heatwaves are coming faster, with less warning. These events are also more widespread.

The latest global sea surface temperatures remain above long-term averages.

As the southern hemisphere shifts into winter, the northern hemisphere’s tropical oceans enter summer. Heat will start to accumulate, this year from a higher base. Reefs are more likely to be under greater heat stress earlier than in previous years.

What Happened Last Summer?

Widespread mass bleaching is new for coral reefs. The first global bleaching event was in 1998.

Global mass bleaching events are “called” when significant coral bleaching is confirmed in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans.

The current event is shaping up to be one of the most severe yet. It began as severe heat stress accumulated in the northern hemisphere summer of 2023. It continued into the southern hemisphere summer of 2023–24.

In the past, summer temperatures on the Great Barrier Reef peaked around February. Now, ocean temperatures are higher for longer. We see maximums above historic values well into April.

On the Great Barrier Reef, large areas were exposed to record-breaking heat stress over its summer (December to March). Prevalent bleaching was observed on three-quarters of surveyed coral reefs in shallow water.

The images below show the reef at North Keppel Island in the southern Great Barrier Reef before bleaching in May 2023 and during bleaching in March 2024. (Click on and drag the slider back and forth to see the difference.)

While it is too early to know the full impact, it is shaping up to be one of the most serious and extensive mass bleaching events recorded on the Great Barrier Reef.

Why Are Coral Reefs So Important?

Coral reefs are vital for ocean health. They also provide food, income and coastal protection from storms and floods for an estimated 500 million people. They cover less than 1% of the seafloor but support at least 25% of marine species.

Like the polar regions, coral reefs are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases are heating the oceans.

Can Reefs Recover From This Event?

This current global event is still unfolding. Its full impacts will not be known for some time.

Some coral deaths are immediate. Some colonies recover, while others succumb after the ocean heat subsides. Complex local and species-specific differences are typical for the responses of corals to heat stress and their recovery after an event.

Bleaching occurs when corals under severe stress expel the symbiotic algae living in their tissues, causing them to turn completely white. Though not dead, corals are weakened by bleaching. Those that survive are more susceptible to diseases. Bleaching could also impair their capacity to reproduce.

More than 40 years of data analysed by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network show a downward trend in the amount of coral on reefs between 2009 and 2018. This coral loss reflects the cumulative impacts of previous coral bleaching events and local pressures such as pollution, destructive coastal development and overfishing.

After the devastating multiyear bleaching event of 2014–17, some reefs regained some of the lost coral cover during low disturbance periods. Most of the gains were by fast-growing “tabular” corals, which may change reefs’ species composition.

An Opportunity To Learn More About Saving Reefs

Long-term monitoring identifies areas of coral reefs that recover naturally after a disturbance, and areas that don’t. This information helps reef managers and scientists know where to focus their efforts to assist reef protection and recovery.

At present, this information is often sparse. Monitoring the world’s reefs is challenging. The total global area of shallow-water coral reefs is estimated at 249,713 square kilometres. Many reefs are in remote locations.

Recent monitoring innovations will improve access to quality data in the medium term.

While devastating, mass coral bleaching events provide a unique opportunity for research to inform actions. In Australia and around the world, scientists are studying which corals are the most tolerant of heat, whether corals are adapting to marine heatwaves, why corals recover differently and how to use this knowledge for interventions that can improve reef resilience.

Science that enables actions that mirror the local conditions – both biophysical and socio-economic – will enable interventions to be more locally relevant.

What Can We Do?

How fast the world acts to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming will determine which reefs, marine species and ecosystem functions and services can be maintained.

A multi-pronged approach for protecting and restoring coral reefs has guided many management strategies, plans and calls to action around the world. These have been largely focused on local and regional actions and solutions. In Australia, there has been significant investment in water-quality management and in research and development of coral reef restoration techniques.

Science plays an important role here. Ideas are cheap but implementation is difficult and expensive. Effective global collaborations can find more cost-effective solutions to improve reef resilience.

Tackling local factors that affect the health of coral reefs remains important, as are innovations to protect and restore coral reefs. But, above all, urgent action to curb the effects of global climate change is vital for the health of our oceans and the people who depend on marine resources.

Britta Schaffelke, Manager International Partnerships and Co-ordinator of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), Australian Institute of Marine Science; David Wachenfeld, Research Program Director – Reef Ecology and Monitoring, Australian Institute of Marine Science, and Selina Stead, CEO, Australian Institute of Marine Science, and Professor of Marine Governance and Environmental Science, Newcastle University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Humans love the coast. But we love it to death, so much so we’ve destroyed valuable coastal habitat – in the case of some types of habitat, most of it has gone.

Pollution, coastal development, climate change and many other human impacts have degraded or destroyed swathes of mangrove forests, saltmarshes, seagrass meadows, macroalgae (seaweed) forests and coral and shellfish reefs. We’ve lost a staggering 85% of shellfish reefs around the world and coral is bleaching globally.

When healthy, these coastal habitats help feed the world by supporting fisheries. They are home to more than 100 species of charismatic marine megafauna, ranging from sharks to dugongs. They sequester carbon, thus helping to slow climate change. The list goes on.

Healthy coastal habitats are the gift that keeps on giving. We need them back, so there’s a lot of enthusiasm for restoring these habitats. For example, we can plant mangroves, build new shellfish reefs and reduce pollution to help seagrass grow back.

But we want to recover more than just the habitats. We want the animals they support too. We need to know if restoration is helping animals.

We analysed restoration projects around the world to assess how animals are benefitting. Compared to degraded sites, restored habitats have much larger and more diverse animal populations. Overall, animal numbers and the types of animals in restored habitats are similar to those in natural habitats.

So restoration works. But outcomes for animals vary from project to project. Not all projects deliver the goods. As a result, resources are wasted and humanity misses out on the huge benefits of healthy coastal habitats.

Animals Can Respond Well To Restoration

We collated over 5,000 data points from 160 studies of coastal restoration projects around the world.

Excitingly, animal populations and communities were remarkably similar to those in comparable undisturbed natural sites. For example, restoring seagrass off Adelaide’s coast brought back invertebrates, which are food for many fish species Australians love to catch, such as Australasian snapper. Invertebrate numbers here were comparable to nearby natural seagrass meadows.

Overall, our review found animal populations in restored coastal habitats were 61% larger and 35% more diverse than in unrestored, degraded sites. So restoration produces serious benefits.

Some projects recorded dramatic increases. For instance, after oyster reefs were restored in Pumicestone Passage, Queensland, fish numbers increased by more than ten times. The number of fish species increased almost fourfold.

And animals can occupy newly restored sites surprisingly quickly. Fish and invertebrate numbers in restored seagrass and mangroves can match those in natural sites within a year or two. This happens even though the vegetation is far sparser in restored areas.

Our study shows that efforts to restore coastal habitat certainly can help animals thrive.

Results Are Not Guaranteed

Although restoration generally helped animals, good outcomes are not guaranteed. We found many projects where animal numbers or diversity barely increased. It was not clear why some projects were great for animals and others had lacklustre results.

Some restoration sites could be in places where animals cannot easily find them.

In other cases, actions to restore the habitat may simply not work. Despite our best efforts, we failed to create suitable environments.

It could be that animals are returning to restored habitats, but we’re not capturing them with our monitoring.

We sorely need more consistent restoration outcomes. We may lose community support for restoration if, for example, it doesn’t deliver on promises of improved fisheries.

We are still working out how to restore coastlines effectively. Clearly, more work is needed to improve techniques and the monitoring of animal numbers.

Global alliances and groups are developing standardised frameworks to guide restoration practice and to report on project designs and outcomes. Such strategies and co-ordination promise to deliver more consistent benefits.

New Technologies Can Improve Monitoring

Monitoring animals and restoration outcomes in coastal habitats is challenging. These aquatic habitats are structurally complex, often impenetrable and hard to navigate, and can be dangerous.

New technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and environmental DNA (eDNA), allow us to collect more and better data on which animals are present and how they use these habitats. We’re rapidly becoming less reliant on hauling in nets or diving down to count animals.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used, for example, to extract information from underwater cameras. We can monitor animals more often, in more places, for less cost.

AI algorithms were recently used to automatically identify, size and count fish in videos taken on restored oyster reefs in Port Phillip Bay, Melbourne. These data were then used to calculate increased fish productivity due to restoration efforts. And what an increase it was – over 6,000 kilograms of fish per hectare per year!

Combining underwater videos with automated data extraction provides a new, reliable and cost-effective method for surveying animals ethically and efficiently.

We still face major barriers to scaling up restoration to even get close to reversing our environmental impact on the coasts. Key concerns include ongoing climate change and policies and laws that hamper restoration efforts. It can be difficult, for example, to get permits to restore habitat, with complex systems involving multiple organisations and arms of government.

Still, our synthesis shows some light at the end of the tunnel. Coastal restoration efforts are having substantial benefits for animals around the world. The evidence supports ambitious restoration targets and action.

Michael Sievers, Research Fellow, Global Wetlands Project, Australia Rivers Institute, Griffith University; Christopher Brown, ARC Future Fellow in Fisheries Science, University of Tasmania, and Rod Connolly, Professor in Marine Science, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Before climate change really got going, eastern Australia’s flash floods tended to concentrate on our coastal regions, east of the Great Dividing Range.

But that’s changing. Now we get flash floods much further inland, such as Broken Hill in 2012 and 2022 and Cobar, Bourke and Nyngan in 2022. Flash floods are those beginning between one and six hours after rainfall, while riverine floods take longer to build.

Why? Global warming is amplifying the climate drivers affecting where flash floods occur and how often. All around the world, we’re seeing intense dumps of rain in a short period, triggering flooding – just as we saw in Dubai this week.

Our research shows east coast lows – intense low pressure systems carrying huge volumes of water – are developing further out to sea, both southward and eastward.

This means these systems, which usually bring most of the east coast’s rain during cooler months, are now dumping more rain out at sea. Instead, we’re seeing warm, moist air pushed down from the Coral Sea, leading to thunderstorms and floods much further inland.

This month, a coastal trough along the Queensland and New South Wales coasts and an inland trough resulted in unusually widespread flooding, triggering flooding in Sydney as well as inland.

What’s Changing?

On the coasts, extreme flash floods come from short, intense rains on saturated catchments. Think of the devastating floods hitting Lismore in 2022 and Grantham in 2011.

Inland, flash floods occur when intense rain hits small urban catchments, runs off roads and concrete, and flows into low-lying areas.

The April flooding in NSW and Queensland had elements of both. Early this month, the subtropical jet stream changed its course, triggering a cyclonic circulation higher in the atmosphere over inland eastern Australia.

At the same time, a low-pressure trough developed low down in the atmosphere off the coast and another inland, through southern Queensland and NSW, where they encountered warm moist air dragged by northeast winds from as far away as the Coral Sea.

The result was localised extremely heavy rain, which led to the Warragamba Dam spilling and flood plain inundation in western Sydney.

This unusual event has been referred to as a “black nor’easter”, a term coined in 1911. These are characterised by a deepening coastal trough and upper-level low pressure systems further west, over inland eastern Australia. This term, mostly known in the marine fraternity, became less common during the 20th century. But it has returned.

Why? Global warming is changing how the atmosphere circulates. As ocean temperatures keep rising, the pool of warm water in the Coral and Tasman Seas grows. This gives rise to northeasterly airstreams, which funnel thick fronts of warm, moist air down towards inland Queensland and NSW.

These low pressure systems occur higher in the atmosphere, causing unstable conditions suiting the formation of thunderstorms. And because these systems move slowly, heavy rain can fall continuously over the same area for several hours. All up, it’s a perfect recipe for flash flooding.

We saw similar systems producing flash flooding in Sydney’s Nepean and Hawkesbury rivers during November and December last year, as well as in other regions of inland eastern Australia.

Is this new? Yes. Between 1957 and 1990, flash floods struck Sydney 94 times. But during this period, fast cyclonic airflow in the upper atmosphere was not connected to the jet stream. Instead, flash floods occurred when slow-moving upper-level low pressure circulations encountered air masses laden with moisture evaporating off the oceans. However, there wasn’t enough water in the air over the inland to trigger flash flooding.

In every case between 1957 to 1990, flash floods in Sydney were not linked to slower-forming riverine floods on the Nepean-Hawkesbury River system. When these rivers did flood during that period, they came from longer duration, less intense rain falling in the catchments, and largely from east coast lows. Now we’re seeing something new.

Haven’t There Always Been Flash Floods?

Flash floods are not new. What is new is where they are occurring. These sudden floods can now form well west of the Great Dividing Range.

Previously, inland floods tended to come after long periods of widespread rain saturated large river catchments. Inland flash floods were not so common and powerful as in recent decades.

In earlier decades, inland riverine floods during extreme rainfall years occurred when the fast-moving jet stream high in the atmosphere was further north. This occurred frequently in the cooler months, with long, broad cloud bands blown by or associated with the jet stream producing widespread rain inland. Known as the “autumn break”, it often primed agricultural land for winter crops.

In recent years, these crucial air currents have begun moving polewards.

Now that it’s moving south, we have increasingly warm air over inland eastern Australia which can hold more moisture and result in heavy falls, even in the cooler months.

What about the famous inland floods which move through Queensland’s Channel Country and fill Kati Thanda/Lake Eyre?

These are slow moving riverine floods, not flash floods. Flash floods are often limited to local regions. By contrast, Channel Country floods stem from heavy monsoonal rains from November to April.

Short, Intense Rain Bursts Are Going Global

The pattern we’re seeing – more flash floods in unusual places – is not just happening in Australia. Inland areas – including deserts – are now more likely to see flash floods.

Dubai this week had a year’s rain (152 mm) in a single day, which triggered flash floods and caused widespread disruption of air travel. Other parts of the United Arab Emirates got even more rain, with up to 250 mm. In Western Australia’s remote southern reaches, the isolated community of Rawlinna recently had 155 mm of rain in a day.

This is precisely what we would expect as the world heats up. Hotter air can hold about 7% more water for every degree of warming, supercharging normal storms. And these floods can be followed by extended periods of almost no rain. The future is shaping up as one of flash floods and flash droughts. 

Milton Speer, Visiting Fellow, School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University of Technology Sydney and Lance M Leslie, Professor, School of Mathematical And Physical Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Water is one of Australia’s most valuable commodities. Rights to take water from our nation’s largest river system, the Murray-Darling Basin, are worth almost A$100 billion. These rights can be bought and sold or leased, with trade exceeding A$2 billion a year. But water is also being stolen (no-one knows how much) and the thieves usually get away with it.

The federal Labor government came to power promising to crack down on water theft in the Murray-Darling Basin. The Productivity Commission has also expressed concerns about a lack of compliance and enforcement.

The Inspector General of Water Compliance, Troy Grant, has also described existing powers to deter theft as ineffective, and called for urgent action to address inconsistencies in the various state laws that penalise theft from the Murray-Darling Basin. That was almost a year ago.

In our new research, we identified the many relevant laws operating in the basin. We examined these laws and found maximum penalties range wildly. It is a dog’s breakfast. Surely we can do better.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?

The mishmash of water theft laws and penalties across the basin is unfortunate but not surprising.

Water in the Murray-Darling Basin is managed under a joint agreement between the federal government, the basin’s four states (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia) and the Australian Capital Territory.

This agreement could be dissolved at any time, should any one state or territory decide to quit.

Murray-Darling Basin compliance is now managed by the Office of the Inspector General of Water Compliance, an independent group of public servants, typically former police officers.

As Inspector General, Grant has been given powers to reduce water theft, uphold compliance with Murray-Darling Basin rules, and restore confidence among those living and working in the basin.

But he was forced to drop 62 cases in February 2023 due to poor state legislative support, inconsistent approaches to water theft, and allowances for some irrigators to balance their accounts in arrears. Basically, Grant stated you had to be a moron to be caught.

Dropped cases lead to questions about water values, continued supply reliability, the extent of environmental harm, and the future security of water rights.

Drought Heightens Concern About Theft

It’s almost 15 years since the most recent review of water theft legislation across state and federal boundaries, which highlighted clear inconsistencies in penalties and approaches to cases.

It’s also nearly ten years since the ABC Four Corners report into large-scale water theft, illustrating the dangers of environmental water harms and wanton disregard by some users for the rights of others.

In more recent droughts, such as the “Tinderbox Drought” of 2017–19, irrigators were more concerned about speculation and hoarding than theft.

But if the basin suffers another serious drought, as predicted by many researchers, it is likely theft will become a top concern for all involved, particularly regulators at state and federal levels.

What’s more, if predictions of climate impacts to water supply are right, available water will dramatically decline in the Murray-Darling Basin, possibly motivating more theft.

We tested this by combining rainfall and runoff data from the Bureau of Meteorology with climate projections from the CSIRO Climate Futures Model and the Garnaut Climate Change Review, to generate a model of future water flows into the southern Murray-Darling Basin up to 2100.

Our research shows we’re on track for a water runoff catastrophe by around 2060, and the eventual collapse of the river’s systems by around 2080. Less rain and higher evaporation rates means less water will runoff the land into streams, rivers and storages. Sobering stuff.

Finding Common Ground

Our research shows the Inspector General is right: a base comparison of the laws in each state show clear differences, along with the penalties that sit behind them. Calls for greater certainty and consistency are yet to resonate. The positive lessons to be drawn from successful processes are falling on deaf ears.

But we did find some consistent aspects worth noting, which could help us better understand and analyse the legal framework for penalising water theft in the Murray-Darling Basin. This is the “pyramid” approach to assessing cases and applying penalties, using a tiered framework of increasing severity that looks to be applied universally throughout the basin.

The pyramids are based on existing principles already in use for water management around the world.

Most Murray-Darling Basin states already follow this approach. Yet some states do it better than others.

Legal inconsistency also stems from some states being unwilling to “climb to the top” of the pyramid and initiate court proceedings against the most egregious offenders. This leads to lower penalties in most cases.

We also note New South Wales has adopted satellite technology to identify and track water theft. This is a good example for others to follow.

Towards Consistent Laws

Consistency in compliance and certainty across state jurisdictions will help restore confidence in the water market, and ultimately ensure the Murray-Darling’s water flows are protected from thieves.

We need certain and severe penalties for water theft across the Murray-Darling Basin and Australia as a whole. Such penalties may garner a wider appreciation of the value of the environment.

Addressing water theft issues consistently and with certainty offers opportunities for Australia to again lead the way in effective water governance and compliance reform globally.

But progress has been slow. This is deeply concerning, especially as water flows into the basin will dwindle as the climate changes.

Adam James Loch, Associate Professor, University of Adelaide; David Adamson, Associate professor, Royal Agricultural University; Mark Giancaspro, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Adelaide, and Michael Croft, Legal Researcher, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Flash droughts strike suddenly and intensify rapidly. Often the affected areas are in drought after just weeks or a couple of months of well-below-average rainfall. They happen worldwide and are becoming more common, including in Australia, due to global warming.

Flash droughts can occur anywhere and at any time of the year. Last year, a flash drought hit the Upper Hunter region of New South Wales, roughly 300 kilometres north-west of Sydney.

These sudden droughts can have devastating economic, social and environmental impacts. The damage is particularly severe for agricultural regions heavily dependent on reliable rain in river catchments. One such region is the Upper Hunter Valley, the subject of our new research.

We identified two climate drivers – the El Niño Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean Dipole) – that became influential during this drought. In addition, the waning influence of a third climate driver, the Southern Annular Mode), would typically bring rain to the east coast. However, this rain did not reach the Upper Hunter.

Flash droughts are set to get more common as the world heats up. This year, a flash drought developed over western and central Victoria over just two months. While heavy rain this month in Melbourne ended the drought there, it continues in the west.

What Makes A Flash Drought Different?

Flash droughts differ from more slowly developing droughts. The latter result from extended drops in rainfall, such as the drought affecting parts of southwest Western Australia due to the much shortened winter wet season last year.

Flash droughts develop when sudden large drops in rainfall coincide with above-average temperatures. They mostly occur in summer and autumn, as was the case for Asia and Europe in 2022. That year saw flash droughts appear across the northern hemisphere, such as the megadrought affecting China’s Yangtze river basin and Spain.

The flash drought devastating the Upper Hunter from May to October 2023 developed despite the region being drought-free just one month earlier. At that stage, almost nowhere in NSW showed any sign of an impending drought.

The flash drought greatly affected agricultural production in the Upper Hunter region, due to the region’s reliance on water from rivers. Low rainfall in river catchments means less water for crops and pasture. It also dries up drinking water supplies.

Flash droughts are characterised by abrupt periods of low rainfall leading to rapid drought onset, particularly when accompanied by above-average temperatures. Higher temperatures increase both the evaporation of water from the soil and transpiration from plants (evapotranspiration). This causes soil moisture to drop rapidly.

The Upper Hunter Drought Is Part Of A Trend

Flash droughts will be more common in the future. That’s because higher temperatures will more often coincide with dry conditions, as relative humidity falls across many parts of Australia and globally.

Climate change is linked to shorter, heavier bursts of rain followed by longer periods of little rainfall.

In south-east and south-west Australia, flash droughts can also occur in winter.

In May 2023 rainfall over south-east Australia dropped abruptly. The much lower rainfall continued until November in the Upper Hunter. Over this same period, mean maximum temperatures in the region were the highest on record, increasing the loss of moisture through evapotranspiration. The result was a flash drought. While flash droughts occurred in other parts of south-east Australia, we focused on the Upper Hunter as it remained in drought the longest.

What Were The Climate Drivers Of This Drought?

We used machine-learning techniques to identify the key climate drivers of the drought.

We found the dominant driver of the flash drought was global warming, modulated by the phases of the three major climate drivers in our region, the El Niño Southern Oscillation, Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode.

From 2020 to 2022, the first two drivers became favourable for rain in the Upper Hunter in late winter through spring, before changing phase to one supporting drought over south-east Australia. Meanwhile, the Southern Annular Mode remained mostly positive, meaning rain-bearing westerly winds and weather fronts had moved to middle and higher latitudes of the southern hemisphere, away from Australia’s south-east coast.

Combined, the impact of global warming with the three climate drivers made rainfall much more variable. The net result was an atmospheric environment highly conducive to a flash drought appearing anywhere in south-east Australia.

Victoria, Too, Fits The Global Warming Pattern

As for the flash drought that developed in early 2024 over western and central Victoria, including Melbourne, it continues in parts of western Victoria. The flash drought followed very high January rainfall (top 5% of records) dropping rapidly to very low rainfall (bottom 5%) in February and March.

It was the driest February-March period on record for Melbourne and south-west Victoria.

At the beginning of April, a storm front brought heavy rainfall over an 18-hour period to central Victoria, including Melbourne.

The rains ended the flash drought in these areas, but it continues in parts of western Victoria, which missed out on the rain.

The pattern of the 2024 flash drought in Victoria typifies the increasing trend under global warming of long dry periods, interspersed by short, heavy rainfall events. 

Milton Speer, Visiting Fellow, School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University of Technology Sydney and Lance M Leslie, Professor, School of Mathematical And Physical Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the early 20th century, canaries were used as early warning systems in coal mines to alert miners to rising levels of carbon monoxide.

A small unremarkable fish may fill a similar role in coastal ecosystems around Aotearoa New Zealand.

Triplefins, or kokopara, are common in a range of shallow coastal habitats across the country. They are a diverse group of fishes, with 26 endemic species living on our shores, and they make excellent “canaries” for the coastal marine environment, helping us to understand and possibly address pollution.

Research using triplefins has already shown increased consumption of microplastics by fish living closer to urban areas. Studies have also identified molecular responses to multiple chemical pollutants and described cognitive damage caused by loss of habitat complexity.

Noise pollution from small boats also has negative effects on coastal fish. And now, new research is investigating the surprising impact of light pollution on coastal ecosystems.

We are finding what is called “skyglow” affects triplefin growth patterns, with consequences for their ability to forage.

An Underwater ‘Canary’

Human activity around coastal waters is intense, about triple the rate of other areas, and it affects ecosystems such as beaches and wetlands.

Coastal urbanisation introduces a range of challenges for near-shore ecosystems, including pollutants, plastics, sound and light.

Light pollution is often recognised for the limitations it imposes on astronomers and stargazers, but a growing body of research has begun to document effects on the health of animals and ecosystems.

Scientists have found coastal fishes in tropical and temperate environments, including the common triplefin, reproduce and grow in a cyclical pattern which follows the monthly lunar cycle.

Patterns in nocturnal illumination (known as artificial light at night, or ALAN) of surface waters have a surprisingly large impact on these fish. The prevalence of light pollution from cities (in this case New Zealand’s capital Wellington) can potentially interfere with their breeding cycles.

Long-term trends in skyglow over the Wellington region have revealed elevated levels of nighttime illumination up to 60 kilometres from the city centre.

Analysis of triplefin samples from nearby waters has identified altered growth patterns, manifesting in different body shapes. The health consequences include decreased swimming and foraging ability and make life harder for fish developing in brighter waters.

Bright City Lights

It may not seem that the effects of light on a tiny fish are a big deal, but triplefins are a clear indicator of what could be happening in other fish.

In marine ecosystems, small changes have a way of propagating further up the food chain. In the light pollution example, theory suggests small-scale, relatively short-term fluctuations in small prey species like the common triplefin are likely to appear later as long-term fluctuations in larger species at a greater spatial scale, with genuine implications for pelagic fisheries.

In an instance such as this, the triplefin is indeed acting as a canary for potential changes affecting the entire marine food web.

We know what affects one fish species may not affect others. But equally, we can’t carry out experiments on every species. What the humble triplefin can tell us is that coastal ecosystems are in trouble, not just from water quality and pollution, but from the lights and sounds of our big cities.

Like the miners, we need to pay attention to the animals we use as indicators. The triplefins are asking us to embrace the dark and there are many ways in which our cities can do this.

Communities can choose LED lightbulbs and shaded fixtures for street lights, so they only point down. Sensible use of dimmers and timers will help turn off unnecessary lights. In fact, Aotearoa New Zealand hosts two of the world’s few dark sky reserves, in Aoraki-McKenzie and, more recently, in the Wairarapa, as well as two dark sky sanctuaries (Aotea/Great Barrier Island and Rakiura/Stewart Island).

New Zealand could be on track to become the second dark sky nation in the world (after Niue).

Kathleen Laura Sterup, Postgraduate in Marine Biology, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Abigail M Smith, Professor of Marine Science, University of Otago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Have you ever wondered if there are more insects out at night than during the day?

We set out to answer this question by combing through the scientific literature. We searched for meaningful comparisons of insect activity by day and by night. It turns out only about 100 studies have ever attempted the daunting and rigorous fieldwork required – so we compiled them together to work out the answer.

Our global analysis confirms there are indeed more insects out at night than during the day, on average. Almost a third more (31.4%), to be precise. But this also varies extensively, depending on where you are in the world.

High nocturnal activity may come as no surprise to entomologists and nature photographers. Many of us prowl through jungles wearing head torches, or camp next to light traps hoping to encounter these jewels of the night.

But this is the first time anyone has been able to give a definitive answer to this universal childlike question. And now we know for sure, we can make more strident efforts to conserve insects and preserve their vital place in the natural world.

Building A Global Dataset Of Sleepless Nights

We searched the literature for studies that sampled insect communities systematically across day and night.

We narrowed these down to studies using methods that would not influence the results. For instance, we excluded studies that collected insects by using sweep nets or beating branches, as these methods can capture resting insects along with active ones.

Studies using light traps or coloured pan traps had to be excluded too. That’s because insects are only attracted to these well-lit traps when there’s low light in the surrounding environment, so they don’t work so well during the day.

Instead, we targeted studies that sampled insects during the day and night with traps that specifically caught moving insects. These include pitfall traps (for crawling insects), flight interception traps (for flying insects) and aquatic drift nets (for swimming insects).

We also accepted studies using food baits such as dung, for some beetles or honey (for ants).

One of the most memorable studies we encountered sampled mosquitoes using (unfortunate) human subjects as bait. Another had devised innovative automatic time-sorted pitfall traps to minimise the labour required, as the specimens collected would automatically be delivered into different compartments at different times of the day.

But in most of the studies that we ended up including in our analysis, the data had been collected by entomologists who set up many traps before dawn, returned before sunset to collect the day’s samples and prepare more traps for the night, and finally, returned once more before dawn to retrieve the night’s samples.

To improve their estimates of insect activity, many studies reported data that spanned multiple days and field sites. The sacrifice of sleep in the name of science is a true testament to their dedication.

Eventually, we homed in on 99 studies published between 1959 and 2022. These studies spanned all continents except Antarctica and encompassed a wide range of habitats on both land and water.

What Did We Find?

We found more mayflies, caddisflies, moths and earwigs at night. On the other hand, there were more thrips, bees, wasps and ants during the day.

Nocturnal activity was more common in wetlands and waterways. In these aquatic areas, there could be twice as many insects active during the night.

In contrast, land-based insects were generally more active during the day, especially in grasslands and savannas. We found the number of insects out and about could triple during the day in these habitats.

This may have something to do with avoiding predators. Fish tend to hunt aquatic insects during the day, whereas nocturnal animals such as bats make life on land more hazardous at night.

We also found insects were more active at night in warmer parts of the globe, where there are higher maximum temperatures. Insects are “ectotherms”, which means they are unable to regulate their body temperature. They are particularly susceptible to extremes in temperature, both hot and cold. This finding underscores the role of climate in regulating insect activity.

Given temperatures peak during the day, higher maximum temperatures may foster increased nocturnal activity as more individuals seek to avoid heat stress by working in the dark.

Findings Underscore The Threats To Nocturnal Insects

Insects perform many vital “ecosystem services” such as pollination, nutrient cycling and pest control. Many of these services may be provided at night, when more insects are active.

This means we need to curtail some of our own activities to support theirs. For instance, artificial lighting is detrimental to nocturnal insects.

Our research also points to the threat of global warming. In the hottest regions of the globe such as the tropics, the warming trend may further reduce the activity of nocturnal insects that struggle to cope with heat. To this end, we hope our study motivates day-loving ecologists to embrace night-time ecology.

Insects are among the most diverse and important organisms on our planet. Studying their intricate rhythms represents not just a scientific endeavour, but an imperative for preserving wildlife.

Mark Wong, Forrest Fellow, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Western Australia and Raphael Didham, Professor of Ecology, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ever more prevalent in our lives. It’s no longer confined to certain industries or research institutions; AI is now for everyone.

It’s hard to dodge the deluge of AI content being produced, and harder yet to make sense of the many terms being thrown around. But we can’t have conversations about AI without understanding the concepts behind it.

We’ve compiled a glossary of terms we think everyone should know, if they want to keep up.

Algorithm

An algorithm is a set of instructions given to a computer to solve a problem or to perform calculations that transform data into useful information.

Alignment Problem

The alignment problem refers to the discrepancy between our intended objectives for an AI system and the output it produces. A misaligned system can be advanced in performance, yet behave in a way that’s against human values. We saw an example of this in 2015 when an image-recognition algorithm used by Google Photos was found auto-tagging pictures of black people as “gorillas”.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Artificial general intelligence refers to a hypothetical point in the future where AI is expected to match (or surpass) the cognitive capabilities of humans. Most AI experts agree this will happen, but disagree on specific details such as when it will happen, and whether or not it will result in AI systems that are fully autonomous.

Artificial Neural Network (ANN)

Artificial neural networks are computer algorithms used within a branch of AI called deep learning. They’re made up of layers of interconnected nodes in a way that mimics the neural circuitry of the human brain.

Big Data

Big data refers to datasets that are much more massive and complex than traditional data. These datasets, which greatly exceed the storage capacity of household computers, have helped current AI models perform with high levels of accuracy.

Big data can be characterised by four Vs: “volume” refers to the overall amount of data, “velocity” refers to how quickly the data grow, “veracity” refers to how complex the data are, and “variety” refers to the different formats the data come in.

Chinese Room

The Chinese Room thought experiment was first proposed by American philosopher John Searle in 1980. It argues a computer program, no matter how seemingly intelligent in its design, will never be conscious and will remain unable to truly understand its behaviour as a human does.

This concept often comes up in conversations about AI tools such as ChatGPT, which seem to exhibit the traits of a self-aware entity – but are actually just presenting outputs based on predictions made by the underlying model.

Deep Learning

Deep learning is a category within the machine-learning branch of AI. Deep-learning systems use advanced neural networks and can process large amounts of complex data to achieve higher accuracy.

These systems perform well on relatively complex tasks and can even exhibit human-like intelligent behaviour.

Diffusion Model

A diffusion model is an AI model that learns by adding random “noise” to a set of training data before removing it, and then assessing the differences. The objective is to learn about the underlying patterns or relationships in data that are not immediately obvious.

These models are designed to self-correct as they encounter new data and are therefore particularly useful in situations where there is uncertainty, or if the problem is very complex.

Explainable AI

Explainable AI is an emerging, interdisciplinary field concerned with creating methods that will increase users’ trust in the processes of AI systems.

Due to the inherent complexity of certain AI models, their internal workings are often opaque, and we can’t say with certainty why they produce the outputs they do. Explainable AI aims to make these “black box” systems more transparent.

Generative AI

These are AI systems that generate new content – including text, image, audio and video content – in response to prompts. Popular examples include ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and Midjourney.

Labelling

Data labelling is the process through which data points are categorised to help an AI model make sense of the data. This involves identifying data structures (such as image, text, audio or video) and adding labels (such as tags and classes) to the data.

Humans do the labelling before machine learning begins. The labelled data are split into distinct datasets for training, validation and testing.

The training set is fed to the system for learning. The validation set is used to verify whether the model is performing as expected and when parameter tuning and training can stop. The testing set is used to evaluate the finished model’s performance.

Large Language Model (LLM)

Large language models (LLM) are trained on massive quantities of unlabelled text. They analyse data, learn the patterns between words and can produce human-like responses. Some examples of AI systems that use large language models are OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s BERT and LaMDA series.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is a branch of AI that involves training AI systems to be able to analyse data, learn patterns and make predictions without specific human instruction.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

While large language models are a specific type of AI model used for language-related tasks, natural language processing is the broader AI field that focuses on machines’ ability to learn, understand and produce human language.

Parameters

Parameters are the settings used to tune machine-learning models. You can think of them as the programmed weights and biases a model uses when making a prediction or performing a task.

Since parameters determine how the model will process and analyse data, they also determine how it will perform. An example of a parameter is the number of neurons in a given layer of the neural network. Increasing the number of neurons will allow the neural network to tackle more complex tasks – but the trade-off will be higher computation time and costs.

Responsible AI

The responsible AI movement advocates for developing and deploying AI systems in a human-centred way.

One aspect of this is to embed AI systems with rules that will have them adhere to ethical principles. This would (ideally) prevent them from producing outputs that are biased, discriminatory or could otherwise lead to harmful outcomes.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a technique in natural language processing used to identify and interpret the emotions behind a text. It captures implicit information such as, for example, the author’s tone and the extent of positive or negative expression.

Supervised Learning

Supervised learning is a machine-learning approach in which labelled data are used to train an algorithm to make predictions. The algorithm learns to match the labelled input data to the correct output. After learning from a large number of examples, it can continue to make predictions when presented with new data.

Training Data

Training data are the (usually labelled) data used to teach AI systems how to make predictions. The accuracy and representativeness of training data have a major impact on a model’s effectiveness.

Transformer

A transformer is a type of deep-learning model used primarily in natural language processing tasks.

The transformer is designed to process sequential data, such as natural language text, and figure out how the different parts relate to one another. This can be compared to how a person reading a sentence pays attention to the order of the words to understand the meaning of the sentence as a whole.

One example is the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), which the ChatGPT chatbot runs on. The GPT model uses a transformer to learn from a large corpus of unlabelled text.

Turing Test

The Turing test is a machine intelligence concept first introduced by computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950.

It’s framed as a way to determine whether a computer can exhibit human intelligence. In the test, computer and human outputs are compared by a human evaluator. If the outputs are deemed indistinguishable, the computer has passed the test.

Google’s LaMDA and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have been reported to have passed the Turing test – although critics say the results reveal the limitations of using the test to compare computer and human intelligence.

Unsupervised Learning

Unsupervised learning is a machine-learning approach in which algorithms are trained on unlabelled data. Without human intervention, the system explores patterns in the data, with the goal of discovering unidentified patterns that could be used for further analysis.

Samar Fatima, Research Fellow Enterprise AI and Data Analytics Hub, RMIT University and Kok-Leong Ong, Director, Enterprise AI and Data Analytics Hub, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As more than half of Australian office workers report using generative artificial intelligence (AI) for work, we’re starting to see this technology affect every part of society, from banking and finance through to weather forecasting, health and medicine.

Many people are now using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to get advice, find information or summarise longer passages of text. But our recent research demonstrates how generative AI can be used for much more than this, returning results in different formats.

On the one hand, AI tools are neutral – they can be used for good or ill depending on one’s intent.

However, the models powering such tools can also suffer from biases based on how they were developed. AI tools, especially image generators, are also power hungry, ratcheting up the world’s energy usage.

And there are unresolved copyright claims surrounding AI-generated outputs, given the content used to train some of the models isn’t owned by the organisations developing the AI.

But ultimately, there’s no escaping generative AI. Learning more about what these tools can do will improve your digital literacy and help you understand their full impact, from benign to problematic.

1. Imagining What Lies Beyond The Frame

Adobe’s recently developed “generative expand” tool allows users to expand the canvas of their photos and have Photoshop “imagine” what is happening beyond the frame. Nine News infamously experimented with this tool for a broadcast featuring Victorian politician Georgie Purcell.

Here’s a video that shows how that tool works:

But it can also be used more innocently to extend the borders of a landscape or still-life image, for example. You might do this when trying to edit a square Instagram photo to fit a 4x6 inch photo frame.

2. Visualising The Past Or The Future

Photography was only invented within the past 200 years, and camera-equipped smartphones within the last 25.

That leaves us with plenty of things that existed before cameras were common, yet we might want to visualise them. This could be for educational purposes, entertainment or self-reflection.

One example is the writings of historical figures, like architect Robert Russell, who conducted the first survey of what is now Melbourne in 1836. He wrote at the time:

The soil is in this country superior to any in the colony, we have a good grazing land, and a fine supply of water: a fine harbour, a Town on which much capital (I am afraid to say how much) has been expended, enterprising settlers and flocks and herds increasing in all directions, a climate well fitted for Englishmen, and events hastening forward the necessity for some scheme of extended emigration from which we shall soon feel the benefit.

We can feed this text from Russell’s letters into a text-to-image generator and see what the area may have looked like.

Conversely, we might want to look ahead and see if AI can help us visualise what is to come.

For example, a probe is currently heading to a never-before-seen metal asteroid, 16 Psyche. It’s projected to reach the asteroid in 2029. We can feed an AI tool a description from NASA to get a rough sense of what the asteroid might look like.

NASA currently works with artists to illustrate concepts we can’t see, but artists could also draw on AI to help create these renderings.

3. Brainstorming How To Visualise Difficult Concepts

Where we might have once turned to Google Images or Pinterest boards for visual inspiration, AI can also help with suggestions on how to show difficult-to-visualise subject matter.

Take the Mariana Trench, for example. As one of the deepest places on Earth, few people have ever seen it firsthand. It’s also pitch black and artificial light wouldn’t allow you to see very far.

But ask AI for suggestions on how to visualise this spot and it provides a number of ideas, including taking a more familiar landmark, such as the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest structure, and placing a scaled model next to the trench to better allow audiences to appreciate its depth.

Or creating a layered illustration that shows the flora and fauna that live at each of the ocean’s five zones above the trench.

4. Visualising Data

Depending on the tool, you can prompt AI with numbers, not just text.

For example, you might upload a spreadsheet to ChatGPT 4 and ask it to visualise the results. Or, if the data is already publicly available (such as Earth’s population over time), you might ask a chatbot to visualise it without even having to supply a spreadsheet.

It’s a great way to speed up such tasks, as long as you keep in mind AI can “hallucinate”, or make things up, so you need to double check the accuracy of the results.

5. Creating Simple Moving Images

You can create a simple yet effective animation by uploading a photo to an AI tool like Runway and giving it an animation command, such as zooming in, zooming out or tracking from left to right. That’s what I’ve done with this historical photo preserved by the State Library of Western Australia.

Another way you can experiment with video is using Runway’s text-to-video feature to describe the scene you want to see and let it make a video for you. I used this description to create the following video:

Tracking shot from left to right of the snowy mountains of Nagano, Japan. Clouds hang low around the mountains and they are about 50m away.

6. Generating A Colour Palette Or Simple Graphics

Maybe you’re creating a logo for your small business or helping a friend with the design of an event invitation. In these cases, having a consistent colour palette can help unify your design.

You can ask generative AI services like Midjourney or Gemini to create a colour palette for you based on the event or its vibe.

If you’re designing a website or poster and need some icons to represent certain parts of the message, you can turn to AI to generate them for you. This is true for both browser-based generators like Adobe Firefly, as well as desktop apps with built-in AI, like Adobe Illustrator.

Next time you’re interacting with a generative AI chatbot, ask it what it’s capable of. In addition to these six use cases, you might be surprised to know that generative AI can also write code, translate content, make music and describe images. This can be handy for writing alt-text descriptions and making the web more accessible for those with vision impairments.

T.J. Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Have you ever wondered if your partner really loves you? Well apparently so have thousands of TikTok users, who are testing their theories for the world to see.

In the past year we’ve seen a rise in TikTok trends that purport to “test” a partner’s loyalty or the strength of a couple’s relationship. These tests vary in severity, from telling your partner you saw a cool bird and hoping they respond with equal enthusiasm, to asking an influencer to flirt with them to see if they’ll cheat.

If this sound stressful or potentially problematic to you, that’s because it is.

What Are These Tests?

Generally, TikTok relationship tests involve the tester acting a certain way in front of their partner, while making a video, and posting the results on TikTok for others to judge.

Several different tests have trended this year. One of the most popular is the orange peel “theory” (we use the word very lightly here), in which the tester tells their partner they feel like eating an orange.

Some partners simply acknowledge the comment, while others actually go and get an orange. But the “winners” are those who first retrieve the orange and then happily peel or cut it up for their significant other.

In another popular test, women TikTokers ask their partners to “name a woman”. If they respond with any name other than the tester’s, the woman pretends to act shocked, surprised or angry.

Why Do We Watch?

So why do millions of people watch and comment on these videos? There are two things we can point to here.

The first is the close resemblance these videos have to reality television, which research has shown we watch, in part, to feel better about ourselves.

Research has also found people are more likely to like, share and comment on stories when they feel a sense of moral outrage. It then comes with a pleasurable payoff once the source of the outrage seemingly gets what they deserve.

One emotion at play here is “schadenfreude”, which refers to taking pleasure from another’s pain. Whether we agree someone’s boyfriend deserves to be called out, or that the original poster “had it coming” with the response, we tend to feel satisfied by being part of the mob response.

Unfortunately, this motivates a hostile online environment. In such spaces, where we see others piling on the shame, we’re also more likely to do so ourselves.

Are The ‘Tests’ Legitimate In Any Way?

It’s safe to assume relationship TikTok tests aren’t even close to what would be recommended by relationship science. Currently in psychology research there is no single diagnostic test that can give us exact information about the validity or longevity of someone’s relationship.

Such psychological assessment is complex and can require multiple types of assessment. Moreover, these assessments are often done in various contexts and with feedback from multiple others. Even well-designed personality tests can give questionable, useless or misleading information when applied at an individual level.

Relationships benefit from all parties taking the time to understand one another – not from rushing to diagnose and assign labels.

How Might The Tests Be Harmful?

Sometimes we treat our partner as an object: a means to the end of our own desires, with no recognition of their desires.

These TikTok video are often driven by a desire for personal fame, reassurance about the security of one’s relationship, or wanting to feel like the “superior” partner. Of course this can backfire, especially if the person being unwittingly “tested” has their response shared online against their will.

People in relationships are interdependent. This means they influence each other and can choose to meet or deny each other’s needs.

When our needs aren’t met, communication is necessary to understand what matters to each person, and why a particular behaviour or pattern of behaviour is hurtful. It also requires a shared understanding of how to move forward together.

Working through what happened, taking time to recognise each other’s needs and agreeing on the shared values underpinning a conflict are important for repairing a relationship. Using a shame-based video to prove a point suggests the absence of healthy communication.

Beyond that, people tend to seek out information that confirms what they already think. This is called “confirmation bias”. If someone feels insecure about their partnership, they may subconsciously seek out information that confirms their insecurities, or interpret new information in this way.

Research has found if you act in a way that’s untrustworthy – such as setting up your partner to fail in a TikTok “test” – you are more likely to create insecurity in your relationship.

The Line Between Humour And Harm

Of course, some people posting these videos are just doing so to be playful or funny. Their partner may not mind, or may even be in on the gag. As long as a behaviour is an expression of a couple’s shared values, is done with consent (especially in terms of uploading the video online) and makes both parties feel respected, who are we to judge?

At the same time, many TikTok relationship tests presented as “jokes” will often portray women as being stereotypically jealous, needy or manipulative. And like all media that stereotype men and women, such content can further feed sexist attitudes and harm our relationships.

Edith Jennifer Hill, Associate Lecturer, Learning & Teaching Innovation, Flinders University and Lydia Woodyatt, Professor of Psychology, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If you’re a fan of all things space, you’ve doubtless heard about the “devil comet”, which has been captivating keen-eyed observers in the northern hemisphere for the past few weeks. Now it’s our turn, as comet 12P/Pons–Brooks is creeping into view for the southern hemisphere.

Before you get too excited, let me quash your hopes. Comet Pons–Brooks is visible to the naked eye, but only if you know where to look. It will look like a fuzzy glowing patch, but nonetheless promises some amazing photo opportunities for the coming weeks.

Even better, it may serve as a celestial warm-up act for an even more special comet later in the year.

Here’s everything you need to know about Pons–Brooks, and how to get the best view.

Why Do People Call It The ‘Devil Comet’?

Named after two astronomers who independently discovered it in the 19th century, Comet 12P/Pons–Brooks (its full, official name) was last visible in 1954.

It takes around 71 years to orbit the Sun, making the comet’s visits to the inner Solar System a rare treat for us here on Earth.

At its heart (its nucleus), Pons–Brooks is a dirty snowball around 34 kilometres in diameter. As the comet came swinging back towards us in its orbit, astronomers spotted it back in 2020. At that time, the comet was almost 1.8 billion kilometres from the Sun, and lay dormant.

As the comet kept falling inwards toward the Sun, its surface temperature began to rise, making it “active”. Exposed ices started to sublime, turning directly from solid to gas. This activity is how a comet gets its tail: the nucleus becomes shrouded in a diaphanous “coma” of dust and debris from its sublimated surface, which is then blown away from the Sun by the solar wind.

But comet 12P/Pons–Brooks didn’t activate gently and smoothly. Instead, it produces several large outbursts of activity, each time, emitting vast amounts of gas and dust in a very short period of time before settling down again.

In the first of those significant outbursts, on July 20, 2023, the comet brightened by a factor of a hundred times, shedding an estimated ten million metric tons of dust and ice.

The solar wind pushed the resulting dust, gas and debris away from the Sun, giving the comet an unusual appearance. To some, the comet looked like the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. To others, it looked vaguely demonic – sporting the cometary equivalent of horns.

The moniker of “devil comet” took hold in media articles and appears to have stuck – even though the comet’s horned appearance is now a thing of the past.

Where (And When) Should I Look?

Over the last few days, the first confirmed sightings of 12P/Pons–Brooks have come in from around Australia. It is currently visible low in the western sky after sunset, albeit almost lost in the glow of twilight.

In the next few weeks, the comet will slowly climb higher in the evening sky. The two videos below show the location of the comet’s head at 6:30pm from mid-April through to mid-June, as seen from Toowoomba and Melbourne.

Remember, the comet is a diffuse object, rather than a single point of light. The head is where the comet is brightest (centred on its nucleus). The comet’s tails point away from the Sun – so will rise upwards from the western horizon in the evening sky.

While the comet is visible with the naked eye, you really need to know where to look. The best bet is to search with binoculars. Make sure to wait until the Sun is well below the horizon. Once you find the telltale blur of the comet, you will know where to look, and can switch to see if you can spot it with the naked eye.

For me, the most exciting time with Pons–Brooks will come during the first two weeks of May. At that point, the comet will be passing underneath the constellation Orion, which will serve as a signpost.

That period will be prime astrophotography season, so I expect to see many spectacular images of the comet’s tails cutting through the celestial hunter, shining next to the spectacular nebulae dotted throughout Orion’s body.

But Wait… There’s More!

While comet 12P/Pons–Brooks currently basks in the limelight, a potentially great comet is currently moving sunward, promising a spectacular show later this year.

That comet, C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS), was discovered in January 2023, and astronomers soon realised it has the potential to become truly dazzling.

Comet behaviour is hard to predict, so take the following with a pinch of salt, but things still look really promising.

Current predictions suggest Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will be at least as bright as the brightest stars in late September and early October this year. During that time, it will pass almost directly between Earth and the Sun. It might even briefly become visible in broad daylight at that time.

In the days following that chance alignment, the comet will gradually become visible in the evening sky and could be an incredible sight, up to a hundred times brighter than Pons–Brooks at its best.

So, with any luck, the current apparition of 12P/Pons–Brooks is merely the warm-up act, with an even greater spectacle to come later this year. Fingers crossed!

Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If you look from above, you can see thousands of stone structures dotting the landscape of the Arabian peninsula. On the ground, you can find a bounty of stone tools and ancient fireplaces scattered along the edges of ancient lakes, as well as rock art depicting hunting and herding scenes in the surrounding mountains.

Despite the visibility of these sites, only in the past decade or so have archaeologists taken a dedicated interest in them. Some of the structures have now been dated at up to 10,000 years old.

However, the arid climate, baking days and freezing nights, and intense wind erosion are not kind to some of the other relics archaeologists prize. To date, there has been little found in the way of fossils or the kind of deeply buried, layered deposits that can open a window onto the history of a place.

Until recently, no archaeologists had surveyed any of the hundreds of caves and lava tubes recorded across northern Arabia. In 2019, our team began to look in these subterranean locations – and in a new study published today in PLoS ONE, we report on the first documented occupation of a lava tube in the Arabian Peninsula.

The Umm Jirsan Lava Tube

The Umm Jirsan lava tube lies some 125 kilometres north of the city of Madinah, in the Harrat Khaybar lava field. The tube formed long ago by cooling lava. It winds an impressive 1.5 kilometres, and reaches 12 metres in height and 45 metres in width in some sections.

The first thing you notice when venturing into the tube’s dark and meandering tunnels is the sheer number of animal remains. The floor is strewn with piles of bones containing thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of exceptionally preserved fossils.

These bone-piles are the work of striped hyenas, which drag bones underground to eat, stash away for times of food scarcity, or process and feed to cubs. This process, repeated over millennia, has produced some of the most incredible accumulations of fossils seen anywhere in the world.

But it’s not all just bones. When we surveyed the entrances of Umm Jirsan – essentially areas where the roof has collapsed, providing access to the lava tube – we uncovered hundreds of stone artefacts made from obsidian, chert and basalt.

Although exciting, these artefacts were all surface finds, making them extremely difficult to date. We needed to look deeper.

Digging In

We excavated in the mouth of the eastern passage, near a series of semi-circular stone structures of an unknown age or function. The excavation uncovered more stone artefacts – all made from fine-grained green obsidian – as well as animal bones and charcoal.

Most of the stone artefacts came from a discrete sediment layer roughly 75 centimetres beneath the surface. Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal, and dating of the sediments using a method known as optically stimulated luminescence dating, revealed this main occupation phase likely occurred between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago.

We also found some interesting objects in the surrounding landscape. These included more stone artefacts and circular structures, as well as a so-called “I-type” structure. These constructions are believed to date to around 7,000 years ago, based on their association with large rectangular structures known as mustatils, which we believe were used for ritual animal sacrifices.

We also found the first rock art discovered in the area. This includes depictions of herding scenes of cattle, sheep and goat, and even hunting scenes involving dogs. This art has similarities with other rock art in Arabia from the Neolithic and the later Bronze Age. It includes overlapping engravings, suggesting people visited the area repeatedly over thousands of years.

We also found human remains at Umm Jirsan, which we dated to the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. By analysing the carbon and nitrogen in these remains, we found these people’s diets were consistently high in protein – though they ate more fruit and cereals over time.

Interestingly, this change in diet appears to coincide with the arrival of oasis agriculture in the region. This saw the emergence of sophisticated farming and water management techniques that enabled people to settle in the deserts more permanently and cultivate plants such as dates and figs.

We made another interesting finding after coming home from the dig. Studying maps of archaeological structures in the wider area, we noticed Umm Jirsan sits along a “funerary avenue” connecting two major oases.

These funerary avenues, which consist of chains of tombs stretching hundreds of kilometres, are believed to have been routes used by Bronze Age pastoralists as they transported their herds between water sources.

We think Umm Jirsan may have been a stopping-off point for pastoralists, a place that offered shelter and water in an otherwise dry and harsh environment.

Archaeologists have made remarkable finds in Arabia in recent years, in settings such as ancient lakebeds. Our finds at Umm Jirsan add another important element to the story of Arabian societies over time, and how they interacted with this dramatic landscape.

Mathew Stewart, Research Fellow, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University; Huw Groucutt, Lecturer in Mediterranean Prehistory, University of Malta, and Michael Petraglia, Director, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

See the word “musician” on a resume and you might not immediately think “stellar employee” or “exceptional leader”.

Perhaps the word evokes the image of a rock star, in trouble for chucking a television out of a hotel room window. Or else someone struggling along in life, who should have picked a “real job”.

But is there more to the profession than meets the stereotype?

It is well known many musicians work simultaneously in arts and non-arts roles, often to create some income security. Less understood is just how well the extensive skillset developed in music transfers to a non-arts, professional workplace.

My nationwide survey sought to find out. I began by conducting 15 in-depth interviews with musicians simultaneously working dual-careers - one in music, and one somewhere else.

The preliminary findings, which are yet to be peer-reviewed, showed dual-career musicians have a plethora of distinctive workplace skills that had been enabled by their musical education and experience. This was verified by their non-musician co-workers.

The discovery sparked an ongoing second stage of research, investigating the experience of a larger group. These include:

• dual-careerists
• musicians who have exited the profession
• musically-educated individuals who never pursued a music career.

With 165 respondents so far, the emerging results are significant – music education and experience lays the foundation for high levels of future aptitude in a range of workplaces.

Practice Makes Perfect

One of the most powerful traits instilled by a music education is a deep sense of professionalism. 85% of survey participants identified the trait as the skill that most influenced expectations of themselves and others, and the quality of their work.

A common industry saying about rehearsal reflects this attitude of consistency and punctuality – “early is on time, on time is late, and late is left behind.”

Other notable skills included autonomy and self-direction, resilience and perseverance, and creativity.

Participants attributed the development of these strengths to the disciplined and focused attention required to learn music, and the intrinsic motivation needed to practise and perfect an instrument over a long period of time.

This is increasingly relevant in an age where screens and social media steal our concentration and cost employers’ productivity.

Another key trait identified was creativity, which may reflect findings that the musically trained have more neuronal matter, and therefore increased brain activity.

Interviews with non-musician colleagues showed that out-of-the-box thinking was particularly prevalent amongt jazz musicians, singer-songwriters and composers.

It Takes A Whole Orchestra To Play A Symphony

Participants unanimously said ensemble work – playing in bands, chamber music, orchestras and so on – has contributed positively to their workplace team dynamics.

As one respondent put it:

It taught me how to be part of something bigger than myself.

Experiences in music translated to a greater appreciation of diversity and inclusivity, exceptional leadership and deep listening skills, and the ability to manage “difficult” conversations respectfully within a team.

Respondents said an ongoing passion for music improved their mental health and workplace resilience. Unsurprisingly, their non-musician co-workers reported better workplace morale and an infectious positive energy from their musical colleagues.

Growth Mindset

All respondents reported a healthy relationship with failure – experiences in music had taught them to remain curious, embrace learning and “fail forward” while owning errors.

This attitude directly enhances one’s ability to upskill in a non-music careers, something many respondents have had to do. 82% of the exited and dual-career musicians had re-accredited, and 71% admitted to “learning on the job”.

Their live performance experiences cemented their ability to work under pressure in a variety of situations – public presentations, deadlines, project management. To them it was a no-brainer: “the show must go on.”

Co-workers’ perceptions further verified the musicians’ transferable skills, suggesting they possessed high professional values, a strong work ethic, high intelligence, willingness to learn, and the ability to take the initiative.

Survey respondents work in a much greater variety of fields than you might expect, including:

• health
• science and academia
• building and engineering
• business and finance
• law
• technology
• government
• transportation
• administration
• and religion.

Many also hold leadership positions. Economically, these findings suggest having a musician on the books may be linked to increased productivity, innovation, and profitability.

Lessons For Educators And Policymakers

The skills of our country’s musically educated are relevant to far more than just the arts. Employers and recruiters need to respect and appreciate the professional contributions of the musically trained.

But the ongoing decline in school music programs and nominal music teacher training, as well as a shift in tertiary training focus to STEM at the expense of the arts, suggest we’re heading the wrong direction.

Including a well-informed understanding of music skills in the proposed National Skills Passport would be a big step forward. So would ensuring all school children have access to proper music education, and that school leavers are not discouraged from pursuing further music training.

Who knows, when the next pandemic comes, it could be a musician who designs the next life-saving vaccine.

Diana Tolmie, Senior Lecturer of Professional Practice, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

So weighed down have Americans become by student debt, and so potent a political issue has it become in the US, that President Biden plans to waive interest or write off money owing by 30 million of them.

He is doing it bit by bit, in the face of resistance from the US Supreme Court. He has already axed or wound back 4.3 million debts, and on Friday cancelled 277,000 more.

The benefits, as he keeps telling anyone who will listen in the lead-up to the November election, are likely to be increased consumer spending, better mental health and credit scores for borrowers, and increased home ownership.

In Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is under pressure to do something – anything – for Australians under the same sort of pressure.

Every June, The Amount Owed Jumps

Every June the amount that someone who has borrowed under the Higher Education Loan Program (HELP) jumps. Because the jump is linked to inflation, and because inflation has been low for decades, in most Junes the jump has been small, until last June.

On June 1 2023, Australians who had made no payments over the previous year faced a jump of 7.1%. Someone who had owed $25,000, suddenly owed $26,770, and so on.

A quarter of a million Australians have signed a petition asking for change.

The good news is there’s likely to be some change, and we are likely to hear about it soon, in the lead-up to the May budget.

The bad news for borrowers is it won’t be debt relief of the kind Biden is offering.

It’s Worse In The US

While in both Australia and the US it’s the government that lends to pay student fees rather than private lenders (who don’t like the risks) in the US the loans are really onerous, requiring fixed monthly repayments over a set period of time, regardless of the borrower’s circumstances.

In Australia and the United Kingdom and New Zealand and some other countries that have copied Australia’s system, the loans are income contingent, meaning they only need to be repaid when the borrower’s income rises to a certain level.

At the moment Australia’s repayment threshold is A$51,550 per year, meaning anyone who earns less than that doesn’t need to repay a cent, perhaps forever if their income never climbs that high.

Where payments are required, they are taken out in the same way as income tax is, each fortnight for pay-as-you-earn employees.

Buried within Biden’s announcement is a decision to move towards an Australian-style plan he has called SAVE, which stands for Saving on a Valuable Education.

If it becomes law, single Americans won’t have to repay until they earn US$32,800. For an American supporting a family of four, the threshold will be US$67,500. It will be an Australian-style system.

Easy Wins For Albo

While Australia’s system is much better than the one in the US and has been copied around the world, it is far from perfect.

A simple change, identified by the report of the Australian Universities Accord delivered to Education Minister Jason Clare, in February is to increase the amount owing each year by either the rate of increase in prices or the rate of increase in wages, whichever is lower.

Usually, prices increase by less than wages, which is why the system was set up in 1988 to index amounts owed to prices.

But last year, unusually, prices increased faster than wages. In those years it would be simple to lift the amount owed only in line with wages, as the report recommends.

The amount owed needs to increase in line with something, because otherwise its value would shrink rapidly as prices rose. The government doesn’t charge interest (which would hurt) so instead it lifts the amount owed in line with prices to ensure that compared to other things it remains little changed.

Make Repayments More Like Tax

Although we repay student loans through the income tax system, we don’t do it like income tax.

Here’s how it works for tax: on our first $18,200 of income we pay nothing, then we pay 19 cents in the dollar for each extra dollar we earn up to the next threshold, and so on. The key words here are “for each extra dollar”. We continue to pay nothing on the first $18,200 we earn.

Higher education loans work differently. For them, we repay nothing until we earn $51,550, and then at that point, even if we earn just one dollar more, we pay one per cent of all our annual income, the entire $51,550 (which amounts to $515).

It’s a repayment cliff that sends us backwards. It means earning an extra dollar costs more than $500 in that year That’s an effective marginal tax rate of 500%.

The cliff matters. Each year, there’s an impressive cluster of taxpayers who happen to be earning just under the threshold. More likely to be women than men, they might be deciding not to work in order to keep their incomes below the threshold.

Make It Easier To Get Home Loans

Britain and other nations that copied Australia’s system don’t impose large repayments in one hit, and the economist who designed Australia’s system now says that part of the system was “an error, a mistake”.

That economist, Bruce Chapman, has suggested a redesign that would require collections only on extra rather than total incomes, a proposal the report to the government endorses.

And there’s something else Albanese can do. Right now Australia’s banking regulator requires banks to count student loans as debt for the purpose of determining who can get a housing loan, knocking some former students out.

Chapman says it would make more sense to treat the compulsory payments as tax, which is how they function. All they do is reduce after-tax income, and for low earners, they don’t even do that. It’d get more people into housing.

Now it’s over to Albo.

Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For millions of years, giant animals or megafauna roamed the lands that are now Australia and New Guinea. Many were like much larger versions of modern animals.

There was a four-metre goanna called Megalania (Varanus priscus), for example, which likely ambushed its prey. This beast disappeared by around 40,000 years ago along with almost all the other megafauna aside from remnants such as the red kangaroo and the saltwater crocodile.

Some of the now-vanished kangaroo species were quite massive. The short-faced kangaroo Procoptodon goliah grew as tall as three metres and may have weighed more than 250 kilograms.

There was another genus of extinct kangaroos, Protemnodon, which were more like the grey and red roos we know today, but little has been known about their lives. In a new study, my colleagues and I describe three new species of these vanished marsupials – and shed some light on where they lived and how they got around.

A 150-Year Puzzle

The first species of Protemnodon were described in 1874 by the British naturalist Richard Owen. As was standard at the time, Owen focused chiefly on fossil teeth. Seeing minor differences between teeth from different fragmentary specimens, he described six species of Protemnodon.

However, Owen’s species have not stood the test of time. Our study agrees with only one of his species — Protemnodon anak. The first specimen of P. anak to be described, called the holotype, still resides in the Natural History Museum in London.

Fossils of individual Protemnodon bones are not uncommon, but more complete skeletons are rare. This has hampered palaeontologists’ efforts to study the creatures.

The question of how many species there were, and how to tell them apart, has not been fully answered. This has made it hard to say how the species differed in their size, geographic range, movement and adaptations to their natural environments.

I set out to solve this problem in my PhD project. With fellow PhD student Jacob van Zoelen, I visited the collections of 14 museums in four countries to gather data.

We have now seen just about every piece of Protemnodon that exists above ground, photographing, scanning, measuring, comparing and describing more than 800 specimens collected from all over Australia and New Guinea.

Finding The Key

Among all this study, the key to the Protemnodon problem turned out to be buried in the dry bed of Lake Callabonna in northeastern South Australia. Three expeditions to Lake Callabonna from 2013 to 2019 found a megafaunal boneyard: complete skeletons of giant kangaroos, giant wombats, and Genyornis newtoni, a 250kg flightless bird, were scattered among the remains of hundreds of Diprotodon optatum, a rhino-sized marsupial herbivore. This lake likely preserves animals that died while searching for water during prolonged drought.

I accompanied the 2018 trip, which returned with all manner of amazing articulated fossils. These fossils allowed me, then a PhD student in my first year, to begin the process of picking apart the identities of the kangaroos.

Two of Richard Owen’s species, Protemnodon brehus and Protemnodon roechus, were only known from their teeth, which were extremely similar. We unearthed and compared several kangaroos with teeth that could have belonged to either of Owen’s species, but the skeletons didn’t match.

By the international rules of species naming, this meant we had to describe two new species. These are Protemnodon viator from central Australia and Protemnodon mamkurra from southern Australia.

Big Kangaroos With Big Differences

Our study reviews all species of Protemnodon, finding surprising differences. We concluded that there are seven species in the genus, adapted to live in very different environments and even hopping in different ways. This level of variation is unusual within a single genus of kangaroo.

Protemnodon viator was a large, long-limbed kangaroo that could hop fairly quickly and efficiently. Its name, viator, is Latin for “traveller” or “wayfarer”. Its elongated hind limbs were muscular and narrow, perfect for supporting the kangaroo as it hopped long distances.

Protemnodon viator was well-adapted to its arid central Australian habitat, living in similar areas to the red kangaroos of today. Protemnodon viator was much bigger, however, weighing up to 170 kg, about twice as much as the largest male red kangaroos.

Our study suggests two or three species of Protemnodon may have been mostly quadrupedal, moving something like a quokka or potoroo – bounding on four legs at times, and hopping on two legs at others.

The newly described Protemnodon mamkurra is likely one of these. A large but thick-boned and robust kangaroo, it was probably fairly slow-moving and inefficient. It may have hopped only rarely, perhaps just when startled.

The best fossils of this species come from southeastern South Australia, on the land of the Boandik people. The species name, mamkurra, was chosen by Boandik elders and language experts in the Burrandies Corporation. It means “great kangaroo” in Bunganditj language.

The third of our newly described species is Protemnodon dawsonae, a woodland-dwelling kangaroo from eastern Australia and the probable ancestor of P. viator and P. mamkurra. It is named for kangaroo palaeontologist Lyndall Dawson.

By about 40,000 years ago, despite their many differences, all Protemnodon were extinct on mainland Australia. We don’t yet know why they died out when similar animals such as wallaroos and grey kangaroos survived – but our study may open the door for further Protemnodon research that will find out more about how they lived and why they died.

Isaac A. R. Kerr, Research Assistant at Flinders University Palaeontology Laboratory, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

After a decade of silence, one of the most powerful magnets in the universe suddenly burst back to life in late 2018. The reawakening of this “magnetar”, a city-sized star named XTE J1810-197 born from a supernova explosion, was an incredibly violent affair.

The snapping and untwisting of the tangled magnetic field released enormous amounts of energy as gamma rays, X-rays and radio waves.

By catching magnetar outbursts like this in action, astronomers are beginning to understand what drives their erratic behaviour. We are also finding potential links to enigmatic flashes of radio light seen from distant galaxies known as fast radio bursts.

In two new pieces of research published in Nature Astronomy, we used three of the world’s largest radio telescopes to capture a host of never before seen changes in the radio waves emitted by one of these rare objects in unprecedented detail.

Magnetic Monsters

Magnetars are young neutron stars, with magnetic fields billions of times stronger than our most powerful Earth-based magnets. The slow decay of their magnetic fields creates an enormous amount of stress in their hard outer crust until it eventually fractures. This twists the magnetic field and releases large amounts of energetic X-rays and gamma rays as it unwinds.

These exotic stars were initially detected back in 1979 when an intense gamma-ray burst emitted by one was picked up by spacecraft across the Solar System. Since then, we’ve found another 30 magnetars, the vast majority of which have only been detected as sources of X-rays and gamma rays. However, a rare few have since been found to also emit flashes of radio waves.

The first of these “radio-loud” magnetars goes by the name XTE J1810-197. Astronomers initially discovered it as a bright source of X-rays after an outburst in 2003, then found it emitted bright pulses of radio waves as it rotated every 5.54 seconds.

Unfortunately, the intensity of the radio pulses dropped rapidly, and within two years it had completely faded from view. XTE J1810-197 remained in this radio silent state for over a decade.

A Wobbly Start

On December 11 2018, astronomers using the University of Manchester’s 76-metre Lovell telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory noticed that XTE J1810-197 was once again emitting bright radio pulses. This was quickly confirmed by both the Max-Planck-Institut’s 100-metre Effelsberg radio telescope in Germany and Murriyang, CSIRO’s 64-metre Parkes radio telescope in Australia.

Following confirmation, all three telescopes began an intense campaign to track how the magnetar’s radio emission then evolved over time.

The reactivated radio pulses from XTE J1810-197 were found to be highly linearly polarised, appearing to wiggle either up and down, left to right, or some combination of the two. Careful measurements of the polarisation direction allowed us to determine how the magnetar’s magnetic field and spin direction are oriented with respect to the Earth.

Our diligent tracking of the polarisation direction revealed something remarkable: the direction of the star’s spin was slowly wobbling. By comparing the measured wobble against simulations, we were able to determine the magnetar’s surface had become slightly lumpy due to the outburst.

The amount of lumpiness was tiny, only about a millimetre off from being a perfect sphere, and gradually disappeared within three months of XTE J1810-917 waking up.

Twisted Light

Normally, magnetars only emit very small amounts of circularly polarised radio waves, which travel in a spiral pattern. Unusually, we detected an enormous amount of circular polarisation in XTE J1810-197 during the 2018 outburst.

Our observations with Murriyang revealed the normally linearly polarised radio waves were being converted into circularly polarised waves.

This “linear-to-circular conversion” had long been predicted to occur when radio waves travel through the super-heated soup of particles that resides in neutron star magnetic fields.

However, the theoretical predictions for how the effect should change with observing frequency did not match our observations, though we weren’t too surprised. The environment around a magnetar in outburst is a complicated place, and there are many effects that can be at play that relatively simple theories aren’t designed to account for.

Piecing It All Together

The discovery of the slight wobble and the circular polarisation in the radio emission of XTE J1810-197 represents an exciting leap forwards in how we can study the outbursts of radio-loud magnetars. It also paints a more complete picture of the 2018 outburst.

We now know that cracking of the magnetar surface causes it to become distorted and wobble for a brief period of time, while the magnetic field becomes filled with super-hot particles whizzing about at almost light speed.

Combined with other observations, the amount of wobble could be used to test our theories of how matter should behave at densities much higher than we could ever hope to replicate in labs on Earth. The inconsistency of the linear-to-circular conversion with theory, on the other hand, motivates us to devise more complex ideas of how radio waves escape from their magnetic fields.

What’s Next?

While XTE J1810-197 remains active to this day, it has since settled into a more relaxed state with no further signs of wobbling or linear-to-circular conversion. There are however hints that both phenomena may have been seen in past observations of other radio-loud magnetars, and might be a common feature of their outbursts.

Like cats, it’s impossible to predict what a magnetar will do next. But with current and future upgrades to telescopes in Australia, Germany and North America, we are now more ready than ever to pounce the next time one decides to awaken.

Marcus Lower, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CSIRO; Gregory Desvignes, Postdoctoral Researcher, Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, and Patrick Weltevrede, Lecturer In Pulsar Astrophysics, University of Manchester

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For many people, the term “bulk billed” refers to a GP visit they don’t have to pay for out-of-pocket. But another form of bulk billing is in the news ahead of May’s federal budget – bulk billing of pathology testing, such as blood tests.

This relates to the fees pathology companies receive from Medicare to perform out-of-hospital laboratory tests, the type your GP might order to help diagnose or monitor disease.

These pathology fees have been frozen for almost a quarter of a century. Is that fair? Obviously not, argues Australian Pathology, which represents private pathology laboratories.

It has recently launched its “Keep Pathology Bulk Billed” campaign. At the core is a request for about an extra A$160 million a year for pathology companies. It argues this is needed to keep most out-of-hospital pathology tests free for the public.

But simple solutions put forward by vested interests involving more public funds are rarely in the public interest. Here’s how we might design a fairer pathology system, fit for the 21st century, that keeps tests free for the public.

Pathology Is Big Business

Collecting specimens and analysing them is big business. Pathology providers received almost $3.25 billion for out-of-hospital tests in 2022-23 from Medicare rebates. Pathology testing is also conducted in public and private hospitals, but these are funded under a combination of different arrangements.

Almost all (more than 99%) of out-of-hospital pathology services are bulk billed. That’s a rate much higher than that for GP visits, which stood at about 80% in the same period.

Pathology use is increasing faster than the population is growing. That’s partly because of more chronic disease in the population, and partly because new tests are becoming available.

Pathology provision is concentrated in a few hands, with a number of providers listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Increases in pathology rebates, as Australian Pathology is calling for, would go straight to companies’ bottom lines, increasing shareholder value.

So why are pathology companies calling for more funding now? Pathology companies’ profits burgeoned during the first years of the COVID pandemic, with the introduction of widespread PCR testing and the government funding that went with it.

But the industry was accused of profiting from “COVID-19 misery”, and the gravy train eventually ended. So pathology companies are now looking to replace that revenue, using the latest campaign to try to increase rebates.

Does The Pathology Industry Have A Point?

On the face of it, a 24-year freeze on pathology government rebates might seem unfair. But a look into the pathology world reveals an industry where there has been significant productivity growth.

An increased volume of standard tests, as we’ve seen in recent years, can lead to improved productivity. For instance, companies can work their testing equipment harder – running them for longer, loading them with more samples – lowering the cost per test. Improvements in equipment also allow tests to be done quicker, allowing increased economies of scale.

But a fee freeze is a lazy policy, an example of “set and forget”. While it does achieve some benefits for the taxpayer, it’s not optimal. That’s because it assumes all the productivity savings (from automation, digitisation and increased economies of scale) exactly offset any increased costs from inflation. This is never likely to be true. Given the current extent of automation and consolidation, this is probably leaving excess profits in the pockets of providers, and costing governments more than they need to pay.

More changes in pathology provision are yet to come. Advances in artificial intelligence are accelerating and automated reading of some pathology tests may reduce pathology costs further, yielding more profits for providers.

Future policies need to reflect changes in how much it costs to provide pathology services, details of which are thin on the ground.

What Needs To Happen?

Government should step back and ask whether a fees-for-pathology-service payment system, designed a century ago when pathology provision was literally a cottage industry, is still right in an era of extensive automation and ownership concentration. The answer is clearly no.

Reform should first dump the existing uncapped, fee-for-service payment system. Pathology is a big business and should be paid as such using tenders and contracts.

Pathology companies should be invited to tender to provide out-of-hospital pathology services in designated geographic areas. Two or more tenders could be approved to maintain competition between providers and keep options open for the end of the tender period. Pathology contracts should involve no out-of-pocket payments by consumers.

In-hospital pathology should not be covered by the same arrangements. Instead, private hospitals should make their own contractual arrangements for pathology provision, as they do now.

Public pathology services – run by state governments or their agencies such as Pathology Queensland – are also changing.

Consolidation of public pathology services in New South Wales yielded significant improvements in productivity. Victoria has started a less ambitious reform process, consolidating into three public providers rather than the single public provider model seen in NSW, Queensland and South Australia. This will also probably yield savings.

Public providers should be invited with private providers into the tender process to enhance competition.

What’s The Take-Home Message?

The world of pathology provision is in flux, with more changes on the horizon, whether that’s related to technology or consolidation. In this environment, paying more to private providers under a payment system that has passed its use-by date is not good policy. That’s despite its simplistic attraction and advocacy from vested interests.

So the next time you go to a pathology collection centre and see posters encouraging you to email your MP to “keep pathology bulk billed”, beware. The campaign is more about company profits than saving you money.

Stephen Duckett, Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Less than 24 hours after Ashlee Good was murdered in Bondi Junction, her family released a statement requesting the media take down photographs they had reproduced of Ashlee and her family without their consent. They said it had caused her loved ones extreme distress.

Their appeal is immediately understandable – many people would be upset by seeing photos of a loved one everywhere after such a traumatic event.

The media had evidently not received permission to use these photos in their news stories. Nor had they afforded the family any ethical sense of privacy when they circulated and displayed the photos across multiple platforms.

There has been valuable commentary about the issues surrounding the common journalistic practice of mining social media after a “newsworthy” death.

My PhD research offers further insight into a perspective that is rarely shared: the view of families bereaved through homicide.

While I cannot and do not presume to speak for Good’s family, I have interviewed families bereaved through homicide and they have shared their experience of photos of their loved one being in the media.

Private Photos In The Public Domain

To the bereaved, photos of loved ones are deeply meaningful. They are more than mere objects, more than random captured moments.

They are wrapped up in specific memories and treated as keepsakes. They are representations of and tangible connections to the person who was taken from them.

When these photos enter the public domain following homicide, they become photos of a victim.

In this new domain, private photos serve altogether different purposes. They furnish media stories now and into the future. Their original context and personal meaning are typically overridden or removed, often along with families’ consent.

My research indicates this is an issue that persists long into the aftermath of homicide, well after media and public interest has dissipated.

In other words, it has the capacity to traumatise families for years.

Judging Victims

While the mining of photos is one matter, how they are then used by the media and interpreted by the public is another.

My research uncovers how details in a photo can be highlighted and twisted at the expense of others. For example, bereaved families told me how hurtful it was when the media republished unflattering and inappropriate photos of their loved one that were just meant for friends and family.

One mother recalled how her son would do a silly pose and ruin their family photos. He was being a typical teenager, but that was not how he was perceived when the media reproduced those photos alongside their chosen narrative. Instead, the mother read comments made by the public underneath the article that said her son deserved to be murdered. The public judged her son based on those photos.

Similarly, a sister was distraught when the media pulled a photo from her social media of her and her brother where he did not look his best. They were at a party and there is a heart-warming story of the moment before the photo was taken. She explained she loves the photo; it is a happy memory for her, but she said it is for his family to love, not for the public to make assumptions about her brother.

These examples highlight how significant it is for families when the media take a photo out of context, without permission, and curate it to suit specific narratives.

Certainly, it is a practice that exacerbates trauma.

The Right To Control

I also spoke to families about how they decided which photographs they wanted in the public domain.

One family, whose daughter was murdered before social media was used as a journalistic tool, told me that when they were asked for photos, they were reflective and careful about the ones they shared, choosing to keep their favourite photos to themselves.

Another mother explained her reasoning behind the two photos that she handed over – one because it depicted her daughter as she was at the time of her murder, and the other where she was dressed up, because it showed what she would have been like if she had had the chance to get married.

Bereaved families want photos to be an accurate, presentable, and appropriate portrayal of their loved one.

The photos might be tied to a specific memory or feeling, they might maintain their privacy, they might be chosen because they do not require context, or they might be the one they believe their loved one would have wanted.

The bereaved deserve to be in control of that decision. Allowing them to make that choice themselves gives the bereaved agency at a time when they feel most powerless.

Laura Wajnryb McDonald, PhD candidate in Criminology, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Former Spanish football federation chief Luis Rubiales may face significant consequences for his non-consensual kiss of Spanish soccer star Jenni Hermoso.

But this is not the norm for perpetrators of gender-based violence in sport. Our research – which reviewed 25 years of studies examining women’s experiences of gender-based violence in sport – found perpetrators are rarely held to account.

More commonly, they are free to continue abusing victims with impunity.

Even after millions of people watched Rubiales’ actions, it was obvious that Hermoso’s experience was minimised, that powerful organisations attempted to coerce her into stating it was consensual, and that it took the collective voices of women standing with Hermoso to fight back with a resounding “no”.

The Shocking Reality Of Gender-Based Violence In Sport

Women’s sport is championed as a platform for empowerment and equality but previous studies have shown gender-based violence is highly prevalent, ranging from 26 to 75% across psychological, physical and sexual violence, depending on how the violence has been defined and measured.

There have been many historical and contemporary cases of abuse, bringing to light some of the concerns about how perpetrators were able to continue their abuse for so long.

Our research systematically gathered and analysed the collective voices of women who experienced gender-based violence in sport to understand their experiences better and to inform future prevention and response initiatives. Participants included current and former athletes, coaches, umpires and managers.

The research found women in sport experience multiple types of violence (sexual, physical, psychological, financial), often by more than one perpetrator. Coaches or other authority figures are the most common perpetrators, followed by male athletes or members of the public.

We found a “normalisation” of these violent behaviours in the sporting context; they were seen as expected and were routinely excused in order to get results.

Beware Of ‘Sporting Family Violence’

When women do speak up and complain, our research highlighted that organisational responses are impotent at best, actively malevolent and cruel at worst.

Complaints often go nowhere, codes of conduct may not exist, and there is a strong lack of confidentiality because “everyone knows everyone”.

In some cases, women were mocked and told they’d imagined the abuse, a deliberate strategy by the organisation to put “success” and “winning” before the safety of women.

Instead, women are left to do their own safety work by avoiding the perpetrator(s) or leaving the sport entirely.

Justice is sometimes only achieved when women act as a group to voice their experiences and confront abusers.

Importantly, our research found the unique context of sport as an extended or surrogate family created the conditions for “sporting family violence”.

Athletes spend significant time within the sporting family unit, creating close relationships with their coach, other authority figures and teammates.

The Coach As A Father Figure

The coach as a father figure was a consistent theme across several studies, with some athletes stating the coach knew more about them than their parents.

If a coach was regarded as “the best”, often no one questioned him. This gave coaches enormous power, which they used to isolate women they abused from both the sport family and their actual family, exerting coercive control to maintain an environment of secrecy and dominance.

Finally, our research found women are still seen as inferior to men and treated as “other” in the sporting context. Consequently, there is a hostility to women, who are perceived as a threat to the hegemonic masculinity of sport.

This was a particularly strong theme in non-traditional female sports such as judo and boxing, and for women in management or official roles.

Power is a key factor running through all our findings, and while women may be able to exercise some power through collective resistance, power often remains with men and sports institutions that are complicit.

Initiatives to address gender-based violence in sport must recognise the many forms of violence women experience, and the different ways in which power and violence play out.

Some Positive Signs, But Much More Is Needed

There are some positive signs of change. A recent report into the culture of abuse in swimming in Australia made several recommendations that are now being actioned.

And in the UK, laws that prohibit coaches from having relationships with players are being developed and acted upon.

Also, several collective survivor advocacy groups have been established, such as The Army of Survivors, Sport and Rights Alliance and Gymnasts for Change.

Of course, this still shows the extent of the collective voice needed to push for change.

While we applaud this and the reckoning of Rubiales’ actions, and cheer for the collective voice standing with women like Jenni Hermoso, it would be negligent to forget the many silenced women’s voices in sport who bear the brunt of violence within a space often considered their family.

Fiona Giles, Research Fellow, La Trobe Rural Health School, La Trobe University and Kirsty Forsdike, Senior Lecturer, La Trobe Business School, and Senior Researcher, Centre for Sport & Social Impact, La Trobe University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson’s victory in the defamation action brought against them by Bruce Lehrmann is the second big win inside a year for the Australian media using the defence of truth. However, it comes at a heavy cost to the reputations of the industry and the profession of journalism.

The evidence about the Seven Network’s efforts to get Lehrmann to give an exclusive interview for its Spotlight program, allegedly including the purchase of cocaine and prostitute services for him, cast a pall over the way commercial TV news programs operate.

These allegations were denied by Seven, but invoices and receipts said to support them were produced in court. Justice Michael Lee stated in his judgment that they were uncontradicted by any evidence in reply from Lehrmann.

By contrast with this unsavoury episode, only ten months ago, in June 2023, Australians saw journalism at the opposite end of the ethical spectrum when The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times proved the substantial truth of the imputation that Ben Roberts-Smith was a war criminal. It was a victory based on extraordinary feats of investigative journalism on a matter of grave public interest.

How Network Ten Got It Right … And Wrong

Network Ten and Wilkinson also produced journalism dealing with a matter of grave public interest. They can claim credit for giving a voice to Brittany Higgins, now proved to be the victim of rape, by interviewing her on The Project, and in doing so standing up for the right of all women victims to be heard.

But the credit is tarnished by their actions first in disrupting Lehrmann’s criminal trial and second by serious journalistic weaknesses in the production of The Project interview itself.

The interview won Wilkinson a silver Logie, but her acceptance speech was considered by the ACT Supreme Court to be so prejudicial in favour of Higgins as to amount to trial by media.

The trial was postponed and ultimately collapsed because of juror misconduct, with no findings against Lehrmann.

Justice Lee acknowledged that Wilkinson had cleared her speech with Ten’s senior litigation counsel, Tasha Smithies, whose conduct in this matter he criticised, and was encouraged by the network to make the speech. In these respects, he said, Wilkinson had been badly let down by those she turned to for advice.

However, he went on to say she was an experienced journalist who might have realised the speech was fraught with danger if she had thought it through as a journalist rather than as a champion of Higgins.

This attachment to Higgins’ cause was a fundamental weakness that underlay the many substantive criticisms Justice Lee made of the journalistic motives and processes leading up to The Project interview.

From the outset, Wilkinson had said to Higgins’ boyfriend, David Sharaz, that she proposed to “hold Britt’s hand through all this”.

Justice Lee observed that while he was aware of the need to build rapport and deal sensitively with a person presenting as a victim of sexual assault, assessing the credibility of someone making claims of serious wrongdoing required a degree of detachment that was absent in the interactions between The Project team and Higgins.

The second weakness was that Wilkinson and the producer of the program, Angus Llewellyn, failed to keep an open mind. In Justice Lee’s words, all contemporaneous records suggested they never doubted the truth of Higgins’ account.

For them, he said, the most important part of the story was Higgins’ narrative in which others were putting up roadblocks to her quest for justice.

It was this cover-up or victimisation allegation that had generated so much notoriety and public interest, yet it had contained inconsistencies, falsities and imprecisions that the journalists had failed resolve.

Justice Lee also raised doubts about Higgins’ motive for doing the interview. Llewellyn had given evidence that he thought Higgins wanted to speak out about her experience to create change, to prevent it from happening to anyone else, and did not consider she had a vendetta.

While conceding there might have been some truth in this, Justice Lee said any suggestion Wilkinson or Llewellyn approached the story with disinterested professional scepticism was undermined by the way they were prepared to assist in the plans of Sharaz and Higgins to use the allegations for immediate political advantage.

He said Sharaz’s political motives were made plain by his expressed intention to liaise with an opposition frontbencher to deploy the allegations against the government during Question Time.

Yet Llewellyn had evidently considered this to be of no consequence, leading Justice Lee to say that any journalist who did not think Sharaz had a motivation to inflict immediate political damage would have to be “wilfully blind”.

Moreover, Llewellyn and Wilkinson had expressed a willingness to assist in the political use of the serious charges they were supposedly interrogating and assessing with independent minds.

So once more in this saga, journalists and the media were revealed as having become partisan political participants in the story.

Journalist As Participant

Previously we had seen The Australian newspaper and one of its columnists, Janet Albrechtsen, insert themselves into the inquiry established by the ACT government into the way the criminal case against Lehrmann had been handled.

According to a judicial review of that inquiry by the ACT Supreme Court, the chair of the inquiry, Walter Sofronoff, engaged in 273 interactions with Albrechtsen over the inquiry’s seven months. This included 51 phone calls, text messages, emails and a private lunch in Brisbane.

It was alleged during the judicial review that Albrechtsen was an “advocate” for Lehrmann, and the review found that Sofronoff’s extensive communications with her gave rise to an impression of bias in the findings he made against the former ACT director of public prosecutions, Shane Drumgold.

This phenomenon of journalist as participant undermines public trust in the credibility of the media.

In his recent book Collision of Power, Martin Baron, who was executive editor of the Washington Post throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, takes a strong stand against this trend.

He argues that the more journalists are perceived as partisans, the less their reporting will be believed.

At a time of peril for democratic institutions, we need to be good stewards of our own, reinforcing standards rather than abandoning them.

The Project did right by Higgins and by helping to elevate the issue of violence against women. But this was achieved by journalistic attitudes and practices that did not stand up to scrutiny.

Justice Lee described the Lehrmann saga as “an omnishambles” that had inflicted widespread collateral damage. The media and journalism have not escaped.

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.