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India-Australia should work together on 6G technology: High Commissioner O’Farrell

Australian High Commissioner to India Barry O'Farrell with India;s Vice President Jagdesh Dankad; Image Source: Barry O'Farrell

India and Australia should work together in framing an ethical regulatory framework for the sixth generation (6G) technology, Australian High Commissioner to India Barry O’Farrell said on Wednesday.

Speaking at a conference organised by the Consumer Unity Trust Society (CUTS), O’Farrell highlighted the need for India and Australia to work together on framing an ethical regulatory framework for the emerging and critical 6G technology.

He called the two countries natural partners based on their shared democratic values and facing common cyber threats from state and non-state cyber actors.

Consumer Unity Trust Society (CUTS) organised a conference titled ‘Identifying Elements of Ethical and Regulatory Framework for 6G and Creating Opportunities for India Australia’, in partnership with the Australian Risk Policy Institute (ARPI), and the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B).

The conference was supported by the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Department of Telecommunication (DoT), Government of India.
Recognising India as a leader in the Indo-Pacific region, he re-emphasised Australia’s commitment to invest in and collaborate with India to develop its potential in the cyber-space. Apart from government-to-government interaction, he called for close collaboration between different stakeholders (civil society organisations, think tanks, industry etc) from both countries to unlock opportunities in this regard.

The India-Australia partnership was also considered to be imperative for ensuring an open, safe, and resilient cyberspace in the Indo-Pacific region.

S P Kochhar, Director General, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), echoed similar views but called for a focus on the implementation of the India-Australia partnership on the subject, else the effort may remain an academic exercise. Thus, taking industry onboard from both countries assumes importance.

He also emphasised the importance of focussing not just on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) but expanding it to include Electronics and Cyberspace as well, calling it ICTEC. He also cautioned against individual countries trying to establish country-specific standards, which deviate from international standards and could be detrimental to a global and interoperable 6G.

Abhay Shanker Verma, Deputy Director General (Mobile Technologies), Telecom Engineering Centre, DoT, confirmed that India and Australia are already working together at the Quad level on relevant subject areas. He further traced India’s steps from being far behind and a mere adopter of international telecommunication standards at the time of 2G/ 3G, to now aspiring to become a contributor to the international 6G standards. He also mentioned that the DoT’s technology innovation group is currently preparing a vision document for 6G.

Pradeep Mehta, Secretary General, CUTS, said the emerging 6G technology will be crucial in bolstering artificial intelligence, the internet of things, blockchain and other advanced technologies. However, the uptake and success of such technologies were stated to be dependent upon framing optimal regulations on privacy, cyber-security, and consumer protection.

Lastly, he suggested the India-Australia partnership to also focus on bolstering mobile manufacturing in India and unlocking opportunities for enabling trade and investment between the two countries.

Alleged imposter ‘Dr’ Yuvaraj Krishnan saw patients for six months in city’s best hospital

Yuvaraj Krishnan

Yuvaraj Krishnan worked for almost six months in a clinical research position at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand.

It is reported that 30-year-old Krishnan allegedly used fake documents to secure this job as a doctor.

Image Source: Middlemore Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand.

When questions were raised about Krishnan’s medical qualifications and enquiries made he was charged with forgery and sacked from the position on 10 August 2022.

It is further reported that during this time Krishnan examined dozens of patients at the Middlemore Hospital.

New Zealand Police’s detective senior sergeant Veronica McPherson told the local media that they have now charged a Krishnan with forgery. McPherson said.

“We are not ruling out additional charges being laid but this will depend on our ongoing inquiries. As the matter is now before the Court, Police are unable to comment further.”

Krishnan allegedly used an annual practicing certificate to obtain a pecuniary advantage, knowing that the certificate was forged.

Image source: Manukau District Court.

Krishnan appeared at the Manukau District Court via a video link in front of Community magistrate Lauolefale Lemalu.

Meanwhile, Krishnan’s lawyer Steve Cullen sought his client to be remanded without a plea at this stage. He has been released on bail and asked not to have any contact with Te Whatu Ora staff and not to travel outside of New Zealand.

Krishnan will reappear in court on 7 September 2022.

‘Shantaram’ an Australian prison escapee who worked with Mumbai mafia coming soon

Shantaram

Apple TV+ has finally released the first look of “Shantaram,” a new drama series starring Charlie Hunnam. In the series, Hunnam plays Lin Ford, an Australian prison escapee living a double life in 1980s Bombay — running a local health clinic by day and working for the local mafia.

Melbourne-based Indian-Australian actor Jeet Dhaliwal who has played a role in “Shantaram” told The Australia Today that he is excited about the opportunity to be part of a series based on such an acclaimed work.

Jeet Dhaliwal (Image source: Facebook)

He says:

“Working on this project’s been a great learning and rewarding experience! I am Grateful to have got the opportunity.”

The series is based on the internationally bestselling novel by Australian writer Gregory David Roberts. Shantaram had sold over 6 million copies and translated into more than 40 languages when Apple TV+ won the rights to adapt the novel in a 2018 bidding war.

Gregory David Roberts (Facebook – Shantaram)

This highly anticipated series is a thrilling epic adventure that follows an Australian’s journey to redemption through India that changes his life. It is a fictionalised account of Gregory David Roberts’ life, a convicted bank robber who escaped to India while serving 10 years time inside Pentridge Prison in Victoria.

A First Look shows Lin Ford riding a motorcycle through Mumbai’s slum. Ford is alone in an unfamiliar city and struggles to avoid the trouble he’s running from in this new place.

Charlie Hunnam in Shantaram as fugitive Lin Ford (Apple TV)

According to a release:

“Ford is committed to living under the radar and alone — a lifestyle that allows him to hold onto his freedom. But that freedom, and solitary existence, will be threatened when he meets Karla (Antonia Desplat) and questions if love is worth more than freedom.

Ford’s future will become a question between the two — freedom which may not be possible without his involvement in the illegal, and dangerous world of Bombay crime.”

The series is written and executive produced by Steve Lightfoot and directed by Bharat Nalluri. In addition to Hunnam, the series also stars Shubham Saraf, Elektra Kilbey, Fayssal Bazzi, Luke Pasqualino, Antonia Desplat, Alyy Khan, Sujaya Dasgupta, Vincent Perez, David Field, Alexander Siddig, Gabrielle Scharnitzky, Elham Ehsas, Rachel Kamath, Matthew Joseph and Shiv Palekar.

The first three instalments of the 12-episode series will premiere in mid-October with subsequent episodes airing each Friday through December.

75 years on haunting memories of partition of India and the afterlife

Harbans Kaur and Harbans Singh (Image: shmeet Kaur Chaudhry)

By Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry

As we celebrate 75 years of Independence entering the 76th year, memories of partition have not faded away, rather for many, these memories resurface whenever 15th August returns.

This year our family was more nostalgic and the sense of loss more hurting. All this seems very strange.

We lost Harbans Singh, my grandfather 103 years of age, this January 2022. With him, an experience of a lifetime was lost. Amongst us, he was the one who had witnessed and experienced partition horrors.

At 97 years of age, he was recorded by the partition archive, but the archive had lost his recording. I was at a complete loss when I got to know this, and then I decided to write about him, his life, and the times he belonged to. Since then, in one way or the other, I am trying to record him in various ways. This became more difficult for me as he grew older. He chose not to speak about the troubles of those times.

When my grandfather turned 100, we sat around him to listen to his experiences of life, but he was extremely selective in choosing what to speak.

My grandfather spoke about all the good times, his experience with the British officers at work, how systematic and organised they were, how kindhearted their wives were, and his tours with them. But then he cheekily mentioned how the white men abducted the women in the remote areas of the hilly estates of Punjab then, now Himachal.

Secretary S.K. Paul addressing the employees at my grandfather’s retirement as Undersecretary, Secretariat of Himachal Pradesh, 1977 (Image: Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry)

My grandfather spoke about setting offices in the free and new India, working with the Red Cross initially, then the newly formed secretariat of Himachal Pradesh. He spoke about the important positions he held during his lifetime, and finally his retirement as an Under-secretary with the Himachal government.

What my grandfather didn’t speak was about partition or his experience with partition violence.

We were all expecting him to tell us the story of his return to Shimla from Lahore on a train that was full of dead bodies, how scared he was if he’ll be able to make it or not, and how he kept falling on the bodies smeared in blood. I triggered him a bit when he retorted:

“What is the point in remembering all this now?”

My grandfather then talked about his native village Kahuta in the Rawalpindi district, Pothohar region of Pakistan, and told us that it had a mountainous terrane, a river flowing beside, and the river was the life-giving force for the village. He often said that the air of that place was very pure. He talked about everyone visiting Gurdwara in the mornings and evenings.

People of that village were mostly merchants and had shops in the central market that catered to several villages around as Kahuta was a tehsil. Then suddenly, my grandfather sighed:

“All is left behind, no more ours, we all should move on, I don’t see any sense in reminiscing the past … for what should we do it … nothing will change now … yet a lot has changed in the last 100 years.…”

These words resonate in my ears even today.

But the truth is that Kahuta never left him, he never failed to remember, the memories haunted him.

Last year when my grandfather was 102, someone in our circle expired. He asked me where my parents were, and I told him that they had gone to attend the cremation of the deceased. My grandfather asked, “Who has expired? Did I know him? Was he from Kahuta?” I couldn’t stop my tears and told him that Kahuta was long lost, no one from Kahuta was around now, many people had expired, while his long life had left behind a long queue of memories and the deceased was not from there … he didn’t know him.

Today, when he is not amongst us, his association with Kahuta haunts us, his people, his family who are rootless, who have never associated with any village, whose clan scattered to many urban towns and cities, and those who have remained dislocated for the last 75 years and will remain so for many more.

Author: Dr Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry is an Assistant Professor at the Center for English Studies, Central University of Gujarat, India.

Disclaimer: The Australia Today is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts, or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of The Australia Today and The Australia Today News does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.

#NationalScienceWeek: After 110 years of climate change scepticism, Are we finally ready to listen?

Climate change

By Linden Ashcroft

On August 14 1912, a small New Zealand newspaper published a short article announcing global coal usage was affecting our planet’s temperature.

This piece from 110 years ago is now famous, shared across the internet this time every year as one of the first pieces of climate science in the media (even though it was actually a reprint of a piece published in a New South Wales mining journal a month earlier).

So how did it come about? And why has it taken so long for the warnings in the article to be heard – and acted on?

Short newspaper article with the headline
This short 1912 article made the direct link between burning coal and global temperature changes. The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal, National Library of Australia

The fundamental science has been understood for a long time

American scientist and women’s rights campaigner Eunice Foote is now widely credited as being the first person to demonstrate the greenhouse effect back in 1856, several years before United Kingdom researcher John Tyndall published similar results.

Her rudimentary experiments showed carbon dioxide and water vapour can absorb heat, which, scaled up, can affect the temperature of the earth. We’ve therefore known about the relationship between greenhouse gases and Earth’s temperature for at least 150 years.

Four decades later, Swedish scientist Svente Arrhenius did some basic calculations to estimate how much the Earth’s temperature would change if we doubled the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. At the time, the CO₂ levels were around 295 parts per million molecules of air. This year, we’ve hit 421 parts per million – more than 50% higher than pre-industrial times.

Arrhenius estimated doubling CO₂ would produce a world 5℃ hotter. This, thankfully, is higher than modern calculations but not too far off, considering he wasn’t using a sophisticated computer model! At the time, the Swede was more worried about moving into a new ice age than global warming, but by the 1900s he was startling his classes with news the world was slowly warming due to the burning of coal.

Climate science began on the fringe

The 1912 New Zealand snippet was likely based on a four-page spread from Popular Mechanics magazine, which drew from the work of Arrhenius and others.

When climate advocates point to articles like this and say we knew about climate change, this overlooks the fact Arrhenius’ ideas were generally considered fringe, meaning not many people took them seriously. In fact, there was backlash about how efficient carbon dioxide actually was as a greenhouse gas.

When the first world war began, the topic lost momentum. Oil began its rise, pushing aside promising technologies such as electric cars – which in 1900 had a third of the fledgling US car market – in favour of fossil-fuel technological developments and military goals. The idea humans could affect the whole planet remained on the fringe.

The Callendar Effect

It wasn’t until the 1930s that human-induced climate change resurfaced. UK engineer Guy Callendar put together weather observations from around the world and found temperatures had already increased.

Not only was Callendar the first to clearly identify a warming trend and connect it to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, he also teased apart the importance of CO₂ compared to water vapour, another potent greenhouse gas.

Guy Callendar’s 1938 results compared to recent global temperature trend calculations, as published in the latest IPCC assessment report. IPCC AR6 WG1

Just like the 1912 article, Callendar also underestimated the rate of warming we would see in the 80 years after his first results. He predicted the world would be only 0.39℃ hotter by the year 2000, rather than the 1℃ we observed. However it did get the attention of researchers, sparking intense scientific debate.

But at the end of the 1930s, the world went to war once more. Callendar’s discoveries swiftly took a backseat to battles, and rebuilding.

Fresh hope scuttled by merchants of doubt

In 1957, scientists began the International Geophysical Year – an intense investigation of the Earth and its poles and atmosphere. This saw the creation of the atmospheric monitoring stations tracking our steady increase in human-caused greenhouse gases. At the same time, oil companies were becoming aware of the impact their business was having on the Earth.

During these post-war decades, there was little political polarisation over climate. Margaret Thatcher – hardly a raging leftie – saw global warming as a clear threat during her time as UK Prime Minister. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen gave his now famous address to the US Congress claiming global warming had already arrived.

Momentum was growing. Many conservationists were encouraged by the Montreal Protocol, which more or less halted the use of ozone-depleting substances to tackle the growing hole in the ozone layer. Surely we could do the same to stop climate change?

As we now know, we didn’t. Phasing out a class of chemicals was one thing. But to wean ourselves off the fossil fuels on which the modern world was built? Much harder.

Climate change became politicised, with conservative pro-business parties around the world adopting climate scepticism. Global media coverage often included a sceptic in the interests of “balance”. This, in turn, made many people believe the jury was still out – when the science was becoming ever more certain and alarming.

With this scepticism came delays. The 1992 Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing greenhouse gases took until 2005 to be ratified. Science — and scientists themselves — came under attack. Soon a vicious tussle was underway, with loud voices – often funded by fossil fuel interests – questioning overwhelming scientific evidence.

Sadly for us, these noisy efforts worked to slow action. People refusing to accept the science bought the fossil fuel industry at least another decade , even as climate change continued to increase, with supercharged natural disasters and intensifying heatwaves.

The best time to act was 1912. The next best time is now

After decades of setbacks, climate science and social movements are now louder than ever in calling for strong and meaningful action.

The science is beyond doubt. While the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 1990 stated global warming “could be largely due to natural variability”, the latest from 2021 states humans have “unequivocally […] warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”.

We’ve even seen a welcome change in previously sceptical media outlets. And as we saw at May’s federal election, public opinion is on the side of the planet.

National and international climate policies are stronger than ever, and although there is still much more to be done, it finally seems that government, business and public sentiment are moving in the same direction.

Let’s use the 110th anniversary of this short snippet as a reminder to keep speaking up and pushing, finally, for the change we must have.

Linden Ashcroft, Lecturer in climate science and science communication, The University of Melbourne

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

Indian international student Gurveer Singh charged with negligent driving after fatal crash

Screen Shot: 7 News

Indian national Gurveer Singh, who only arrived in Australia last month, has been granted bail. The 23-year-old was charged with negligent driving occasioning death after a man died after a crash between the ute driven by Mr Singh and the man’s motorcycle in Sydney’s Lidcombe.

According to NSW police at about 7 pm on 15 August 2022, emergency services were called to Olympic Drive near Childs Street, Lidcombe, after reports of a car and a motorcycle collision.

Police and firefighters conducted CPR on the rider until NSW Ambulance paramedics arrived.

Screen Shot: 7 News

They continued treatment, however, the rider could not be revived and died at the scene. The deceased is yet to be formally identified but is believed to be aged 49.

Officers from Auburn Police Area Command established a crime scene, which was examined by specialist forensic police.

Screen Shot: 7 News

An investigation into the circumstances surrounding the crash commenced.

Mr Singh was taken to Auburn Hospital for mandatory testing.

He was then taken to Auburn Police Station and charged with negligent driving occasioning death.

The Daily Telegraph reported that Magistrate Richard Funston granted Mr Singh bail yesterday (16th August) and imposed several conditions on him.

Screen Shot: 7 News

The conditions required Mr Singh to hand his passport to Auburn police within 24 hours, not leave Australia and not drive with an international or Australian licence.

Mr Singh is studying a master of office administration through Queensland University and resides in Sydney’s Homebush West.

The next hearing on the matter will be on August 30

Migration Queensland opens visa program for onshore and offshore applicants in Skilled workers, Businesses and Graduate streams

Queensland Visa Application; Image Source: @CANVA
Queensland Visa Application; Image Source: @CANVA

The Migration Queensland (MQ) Program has been opened on 16 August 2022 for all new applications.

The important fact is that Queensland will have new nomination criteria and fact sheets for these applicants.

Skilled Migration Program

Migration Queensland will only accept a brand new EOI submitted on Skill select from 16 August 2022, updating existing EOIs submitted prior to 16 August 2022 will not be invited.  

All applicants need to ensure they have carefully read and understood the new criteria relevant to their stream or pathway, and that they meet the criteria before submitting an Expression of Interest (EOI).

This 2022-23 financial year Skilled Migration Program will be open to both onshore and offshore applicants, and provide pathways for skilled workers, graduates, and small business owners.

Queensland Visa Application; Image Source: @CANVA
Queensland Visa Application; Image Source: @CANVA

Business Migration Program 

Migration Queensland has been allocated a limited interim nomination allocation from the Department of Home Affairs for the business program.

The business program will continue to be open to the 188 – Business Innovation stream, the 188 – Investor stream and the 188 – Significant Investor stream.

From 16 August 2022, the new 188 – Entrepreneur stream is also open.

Migration Queensland says state nomination is a highly competitive program and not everyone will be invited for nomination.

However, due to a big backlog of visa applications processing time has been hurting applicants for the last few months. Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs has directed the Department of Home Affairs to devote more staff to address the current visa backlog.

The Immigration Department says it is prioritising the processing of key offshore caseloads – temporary skilled, students and visitors – so more people can travel to Australia and contribute to economic growth, and assist with labour shortages.

Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, Andrew Giles has tasked the Department with dealing with the backlog as quickly as possible.

Andrew Giles
Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, Andrew Giles

Minister Giles said the Department was working through large numbers of older cases, as well as seeing application volumes increase across key programs.

“The number of applications received in June 2022 is 6.5% higher than May 2022 – over the same period, there was a 10.6% increase in applications finalised,”

Minister Giles said.

“The former Government devalued immigration, with the visa application backlog increasing to nearly 1,000,000 on their watch. The Albanese Government is determined to reduce the backlog and restore the importance of the immigration function of our Government.” Minister Giles said.

Australian businesses must reap post-pandemic benefits in people and technology: Dr Ambika Zutshi

Women in technology; Image Source: @CANVA
Women in technology; Image Source: @CANVA

A new research project headed by Deakin University researchers along with Tata Consultancy Services’ (TCS) Global Research & Development program has pointed to a correlation between higher levels of data maturity and increased performance, regardless of the size, and type, or maturity of the organisation.

Associate Professors Ambika Zutshi, Lemai Nguyen and William Yeoh who work at Deakin Business School partnered with TCS to develop the “State of Data and Analytics in Australian Organisations” report.

Associate Professors Ambika Zutshi, Lemai Nguyen and William Yeoh from Deakin Business School

Dr Ambika Zutshi observes that their research identified that for “a digital transformation to be truly successful an organisation must take its people along the journey as well.” She adds:

“The people we spoke to in compiling this report emphasised the importance of finding a balance between the development of people, as well as technology, for holistic success in the different dimensions of digital.”

The researchers used TCS Datom™ (Data and Analytics Target Operating Model) framework “as a guideline for participants to self-assess their respective organisational levels of data maturity.”

Further, Deakin researchers used a mixed-methods research approach consisting of:

  • a cross-sector online questionnaire survey completed by 138 participants representing Chief Information or Technology Officers (CIOs / CTOs), other executive positions, and senior and middle managers;
  • Eight (8) semi-structured interviews conducted with Executive managers, Directors, Heads, and senior managers; and
  • a workshop conducted with twelve (12) participants to discuss the preliminary survey findings.

Alfred Deakin Professor Mike Ewing, Executive Dean of Deakin’s Faculty of Business and Law (Deakin University)

Alfred Deakin Professor Mike Ewing, who is the Executive Dean of Deakin’s Faculty of Business and Law, said in a statement that their study showed every organisation was forced to become a digital organisation during the pandemic.

“The pandemic reinforced the role of data and analytics for business survivability and performance. The digital change that would have previously happened over a decade happened in one year.”

Prof. Ewing notes that their report can help guide business decision-makers on leveraging the best-practices of data and analytics to keep driving their digital transformation journey post-pandemic. he adds:

“Unleashing the true potential of data enables faster decision-making, better customer experience and reveals new revenue opportunities. It helps organisations develop stronger business models, adapt to rapidly changing market dynamics, and deliver highly personalised products and services.”

According to the report, the average score from participating organisations was around three. This indicates that Australian businesses are faring better than others surveyed by TCS globally, where the average score is below two.

Further, more than 70 per cent of Australian participants said investment in data and analytics had increased during the pandemic.

Dinanath Kholkar, VP and Global Head, Analytics and Insights for TCS and Vikram Singh, Country Head for TCS Australia and New Zealand.

Dinanath Kholkar, VP and Global Head, Analytics and Insights for TCS says that business organisations must step up their game and “harness data from their ecosystem that includes their partners, suppliers, customers as well as open data to glean meaningful, actionable insights and foresights”. He adds:

“In a post-pandemic Next Normal, organisations must embrace digital transformation to stay relevant to their customers and drive growth at same time. Data being the DNA that guides this digital transformation, it has become a boardlevel agenda and a priority for CXOs.”

Vikram Singh, Country Head for TCS Australia and New Zealand, said “the increased adoption of digital transformation by Australian organisations meant that data and analytics had emerged as a critical element of supporting long-term business strategies.” He adds:

“Organisations that shift away from managing centralised data silos and connect data across their entire ecosystem will deliver the most impactful customer experiences.”

The report suggests that Australian businesses can grow data maturity in three important ways: “improve data literacy, evangelise data-centricity, and develop a holistic data strategy and roadmap.”

Data (Image source: Canva)

Australian organisations and educational institutions are working closely with their Indian partners such as TCS to fill the skills gap and innovate in emerging technologies to drive the future of global business.

Australian education ministers’ new plan ignores root cause of teacher shortage problem

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare MP visting Sacred Heart Primary School in Villawood (Image source: Twitter - Jason Clare MP)

By Pasi Sahlberg

Last Friday, Australia’s state and federal education ministers met with emotional teachers, who spoke of working on weekends and Mothers’ Day to cope with unsustainable workloads – and how they were thinking about leaving the profession.

This was part of their first meeting hosted by the federal minister Jason Clare. The top agenda item was the teacher shortage.

The issue has certainly reached a crisis point. Federal education department modelling shows the demand for high school teachers will exceed the supply of new graduate teachers by 4,100 between 2021 to 2025.

Meanwhile, a 2022 Monash University survey found only 8.5% of surveyed teachers in New South Wales say their workloads are manageable and only one in five think the Australian public respects them.

Ministers say they are working towards a plan to fix the crisis. But are they addressing the right issues?

What happened at the meeting?

On a positive note, all ministers agreed Australia has a problem and it is a national one. As NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said, “no matter which state minister would be speaking to you […], we’re all dealing with the same issues and challenges”.

Clare told reporters the ministers had tasked their education departments to develop a national plan to address the problem. This will be brought back to the ministers’ next meeting in December for tick-off.

The “National Teacher Workforce Action Plan” will focus on five areas: “elevating” the teaching profession, improving teacher supply, strengthening teaching degrees, maximising teachers’ time to teach, and a better understanding of future workforce needs.

In the post-meeting press conference, Clare particularly emphasised the need for more opportunities for student teachers to get practical experience, more focus on how to teach maths and English and encouraging more teachers to mentor their colleagues.

Key questions are missing

Before the election, Labor promised to fix teacher shortages by attracting high-performing school graduates into teaching, paying additional bonuses to outstanding teachers, and importing experts from other fields to teaching.

Not surprisingly, these same ideas appear in the media release for the forthcoming national action plan.

But together Labor’s ideas and the new national plan don’t adequately address the root causes of teacher shortages: unproductive working conditions and noncompetitive pay.

One priority in the proposed new plan is to “maximise” teachers’ time to teach. In fact, Australian teachers already teach for more hours than their peers in other OECD countries.

What would improve teachers’ working conditions is not more time to teach per se, but enough time to plan and work with their colleagues to find more productive ways of teaching.

The workload is the most common reason for intending to leave the teaching profession. In the 2022 Monash University survey, teachers reported their workloads were intensifying and difficult to fit into a reasonable working week. This is due to overwhelming administration, reporting and paperwork for compliance purposes.

The detail we have so far from ministers is silent on how to fix current teacher workloads.

What about pay?

Another reason for teacher shortages is non-competitive pay, especially when it comes to salary progression over a teaching career.

So far, ministers are talking about “rewarding” high-performing teachers. International studies show unexpected things can happen when teachers strive for “excellence” to receive monetary bonuses. Performance-based pay can lead to declining creativity and collegiality in schools when test scores become the dominant driver of teachers’ work.

This also takes away from the main issue. Instead of paying some teachers more, every teacher in Australia deserves fair compensation that reflects the work they do.

A plan to have a plan

Australia is a Promised Land of action plans and working groups. But we are not so good at implementation.

For example, we have declarations and reviews about what school education should be (the Mparntwe Declaration), how schools should be funded (the Gonski Review), and what rights our children have.

But we struggle to turn these into practice. There is a real risk the new “National Teacher Workforce Action Plan” will just see more good intentions and little concrete action.

Australia can learn from other countries

The good news is, that Australia is not alone. The United States and England have suffered from a chronic shortage of teachers in their schools for some time.

Even in Estonia and Finland – the OECD’s highest-performing countries in education – teaching is not as attractive a profession as it used to be. So, there is an opportunity to learn how other countries deal with the teacher workforce challenge.

Every year since 2011 the OECD and Education International have organised the International Summit on the Teaching Profession with the world’s top-performing education systems. Here education ministers and education leaders from 20 countries explore current issues in the teaching profession. Collaboration between ministers and teachers’ unions is the key principle of the summit.

Australia has been invited to these summits since 2011 but has never attended. So, a decade of opportunities to work with other countries has been wasted.

But it is not too late, Clare could attend the 2023 summit that will be held in Washington DC. Not only to see what others do but to learn what might be improved in governments’ action plans and teacher policies.

This is what all “education nations” do. Why don’t we?

Pasi Sahlberg, Professor of Education, Southern Cross University

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

India is emerging as a strategic partner for Australia, thanks to its diversity

Jim Varghese AM is National Chair of Australia India Business Council; Image Source: Supplied

By Jim Varghese

On August 15, Monday, We have marked 75 years of Independence of India as it gained freedom from the British on August 15, 1947.

As the Indian community globally has celebrated the 75th Independence Day along with millions of friends of India throughout the world, it is time to reflect on the importance of this day, the history of India, and the sacrifices made by millions of people to obtain independence. The Indian Flag reflects multicultural integration, Harmony, and Peace

India with many multicultural communities is a great example of Unity in Diversity

Over 700, 000 people the fastest growing Indian diaspora will be celebrating Indian Independence Day in Australia. This Indian diaspora with an average age below 40, is contributing significantly in Australia to entrepreneurship in a number of industry sectors identified in the India Economic Strategy by Hon. Peter Varghese and Australia Economic Strategy by Ambassador Anil Wadhwa.

The biggest advantage of the growing Indian diaspora is the high skill level of men and women which is driving their contribution to the economic growth of Australia in many fields such as education, health, manufacturing, finance, agriculture, startups, Information and Communication technologies. In line with the above bilateral economic strategies, the increasing people-to-people connection is providing further momentum to the cultural and economic relationship and bonding between India and Australia.
 
India has been and will continue to be a major partner in Australia’s economic growth.  The cultural and economic engagements with India have always received bipartisan support in Australia during last many decades.

In fact, India is emerging as a strategic partner for Australia

Australian businesses at all levels now have an unrivalled opportunity to view India as a market to supply rather than just a market for consumption.

The recently signed AUSTRALIA INDIA ECONOMIC COOPERATION AND TRADE AGREEMENT(ECTA) enhances the partnership between Australia and India. It will generate trade in many sectors in the next few years.

The AIBC is very encouraged by this important development which we have been passionately driving and supporting for over a decade.

The initiative by the Prime Ministers of India and Australia to establish the AIBC over 35 years ago to assist in making these milestones happen is now positively vindicated.
To effectively support bilateral trade, AIBC has established many Industry chapters and more recently the Australia India Business Enterprise Ltd (AIBE), as its commercial arm to focus on and facilitate business-to-business engagements.

The recent QUAD strategic agreement also places India and Australia on the same page in cooperation and partnership in Defence and Security. To effectively support emerging opportunities, AIBC has also established a Defence & Security Industry Chapter.

Commemorating 75 years of Independence and the history of India’s people, culture, and achievements, AIBC has organised its inaugural Australia India International Business Summit in Sydney between 23-25 August 2022.

This will be an exciting opportunity for Australian corporations and industries to consider India for partnering and achieving business-to-business outcomes.

With there no boundaries to the India-Australia relationship, AIBC applauds the Australian Indian community for celebrating the 75th Indian Independence Day.

On behalf of all AIBC Members and Team, I greet all Indian community members with a “Jai Hind” on this very important milestone and a great occasion.
 
Author: Jim Varghese AM is National Chair of Australia India Business Council

India is a vibrant democracy and a pluralistic society with traditional cultural values at heart

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the Nation on the occasion of 76th Independence Day from the ramparts of Red Fort, in New Delhi on Monday. (Image Source: PIB)

By Ambassador A. R. Ghanshyam

Introduction

For much of the two thousand years of the Common Era, India was the largest economy contributing a third of the global output. Archaeological evidence traces the origins of ancient India’s Indus Valley Civilization to the 5th millennium before the Common Era. During medieval times India witnessed several glorious empires and great civilizations spread across millions of miles under enlightened emperors. 

Towards the last quarter of the last millennium, India came under the influence of the East India Company for almost a century during the 18th and 19th centuries. Thereafter the Sepoy Mutiny or the First War of Independence in 1857 compelled the British to place India directly under the British Crown for another ninety years. For almost two centuries, therefore, India was anchored to Great Britain serving the interests of only the British Empire. Of all the colonies the British conquered, controlled and immensely benefited from it was India which was by far the biggest and the wealthiest and was often referred to as the Jewel in the (British) Crown.

Before finally leaving India the British divided the Indian subcontinent into two countries in three parcels – India, Pakistan West and Pakistan East. India’s population then was 330 million and the GDP was INR 2.7 trillion – a paltry 3% of the global GDP. A country that accounted for a third of the global output for much of two millennia before had thus been bled bone dry by the colonial masters. 

Independent India 

Independent India has witnessed seventeen free and fair Parliamentary Elections with fifteen Prime Ministers at the helm – each contributing his/her mite to the growth, stability and development of the Indian Nation, its society and economy. How individual Prime Ministers of India tried to build a modern India from the debris of two centuries’ rule by the British Empire is in itself a great story and has been narrated by many authors, Indian and foreign. 

In the seventy-five years since independence, India has negotiated a difficult, at times treacherous, journey replete with five wars (1948, 1962, 1965, 1971 and 1999) and facing frequent occurrence of natural calamities i.e. floods, famines, droughts and epidemics. Two of its elected Prime Ministers were brutally assassinated and a third died mysteriously after signing the Ceasefire Agreement in the Soviet city of Tashkent post the India-Pakistan 1965 War. A stretch of 21 months during 1975-77 remains an aberration in India’s otherwise uninterrupted democracy when fundamental rights of Indian citizens were suspended during the period of national emergency. 

Progress achieved

Much water has flown in the river Ganga since India attained its independence. During 1950-51 the contributions to Indian GDP by agriculture, industry and services sectors were 56%, 15% and 29% respectively. Agriculture employed the largest workforce of 72% with Manufacturing and Services providing 10% and 18% jobs respectively. Today the service sector accounts for 54% of Indian GDP. Industry and agriculture follow with 25.92% and 20.19% respectively. 

Life expectancy on the eve of independence was 32 years. It has now gone up to 70 years. In 1950, the infant mortality rate in India was 145.6/1000 live births and the maternal mortality ratio in the 1940s was 2000/100,000 live births which declined to 1000 in the 1950s. There were just 50,000 doctors across the entire country and the number of primary healthcare centres was 725. Today, infant mortality is 27.7 per 1000 births and the maternal mortality rate is 103 per 100,000.

India now has more than 1.2 million doctors. There are 54,618 Sub-Health Centres (SHC), 21,898 Primary Health Centres (PHC) and 4,155 Urban Primary Health Centres (UPHC), as of December 8, 2021. There are as many as 70,000 public and private hospitals. As of April 5, 2022, there were 117,771 Ayushman Bharat-Health and Wellness Centres (AB-HWCs) operational in India apart from 748 e-Hospitals established across the country as part of the ‘Digital India’ initiative of the government.

As for education, when the British left India there were 210,000 primary schools, 13,600 middle schools and 7,416 higher secondary schools in India apart from 498 colleges and 27 Universities. Today there are 1.6 million schools, 42,343 colleges and a thousand Universities. More than 250 million children are going to school today in India and close to 40 million are enrolled in our Universities. 

India survived a devastating once-in-a-century pandemic of COVID 19 and its economy contracted by 7.3% in the financial year 2020-21.  It may be some consolation that this contraction was lower than in other major economies. As per the latest available estimates, the growth rate of GDP for 2021-22 is pegged at 8.7% which has to be seen in the context of a 7.3% contraction in the preceding year. 

India is bound together as a great nation by the strength and stability of its democracy, the rule of law and a breathtaking diversity of its populace in terms of religion, language, culture, climate, history, geography and more.

At the time of India’s first census in 1951 Hindus were 305 million (84.1%), Muslims 35.4 million (9.8%), Christians 8.3 million and Sikhs 6.86 million (1.9%).

In 2022 the estimated population is 1090 million Hindus (79.80%), 200 million Muslims (14.23%), 31.2 million Christians (2.3%), 23.7 million Sikhs (1.72%), 9.6 million Buddhists (0.70%), 5.1 million Jains (0.37%) and 9.1 million (0.66%) other religions and 3.3 million (0.24%) religion not stated.

There are two million Hindu temples, 300,000 active mosques, 8,114 Jain temples a few of them abroad, more than 125 Buddhist temples, monasteries, stupas and pagodas, some 35 Jewish synagogues etc.  At the time of independence, many predicted that India will splinter into pieces based on caste, creed, tribe, language, culture etc., but she has remained in one piece and stronger than ever. 

Future Prospects

In the last ten years, despite a sliding down of growth rates since 2016 till the economy picked up this year and a significant unemployment burden haunting policymakers in the country, there is a quiet revolution taking place in the arena of technology, digitization and innovation spearheaded by young Indian companies. The government’s Atmanirbharta crusade has given an impetus to it.

The latest research on the Indian economy in the last ten years by analyst Ruchir Sharma has a few exciting revelations. In 2011 India had 55 Billionaires with a cumulative wealth of US $ 256 billion which was then equivalent to 13.5% of India’s GDP. Ten years later in 2021 India hosts 140 billionaires with a cumulative wealth of US$ 596 billion equivalent to 19.6% of the GDP. Sharma adds that 110 of these are new Billionaires created during the course of just the last decade. At the time of independence, India was the sixth largest economy in the world. In 2021 it retains the same position which is no mean achievement with India’s population has more than quadrupled. 

Notwithstanding the above, there is no room for complacency because (a) India still has a large population that lives below the poverty line, estimated by the World Bank at 140 million which is 10% of the population, (b) the formal and informal sectors may not able to absorb the large number of educated young who are passing out of colleges (2022 estimate is 10.76 million), (c) external and internal factors will keep haunting the policy establishment in its effort to achieve double-digit GDP growth rate which is the need of the hour for India. Be that as it may, India also has several advantages – (i) median age of fewer than 30 years, (ii) a strong and focused government, (iii) a growing market, and, (iv) an innovative Indian youth. If India persists with its pursuit of building and consolidating its infrastructure, keeps the society cohesive and harmonious, and stabilizes predictable consistency in policy formulation and implementation, a brighter future can be ensured for its future generations. 

Author: Ambassador A. R.Ghanashyam is a retired Indian diplomat who has served as Ambassador of India to Angola and High Commissioner of India to Nigeria.

Disclaimer: The Australia Today is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts, or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of The Australia Today and The Australia Today News does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.

Nine recipients of Australia-India Council grant announced to foster collaboration

AIC Grants 2021-22

The Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong has released the list of 2021-22 Australia-India Council (AIC) grant recipients.

In her statement, Wong said:

“The grants program is key to fostering understanding and encouraging collaboration between our two countries.”

There are nine successful projects that will receive a share of $935,000 of funding. These include a space start-up exchange, research identifying drought-resilient chickpeas, and a disability‐inclusive virtual healthcare pilot among others.

Image source: The University of Newcastle project team members, Dr Jessica Siva (Left), Associate Professor Thayaparan Gajendran (Middle), Dr Kim Maund (Right), School of Architecture and Built Environment precinct, University of Newcastle, 16/05/22. Credit: University of Newcastle media team.

University of Newcastle project ($49,500.00 incl GST) aims to foster an Australian-Indian zero-carbon building construction network. This project will help deliver three dialogues between academia, government, and industry to develop an action roadmap toward achieving zero-carbon buildings.

Image source: James Makinson (Twitter)

The Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University’s investigation ($66,000 incl GST) into mango cultivars and their pollinators will inform industry recommendations to both India and Australia to respond to the impacts of climate change.

Image source: Members of the University of South Australia’s Innovation & Collaboration Centre (ICC).

The University of South Australia’s (UniSA) space start-up exchange and trade visit ($49,500.00 incl GST) aims to connect deep technology space companies and their respective research, industry, and investment network.

The University of Western Australia’s (UWA) mapping of fish biomass on the continental shelves of India and Australia ($176,000.00 incl GST) aims to generate data on blue carbon storage capacity. The project will provide key information for India’s fisheries management to mitigate climate change and expand its marine conservation areas under its commitment to protect 30% of national waters by 2030.

Image source: Chickpea growing in a greenhouse at Flinders University, Adelaide. Credit: Ms Tania Bawden, Media Advisor, Office of Communication, Marketing and Engagement, Flinders University.

Flinders University’s collaboration with Murdoch University and the International Crops Research Institute ($176,000.00 incl GST) for the Semi-Arid Tropics will identify high-performing chickpea variants with low water and nitrogen requirements for increased drought tolerance and reduced fertiliser use.

The Nossal Institute’s “Virtu-Care” ($176,000.00 incl GST) will produce a telehealth care model that specifically meets the health and rehabilitation needs of people with disability.

Image source: Dipen Rughani and Natasha Jha Bhaskar (Twitter)

Newland Global Group’s project ($88,000 incl GST) aims to address the knowledge gap that currently persists in both markets on existing business successes.

Austmine Limited’s Australia-India Mining Innovation Program (AIMIP) will facilitate collaboration between Indian mining companies and Australian METS companies ($55,000.00 incl GST) to solve critical technology challenges in relation to increasing Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) expectations.

Image source: AI for Digital Pathology: Mitigating Global Health Inequalities Based on A Novel Computational Framework for Detecting Malaria in Rural Communities. Credit: Girija Chetty.

University of Canberra’s project ($99,000.00 incl GST) aims to develop an innovative cyber-critical technology framework for early malaria pathogen detection. The proposed translational technology solution can be useful for other diseases and regions globally.

The announcement comes as India is celebrating its 75th year of independence. AIC, which too is celebrating its 30th year of formation, has helped advance Australia’s foreign policy and trade interests – strengthening the people-to-people and institutional bonds between Australia and India.

What’s causing Australia’s egg shortage?

eggs

By Flavio Macau

Australia is experiencing a national egg shortage. Prices are rising and supermarket stocks are patchy. Some cafes are reportedly serving breakfast with one egg instead of two. Supermarket giant Coles has reverted to COVID-19 conditions with a two-carton limit.

We became used to grocery shortages throughout the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. These were due to changes in buying patterns, stockpiling and panic-buying. Eggs were temporarily part of this, along with flour, as people at home got baking.

But with lockdowns long past, what’s causing this egg shortage now?

News reports have quoted eggs producers blaming, at least in part, pandemic restrictions – because they reduced their laying flocks due to lower demand from restaurants and cafes.

That was the case in countries such as India, where misinformation about poultry being a source of COVID-19 led to a sharp decline in demand. But in Australia, an initial 30% drop from hospitality was compensated by a growth in retail sales.

What changed during that time was the way people got their eggs. Food delivery, food boxes and home cooking exploded for a time.

More fundamentally, this shortage reflects a long-term trend in egg-buying preferences, with a shift to free-range eggs, whose production is more affected by the colder, shorter days of winter.

Shifting to free-range eggs

Australians consume about 17 million eggs every day. In the 2020-21 financial year, egg farmers produced about 6.3 billion eggs. Of those, 52% were free-range. This compares to about 38% a decade ago.



This growth, however, has not been consistent. Between 2012 and 2017, free-range eggs’ share of the market grew about 10 percentage points, to about 48%. Growth in the past five years has been half that.

But with more rapid growth predicted, and the promise of higher profits, many egg farmers invested heavily in increasing free-range production. In New South Wales, for example, total flock size peaked in 2017-18.

Like many agricultural industries where farmers respond to price signals and predictions, this led to overproduction, leading to lower prices and profits. This in turn led to a 10% drop in egg production the next year.

Compliance costs also increased. In 2018 the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission introduced rules to police the marketing of eggs as “free-range”.

These rules mean hens need to have “meaningful and regular access” to an outdoor range during the daylight hours of their laying cycle (with a maximum density of 10,000 hens per hectare).

This experience has likely influenced farmers’ reticence to increase their flocks based on predictions of higher demand.

Winter affects free-range production

Producing free-range eggs is more expensive not just because it requires more land. Free-range hens are less consistent layers.

Hens kept in cages or barns are more regular producers because conditions are optimised to stimulate laying. Temperatures are constant, and hens are exposed to 16 hours of light every day.

Free-range hens are affected by hot or cold temperatures, wind and rain, and length of daylight. In winter months they have less energy and produce (on average) 20% fewer eggs than a chicken confined indoors in controlled conditions.

Pressures on farmers

The egg industry is flexible and adaptable – but the confluence of economic and environmental events in 2022 has made things difficult. Farmers will want to meet demand, but face time lags and cost pressures.

Increasing a laying flock takes about four months. An egg takes about three weeks to hatch. Under ideal conditions, chicks need another 17 weeks before they are ready to begin laying.

Any farmer who has begun this process in the past month will be producing more eggs by December. But then it will be summer, when they won’t need 20% more hens to make up for their winter slump.

Feed costs, which typically represent 60-70% of layer production costs, have been increasing along with transport, electricity and interest rates.

So farmers must be cautious if they are to stay in business. It is preferable to undersupply than go bankrupt through oversupply.

Are farmers willing to invest in increasing production in an uncertain economic environment, with interest rates and costs going up and a recession on the horizon? Probably not.

So a short-term fix seems unlikely. Weather forecasts are not favourable. The Bureau of Meterology expects a wetter August to October, with “more than double the normal chance of unusually high rainfall”. That means less daylight and more cold. Blame the negative Indian Ocean dipole, not the chickens.

Come spring, with longer days and milder temperatures, along with an agricultural visa program, things should return to “normal”.

Unless consumers are willing to pay more to ensure a constant supply in winter months, our shift to free-range eggs carries a higher likelihood of winter shortages.

We must do what we have done through every disruption in recent times: endure, adapt and prepare for the next crisis.

Flavio Macau, Associate Dean – School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

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

World’s first ‘synthetic embryo’: why this research is more important than you think

Mouse emobryo model in the lab from day 1 to 8. The Wizemann Institute of Science

By Megan Munsie

In what’s reported as a world-first achievement, biologists have grown mouse embryo models in the lab without the need for fertilised eggs, embryos, or even a mouse – using only stem cells and a special incubator.

This achievement, published in the journal Cell by a team led by researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, is a very sophisticated model of what happens during early mouse embryo development – in the stage just after implantation.

This is a crucial stage: in humans, many pregnancies are lost around this stage, and we don’t really know why. Having models provides a way to better understand what can go wrong, and possibly insights into what we may be able to do about it.

The tiniest cluster

What’s particularly interesting about the newly published model is its very complex structure; not only does it mimic the cell specification and layout of an early-stage body plan – including precursors of heart, blood, brain and other organs – but also the “support” cells like those found in the placenta and other tissues required to establish and maintain a pregnancy.

This eight-day-old mouse embryo model has a beating heart, a yolk sac, a placenta and an emerging blood circulation. The Weizmann Institute of Science.

The earliest stages of pregnancy are difficult to study in most animals. The embryos are microscopic, tiny clusters of cells, difficult to locate and observe within the uterus.

But we do know that at this stage of development, things can go awry; for example, environmental factors can influence and interfere with development, or cells fail to receive the right signals to fully form the spinal cord, such as in spina bifida. Using models like this, we can start to ask why.

However, even though these models are a powerful research tool, it is important to understand they are not embryos.

They replicate only some aspects of development, but not fully reproduce the cellular architecture and developmental potential of embryos derived after fertilisation of eggs by sperm – so-called natural embryos.

The team behind this work emphasises they were unable to develop these models beyond eight days, while a normal mouse pregnancy is 20 days long.

Are ‘synthetic embryos’ of humans on the horizon?

The field of embryo modelling is progressing rapidly, with new advances emerging every year.

In 2021, several teams managed to get human pluripotent stem cells (cells that can turn into any other type of cell) to self-aggregate in a Petri dish, mimicking the “blastocyst”. This is the earliest stage of embryonic development just before the complex process of implantation, when a mass of cells attach to the wall of the uterus.

Researchers using these human embryo models, often called blastoids, have even been able to start to explore implantation in a dish, but this process is much more challenging in humans than it is in mice.

Growing human embryo models of the same complexity that has now been achieved with a mouse model remains a distant proposition, but one we should still consider.

Importantly, we need to be aware of how representative such a model would be; a so-called synthetic embryo in a Petri dish will have its limitations on what it can teach us about human development, and we need to be conscious of that.

Ethical pitfalls

No embryonic modelling can happen without a source of stem cells, so when it comes to thinking about the future use of this technology, it is vital to ask – where are these cells coming from? Are they human embryonic stem cells (derived from a blastocyst), or are they induced pluripotent stem cells? The latter can be made in the lab from skin, or blood cells, for example, or even derived from frozen samples.

An important consideration is whether using cells for this particular type of research – trying to mimic an embryo in a dish – requires any specific consent. We should be thinking more about how this area of research will be governed, when should it be used, and by whom.

However, it is important to recognise that there are existing laws and international stem cell research guidelines that provide a framework to regulate this area of research.

In Australia, research involving human stem cell embryo models would require licensing, similar to that required for the use of natural human embryos under law that has been in place since 2002. However, unlike other jurisdictions, Australian law also dictates how long researchers can grow human embryo models, a restriction that some researchers would like to see changed.

Regardless of these or other changes to how and when human embryo research is conducted, there needs to be greater community discourse around this subject before a decision is made.

There is a distinction between banning the use of this technology and technologies like cloning in humans for reproductive use, and allowing research using embryo models to advance our understanding of human development and developmental disorders that we can’t answer by any other means.

The science is rapidly advancing. While mostly in mice at this stage, now is the time to discuss what this means for humans, and consider where and how we draw the line in the sand as the science evolves.

Megan Munsie, Professor Emerging Technologies (Stem Cells), The University of Melbourne

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

Australia and India relationship in pictures

Australia-India relations in photos

Today, as India celebrates its 75th Independence day, Australia recognises it as one of the most important Indo-Pacific partners. The relationship between the two nations is characterised by growing people-to-people links and close socio-economic cooperation supported by the governments.

Diplomatic relations were established between the two nations when the Consulate General of India was first opened as a Trade Office in Sydney in 1941. In March 1944, Lieutenant-General Iven Mackay was appointed Australia’s first High Commissioner to India and soon, in 1945, India’s first High Commissioner to Australia Sir Ragunath Paranjype arrived in Canberra.

L-R: Ramdas Paranjpe and Sir Raghunath Paranjpye at an event of felicitation at Pune Municipal Corporation, 1963 (Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s a brief look at the Australia and India relationship through selected images from our shared history and engagement.

Photo: Indian hockey team (1938) – Members of the Indian hockey team at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Photo: The last gift made by the late Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, was shown to the Australian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, in Canberra. The gift is the Nehru Challenge Shield for the University of Adelaide Debating Club. A spokesman for the Indian High Commission in Australia said that the gift may set a pattern for similar torphies to be presented to universities all over the world – the Indian High Commissioner in Australia, Shri B K Massand (right) and Sir Robert Menzies, examine the shield in Sir Robert’s office in Parliament House, Canberra [photographic image] / photographer, Michael Brown (1964).

Photo: Presentation of Credentials – Sir Arthur Tange – India (13 May 1965) – Sir Arthur Harold Tange, High Commissioner-designate of Australia, presenting his Letter of Commission to the President of India, Dr Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishan, at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, 13 May 1965.

Photo: John Gorton with Indira Gandhi (21 May 1968) – The Australian Prime Minister, John Gorton (left), and Mrs Bettina Gorton (right), with Indira Gandhi, the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Australia, at a reception in her honour at the Indian High Commission.

Photo: Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi with Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke in Canberra (1986).

Photo: Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Alexander Downer, visits India (1) (23 April 2002) – Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Alexander Downer, with Indian Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in New Delhi on 23 April 2002.

Photo: Prime Minister John Howard and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh discussed Australian uranium exports to India (March 2006).

Photo: The Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, Smt. Sushma Swaraj meeting the Prime Minister of Australia, Ms. Julia Gillard, in New Delhi (October 17, 2012).

Photo: Prime Minister being received by Mr Campbell Newman, Premier of Queensland on his arrival in Brisbane (November 2014).

Photo: Prime Ministers writes his message at the Agro Robot at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane (November 2014).

Photo: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull at the Akshardham Temple in New Delhi (April 2017).

Photo: Prime Ministers Narendra Modi with his Australian counterpart Scott Morrison ahead of the Quad Leaders’ Summit in Washington (September 2021).

Photo: Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Ausrtralian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the sidelines of the QUAD Summit in Japan (May 2022).

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has sent his wishes on India’s 75th Independence Day: “I have fond memories of my travels to India, and remain strongly committed to deepening our partnership in the spirit of respect, friendship and cooperation….We also give thanks for the contribution of our Indian-Australian community to our society, to our culture, to our country, and to the links between our nations.With these thoughts in mind, I wish all those marking India’s Independence Day a wonderful celebration.”

IndiaAt75: “Talent will be basis to fulfil dreams of country in next 25 years,” PM Modi

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the Nation on the occasion of 76th Independence Day from the ramparts of Red Fort, in New Delhi on Monday.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday hoisted the National Flag at the ramparts of the Red Fort and delivered his customary ‘Address to the Nation’, the ninth consecutive time he is doing so.

He started his address to the nation by congratulating the countrymen on the completion of 75 years of independence which is being celebrated in the country under the banner of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav.

“I congratulate all Indians and those who love India on this Independence Day. It is a day to step towards a new direction with a new resolve.”

PM Modi said, “Our flag is flying high across the world and I wish all Indians across the world a Happy Independence Day. This is a historic day, a new day.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi unfurling the Tricolour flag at the ramparts of Red Fort on the occasion of 76th Independence Day, in New Delhi on Monday. Image Source: PIB

Wearing a traditional tri-coloured motif safa (headgear) with a long trail, the Indian PM arrived at Red Fort after paying tribute to Mahatma Gandhi at his samadhi at Rajghat and was received by India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Minister of State Defence Ajay Bhatt.

Beginning his speech at the Red Fort marking India’s 75th Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi recalled the “architects of free India” who significantly contributed to India’s freedom struggle.

“During our freedom struggle, there was not one year where our freedom fighters did not face brutality and cruelty. Today is the day when, as we pay them our respects, we need to remember their vision and dream for India,” PM Modi said while addressing the nation from the Red Fort for the ninth consecutive time.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets after addressing the Nation on the occasion of 76th Independence Day from the ramparts of Red Fort, in New Delhi on Monday. Image Source: PIB

“Our country is grateful to Gandhiji, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Ramprasad Bismil, Rani Laxmi Bai, Subash Chandra Bose, and all other freedom fighters who shook the foundations of the British Empire. We salute not only those who fought for freedom but also the architects of free India such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Ram Manohar Lohia and Sardar Vallabhai Patel, amongst the many others,”

PM Modi said.

The Prime Minister also said that India has been home to great thinkers like Vivekanand, Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore. “Our heroes like Rajendra Prasad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Lal Bahadur Shastri fought for our independence and moulded our country,” he said.

Addressing further on this historic day, the Prime Minister said that Adivasi freedom fighters such as Birsa Munda, Tirot Singh and Alluri Sitarama Raju played a pivotal role in keeping the freedom struggle alive in every corner of India.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the Nation on the occasion of 76th Independence Day from the ramparts of Red Fort, in New Delhi on Monday.

“This nation is thankful to Mangal Pandey, Tatya Tope, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Chandrashekhar Azad, Ashfaqulla Khan, Ram Prasad Bismil and our innumerable revolutionaries who shook the foundation of the British Rule,” the prime minister said.

PM Modi also recalled the contributions of the women freedom fighters of India. “Every India is filled with pride when they remember the strength of the women of India, be it Rani Laxmibai, Jhalkari Bai, Chennamma, Begun Hazrat Maha,” PM Modi said.

PM Modi takes aim at ‘Parivaarwaad’, ‘Bhai Bhatijawad’ (Nepotism)

Mr Modi said that there is no place for corruption in our society and that the people of the country need to come together as a society to punish those who have propagated the evil of corruption.

“Today the nation shows anger towards corruption, but not the corrupted. Until and unless, people have the mentality of penalizing the corrupt, the nation cannot progress at optimum pace,”

Prime Minster Modi said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi after addressing the Nation on the occasion of 76th Independence Day from the ramparts of Red Fort, in New Delhi on Monday. Image Source: PIB

“Another evil we need to come together against is nepotism. We need to give opportunities to those who are talented and will work towards the progress of the nation. Talent will be the basis of a New India. To cleanse every institute of India, let’s shift our mentality from ‘Bhai Bhatijawad’ and Parivaarwad and give an opportunity to the citizens who deserve it,” said PM Modi

5 pledges ‘Panch Prans’ (Five resolves) to fulfil dreams of the country in the next 25 years

Though India is faced with numerous challenges and restrictions, the PM highlighted that the country has the ability to overcome them all for a New India.

He talked about the five pledges the country needs to focus on for the next 25 years.

“The first pran is to move forward with bigger resolves and resolve of developed India.
The second pran is to erase all traces of servitude. Even if we see the smallest things of servitude, inside us or nearby us, we have to get rid of them.
The third is to take pride in our legacy.
Four is the strength of unity for our dreams of ‘Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat’.
The fifth pran is the duties of citizens which include the Prime Minister and the Chief Ministers also.

This is a big pranshakti for fulfilling the dreams of the country in the next 25 years.

“We have to work with the vision of accomplishing what our freedom fighters dreamt of. By 100 years of independence, for the next 25 years we need to focus on the 5 resolves – first Viksit Bharat (Developed India), second Removing every ounce of Gulami (slavery) in us, third Work on the pride for our glorious heritage, fourth. Ensuring Unity among all, fifth. Fulfilling our fundamental Duties,”

said Mr Modi

The Prime Minister said, “When dreams are big, the hard work is equally strenuous. We need to be inspired by the Sankalp and the determination of our freedom fighters who dreamt of a free India. I urge the youth to dedicate the next 25 years of their lives to the development of the nation. We will work towards even the development of the entire humanity. That is the strength of India.”

Ahead of his speech at the Red Fort, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unfurled the National Flag amid a 21-gun salute by the indigenously developed howitzer gun, ATAGS. This was followed by a shower of flower petals by helicopters. Earlier in the day, PM Modi visited Rajghat to pay his respects.

India’s march towards Aatmanirbharta is good for world at large

Aatmanirbharta: Image Source: Supplied

By Amb. (Dr.) Mohan Kumar

It was in May 2020 that Indian Prime Minister Modi made a clarion call for a Bharat that was “Aatmanirbhar”. It is important to clarify what this meant and what it did not. While a rough translation of the word is no doubt “self-reliant”, it is nevertheless not the kind of self-reliance that India arguably believed and practised in the early years of its independence up until the seventies and eighties.

It is easy to state what it is not. It is certainly not autarchy; it is certainly not inward-looking, and it is most certainly not stopping imports and making every product at home. It may be more prudent to think of “Aatmanirbharta” as Self-Reliance 2.0.

There is little doubt that the global pandemic i.e. COVID-19, played a significant role in India’s push for Self-Reliance 2.0. Take the simple example of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) and N-95 masks. At the beginning of the pandemic, India was not making any N-95 masks. Today, India manufactures at least 200,000 N-95 masks a day, if not more.

Even more impressive is India’s own record of vaccinating its mammoth population. In 2020 when COVID emerged, almost no one believed India could ever fully vaccinate its population and that such an exercise would take years and years. Yet, in July 2022, about 18 months after the first vaccination began, India completed 2 billion doses of vaccines for its citizens. The story of how this was achieved is worthy of a case study that will cover vital issues such as public-private partnership, centre-state cooperation and not to mention building awareness among citizens and getting their participation willingly in this exercise.

A mission towards Atmanirbhar Bharat

Indeed, the WHO and others have praised India and the best practices here will be emulated the world over. Proving that Self-Reliance 2.0 is not just for Indians, India also exported a large number of vaccines and PPE countries all over the world. The latest statistics from the MEA website talk of 240 million (approx) vaccines that have been delivered to 101 countries, of which there are developed, developing and least-developed countries. The story of India being the pharmacy of the world is too well known to bear any repetition here. All of this is real “aatmanirbharta” at work. 

Atma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyan, How SMEs Can Become Self-Reliant?

The COWIN platform that India used for distributing vaccines to its mammoth population was remarkable. COWIN is essentially a cloud-based IT solution for planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating COVID vaccination in India. By July 2021, India decided to make this open platform available to all countries for their use. In the COWIN global conclave organized in July 2021, as many as 142 countries in the world expressed interest in adopting this platform. Again, this is Aatmanirbharta at work. 

India's “Atmanirbhar Bharat” vision requires open, not protectionist,  policies - Atlantic Council

The war in Ukraine has had a profound impact not just in Europe, but more importantly on developing and least-developed countries. Specifically, the war has impacted food, energy and commodity prices adversely. Wheat shortage, in particular, is expected to affect Africa and the Middle East quite significantly. At a time like this, it is comforting to know that India’s position when it comes to food security for its huge population is satisfactory. This is yet another manifestation of Self-Reliance 2.0. Indeed, not only was India able to give away food grains and lentils to 800 million of its citizens as part of the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana, but India was also able to carry out modest exports of food grains to low-income countries that needed it. Again, Aatmanirbharta is at work. 

Yet another amazing success story of Aatmanirbharta is the case of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a government-backed centralized digital payment gateway widely popular in India. To understand the significance of UPI, consider this: India accounted for the largest number of worldwide digital transactions in 2021 at a whopping 48 billion, a number that is nearly three times bigger than China’s (18 billion) and is at least six times bigger than the transactions of US, Canada, UK, France and Germany combined. Voices in the US are saying that we must learn from India which is leapfrogging into the future. Again, Aatmanirbharta is at work. 

The above is not to suggest that everything is rosy. India faces monumental challenges with regard to the eradication of poverty, job creation and investment in health/education/skills of its vast population. But the lessons are clear: India is sui generis and it is only an “Indian” model that will work for India and Indians. Hence, the capital importance of Aatmanirbharta. After all, as we have seen above, ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’ is not just good for India but also for the world at large. 

Author: Ambassador (Dr.) Mohan Kumar is a former Indian Ambassador and a full-time academic.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The Australia Today is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts, or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of The Australia Today and The Australia Today News does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.

Australia was first to hoist independent India’s flag in the world, just seven hours after gaining independence

Indian flag hoisting in Autralia

In 1947, when Australians were celebrating the 159th anniversary of ‘white settlement’, Britain’s Indian Empire came to an end. India gained independence from British colonial rule. Sir Raghunath Purushottam Paranjpye, the first High Commissioner of India to Australia, organised the hoisting of independent India’s flag in Australia just seven hours after India was officially recognised as a nation.

Sir Paranjpye was a well-known scholar actively involved in the political, educational, and literary life of India. He was the first Indian to be awarded the title ‘Senior Wrangler’ in 1899. This title was given to the topper among those getting First Class Honours in undergraduate Mathematics at Cambridge.

He worked as the head of the Mathematics Department at Fergusson College, Poona, then served as its Principal (1906-26), and then became Vice-Chancellor of Bombay and Lucknow Universities. He also founded the Indian Rationalist Association in Madras (1949) and remained its president for many years.

L-R: Ramdas Paranjpe and Sir Raghunath Paranjpye at an event of felicitation at Pune Municipal Corporation, 1963 (Wikimedia Commons)

Sir Paranjype was appointed India’s High commissioner to Australia in 1944. Soon after taking up residence in Canberra, he strongly advocated for forming a direct trade and shipping line between Australia and India.

Sir Paranjpye told local media that such an initiative would “result in an enormous increase in trade between the two countries” that had both pre-colonial and colonial links.

These included stong connections as the trade between Aborigines and Makassar seamen, the rum of the Rum Rebellion or Great Rebellion of 1808 came from India, lawyer John Lang who represented the Indian Queen of Jhansi in Court against the British was the first Australian-born novelist, the Ghans and hawkers who connected the outback with towns and cities, were brought from Northern India, an Australian named James “Rajah” Inglis made a fortune through his “Billy Tea” brand, and the Mahalaxmi Racecourse in Mumbai was designed after Caulfield and Randwick Racecourses.

Owing to many connections, even today, some Australian towns and pastoral properties carry Indian names reflecting a deep but sometimes fractured connection between colonial India and white Australia.

Indian flag hoisting in Australia, August 1947 (Image Source: trove.nla.gov.au)

The Australian settler colonies – the white man’s club – and British India had a very different relationship to the British Empire. Given the maritime and trade links between Australia and India, this celebration to mark India’s independence in Canberra, Australia was a momentous occasion as it was for the first time that independent India’s tricolour was officially hoisted in a foreign land.

Independent India’s new flag – horizontal stripes of saffron, white, and green, with Ashok Chakra at the centre – arrived by air from India.

South side of Martin Place, from Commonwealth Bank to Prudential Building c1938 – By Australian National Publicity Association From the collections of the State Library of New South Wales [a390004 / PXA 907 Box 22, 41] (Walkabout Collection, Mitchell Library)

To mark this occasion, Sir Ragunath Paranjpye was joined by 350 guests which included members of the Indian community in traditional dresses along with Australian federal ministers and official representatives of other countries. 

After unfurling the Indian flag on the roof of the Prudential Building in Martin Place, Sir Paranjype explained the significance of the three colours to the gathered people:

“The saffron denoted courage and sacrifice, the white stood for purity and truth, and the green for devotion and chivalry. The blue wheel was the symbol of the law of duty.”

The magnitude of this occasion and its significance should not be underestimated as Indians took their destiny into their own hands.

Sir Paranjype further added that “India would always work for the liberty of all peoples of the world for peace among nations and the progress of humanity.”

Ben Chifley, the 16th Prime Minister of Australia (The National Museum of Australia)

Ben Chifley, the 16th Prime Minister of Australia, in a message to the Indian Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, said “the Australian people rejoiced in India’s new status as a sovereign nation and warmly welcomed their fellow members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.” 

Dr H. V. Evatt, Australia’s Minister for External Affairs (Evatt Foundation)

In his message, Dr H. V. Evatt, Australia’s Minister for External Affairs, said:

“Australia would watch India’s development with friendship and sympathy.”

He also announced the appointment of Sir Iven Mackay as the first Australian High Commissioner to independent India with headquarters in New Delhi.

After the flag hoisting ceremony, Sir Paranjype, Dr Evatt, and the High Commissioner of the United Kingdom (Mr Williams) drank a toast to “The New India.”

(Originally published on 15th August 2022).

15 years of experiments have overturned a major assumption about how thirsty plants actually are

Plants (Image source: Canva)

By Lucas Cernusak and Chin Wong

Have you ever wondered just how much water plants need to grow, or indeed why they need it? Plants lose a lot of water when they take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so they need up to 300 grams of water to make each gram of dry plant matter.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In a new paper published in Nature Plants, we report on a natural secret that could ultimately be used to help plants thrive while using less water.

An essential ingredient for plant growth

Plants are mostly made up of water – about 80% by weight. So we might expect plants would need around four grams of water for each gram of dry mass to achieve their ideal level of hydration.

That may be so, but they need a lot more water to grow. To produce one gram of new dry mass, a plant needs about 300 grams of water.

Why such a large difference between the amount of water required for hydration and the amount required for growth? Because almost all the water plants take up from the soil through their roots soon rises out into the atmosphere through their leaves.

Plant leaves are covered in microscopic valves called stomata. Stomata open to let in carbon dioxide from the air, which plants need for photosynthesis and growth.

But when the stomata are open, the moist internal tissue of the leaf is exposed to the drier outside air. This means water vapour can leak out whenever the stomata are open.

A long-held assumption

Plant scientists have long assumed the opening and closing of the stomata almost entirely controlled the amount of water evaporating from a leaf. This is because we assumed the air in small pockets inside the leaves was fully saturated with water vapour (another way to say this is that the “relative humidity” is 100%, or very close to it).

If the air inside the leaf is saturated and the air outside is drier, the opening of the stomata controls how much water diffuses out of the leaf. The result is that large quantities of water vapour come out of the leaf for each molecule of carbon dioxide that comes in.

Why did we assume the air inside the leaves has a relative humidity near 100%? Partly because water moves from more saturated places to less saturated places, so we thought cells inside leaves could not sustain their hydration if exposed directly to air with relative humidity much lower than 100%.

But we also made this assumption because we had no method of directly measuring the relative humidity of the air inside leaves. (A recently developed “hydrogel nanoreporter” that can be injected into leaves to measure humidity may improve this situation.)

A secret revealed

However, in a series of experiments over the past 15 years, we have accumulated evidence that this assumption is not correct. When air outside the leaf was dry, we observed that the relative humidity in the air spaces inside leaves routinely dropped well below 100%, sometimes as low as 80%.

What is most remarkable about these observations is that photosynthesis did not stop or even slow down when the relative humidity inside the leaves declined. This means the rate of water loss from the leaves stayed constant, even as the air outside increased its “evaporative demand” (a measure of the drying capacity or “thirstiness” of air, based on temperature, humidity and other factors).

If the leaves restricted their loss of water only by closing their stomata, we would expect to see photosynthesis slowing down or stopping. So it appears plants can effectively control water loss from their leaves while stomata remain open, allowing carbon dioxide to continue diffusing into the leaf to support photosynthesis.

Using water wisely

We think plants are controlling the movement of water using special “water-gating” proteins called aquaporins, which reside in the membranes of cells inside the leaf.

Our next experiments will test whether aquaporins are indeed the mechanism behind the behaviour that we observed. If we can thoroughly understand this mechanism, it may be possible to target its activity, and ultimately provide agriculturalists with plants that use water more efficiently.

Over the coming decades, global warming will make the atmosphere increasingly thirsty for evaporated water. We are pleased to report that nature may yet reveal secrets that can be harnessed to boost plant production with limited water resources.


The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions to this work of Graham Farquhar, Martin Canny (deceased), Meisha Holloway-Phillips, Diego Marquez and Hilary Stuart-Williams.

Lucas Cernusak, Associate Professor, Plant Physiology, James Cook University and Chin Wong, Visiting Fellow, Plant Sciences, Australian National University

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

#EXCLUSIVE: Hindu dancer left British India but returned to Independent India from Australia

Shivaram (Image source: Music Archives of Monash University)

By Amit Sarwal and Pallavi Jain

Ananda Shivaram, dressed in a grey sherwani (traditional Indian long coat) arrived in Australia in March 1947 at Port Melbourne on the SS Marella attracting the attention of photojournalists eager to capture him. He was the first Indian Kathakali artist to tour Australia. Kathakali is an ancient Indian dance. Historically it is an all-night traditional dance-drama performed in Hindu temples.

Ananda Shivaram, 1947. Photograph: Source unknown. Photograph from the Louise Lightfoot Bequest, Monash University. Photograph Courtesy: Music Archives of Monash University and Mary Louise Lightfoot.

Shivaram was received in Australia by an Australian ballet dancer and impresario Louise Lightfoot who spent several years in India learning different Indian classical dance forms including Kathakali, Bharatnatyam and Manipuri.

(Left to Right) Ananda Shivaram received by Louise Lightfoot at Port Melbourne on board SS Marella, 1947. Photograph: Source unknown. Photograph from the Louise Lightfoot Bequest, Monash University. Photograph Courtesy: Music Archives of Monash University and Mary Louise Lightfoot.

Shivaram, then in his early thirties, performed in all the major Australian cities: Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Perth. The Australian media overwhelmingly characterized him as an “exotic Hindu temple dancer.”

Ananda Shivaram posing and performing eye exercises for Australian journalists, May 31, 1947. Photograph: PIX Magazine. Photograph from the Louise Lightfoot Bequest, Monash University. Photograph Courtesy: Music Archives of Monash University and Mary Louise Lightfoot.

His first major show was organized at the National Theatre in Melbourne, under the patronage of the Indian High Commissioner to Australia, Sir Raghunath Purushottam Paranjpye. By the time Shivaram was leaving Australia he had already become a star.

A poster for Ananda Shivaram’s first dance recital at the National Theatre, Melbourne, Victoria, April 28 to May 3, 1947. Photograph from the Louise Lightfoot Bequest, Monash University. Photograph Courtesy: Music Archives of Monash University and Mary Louise Lightfoot.

When Shivaram boarded the SS Marella for Australia, India was still under British rule but when he left Australia and touched the shores of Mumbai (then Bombay) on his way to London he was in the seas of an Independent India.

Hindu temple home of all arts: Louise Lightfoot

This fascinating chapter in the history of Australian-Indian cultural relations was made possible by the Australian impresario Loiuse Lightfoot.

The Indian media saw this collaboration between Shivaram, Lightfoot and other Australian Ballet artists as a much-awaited “cultural union between the Orient and the Occident.”

Louise Lightfoot wearing a Sari. Photograph from the Louise Lightfoot Bequest, Monash University. Photograph: Mac Juster. Photograph Courtesy: Music Archives of Monash University and Mary Louise Lightfoot.

Louise was the first Australian and the first Western woman to study Kathakali. Born in May 1902 in Yangery in Victoria she first arrived in India in 1937. She learned Bharatnatyam, Kathakali and Manipuri during the many years that she spent in India over several visits. She also devoted her considerable talents—experiences drawn from promoting ballet in Australia—and energy to promote Indian classical dance in Australia.

Before Shivaram’s arrival in Melbourne, Louise successfully started preparing the public to receive him by publishing extensively on Hindu dance art in Australian newspapers and magazines, teaching selected Australian ballet students Indian dance and giving public talks at the Theosophical Society and at Ballet clubs.

Poster for Ananda Shivaram’s dance recitals, 1947. Photograph from the Louise Lightfoot Bequest, Monash University. Photograph Courtesy: Music Archives of Monash University and Mary Louise Lightfoot.

Louise spoke of discovering Indian dance, an ancient and perfect art, though in danger of extinction; of Indian dance being more than entertainment, being considered an approach to God; and how the Hindu temple was the home of all arts.

Seeing Louise’s dedication towards promoting Kathakali, Vallathol Narayana Menon, the great poet of Malabar and the founder of Kerala Kalamandalam, bestowed upon Louise the fond title of “Kathakali’s Australian mother.”

Kathakali in Australia

To popularise Kathakali in Australia, Louise thought it was best to infuse the Indian rhythms of this symbolic art with Western dance and vice versa. Here, Louise’s knowledge and training in architecture, sculpture and painting helped her in the elaborate planning of costumes, ornaments and stage design. Nevertheless, this experimentation could not have been possible without the active support of Ananda Shivaram—Louise’s teacher, friend and star artist.

Louise and Shivaram’s experimentation in the fusion of Eastern and Western practices and making a classical Indian form accessible to uninitiated audiences was an overwhelming success. Audiences and critics were bowled over by the eloquence, expressiveness, and range of characterization of Shivaram’s Kathakali performances.

Ananda Shivaram in his iconic Peacock Dance, 1947. Photograph: John Tanner. Photograph from the Louise Lightfoot Bequest, Monash University. Photograph Courtesy: Music Archives of Monash University and Mary Louise Lightfoot.

After his first tour, Shivaram attracted attention from journalists and public alike, in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, as a picturesque figure with shoulder-length hair. The critical consensus was that the audiences had viewed the ancient temple dances as if on a “magic carpet” ride.

Australian connoisseurs of ballet were “profoundly interested” and “pleasantly impressed” with Shivaram’s “original demonstrations.” Comparing the dance style of Shivaram with that of the American modern dancer Ted Shawn, Alan Seymour wrote in The Mail: “… the most marvellous thing in Shivaram’s dancing is his virility, which makes such a deep impression … it unleashes before us a power and vitality completely masculine and astonishingly thrilling.”

Ananda Shivaram in a Man-Lion pose from Narasimha Avatar, 1947. Photograph: The Advertiser. Photograph from the Louise Lightfoot Bequest, Monash University. Photograph Courtesy: Music Archives of Monash University and Mary Louise Lightfoot.

Alan Seymour noted that during her stay in India, the “religious tradition” and the “deep spiritual content of Indian dance” had had “an over-whelming effect” on Louise and she had “absorbed its technique and emotional content” in her own presentations.

According to Moya Beaver, who was also an Australian ballet dancer and teacher, no Australian woman had done this before. Seymour also noted that “… unlike many Australians in the theatre world who have gone abroad and forgotten to come back, she has devotedly, and with passionate sincerity, attempted to bring something of culture, enlightenment, and international goodwill to the Australian people.”

(Sitting in the centre, from left to right) Ruth Bergner, Ananda Shivaram and Louise Lightfoot, Fiji, 1950. Photograph: Source unknown. Photograph from the Louise Lightfoot Bequest, Monash University. Photograph Courtesy: Music Archives of Monash University and Mary Louise Lightfoot.

While Shivaram was on his way to becoming an international star, a rich Indian-origin business owner invited Louise and Shivaram to Fiji. On their return to Melbourne, however, Louise and Shivaram were told by the officers of the immigration department that Shivaram’s visa was meant for Australia and his Fiji tour had led to its cancellation. On Louise’s request, the officials granted a few weeks’ stay to Shivaram to make arrangements for his travel back to India. But in any case, Shivaram was now ready to move on and explore Europe.

Louise and Shivaram boarded Marseilles from Freemantle bound for Ceylon and Bombay. But they did not get down at Bombay as planned and moved on to London to showcase India’s new cultural ambassador. However when Marseilles docked in Mumbai, India had gained independence from the British and Shivaram who had left British India touched the shores of a free India.

(Right to Left) Ananda Shivaram with his father and first guru Gopala Panikar. Photograph: Source unknown. Photograph from the Louise Lightfoot Bequest, Monash University. Photograph Courtesy: Music Archives of Monash University and Mary Louise Lightfoot.

From 1947-1950, Shivaram performed in Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and England with Louise as his trusted impresario. The Australian tours, 1947 and 1949-50, were made possible by the official assistance of state funding bodies, such as the Arts Council of Australia, the Adult Education Board (in Western Australia and in Tasmania), and the Council of Adult Education (in Victoria). Shivaram performed at prestigious theatres, such as the National Theatre in Melbourne, the Majestic Theatre in Adelaide, and the Repertory Theatre in Perth.

Shivaram was the “star of India” who enjoyed constant attention from an excited public. After his successful Australian tours, the Indian media hailed Shivaram as the true “cultural ambassador” of India in Australia. He interacted with both Australian artists and the common people to promote knowledge of his art and to bring Indian and Australian cultures and worlds closer together. In the 1950s, Shivaram returned to independent India to rest after years of touring continuously and Louise moved on to learn another traditional Hindu dance form of India – Manipuri.

(For a detailed story, please see Amit Sarwal’s The Dancing God: Staging Hindu Dance in Australia, London: Routledge, 2020)

Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav: 75 Years of Progressive India

By Ambassador Anil Trigunayat

75 years of free India are replete with stupendous achievements. These become more remarkable because the country had to make a ‘Tryst with Destiny’ bringing out an exploited 1/6th of the humanity from the vagaries of the colonial yoke.

The major challenges at the time of independence in 1947 included socio-economic development and nation-building through education and industrial development, eradication of poverty, and food self-sufficiency in a drought-hit era with a divided nation by the colonial masters who were forced to lift their colonial shackles by the Gandhian non-violent movements.

This was even more difficult as the world was divided into Cold War adversaries and bloc politics which India could not have subscribed to. Hence, India not only stood and helped in the emancipation of a large number of colonised countries but also created a third way with a more equitable force in the form of NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) to serve national interest and cause of peace and development, especially for the developing and underdeveloped world. It became a champion for the rights of oppressed people at the international fora while discharging its obligations as a responsible international actor and a voice of reason. 

India, before the advent of the colonial powers, contributed to over a quarter of the global GDP which went down to less than 4% when they left with her industry decimated and an administrative system that was geared to serve the interests of the colonial masters.

In the last over seven decades, India has engineered Green, Yellow and White Revolutions with continuous upgradation in technology in the agricultural and food processing areas not only to meet the demand of a burgeoning population but has also emerged as a net exporter and helper to the world. India has also emerged as credible nuclear and space power in the world- the tools it intends to employ for the global good.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi while speaking at the inaugural of curtain raiser activities of the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav reiterated and reaffirmed that “We are proud of our Constitution. We are proud of our democratic traditions. The mother of democracy, India is still moving forward by strengthening democracy. India, rich in knowledge and science, is leaving its mark from Mars to the Moon. Today, India’s startup ecosystem has become a centre of attraction in the world.

Today, India is moving out of the darkness of scarcity to meet the aspirations of more than 130 crores (1.3 bn) people.” India has the largest young aspirational population and the fastest growing market economy which is ready to cater to the needs of teeming billion-plus people who take pride in the Indian story. 

As a result of umpteen initiatives by the present government, hundreds of archaic laws have been dispensed with. India‘s global ranking for DBI (Doing Business with India) has moved up significantly even as more needs to be done. India has become a favourite investment destination garnering the highest annual FDI inflow of $83.57 billion in FY21-22 despite the Pandemic.

Computer Software and Hardware became the top recipient sector of FDI Equity inflow with a share of around 25% which indicates that India figures prominently for the investors as the AI-driven Industrial Revolution 4.0 moves to a higher orbit. India also boasts of fast growth in billionaire Unicorns globally. Moreover, the FDI equity inflows in Manufacturing rose by 76% in FY 2021-22 well supported by the Indian policy framework and ‘Make in India’  and PLI ( Performance Linked Initiative) schemes. This is a remarkable achievement and a testament to Indian economic and political resilience. 

Likewise, for the first time, Indian exports of goods and services reached over $600 billion in 2021-22 despite the global problems and supply constraints due to the pandemic and the ongoing Eurasian war. India has always been a trading nation and is working hard to reclaim that status yet again. Along with this, India is also focusing on self-reliance with a global footprint – ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’, especially in the manufacturing sector and to be an integral part of alternate value and supply chains that are resilient and reliable for the national interest and the global good.

In this context, India’s participation in the I2U2, Quad, Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) and other regional and sub-regional connectivity-oriented frameworks acquires a renewed salience and focus. Likewise, vigorous move to expeditiously implement INSTC (North-South Transport corridor), strategic connectivity projects like Chabahar in Iran to Afghanistan to Central Asia and Europe or North-Eastern India to ASEAN corridors aim at providing crucial trade and economic linkages for India’s centrality in global supply chains.

As India wishes to lead through the AI-driven Industrial revolution 4.0, its Digital India, Innovate, Start Up and Stand Up India campaigns have become the hallmark of a unique digital footprint. Some initiatives like access to the internet, banking at the doorstep and direct payment into accounts to nearly a billion Indians are the game changer and are providing the leadership position to India in the comity of nations. PM Modi recently, while speaking at the inaugural of the first bullion exchange, claimed that India already accounts for 40% of global digital payments. 

India’s foreign policy has become more robust and confident with impeccable credentials as the country pursues a value-based foreign policy clearly driven by strategic autonomy to subserve her own national interests which are aligned with the global welfare and has emerged as a voice of reason at the global stage. India at the UNSC no longer pleads for a place on the horseshoe table but claims it on the basis of her credentials. Meanwhile, India continues to play the global leadership role as a voice of the developing and underdeveloped countries be it for the waiver of Intellectual Property Rights for Vaccines or at the WTO negotiations on fishing and agriculture and on the reforms for the multilateral institutions. 

India is also at the forefront of the fight against Climate Change. The International Solar Alliance (ISA), Coalition of Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) and ‘One Planet One Health’ are the initiatives that India has launched with and for the global community as it has emerged as a first responder in crisis situations from natural disasters to the pandemic.

With a clear focus on multilateralism and primacy of the UN Charter, India navigates her foreign and security policy with dignity and confidence as she engages with diverse partners across various groupings like the Quad, BRICS, SCO, G20 and Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) where India becomes a pivot. Her Neighbourhood First, Act East and Link West and Africa for Africans policies provide her with the effective fulcrum for mutually beneficial partnerships.

India’s capacity-building assistance under the ITEC (Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation) to over 160 countries and supply of essential medicines, medical supplies and deputing professionals and paramedics during the pandemic have given it unparalleled heft as a responsible global-centric power always rising to the occasion. India has emerged as a first responder during the crises with the ‘Share and Care’ attitude, immensely adding to its Soft Power which has translated into unprecedented support for India at the international fora including at the declaration of June 21 as the International Yoga Day. 

As a new global order emerges out of the current churn and transition, India is all set to take up a benign leadership role during the ‘Amrit Kaal’ – next 25 years with a strong polity, stronger economy and efficient foreign policy which is robust, resilient and result oriented and with the global good at the core. 

Author: Anil Trigunayat is a former Indian Ambassador to Jordan, Libya and Malta.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The Australia Today is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts, or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of The Australia Today and The Australia Today News does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.

Canberra Airport evacuated after a gunman fired shots in check-in area

Canberra Airport. August 2019. Photograph Dallas Kilponen (Image source: https://www.canberraairport.com.au/)

Australian capital Canberra’s airport has been evacuated after a gunman fired shots in the check-in area of the terminal. 

According to media reports, a man has been apprehended by police and a firearm was recovered.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) were doing a security sweep of the airport.

Dan Bourchier, ABC newsreader, tweeted: “AFP is doing a “security sweep” of the airport after we were told the airport has been evacuated.”

ABC reporter Lily Thomson who was at the airport narrated her experience:

“I saw this grandma with a baby and the fear in her face and I knew it was something serious. So we all ran and I stayed with that grandma and her baby and hid behind an information desk. We stayed there for a couple of minutes until security told us to evacuate out to the car park. Everyone was hiding behind chairs and people were running. It was terrifying. We didn’t know what was going on. The look on people’s faces was quite terrifying.”

A number of planes are waiting on the tarmac as passengers wait patiently inside to disembark.

Josh Butler, the political reporter for Guardian Australia, tweeted that four bullet holes can be seen in three large glass windows on the second floor of Canberra airport.

There have been no reports of injuries at this stage. AFP is treating Canberra Airport as a crime scene and has advised members of “the members of the public to not attend the airport at this time.”

‘Time to tell our stories’: India approves film co-production treaty with Australia

Lion, Salaam Namaste and unIndian

India has approved the signing of an audiovisual co-production treaty with Australia with an aim to boost the joint production of films.

A still from Bollywood film ‘Salaam Namaste’ shot in Australia.

Audio-visual co-production treaties are enabling documents that facilitate the co-production of films between two countries. According to the agreement, producer contributions from the two countries can vary from 20% to 80% of the final total cost of the jointly produced work. The Indian government said in a statement:

“The proposed agreement will boost ties with Australia, lead to exchange of art and culture, showcase the soft power of our country and lead to generation of employment among artistic, technical as well as non-technical personnel engaged in audio visual co-production, including production and post-production work.”

The statement notes that in recent years Australia has emerged as a preferred destination for shooting of Indian films. The Indian government believes that India too is fast emerging as a major content hub for filmmakers looking for new projects. It adds:

“India has abundance of exotic locations, talent pool and relatively cheaper cost of production, making India a favoured destination of foreign filmmakers.”

This approval for co-production comes after Australia India Film Council (AIFC) signed an MoU with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in June 2022.

Anupam Sharma (Facebook)

Well-known Indian-Australian filmmaker Anupam Sharma who is also the chair of AIFC says “it is really encouraging to see the co-production treaty from India side, that too in the special year of 75 years of Indian Independence and Australia India Dosti.” He adds:

“As an Australian of Indian origin and a filmmaker who participated in the first discussions about Australia India co production treaty in 2001 at the then Australian Film Commission, it is so encouraging and rewarding to see this important dream finally getting closer to reality. Now the ball is in the Australian court!

Anupam Sharma with Brett Lee and Tannishtha Chatterjee.

Anupam, who has years of experience in film production and made his directorial debut with the 2015 Australian romantic comedy, further observes that Indian-Australian stories are waiting to be narrated on screen. He says:

“With the success of Australia India projects in the recent past, the Indian Diaspora is so important and big in numbers as per the current census, Australian stories are changing in their very definition. Australian stories which are India-centric are waiting to be narrated on screen and this co-production treaty will a huge boost to Australian and Indian filmmakers to collaborate at a deeper level. Australia and India don’t have to just service each other’s offshore shoot, we can co-produce and collaborate now after the treaty is ratified by Australia as well.”

Anupam’s next film, ‘Bollywood Down Under,’ aims to document the history, glory, globalisation, and Bollywoodisation of Indian cinema in Australia. The film is narrated in the voice of stars like Farhan Akthar, Anupam Kher, Sajid Nadiadwala, Ritesh Sidhwani, Srishti Behl, Siddharth Roy Kapur, Fardeen Khan, Ashutosh Gowariker, and Leena Yadav to name just a few. 

Dev Patel (a still from Lion)

This new treaty with Australia also adds to the 15 co-production treaties India has with countries including Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Korea, Russia, Spain, and the UK. The statement adds that utilization of Indian locales will lead to an inflow of foreign exchange into the country.

Australia currently has treaties with Canada, China, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. in addition, it is a signatory to MOUs with France and New Zealand. Australia is also negotiating co-production treaties with Denmark and is renegotiating the treaty with the United Kingdom.

As per regulations, official co-productions can only be made where Arrangements are in place between the countries. The first official project to apply for co-production funding under this treaty will be ‘The Laugh of Lakshmi,’ a film produced by John Maynard and directed by S. Shakthidharan. this film is set to be shot in India and Sydney in early 2023.

A new book about 12 experiments that changed the world sidelines the role of beautiful theory in physics

Suzie Sheehy and The Matter of Everything

By Sam Baron

Review: The Matter of Everything: 12 experiments that changed the world – Suzie Sheehy (Bloomsbury)

The Matter of Everything tells the history of physics through experiments. Any book about the history of science for a general audience will, of necessity, be something of a distortion. The question is whether the distortion is useful: does it offer a new perspective on the history of physics? While there is much to like about the book, I found it to be largely polemic and unhelpful.

Here’s what I liked about the book: it is extremely detailed. It takes us through 12 important experiments within physics from roughly the last century and a half.

Simulation of lead ion collisions within the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider – one of eight detector experiments. CERN

The experiments range from the study of X-rays and the nature of light in the early 20th century, to the early development of particle accelerators to detect and study subatomic particles throughout the 20th century, culminating in the modern era of Big Science and the use of the Large Hadron Collider to find the Higgs boson. They are described in a manner that is rigorous and accessible.

Rigour and accessibility clearly trade off, at least for a non-technical audience. The book manages this trade off beautifully. Complex experiments are described in a manner that is easily understood.

The role that those experiments play in pushing forward the frontiers of particle physics – the study of an increasingly large array of very small pieces of reality, including those that constitute matter such as electrons, along with the forces that bind them – is also explained well.

It is done so without needing to take the reader through the details of some imposing theories, most notably: the various quantum field theories within the standard model of particle physics.

Author Suzie Sheehy, an Australian physicist with academic roles at Oxford and Melbourne universities, also does an incredible job of explaining the wider implications of the experiments considered. Sheehy is an expert in accelerator physics: the design and implementation of particle accelerators to conduct experiments.

Careful attention is paid to spin-off technologies developed in the course of building particle accelerators, including the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRIs) as well as the production of radio isotopes for use in medical imaging more generally.

The point is well-made that developing these technologies was not an aim of scientific investigation but an unpredictable by-product. A word of caution underlies much of the discussion of these technologies: industry should be in the service of science, and not the other way around.

I also loved the book’s relish for the ingenuity of the inventor. For each of the 12 experiments described a common story unfolds: there is something we want to test but we just don’t know how to do it.

Scientists must invent new ways of managing electricity, magnetism, and more just so they can carry out their experiments. The world of experimental particle physics feels suddenly familiar: scientists are tinkerers, hammering out new pieces of equipment in much the same way one might invent a new kitchen utensil on the fly with some duct tape and a healthy dose of optimism.

A distorted history

As noted, The Matter of Everything is an inevitable distortion of the history of physics. One of the main distortions lies with the central premise of the book. The 12 experiments chosen are from the realm of particle physics. Whether by design or by accident, the history of 20th century physics is recast as the history of particle physics.

To say that this leaves a lot out, is an understatement. The standard model of particle physics is rivalled, in rigour and experimental confirmation, only by the general theory of relativity.

Whereas the standard model describes the world of particles and particle interactions, general relativity describes the large-scale structure of the universe and gravity.

In the 20th century, general relativity was both motivated and ultimately confirmed by a fascinating array of experiments, starting from the ingenious interferometer experiments in the early 20th century to the detection of gravity waves in 2015.

The focus on experiments relating to particle physics not only paints a strange picture of 20th century physics, but it also tends to cast the standard model in a rosy light. For we now know that the standard model is, in some sense, incomplete. The standard model “conflicts” with general relativity. The two theories are in need of replacement.

A more balanced telling of the history of 20th century physics might have included a wider array of experiments. Of course, a single book cannot cover everything. But some remarks on what is being left out should be offered. Otherwise, an idiosyncratic take on the history of 20th century physics quickly turns into a polemic retelling of where the “real” physics lies.

Experiment and theory

Why experiments? This is a question I kept asking myself throughout the book. Ultimately, the answer appears to be a political one. The book works hard to impress upon the reader the importance of experimental physics. Experiments are where the action is in science. Progress can only be made through gathering empirical data.

This focus on the experimenter as the pioneer, forging a path into new scientific terrain, is at best, a half truth. Companion to the experimenter is the theoretician. Theoretical work and experimental work generally go hand-in-hand. Theoretical physics, however, seems to be downplayed throughout the book. This is perplexing, given that theories are essential to experimental work twice-over.

Trajectories in a Cloud Chamber. Image from Gordon Fraser/CERN, http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/28742), CC BY

First, theories are typically needed to generate hypotheses for experimental testing. Much experimental work tests the predictions of known theories in order to confirm them. There are, of course, cases in which an experiment is conducted and produces results that challenge all known theories. But even then, it is the interplay between theory and experiment that drives science forward.

Second, theories are needed to make sense of empirical data. A theory of some kind is typically needed to understand how a given experiment works.

The Large Hadron Collider – a massive ring of electromagnets used to accelerate particles to high velocities before smashing them together, to see what they’re made of – is a case in point. The experiment is so complex that understanding it requires grasping an array of theories from different areas of science. Experimental data in a vacuum is virtually meaningless. Theories provide context for experimental data.

The suppression of theoretical work in physics is part of the book’s gimmick. But, again, the picture this conveys of 20th century physics is unrealistic. The story of 20th century physics is as much one of beautiful theory, as it is of ingenious experiment. Again, it is hard not to see the focus on experiment as something of a normative statement on how science ought to be done.

Lost voices

People play a large role in the Matter of Everything. Glorious experimental machinery is set against the backdrop of scientist-inventors who tinker and toil. This focus on people is welcome. It helps to humanise the story of 20th century physics, and give the reader a sense that they too could contribute to science, if only they mucked around in the shed long enough.

That being said, the book might have said more about scientists who are widely acknowledged to have been unjustly neglected in the history of their field. As the book itself acknowledges, there is, for example, a need to tell the story of women scientists.

Given this, I found the omission of Marie Curie, and her daughter Irene, striking. Marie and Irene pass in and out of the book at various places, but their story is never properly told.

Marie and Irene Curie. Wikimedia Commons

This is particularly odd given that both were involved in experimental work in particle physics, and one was a Nobel laureate. Ultimately, the book doesn’t fully heed its own warning, and what we are left with is a history of physics with notable gaps. This is a shame, since it was an opportunity to set the record straight.

Limitations

Overall, The Matter of Everything suffers from some serious limitations. It claims to be a history of 20th century physics but, at best, tells the story of experimental particle physics.

Theoretical work is missing, as are some of the experiments that relate to gravitational work in physics. The book also has significant gaps when it comes to the scientists themselves.

I thus don’t recommend the book as a complete history of 20th century physics. But read it if you’re interested in particle accelerators, and if you’re keen to know why they matter so much to everyday life, and not just big science.

Sam Baron, Associate professor, Australian Catholic University

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

Indian-origin writer Salman Rushdie stabbed on stage by Hadi Matar in New York

Salman Rushdie attacked in New York

Well-known Indian-origin writer Salman Rushdie, 75-year-old, was stabbed in the neck and abdomen on Friday by a Muslim fanatic during a lecture tour in New York.

Police identified the attacker as Hadi Matar, 24-year-old, from Fairview, New Jersey. He was arrested at the scene and was awaiting arraignment. Rushdie was flown to a hospital and underwent surgery. An eyewitness who is a doctor described Rushdie’s wounds as “serious but recoverable.”

An Associated Press reporter witnessed the attacker confront Rushdie on stage at the Chautauqua Institution and punch or stab him 10 to 15 times as he was being introduced to 2,500 people in the audience.

It was reported that Matar, dressed in black with a black mask, ran onto the stage and started beating Rushdie for about 20 seconds.

Henry Reese, the 73-year-old, moderator of the lecture was also attacked and suffered a facial injury. He and Rushdie were about to discuss the United States as a refuge for writers and other artists in exile.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told the media that Rushdie “is an individual who has spent decades speaking truth to power.” The governor added: “Someone who has been out there unafraid, despite the threats that have followed him his entire adult life it seems.”

While no response has come from the President of America Joe Biden or Vice-president Kamala Harris, the President of France Emmanuel Macron was among the first to tweet his support for Rushdie: “His fight is our fight; it is universal. Now more than ever, we stand by his side.”

Prime Minister of Australia Anthony Albanese too in a tweet condemned the “senseless violence against a celebrated author is also an assault on global freedom of expression and deserves unequivocal condemnation.”

Well-known writer Taslima Nasreen, who had had to leave Bangladesh in 1990s due to death threats by Islamists, tweeted: “If he is attacked, anyone who is critical of Islam can be attacked.”

Masih Alinejad, the Iranian journalist and activist in exile, condemned the attack on Rushdie. In a tweet, she said: “You can kill us but you cannot kill the idea of writing & fighting for our dignity.”

PEN America said in a statement that they are “reeling from shock and horror at word of a brutal, premeditated attack.” PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said: “We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil. We hope and believe fervently that his essential voice cannot and will not be silenced.”

Rushdie who is also a past president of PEN America is well-known for his advocacy of free expression and liberal causes. In the late-1980s, Rushdie received death threats and fatwa from Islamists for his lucidly written novel “The Satanic Verses” (1988). The novel was viewed as blasphemous by many Islamists, who saw one of the characters as an insult to the Prophet Muhammad, among various other objections.

The book was banned in Iran and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. The death threats led Rushdie to go into hiding under a British government protection program. In 1991, a Japanese translator of the book was stabbed to death; the same year an Italian translator survived a knife attack; and in 1993 a Norwegian publisher was shot three times. Even now, Rushdie has a bounty of $3 million on his head for anyone who kills him.

Kapil Komireddi, author of Malevolent Republic (2019), tweeted a scene from a 1990 Pakistani film that depicted Salman Rushdie as a satanic agent of Jews and Hindus out to destroy Islam.

State police Maj. Eugene Staniszewski told the media that Matar’s motive for stabbing Rushdie is still unclear. Meanwhile, Matar’s attorney, public defender Nathaniel Barone, declined to comment to media.

The length of Earth’s days has been mysteriously increasing, and scientists don’t know why

Space (Image source: Canva)

By Matt King and Christopher Watson

Atomic clocks, combined with precise astronomical measurements, have revealed that the length of a day is suddenly getting longer, and scientists don’t know why.

This has critical impacts not just on our timekeeping, but also things like GPS and other technologies that govern our modern life.

Over the past few decades, Earth’s rotation around its axis – which determines how long a day is – has been speeding up. This trend has been making our days shorter; in fact, in June 2022 we set a record for the shortest day over the past half a century or so.

But despite this record, since 2020 that steady speedup has curiously switched to a slowdown – days are getting longer again, and the reason is so far a mystery.

While the clocks in our phones indicate there are exactly 24 hours in a day, the actual time it takes for Earth to complete a single rotation varies ever so slightly. These changes occur over periods of millions of years to almost instantly – even earthquakes and storm events can play a role.

It turns out a day is very rarely exactly the magic number of 86,400 seconds.

The ever-changing planet

Over millions of years, Earth’s rotation has been slowing down due to friction effects associated with the tides driven by the Moon. That process adds about about 2.3 milliseconds to the length of each day every century. A few billion years ago an Earth day was only about 19 hours.

For the past 20,000 years, another process has been working in the opposite direction, speeding up Earth’s rotation. When the last ice age ended, melting polar ice sheets reduced surface pressure, and Earth’s mantle started steadily moving toward the poles.

Just as a ballet dancer spins faster as they bring their arms toward their body – the axis around which they spin – so our planet’s spin rate increases when this mass of mantle moves closer to Earth’s axis. And this process shortens each day by about 0.6 milliseconds each century.

Over decades and longer, the connection between Earth’s interior and surface comes into play too. Major earthquakes can change the length of day, although normally by small amounts. For example, the Great Tōhoku Earthquake of 2011 in Japan, with a magnitude of 8.9, is believed to have sped up Earth’s rotation by a relatively tiny 1.8 microseconds.

Apart from these large-scale changes, over shorter periods weather and climate also have important impacts on Earth’s rotation, causing variations in both directions.

The fortnightly and monthly tidal cycles move mass around the planet, causing changes in the length of day by up to a millisecond in either direction. We can see tidal variations in length-of-day records over periods as long as 18.6 years. The movement of our atmosphere has a particularly strong effect, and ocean currents also play a role. Seasonal snow cover and rainfall, or groundwater extraction, alter things further.

Space (Image source: Canva)

Why is Earth suddenly slowing down?

Since the 1960s, when operators of radio telescopes around the planet started to devise techniques to simultaneously observe cosmic objects like quasars, we have had very precise estimates of Earth’s rate of rotation. https://www.youtube.com/embed/59Bl8cjNg-Y?wmode=transparent&start=0 Using radio telescopes to measure Earth’s rotation involves observations of radio sources like quasars. NASA Goddard.

A comparison between these estimates and an atomic clock has revealed a seemingly ever-shortening length of day over the past few years.

But there’s a surprising reveal once we take away the rotation speed fluctuations we know happen due to the tides and seasonal effects. Despite Earth reaching its shortest day on June 29 2022, the long-term trajectory seems to have shifted from shortening to lengthening since 2020. This change is unprecedented over the past 50 years.

The reason for this change is not clear. It could be due to changes in weather systems, with back-to-back La Niña events, although these have occurred before. It could be increased melting of the ice sheets, although those have not deviated hugely from their steady rate of melt in recent years. Could it be related to the huge volcano explosion in Tonga injecting huge amounts of water into the atmosphere? Probably not, given that occurred in January 2022.

Scientists have speculated this recent, mysterious change in the planet’s rotational speed is related to a phenomenon called the “Chandler wobble” – a small deviation in Earth’s rotation axis with a period of about 430 days. Observations from radio telescopes also show that the wobble has diminished in recent years; the two may be linked.

One final possibility, which we think is plausible, is that nothing specific has changed inside or around Earth. It could just be long-term tidal effects working in parallel with other periodic processes to produce a temporary change in Earth’s rotation rate.

Do we need a ‘negative leap second’?

Precisely understanding Earth’s rotation rate is crucial for a host of applications – navigation systems such as GPS wouldn’t work without it. Also, every few years timekeepers insert leap seconds into our official timescales to make sure they don’t drift out of sync with our planet.

If Earth were to shift to even longer days, we may need to incorporate a “negative leap second” – this would be unprecedented, and may break the internet.

The need for negative leap seconds is regarded as unlikely right now. For now, we can welcome the news that – at least for a while – we all have a few extra milliseconds each day.

Matt King, Director of the ARC Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, University of Tasmania and Christopher Watson, Senior Lecturer, School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences, University of Tasmania

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

Indian Air Force on its way to Australia to participate in exercise ‘Pitch Black 2022’

Indian Air Force (Twitter)

After a three-year gap caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Indian Air Force (IAF) is on its way to participate in the exercise ‘Pitch Black’ that will take place in Australia from 19 August – 8 September 2022.

About 100 aircraft and 2,500 military personnel from 17 nations will take part in this two-week-long exercise in the Northern Territory. Earlier, Australia’s Department of Defence said in a statement:

“This exercise is the Royal Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) most significant International Engagement activity, with forces participating from a wide range of partner and allied nations, with the aim of developing and enhancing military relationships at all levels.”

Exercise Pitch Black, which includes day and night flying, is a biennial multi-national large force employment exercise that this year will be conducted from RAAF Base Darwin, RAAF Base Tindal, and RAAF Base Amberley.

Royal Australian Air Force tweeted: “100 aircraft from up to 15 nations from around the globe participating” in 2022 Pitch Black.

Along with Australia and India, other participants this year are Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, UAE, the U.K., and the U.S.

IAF is again excited to participate in and continue the series of military exercises with countries in the Indo-Pacific. IAF contingent for the 2018 exercise consisted of 145 personnel, four Su-30MKI fighters, one C-130, and one C-17 transport aircraft.

IAF hosted a contingent of the French Air & Space Force which was on their way to Pitch Black 2022.

Air Commander Australia, Air Vice-Marshal (AVM) Darren Goldie said in a statement that exercises such as Pitch Black are important in strengthening our regional partnerships. He added:

“Exercises such as Pitch Black provide important training opportunities in a multi-nation coalition environment and are important for ensuring Air Force remains ready to respond, whenever the Australian Government requires.”

Through Exercise Pitch Black the RAAF will demonstrate Air Force’s commitment to building professionalism and enhancing military relationships for the safe and effective conduct of air operations with regional and partner nations.

Australia and India support a comprehensive strategic partnership and signed have also signed a deal, Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MLSA), for reciprocal access to military bases for logistics support.

The 2020 edition of the exercise was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Australian Navy was part of the ‘Malabar Naval Exercise’ hosted by India in 2020 and 2021.

Perth Children’s Hospital chief Dr Aresh Anwar resigns two weeks before inquest into Aishwarya Aswath’s death begins

Perth Children's Hospital (Image Source: Wikipedia)
Perth Children's Hospital (Image Source: Wikipedia)

The chief executive of WA’s Child and Adolescent Health Service (CAHS), Dr Aresh Anwar, has resigned. CAHS oversees the Perth Children’s Hospital. 

Seven-year-old Aishwarya Aswath died at the hospital, after waiting for two hours at the Hospital’s emergency department, from organ failure resulting from sepsis, on 3rd April 2021.

The WA Department of Health confirmed that Dr Anwar had resigned from his role effective from 12th August 2022. 

WA’s Health Director General Dr David Russell-Weisz said he had accepted Dr Anwar’s resignation.

According to the ABC a report released in November 2021 revealed extensive problems with the hospital’s handling of her case.

A coronial inquest into Aishwarya’s death will begin on 24th August 2022.

In a media release issued on Thursday, Dr Russell-Weisz acknowledged Dr Anwar’s efforts in charge of CAHS. He said that Dr Anwar brought to the role considerable expertise, a strong work ethic, dedication and integrity, and he has also been a trusted member of the broader WA Health executive team.

He added that among Dr Anwar’s many achievements, he oversaw the foundational phase of the flagship Perth Children’s Hospital and steered CAHS through a complex and challenging period while also leading CAHS’s outstanding response to COVID-19.

Dr Aresh Anwar (Image Source: CAHS website)

Dr Anwar was appointed to this role in 2018.

According to WAToday, a report into the circumstances of the little girl’s death in April last year found multiple staffing, equipment and policy failures could have contributed to her passing.

Chair of Perth Children’s Hospital board, Debbie Karasinski, had resigned from her role in May last year in the aftermath of this tragedy but Dr Anwar’s verbal offer of resignation was rejected by Dr Russell Weisz at the time.

How much choice do young Australian women really have?

Young women (Image source: Canva)

A new report from Monash University academics looks critically into the common catch cry ‘women can do anything they choose’. 

Monash Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice (CYPEP) has released this report entitled Young Women Choosing Careers: Who Decides? to mark International Youth Day 2022 (Friday August 12).

The researchers have tried to answer how much choice do young Australian women really have? Further, the researchers look into the key idea or personality that shapes their choices?

Representative image (Source: Canva)

In their study, the authors found that young women:

  • Prefer tertiary education pathways that lead to traditional professional careers
  • Imagine only a narrow range of possible selves, which represents real risks for eventual realisation given current employment market realities
  • Feel constrained in their career choices and lack confidence about realising their possible selves given ‘who they are or where they come from’
  • Lack career direction and knowledge about what careers best suit them, despite thei imaginations of possible selves
  • Feel a high degree of career stress, triggered by career uncertainty, indecision, worries about job availability, and perceptions of constrained career choices
  • Rely on others (family, peers, school communities) to help make career decisions and craft their possible selves
  • Worry about others’ approval of their career choices and possible selves

This study is focused on young women in their final years of schooling and their post-school study and
career aspirations. The researchers note in their paper:

“The data presented provides a window into young women’s experiences when choosing their career destinations in school, and how their transitions to post-school life are enmeshed in long-term social, political and economic change.”

Researchers point out that the study draws on the responses of more than 1,300 young women who were students in Years 10–12 (the final years of compulsory schooling in Australia) in 2018 at four schools in Victoria. The researchers add:

“It reveals the complexities involved in how young women develop and navigate their possible career selves. It also highlights the diverse career-related emotions, beliefs and experiences they have as they do this.”

Representative image (Source: Canva)

Other key findings of the report include:

  • A third of young women were highly stressed about choosing the right career
  • One in five young women were overwhelmed by the career information and choices they face. 
  • Two in five young women said they had no career direction. 
  • 39% of young women were concerned about ever achieving a real career. 
  • Nearly 40% of young women were worried that their studies will not lead to a “real” career. 
  • Around a third of young women felt unemployable. 
  • Over a third of young women who had chosen a career were still anxious about their future careers.
Representative image (Source: Canva)

In their conclusion, the researchers observe that “the results of this survey are complex and dense.”

“The results suggest a multiplicity of forces and factors shaping the development of our young women’s possible selves. It is worth reflecting on just a handful of them and the implications for those engaged in youth policy and education practice. Many careers educators throughout Australia work in a dynamic and rapidly changing environment shaped by wider forces, such as the changing labour market.”

The researchers suggest that to make Australia’s changing landscape more visible to students and families, better ways of informing parents and carers should be developed with the help of policy-makers, government departments, and other stakeholders.

Monash Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice (CYPEP) team (Image: CYPEP website)

The authors of this study are Dr Joanne Gleeson, Professor Lucas Walsh, Dr Beatriz Gallo Cordoba, Dr Masha Mikola, Dr Catherine Waite, and Blake Cutler from CYPEP which is a multi-disciplinary research centre that undertakes research into the social, political, and economic factors that affect young people’s lives.

Manpreet Singh Brar will be deported to India after 20 months in prison for causing death of 51-year-old man

Ian Seibel and Manpreet Singh Brar ; Image Source: Courier mail
Ian Seibel and Manpreet Singh Brar ; Image Source: Courier mail

The family of 51-year-old Ian Seibel who was killed after being hit by Manpreet Singh Brar, then 33-year-old, in Brisbane have questioned the punishment handed by the court.

Ian Seibel’s son Aaron Seibel told media outside the court that the family was disappointed by the judgment. He added:

“I can’t put it into words how disappointed I am. A man’s life is worth 20 months — it’s ridiculous.”

Manpreet Singh Brar was sentenced to five years in jail on a suspended sentence of 20 months; Image Source: Courier Mail
Manpreet Singh Brar was sentenced to five years in jail on a suspended sentence of 20 months; Image Source: Courier Mail

As per reports, Manpreet Singh Brar pleaded guilty in the District Court “to one count each of dangerous operation of a vehicle causing death and driving without a licence.”

The court of Judge Katherine McGinness was told that Manpreet Singh Brar is an Indian national residing in Australia on a partner visa. He had been driving unlicensed since 2016 and continued to do so after the crash which was a significant breach of his bail conditions.

Further, the court was told that Manpreet Singh Brar has a traffic history dating back several years which included multiple counts of speeding. In 2021, after the accident, Manpreet Singh Brar was pulled over while driving. The police said that Manpreet Singh Brar claimed to be doing food deliveries and at first gave a false name and then said he did not know his licence was suspended.

Ian Seibel's wife said she is devastated by the sentencing; Image Source: 9News
Ian Seibel’s wife said she is devastated by the sentencing; Image Source: 9News

Crown prosecutor Chris Cook told the court tests also determined Brar had a low level of cocaine and a high level of cough medicine in his system. Although, the Crown prosecutor Cook didn’t allege that Manpreet Singh Brar was adversely affected by the drugs at the time. He said:

“He was fatigued having used those drugs earlier. He shouldn’t have been on the road that day.”

The court was told that Ian Seibel was crossing an intersection in Kallangur with his wife, Paula, and their dog in November 2020, when they were hit by Manpreet Singh Brar’s car which was being driven 25km/h over the speed limit (travelling at 85km/h in a 60km/h zone).

The court saw dashcam footage that showed Manpreet Singh Brar speeding through a red light, colliding into the side of another vehicle that moved into the intersection after the light turned green and finally slamming into the couple.

While Ian Seibel sustained extensive head injuries and died in hospital several days later, Maria Garcia who was driving the second car was critically injured. The court was told that she too “likely would have died” without surgery.

Manpreet Singh Brar was sentenced to five years in jail on a suspended sentence of 20 months; Image Source: Courier Mail
Manpreet Singh Brar was sentenced to five years in jail on a suspended sentence of 20 months; Image Source: Courier Mail

Crown prosecutor Cook told the court that Ian Seibel was a “much loved” husband, father, son, and friend. He added:

“Mr Brar has caused his unnecessary and untimely death through his actions that day.”

Paula Seibel in a statement provided to the court described Ian Seibel as her “best friend” and “better half.” She said:

“I feel like I am less than a whole person now that I don’t have him by my side. I am beyond angry that I have not had the opportunity to spend the rest of my life with this kind, loving, gentle giant.”

The couple had been planning a special trip to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. Paula Seibel urged the judge to apply the maximum penalty to Manpreet Singh Brar. She pleaded:

“I hope that my voice will not go unacknowledged and that lan will not be victimised once again. Our society is crying out for harsher penalties… Where is the incentive to stop committing crimes when a mere slap on the wrist is the only punishment received?”

Judge Katherine McGinness acknowledged the “enduring heartache” Ian Seibel’s family would suffer but said there were sentencing considerations she had to make under Queensland legislation. She said:

“”No sentence I impose can turn back time or can alleviate in any way the profound pain and enduring heartache that Ms Seibel or Ms Garcia or family and friends will continue to suffer.”

Judge McGinness, keeping into account the guilty plea, sentenced Brar to five years in prison wholly suspended after 20 months.

Since Manpreet Singh Brar is not an Australian citizen, he would be deported to India upon his release from prison thus leaving behind his wife and two children.

40 Iconic Australian monuments to be illuminated in tricolour on Indian Independence day, Here’s list

Iconic monuments to be illuminated in Indian Tricolour; Image Source: @CANVA
Iconic monuments to be illuminated in Indian Tricolour; Image Source: @CANVA

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade this year is leveraging India’s 75th anniversary of independence on 15 August 2022 to promote the growing importance of the bilateral relationship with Australia, and the significant contributions of the Indian diaspora community to raising ‘India literacy’ in Australia.

In partnership with the India High Commission, the Department has arranged the illumination on the evening of 15 August 2022 of some 40 national monuments in the India tricolour.

VenueStateOrganisation
Telstra TowerACTTelstra
QuestaconACTQuestacon
Questacon (Parkes) ACTQuestacon
Canberra Times FountainACTACT Government
Malcolm Fraser Bridge (near CBR Airport) ACTACT Government
Light RailACTACT Government
National CarillonACTNCA
Old Parliament HouseACTNCA
John Gorton BuildingACTNCA
Treasury BuildingACTNCA
National Film and Sound Archive of AustraliaACTNFSA
National Museum of AustraliaACTNMA
Shine DomeACTAcademy of Science ANU
Sydney Opera HouseNSWSydney Opera House
The GabbaQLDThe Gabba
Brisbane City HallQLDBrisbane City Council
Sandgate Town HallQLDBrisbane City Council
Story BridgeQLDBrisbane City Council
Victoria BridgeQLDBrisbane City Council
Reddacliff PlaceQLDBrisbane City Council
Breakfast Creek BridgeQLDBrisbane City Council
Wickham Terrace WallQLDBrisbane City Council
Adelaide Convention Centre, AdelaideSAAVMC
Adelaide Oval, North AdelaideSAAdelaide Oval
Rose Garden BridgeTASCity of Hobart
Doone Kennedy Hobart Aquatic CentreTASCity of Hobart
CardinalTASCity of Hobart
Franklin SquareTASCity of Hobart
Elizabeth MallTASCity of Hobart
Melbourne Cricket GroundVICMCG
Royal Exhibition Building (from 9:30 pm)VICMuseums Victoria
Bolte Bridge, DocklandsVICTransurban
Old Treasury BuildingVICState Government
Rod Laver Arena VICMOPT
Trafalgar BridgeWACity of Perth
Council HouseWACity of Perth
Bell Tower PerthWABell Tower
Elizabeth Quay, Perth (14 August)WACBRE
Yagan Square, Perth (14 August)WACBRE
Optus StadiumWAVenues Live
TBCNTTBC

Indian High Commission says, “We encourage stakeholders to help promote these illuminations under the hashtag #IndiaAt75.

In previous years Adelaide-based Indian diaspora organisations and members got some buildings illuminated in tricolour.

Australia’s top university in court for alleged adverse action against casual academics 

Teacher (Image source: Canva)

Australia’s workplace relations watchdog, the Fair Work Ombudsman, has commenced legal action against the University of Melbourne for allegedly coercing and taking adverse action against two casual academics.

According to a statement released by Fair Work Ombudsman, the University of Melbourne allegedly tried to stop the two casual academics “from claiming payment for work performed.”

Under the Fair Work Act, it is unlawful for an employer to take adverse action against a person because a person exercises a workplace right or to prevent them from doing so. It is also unlawful for a person to take or threaten to take any action against another person with the intent to coerce them to not exercise a workplace right.

In documents filed in Australia’s Federal Court, Fair Work has alleged that the University of Melbourne took adverse action against one of the academics when it decided not to offer her any further teaching work. This was done after the said academic claimed payment for extra work and made a number of complaints or inquiries to the University of Melbourne.

In its statement, Fair Work further alleges that the University of Melbourne also threatened not to re-employ the two academics with their supervisor allegedly saying: “if you claim outside your contracted hours, don’t expect work next year”. This was done, Fair Work claims, with the intent to coerce both academics to “not exercise their workplace right to claim payment for the extra work.”

Fair Work Ombudsman Sandra Parker (Fairwork)

Fair Work Ombudsman Sandra Parker said the University of Melbourne’s alleged conduct impacted on fundamental employee rights, and commencing legal action to seek penalties was in the public interest. Ms Parker adds:

“We treat allegations of employers taking action to stop or prevent employees from claiming their lawful entitlements very seriously. Adverse action and coercion directly undermine workplace laws and the ability of employees to exercise their lawful rights.”

Both the academics were engaged on contracts by the University of Melbourne which set out the number of “anticipated hours” per subject. Fair Work alleges that the threat was made because the academics complained about being required to work more hours than the anticipated hours in their contracts.

The legal action comes after the Fair Work Ombudsman announced in June that addressing significant non-compliance issues in the university sector had become one of its top compliance and enforcement priorities. Ms Parker said:

“We are currently investigating a range of underpayment issues in the universities sector, including failures to pay casual academics for all hours worked.”

The Fair Work Ombudsman is conducting a separate investigation into the alleged underpayment of University of Melbourne casual academic employees. That investigation is ongoing.

At the time the alleged adverse action and coercion breaches occurred, the University of Melbourne had employed the two affected academics on a series of short-term casual teaching contracts – since at least 2016 and 2017, respectively – in its Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

The Fair Work Ombudsman alleges the first adverse action breach and coercion occurred when the academics’ supervisor allegedly threatened not to re-employ them during a Zoom video conference meeting in August 2020.

The Fair Work Ombudsman alleges the second adverse action breach occurred in or around February 2021 when the supervisor decided not to offer one of the two academics any further casual teaching contracts.

It is alleged that the decision was made after the academic asked to be paid for several hours of work she had performed that exceeded the “anticipated hours” in her contract for Summer Semester 2021, and following a number of complaints and inquiries made by the employee to the University since July 2020.

It is alleged that the University of Melbourne has subsequently not offered that academic any further teaching work. However, the University continues to employ the other academic in its Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

Ms Parker said:

“Employers should have proactive measures in place to ensure they are meeting workplace laws. If employers become aware of concerns their employees may be being underpaid, the only appropriate response is to check that they are paying their employees correctly and promptly rectify any compliance issues discovered.”

Provost Nicola Phillips (the University of Melbourne)

In June 2022, the University of Melbourne Provost Nicola Phillips in an interview with ABC’s 7.30 program apologised for underpayment and also announced a shift in University’s reliance on casual staff in response to the scandal. 
She said:

“We’re dismayed that it’s happened … In this case, we have not done the right thing. And we are working really hard to put it right.” 

In the program, Prof. Phillips acknowledged that the casual staffing model was partly to blame for the widespread underpayment at the institution.
She observed:

‘”We’ve identified that this kind of model is not one that serves the university well, and it’s not one that serves our employees well, and we’re determined that for the future, we’re going to rethink this model, reduce our reliance on casual staff and make sure that we put in place something that is more sustainable for the future.”

NTEU Victorian Division Assistant Secretary Sarah Roberts (Twitter)

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has been calling for a reduction in the reliance on casual staff at Australian universities. NTEU has pointed out the problem of underpayment of casual academic staff at several universities and also lodged disputes.
In a tweet, NTEU Victorian Division Assistant Secretary Sarah Roberts said:

“What will it take for unis to take pro-active steps to fix insecure work and wage theft? Apologies won’t cut it, they speak of deep hubris when prosecutions like this can happen. Fix up this mess now, backpay casuals with super and interest & make sure it never happens again.” 

In the present dispute, the Fair Work Ombudsman is seeking penalties against the University of Melbourne for the alleged contraventions of the Fair Work Act. The maximum penalty per breach is $66,600. In addition to penalties, the regulator is also seeking a court order for the University to pay compensation to the two academics for losses arising from the contraventions. A date for directions hearing in the Federal Court in Melbourne has yet to be listed.

Clean energy company LGI looking to raise $25million in IPO under Indian-Australian Chair Vik Bansal

Vik Bansal (Image source: Linkedin)

Queensland-based waste-to-energy company LGI is looking to raise about $25 million in investments with its Initial Public Offering (IPO).

LGI’s core businesses include installing power generation systems on landfill sites and selling power into the national electricity market, and operating biogas extraction systems under contracts.

It operates at the convergence of the waste and clean energy industries. It also collaborates with landfill owners to help solve the methane emission problem where we operate.

Image Source: LGI Instagram

Founded by Adam Bloomer, LGI aims to provide biogas solutions to landfill sites in regional Australia. The company is chaired by Indian-Australian Vik Bansal who was the CEO of Cleanaway (2015-2021) and is presently CEO and Executive Director of InfraBuild. Under Bansal, an electrical engineer with an MBA, LGI recorded $15.2 million in revenue and $6.6 million EBITDA in the financial year 2021. During Bansal’s tenure, Cleanaway’s shares had risen 300 per cent but they slumped 8.5 per cent on the news of his departure amidst controversy in 2021.

Image Source: LGI Instagram

As per reports in AFR, LGI is meeting with Sydney and Melbourne-based fund managers for its IPO. $18 million from the $25 million investments raised will go towards financing new projects. Further, the deal’s expected to value LGI at $130 million on a market capitalisation basis.

At present, LGI has around 30 projects across Queensland, New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory. With the new investment, LGI plans to build more including at Toowoomba (Qld) and Nowra (NSW).

Image Source: LGI Instagram

As per the company, in the last three years, LGI has grown its return on invested capital by up to 20% per annum. LGI tried to list earlier this year but postponed it due to Australian market conditions. It is now looking forward to launching a prospectus formally outlining the deal early next week.

Felt anguished with ‘jugaad’ and nepotism in Bollywood: Yashpal Sharma

Actor and Director Yashpal Sharma (Image source: CANVA)
Actor and Director Yashpal Sharma (Image source: CANVA)

Yashpal Sharma is a well known Indian film actor and theatre artist. He has acted in many movies including Lagaan, Gangaajal, Ab Tak Chappan, Apaharan and Rowdy Rathore among several others. He was nominated for both Filmfare and IIFA Awards for his role in Gangaajal.

Yashpal Sharma graduated from the National School of Drama in 1994. He got his first big break in 1998 with Govind Nihalani’s Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa. Thereafter he acted in movies like Shool and Arjun Pandit but it was his role in Lagaan (2001), where he played the character of ‘Lakha’, which is still etched in our memories. The year 2003 was also a remarkable year for Yashpal Sharma with stellar performances in Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi and Gangaajal after which there was no looking back for him.

Yashpal Sharma recently made his directorial debut with the movie Dada Lakhmi. The film is a biopic based on the life of Haryanvi poet Dada Lakhmi Chand. The film won India’s prestigious National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Haryanvi.

In a candid interview with The Australia Today, Yashpal Sharma noted that he wanted to make a film which was different from run of the mill stories and faced many challenges, but in the end it was worth it. Catch his full interview here:

Yashpal Sharma has also acted in TV serials like ‘Neeli Chatri Waale’. Besides acting, he plans to direct more movies in the years to come.

Three lessons Olivia Newton-John taught me about music – and life

Australian Actor Olivia Newton-John; Image Source: Twitter
Australian Actor Olivia Newton-John; Image Source: Twitter

John Encarnacao, Western Sydney University

My default mental image of Olivia Newton-John is from the mid-1970s: long, flowing floral dresses; long, centre-parted light brown hair; big inquisitive eyes; and, when called for, an irresistible smile perfect for the cover of TV Week.

It seemed like the counterculture had passed her by.

But even in the heights of my hippie and punk-inspired (imagined, toothless) rejections of society and a perceived mainstream, I respected Olivia, a figure so ubiquitous in popular culture during my first 20 years on the planet feels natural to call her by her first name.

There was something about her voice, her way with a song. Through her phrasing and timbre, there was always a personal appeal to her singing.

Like heatstroke in December through February, Olivia was part of the Australian landscape. The country felt a little less hostile for her being in it – or beamed into it from the northern hemisphere, while we claimed her as “ours”.

Image
Australian Actor Olivia Newton-John; Image Source: Twitter

There was a big sister who understood and sympathised.

1. What she taught me about murder

Despite all this, Olivia did contribute to a specific loss of innocence.

Some of us are unlucky enough to encounter death personally as children; for the rest, it will be a song or a TV show, a passing remark or a news item.

Image
Australian Actor Olivia Newton-John; Image Source: Twitter @NancySinatra

Newton-John’s recording of the folk ballad Banks of Ohio was released in 1971. It concerns the protagonist luring their loved ones down to the river to stab them through the heart.

I held a knife against his breast
As into my arms he pressed
He cried: My love! Don’t you murder me
I’m not prepared for eternity.

I can’t think of earlier exposure to the idea of death, let alone murder. I associate it with the tinny sound of a portable AM radio. I have the honeyed tones of ONJ forever linked to the visceral realisation one human being could wilfully kill another.

Heavy metal and hip hop are the traditional punching bags of parents worried about harmful content. But people let their guards down around ONJ.

Image
Australian Actor Olivia Newton-John; Image Source: Twitter @DanAndrews

2. What she taught me through a cover band

Shaggin’ Wagon, a cover band of mine instigated around 1993, did what it said on the label: rocked the hell out of songs from the 1970s.

We combined relatively obscure minor chart hits – say, Silver Lady by David Soul, or Ebony Eyes by Bob Welch – with what we thought of as a classic lineage of power pop by the likes of Big Star, The Soft Boys, The dB’s, The Sweet and Abba.

There was always a smattering of hard rock – Kiss, Alice Cooper – and Australian artists like The Numbers, Models and Dragon. Though the repertoire was always changing, there were a few big crowd pleasers to bring the house down.

One of mine, as a part-time singer, was Hopelessly Devoted to You. What started as half a joke I took to with gusto. It is a great song, with a great key change from A major in the verses to F major in the chorus via a devastating G minor chord. https://www.youtube.com/embed/i52mlmJtyJQ

“There’s nowhere to hide”, wallows the protagonist on that pitiful chord, harmonically so removed from the plaintive longing of comfortable A major we’ve swooned through thus far.

I started to search for other Olivia songs. I picked up a 45 of A Little More Love and realised it was a kind of masterpiece; like Hopelessly it was composed by longtime Newton-John collaborator John Farrar.

It is another beautifully structured song, somewhat labyrinthine. Even now I find it a thrill to play the guitar. https://www.youtube.com/embed/4RFK8Ft-GNQ

Despite my party trick of (usually) being able to hit the high F at the end of Hopelessly, sustaining the upper octave required for the choruses of A Little More Love was beyond me.

The attempt further educated me about the technical demands Olivia shrugged off. The range is so wide that no matter how I transposed it, I could not pull off both low verses and high choruses.

I already knew she was good – and I’d never claim to be anywhere near ONJ’s league – but this was further proof being learned by my body.

Image
Australian Actor Olivia Newton-John; Image Source: Twitter

3. What she taught me about the girl-next-door

Olivia wasn’t entirely convinced about Physical. She loved the song but wondered: could she get away with it?

Tired of the flirtation and game-playing, the protagonist wants to get down to it: “There’s nothin’ left to talk about unless it’s horizontally”.

The record was banned in Utah and South Africa due to its explicit content (!). The video further fanned the flames, with its closing “gay scene” (two guys leaving the gym holding hands). https://www.youtube.com/embed/vWz9VN40nCA

Every bit of controversy just further hyped what was a superlative pop record. Physical topped the US charts for 10 weeks in 1981 and was one of the biggest songs of the decade. And if Physical wasn’t enough, the follow-up single was Make a Move On Me.

Flowers and photos of Olivia Newton-John on her Walk of Fame star.
Australian Actor Olivia Newton-John; Image Source: Twitter

You’d be forgiven for sensing a theme.

Physical, the album, is about more than a seasoned pop star trying on a slightly more risqué persona. None of the six images of Newton-John on the cover features her looking at the camera, or even with her eyes open.

She does not challenge the camera or voyeur with her direct gaze, and so may be seen to be offering herself as an object to be consumed; the assumption along this line of reasoning is she avails herself of the male gaze.

I find it more compelling to consider her loss in her body. The viewer, the whole world outside her physical sensation, is irrelevant. https://www.youtube.com/embed/n0JaFvjj_oo

Despite the fact the music remains eminently accessible, she is not looking to her audience for approval.

Physical is the definitive statement of independence – from country music radio, from her pre-1978 image as girl-next-door, from a certain level of conservatism in her audience.

She even cut her hair.

John Encarnacao, Musician, lecturer, Western Sydney University

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

Commonwealth Games 2022 officially declared closed; flag passed on to Australia for 2026

Commonwealth Games 2022; Image Source: Twitter @Birmingham 2022
Commonwealth Games 2022; Image Source: Twitter @Birmingham 2022

The Commonwealth Games 2022 came to an end with a stunning closing ceremony at the Alexander Stadium in Birmingham on Monday.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, declared the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games over.

The Commonwealth Games flag was presented to the Governor of Victoria Linda Dessau. The state of Victoria, Australia will be the next host of the Commonwealth Games in 2026.

The Flag Handover Ceremony signified the official handover of the Commonwealth Games from Birmingham to Victoria, which will be the first multi-city Commonwealth Games in Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo and Gippsland.

Australia’s First Nations people were recognised after the Commonwealth Games flag was handed over to Victorian governor Linda Dessau.

Elders of the lands the Games will be held on: Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung (Melbourne), Wadawurrung (Geelong and Ballarat), Dja Dja Wurrung (Bendigo) and Gunaikurnai (Gippsland), performed a smoking ceremony.

The elders also presented carved message sticks, which represent an invitation to walk on the Country in 2026, to Commonwealth Games Federation president, Dame Louise Martin DBE.

Birmingham 2022 has been the biggest Commonwealth Games ever – with more sporting events than ever before. More than 5,000 athletes have competed over the past 11 days.

Australia topped the table with 178 medals (67 gold, 57 silver, 54 bronze), while hosts England finished the campaign in the second spot with 175 medals (56 gold, 65 silver, 53 bronze).

India finished 4th in the medal tally with 22 Gold, 15 Silver and 23 Bronze medals and with a total of 61 medals.

Apache Indian performed ‘Boom Shack-A-Lak’, a song that had featured heavily on playlists at various venues across the Games.

The Australians entered the arena as reggae group Musical Youth played ‘Pass the Dutchie’, a song which recently catapulted back into prominence via an appearance on the hit show ‘Stranger Things’.

Commonwealth Games 2022; Image Source: Twitter @Birmingham 2022
Commonwealth Games 2022; Image Source: Twitter @Birmingham 2022

Diving stalwart Melissa Wu was Australia’s flagbearer and walked out with the other flagbearers as her compatriots entered the stadium in another group.

But the loudest roars were saved for when Panjabi MC played the bhangra classic ‘Mundian To Bach Ke’.

Gold medal-winning Table tennis player Achanta Sharath Kamal and boxer Nikhat Zareen led the Indian contingent as the Commonwealth Games 2022 closing ceremony was held in Alexander stadium in Birmingham.

Indian women’s cricket and Hockey teams both lost finals to Australia to settle for silver while Australians flaunted their gold medals with some controversy around both matches.

Image

Are migrant and refugee women more likely to face sexual harassment at work?

Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)
Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)

In Australia’s first groundbreaking study views and perspectives of women from migrant and refugee backgrounds are being sought to capture their experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Researchers from Monash University have partnered with Harmony Alliance which is the National Women’s Alliance representing migrant and refugee women to conduct this national study funded by ANROWS.

Experts note said past national studies on workplace sexual harassment had not explored migrant and refugee women’s experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace in detail.

According to the project statement, the new study will “build on the knowledge that migrant and refugee women are more likely to be in precarious employment i.e. non-permanent, casualised, or contract labour.”

Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)
Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)

Other factors such as limited English proficiency, non-permanent visa status, race-based bias and discrimination, and disparate cultural expectations can also contribute to the likelihood of experiencing work-based sexual harassment.

Associate Professor Marie Segrave (Monash University)

Lead researcher Associate Professor Marie Segrave from the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre said:

“Migrant and refugee women remain largely overshadowed in major national studies and national commitments to ending sexual harassment in the workplace.” 

Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)
Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)

Results from the study will aim to build a national picture of the experiences of a diverse group of migrant and refugee women with the view of informing more targeted engagement with women and workplaces regarding unacceptable workplace behaviour.

Nyadol Nyuon OAM (Facebook)

Nyadol Nyuon OAM, Chair of Harmony Alliance says it is important to carry out such studies. She adds:

“It’s so important that we now understand the experiences of migrant and refugee women who we know are at a higher risk of sexual harassment at work so that we can develop the systemic and cultural responses that are needed to ensure their safety.”

Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)
Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)

Further, Ms Nyuon is hopeful that this study will help highlight stories of workplace sexual harassment. She adds:

“We can work together to ensure women in Australia, from all backgrounds, are protected from sexual harassment in the workplace. That’s why this first ever research into migrant and refugee women’s experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace is so important and why we are asking women all over Australia to share their stories.”

Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)
Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)

It is hoped that the new study will provide governments, employers, and industry groups with the evidence they need to support migrant and refugee women in Australian workplaces. Assoc. Prof. Segrave adds:

“We’re hoping to lay the groundwork for developing more informed and responsive systems that are attuned to the social and systemic factors that influence how women negotiate and respond to experiences of sexual harassment as bystanders and/or targets.”

The views and responses collected in this study will be used to guide training and education needs and to identify service gaps in the current system.

Padma Raman PSM (ANROWS)

Padma Raman PSM, CEO of ANROWS said:

“We know these groups of women experience high levels of sexual harassment, and this research will help us develop more effective and culturally safe strategies to prevent and respond to it.”

Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)
Representative Sexual Harassment picture (Image source: Canva)

As per the latest Census data released by ABS, almost half of the adult population in Australia are overseas-born citizens, permanent residents, and temporary visa holders.

Source: ABS 2021.

This new project has been funded as part of the Australian Government’s response to the Respect@Work report. The project involves an online survey, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions. These would be conducted with key women leaders and diverse groups of women across different levels of English language proficiency, citizenship or visa status, employment status, and work settings.

Australian universities to conduct largest study on employment outcome of nursing graduates

Nursing (Image source: Canva)

Six Australian universities have joined hands to conduct the largest study of employment outcomes for nursing and allied health graduates.

The study, which first began in 2017 as a partnership between Monash University and the University of Newcastle, now brings together a national collaboration of Deakin University, the University of Newcastle, Monash University, The University of Queensland, University of Southern Queensland, and University of South Australia.

According to a statement, the Nursing and Allied Health Graduate Outcome Tracking (NAHGOT) study will follow thousands of nurses and allied health professionals for ten years post-graduation. This will give NAHGOT researchers the most comprehensive picture of Australian workplace trends in the nursing and allied healthcare sectors.

“It is particularly focused on the factors that influence the choice of work location and what changes are needed to solve the ongoing problem of nurse and allied health professional shortages in regional, rural and remote areas.”

Dr Keith Sutton from Monash Rural Health (Monash University)

Dr Keith Sutton from Monash Rural Health said the NAHGOT study would contribute to the broader health workforce.

“We expect as the project matures the insights will become a major contributor to workforce planning and augment established efforts in medicine. We’ve established a framework that allows for future expansion of the NAHGOT study to include other institutions.”

The six universities expect to add more than 7,000 students to the study each year, with the intention of tracking graduate outcomes for 10 years post-registration.

This will be done primarily by linking practice location data from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency with university administrative records. It will also be complemented by the national Student Experience Survey and Graduate Outcomes Survey.

Professor Vin Versace, Director of Deakin Rural Health (Deakin University)

Professor Vin Versace, Director of Deakin Rural Health and inaugural Chair of the NAHGOT Steering Committee, said in a statement that universities are the logical choice to undertake tracking of graduate outcomes at scale. Professor Versace said:

“Unlike other data custodians, universities hold admission and professional placement data not available elsewhere – this is key to understanding the type of graduate that is most likely to live and work in a rural location once they complete their training.”

Dr Martin Jones from the University of South Australia (UniSA)

Dr Martin Jones from the University of South Australia said that in Australia, and other countries, evaluations of rural health workforce programs aimed at increasing the numbers of nursing and allied health care professionals have been over short periods and not completed at scale.

Associate Professor Geoff Argus (Southern Queensland Rural Health)

Southern Queensland Rural Health’s (SQRH) Associate Professor Geoff Argus said NAHGOT was the only large-scale study of its kind focusing on Australian nursing, midwifery, and allied health graduates and the factors that lead to rural practice.

Associate Professor Leanne Brown from the University of Newcastle

Associate Professor Leanne Brown from the University of Newcastle Department of Rural Health said that universities are “also keen to understand how our rural programs may influence students to return to rural and rural practice both in the short and longer term.”

University of Southern Queensland public health researcher and Senior Associate Dean (Academic Transformation) Professor Marion Gray said universities played an important role in contributing to the wellbeing of health services in regional and remote Australia.

“Health services are the lifeblood of regional and remote Australia and through the NAHGOT project we hope to continue to support this essential work.”

Professor Ruth Stewart (National Rural Health Commissioner)

National Rural Health Commissioner Professor Ruth Stewart said she was excited to see the development of the plan to track Nursing and Allied Health Graduate Outcomes.

“When we have a better understanding of these things, we can tailor our programs to ensure that we are training the health workforce that our communities need.”

All NAHGOT participating universities are funded by the Rural Health Multidisciplinary Training (RHMT) program, with the study design reflecting the objectives of the Commonwealth Department of Health.

NSW promoting edtech, medtech, fintech, and space tech collaboration with India

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet and the Minister for Enterprise, Investment and Trade Stuart Ayres with representatives of Bengaluru technology companies (Twitter)

New South Wales (NSW) Premier Dominic Perrottet and the Minister for Enterprise, Investment and Trade Stuart Ayres recently met with Indian tech companies in Bengaluru, Karnataka, which is India’s largest startup ecosystem, with around 5,000 startups.

This meeting was to promote collaboration between the state of NSW and India to encourage business partnerships.

New South Wales (NSW) Premier Dominic Perrottet opening a trade office n Mumbai (Twitter)

NSW Premier Perrottet said in a statement that his state is working to attract Indian technology investment across various subsectors such as edtech, MedTech, fintech, and space technologies. Mr Perrottet added:

“We are focused on linking the NSW and Indian technology ecosystems and through the expansion of our international network and programs we are providing better support for NSW exporters to reach their target markets and help open more doors. Through these networks we have helped facilitate four new tech partnerships between NSW and Indian firms. I’d like to congratulate these businesses and welcome more like these.”

While Medtech is a leading sector in NSW contributing $2 billion to our state’s economy, it is Quantum computing that is a fast emerging sector in NSW. Experts believe that by 2040 Australia will potentially have 16,000 quantum jobs generating $4 billion in revenue.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet with Chief Minister B S Bommai (Twitter)

Currently, the two-way trade between India and NSW has now reached $4.6bn. To further assist NSW businesses seeking trade and investment opportunities in the Indian market, NSW has opened its NSW office in Mumbai.

The four new tech partnerships between NSW and India are as follows:

  • HCL Technologies has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Sydney Quantum Academy o strengthen HCL’s Quantum computing capabilities through education and development opportunities including internships for Australia-based students from Sydney Quantum Academy member universities. 
  • Cicada Innovations and Mach33.aero have signed a collaboration agreement to provide launch pad support to startups and medium-sized enterprises.
  • Birth Beat has formed a partnership agreement with Cloudnine hospitals to promote its online maternity training programs in India.
  • SkinDNA has entered a three-month trial program with Kosmoderma Healthcare Private Limited.
Minister for Enterprise, Investment and Trade Stuart Ayres with a representative of tech company (Twitter)

In relation to the business meeting and MoUs with Indian technology companies, Minister for Enterprise, Investment and Trade Stuart Ayres said that such events “provide an opportunity to showcase NSW technology capabilities to potential partners and investors.”

Mr Ayres said Sydney is Australia’s technology hub and a thriving technology sector with innovative precincts like Tech Central and our Startup and Scaleup Hubs making our state even more attractive to companies looking to grow in the Asia-Pacific region,”

“Being on the ground in India has given us the opportunity to discuss with Indian businesses the growing opportunities available and see firsthand the important role our Going Global Export Program and international offices play in bringing business and partners together.”

Bengaluru, the epicentre of India’s IT-enabled services, is the world’s fourth largest tech cluster and has 40 per cent of all startup venture capital in India.

COVID-positive Australian cricketer plays CWG22 final against India; netizens point out hypocrisy

Tahlia McGrath (Image source: Australian Women's Cricket Team - Twitter)

Australia’s all-rounder Tahlia McGrath played the final against India in the Commonwealth Games 2022 despite testing positive for Covid-19 at the Edgbaston Stadium in Birmingham on Sunday.

Tahlia did not line up during the national anthem and could be seen sitting alone in the stands wearing a face mask. However, despite testing positive for COVID19, Tahlia came into bat at No. 4 without a mask on.

Well-known writer and economist Sanjeev Sanyal called out the hypocrisy of Australian cricket team in a tweet: “Now imagine that this was an Indian athlete…”

Karishma Singh, an Indian sports journalist, also pointed out how tennis legend Novak Djokovic was deported and not allowed to play in the Australian Open for being unvaccinated. She tweeted: “When it came to one of their own – it was okay to let her play with covid?”

In a statement, Commonwealth Games Australia said that they had consulted with tournament experts and match officials before permitting Tahlia to take part in the match against India. The statement adds:

“McGrath presented to team management with mild symptoms on Sunday and subsequently returned the positive test. She was named in the starting XI at the toss and the International Cricket Council (ICC) approved her participation in the final. Cricket Australia medical staff have implemented a range of comprehensive protocols which will be observed throughout the game and for post-match activity, to minimise the risk of transmission to all players and officials.”

This is the first known instance in international cricket when a COVID-19 positive player has taken part in a match.

Australian Women’s Cricket Team at CWG22 (Image source: Australian Women’s Cricket Team – Twitter)

Abhishek Mukherjee, the Head of Content Wisden India, was quick to point out in a tweet that other teams may follow suit and make COVID-19 positive players go out and play in the field.

As per rules, the participation of COVID-positive players across all sports at the CWG22 would be assessed on a case-by-case basis and multiple factors.

Tahlia took a catch dismissing India opener Shafali Verma, but couldn’t celebrate with her teammates.

Tahlia scored two runs off four balls before being dismissed to a Radha Yadav diving screamer at backward point.

Australia won the match while the Indian women’s cricket team was able to create history with their maiden silver medal.


Chasing the target of 162 for the gold medal, the Indian team was bowled out for 152.

After initially following social distancing, during the victory celebration, Tahlia was welcomed with open arms and warm hugs by her teammates. 

Brief score: Australia 161/8 (Beth Mooney 61, Meg Lanning 36; Renuka Singh 2-25) vs India 152 (Harmanpreet Kaur 65, Jemimah Rodrigues 33; Ashleigh Gardner 3-16).

The nightmare of housing wait lists for people fleeing domestic violence

Domestic violence (Canva)

By Alan Morris, Catherine Robinson, and Jan Idle

People who flee domestic violence desperately need safe, affordable and secure housing. Our study of people on housing waiting lists in New South Wales, Tasmania and Queensland found private rental housing isn’t an option when leaving domestic violence.

Besides the cost, most people fleeing domestic violence aren’t able to provide rental histories and credit ratings. That makes it very difficult to be accepted as a tenant.

The obvious solution is social housing – affordable rental housing provided by government or not-for-profit agencies. However, our interviews with people who fled their homes because of domestic violence revealed they had great difficulty accessing social housing.

Their marginal housing status or homelessness then contributed to some interviewees’ children being taken away. Knowing this risk, others asked extended family to care for their children until they found a secure home.

The agony of years of waiting

Susan* has two kids under seven. Two years after escaping a violent relationship, she’s still waiting for social housing.

We run from 20 years of domestic violence and we went to a women’s shelter […] and was put on high priority. And then we were there for nearly a year and then they got cranky with me going to [Department of] Housing. Yeah, I went every day, twice a day, sometimes for a whole year. And then they gave me transitional housing and they said we’ll be there for four months. It’s nearly been a year.

She was terrified every time she went outside:

I said to them, “You don’t get us out […] he’ll shoot us. We’ll be the next ones on the news.”

After fleeing a violent partner, Theresa and her six-year-old son were moving between friends and her uncle. She had been on the NSW housing register (waiting list) since her son was born.

Because her initial application was apparently missing some documentation (applications can be challenging) Theresa was not on the priority list. People on the general waiting list can wait many years to be housed.

Theresa finally got onto the priority list in 2020. But she is still waiting.

Theresa was approved for the NSW RentStart program, which supports people in the private rental market. However, our interviewees told us it was nearly impossible to find a property and be approved by the landlord or agent. As Theresa said:

I had no success with [RentStart] at all […] I think it’s almost impossible […] There’s just nothing out here like housing-wise, rental market-wise.

Mothers and children separated

Interviewees lived in fear of their children being taken into care because of their lack of secure housing. Jen told us:

Now because of all the instability DOCS [Department of Community Services, now called Department of Communities and Justice] has removed them from my care because I was, I guess, somebody who suffered from domestic violence on a regular basis. So I had issues with my ex finding them and then it’d start all over again. So in the last three months I’ve had my [two] children removed from my care because I’m waiting for a house, a safe house […]

I just feel so saddened by the whole process. I just want to hide […] I’ve had DCJ just rip my life apart pretty much as well as being homeless.

She alleged Housing NSW had never offered her permanent housing despite being on the waiting list for seven years and having periods of homelessness:

I’ve been homeless three times with children. It’s the worst. I live out of a car basically – that’s if I’ve had one at the time […] I’ve had a car on two occasions. The children become very unsettled.

In between, Jen has had temporary accommodation. Although a step up from sleeping in her car, she felt it contributed to her children being removed.

We could be going hotel to hotel. They could just move us in a whole new area completely […] They actually put me into an area where there’s a lot of disadvantage and my children’s behaviour slid down even worse […] to the point where I wasn’t able to control them anymore. […] Just what got DOCS, DCJ involved. So it’s been a horrible domino cycle.

Kylie also had a real fear of losing her child:

I didn’t choose to be homeless and then I had the fear like they [Housing Department] were going to call child protection service on me for no reason. I looked after my son completely. He was my world. I would do anything for him and because I went there for a little bit of help I was threatened with they’re going to call child protection services on me because I can’t find a stable home.

Some interviewees relied on relatives, usually their mothers, to look after their children. Josie had three children.

I left with the kids and ended up homeless with them, and I couldn’t have them on the street because that’s not what kids deserve […] I just sent them to mum, thinking that was the best thing for me to do, which it was.

Secure housing can turn lives around

All of the women were adamant that secure social housing would transform their lives. As Kylie said:

[A] stable place, you know, can bring so many opportunities […] for someone to get a better quality of life [they need] stable accommodation.

That people fleeing violence languish in unacceptable conditions for months or even years is a sad indictment of our social housing system. Mothers and children who are forced apart to manage the risks of both violence and homelessness are likely to suffer lasting trauma.

Prompt access to affordable long-term housing could pave the way for women and children to recover and flourish together. Instead of investing in high-cost practices of family separation and child removal, let’s invest in secure, affordable housing.

The Albanese government has pledged to set aside a proportion of new social housing for survivors of domestic violence. State governments have also announced various initiatives. It remains to be seen if these can satisfy the growing demand.


* All names are pseudonyms and details may be slightly changed to ensure confidentiality and protect the individuals.

Alan Morris, Professor, Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney; Catherine Robinson, Associate Professor in Housing and Communities, University of Tasmania, and Jan Idle, Research Officer, Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney

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

Justice and Legal Research: Using “Good Law”

Judicial Impartiality; Image Source: @CANVA
Judicial Impartiality; Image Source: @CANVA

Perennial questions have been raised in the research paper “Situation Analysis of Pacific Legal Aid Systems” (2020) by Dr Carolyn Graydon, which analysed the legal aid program in use in the Pacific and attempted to identify some best practices in place and suggest how legal aid coverage can be improved by making it cost-effective and efficient. 

Her findings based on a survey revealed that more than half of Pacific nations under the research have dedicated legal aid law establishing legal aid services but shows grave concern that “legal aid services are in short supply…. Large portions of Pacific populations have limited or no access to legal aid” where women are most disadvantaged concerning their access to legal aid and indicated concern for short of diverse legal aid models at “grassroots engagement, connection and outreach capacity and responsiveness to common kinds of local disputes” (Graydon, 2020).

It becomes pivotal that Pacific islanders enjoy the right to access justice and understand legal research concepts, its procedure and significance, to understand the legal methodology of working on their case before and during the consultation with a legal expert. The process, methods and significance of legal research are discerned in this opinion article. 

What is Legal Research?

In simple terms, it refers to identifying, locating and retrieving the laws (including regulations, statutes and court opinions) that imply the particular case and finding evidence to support a legal issue or decision. The research should concentrate on relevant jurisdiction to find the answers to a legal task or question. It is a “scientific and purposive investigation or inquiry of a problem or issue of any discipline” (https://www.iedunote.com/legal-research).

The objective is to gain new legal knowledge and validate current legal knowledge/phenomenon to apply legal reasoning to help judicial decision-making. It is about ‘systematic finding and ascertaining law’ on the given topic. 

Jacobstein and Mersky (2002) defined legal research as “the process of identifying and retrieving information necessary to support legal decision making”. Legal research begins with gathering and understanding the case’s crucial facts, then determining the legal problem, identifying the possible legal solutions, exploring the legal information, then making legal analysis, writing and after that.  Although legal research can be carried out by anyone who wants to discern the law and its implication, professionals who carry it include legislators, lawyers, judges, legal academicians, research bureaus, paralegals and legal advisors. 

Methodology of Legal Research

After collecting the facts and understanding the legal issue, it is implied to the legal argument. Therefore, a lawyer tries to find the primary sources to support the idea that is binding law in form, so they research the statutes, case law, regulations and Constitutions. The binding and mandatory authority of the primary sources makes it highly significant.

They also use secondary sources with no legal binding or persuasive authority that help supplement the primary law and legal theory, including treatises, journals, law reviews, legal articles, legal encyclopedias, practice guides, commentaries, and legal digests and so on. This source material helps to analyse, summarize or comment on any given law (Thomas Reuter https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/insights/articles/basics-of-legal-research-steps-to-follow).

On many occasions, non-legal sources are also investigated to identify the supporting information. 

It is recommended to use “good law” that has not been overruled or reversed. Thus, many lawyers use KeyCite, a citator on Westlaw that will indicate that the statute or regulations have a negative history, to determine whether it is good law. Similarly, Shepard’s citation is used to check whether the status of the case is still considered a “good law”, if there are any parallel citations, or if the case has been used in other jurisdictions.

Shepard’s validation is a crucial step of legal research after referring to primary and secondary authority that helps identify whether the case has been reaffirmed, overturned, questioned or has precedent. Using the primary sources has a binding value that is authoritative, precedential, controlling and possesses binding authority. Usually, lawyers begin with secondary sources, move to primary and then shepardize the legal research. The lawyers show perseverance, patience, and fortitude to record, update and verify any law before using it. 

Conclusion: Significance of Legal Research

Competent legal research is about finding the best possible outcome within the shortest time with the lowest cost. It is highly essential to update the knowledge. It is vital to determine the law on a specific topic or issue, as it uncovers ambiguities and intrinsic flaws in legislation and critically analyses legal provisions to decide whether or not they are consistent and coherent. Legal research aids the application of one’s formerly acquired law knowledge and the legal principles of functioning. Comprehensive Legal knowledge, competence, diligence, and preparation are required to examine factual and legal concerns.

Legal research is valuable to bring about social change and reform, as it is based on current and proposed legislation. The laws keep on changing with the need of society. Laws that are obsolete and need revision might be discovered via legal research to support ‘just social order’. This process assists in making reforms in the current laws and making suitable changes by the legal institutions. Legal research helps discover, clarify, advance, compare and authenticate legal issues (William Elegbe and Ojomo, 2013). 

In a similar vein, legal research “ascertain the law on the subject, highlight its ambiguities and inbuilt weaknesses of law; to critically examine legal provisions, principles, or doctrines with a view to see consistency, coherence, and stability of law and its underlying policy, to undertake a social audit of law with a view to highlighting its pre-legislative “forces” and post-legislative “impact,” and to make suggestions for improvements in, and development of the law” (Vibhute and Aynalem, 2009).

Thus, legal research becomes pivotal for a legal institution to serve the nation better by providing the best legal advice. 

Dr Sakul Kundra; Picture Source: Supplied
Dr Sakul Kundra; Picture Source: Supplied

Author: Dr Sakul Kundra is an Associate Dean (Research) and Assistant Professor at the College of Humanities and Education, at Fiji National University. The views expressed are his own and not of his employer. Email dr.sakulkundra@gmail.com
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The Australia Today is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts, or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of The Australia Today and The Australia Today News does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same. 

Pragnya Mohan trained in Australia, lead India’s Triathalon team at CWG2022

Pragnya mohan

India’s star triathlete at the Commonwealth Games 2022, Pragnya Mohan spent six months in Australia and Spain to train in the open waters.

Pragnya Mohan (Twitter)

Pragnya, lovingly called Praggers, trained with Fluid Movements in 2017 and did her first open water swim in Australia.

Pragnya Mohan with her trainer in Australia, 2017 (Fluid movements – Facebook)

The 27-year-old qualified chartered accountant had suffered five major road accidents during training or competing and also undergone two surgeries that left metal rods inserted in her wrist and leg.

However, 5 accidents and 2 surgeries couldn’t break Pragnya’s spirit and she lead India’s triathlon team which made its debut at the CWG 2022.

Sarah Storey, Australia’s Deputy High Commissioner to India, (image: Twitter)

Sarah Storey, Australia’s Deputy High Commissioner to India, tweeted: “Australian and Indian women athletes are doing our countries proud at #CWG2022.”

Pragnya told The Bridge that her father is her coach and strength since childhood:

“My father, Pratap Mohan, is my coach whenever I am training in India and he is extremely involved…he has been the one pushing me since the beginning.”

Pragnya Mohan (Twitter)

Pragnya Mohan and Sanjana Sunil Joshi, who is just 16-year-old and competed on a borrowed bike, finished 26th & 28th respectively in Women’s individual sprint distance (Final) out of 32 contestants.

India sent a four-member Mixed Relay Team —  Adarsh M S, Vishwanath Yadav, Sanjana Joshi, and Pragnya Mohan — in a sport that incorporates swimming, cycling and running in one race and where the country virtually has no history.

All eyes were set on Pragnya who is the national and South Asian champion and the only Indian to compete in a triathlon World Cup.

Pragnya Mohan is also the first Indian to compete in a World Cup held in Madrid, Spain, in 2019. She told World Triathalon:

“I was proud to be able to race well despite an injury, and to have led my peloton for two thirds of the route. There were people in the crowd cheering for India and that got the adrenaline pumping.”

Pragnya is currently ranked 365 in the world and to qualify for the Olympics she’ll need to be around the top 70. 

Team India finished 10th in the Mixed Relay Triathalon event while the Australian team won the Bronze medal.

https://triathlon.org/results/result/2022_birmingham_commonwealth_games/567960

Triathalon is one of the world’s most popular endurance events which made its debut in the Olympic programme at the 2000 Sydney Games.

Why Australian businesses should lift their name game

Conversation (Image source: Canva)

By Fiona Price

In a culturally diverse society like Australia, mastering multicultural names can give your business an edge over your competitors.

When people immigrate to an English-speaking country where locals aren’t familiar with their language and culture, even those who speak good English learn to expect some level of difficulty with communication. They encounter differences in accent and vocabulary to work around, and new social nuances around authority and small talk to sort out. For anyone with a non-Anglo name, there’s also a decision to be made about where to set the bar when it comes to name pronunciation.

Most people with non-Anglo names soon realise that expecting locals to pronounce their name like a native speaker of its language of origin just isn’t realistic. Sometimes this is because their native language is very different from English. Their name may have intonation, or include sounds English doesn’t have. Sometimes it’s because native English speakers feel the way the name is spelled doesn’t ‘match up’ with its pronunciation, or contains a combination of letters they don’t know how to interpret.

When trying to make social and professional connections in a new society, having a name people can’t say can be a real obstacle. Because of this, a lot of immigrants choose to select a Western name or settle on a ‘close enough’ version of their actual name. Priyanga might call himself ‘Pree’, Noémi might default to ‘Naomi’, Zhang Yunqian might call herself ‘Sally Zhang’ and accept that people are going to pronounce her surname as ‘zang’, rather than ‘jaang’. These strategies produce a version of their names that locals can manage and remember, names they recognise as theirs when someone addresses them.

Often this ‘close enough’ pronunciation isn’t a good approximation of the original name. It’s a workable compromise that people arrive at after a trial period of introducing themselves, listening to locals trying to say it and figuring out what most of them can manage. Many people with non-Anglo names eventually start introducing themselves by the English Speaker Version to save time, effort and confusion, even if on some level this makes them wince inside.

As someone who works with name pronunciation, I myself often wince inside when I hear someone use an English Speaker Version of their name. And where it’s appropriate and when I’m confident of the actual pronunciation, I offer something much closer to it. If the person reiterates that they prefer the anglicised version, I respect that, embrace it and keep any wincing to myself. Usually, however, the person is astonished and impressed. They ask me how I knew how their name was pronounced, ask if I speak their language and show me a lot of warmth and interest.

Positive responses like these show the value of raising the bar on name pronunciation for any business that wants to connect with multicultural customers, affiliates, or staff. For someone who’s reluctantly embraced an inaccurate, anglicised version of their name, an organisation that opens communications with the correct pronunciation of their name demonstrates respect, builds rapport, and automatically differentiates themselves from the majority who need the safety rail of an adapted pronunciation.

Contributing Author: Fiona Price is a Melbourne-based cross-cultural communication specialist and expert on multicultural names.

Alleged comment on schoolgirl’s ‘brown’ skin and assault charge force Australian university Vice-Chancellor to resign

UNE Vice-Chancellor

The University of New England (UNE) Vice-Chancellor, Prof Brigid Heywood, resigned after she was charged with common assault and behaving in an offensive manner near a public place or school. NSW police said:

“Following extensive inquiries, officers attached to New Eng­land Police District issued a 65-year-old woman a future court attendance notice for common assault and behave in offensive manner (sic) in/near public place/school.”

As per a report in the Sydeny Morning Herald, the girl’s father has accused Prof. Brigid Heywood of allegedly wiping saliva on the 16-year-old student’s face at an International Women’s Day event held at Armidale’s Ex-Services Memorial Club on March 8, 2022. Further, the girl’s father has also accused Prof. Heywood of allegedly making a remark about her skin colour.

The alleged incident occurred after a discussion at the event when the teenager approached another panel member to say that she related to that speaker’s experience of racism.
The father said:

“When she said that, the vice chancellor licks her finger with saliva and rubs it on my daughter’s face and says something to the effect of ‘Oh you’re brown, yes you’re right, it’s not coming off’”

The father, as per SMH, has rejected the police statement that emphasised there was no physical harm to the alleged victim.
He adds:

“In this day and age, saliva on someone’s face, is that not an injury?”

In a statement, UNE’s Chancellor James Harris said that Prof. Heywood strenuously denied the allegations.

The statement said:

“The university council and Professor Heywood acknowledge the criminal charges laid against her on 1 August 2022, and the widespread attention and concern this has garnered within the university and the broader community.

In this context, Professor Heywood formed the view that it was in the best interests of the university that she resign from her position and [the] university council has accepted her decision.

Professor Heywood has advised the university council she strenuously denies there is any truth to the charges and will defend them. Given the charges are before the court, the university council does not intend to make any comment about the charges or their subject matter.”

UNE has been under pressure from the community, NSW Labor’s tertiary education spokesman Tim Crakanthorp, local MP Adam Marshall and the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) who called to stand down Prof. Heywood pending the court proceedings.

Tim Crakanthorp (NSW shadow minister for Skills, TAFE and Tertiary Education) tweeted late Wednesday, “these are serious allegations and given their nature it’s appropriate that the vice chancellor step down pending their investigation.”

Chancellor Harris in his statement praised Prof. Heywood for “her strong leadership of the university in navigating a period of tremendous change”.
He said:

“Professor Heywood considers it a great honour to have been the vice-chancellor and chief executive officer.” 

The statement added:

“The university council wants to clearly state that it remains deeply committed to fostering a safe, inclusive and respectful environment for its students, staff and community at all times.” 

The girl’s father told the SMH that the University council “are the ones that need to be put on the spot. The public needs to know how the UNE is dragging their heels.” He added that since the incident his daughter has become “withdrawn.”

UNE Vice-Chancellor Prof. Heywood (UNE Facebook)

Prof. Heywood in an email accessed by SMH to the UNE staff “strenuously denies there is any truth to the charges and will defend them”.
She adds:

“University of New England must move forward with certainty of clear leadership. That is not something that it is appropriate for me to be a part of given current extenuating circumstances.”

Prof. Heywood joined UNE as its 14th Vice-Chancellor following an academic career spanning several countries. Prof. Heywood joined UNE from the University of Tasmania, where she was Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research). Before that, she was Assistant Vice Chancellor – Research, Academic and Enterprise at New Zealand’s Massey University.

Prof. Heywood is scheduled to appear in court in September on assault charges and UNE’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor Prof. Simon Evans will take charge until the council appoints a new Vice-Chancellor.

Indian Diaspora is the pillar for strengthening ties between Australia and India: Dr Vijay Chauthaiwale

Dr Vijay Chauthaiwale in Sydney (OFBJP Twitter)

Dr Vijay Chauthaiwale, who is in charge of the Foreign Affairs Department of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is on his first visit to Australia.

The BJP is currently the ruling party in India and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been active in engaging with the Indian Diaspora since he came to power in 2014. PM Modi also became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Australia in 28 years when he came to Australia in November 2014 shortly after he was elected Prime Minister of India for the first time.

Dr Chauthaiwale, who is also a member of the National Executive of the BJP, was hosted by OFBJP (Overseas Friends of BJP) in Sydney where he interacted with members of the Indian Diaspora.

In an exclusive interview with The Australia Today, Dr Chauthaiwale said that the Diaspora are “good ambassadors of India.”

(Video source: Dharmendra Modi)

The Australia Today also spoke with guests at the event about Dr Chauthaiwale’s visit and Australia-India ties.

(Video source: Dharmendra Modi)

Pancham Dham brings religious harmony and announces meditation centre in Nepal

Pancham Dham brings religious harmony and announces meditation centre in Nepal; Image Source: Supplied
Pancham Dham brings religious harmony and announces meditation centre in Nepal; Image Source: Supplied

In its movement to visit sacred SHIVA temples globally, Pancham Dham Trust trustees, members and devotee groups with saints, scholars, social leaders, politicians, media professionals and other members visited Kathmandu, Nepal for darshan at Shree Pashupatinath temple on July 24-26, 2022.

The group of about 60 devotees was led by Pancham Dham Trust chief mentor Dr Indresh Kumar, an RSS veteran who has mentored and been the torch bearer of the movement since conceptualisation and later its formal foundation in 2018. Dr Indresh Kumar has been a mentor of many global initiatives for peace and harmony.

Pancham Dham brings religious harmony and announces meditation centre in Nepal; Image Source: Supplied

On the movement, RSS veteran Dr Indresh Kumar said, “Thousand years ago, Adi Shankaracharya visited all corners of Bharat and he then established Mathas there. Today we know it as Char Dham. Likewise, Cambodia is blessed with the world’s biggest Hindu temple of Lord Vishnu and thousands of Shivlingas since time immemorial.

People there have been connecting here with religious belief and now they are looking forward to this place as Pancham Dham outside Bharat.” Dr Gopal Narayan Singh, founding trustee and chancellor of GNS University India is one of the forces of the movement, who also promised to explore the possibility of a high-quality higher education institution in Nepal for research and education of Nepalese students primarily. Trust is looking forward to establishing a world-class educational hub there.

Mahamandaleshwar Juna Akhara, Swami Yatindranand Giri Maharaj who has volunteered for the purpose of Pancham Dham in the north of India and Dandi Swami Anantanand Ji Saraswati, who also has devoted his life to the purpose and spread of Sanatan values in Purvanchal region, accompanied and led the religious faith of the group and conducted Pooja Sanskar at Pashupatinath temple in a most ancient way of Bharat and Nepal. One of the most sacred Hindu temples of Nepal – Pashupatinath Temple is located on both banks of the Bagmati River on the eastern outskirts of Kathmandu.

Before reaching Nepal, the Pancham Dham Trustees, saints and about 200 members visited Cambodia’s Siem Reap and Angkor Wat temple in the first week of June 2022 for the fifth-anniversary celebration of the Pancham Dham initiative and Pooja at the foundation of the proposed temple.
Pancham Dham is on a mission to revive the glory of Sanatana Dharma and bring people peace and harmony and make a bond among countries who have to believe in the same philosophy. The identity of each culture and nation is supreme and efforts to create global peace with common values of Sanatan is the exertion made by Pancham Dham. During “Sanatan Sanskar Mahotsav” on second Somvari many other groups based in India did their programs at Kathmandu from July 24 to 26.

Pancham Dham brings religious harmony and announces a meditation centre in Nepal; Image Source: Supplied

Mahamandaleshwar Juna Akhara, Yatindranand Giri said the concept of Pancham Dham is like an ocean unfathomable and deep. So many rivers and water bodies may come to merge into it. Ocean never merges anywhere. This samagam in Nepal proves itself. Arunachal Pradesh veteran politician and presently Chairman of AP forest council is the committed national executive member of Pancham Dham.

Pancham Dham is an international organisation to unfurl flags to create a culture and religious awareness only. It is a religious, cultural and peace movement by a group of people from Cambodia and India led by saints, social leaders, business leaders and professionals who are developing the Pancham Dham temple in Siem Reap in Cambodia. Before going to sacred Shiva temples in Cambodia, Nepal and other countries, the Pancham Dham team collected blessings from all four Dhams in India. The Santan values are spread in about 52 countries along the coastal nations in Asia, which are in plan to be visited over the next few months to spread the message of religious and social peace and cultural harmony in the world which is affected by conflicts, war and terrorism.

The Pancham Dham movement respects the cultural identity and religious freedom of all cultures and nations and will have the utmost respect in this movement for peace and harmony. Few people and organisations have attempted to malign a very pious initiative and tried to connect it with the personal initiatives of a few groups ‘Akhand Bharat’ which is rejected in absolute. Pancham Dham has no connections and relations with such groups or people or organisations, any linking with Pancham Dham is wrong and misleading. The Pancham Dham trust stands on its mission and objectives and does not partner with any other organisation to its activities.

Dr Sailesh Lachu Hiranandani, founding Trustee and the man behind the Pancham Dham movement who has been visiting Siem reap Cambodia for about 20 years and invested time and effort to research about the place and its sacred importance, said, “When I observed holy river Kulin Devi flows uninterruptedly and nourishing shastra Shivling over years of visit at the place, there was a divine force bringing everyone to the purpose and I was blessed to receive mentoring and support of Dr Indresh Kumar ji to the initiative. With the deep knowledge and insight of many saints and scholars, the initiatives reached where it is today, thus we always commit to research and meditation centres in the countries we visit.”

Pancham Dham brings religious harmony and announces a meditation centre in Nepal; Image Source: Supplied

Dr Hiranandani also indicated establishing a Bharat Nepal fund to support the cultural and research and educational development of Nepal with its own value systems. He said that we welcome people of Nepal to come forward and establish themselves globally.

On the occasion, Prof Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, the first woman Vice Chancellor of prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi enlightened on the role of women in society and how women empowerment brings a change in society. Any world-class research and higher education development in Nepal is always a welcome step and Indian educational institutions will come forward to support the initiative.

Shailesh Vats, General Secretary Pancham Dham stated that “So many organisations are working on Hindutva in India. Pancham Dham is an expedition for not only the Prachar Prasar of Sanatan culture across the country but also to establish a connection between those countries where this great grand Sanatan civilisation exists. To revive that energy of Sanatan culture, not only Nepal but Pancham Dham is working in more than 10 countries.”

According to its mission and commitments, the only extension to the religious confluence of Pancham Dham Trust will be its contributions in higher education, and cultural and meditation research and activities of the country.

Pancham Dham’s team received immense support from Nepal during this visit. More than twenty House of Representatives and religious leaders came to meet Dr Indresh Kumar and discussed the way forward and support to Pancham Dham organisation. These dignitaries echoed the support and welcomed the initial contributions made by the Pancham Dham Trust of Cambodia and India.

Australia beat India in a controversial women’s hockey semi-final at CWG

Hockey Australia (Twitter)

Indian women’s hockey team lost to Australia in the semi-finals at Birmingham by 3-0.

After scores were locked 1-1 at fulltime, the Hockeyroos won 3-0 in the penalty shootout.

Hockeyroos tweeted: “We are through to the Gold Medal Match after a thriller!”

In a bizarre turn of events, the Indian captain Savita Punia was denied a save off the first shot by Australian Rosie Malon. The umpire informed both teams that the match clock did not start with Indian striker Lalremsiami ready to take India’s first shot. Malone scored in a re-take to hand a 1-0 lead before Lalremsiami missed her shot.

Kaitlin Nobbs then scored for Australia off the second shot before Jocelyn Bartram made a save off Neha Goel. Amy Lawton then scored the third goal for Australia and with India requiring to convert to have a chance, Navneet Kaur missed the chance to score off the third shot to hand Australia the win.

India’s coach with the umpire (Image source: Seven)

Hockey India tweeted: “A tough result to take for #WomenInBlue. Now it’s all about the Bronze medal!”

Captain Savita Punia told media: “I can only say that it is tough for us but it’s part of the game.”

Indian Hockey team (Image source: Savita Punia – Twitter)

India’s coach Janneke Schopman told media after the match that it was tough. He added:

“It is tough and I think we’re trying as coaches to be able to…but that is life. It is emotional and there was so much at stake. Of course, they need to not be influenced by it, but they’re also humans and it did play a role. The players are sad and they should be sad. We fought really hard and were very close to playing in the final.”

Channel 7 commentator Alister Nicholson could be heard slamming the controversial play that gave Australia the extra shootout goal. Nicholson said in the commentary:

“That would be a national outrage if that happened to Australia.”

Former Hockeyroos star Georgie Parker also felt sad for the Indians Hockey team and said:

“It’s the most incredible way to win; most heartbreaking way to lose.”

International Hockey Federation tweeted their statement regarding the penalty shootout issue: “The process in place for such situations is that the penalty shootout has to be retaken, which was done. This incident will be thoroughly reviewed by the FIH in order to avoid any similar issues in the future.”

Australia will play England in the Hockey final after it also secured a spot with 2-0 shootout triumph against New Zealand. The Hockeyroos have won both and have four Commonwealth titles in the six completed editions of the Games.

Tamil asylum seeker ‘Biloela family’ granted Australian permanent visas

Nadesalingams family (Twitter)

The Tamil asylum seeker Nadesalingam family, popularly known as the Biloela family, have received Australia’s permanent visas.

A group of Biloela residents advocating for the Tamil asylum seeker family, called HometoBilo,  tweeted the announcement.

In a statement, Australia’s Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Andrew Giles MP said he had intervened in the case following careful consideration.

Andrew Giles MP, Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs (Twitter)

Giles added that he had provided the family visas allowing them to remain permanently in Australia.

“This government made a commitment before the election that, if elected, we would allow the family to return to Biloela and resolve the family’s immigration status. Today, the government has delivered on that promise. This decision follows careful consideration of the Nadesalingam family’s complex and specific circumstances. I extend my best wishes to the Nadesalingam family.”

Karen Andrews MP (Twitter)

Opposition Home Affairs spokesperson Karen Andrews MP told the media Labor government’s decision to grant the Nadesalingam family permanent visas set “a high-profile precedent”. She said:

“It undermines the policy that if you come here illegally you will never settle in Australia. Together with Labor’s policy to abolish temporary protection visas, this gives people smugglers a product to sell to desperate families and people.”

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk tweeted that she is pleased to hear that the Nadesalingham family in Biloela has been granted permanent visas.

The Nadesalingam family, Priya Nadaraja, Nades Murugappan and their daughters Kopika and Tharnicaa, have been living in Biloela, Queensland since June. The family had previously spent four years in immigration detention as their claim for refugee status was rejected by the Coalition government.

Let’s talk about Australian slavery

Kanakas on a sugar cane plantation, Queensland c.1890. Public domain

By Jeff Sparrow

In July 2021, Jack Dempsey, the mayor of Bundaberg, delivered an official apology for Northern Queensland’s past reliance on the indentured labour of Pacific Islanders, many of whom were kidnapped (or “blackbirded”) and forced to work on the state’s cane plantations. “To say sorry,” explained Dempsey, “is a start in the healing and the hope for a better relationship going forward.”

The emotional response – equal parts sorrow and relief – from the local Islander community confirmed the gesture’s importance. “I’m thinking about my mother and my brother and my aunties who have all passed on,” said Aunty Coral Walker, the president of the Bundaberg South Sea Islanders Heritage Association. “It would have meant a lot to them because they were a part of that era where they knew about blackbirding.”

But if the Bundaberg apology began a healing, it by no means completed it. On the contrary, the statement highlighted the inadequacy of Australia’s reckoning with its past.

That’s because the practice Dempsey described – sometimes known as “sugar slavery” – was not a minor or incidental phenomenon. In fact, it was so important to plantation owners that, to defend it, they briefly contemplated separation from the rest of the colony, with Townsville mooted as the capital of what many observers dubbed a “slave state”. This “scheme for the extension and perpetuation of the slavery system” showed, one journalist claimed at the time, that Queensland had become “what the United States were before the Wars of the Secession”.

Similar references to civil war occurred again and again during the debates prior to the federation of the Australian colonies. Slavery and its consequences – both in Queensland and in the American South – obsessed Australia’s founders, and fundamentally moulded the country they created. Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, explained, quite accurately, that the “limited slavery” of the cane fields had agitated “the whole of Australia” and so was “a question which belongs to the Federation we have succeeded in establishing”. He also outlined the shocking philosophy upon which he considered Australia based:

I do not think either that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races – I think no one wants convincing of this fact – unequal and inferior. The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman. There is deep-set difference, and we see no prospect and no promise of its ever being effaced. Nothing in this world can put these two races upon an equality. Nothing we can do by cultivation, by refinement, or by anything else will make some races equal to others.

Australia’s first prime minister Edmund Barton. Public domain

It’s impossible to understand that speech – and Barton’s conviction that, in dismissing racial equality, he spoke for the nation – without thinking about the sugar fields of Queensland and what was done there.

The French historian Ernest Renan described forgetting as “an essential factor in the creation of a nation”, since patriots do not want to remember the “deeds of violence” at the origin of all political formations. In the Australian context, a strange contradiction contributes to the ongoing amnesia about slavery and its consequences.

From the very beginning, enslavement shaped white settlement in Australia – and so, too, did abolitionism. That paradox, a peculiar entwinement of two ostensibly antagonistic impulses, makes for a complicated narrative, one that cannot be grasped simply as a local version of the better-known American story.

But if regret is to bring change, we must comprehend what we’re apologising for and why. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a man who had escaped enslavement in 1838, described the past as a mirror that could, if used correctly, convey “the dim outlines of the future” and, perhaps, “make them more symmetrical”.

With that in mind, let’s talk about Australian slavery.

‘No slavery in a free land’

In 1788, England remained the most important slaving nation in the world, a country that, from the 17th century until 1807, conveyed a dizzying 3.25 million people out of Africa and into bondage.

The planners of the new convict colony in New South Wales drew directly on logistical skills acquired through Britain’s long involvement in the slave trade. They contracted the Second and Third Fleets to one of London’s biggest slaving firms, the merchants Calvert, Camden and King, who duly showed the same care for British convicts as they did for African slaves. Some 25 per cent of prisoners died on the voyage; 40 per cent succumbed within six months of arrival.

In New South Wales, the men and women labouring on the settlement were officially described as “in servitude” until they became “emancipated”, a vocabulary taken directly from the Atlantic trade.

Yet if slavery pressed on the colony, so too did anti-slavery.

Britain required New South Wales because, after the American War of Independence broke out in 1775, the English could no longer dump its criminals in the American territories. The same colonial uprising that disrupted transportation to the New World also turned public sentiment against slavery, an institution tainted by association with the ungrateful Americans.

That was why, in the month that the First Fleet sailed from Portsmouth, evangelical Christians in London launched the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade – an organisation that would eventually succeed in rendering slavery illegal in Britain.

A few years later, the Haitian revolution – perhaps history’s greatest uprising of the enslaved – would intensify respectable concern about the dangerous instability of slave societies. The visceral fear of black revolt induced merchants enriched by trading Africans to consider the new opportunities of the factory system, shifting Britain’s economy away from plantation agriculture to manufacturing and other, more modern, industries.

Battle of San Domingo, also known as the Battle for Palm Tree Hill, in Haiti – January Suchodolski. Wikimedia Commons

All of that affected the Australian colony. The more far-sighted members of the British elite had no desire to replicate the American disaster – and they most definitely did not want to found a new Haiti in the Pacific. So, before the First Fleet even departed, its commander, the 50-year-old naval veteran Captain Arthur Phillip, explicitly eschewed any intent to allow enslavement in the settlement.

“There can be no slavery in a free land,” he declared, “and consequently no slaves.”

In 2020, with Black Lives Matter protests spreading globally, Prime Minister Scott Morrison took a question from a radio host about the removal of colonial statues. In response, the Prime Minister defended the European settlers as relatively enlightened men, committed to ideals of freedom in New South Wales.

“It was a pretty brutal place,” he concluded, “but there was no slavery in Australia.” The comments brought widespread condemnation, and the Prime Minister quickly acknowledged that “hideous practices” had indeed occurred.

Yet Morrison’s initial point was not entirely wrong.

Phillip had, indeed, promised a free colony. So how did his pledge affect the “hideous practices” the PM described?

In 1788, mainstream abolitionism was not especially radical. The evangelicals, with their concern for human souls, considered chattel slavery – the legal ownership of one man by another – a denial of the personal agency so central to Protestantism. But, as moral campaigners, they also approved of punishing sin – and in the late 18th century there was plenty of it to punish.

In Britain, the enclosure of the English commons had driven impoverished rural populations into cities like London. Swelling unemployment meant crime and rebellion. To control the desperate and the jobless, the authorities passed harsh new laws, a legislative program designed to quell disorder and ensure a pliant workforce for the factories. The Riot Act banned public disorder; the Combination Act made trade unions illegal; the Workhouse Act forced the poor to work; the Vagrancy Act turned joblessness into a crime. Eventually, over 220 offences could attract capital punishment – or, indeed, transportation.

As we have seen, convict transportation – a system in which prisoners toiled without pay under military discipline – replicated many of the worst cruelties of slavery. Yet, rather than fostering opposition to the forced labour of transportees, mainstream abolitionism helped justify it.

Middle-class anti-slavery activists expressed little sympathy for Britain’s ragged and desperate, holding the urban lumpenproletariat responsible for its own misery. The men and women of London’s slums weren’t slaves. They were free individuals – and if they chose criminality, the abolitionists reasoned, they brought their punishment on themselves.

That was how Phillip could decry chattel slavery while simultaneously relying on unfree labour from convicts. The experience of John Moseley, one of the eleven people of colour on the First Fleet, illustrates how, in the Australian settlement, a rhetoric of liberty accompanied a new kind of bondage.

As Cassandra Pybus documents, later in life, Moseley claimed to have been employed as a “tobacco planter in America”. By that he almost certainly meant that he had been enslaved on a plantation in the Tidewater region of Virginia and Maryland. How had he washed up in Sydney?

Like several of the black First Fleeters, Moseley fought for Britain during the American Revolution. That was because Lord Dunmore, the last British governor of Virginia, had offered liberty to “all indented Servants, Negroes, or others […] that are able and willing to bear arms” against the insurrectionists.

Moseley, and others like him, chose freedom – and then faced recapture when Britain surrendered. One slave later said that the success of the revolt “diffused universal joy among all parties; except us who had escaped from slavery and taken refuge in the English army”. Desperate to evade their old masters, the formerly enslaved begged the retreating British for passage to London. Those who were successful remained free – but also, for the most part, unemployed, struggling in a strange and harsh city without friends or family.

Australian South Sea Islander cane cutters on a sugar cane plantation in Queensland. Wikimedia commons

Loyalists could, in theory, claim compensation for fighting in the revolutionary war. In practice, the authorities generally rebuffed pleas from ex-slaves, on the cynical basis that emancipation constituted sufficient reward.

“Instead of suffering by the war, he gained by it,” wrote an official about one claimant, “for he is in a much better country where he may with industry get his bread, where he can never more be a slave.”

Moseley, like so many others, struggled in the harsh city to get his bread. When he eventually turned from industry to criminal fraud, the contrast between British liberty and American slavery provided the ideological justification for the treatment he received. He was a free man; the court held him responsible for his own dishonesty and sentenced him to death. The eventual commutation of a capital sentence to transportation meant that armed guards marched a black ex-slave, chained once more by the neck and ankles, to the Scarborough, on which he sailed to New South Wales.

Phillip’s prohibition on chattel slavery was, on its own terms, genuine. But we need to understand what those terms were. For John Moseley, the “free land” of New South Wales brought only a replication of that captivity he’d endured in Virginia. His experience was not unique. As the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht might say, throughout the settlement, the old strode in, disguised as the new. In years to come, colonial opposition to slavery would co-exist with, and even facilitate, various kinds of bonded labour – and nowhere more so than in Queensland.

‘A second Louisiana’

From the very start, the Australian sugar industry demonstrated how formal and real freedoms might collide.

In Tascott, New South Wales, you can still find a plaque celebrating the man who gave the town its name: a certain Thomas Scott, who, we are told, “arrived in the colony in 1816 [and] pioneered the sugar industry in Australia”.

The Tascott memorial neglects to mention Scott’s background in the slave trade. Yet that was how he developed his familiarity with sugar. As a young man, he assisted an uncle buying and selling Africans, before he began managing slave labour on his family’s plantation in Antigua.

Slaves working on a plantation in Antigua – William Clarke (1823). Public domain

Scott came to Port Macquarie in 1823, where Major Frederick Goulburn engaged him for an annual salary of £250 to grow sugar in the strange climate. Historians now agree that he failed miserably.

“How many times did you try to make sugar at the settlement before you made anything like it?” a contemporary mocked him. “What you made yourself was not fit for dogs to eat before the poor black man shewed you the way.”

That “poor black man” was another Antiguan, James Williams.

Where Scott was an ex-slaver, Williams was an ex-slave. He had somehow escaped to England, where, like Moseley, he resorted to crime. Sentenced to seven years transportation, Williams arrived in Sydney in 1820. Another theft saw him banished to Port Macquarie. In that town, a full year before Scott’s arrival, he established a viable crop from eight joints of cane, using the “knowledge of the growth of that Plant” he had acquired as a slave.

Despite the successful production of “very good Sugar and Rum”, Williams never adjusted to life in the colony, spending the rest of his days in and out of various forms of custody. By contrast, Thomas Scott, confident the rival claims of a “poor black man” would not be heeded, basked in an entirely undeserved reputation as the father of Australian sugar, even receiving an annual pension for his supposed achievements. In that foundational moment – an ex-slaver exploiting an ex-slave – the racial dynamic of the industry was already visible.

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, many Europeans in Australia sympathised with the Confederates, particularly after the Unionists briefly seized the Trent, a British Royal Mail steamer. The Melbourne Argus anticipated war between Australia and the northern American states, arguing that that “as a matter of sound precaution, citizens of the United States now resident in Victoria should be placed under surveillance”. Some of the gun emplacements still visible in Sydney Harbour date back to that fear of invasion by the Yankees.

In the context of that widespread enthusiasm for the South (the welcome extended to the Confederate ship Shenandoah in Melbourne in 1865 led one of its officers to conclude “the heart of colonial Britain was in our cause”), Queenslanders dreamed of building a “second Louisiana”. They could, they thought, capitalise on the disruption of the international cotton and sugar trades, if only they could establish a viable local crop.

But how might they emulate agriculture from a slave state?

Attempts to attract English workers to Queensland did not succeed. The men that came found the conditions unbearable, something the colonists attributed not to the innate unpleasantness of cutting cane in the sticky heat, but to the racial unsuitability of white labour to the tropics. So, in 1863, the shipping tycoon Robert Towns (the man who gave Townsville its name) tried another approach.

Robert Towns (1794-1873), after whom Townsville is named. Public domain

Towns knew that, back in 1847, an entrepreneur called Benjamin Boyd – another man with a background in Caribbean slavery – had scandalised the colony by transporting men from the Pacific Islands of Tanna and Lifou to supply his cattle station with labour. The “signatures” on the documents that indentured them were thumb prints from illiterate men who had never before seen cattle; their “contracts” bound them to work for a pittance however Boyd commanded. Some of the labourers revealed their genuine feeling by fleeing as soon as they could; the others demanded to be sent home. Boyd’s business collapsed and he decamped to California.

In Boyd’s inauspicious venture, Towns glimpsed a solution, a means by which he might recreate Louisiana in Queensland. The insatiable demands of the textile industry meant, he thought, that cotton plantations would be far more profitable than Boyd’s cattle stations. Accordingly, Towns chartered a ship called the Don Juan and sailed it to the New Hebrides from where it returned crammed with Islanders destined for Towns’ huge property near the Logan River.

The Civil War ended before Boyd could prove his experiment a success. But though peace dashed prospects for a Queensland cotton boom, a planter called Louis Hope realised that cotton fields could also be used for sugar, a commodity always in demand. He duly sent out ships to obtain indentured labour of his own.

That was how it began. Between 1863 and 1904, 62,000 South Sea Islanders were transported to Australia, landing in Brisbane, Maryborough, Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Mackay, Bowen, Townsville, Innisfail and Cairns. Most indentured labourers arrived from the New Hebrides, with a substantial proportion taken from the Solomons, as well as smaller islands. By the 1890s, Pacific Islanders constituted 85 per cent of the workforce for Australian sugar.

Some came willingly, accepting – as desperate people do – unknown hardship to escape grinding poverty. Some, equally clearly, did not. Faith Bandler, the much-loved civil rights activist and hero of the 1967 Indigenous rights referendum, was the daughter of one such sugar slave. As a child, she’d listened to her father, Peter Mussing, describing his youth. He told Faith about

when he was kidnapped and taken into the boat by the slavers, and what it was like in the boat coming over from his island Ambrym in the New Hebrides, and how rough it was and how they were all held in the hull and how sick they were and those who died would be thrown overboard and how it was when the boat would arrive in Australia and how strange everything seemed to him.

Activist Faith Bandler (1918-2015) was the daughter of a sugar slave. Wikimedia commons, CC BY-NC-SA

Paradoxically, such experiences – so reminiscent of the Middle Passage endured by slaves brought across the Atlantic Ocean – coincided with a hardening of official hostility to slavery throughout the British Empire. In 1833, the parliament in Westminster had officially legislated abolition, with enslavement thereafter disdained as contrary to English principles of liberty. The politicians allocated an extraordinary sum of £20 million (about 40 per cent of Britain’s total income) to restitution: an amount granted not to the slaves but to their owners, compensation to them for the loss of their “property”.

The records of those disbursements include a remarkable number of colonial Australians. Judges, statesmen, bankers, even the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon: the upper echelons of Australia society contained many men who had either personally kept slaves or belonged to families that did.

In the bigger population centres, the beneficiaries of enslavement generally distanced themselves from their less than reputable past. The tropical north, however, was different. There, those with a background in Caribbean slavery could recreate something of their old ways.

Louis Hope, for instance, set himself up (according to one biographer) “as a landed aristocrat”, with a grand mansion at Ormiston, an estate akin to those his slave- owning relatives occupied in the Caribbean. He was not alone in his affectations. A visitor to Queensland in the late 1870s and early 1880s described the planters living along the river at Mackay:

Their houses as a rule, are extremely comfortable, and very well furnished, and the gardens of many of them are paradises of beauty. In good times, they make tremendous profits, and their occupation chiefly consists in watching other people work, in the intervals of which they recline in a shady verandah with a pipe and a novel, and drink rum-swizzles. Most of them keep a manager, so that they can always get away for a run down south, or a kangaroo hunt up the country.

The men did not merely adopt a lifestyle associated with New World slavery. They also relied on its techniques and its personnel.

Hope, for instance, acquired his sugar plants from the old slaver Thomas Scott. He hired supervisors from Jamaica and Barbados, looking for those with experience driving plantation slaves. To obtain the men for his fields, he turned – just as Boyd had before him – to a certain Captain Lewin, a notoriously shady character.

The Royal Navy’s Commander George Palmer described Lewin’s vessels as “fitted up precisely like an African slaver, minus the irons” and noted that, “I heard of him [Lewin] at every island I was at as a man stealer and kidnapper”. Lewin escaped conviction for a rape committed on one of those ships when a Brisbane court held that his 13-year-old victim could not give evidence since “she was not a Christian, and there were no courts of law in her country”, ignoring the testimony of the Islander witnesses who described the girl’s screams.

Between 1863 and 1868, this was the man responsible for “recruiting” nearly half the Islanders who arrived in Australia.

An illegitimate offspring

The uncontrolled growth of blackbirding eventually spurred the Polynesian Labourers Act, an attempt by the Queensland government to enforce some sort of regulation. The law required recruiters to get a licence; it mandated certain minimum standards on voyages where previously passengers had often simply been imprisoned in the holds.

Yet conditions did not necessarily improve. In general, the treatment of Islanders in Queensland depended less on legislation than on how desperately the planters needed labour at any given moment.

Some young men found indenture quite bearable, so much so that when one contract ended, they signed on for another, before eventually returning to their homes with cash in their pockets. Yet when the sugar boom of the 1880s fostered a scramble for cutters, the cruelties intensified. On occasion, recruiters – desperate to fill their quotas – travelled to islands where blackbirders had never previously visited and simply grabbed whomever they could find.

In 1884, at the height of that demand, a vessel called the Hopeful opened fire on Islanders who resisted being stolen, killing at least 38 people and possibly more. Its crew faced trial for kidnapping and murder; a subsequent Royal Commission found that only nine of the 480 people “recruited” by the ship had understood the supposed agreements they’d signed. The commission described the Hopeful’s expedition as “one long record of deceit, cruel treachery, deliberate kidnapping and cold-blooded murder”.

The sailors were subsequently released, after “public indignation [about their convictions] in Brisbane and the coast towns waxed to fever heat” and some 28,000 people signed a petition calling for clemency.

The massive support for the Hopeful’s crew needs to be understood in the context in which indentured labour was advocated. Hope, and the others like him, did not see themselves as recreating slavery. On the contrary, they declared their opposition to the practice. The Islanders were not, they said, chattels. Rather than being bought or sold, the men were employees, hired like any other workers. They received money in return for the contract; when their term expired, they could leave.

This was not altogether untrue. Legally, the Islanders were never enslaved. Unlike the slaves in America, they were not officially classified as property. Some managed to improve the terms of their engagement, winning better wages and less brutal conditions. By the 1890s, many were engaged in something more like wage labour.

Nevertheless, the reason the sugar barons wanted Islanders did not vary: they understood that white men could impose upon indentured non-white labourers a discipline that Europeans would not accept. They could pay them less (and sometimes not at all). They could beat them and belittle them and abuse them, confident no law would intervene, and they could work them relentlessly under regimes that regularly proved fatal.

Queensland was not the Americas. What was done in Australia was different and needs to be understood on its own terms. The historian Emma Christopher suggests that, rather than being imagined as analogous to Atlantic slavery, the trade in the Pacific might be thought of as one of its illegitimate offspring: a forced labour both reminiscent of and distinct from the practices of the New World. Nevertheless, a legal case in Rockhampton in 1868 illustrates the aptness of the term “sugar slavery”.

In January that year, a man called John Tancred faced charges under the Master and Servants Act after a conflict with one Arthur Gossett over an Islander boy identified only as “Towhey”. Though bound to Gossett, the child had fled his employment to join men from his own island who were labouring for Tancred. Their teary reunion provoked a legal dispute between two white men about the “lawful ownership” of Towhey (known by a quite different name among his own people) – a matter settled when Gossett proved his claim by identifying a brand on the boy’s leg.

“The advantage,” explained the Rockhampton Bulletin,

of the branding these intelligent islanders who cannot speak English and who make crosses to their agreements, has been made very manifest by this case, and, perhaps, it may not yet be too late for the Assembly to insert a “branding” clause in the Polynesian Laborers Bill.

The Assembly did not adopt that suggestion. It did, however, accept an amendment proposed by Hope himself (who became a member of the Queensland Legislative Council in 1862), which decreed that if an indentured labourer “absent[ed] himself from the place of employment for a greater distance than one mile […] without a pass from his employer”, he would be “liable to apprehension and punishment” – a clause justified by the need for “the employer to retain control over his laborers”.

The Australian press described the Islanders as “kanakas”. In its original, Hawaiian context, kanaka meant “free man”. In Australia, it signalled the opposite, as no less an authority than the Governor General confirmed.

Like many of the planters, Sir Anthony Musgrave had come to Australia from the West Indies. Like them, his family had owned slave-run plantations – and so he knew enslavement when he saw it. In Australia, he privately described the recruitment of Islanders as “a system & arrangements wh. are as much like slavery & the slave trade as anything can well be wh. is not avowed as such”.

Anthony Musgrave, governor of Queensland from 1883 to 1888.

By 1884, the annual mortality rate for Islanders in Queensland had climbed to 147 deaths per 1000 people. Everyone knew why: as the Brisbane Courier reported, the causes of mortality were “indisputably plain; the islanders were being killed mainly by overwork, insufficient or improper food, bad water, absence of medical attention when sick, and general neglect”.

The harshness was not accidental. “[Islanders] must be treated with firmness,” explained the planter J.W. Anderson,

they do not expect much leniency and would take advantage of it. Above all, they must not be treated too well, according to our notions […] for their minds are so constituted that they do not appreciate such treatment.

Anderson’s belief that Islanders were innately predisposed to appreciate brutality illustrates how Queensland sugar depended on the most pernicious ideological legacy of the Atlantic slave trade: modern racism.

Built upon a groan

The philosophical underpinnings of slaving might seem obvious. The perceived inferiority of Africans enabled, we assume, merchants to buy and sell them as commodities. But that’s quite wrong. Africans weren’t enslaved because they were black. They were black because they were enslaved, with the vast profits in Atlantic slavery giving rise to entirely novel forms of classifying humanity.

Slavery existed in the past, of course. But in the ancient and medieval worlds, enslavement related typically to conquest or religion rather than “race” – a concept that didn’t really exist as we know it today. Anyone could become a slave after a battle; slaves could sometimes free themselves by converting to their masters’ faith.

Slavery was not, in other words, a condition attached permanently to a certain type of person so much as an unfortunate fate that might befall anyone.

The system imposed in the Caribbean and the Americas was different. The immensely profitable cultivation of cotton and sugar required vast quantities of labour, not least because the plantations often proved fatal to the men and women toiling in them. Begrudging any cessation of production, planters in the New World did not release converts; they deemed the sons and daughters of slaves to inherit their parents’ status.

Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-1794).

Accordingly, slave owners developed a different rationale for their system, one under which the skin pigmentation of the enslaved – previously an entirely incidental feature – defined them, as an indelible quality that marked men and women as suitable for servitude. The French philosopher and mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet pointed out that the new theories made “nature herself an accomplice in the crime of political inequality”. Indeed, the identification of “blackness” with inferiority corresponded with an equally novel claim about the superiority of “whiteness”, one that provided a legitimation for the spread of British power.

From the very start, such ideas had underpinned the establishment of the Australian colonies.

The “natives”, Phillip complained soon after landing, were “far more numerous than they were supposed to be”. Their abundance mattered because it undercut the legal foundations of the entire colony. Phillip, like everyone else on the mission, knew perfectly well that international law forbade a nation claiming sovereignty over territory inhabited by others.

Aboriginal woman and child c.1870.

The settlers resolved the jurisprudential problem by ignoring it. The colony might have been illegal, but race theory allowed the colonists to believe themselves committed to universal law, even as they more or less entirely excluded Indigenous people from its remit.

That provided the pattern for everything that followed. In theory, Indigenous people enjoyed all the protections of British subjects. In practice, they were often treated as animals – or, indeed, slaves.

As late as 1899, a Select Committee of the South Australian Parliament received grotesque testimony about the sexual slavery to which Aboriginal women were subjected. One policeman explained that the rape of “lubras” (a racist term for Indigenous women) was commonplace.

“If half the young lubras,” he said,

now being detained (I won’t call it kept, for I know most of them would clear away if they could) were approached on the subject, they would say that they were run down by station blackguards on horseback, and taken to the stations for licentious purposes, and there kept more like slaves than anything else. I have heard it said that these same lubras have been locked up for weeks at a time – anyway whilst their heartless persecutors have been mustering cattle on their respective runs. Some, I have heard take these lubras with them, but take the precaution to tie them up.

A few years later, persistent accounts of abuses in Western Australia led to a Royal Commission in that part of the country. Under its auspices, Walter Roth, the former Chief Protector of the Aborigines in Queensland, produced a lengthy document chronicling the proliferation of forced labour.

“Here at our own doors,” said the Melbourne Advocate,

we have had revealed a system of slavery so revolting in its brutality, and so inhuman in all its details, as to equal all the horrors that have been alleged against the slave owners in America and the military expeditions in Central Africa.

The activist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois once described America as “built upon a groan”. Something similar might be said about the colony of Australia, at least as far as Indigenous people were concerned.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). Wikimedia commons

White Australians tend to imagine frontier violence largely in images derived from first contact: a matter of sharp, almost accidental, clashes as European and Indigenous worlds collided. In fact, the worst depredations were considerably more deliberate, and they escalated as the settlers established themselves. The increasing independence of the colonies during the second half of the 19th century reduced the humanitarian influence exerted by London and allowed the settlers to bring to the frontier techniques of dispossession refined through bloody experience.

The European occupation of Queensland took place later than in other states. As late as 1850, the state contained only about 8000 white settlers. Thereafter, a rapid influx of Europeans unleashed horrific violence against an Indigenous population of about 200 000 people, in a process the colonists considered both necessary and inevitable.

“We should be sorry to see the natives treated with cruelty and oppression,” explained a Queensland cabinet minister to parliament in 1861, “but that the settlers will increase and the colony expand, is a result which the rules of nature render positively certain.” The whites could not and should not be prevented from taking the land and “if the inferior race suffers in the process, that is only what has happened in all such cases, and will happen again until the end of time”.

In reality, his government was less a passive observer of “cruelty and oppression” than a key facilitator. The authorities established the Queensland Native Mounted Police in 1855, equipped its members with high-powered rifles, and paid them to “disperse” any Indigenous people they located. As another parliamentarian acknowledged, the euphemism “dispersal” meant “nothing but firing into them”.

The Mounted Police were, in contemporary terms, death squads – and some historians estimate they eventually killed as many as 40,000 Aboriginal men, women and children.

As late as 1880, the liberal Queenslander described the slaughter on the frontier, noting that the Indigenous inhabitants of territory into which Europeans moved were

treated exactly in the same way as the wild beasts or birds the settlers may find there […] Their goods are taken, their children forcibly stolen, their women are carried away, entirely at the caprice of the white men. The least show of resistance is answered by a rifle bullet; in fact, the first introduction between blacks and whites is often marked by the unprovoked murder of some of the former—in order to make a commencement of the work of “civilising” them.

That article provoked a year-long discussion, in which the Queenslander’s contributors demonstrated how the genocidal campaign against Indigenous people had normalised measures unthinkable in any other context.

Queensland Native Police 1864.

A writer styling himself “Never Never” called, for instance, for a speedier genocide, urging the “exterminating force” of the Native Police to work more “thoroughly and effectually”.

“Is there room for both of us here?” he asked. “No. Then the sooner the weaker is wiped out the better, as we may save some valuable lives in the process.”

Others, like a certain “Outis”, argued for what he saw as a more liberal solution. He suggested that, rather than being murdered, Aboriginal people should be treated like “rogues and vagabonds”, and forced to work so that they will have no time to hatch mischief”.

Outis noted how planters were bringing “large numbers of South Sea Islanders to Queensland” under laws that forced them to work as directed by their employer. He argued the same policy could be applied to Indigenous people forcibly removed from their land:

Only get the blacks out of their own district and it would rest with the employer to make them work; some harshness would no doubt be necessary (as I am told is also the case with Kanakas), but I firmly believe that firmness combined with kindness, and the low rate of wages that the blacks would be paid, would make the employment of aboriginal labor a payable speculation.

For Outis, officers from India or Ceylon could enforce the necessary discipline – so long as they were “untethered by red tape”. A policy of enslavement rather than murder would, he said, remove ‘the present blood guiltiness that weighs upon us each individually as colonists’, and so would be worth whatever it cost.

“Is there no member of Parliament who will take this question up?” Outis wondered:

Are all so overburdened by the cares of the squatters, or diggers, who comprise their constituencies that they cannot spare the time to consider and devise a remedy for “the poor old nigger”?

As it happened, at least one MP did share his enthusiasm.

On 21 October 1880, the Queensland Parliament debated the role of the Native Police. In the discussion, John Douglas (who would later become premier) argued that the distinction between Islanders and Aboriginal people was not so great to extinguish “the hope that some use might be made of the latter”.

He pointed to Western Australia where “the natives had been […] in some cases captured, and as prisoners of war had been compelled to submit to a period of pupilage, afterwards becoming useful settlers”. Queensland, Douglas said, might follow suit by taking “the natives prisoner, instead of shooting down and killing them”.

He did acknowledge the legal difficulties in a policy “by which these people, taken in open warfare, might be kept in a state of captivity” but stressed it would “be a more benevolent process than shooting them down and taking their lives”.

The chamber did not embrace Douglas’s “benevolent process” (which would, of course, have been entirely illegal), though some years later a correspondent to the Adelaide Evening Journal reported that the Native Police were, in fact, selling into slavery the children of Indigenous people they had massacred.

The willingness of Queensland parliament to ponder the relative merits of enslavement over murder provides a particularly repellent example of the moral desensitisation arising from colonial dispossession. Amid the cruelty inflicted on Indigenous people, the indentured labour of Islanders could seem entirely unremarkable.

Sugar versus slavery

The relationship between sugar slavery and the foundational racism of a colonial settler state makes an intuitive sense. We understand that the planters who built fortunes from forced labour were infused with a sense of their own biological superiority.

We might not grasp that those who denounced slavery were often even more avowedly racist.

In the Queensland parliament, the Liberal politicians attacked the planters’ reliance on Islander labour almost as soon as indenture began. They did so by objecting to the sugar barons polluting the colony with, as the Liberal MP Charles Lilley said in 1869, “men of an inferior race”.

“The British people are the possessors of this soil,” Lilley declared. “We hold the land in trust for our countrymen alone not for Polynesians or Chinamen.”

The parliamentary argument about the sugar industry was not a debate between racists and their opponents but a contest between different visions of whiteness. The Conservative Premier Sir Thomas McIlwraith, a man with personal interests in the sugar industry, expressed the perspective of the planters. He wanted, he said, a Queensland both successful and white. Economic prosperity depended on cane, a crop he thought Europeans racially incapable of harvesting. Hence the necessity for a subservient caste of Islanders, who could ensure Queensland remained “a white man’s colony, influenced by white men and owned by white men”.

His Liberal rival Samuel Griffith, on the other hand, argued that the importation of Islanders would foster the “degeneration which we have seen whenever the black and white races have endeavoured to mix”. If whites depended on slavery, they’d lose their racial consciousness and accept widespread immigration. Accordingly, Griffith advocated a purely European colony based on the rigid exclusion of all non-whites – in essence, attacking the proponents of sugar slavery for being insufficiently racist.

When Griffith won the 1883 election, his victory threw the sugar industrialists into panic. Politics in Queensland, the Sydney Evening News explained, was “fast narrowing itself down to the very simple issue – sugar versus slavery”, since “sugar plantations cannot be worked in Queensland without slave labour in some form or other”.

Fearing the collapse of their estates, the sugar barons contemplated secession. Seeking to marshal all those benefiting from the industry, they presented a vision of independence. They would, they declared, form their own colony, where they could employ on their plantations as much Islander labour as they saw fit.

In April 1885, a Northern Separation convention in Townsville attracted delegates from eleven towns in the region. A petition for secession gathered some 10,000 signatures, a not insignificant number in a population area of perhaps 19,000 European men. In parliament, Maurice Hume Black – a representative of the sugar interests – openly warned that North Queensland wanted to go its own way, while the planters John Ewen Davidson and Sir John Lawes argued their case to the Colonial Office in London.

For a while, it seemed entirely possible that Northern Separation – a movement led by some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the region – might prevail. In his book A Land Half Won, historian Geoffrey Blainey suggests that, had that occurred, northern Queensland “would probably have remained outside the new Commonwealth of Australia”, becoming “a version of Rhodesia or the old American confederacy of cotton states”.

Many people at the time, with the American Civil War fresh in their minds, thought the same. “If tropical Australia is politically severed from the South,” warned the Brisbane Courier,“[…] we may leave to our children such a legacy of evil as that from which America only rid herself by the most terrible fratricidal war which the modern world has seen.”

That didn’t happen because, with their dream of Northern Separation and sugar slavery, the planters faced two powerful opponents.

Overseas, Britain reacted to the petitioning Queenslanders with unabashed horror. If anything, London’s concern about the social instability of chattel slavery had only increased since in 1788. In the wake of the civil war in America, British diplomats regarded the prospect of a new antipodean Confederacy as disastrous. As the Times noted, England bluntly informed the planters and their supporters that it would “not permit the establishment of a slave state in Northern Queensland”.

At home, the separatists confronted a different problem. After the gold rush, Chinese immigration had become the focus of racist agitation all over the colony. As early as 1855, Victoria had passed “an Act to Make Provision for Certain Immigrants”, which imposed a discriminatory tax on the Chinese. Other states followed. In 1857, Europeans physically attacked Chinese miners in the Buckland River gold fields; similar riots took place at Lambing Flats in 1860 and 1861. Many leaders of the newly-formed trade unions blamed the Chinese for driving down wages and so called for racial exclusion, a policy famously expressed in the slogan used by the pro-labour Bulletin: “Australia for the White Man”.

Politicians agonised over whether a colony reliant on a non-white workforce would remain sufficiently British. Many saw the Queensland plantations as a dangerous wedge, a crack in the white wall through which other races might insinuate themselves.

In the days of Arthur Phillip, anti-slavery had legitimised transportation. It now served an even more perverse cause, providing a moral justification for those demanding complete racial exclusion.

The Rockhampton-based Daily Northern Argus, for instance, attacked sugar-growersfor their “extraordinary persistence” in agitating for a cause that had already been defeated in the southern states of America. Yet the editorialist’s loathing for what the paper described as a “slave colony” culminated in a lurid vision of the sugar industry facilitating a Chinese takeover.

“The Mongolianisation of North Queensland,” the Argus declared, “is only an advance operation of the Mongolianisation of all of Australia.”

The advocates of Northern Separation denied, again and again, any intent to create what the press referred to as a “black state”. Again and again, they were attacked on precisely that basis, with secession decried as a pretext for slavery, and slavery as a threat to whiteness.

In 1885, Griffith announced that he would prohibit the importation of Islanders within five years. His declaration promised to end the whole controversy, committing Queensland to the Liberal vision of a racially pure nation, rather than the Conservative plan for apartheid. But before the plan could come into operation, the Great Depression of the 1890s struck, threatening the state with economic ruination. Baulking at the prospect of closing the sugar industry in such desperate times, Griffith united with his former rival McIlwraith to delay the ban.

The prevarication by “the Griffilwraith” (as the press dubbed the unlikely alliance) transformed the sugar debate in Queensland from a local dispute into a national issue, one of the major controversies preoccupying colonial politicians as they planned an Australian federation.

‘The necessary complement of a single policy’

The present location of Canberra, halfway between Melbourne and Sydney, echoes arguments made by Queensland secessionists.

In 1886, John Murtagh Macrossan, a prominent Northern Separationist, had proposed establishing the capital of the new Queensland state away from existing population centres so as to minimise regional jealousies. The logic later prevailed with the creation of Canberra.

Even though the Queenslander Samuel Griffith played a major role in drafting a national constitution, the unresolved tension over indentured labour limited the participation of his state in the federation debates. The representatives of the other colonies might have been divided over the merits of free trade versus protectionism, but they shared the goal of an entirely white Australia. That was, indeed, a major motivation for unity: as Alfred Deakin later explained, only federal legislation could prevent the discrepancies between different laws that constituted “a half-open door for all Asiatics and African peoples”.

With the national project at odds with the planters’ continued hopes for some form of indenture, a divided Queensland did not attend the 1897/98 constitutional convention. It was only in the following year, when the sugar industry had been placated by the offer of federal compensation, that a pro-federation referendum narrowly succeeded in the state – a victory that signalled majority support for racial homogeneity.

In the Westminister Review, T.M. Donovan explained the triumphant Liberal perspective:

Federation will bring us statesmen, an honest democratic franchise, and will, no doubt, in a short time rid us of the Asiatic and coloured labour curse. Under the federal flag a piebald race will be an impossibility. […] total exclusion alone can save Queensland from the coloured problem of the United States.

His reference to America expressed a common perception that the legacy of slavery had polluted that country, in ways that young Australia, with its commitment to racial purity, needed to avoid. When Prime Minister Barton introduced the Immigration Restriction Bill by declaring non-whites to be fundamentally inferior and their exclusion something to be greatly desired, he did not consider the statements at all controversial.

George Reid (1845-1918).

The intensity of the discussion that followed (the Hansard account runs to nearly half a million words) was not the result of any programmatic disagreement among the speakers. On the contrary, the Leader of the Opposition George Reid declared unanimity on the aim that “the current of Australian blood […] not assume the darker hues”; the Protectionist Samuel Mauger cited “expert” opinion that bringing “the white man into contact with the black [would] suspend the very process of natural selection on which the evolution of the higher type depends”; and Labor’s James Ronald explained that Australians objected to “inferior races” because “they are repugnant to us from our moral and social standpoints”.

The debate centred not on the desirability of a White Australia (for on that the MPs were as one) but on how it might be obtained, after four decades of indentured labour had brought so many Islanders into the country. That was why slavery in the United States featured so heavily in parliament’s deliberations: it was invoked again and again as a cautionary tale of racial pollution.

America was, explained the Liberal MP H.B. Higgins, undergoing “the greatest racial trouble ever known in the history of the world” and so Australians should “take warning and guard ourselves against similar complications”. Foolishly, white Americans had failed to expel their former slaves. America would, he continued,

have been ten times better off if the negroes had not been left there. There are no conditions under which degeneracy of race is so great as those which exist when a superior race and an inferior race are brought into close contact.

A supportive press concurred. “The Australian Commonwealth,” explained Queensland’s General Advertiser,

at the outset of its career has the golden opportunity of preserving to its citizens the purity of race. The great American commonwealth had not quite such an advantageous opportunity, insofar as long before it was founded the negro race had partly become rooted in American soil.

Local parliamentarians pledged not to make the same mistake, congratulating themselves on the superiority of their constitution over the one ratified by the United States, on the basis that its Section 51 (the so-called “race powers”) allowed them, as Prime Minister Barton had explained, “to regulate the affairs of the people of coloured or inferior races who are in the Commonwealth”.

Attorney General Alfred Deakin went so far as to boast that “our Constitution marks a distinct advance upon and difference from that of the United States”. Its passages explicitly permitting racial discrimination enabled parliament to pass the Immigration Restriction Act (to keep non-whites out) and the Pacific Islands Labourers Act (to deport those Islanders already in Australia).

“The two things go hand in hand,” Deakin explained. Stopping the “lesser races” from arriving (with Islander recruitment ceasing in 1903) and expelling those who were currently resident: these were “the necessary complement of a single policy – the policy of securing a White Australia”.

The new nation thus signalled its birth by doing what the United States did not dare: ethnically cleansing its former slaves.

Victoria Street, Mackay, Queensland, circa 1905. Wikimedia Commons

‘These people want to hunt us out of the country’

The deportations began in 1904.

By then, the Islanders resident in Australia numbered perhaps 10,000. Many had built lives for themselves after their terms of indenture ended: finding jobs, building houses, raising families. Some barely remembered the places from which, decades earlier, they’d been taken. They were incredulous they were expected to return.

“Is it really true that white people want to send all boys back to islands?” asked an Islander in Mackay. “[W]e been work well in this land for white people, then why they want to turn us out?”

From the start, they resisted. In 1902, more than 300 Islanders signed a petition that they presented to Queensland’s governor and, via him, to the king. It pleaded for an end to a policy “contrary to the spirit of English common law and of freedom, justice and mercy”, a scheme that would “induce for hundreds, if not thousands of us, misery, starvation or death”.

In Mackay in 1904, a man called Henry Tongoa organised a Pacific Islanders Association. The association held meetings across North Queensland, where speakers explained that white men had refused to work in the cane fields and had been “glad to get us to do so”. The planters had become rich on Islander labour, they said, “with good homes, buggies, horses, pianos, sewing machines and all sorts of other good things which they could not buy or have before we came to the country and worked hard for them”. Yet, despite that, “these people want to hunt us out of the country”.

The protests – and persistent fears by Queensland planters about labour shortages – forced a 1906 Royal Commission into the program. The Commission recommended exemptions, including for the elderly, for long-term residents, those who could prove themselves in danger, and people who had married others from outside their own islands. But the expulsions were not halted.

In desperation, Tongoa sailed to Melbourne with another petition, this time for Alfred Deakin. The signatories begged for citizenship for those who wanted to stay. They even offered to remove themselves to a reserve somewhere in the north, a place where, they said, they would pose no competition to white men and could put their “long experience of tropical cultivation to use”.

Alfred Deakin. National Library of Australia

Deakin remained unmoved. After the 1902 petition caused a stir in London, he’d responded by emphasising parliament’s unanimity about racial purity (as well as slandering the signatories as “ignorant savages unable to read and write”).

He’d also resorted to the old trick of legitimating repression by fulminating against enslavement. In reply to British humanitarians in London, he expounded on the brutality of the blackbirders, the recruiters’ trickery, and the cruelty of the planters.

Slavery was an abomination, Deakin said – and the government was shutting it down. A supportive press chided the Islanders for the petition, with the Telegraph dubbing them “ill advised” for resisting measures so obviously necessary. The paper invoked the experience of America, where, it explained, “the negro was emancipated […] but he was left in the country”. That, the Telegraph explained, was a disaster not to be replicated:

Now he lives and multiplies. The presence of about 10,000,000 negroes in America, without civil rights, is a great danger. It might be a greater danger if he had civil rights.

The purported opposition to slavery slid, once again, into a justification for tyranny, legitimating a rhetoric that became, at times, almost fascistic. When, for instance, Deakin’s government accepted the Royal Commission’s recommendations – including the exemption for married men – the Bulletin published a call to make miscegenation a crime punishable by hard labour so as to avoid a race war similar to one being fanned by ex-slaves in America. Its correspondent concluded by proposing the boiling in oil of “nigger-loving legislators […] who recently voted in favor of non-deportation of those Kanakas married to white men” – a suggestion to which the magazine’s editor added his endorsement.

The novelist Christopher Isherwood once described broadcasts of Hitler as conveying a sense of a man dancing up and down on the tips of his toes while he spoke. The shrill, mad voices in the Bulletin and elsewhere give the modern reader a similar impression.

In that ideological environment, the deportations continued. By 1908, only 2500 Islanders remained: a few of them because they successfully hid and the others because they’d been exempted. Most, however, were herded on to boats, in a ghastly process that separated lovers, friends and relatives from each other and from the country for which they’d toiled for so long.

In an extra act of bastardry, the government defrayed the expense of a process that was meant to be funded by employers, instead using money from the Pacific Islanders Fund – a trust established to remit wages owed to deceased labourers.

The Queensland Evening Telegraph recorded the understandable bitterness of the deportees, voiced once they were beyond the reach of the police on the wharfs and the jetties.

“Goodbye you white —,” they yelled, and your — white Australia!“

A legacy of racism

What might an apology for sugar slavery address?

What was done in in the cane fields was not merely the responsibility of the planters who benefited directly from it. Its centrality to politics in Queensland and, later, to Federation, implicated the men most responsible for Australia’s foundation.

To be clear, the big names in colonial politics – Deakin, Griffith, Barton, Watson and others – did not defend slavery in the manner of, say, those Confederate leaders whose statues still mar towns across the American south. On the contrary, most of them railed against the practice, competing with each other and with state politicians in Queensland to make their disdain known. ”[T]his government thinks,“ explained Barton bluntly, “that the traffic in itself is bad and must be ended.”

Yet, almost without exception, politicians used their hostility to slavery to legitimate a generalised racism, which they then presented as the foundation of a new state. Barton, for instance, introduced the Pacific Islanders Bill as embodying “the policy, not merely of the government, but of all Australia, for the preservation of the purity of the race.”

“Let us keep before us,” urged the Labor MP James Ronald during the debate,

the noble idea of a white Australia – snow-white Australia if you will. Let it be pure and spotless.

Instead of facilitating justice, opposition to sugar slavery enabled institutionalised discrimination, a policy its advocates grotesquely draped in the garb of abolition.

The differences between indentured labour in Queensland and chattel slavery in the American south did not prevent Australian parliamentarians from comparing the two. In their discussions of the federation they were building, American slavery provided a constant referent. A past reliance on African labour had left, they said, the United States a piebald nation, subject to the mongrelisation that a white Australia would avoid. Racialised anti-slavery justified the expulsion of Islanders, an ethnic cleansing necessary for Ronald’s “pure and spotless” society.

As Deakin explained, White Australia meant “the prohibition of all alien coloured immigration, and more, it [meant] at the earliest time, by reasonable and just means, the deportation or reduction of the number of aliens now in our midst”.

With the passage of the Pacific Islands Labourers Act, the founders explicitly sought to control not just sugar slavery but also its historical legacy. That was the point. The law meant, they said, that white Australians – unlike their American cousins – could avoid the descendants of those they’d enslaved. The exclusion of the Islanders would excise an awkward history, with the slaves expelled from Australia’s border and its memory.

For a time, it seemed like they’d succeeded. The deportations marginalised the Australian Islander communities, with those who remained often forced on to the margins of white society, usually alongside an equally oppressed Indigenous population. Like African Americans under Jim Crow, Islanders faced segregation in schools, shops, theatres, swimming pools, workplaces and just about everywhere else. A raft of laws forbade them from working in the cane fields, with an industry that had relied overwhelmingly on Islanders in 1902 using nearly 90 per cent European labour by 1908. The resulting impoverishment was exacerbated by their exclusion from the welfare system – they could not, for instance, claim the old age pension until after 1942.

Yet, despite the best efforts of white Australia, the Pacific Islanders survived – and they did not cease fighting to reclaim their past.

The ceremony in Bundaberg came as the result of prolonged lobbying from Islander organisations, part of a campaign that is forcing official recognition of blackbirding and sugar slavery. “The full truth needs to be told,” explained Emelda Davis from the South Sea Islanders Association to the Guardian back in 2017.

It’s inaccurate not to talk about the trade in people that built this part of Australia and there’s a lack of knowledge about what happened. Our people are left out of the narrative.

That remains central to justice: an acknowledgment of the victims and what was done to them. But the reckoning cannot end there.

In 2019, on the 400th anniversary of enslaved Africans arriving in Virginia, the New York Times launched its “1619 Project”, a series of essays, events and podcasts intended to place the consequences of slavery at the centre of American history. “America,” explained Jamelle Bouie, one of its contributors, “holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others.”

What might we say, then, about the assumptions fostered through the founding of Australia on 1 January 1901? Unlike in the United States, slavery was always illegal in Australia. From the colony’s first days, enslavement was understood as both a crime and a sin. No-one called himself a slaver, not even the overseers. That hostility to a practice still widely accepted elsewhere helped define the settlement and the nation it became, as the composer Peter Dodds McCormick recognised. “Australian sons, let us rejoice,” his lyric for a future national anthem urged, “for we are young and free.”

The line hinted at the ideological work that freedom performed, then as it does now. McCormick’s invocation of “youth” defined the nation in opposition to its Indigenous people and their ancient culture, identifying the country with its European invaders. His song implicitly excluded the Aboriginal population from the rights of citizenship, calling on Australian sons to celebrate a liberty they denied to others. By 1878, when McCormick wrote Advance Australia Fair, sugar slaves had been toiling in Queensland for more than a decade.

Australian politicians today praise a “national character” defined by tolerance and laconic egalitarianism. They recall a past exemplifying those traits, a chronicle of good-hearted larrikinism quite distinct from the depravities associated with other countries. Yet the record shows something different.

“We have decided,” declared Prime Minister Barton, “to make a legislative declaration of our racial identity.”

Australia’s first leader explicitly understood the ethnic cleansing that followed slavery (along with racialised restrictions on immigration) as definitive, a policy central to the nation’s self-perception.

In the process of federation, Queensland’s peculiar institution served as the grit around which Australia cohered, a persistent irritant that gave the new nation its shape. That’s a point on which Australians should ponder. The history of sugar slavery highlights a national obsession with racial purity, a corollary of the dispossession that white settlement entailed. The treatment of Pacific Islanders built upon the treatment of Indigenous people, the great weeping sore of antipodean history.

In thinking about that, we might also consider the contemporary use of self-congratulatory humanitarianism and the ways a very Australian rhetoric of fairness continues to legitimate official cruelties. When our politicians explain the indefinite detention of those fleeing persecution as a policy to prevent refugees drowning, their words echo previous invocations of morality in service of bondage, a tradition stretching back to 1788.

The American scholar Richard White once described history as the enemy of memory. “The two stalk each other,” he said, “across the fields of the past, claiming the same terrain.”

That encounter matters, not simply because of the abstract virtue of truth prevailing over delusion but because an acceptance of history might enable a different future to be built.

The story of Queensland sugar highlights a particularly degraded notion of freedom, one in which liberty for some justifies oppression for others. But that’s not the only way to understand the concept. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, once described freedom as “what we do with what is done to us”, a definition that aptly describes the long struggle by Pacific Islanders, and many others, to build something better in Australia.

The past cannot be altered. But it can, perhaps, inspire a different future.


An extract from Provocations: New and Selected Writing – Jeff Sparrow (Newsouth)

Jeff Sparrow, Lecturer, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

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

Australia deeply concerned on launch of ballistic missiles by China near Taiwan

Yj-18_missile (Wikimedia Commons)

Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Senator Penny Wong has released a statement on China’s launch of ballistic missiles into waters around Taiwan’s coastline.

The Eastern Theater Command Army of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on Thursday conducted long-range live-fire drills targeting designated areas on the eastern part of the Taiwan Strait.

Senator Wong showing her deep concern has called this as “disproportionate and destabilising.”

Further, Senator Wong has termed it “a serious matter for the region,” including Japan which is Australia’s close strategic partner. She adds:

“Australia shares the region’s concerns about this escalating military activity, especially the risks of miscalculation.”

Senatior Wong has urged China for “urge restraint and de-escalation.” She says:

“It is in all our interests to have a region at peace and not in conflict. Australia does not want to see any unilateral change to the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. There is no change to Australia’s bipartisan one-China policy.”

At this stage, Australia is continuing to monitor the situation in Taiwan and also talking to its allies.

Senator Wong at ASEAN (Twitter)

Senator Wong has also expressed Australia’s concerns to her Chinese counterpart:

“Today I have expressed Australia’s concerns to my Chinese counterpart along with other regional foreign ministers in the East Asia Summit in Phnom Penh, and officials from my department have reiterated our concerns with the Chinese Government.”

Senator Wong is participating in Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) which ASEAN includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

According to reports Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov walked out of a plenary meeting when their Japanese counterpart spoke.

China has blamed the US for causing tension across the Taiwan Straits by “severely” violating “the one-China principle.”

China has deployed planes and fired live missiles near Taiwan as part of millitary drills in the Taiwan Strait. These exercises were conducted a day after U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a trip to Taiwan.

In response to Pelosi’s trip, Chinese government has sanctioned Pelosi and her immediate family members.

Both Taiwan and Japan have protested these missiles and requested “the global community to call on China to halt military activity.”

After condemning China’s missile launches, the White House announced that it would move an aircraft carrier strike group through the Taiwan Strait.

Indian and Australian foreign ministers positive on bilateral relations progress

Dr Jaishankar and Senator Wong (Image source: Twitter - Dr S. Jaishankar)

India’s External Affairs Minister Dr S. Jaishankar and Australia’s Senator Penny Wong are in Cambodia to attend the ASEAN ministerial meeting.

Ahead of the ministerial meeting, both met to discuss bilateral relations. Dr Jaishankar tweeted that he and Wong took a positive note of the progress in the Australia-India bilateral relations: “Pleasure meeting FM @SenatorWong of Australia again. Took positive note of the progress in our bilateral relations. Benefited from the exchange of perspectives on regional and global issues.”

In her reply, Senator Wong tweeted: “India is a vital partner for Australia in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.”

After Senator Wong’s appointment, Dr Jaishankar in a tweet called her a long-standing friend of India: “Congratulations @SenatorWong on your appointment as Australia’s Foreign Minister. We know you as a longstanding friend of the #IndiaAustralia relationship. Look forward to meeting you soon.”

Former Senator Lisa Singh, CEO of the prestigious Australia-India Institute (AII), also took to Twitter to highlight the importance of Dr Jaishankar and Senator Wong’s meeting: “Two outstanding leaders for the region and the Australia-India relationship.”

Meanwhile, Dr Jaishankar visited the 12th-century Ta Prohm Temple in Siem Reap of Cambodia and tweeted India’s “our deep cultural connect” with the small Southeast asain nation.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

No ‘Munnabhai’ at Australian universities, Federal government blocks 40 cheating websites

Student on computer (Wikimedia Commons)
Student on computer (Wikimedia Commons)

The Australian government has blocked access to 40 of the most visited academic cheating websites which had traffic of about 450,000 times a month.

Such cheating websites are used to sell students essays, help in online assessments, and accept payment for someone else to sit exams on a student’s behalf. 

Jason Clare MP, Minister for Education (Image source: alp.org.au)

In a statement, Jason Clare MP, Minister for Education, said that

“For the first time, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) has used new protocols developed with members of the Communications Alliance to prevent access to the websites. The protocols streamline the process for blocking illegal academic cheating websites, better enabling TEQSA to enforce Australia’s anti-commercial academic cheating laws.”

An earlier news report has stated that International students are over-represented in such cheating statistics as most focus on working and making ends meet in Australia.

Most Australian universities, in the COVID-19 and post-COVID scenario, moved to online learning and assessments. This gave rise to a new billion-dollar industry dedicated to helping students cheat. These company advertise themselves online as study aids. However, a close look and it is clear that they are for-profit companies helping students cheat.

Some Australian universities have started using advanced online anti-cheat software to deter students from academic misconduct. However, these companies create a way around this anti-cheat software.

Dr Ritesh Chugh, Associate Professor at CQ University, Australia (Image supplied)

Dr Ritesh Chugh, an Associate Professor at Central Queensland University, co-authored a research paper on academic integrity last year with colleagues from his university. The authors observed:

“The increased incidences of academic misconduct in universities are compromising the reputation of higher education in Australia and increasing the work of academics responsible for the delivery of quality learning outcomes to students.”

Image Source: @CANVA

Dr Chugh adds that their research found that participants were genuinely interested in furthering their understanding of academic integrity issues. He observes that blocking such websites is a good step in the right direction but is not a complete solution. He says using their suggested measures universities could curb this behaviour proactively:

“We recommended that universities increase penalties for academic misconduct, improve management response to the way academic misconduct infractions are handled, encourage international students to appreciate the intrinsic value of their education and redesign assessments to mitigate academic dishonesty attempts.”

Image Source: @CANVA

Dr Chugh says that a blend of actions from regulatory agencies and educational institutions is required to curb this menace.

Minister Clare calls such websites criminal in their operation. He observes:

“Illegal cheating services threaten academic integrity and expose students to criminals, who often attempt to blackmail students into paying large sums of money.”

He further adds:

“Blocking these websites will seriously disrupt the operations of the criminals behind them.”

Image Source: @CANVA

Two years ago, the Australian federal government announced its solution to online cheating. The government asked Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) to develop protocols with participating internet service providers (ISPs). TEQSA says that apart from blocking it has a range of resources to help both domestic and international students. It further encourages both the students and staff at Australian universities to report all suspected cheating services for investigation.

Australian wine-makers ready to curate for Indian consumers’ taste to boost exports

Australian Wine; Image Source: @CANVA
Australian Wine; Image Source: @CANVA

Australian government’s trade wing, Austrade, has partnered with Wine Australia to develop the Wine Export Ready Hub. This is a comprehensive digital knowledge hub to help Australian wine producers grow their wine sales internationally. The Hub will collate information and provide how-to guides to help wine producers understand the export process. 

This project builds on the outcomes of the Australia-India Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (AI-CECA) and the Australia-India Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (AI-ECTA) negotiations.

The recently signed agreements proposes to further boost two-way trade in goods and services between India and Australia which has grown in value from $13.6 billion in 2007 to $24.3 billion in 2020.

Damien Griffante, Director of Strategy & International Affairs at the Australian Grape & Wine, told The Australia Today that the Free trade Agreement is a good starting point:

“The Free Trade Agreement and these initial engagements represent a good starting points to establishing a much greater longer term trade relationship. India remains a long term priority of the Australian wine sector and we will continue to work to build on technical exchange and regulatory cooperation in growing the market.”

Australian Wine; Image Source: @CANVA
Australian Wine; Image Source: @CANVA

Dr Martin Cole, who is CEO of Wine Australia, notes that around 60 per cent of Australia’s wine production is exported each year. He adds that the profitability of the Australian wine sector is strongly linked to exports. Cole says:

“Many wine producers are developing strategies to intensify exports and to enter new markets, and we’re delighted to launch the Wine Export Ready Hub in partnership with Austrade to support these activities.”   

Australian Wine; Image Source: @CANVA
Australian Wine; Image Source: @CANVA

According to Wine Australia’s Export Report, the value of wine exports grew in 71 destinations in the year to March 2022. Australia has more than 6,000 grape growers, 2,000 wineries, and 1,000 exporters who send over 18,000 different varieties of wines to around 100 destinations worldwide.  

Two years ago, the Australian government committed $72.7 million to establish the Agribusiness Expansion Initiative. This aims to help Australian agribusiness exporters to grow sales in overseas markets.  

Mr Griffante adds that such an agreement will help in a lot of ways to boost business between Australia and India. He says:

“Improving market access and removing barriers to trade will benefit local economies through expanding local investment opportunities, building the wine category as a whole, and providing consumer choice for a broader range of high quality Australian and Indian wine.“ 

Australian Wine; Image Source: @CANVA
Australian Wine; Image Source: @CANVA

Further, Australian Grape & Wine Incorporated, the national association of winegrape and wine producers, is also undertaking a long-term strategy to improve the economic viability of Australian wine exports to India.

According to a statement by Australian Grape & Wine, this includes “a series of initiatives focused on collaborative technical and regulatory cooperation to grow the market, remove trade barriers and improve access.”

Australian Wine; Image Source: @CANVA
Australian Wine; Image Source: @CANVA

CEO of Austrade Xavier Simonet told Foodmag that the industry-first free digital hub will fuel Australia’s wine exporters to go further and faster. He says: 

“Australia produces some of the world’s most sought-after wines, and the new Wine Export Ready Hub will help our producers get more product to consumers the world-over. This one-stop-shop, developed by Austrade and Wine Australia, will provide clear, comprehensive answers to wine producers’ most pertinent export questions.” 

Australian Grape & Wine notes that the key measures to develop the wine market for Australian exports to India are:

  • Building trust and relations with the Indian wine sector to use our technical, regulatory and marketing expertise and collaboratively build wine as a category in India.
  • A strong collaborative relationship improves our ability to advocate for policy, technical and regulatory improvements as well as supporting advocacy for further reduction in import tariffs under the next negotiating rounds for the AI-CECA.
  • Expanding government-to-government relations with the aim of building regulatory and technical cooperation that builds on the AI-CECA side letter on Trade and Production of Wine.

A delegation of Indian industry and government visited Australia to participate in the Australian Wine Technical Conference held on 26 to 29 June 2022.

This conference presented the perfect platform to introduce a large number of Australian wine sector participants in one place. Further, it allowed the Australian wine sector to highlight the local technical proficiency in winemaking and expertise in distribution.

The Indian delegation also travelled to Barossa Cellar to meet with James March, CEO of Barossa Grape and Wine and Louisa Rose, Yalumba head winemaker and Chair of Barons of Barossa.

The Indian delegation at Barossa Cellar (Australian Grape & Wine)

As per reports, the Indian delegates have shown a particular interest in Sparkling wines and other innovative wine-based beverages and spirits that would meet the consumer’s preferences. The report notes:

“Some suggested that Indian alcohol consumers, accustomed to higher alcohol spirits and beer already considered traditional wine as a lower alcohol alternative and that no alcohol wines may not be able to compete with a consumer preference for sweeter juice, soft drink and other beverages in India.” 

Australian Grape & Wine points out that the next stage of the collaboration will involve a return delegation of Australian winemakers and distributors to engage with their counterparts in India. Griffante says:

“Australian Grape & Wine will continue to working with our government and industry colleges in India to grow investment and build up the wine category in India for mutual benefit of our sectors.“

This project led by Australian Grape & Wine is supported by Australian government funding through the ATMAC program and is being run in collaboration with AWRI (Technical), Wine Australia (Regulatory and Marketing) and Austrade (Resourcing & Food and Wine Marketing).

Indian-origin actor Dev Patel heroically breaks up a knife fight in Australia

Dev Patel (a still from Lion)

Indian-origin actor Dev Patel who is best known for Slumdog Millionaire and Lion recently broke up a knife fight in Adelaide, Australia.

Dev Patel’s representatives confirmed that the actor who lives in Adelaide with his Australian girlfriend, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, “acted on his natural instinct.”

As per media reports, a man and a woman were reportedly fighting on Gouger Street just after 8.45 pm on Monday around a convenience store when Dev Patel along with other witnesses attempted to break up the fight. His representative told the media:

“We can confirm that last night, in Adelaide, Dev Patel and his friends witnessed a violent altercation that was already in progress outside of a convenience store. Dev acted on his natural instinct to try and de-escalate the situation and break up the fight. The group was thankfully successful in doing so and they remained on site to ensure that the police and eventually the ambulance arrived.”

Police officers were called at around 8.45 pm as the woman allegedly stabbed the man in the chest.

A 32-year-old man from Glengowrie was treated at the scene by ambulance officers before being taken to the Royal Adelaide Hospital. His injuries are not considered life-threatening.

The 34-year-old woman from Park Holme was arrested at the scene and charged with aggravated assault causing harm and has been refused bail.

The statement from Dev Patel’s representative continued:

“There are no heroes in this situation and sadly this specific incident highlights a larger systemic issue of marginalised members of society not being treated with the dignity and respect they deserve. The hope is that the same level of media attention this story is receiving (solely because Dev, as a famous person, was involved) can be a catalyst for lawmakers to be compassionate in determining long-term solutions to help not only the individuals who were involved but the community at large.”

The Oscar-nominated actor has also starred in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Hotel Mumbai, and The Green Knight.

WATCH VIDEO: Actor Dev Patel Steps In To Break Up Knife Fight In South Australia

Sole traders should have access to world-class accounting services, says Hnry’s Karan Anand

The Hnry team - Karan Anand, James Fuller and Claire Fuller. Image: Supplied.

The New Zealand-based fintech startup, Hnry, is seeing a rapid rise in the Australian market. It calculates and lodges income tax, GST, BAS, and PAYG for the user. In fact, Hnry can review a person’s expenses, pay Medicare and student loan obligations and even chase up clients if they’re falling behind in paying their invoices.

The users of Hnry are given a bank account that receives payment and Hnry automatically calculates the correct amount of GST, income tax, Medicare levy, student loans, superannuation owed – whatever is relevant. It also pays the amount to the ATO and super fund and then the remainder is transferred to your personal bank account.

Hnry’s managing director in Australia Karan Anand told Startup Daily that a sole trader should pay the company only when they are earning. He adds:

“It’s an important part of what we offer given that many sole traders’ income isn’t consistent.”

Karan says that this also means that a sole trader should have access to world-class accounting services:

“In fact, we can use digital technology to alleviate a lot of the stress that goes on with that.”

Karan observes that many people move into contracting or freelancing because “it’s a lifestyle choice.” He adds:

“So, if it’s a lifestyle choice, your life shouldn’t be hampered by the stress that comes with [working] out what to do with business expenses, or chasing up invoices.”

Due to the nature of service it is providing, Hnry has grown rapidly since its launch in New Zealand in 2017 – its user base has grown by 30% month on month.

Hnry co-founders are a husband and wife team of James and Claire Fuller who developed the accounting software after experiencing finance administration struggles when they were sole traders themselves. Their company is now considered Australasia’s fastest-growing digital accountancy and New Zealand’s largest specialist tax accountancy. 

The company entered the Australian market in 2020 with a $4.1 million capital raise led by Equity Venture Partners. This was the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this didn’t hinder Hnry’s progress and the company was able to hire a team to provide real-time support to its customers. Karan observes:

“Providing access for that segment of the market to engage with best-in-class services that they wouldn’t usually be able to get because it’s too expensive.”

Karan, who was the first hire of Hnry’s Australian business, has presently 14 employees working under him dedicated to solving customer problems.

Hnry has strategic relationships with NAB and partnerships with investment platform Spaceship and payment solution provider Monoova. Experts believe that with more than 1 million Australians working as self-employed, an increase of up by 110k since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company will see continuous growth.

How could so many senior judges get law absolutely wrong?

Judicial Impartiality; Image Source: @CANVA
Judicial Impartiality; Image Source: @CANVA

By Gabrielle Appleby

Australians expect judges to make decisions impartially: that is, free from a range of improper and unacceptable political, financial and personal influences. Not only must they make decisions impartially, but they must also be seen to make their decisions impartially.

However, as the cases before the courts continually show, judges can make mistakes. Even when judges are not at fault, developments in behavioural psychology tell us to bias and interference can get in the way of good decisions.

Today’s release of the Australian Law Reform Commission’s report on judicial impartiality in federal courts is a much-needed examination of how the whole court system supports judges to deliver justice impartially. Its recommendations would change how judges are appointed, monitor judicial diversity, unleash the transformative potential of judicial education, and create an independent avenue to deal with complaints against the federal judiciary.

If the government and the courts pursue these recommendations, there would be major changes to the federal court system.

Judicial Impartiality; Image Source: @CANVA
Judicial Impartiality; Image Source: @CANVA

Why look at judicial impartiality?

The report stemmed from concerns by the then attorney-general, Christian Porter, that there might be a misunderstanding of the test for bias among the judiciary, the legal profession and the public. Porter’s concern arose out of a Western Australian family law case involving a judge who refused to step down after it was revealed that he had had coffee with, spoken on the phone and sent text messages to a senior lawyer involved in a case he was deciding.

A majority of the Full Court of the Family Court agreed with him that there were no apparent bias concerns. But the High Court unanimously found apparent bias and ordered the matter be retried.

How could so many senior federal judges have got the law wrong?

The test and procedure for judicial bias

Was there a problem with the test, which requires the judge to adopt the perspective of an ordinary, informed member of the public in relation to their own circumstances? No, according to the commission. But there is more work to be done in developing and reviewing guidelines for judges and the public to create better clarity and understanding of the principles and processes involved.

The commission also recommended changes to the process whereby judges must determine their own bias. The idea is a hard one for the public to accept. It also cuts against the findings of behavioural psychology, which raises questions about judges’ capacity to assess their own bias from the perspective of a third party.

Judicial Impartiality; Image Source: @CANVA
Judicial Impartiality; Image Source: @CANVA

The need for more wide-ranging reform

These are all important reforms. But the commission goes further and makes a number of recommendations that, if adopted, would transform the judiciary as an institution by elevating the values of impartiality, representativeness, accountability and transparency. This would bring Australia into line with international standards and trends.

Judicial appointments

The commission recommends that the Australian government develop a more transparent process for judicial appointments. This would involve the publication of criteria for an appointment, public calls for expressions of interest, and a commitment to promoting diversity in the judiciary.

This recommendation reflects the need for a transparent system to minimise the perception that appointments are political. It also responds to the need for excellent legal minds on the bench that are informed by a diversity of backgrounds and life experiences. This would expose and reduce social and cultural bias at an institutional level.

The current system of appointments, which amounts to an opaque “captain’s pick” by the government of the day, is increasingly being abandoned internationally. Put simply, it is incapable of meeting these objectives.

An independent commission to deal with complaints

The commission also recommends the Australian government establish a federal judicial commission. This would provide an independent body to receive and deal with complaints against judges, including complaints about bias.

The establishment of an independent federal judicial commission to deal with complaints and discipline is long overdue. We see movement in this direction internationally, as well as in Australian states and territories.

The absence of such a body would not be tolerated in any other workplace in Australia. Indeed, we have recently seen the Australian Human Rights Commission recommended the establishment of something similar for the federal parliament.

Judicial Impartiality; Image Source: @CANVA
Judicial Impartiality; Image Source: @CANVA

Yes, it would have to be established carefully, with appropriate respect for judicial independence and the separation of powers. But its establishment would support judicial impartiality and public confidence in the independence and integrity of the courts.

There is ample evidence that while most judicial officers perform their tasks with the highest integrity, they are not above human error and misconduct. Yet there is no effective mechanism for addressing poor behaviour, sometimes of a very serious nature.

An independent commission would provide an avenue for complaints to be dealt with fairly for both the complainant and the judicial officer. A transparent, independent, proportionate response could then be determined.

The Law Reform Commission accepts this is a significant reform and so recommends further consultation before it’s implemented. But it was seen as crucial by key stakeholders, including the Australian Bar Association and the Law Council of Australia.

The horizon looks promising for this reform: Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has indicated he intends to introduce a commission to investigate alleged misconduct by judges after the government introduces its federal integrity commission.

Educating and supporting judges

Finally, the commission recommends greater structure and transparency from within the courts relating to how judges receive ongoing education. There is currently an expectation (that is, unenforceable) that judges will undertake five days of education and training on the appointment, and then five further days each year. Of course, judicial education is important to ensure judges stay up to date on the substantive law – including the law and process relating to impartiality.

But judicial education can have a deeper and more transformative role. Well-designed training programs can be directed at exposing cognitive biases in judicial decision-making. The shortcuts and stereotypes that judges (like all of us) use can lead to gendered and racial outcomes.

Training can also equip judges with the tools needed to manage the very demanding work they do.

It is no surprise, then, that the commission identifies core topics for the education of judges such as:

  • emotional awareness and emotion management
  • trauma-informed approaches
  • cultural competency
  • cultural humility and understanding of diversity
  • reflective practice
  • mental health and wellbeing
  • critical reflection on social and cultural bias.

A separate recommendation explicitly calls for a structured and ongoing program of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cross-cultural education for members of the judiciary. This would be led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and organisations.

A recent report for the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration that I’ve been involved with reveals the provision of and attendance at judicial training at the moment is, shall we say, haphazard.

What we do know is the bulk of education is directed at substantive law training by judges for judges. The commission’s recommendations, if adopted, provide an avenue for judicial education and training to provide a platform that supports – and potentially transforms – judicial impartiality.

Gabrielle Appleby, Professor, UNSW Law School, UNSW Sydney

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

Australian ‘inQ’ and Indian ‘WE Hub’ launch women-led tech start-ups market access pathways

Women-led tech start-ups market access pathways; Image Source: @Canva
Women-led tech start-ups market access pathways; Image Source: @Canva

Sydney-based inQ Innovation Global in partnership with WE HUB, an initiative of the Government of Telangana state in India has launched a Market Access and Business Pathways Program for Women-led technology businesses.

This new initiative is supported by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) under its $12.7 million Australia-India Bi-lateral Cyber and Critical Technology Partnership (AICCTP). Under this grant program, the Australian government recognises that “India and Australia have a key role to play in contributing to the global development of critical and emerging technologies.”

inQ Innovation Global and WE HUB was selected in the 2nd round of the AICCTP Grant Program for their project on practical collaboration on cyber and critical technology issues.

inQ’s Co-Founder and CEO Irfan Malik (Image source: LinkedIn)

inQ Innovation which was set up in 2017 offers incubators for start-ups, co-working spaces for early-stage innovative companies, and acts as a launch pad for activities in the start-up ecosystem. On starting this initiative for women-led technology businesses, inQ’s Co-Founder and CEO Irfan Malik told The Australia Today:

“A global innovation exchange program will be integral to building an ongoing bilateral start-up-scale-up exchange program to support and enrich the start-up ecosystem for Women Entrepreneurs in Cyberspace and Critical Technology across the two nations.”

The program launch saw a stellar line-up of speakers from India & Australia including, Mr. Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, Industries & Commerce (I&C) & Information Technology (IT) Departments, Govt. of Telangana, Ms Sarah Kirlew, Consul General of Australia, South India, Ms Natasha Morris on behalf of Dr Melanie Broder, Director, Australian Govt. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade – Cyber Affairs AICCTP Program Director, Ms. Jacqui Nelson, CEO, Dekko Secure, Ms. Deepthi Ravula, CEO, WE HUB, Govt. of Telangana, Dr Ramanan Ramanathan, Former (First) Mission Director Atal Innovation Mission, Mr. Amit Chaubey, Chair – Australian Information Security Association (AISA)-NSW. 

Further, Malik feels that the signing of the historic Australia-India Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (AI-ECTA) will help accelerate women-led technology business scale to global markets.

“This will increase the participation of women entrepreneurs in the areas of cyber and critical technologies.”

Deepthi Ravula is CEO of WE HUB a government of Telangana initiative.  

Ms Ravula said, “For over a decade, start-ups, especially women entrepreneurs in tech, have expressed a lack of opportunities and financial support to optimally scale up their businesses globally.”

Deepthi Ravula, CEO, WE HUB

“What differentiates the AICCTP Market Access and Business Pathways start-up-scale-up exchange program in partnership with inQ Innovation, is that we will holistically address the big tech hurdles and challenges faced by women-led tech businesses, not just by mentoring them but also supporting them with the required financial impetus to launch and accelerate their businesses,” 

Ms Ravula added.

The new initiative will host six women-led Indian start-ups and six women-led Australian start-ups foraying in the following areas:

  • Cybersecurity and Critical Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, and Quantum Computing;
  • Next Generation Telecommunications (5G & 6G);
  • Internet of Things (IoT);
  • Synthetic biology (SynBio);
  • Genomics & Genetic Engineering;
  • Low Emission Alternative Fuels;
  • Autonomous Vehicles, Drones, Swarming and Collaborative Robotics; and
  • Big Data.
Sarah Kirlew, Consul General of Australia, South India

Mr Malik says that throughout the exchange program shortlisted startups would have the ecosystem to access Australia-India collaborations, access to investors, business advisory support, mentors, market readiness assessment, and potential opportunities to pilot and showcase in February 2023.

The program will also aim to support the launch of these 6 companies each across the bi-lateral markets and with an option to provide further Soft-landing support in the respective markets for 3 months beyond the program to ensure impactful business outcomes.

Applications for Expression of Interest from women-led startups opened on the 1st of August 2022 and Applications Close on the 1st of September 2022,

Sunaina Gowan explores experiences of Indian-Australian professionals through her new book

Dr Sunaina Gowan (Image supplied)

A new book entitled The Ethnically Diverse Workplace: Experience of Immigrant Indian Professionals in Australia by Dr Sunaina Gowan aims to highlight real and imagined discrimination against Indian immigrants through marginalisation based on accent, colour, or ethnic background.

Book cover: The Ethnically Diverse Workplace: Experience of Immigrant Indian Professionals in Australia (Image supplied)

Dr Gowan is a seasoned higher education leader who has worked in the education and management fields for over two decades. She has also taught a range of business and communication courses at several colleges and universities in Australia. Her research interests include student development and belonging, cultural diversity, environmental concerns, principles of responsible business and education, inclusiveness, and emotional labour.

Dr Sunaina Gowan with Neeraj and Simran Gowan (Image supplied)

Dr Gowan told The Australia Today that this book is based on in-depth interviews and anecdotal evidence. She adds that the book would not have been conceivable if her husband, Neeraj, and daughter, Simran, had not encouraged her to publish it. Explaining her choice of the research topic for this book, Dr Gowan observes:

“I’ve always wanted to write a book. When I finally chose to pursue it, I had no idea it would lead me on a journey of personal highs and lows while writing about immigrants’ experiences, particularly immigrant Indian professionals in Australia.”

Further, Dr Gowan adds that the Australian workplace continues to become more ethnically diverse as the number of skilled or professional migrants from India keeps arriving each year. 

The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has found that India has overtaken China and New Zealand to become the third largest country of birth for Australian residents. As per Census 2021, 673,352 people living in Australia reported India as their country of birth – an increase of 220,000, or 47.9% per cent, since the previous census in 2016.

Dr Sunaina Gowan with Neeraj and Simran Gowan (Image supplied)

Dr Gowan, who grew up in North Dakota, USA, arrived in Australia from New Delhi, India, in 2004, to join her husband, Neeraj, who had been accepted into a leading business school in Sydney. She adds:

“Family and friends had questioned our choice to immigrate and leave behind our secure, well-paying careers for student life in Sydney.  It was my idea to migrate. I had a strong yearning to return to ‘western civilisation.’ Why Australia, specifically? I’m still unsure.”

Dr Gowan says while she has not personally experienced any racism or prejudice in Australia, it doesn’t mean that her spirit and ambitions as an ethnic immigrant woman have not been smothered on several occasions. She observes:

“I have encountered the well-known glass and bamboo ceiling. Despite my degrees and job experience, I have often been passed over for top management positions. I have gone through what some of the respondents in this book have gone through and am slowly coming to terms with it.”

Dr Sunaina Gowan (image supplied)

Like many other skilled and professional Indian immigrants who wish to call Australia home, despite having qualifications and extensive experience, Dr Gowan too had to invest time and energy in studying for additional degrees and looking for local work experience before the Australian employers considered her for a role in higher education. She says:

“When you find yourself in a mostly white setting, you will feel strange and doubt your abilities. You will go through everyday emotional labour if you are not ‘like them.’ Do not get burned out. Persist and never second-guess yourself, and you will shine, since Indians are diligent workers who are loyal and trustworthy.”

Dr Gowan notes that more than a million migrants arrived in Australia in the past five years. She is hopeful that her research would encourage and promote greater awareness amongst Australian management and boards to better serve the skilled migrant, especially the highly valuable Indian professional diaspora.

International media’s silence over radical Islam’s ‘Sar Tan Se Juda’ beheadings in India is nauseating

Image Source: Sham_Sharma_Show

By Monica Verma


Kanhaiya Lal, Umesh Kolhe, Munish Bhardwaj, Ankit Jha, Shanu Pandey, and Nishank Rathore.
All these are names of people who were attacked in the past few weeks for supporting Nupur Sharma’s freedom of speech. Most of them are dead today. Udaipur’s Kanhaiya Lal was butchered with a cleaver. Nishank Rathore’s body was found on a railway track with a cryptic message sent to his father reading, “Gustakh-E-Nabi ki ek hi saza” [only one punishment for those who insult the Prophet].

Ankit Jha was, however, lucky that he survived the six knife stabs given by the assailants, but his parents are alleging that Bihar Police didn’t register an FIR until Nupur Sharma’s reference was removed. Six men across India were attacked brutally for freedom of speech and supporting Nupur Sharma, but not a single coverage of how radical Islamists are targeting India anywhere in the international press.

Gaus Mohammed and Riyaz, who beheaded Kanahiya lal (Left); Image Source; The Australia Today
Gaus Mohammed and Riyaz, who beheaded Kanahiya lal (Left); Image Source; The Australia Today

Contrast this with the outpour that Zubair’s arrest has generated. Almost all international media outlets have covered his arrest with headlines, stressing his identity as a Muslim and a journalist. The frame of reference chosen in their coverage is that of a journalist belonging to a minority community persecuted by a majoritarian state. For them, India is a fascist state that puts journalists behind bars for speaking the truth to power. It is a country where minorities are being suppressed by the current regime. But all this sounds like well-crafted work of fiction when on the ground, multiple men are losing their lives to the “Sar Tan Se Juda” mobs [beheading].

Needed: A Crackdown On Beheading Calls, 'Sar Tan Se Juda' Slogans Over  Blasphemy

What explains this international silence on murders committed over blasphemy in India? The Western media hasn’t been this silent over Islamist mobs baying for the blood of those who committed alleged blasphemy in other cases though. Remember the international support that Asiya Bibi received when she was sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan?

The assassination of Salman Taseer, then governor of Punjab province in Pakistan, over blasphemy was also widely condemned internationally. And no one needs to be reminded of the “Je Suis Charlie” protests that evoked massive support from freedom of speech warriors across the world after a deadly shooting at French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s office.

2 men receive 'Sar tan se juda in 10 days' threat in Bharatpur in Rajasthan

Six people have been attacked in India even as multiple others are getting threats on a daily basis. The person at the centre of it all, Nupur Sharma herself has been forced to stay away from public life owing to grave danger to her well-being. All of this is due to the fear of Islamists but not an iota of protest internationally. The only reason for this silence is the need to project India as “unsafe” for minorities. In the daily hit jobs targeting India over the treatment of Muslims, such violent incidents of Hindu men being killed don’t fit their narrative.

India must also stop expecting any international condemnation of these events. Remember, when China was rising? There was a spate of articles questioning China’s human rights record, its authoritarian governance, treatment of ethnic minorities, etc. Today India is in the same shoes. It is already the third largest economy by purchasing power parity and is all set to become the third largest economy nominally as well by 2030.

A Hard Reality of Islam With Targeted Others. | Struggle for Hindu Existence

India’s influence and geopolitical weight are on an ascending trajectory. Its soft power needs to be undercut. It is possible only when India is put on a back-foot by inventing a narrative that “minorities are under attack in India”. It is here that the incidents of violence over blasphemy by Islamist mobs become inconvenient. Hence the hard-walling of this narrative by the international media.

This same media has the space and will to cover fake incidents of lynchings by Hindu mobs over beef without any authentic fact-check but when it comes to events such as these which are backed by evidence, it prefers to lie low and stay silent. In the case of China, these media organisations still had to rely on home-grown experts to produce anti-China commentary. But in the case of India, the job has become easier because many so-called Indian “journalists” have become ready entrepreneurs in writing for these outlets by utilising their own prejudice against the current government to the hilt.

This Time Graffiti by Miscreants on Wall of Old Police Outpost near  District Court - Mangalorean.com
Graffiti by Miscreants on Wall of Old Police Outpost near District Court Mangaluru, Karnataka; image source: www.mangalorean.com

India indeed is in a precarious situation. On one hand, there is a constant narrative demonising the majority community over the treatment of minorities. There are conferences being organised in university departments the world over painting a doomsday scenario for India due to the tyranny of the ruling party. On the other hand, there is a credible threat from radical Islam to the country. Just a few days ago, a module of the Popular Front of India (PFI), a radical Islamist organisation was busted in Patna, Bihar.

In the documents recovered from this raid, the most alarming was a “Vision 2047” document that disclosed plans to turn India into an Islamic State by 2047. The documents that generated a furore domestically were hardly even noticed by the international media. Any action by India against radical Islam will increasingly call for even more scrutiny and condemnation by the global press. That’s the challenge that India must face. Even innocent people belonging to the so-called majority Hindu community keep losing their lives.

Contributing Author: Monica Verma is a PhD in International Relations from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. Her research focuses on the political economy of South Asia and regional integration. 

This article was first published on www.news18.com. We have republished it with kind permission.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The Australia Today is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts, or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of The Australia Today and The Australia Today News does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.  

Tamannah, Samantha, Vaani Kapoor and Abhishekh Bachchan to mesmerise at IFFM 2022

Indian Film Festival of Melbourne; Image Source: Supplied
Indian Film Festival of Melbourne; Image Source: Supplied

Alia Bhatt-starrer Gangubai Kathiawadi’ has dominated the nominations for the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne (IFFM) Awards 2022.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s directorial is nominated in three categories, including Best Film, Best Actress and Best Director. Ranveer Singh’s sports drama ’83’ and Suriya’s ‘Jai Bhim’ will also compete with ‘Gangubai’ for the Best Film award. Apart from Alia, Deepika Padukone and Vidya Balan will also be vying for the award of Best Actress for their respective films ‘Gehraiyaan’ and ‘Jalsa’.

For the Best Actor category, Ranveer Singh (83), Abhishekh Bachchan (Dasvi) and Vicky Kaushal (Sardar Udham) among others are nominated.

In its 13th edition to be held this month, the IFFM 2022 is making its comeback for its physical version of the festival, after the festival has been solely virtual for the last two years. This year the festival starts on 12-20 August and will also have especially virtual programming between 13-30 August for Australian audiences. This year there are over 100 films across 23 languages being screened at the festival.

The Awards night is all set to take place on the 14th of August in Melbourne. The awards will recognise the best in cinematic talent from across the Indian subcontinent across the formats of feature films and will also honour the acclaimed OTT series. This year’s nominations will see films and content which were released between August 2021 to April 2022.

Speaking about the jury, it comprises global award-winning film editor Jill Bilcock, one of Australia’s renowned actors Vince Colosimo, multi-award-winning director Geoffrey Wright and multi-award-winning filmmaker Nadia Tass.

Let’s have a look at the complete list of IFFM 2022 nominations:

BEST FILM

Image


1. 83 / Hindi
2. Badhaai Do / Hindi
3. Gangubai Kathiawadi / Hindi
4. Jai Bhim / Tamil
5. Minnal Murali / Malayalam
6. Paka (River of Blood) / Malayalam
7. Sardar Udham / Hindi
8. The Rapist / English, Hindi

BEST INDIE FILM
1. Boomba Ride / Mishing
2. Dug Dug / Hindi
3. Jaggi / Punjabi
4. Once Upon a Time in Calcutta / Bengali
5. Pedro / Kannada
6. Shankar’s Fairies / Hindi
7. Shoebox / Hindi
8. Fairy Folk / Hindi, English

BEST ACTOR (MALE)

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1. Gopal Hegde, Pedro / Kannada
2. Rajkummar Rao, Badhaai Do / Hindi
3. Ramnish Chaudhary, Jaggi / Punjabi
4. Ranveer Singh, 83 / Hindi
5. Suriya, Jai Bhim / Tamil
6. Tovino Thomas, Minnal Murali / Malayalam
7. Vicky Kaushal, Sardar Udham / Hindi
8. Abhishek Bachchan – Dasvi / Hindi

BEST ACTOR (FEMALE)

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1. Alia Bhatt, Gangubai Kathiawadi / Hindi
2. Bhumi Pednekar, Badhaai Do / Hindi
3. Deepika Padukone, Gehraiyaan / Hindi
4. Konkona Sen Sharma, The Rapist / English, Hindi
5. Lijomol Jose, Jai Bhim / Tamil
6. Shefali Shah, Jalsa / Hindi
7. Sreelekha Mitra, Once Upon A Time In Calcutta / Bengali
8. Vidya Balan, Jalsa / Hindi

BEST DIRECTOR

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1. Anmol Sidhu, Jaggi / Punjabi
2. Aparna Sen, The Rapist / Hindi
3. Kabir Khan, 83 / Hindi
4. Pan Nalin, Chhello Show (Last Film Show) / Gujarati
5. Sanjay Leela Bhansali Gangubai Kathiawadi / Hindi
6. Shoojit Sircar, Sardar Udham / Hindi
7. Suresh Triveni, Jalsa / Hindi
8. T.J. Gnanavel, Jai Bhim / Tamil

BEST DOCUMENTARY
1. A Night of Knowing Nothing
2. Ayena (Mirror)
3. Kicking Balls
4. Ladies Only
5. Urf (A.K.A)

BEST FILM FROM SUBCONTINENT

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1. Joyland / Pakistan
2. Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom / Bhutan
3. No Land’s Man / Bangladesh
4. Rehana Maryam Noor / Bangladesh
5. The Newspaper / Sri LankaBEST ACTOR IN A SERIES
1. Mohit Raina, Mumbai Diaries 26/11
2. Parambrata Chatterjee, Aranyak
3. Varun Mitra, Guilty Minds
4. Tahir Raj Bhasin, Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein
5. Dhruv Sehgal, Little Things Final Season

BEST ACTRESS IN A SERIES
1. Konkona Sensharma, Mumbai Diaries 26/11
2. Sakshi Tanwar, Mai
3. Madhuri Dixit, Fame Game
4. Mithila Palkar, Little Things
5. Raveena Tandon, Aranyak
6. Shriya Pilgaonkar, Guilty Minds

BEST SERIES
1. Aranyak
2. Mumbai Diaries 26/11
3. Fame Game
4. Mai
5. Little Things Final Season
6. Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein 

RBA lifts interest rate for fourth consecutive month, here are details

Interest Rate; Image Source: @CANVA
Interest Rate; Image Source: @CANVA

The Reserve Bank of Australia lifted interest rates for the fourth month in a row. The RBA board decided to increase the cash rate target by 50 basis points to 1.85 per cent. It also increased the interest rate on Exchange Settlement balances by 50 basis points to 1.75 per cent.

The Board places a high priority on returning inflation to the 2–3 per cent range over time while keeping the economy on an even keel. The path to achieving this balance is a narrow one and clouded in uncertainty, not least because of global developments.

Inflation in Australia is the highest it has been since the early 1990s. In headline terms, inflation was 6.1 per cent over the year in the June quarter; in underlying terms, it was 4.9 per cent. Global factors explain much of the increase in inflation, but domestic factors are also playing a role. There are widespread upward pressures on prices from strong demand, a tight labour market and capacity constraints in some sectors of the economy.

Reserve Bank Of Australia; Picture Source: @CANVA
Reserve Bank Of Australia; Picture Source: @CANVA

The board claims that today’s increase in interest rates is a further step in the normalisation of monetary conditions in Australia.

The increase in interest rates over recent months has been required to bring inflation back to target and to create a more sustainable balance of demand and supply in the Australian economy. The Board expects to take further steps in the process of normalising monetary conditions over the months ahead, but it is not on a pre-set path.

The size and timing of future interest rate increases will be guided by the incoming data and the Board’s assessment of the outlook for inflation and the labour market. The Board is committed to doing what is necessary to ensure that inflation in Australia returns to target over time.

Inflation is expected to peak later this year and then decline back towards the 2–3 per cent range.

The expected moderation in inflation reflects the ongoing resolution of global supply-side problems, the stabilisation of commodity prices and the impact of rising interest rates. Medium-term inflation expectations remain well anchored, and it is important that this remains the case.

Image source: Big Four OZ banks - Wikipedia.
Image source: Big Four OZ banks – Wikipedia.

The Bank’s central forecast is for CPI inflation to be around 7¾ per cent over 2022, a little above 4 per cent over 2023 and around 3 per cent over 2024.

The Australian economy is expected to continue to grow strongly this year, with the pace of growth then slowing. Employment is growing strongly, consumer spending has been resilient and an upswing in business investment is underway. National income is also being boosted by a rise in the terms of trade, which are at a record high. The Bank’s central forecast is for GDP growth of 3¼ per cent over 2022 and 1¾ per cent in each of the following two years.

Beyond that, some increase in unemployment is expected as economic growth slows.

The Bank’s central forecast is for the unemployment rate to be around 4 per cent at the end of 2024. Our liaison program and business surveys continue to point to a lift in wage growth from the low rates of recent years as firms compete for staff in the tight labour market.

A key source of uncertainty continues to be the behaviour of household spending. Higher inflation and higher interest rates are putting pressure on household budgets. Consumer confidence has also fallen and housing prices are declining in some markets after the large increases in recent years. Working in the other direction, people are finding jobs and obtaining more hours of work. Many households have also built up large financial buffers and the saving rate remains higher than it was before the pandemic. The Board will be paying close attention to how these various factors balance out as it assesses the appropriate setting of monetary policy.

The outlook for global economic growth has been downgraded due to pressures on real incomes from higher inflation, the tightening of monetary policy in most countries, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the COVID containment measures in China.

Mother and Son duo get commissioned in Indian Army 27 years apart in a ‘rare euphoric moment’

Major Smita Chaturvedi (Retd) with her son (Image source: Ministry of Defence, Government of India, PRO Chennai - Twitter)

Major Smita Chaturvedi (Retd) could not contain her happiness and pride as her son passed out from the Officers Training Academy in Chennai, India. While it is a matter of pride and joy for any parent to see their child donning the Indian Army uniform, for Major Chaturvedi (Retd) it was truly special as she had got commissioned into the Indian Army from the same academy 27 years ago.

The Indian Ministry of Defence shared this good news on Twitter calling it a ‘rare euphoric moment’.

The Ministry also shared an old picture of Major Chaturvedi (Retd) donning the uniform herself.
(Image source: Ministry of Defence, Government of India, PRO Chennai – Twitter)

The Ministry also tweeted a video of Major Chaturvedi (Retd) mentioning that she was ecstatic about her son joining the Army like herself.

A total of 125 Gentlemen and 41 Lady Cadets got commissioned into the Indian Army at Officers Training Academy this year.

Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri killed in drone strike confirms President Biden

Ayman al-Zawahiri, international terrorist and Al Quida Chief; Image Source: Twitter CBS
Ayman al-Zawahiri, international terrorist and Al Quida Chief; Image Source: Twitter CBS

Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed on Saturday in an air strike by the United States, US President Joe Biden confirmed.

“On Saturday, at my direction, the United States successfully concluded an air strike in Kabul, Afghanistan and killed Al Qaeda Amir Ayman al-Zawahiri,” Biden said in a media briefing.

The US President said that justice has been delivered, adding, “No matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the US will find you and take you out.”

“He carved a trail of murder and violence against American citizens, American service members, American diplomats, and American interests. Zawahri was Bin Laden’s leader, his number two man, and his deputy during the time of terrorist attacks on 9/11. He was deeply involved in the planning of 9/11,”

Biden said.

“When I ended our military mission in Afghanistan almost a year ago, I made a decision that after 20 years of war, the United States no longer needed thousands of boots on the ground in Afghanistan to protect America from terrorists who seek to do us harm,” Biden said, adding “I made a promise to the American people that we would continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and beyond. We’ve done just that.”

Who was Ayman al-Zawahiri

Al Qaeda chief and key plotter of the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Born in an Egyptian middle-class family of scholars and doctors, Ayman al Zawahiri grew up to be a doctor.

He was the grandson of Rabia al-Zawahiri, the grand imam of Al Azhar, which is the centre of Sunni Islamic learning in the Middle East and one of Islam’s most important mosques.

Zawahiri served three years as a surgeon in the Egyptian Army, but his journey from an eye surgeon to becoming a most wanted global terrorist started after he met Laden in 1986, and joined Laden as his personal advisor and physician.

In 1993, he took over the leadership of Islamic Jihad in Egypt and became a leading figure in a campaign in the mid-1990s to overthrow the government and set up a purist Islamic state. He was found to be involved in the killing of over 1,200 Egyptians.

Years later, Zawahiri became number two on the list of “most wanted terrorists” announced by the US government in 2001.

In 1998, Zawahiri finally merged the Egyptian Islamic Jihad with Al-Qaeda.

Zawahiri was indicted for his alleged role in the bombings of August 7, 1998, when nearly simultaneous bombs blew up in front of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in Africa – 224 people died in the blasts, including 12 Americans, and more than 4,500 people were wounded.

The culmination of Zawahiri’s terror plotting came on September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. A fourth hijacked airliner, headed for Washington, crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought back.
Both he and bin Laden escaped US forces in Afghanistan in late 2001.

In May 2003, Zawahiri was found involved in suicide bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing 23 people, including nine Americans, days after a tape thought to contain Zawahiri’s voice was released.
Zawahiri emerged as a prominent speaker of Al-Qaeda, in recent years after he appeared in 16 videos and audiotapes in 2007, four times as many as Bin Laden, as the group tried to radicalise and recruit Muslims around the world.

His whereabouts were a mystery for several years, but he was believed to be hiding along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In January 2006, the US had earlier tried to kill Zawahiri in a missile strike near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The attack killed four al-Qaeda members, but Zawahiri survived and appeared on video two weeks later, warning US President George W Bush that neither he nor “all the powers on earth” could bring his death “one second closer”.

Charles Lister is a senior fellow and the Director of the Syria and Countering Terrorism & Extremism programs at the Middle East Institute.

According to Charles Lister, “The strike and its reported location — in Kabul’s Sherpur neighbourhood — raise fascinating questions about how Zawahiri was found, and in all likelihood, about who sold him out.’

“Already, local reports suggest relatives of Sirajuddin Haqqani may have been present and were possibly killed in the strike. While we may never know some of the answers, this will serve to exacerbate already tense inter-factional divisions within the Taliban.”

Image
This building in which #Zawahiri was killed was owned by Sirajuddin Haqqani, whose son & son-in-law also died in the strike.

“Did a Taliban operative cooperate with this U.S. strike, or was a wing of the Taliban (the Haqqani Network) providing Zawahiri shelter in Kabul? Either or both possibilities could trigger an intense internal crisis within the Taliban, threaten to break down the Doha Agreement, and heighten hostilities between a wide variety of other rival actors vying for advantage in Afghanistan.”

“More than anything else, Islamic State-Khorasan Province may stand to benefit the most, exploiting the inevitable sense of paranoia and disenchantment that foreign fighters and extreme elements within the Taliban will likely feel in the aftermath of this strike,” added Mr Lister

Zawahiri’s targeted killing comes a year after the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s takeover of the country.

Reports surpassed on Monday that the US killed Zawahiri in Afghanistan in a drone strike.

Following this, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid confirmed the strike and said, “An air strike was carried out on a residential house in Sherpur area of Kabul city on July 31.”

He said, “The nature of the incident was not apparent at first” but the security and intelligence services of the Islamic Emirate investigated the incident and “initial findings determined that the strike was carried out by an American drone.”

Mujahid said the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan “strongly condemns this attack on any pretext and calls it a clear violation of international principles and the Doha Agreement.”

The US State Department had offered a reward of up to USD 25 million for information leading directly to Zawahiri’s capture. 

Indian-Australian scientist contributes to breakthrough research that could make hydrogen safer to use

Alfred Deakin Professor Ying (Ian) Chen and Dr Srikanth Mateti (Deakin University)
Alfred Deakin Professor Ying (Ian) Chen and Dr Srikanth Mateti (Deakin University)

Hydrogen, which can be used as an alternate and sustainable solution to the gas crisis, has a significant problem – how to store it in enormous quantities for regular usage?

Now, it appears that Nanotechnology researchers, Alfred Deakin Professor Ying (Ian) Chen and Dr Srikanth Mateti, working at Deakin University’s Institute for Frontier Materials (IFM) have found an answer.

In a research paper published in the prestigious journal Materials Today they have offered a novel way to separate, store and transport huge amounts of hydrogen gas safely and with almost no wastage.

Alfred Deakin Professor Ying (Ian) Chen (Deakin University)

Prof. Chen, who is IFM’s Chair of Nanotechnology, said in a statement that Australia is “experiencing an unprecedented gas crisis and needs an urgent solution.” He adds:

“More efficient use of cleaner gaseous fuels such as hydrogen is an alternative approach to reduce carbon emissions and slow global warming.”

The traditional oil refinery methods make up 15 per cent of the world’s energy use. This process uses a high-energy ‘cryogenic distillation’ process to separate crude oil into different gases that are further used by consumers as petrol and household gas.

IFM researchers in their papers have outlined a completely different mechanochemical way of separating and storing gases that use a tiny fraction of the energy and create zero waste.

Dr Srikanth Mateti (LinkedIn)

Dr Mateti did his Master of Technology degree from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad in 2011 and received his PhD degree in 2018 from Deakin University. Since then, he has been working as a Research Fellow at IFM. His research interests include the in situ mechanochemical synthesis and controlled doping of carbon and nitrogen in various nanomaterials, especially nanotubes (boron nitride, carbon), nanosheets (graphene, BN, etc.) using mechanochemistry (high-energy ball milling), as well as in new applications (thermal management, energy storage, and catalysis)

Dr Mateti said he had to repeat the experiment 20 to 30 times before he could truly believe it himself. He adds:

“We were so surprised to see this happen, but each time we kept getting the exact same result, it was a eureka moment.”

This breakthrough is very significant and is considered a departure from accepted scientific wisdom on gas separation and storage. The researchers say that the special ingredient in their process is boron nitride powder. This is great for absorbing substances because “it is so small yet has a large amount of surface area for absorption.”

“The boron nitride powder can be re-used multiple times to carry out the same gas separation and storage process again and again.”

Alfred Deakin Professor Ying (Ian) Chen and Dr Srikanth Mateti (Deakin University)

Dr Mateti adds:

“There is no waste, the process requires no harsh chemicals and creates no by-products. Boron nitride itself is classified as a level-0 chemical, something that is deemed perfectly safe to have in your house. This means you could store hydrogen anywhere and use it whenever it’s needed.”

Deakin University notes that this breakthrough is the culmination of three decades of work led by Prof. Chen and his team and could help create solid-state storage technologies for a range of gases, including hydrogen.

Prof. Chen said that the current way of storing hydrogen is in a high-pressure tank, or by cooling the gas down to a liquid form. Both require large amounts of energy, as well as dangerous processes and chemicals. He adds:

“We show there’s mechanochemical alternative, using ball milling to store gas in the nanomaterial at room temperature. It doesn’t require high pressure or low temperatures, so it would offer a much cheaper and safer way to develop things like hydrogen powered vehicles.”

With their current research, Deakin’s IFM team has been able to test their process on a small scale, separating about two to three litres of material. Prof. Chen said:

“We need to further validate this method with industry to develop a practical application. To move this from the laboratory to a larger industry scale we need to verify that this process is cost saving, more efficient, and quicker than traditional methods of gas separation and storage.”

The research team is hopeful that with industry support they can scale up to a full pilot and have submitted a provisional patent application for their process.

STEM Sisters that empowers women of colour wins 2022 TechDiversity Business Award

Dr Ruwangi Fernando; Image Source: STEM Sisters
Dr Ruwangi Fernando; Image Source: STEM Sisters

Non-profit organisation STEM Sisters has won the Business Award at TechDiversity Awards 2022.

This year’s edition of the Tech Diversity Awards was held at the Sofitel in Melbourne and welcomed more than 470 attendees.

“The awards recognise and put a spotlight on those who are leading diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives across gender and minority groups in the tech sector.”

TechDiversity director Luli Adeyemo (Website)

Unveiling a new program called the ‘TechDiversity Academy,’ TechDiversity’s Director Luli Adeyemo said in a statement:

“We fundamentally need to change the mindsets within tech organisations. We are going to make diversity, equity, and inclusion a number one priority. It’s not about individual actors or activities, it’s about changing the systems. The academy is about providing the actual support, the education, and the frameworks and methodologies to do that.”

STEM Sisters, founded in 2017, is home to a diverse group who are deeply committed to an intersectional approach to empowering women of colour in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields (STEM). Their website observes:

“Gender Bias is a massive contributor to the issues women face in trying to secure a STEM job. Additionally, racial bias plays an equally trying role for people of colour in Australia. The difficulty is elevated with the combination of the two, therefore Women of Colour in STEM need more support.”

Dr Ruwangi Fernando, the Founder and Director of STEM Sisters, has won many awards for her academic and professional contributions to the field of IT technologies. With over 16 years of experience, she aims to help culturally and linguistically diverse women in STEM through a range of initiatives.

Dr Ruwangi Fernando; Image Source: STEM Sisters
Dr Ruwangi Fernando; Image Source: STEM Sisters

Under her leadership and guidance, STEM Sisters which has around 100 volunteers and a network of over 700 women runs nine structured programs addressing key challenges for women of colour in the field of STEM. 

Hosted since 2016, TechDiversity Awards are supported by the Victorian state government, Avanade, REA Group, the Australian Computer Society, and Salesforce.

If it’s not all sugar, is it bad for our health?

Indian Australian Family eating icecream: Image Source: CANVA
Indian Australian Family eating icecream: Image Source: CANVA

By Cherie Russell, Carley Grimes, Mark Lawrence, Phillip Baker, and Rebecca Lindberg

Humans have an evolutionary preference for sweetness. Sweet foods, like fruit and honey, were an important energy source for our ancestors.

However, in the modern world, sweetened foods are readily available, very cheap and advertised extensively. Now, we are consuming too much sugar in foods and drinks – the kind that is added rather than sugar that is naturally occurring. Consuming too much added sugar is bad news for health. It is linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes and tooth decay.

Because of these health concerns, manufacturers started using non-nutritive sweeteners to sweeten food as well. These sweeteners contain little to no kilojoules and include both artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame, and those that come from natural sources, such as stevia.

Our research, published today, shows the amount of added sugars and non-nutritive sweeteners in packaged foods and drinks has grown a lot over the last decade. This is especially true in middle-income countries, such as China and India, as well as in the Asia Pacific, including Australia.

Donuts (SuzyQ Doughnuts – Facebook)

From lollies to biscuits to drinks

Using market sales data from around the globe, we looked at the quantity of added sugar and non-nutritive sweeteners sold in packaged foods and drinks from 2007 to 2019.

We found per person volumes of non-nutritive sweeteners in drinks is now 36% higher globally. Added sugars in packaged food is 9% higher.

Non-nutritive sweeteners are most commonly added to confectionery. Ice creams and sweet biscuits are the fastest-growing food categories in terms of these sweeteners. The expanding use of added sugars and other sweeteners over the last decade means, overall, our packaged food supply is getting sweeter.

Our analysis shows the amount of added sugar used to sweeten drinks has increased globally. However, this is largely explained by a 50% increase in middle-income countries, such as China and India. Use has decreased in high-income countries, such as Australia and the United States.

It is recommended men consume less than nine teaspoons of sugar a day, while women should have less than six. However, because sugar is added to so many foods and drinks, over half of Australians exceed recommendations, eating an average of 14 teaspoons a day.

The shift from using added sugar to sweeteners to sweeten drinks is most common in carbonated soft drinks and bottled water. The World Health Organization is developing guidelines on the use of non-sugar sweeteners.

Soft drinks (Wikimedia Commons)

Rich and poor countries

There is a difference in added sugar and sweetener use between richer and poorer countries. The market for packaged food and beverages in high-income countries has become saturated. To continue to grow, large food and beverage corporations are expanding into middle-income countries.

Our findings demonstrate a double standard in the sweetening of the food supply, with manufacturers providing less sweet, “healthier” products in richer countries.

Unexpected consequences of control

To reduce the health harms of high added sugar intakes, many governments have acted to curb their use and consumption. Sugar levies, education campaigns, advertising restrictions and labelling are among these measures.

But such actions can encourage manufacturers to partially or completely substitute sugar with non-nutritive sweeteners to avoid penalties or cater to evolving population preferences.

In our study, we found regions with a higher number of policy actions to reduce sugar intakes had a significant increase in non-nutritive sweeteners sold in drinks.

Sugarcane and bowl of sugar (Wikimedia Commons)

Why is this a problem

While the harms of consuming too much added sugar are well known, relying on non-nutritive sweeteners as a solution also carries risk. Despite their lack of dietary energy, recent reviews, suggest consuming non-nutritive sweeteners may be linked with type 2 diabetes and heart disease and can disrupt the gut microbiome.

And because they are sweet, ingesting non-nutritive sweeteners influences our palates and encourages us to want more sweet food. This is of particular concern for children, who are still developing their lifelong taste preferences. Additionally, certain non-nutritive sweeteners are considered environmental contaminants and are not effectively removed from wastewater.

Non-nutritive sweeteners are only found in ultra-processed foods. These foods are industrially made, contain ingredients you would not find in a home kitchen, and are designed to be “hyper-palatable”. Eating more ultra-processed foods is linked with more heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer and death.

Ultra-processed foods are also environmentally harmful because they use significant resources such as energy, water, packaging materials and plastic waste.

Foods that contain sweeteners can receive a “health halo” if they don’t contain sugar, misleading the public and potentially displacing nutritious, whole foods in the diet.

Focus on nutrition

When making policy to improve public health nutrition, it is important to consider unintended consequences. Rather than focusing on specific nutrients, there is merit in advocating for policy that considers the broader aspects of food, including cultural importance, level of processing and environmental impacts. Such policy should promote nutritious, minimally processed foods.

We need to closely monitor the increasing sweetness of food and drinks and the growing use of added sugars and non-nutritive sweeteners. It is likely to shape our future taste preferences, food choices and human and planetary health.

Cherie Russell, PhD Candidate, Deakin University; Carley Grimes, Senior Lecturer Population Nutrition, Deakin University; Mark Lawrence, Professor of Public Health Nutrition, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Deakin University; Phillip Baker, Research Fellow, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Deakin University, Deakin University, and Rebecca Lindberg, Postdoctoral research fellow, Deakin University

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

Archie Roach: the great songman, tender and humble, who gave our people voice

Archie Roach AM; Image Source: (Wikipedia)
Archie Roach AM; Image Source: (Wikipedia)

By Bhiamie Williamson

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people. Archie Roach’s family have given permission for his name and image to be shared.


I am not sure of the first time I heard Archie Roach’s music.

Like most Aboriginal people born during or after the 1980s, we grew up listening to the person we affectionately called Uncle Archie. But there was one song that spoke to me from the first moment I heard it: From Paradise.

The song tells the story of a young girl who was taken away from her Country, the river lands, part of the stolen generations.

While his songs will play loud and long into the future, beneath his music Uncle Archie gave us something else, something deeply profound but mostly invisible.

He gave us – and all of Australia – an image of an Aboriginal man, tender and humble. An image long denied us.

Our greatest storyteller

The passing of Archie Roach has hit us – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – like the first crack of thunder after dark clouds descend.

You know it’s coming, but it shocks you still.

Uncle Archie gave voice, a story, to the experiences of so many of our people. His song Took the Children Away gave shape to a suffering so deep and profound. “This story’s right, this story’s true,” he sang.

These cathartic melodies continue to offer us healing.

His catalogue of music spans distances and experiences difficult to grasp. Uncle Archie’s gift was to write and bring to life through the strum of his guitar, the stories so familiar to us all.

His success took our stories to the nation, and the world.

To describe him simply as a musician fails to recognise him as a messenger. His music reaches through darkness like the beam of a lighthouse, offering guidance and safe harbour in times of despair.

Through his life and love of music, Uncle Archie became our greatest storyteller.

The father and mentor

The music of Uncle Archie came from a place of suffering. Taken away as a child, being homeless, a drunk, locked up, learning of the death of family through whispers and letters, grief was his constant companion.

Through this time, he found Ruby Hunter. They would have two sons, Amos and Eban. Uncle Archie and Aunty Ruby, with their kids, shared a life of love, laughter and song. My personal favourite song, Down City Streets, was written by Aunty Ruby.

Uncle Archie has supported hundreds of young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and inspired countless more through his foundation.

For decades Uncle Archie worked in youth detention centres, talking with young people who found themselves in hardship. He offered guidance and mentorship to young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people, illuminating a road through the difficulties of life, often the result of colonisation and racism.

He carefully navigated these spaces, acknowledging that while many young Aboriginal people, and especially boys, are born into a world that has been built to suppress them, they possess an inner strength stemming from culture and community. https://www.youtube.com/embed/EATZpASejvQ?wmode=transparent&start=0

Emu Man

Through his life, his dedication to Aunty Ruby, his devotion to his sons, his work with disengaged youth and his profound love for his people, Uncle Archie gave the nation an image of an Aboriginal man seldom found in the national psyche.

Images of the violent abuser, the drunk, the criminal, the absent father, or a combination of these, saturate our print media and television news bulletins. Even positive representations of Aboriginal men – the warrior, the sports star – exudes a sense of toughness and candour.

Rare, almost unheard of, are the stories of Aboriginal men as sensitive, soft, loving and vulnerable people.

Yet it is these qualities my research has revealed are most valued by our people.

The notion of “Emu Men” has emerged throughout my PhD.

Male emus are the primary carer for their chicks. The male partner will sit on the nest and the father rears the babies.

This notion of manhood and fatherhood – someone dedicated to his family, who has a primary responsibility to ensure the safety of his children and their passage through the world – appears to be deeply entwined in many of our peoples’ customs and cultures.

In Uncle Archie, we find the most profound sense of this alternate masculinity.

His songs will live on forever. But he also gifted us this alternate image of an Aboriginal man: someone soft, tender, loving, vulnerable, generous, resilient. Someone profoundly strong and with an inner wisdom, who sat on his nest and looked after his family and young people experiencing hardship.

It will take time to come to terms with this loss.

To his family we offer our hearts and hold you in our spirit.

This great songman gave our people a voice and a way to understand what has happened to us. He gave so much to a nation that treated him so badly.

As for me, like many others, Uncle Archie’s music and concerts has offered companionship through major life events. My wife and I danced to Love in the Morning on our wedding day.

And as for From Paradise, from the first moment I heard this song I thought he wrote it about my grandmother who was taken away and sent to Palm Island.

It is difficult to put words to this loss – Uncle Archie was always the one with the words.

Thank you for everything Uncle. May you soar with the eagles.

Aunty Ruby be happy to see you.

Bhiamie Williamson, Research Associate & PhD Candidate, Australian National University

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

Indian woman with a moustache is viral internet sensation

Shyja (Image Source: Meesakkari Facebook)

Shyja from India’s Kannur district has set the internet abuzz. The 35-year-old from the state of Kerala has a well groomed moustache and has no intentions of shaving it off. In fact her Facebook page is called ‘Meesakkari’ (woman with a moustache).

(Image Source: Meesakkari Facebook)

According to local media outlet Onmanorama Shyja says she is in love with her moustache and wouldn’t shave it off even if she is offered the most precious thing. She adds that lots of people have made fun of her and stare at her but she has not removed the moustache just because they have done that, the only reason for that being that she is really fond of her moustache.

(Image Source: Meesakkari Facebook)

Shyja has recieved both appreciation and sneers from people online but the BBC reports that she says she is unfazed by all the interest around her moustache.

Shyja states in her WhatsApp status section, below a photo of herself “I love my moustache”, according to the BBC.

(Image Source: Meesakkari Facebook)

Shyja, who uses only one name, would regularly get her eyebrows threaded but never felt the need to remove the hair above her upper lip.

When it began to thicken into a visible moustache around five years ago, Shyja decided to keep it.

(Image Source: Meesakkari Facebook)

Shyja has had to deal with several medical issues (six surgeries over the past decade) and overcoming multiple health crises has strengthened her belief that she should do what makes her happy. Shyja’s husband Lakshmanan and her family have been supportive of her decision to keep the moustache.

Muslim students offering Namaz on Monash University lawn say multi-faith room impractical

Image Source: Monash University Islamic Society (Instagram)
Image Source: Monash University Islamic Society (Instagram)

Muslim students at Australia’s prestigious Group-8 university Monash have offered Namaz on the lawn as a mark of protest.

The students put up protest signs at Monash University that said:

“Monash is not providing adequate prayer space on campus for Muslims. So we are praying outside. Please walk around us.”

May be an image of 12 people and outdoors
Image Source: Monash University Islamic Society (Facebook)

Vice President of the MUIS Fatima Ramtoola told ABC Radio Melbourne that there is only enough room for eight men and eight women to pray in the current space. She added

“It’s way too small for the number of people who have to use it… every single other university in Melbourne has adequate Muslim prayer space and we don’t understand why Monash University is not providing this for our Muslim students on campus.”

May be an image of 6 people and people standing
Image Source: Monash University Islamic Society (Facebook)

Prof. Sharon Pickering, Deputy Vice Chancellor of Education and Senior Vice-President at Monash, told the media that the university is meeting with students to try to reach a solution. She said:

“I understand it has taken too long, we want to work with them in remedying that and I really do hope that we’re able to get to an outcome sooner rather than later.”

Muslim students claim that they have been lobbying for a more enormous prayer hall dedicated to offering Namaz since 2018. Protesting students were updated last month that Monash is a “multi-faith” university and any new communal space built there would be made available to all staff and students.

May be an image of 3 people, people standing and headscarf
Image Source: Monash University Islamic Society (Facebook)

According to Monash University Islamic Society (MUIS) survey, this inadequate prayer space is used almost 2000 times a week by 233 students.

However, Ramtoola told the Age that male and female students wanted to pray together and the concept of a multi-faith communal room was impractical.

“A multi-faith prayer room is going to be very difficult to manage. Different faiths have different requirements, and putting all these faiths in a room together and expecting us to be able to regulate it … we’re just really confused about how we would be expected to do that.”

Monash University student union president Ishka de Silva said that Monash University’s insistence that all new spaces must be “multi-faith” was confusing and frustrating for Muslim students.

Monash University Islamic Society (Facebook)

The Religious Centre according to the Monash University website is a multi-faith centre suitable for spiritual services, weddings, christenings, funerals, memorials, private prayer and seminars.

Multi-faith centre Monash University (Image Source: Monash University website)

It has a circular design with stained glass windows, but no overt religious imagery. The main chapel includes a large, removable cross. The venue features the main chapel which seats around 400 people, a smaller chapel that can seat 40 people and several smaller meeting rooms.

New Zealand now has a ‘Waheguru Lane’ to connect with Indian cultural values

Wahe Guru lane, New Zealand; Image Source: indiannewslink
Wahe Guru lane, New Zealand; Image Source: indiannewslink

New Zealand’s Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board has honoured its Sikh residents by naming a passage off Redoubt Road in Manukau City as ‘Waheguru Lane.’

This is the result of the initiative of Sunshine Homes Limited which developed 18 new houses in the area.

Source: Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board OPEN AGENDA – 16 Nov 2021.

Earlier, the developer selected three names – Bhagat, Mohammed, and Nanak – that were closely associated with India’s cultural values. However, after further deliberation, these were changed to Simran Lane, Harkirat Lane, and Waheguru Lane for the private roads at 42, 42A, and 42B Redoubt Road.

Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board (Auckland Council)

Former Member of Parliament and current Otara Papatoetoe Local Board Member Dr Ashraf Chaudhry has been instrumental in getting approvals for Indian-origin names. He told local media:

“Naming of roads and streets in new housing developments is a recent expression of celebration of diversity. Local Councils have the right to give names to new streets and roads being built.”

Around 50% of the population of South Auckland is home to South Asian origin residents, especially in the areas of Manukau, Mangere, Manurewa, and Papatoetoe. Earlier, the local council had also approved Diwan Lane, Shahkot Way, and Deepak Lane in the South Auckland suburb of Papatoetoe.

Australian film and TV lack diversity and rife with discrimination

Arri_Alexa_camera (Wikimedia Commons)

By Amanda Coles, Justine Ferrer, and Vejune Zemaityte

It has been a fantastic year for Australian cinematographers in Hollywood.

Australian directors of photography represented two of the five nominees for best cinematography at the 2022 Oscars. Greig Fraser won the Oscar for his work as cinematographer on Dune. Ari Wegner became the second woman ever to be nominated for best cinematography in the 94-year history of the Oscars, for her work on Power of the Dog.

Now, the work of Aussie director of photography Mandy Walker is being seen by audiences around the globe on Baz Luhrmann’s film Elvis, grossing more than US$210 million (A$304 million) at the worldwide box office.

The director of photography or cinematographer is responsible for the overall look of a film. This key creative leadership role demands advanced artistic and technical expertise. Our new report, A Wider Lens: Australian camera workforce development and diversity, looks behind the red carpet glitz to analyse the workforce, the work model and the work culture of Australian film and television camera departments.

We have found a workplace lacking in diversity and a toxic work culture rife with discrimination, stress and precarious employment.

Our findings suggest Australian cinematographers are succeeding on the international stage in spite of – rather than because of – labour markets and working conditions in the Australian film and television production industry.

A serious lack of diversity

Commissioned by the Australian Cinematographers Society, the report draws from Screen Australia production data and on 640 complete responses to a survey of Australian film and television camera professionals conducted in early 2021.

In line with a growing body of research in Australia and internationally on diversity in the film and television production industry, our study finds that gender inequality is a defining feature of work and labour markets in the camera department.

The Australian film and television camera workforce is 80% men, 18% women and 2% trans/gender diverse. It is an ageing workforce, with nearly 70% of camera professionals over the age of 35. It is also largely white, with 63% identifying as Anglo-Celtic. Only 2% of the survey respondents identified as Indigenous, and only 13% as non-European.

The workforce is 85% heterosexual, and 8% identify as a person with a disability.

This data snapshot must be understood in relation to the quantity and quality of work for film and television camera professionals – and indeed in the film and television production industry more generally.

A stressful environment

Work as a camera professional is high-performance, requiring a highly specialised, technical skill set and intense concentration for extended periods of time.

Job stress is compounded by the fact that film crews commonly work in unusual, and at times dangerous, locations.

The very real dangers that camera professionals face in doing their jobs is demonstrated by the tragic deaths of director of photography Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust in 2021, and of camera assistant Sarah Jones on the set of Midnight Rider in 2014.

Work stress is compounded by an employment model that is the definition of precarity.

Employment and income insecurity are driven by short-term freelance contracts that can be for as little as one day. Employment is accessed through highly exclusionary, informal hiring networks.

Half our survey respondents report directly experiencing discrimination in the hiring process, with gender, age and racial discrimination being the most frequently encountered.

When work is secured, working patterns are highly erratic, with irregular, frequently excessive and antisocial hours.

This work model produces severe consequences for workforce development and wellbeing. From our survey respondents, 60% of all camera professionals – and 70% of women – reported the work model actively prevents work-life balance.

Precarity and health stressors are even further exacerbated by what can only be described as a toxic industry work culture. Discrimination and harassment at work is commonly experienced.

Half of all non-European and Indigenous respondents report experiencing racism at work. Sexism at work has been experienced by 75% of trans and gender diverse respondents, and 89% of women. Sexual harassment is routine for women.

Those in positions of power and influence are often the perpetrators of discrimination, harassment and bullying. Unsurprisingly, reporting is a key challenge facing the industry.

Freelancers work in a reputation economy. There is widespread fear that reporting incidents of bullying, discrimination and harassment will jeopardise both future job prospects and career longevity in the camera department.

A workforce-wide problem

The timing is good for action. Many of the key policy and industrial issues fall across Tony Burke’s dual portfolios as Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, and Minister for the Arts.

These issues aren’t unique to film sets. Many of the issues raised by the report speak to key issues in Australian work places more generally.

The upcoming Jobs + Skills Summit offers an opportunity to advance the core issues raised here as emblematic of the types of workforce development and diversity issues cultivated by high-skill, low-quality and insecure work.

A lack of diversity in camera departments will not be solved by simply adding different people to the existing toxic system.

An industry-wide commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion must first focus not on the excluded, but those doing the excluding.

Amanda Coles, Senior Lecturer, Employment Relations, Department of Management, Deakin University, Deakin University; Justine Ferrer, Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management, Deakin University, and Vejune Zemaityte, Senior Research Fellow in Cultural Data Analytics, Tallinn University

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

Meet Shailja, the Indian poetess who writes fearlessly about the sufferings of women

Shailja Pathak's poetry (Image Supplied)

By Sushma Shandilya

Shailja Pathak, one of the most sensitive poetess of Hindi poetry undoubtedly has the blessings of Goddess Saraswati, otherwise, she would not have been able to write such cruel truths with honesty. Shailja’s poems are a mirror of her mind, an attempt to save herself from getting lost in the huge crowd of Mumbai. She often listens to her heart’s voice while sitting on the quiet beaches of Mumbai. Here is one of her works that shows the undesirable interference by men on the soul, mind-heart, and body of women throughout their lives. She writes:

Now let me decide…

You always decided

My limits

My being or not being

You decided

My inside outside

Life

My ways

Conversation

My friends, my family too

You decided

Now let me decide

That what you

Should decide and what not…

Shailja’s poems are a true depiction of women’s sufferings, the results of tortures and atrocities of the unjust tyrants who do not care about humanity. Shailja’s poems touch on every aspect, issues related to women’s life softly but deeply, tenderly, showing tales of women’s woes. No doubt her fans are deeply connected with her poems. The many dimensions of life of familiar or unknown women around can be seen in her poems, often making the reader’s eyes moist or making them smile.

Shailja is a vocal, bold, outspoken poetess whose inner self is highly emotional and sensitive. Shailja born in Uttarakhand, was brought up in Varanasi, making her a proud Banarsi. She understands the deepest pain of women and puts feelings into words with expertise. In today’s rather selfish, artificial era, writers hesitate to speak the truth but Shailja considers it her religion to write fearlessly about the sufferings of women, the burning issues of female lives like adultery, oppression, exploitation, atrocities, etc. 

Shailja Pathak (Image source: supplied – Facebook)

While the so-called literary pioneers of the literary world, self-confessed in the conceit of pseudo-intellectuality, drenched in their malevolent egoism, pat themselves on their back and consider themselves far more superior to writing about women’s issues, Shailja never hesitates to give voice to the untold sufferings of women. She writes impeccably on topics related to women that are not considered important at all. Some readers accuse her of not penning untold pains of men, finding her writings one-sided and discriminating. But Shailja, unmoved by the fear of being disputed, effortlessly pens down and unveils the naked truths of the sickly-contaminated mindset prevailing in society for centuries. She is determined to make the world aware of the untold pain of women by illuminating the path of truth with her honest writings.

Shailja’s poems, like a mirror, reflect the latent feelings of those women who can never share anything with anyone or write poetry. Whether women are from towns, cities, or metros, they often don’t have a corner in the house to call their own space. In case they have a corner, it’s often the most neglected one occupied by the family. But in spite of living in a neglected corner, most women never ignore anyone and while doing so much for all, they keep neglecting themselves.

Shailja’s poems are sad songs about women living, walking, singing in groups, yet being alone with themselves. Those understanding this irony and paradox are able to read the woman inside Shailja, otherwise, the poems may seem strange. Readers who already have an image of modern women in their minds will find the women in her poems backward, conservative and old-fashioned. If the women depicted in Shailja’s poems are read with open eyes, only then the real woman can be seen, instead of women hidden under layers of make-up. Most women still never get an opportunity to talk and yet they are accused of being very talkative.

Shailja Pathak (Image source: supplied – Facebook)

Shailja Pathak is a very popular poetess, a well-known name among the young writers of Hindi literature, and admired by her readers. She did her post-graduation in Hindi from Varanasi and after marriage, settled in Mumbai. Two of her poetry books, ‘Main Ek Deh Hoon Phir Dehri’ and ‘Jahan chuppi tootti hai’ (Where the Silence Breaks) have been published. Her poems are often published in literary magazines and blogs. Shailja has carved a niche for herself, making a strong presence in Hindi poetry in a short span of time. Infused with the feelings of the female mind, her poems directly communicate or question the evil characters.

Shailja’s poems are true stories serving bitter reality. Defining the disorders of the male mind, there is a call for compassion to warn them. Shailja has a unique style containing indigenous words, the reason she easily touches the hearts of the readers. Shailja’s ruthless, naked truths flow uninterruptedly and upheaval begins in the mind. After reading her, the ignorant readers are aware that there are so many forms and types of pains women suffer. Her poems, especially known for expressions and images, take the readers on a tour of the real world of women. The depiction of the frightening possibilities of girls and women being oppressed by emotional strangulation is well portrayed in these two short poems, defining the truth in a few words.

We were always

Cursed for our mistakes

We weren’t alone

Our mother was in this together..

*********************************************

Because of our status at our mother’s place, 

We were supposed to only wash dishes in the house

She had written for us the fate of queens

But when were the queens asked about their agony?

Shailja’s themes of her poignant poems are often touching, always relevant, having painful cries of untold pains, buried deep in the minds of women. Her writing style forces the poems to stand in the discussion category. Like in Indian society, even today in some quarters, after the death of the husband, despite being innocent, the stamp of widowhood is affixed on the forehead, where the women are forced to lead a neglected life, in spite of serving their loved ones lifelong. Or be it girls who are full of life but suffering the brunt of feudal patriarchy, eventually become fearful, and often are forced to marry mismatched spouses. After sacrificing their dreams and happiness, their dreadful pain can only be imagined.

Shailja Pathak (Image source: supplied)

Shailja’s poems have a strange dispersion of emotions which is a permanent expression of highly emotional hearts. Shailja doesn’t care about the craft, the discipline of words, or images, nor does she believe in creating miracles for her readers. While expressing feelings, her words simply flow like mountain rivers, bouncing, scattering the experiences related to the moments. Instead of seeming composed in the world, the silence in her poems seems to be murmuring or humming. Her poems are an attempt to solve them by engaging themselves in the entangled times in the tangled mind. Her readers swear they open their hearts’ knots with her writings, and that’s why they admire her.

It is heartbreaking to read Shailja’s poignant poems because in her creations women hide their emotions, deeply buried in the innermost corners of their minds with lots of pain and anguish articulated. Her deep sensitivity, maturity and effort at a young age, putting all kinds of pains of females into words is highly commendable. Shailja’s poems depict poignancy arising out of insecurity along with sadness, frustration, and disappointment; but a little ray of hope too. Shailja is an expert in creating heartfelt sentiments with great ease in simple words. I wish that Shailja continues to write so that ardent admirers of her writings can get to read more touching truths that are rare in today’s gimmicky world. When Shailja pens female sorrows and joys, then many unknown lives start passing in front of the eyes, many an untold agony finds words, getting the mind drenched.

Shailja Pathak (Image source: supplied – Facebook)

Shailja’s heart gets hurt deeply by women’s pains and sufferings, proving her to be one of the best poets of today’s era, who is very much appreciated for portraying the subtlest feelings of the female mind with amazing quality. On the birthday of this wonderful sensitive poetess Shailja Pathak, we hope that she continues to churn our hearts with her poetry and create more awareness about the deep pain of voiceless women.  

 

Contributing Author: Sushma ‘Shandilya’ is a well-known Hindi poet and writer based in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. Her short stories, articles and plays have been published in leading Indian publications. Sushma ‘Shandilya’ writes on various contemporary issues including themes around women empowerment. She is also a yoga teacher.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The Australia Today is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts, or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of The Australia Today and The Australia Today News does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.

Sexual assault cases increase in Australia for tenth year in a row, reveals ABS data

Sexual assault (representative picture); Image Source: @CANVA
Sexual assault (representative picture); Image Source: @CANVA

The number of police-recorded victims of sexual assault has increased in Australia by 13 per cent in 2021. This is the tenth annual rise in a row as per data revealed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

William Milne, head of crime and justice statistics at the ABS, said in a statement there were 31,118 sexual assaults in 2021. He added:

“The rate has risen from 83 to 121 victims per 100,000 people since 2011, and that accounts for population changes.”

This is the largest number recorded by police in the 29 years of ABS crime data. ABS recorded a surge in the number of cases in all seven states and territories except the Northern Territory, with the largest increases in:

  • Queensland (up 1,771 victims or 35%)
  • Victoria (up 651 victims or 12%)
  • Western Australia (up 516 victims or 17%)

The number of recorded victims of sexual assault in the Northern Territory decreased by 4% or 15 victims.

Sexual assault (representative picture); Image Source: @CANVA
Sexual assault (representative picture); Image Source: @CANVA

As per ABS data, almost two-thirds (61 per cent) of victim-survivors were under the age of 18 when the sexual assault occurred. The data also reveals that there were six times more female victim-survivors of sexual assault (26,669) than male victim-survivors (4,350). Further, sexual assaults mostly occurred at residential locations (67%). Over a third, (37 per cent) of sexual assaults were recorded as family and domestic violence-related (11,367 victim-survivors).

ABS notes that since 1993, the rate of victimisation for sexual assault has increased from 69 to 121 victims per 100,000 persons in 2021. Experts say that while the ABS data shows sexual assault cases reported to police, the actual number of cases could be far higher with many going unreported.

Please note that if you or anyone you know is in need or crisis please call the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) or Lifeline 131 114.

Investment NSW opens Mumbai office to take advantage of Australia-India trade agreement

Investment NSW has launched its office in Mumbai to conduct business. This office will be operated by the Australian state New South Wales government’s trade and investment attraction agency.

This step has been taken just four months after Australia and India signed an interim Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (ECTA). Under the full free trade agreement, the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA), India and Australia plan to deepen bilateral trade and investment engagement in many key areas including textiles, leather, furniture, jewellery, machinery and select medical devices.

Dom Perrottet in Mumbai (Twitter)

NSW’s Premier Dom Perrottet tweeted from Mumbai: “India’s significance to NSW cannot be understated. Two-way trade between India & NSW has now reached $4.6bn. We want that to grow. I’ve opened our NSW office in Mumbai, which will assist NSW businesses seeking trade & investment opportunities to access the lucrative Indian market.”

NSW’s Minister for Enterprise, Investment and Trade Stuart Ayres told local media that the office will work to deliver direct benefits for NSW.

NSW’s Minister for Enterprise, Investment and Trade Stuart Ayres (Twitter)

Ayres tweeted: “India is a land of opportunity. It was great to open India’s @InvestmentNSW office today.”

The new office has been opened in Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex. According to reports, the aim of this office in Mumbai is to boost investment and promote exports from New South Wales to India. Further, it will also strive to improve services trade by attracting more Indian students to NSW.

NSW’s Premier Dom Perrottet in Mumbai (Twitter)

In 2020-21, as per reports, India was NSW’s third-largest source of international students, sixth largest source of tourists, and 11th largest two-way trading partner, with two-way merchandise trade at $4.6 billion.

Aarush Khurana receives Junior Triple Zero Hero Award for saving his brother’s life

Youngster Aarush Khurana has been recognised for his bravery and quick thinking when calling triple-0 after his younger brother Rihaan’s car accident last year.

He was among seven young Victorians aged between five and 13 who have been named Junior Triple Zero Heroes for 2022 by the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (ESTA), for calling triple zero.

Aarush who was aged eleven at the time recognised for his courage and clear thinking during the emergency.

What happened that day…

It was a normal lockdown day for Ashish and Dristy Khurana working from home while looking after young kids.

Ashish Khurana told The Australia Today, Due to the pandemic all parks were locked by the victorian government and no one was allowed to do a home visit, kids only had the option to play in the front yard and driveway.

“My younger son was ridding his scooter with a few mates and was going from our driveway to our neighbours.”

“I asked him to finish the game and he replied one last go daddy, by the time I said no come back he was already halfway down the street.”
“From my front door, I could see a car (four-wheel drive) coming toward him, seeing the danger I ran and shouted Rihaan stop.”

“My voice was drowned by the loud noise of him colliding with the car.”

“Rihaan flew up in the air and landed 15 meters away on the road, he was badly injured, bleeding from multiple places.”

“I picked him up in my arms and took him inside the home, asked my wife to call triple zero, which she did immediately.”

“But seeing her son bleeding and injured so badly shocked her and she was not able to reply properly to the ESTA operator.”

“Here comes the saviour, Aarush took the phone from his mom and sat her on the side, he explained everything clearly and calmly to the operator who was under the impression that Rihaan was eight months old.”

“Aarush provided the critical information to the operator and received directions to help Rihaan till the ambulance arrived.”

“He quickly bought towels and asked me to put them on Rihaans bleeding and put pressure.”

The ESTA operators who took their call said Aarush was very composed and conveyed the message properly which is most important in any emergency situation.

Aarush told The Australia Today, “I did what I was supposed to do to help my brother.”

The awards, which are in their eighteenth year, recognise young people for their bravery and clear thinking in emergencies.

After a gap of two years, the Junior Triple Zero Hero Awards were presented in a formal ceremony at MCG. And the young heroes received their medals and certificate in a colourful ceremony. 

And for Aayush and Rihaan award ceremony was bit more than just certificate and medals. It was bowl full of chocolates and lollies.

ESTA’s CEO said: “The awards highlight the importance of teaching children when and how to call triple zero.”

“These young heroes have shown that by knowing how to get the right help in an emergency, a child might save the life of a loved one.”

India’s rich women’s cumulative wealth contributes to 2% of GDP

India’s rich women; Image Source: The Australia Today
India’s rich women; Image Source: The Australia Today

Tech giant HCL Technologies’ Roshni Nadar Malhotra is India’s wealthiest woman closely followed by Falguni Nayar, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Nilima Motaparthi, and Radha Vembu.

According to the ‘Leading Wealthy Women, 2021’ report published by Hurun India with Kotak Private Banking the cumulative wealth of the top 100 of India’s wealthiest women increased by 53% to ₹4,16,970 crore from ₹2,72,540 crore in 2020.

‘Leading Wealthy Women 2021’ is the third annual list of India’s wealthiest women, entrepreneurs, and professional managers, and the wealth calculations in the report are based on 31 December 2021. It highlights the success stories of India’s top 100 self-made or active women entrepreneurs, businesswomen, and professionals. 

Oisharya Das, CEO – Private Banking at Kotak Mahindra Bank.

Oisharya Das, CEO – Private Banking at Kotak Mahindra Bank, said in a statement:

“Each woman’s journey is unique; however, what is common among them is the drive, commitment and passion to succeed. Over the years, Indian women are slowly yet surely coming into their own – carving a space for themselves through knowledge, excellence, passion, and empathy.”

Roshni Nadar Malhotra, Chairwoman of HCL Technologies

The total wealth of Roshni Nadar Malhotra, estimated at ₹84,330 crores (AUD), increased by 54% in 2021. Further, under her leadership, HCL purchased seven IBM products worth ₹13,740 crores, the largest in its history.

Roshni Nadar Malhotra is closely followed by Falguni Nayar, the founder and CEO of Nykaa, with a net worth of ₹57,520 crores.

Falguni Nayar is India’s richest self-made woman and the world’s 10th richest self-made woman. She had previously worked with the Kotak Mahindra Group for nearly two decades. Falguni Nayar and her family’s net worth has jumped 963% in 2021 to ₹57,520 crores.

Falguni Nayar

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the founder and CEO of Biocon, saw her wealth estimated at ₹29,030 crores which has declined 21% in 2021. In February 2022, her company announced the acquisition of the U.S.-based Viatris’ biosimilar business for ₹22,350 crores (US$3 billion).

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Nilima Motaparthi of Divi’s Laboratories is at number four with a net worth estimated at ₹28,180 crores.

Nilima Motaparthi

Radha Vembu ranks fifth with an estimated net worth of ₹26,260 crores. She is the sister of Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu and leads the company as the product manager of Zoho Mail.

Radha Vembu

Leena Gandhi Tewari of the global pharmaceutical and biotech corporation USV ranks sixth on the list. Her estimated wealth is ₹24,280 crore.

Leena Gandhi Tewari

Anu Aga and Meher Pudumjee of energy and environment firm Thermax rank seventh on the list.

Anu Aga and Meher Pudumjee

Neha Narkhede, the co-founder of data streaming company Confluent is eighth on the list. Her net worth stands at ₹13,380 crores. Neha had previously worked as a software engineer at Linkedin.

Neha Narkhede

Vandana Lal, the executive director of Dr Lal Path Labs, is at number nine with an estimated wealth of ₹6,810 crores. She is the new entrant to the top 10 list and handles the company’s R&D department.

Vandana Lal

Renu Munjal, the Managing Director of Hero FinCorp, ranks tenth on the list with an estimated net worth of ₹6,620 crores.

Anas Rahman Junaid, MD and Chief Researcher at Hurun India.

Anas Rahman Junaid, MD and Chief Researcher at Hurun India said in a statement:

“Women-led wealth creation directly improves women’s employment, corresponding families, and society. Inclusion of women, who represent 50 per cent of India’s population in the workforce or wealth creation, cuts across societal barriers.”

Almost one-fourth of the list constitutes new entrants and their cumulative wealth contributes to 2% of India’s nominal GDP. According to ‘Leading Wealthy Women 2021’, the cut-off for the new list was ₹300 crore.

Around 1,000 passenger complaints received against Air India in 3 months

Image: Air India (Source: Wikipedia)

India’s Minister of State for Civil Aviation V. K. Singh has informed Rajya Sabha that around 1,000 passenger complaints were received against Air India during the last three months.

Singh said these complaints were related to various issues such as refund of fares, overbooking of flights, and staff behaviour. In a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha, Singh added:

“Ministry of Civil Aviation has been receiving grievances related to air transport, including Air India, on the various issues such as refund of fares, flight issues, staff behaviour, baggage issues, overbooking of flights, etc.”

India’s aviation regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), on June 14 said it imposed a fine of Rs 10 lakh (AUD 18,000) on Air India for denying boarding to passengers holding valid tickets and thereafter not providing mandatory compensation to them.

The DGCA had in May said that the airlines are indulging in “unfair practice” of denying boarding to passengers even when they report for their flights at the airport on time.

Further, the aviation regulator had also asked all Indian carriers to give compensation and facilities to passengers affected by such denial of boarding, failing which it would impose financial penalties on them.

In July, aN AIR India-operated Boeing 787 plane with around 260 people on board suffered cabin depressurisation while flying from Dubai to Kochi. According to official sources, the flight was diverted to Mumbai and alternate aircraft was arranged to carry passengers from Mumbai to Kochi.  

Earlier this year in January, the Tata Group took control of Air India after winning the bid for the airline. The Tata Group, in a Twitter post, tagged Air India and said: “Your arrival was much awaited.” It also posted a photo saying “Welcome back, Air India!”.

In a press release, Tata Sons said:

“We philosophically agree with the Prime Minister’s vision for the aviation sector, of making it affordable and ensuring it contributes to boosting ‘Ease of Living’ for citizens.”

Air India has 12,085 employees – 8,084 permanent and 4,001 contractual. 

How did Sri Lanka run out of money? 5 graphs that explain its economic crisis

Anti-government_protest_in_Sri_Lanka_2022 (Wikimedia Commons)

By Thilak Mallawaarachchi and John Quiggin

Sri Lanka is facing its worst economic crisis in modern history. Its 22 million strong population is struggling with huge price increases for food, power, medicines and other necessities. That’s if they can get them at all, with private motorists spending hours queuing for their fuel quota.

This is why Sri Lankans have been protesting on the streets and stormed the President’s House.

How did it come to this?

The immediate cause of the crisis is straightforward: Sri Lanka ran out of foreign reserves, the currencies its government and citizens need to pay for imports.

How it got into this situation requires more explanation. It’s a story of fiscal imprudence, unsustainable exchange rate policy and chronic mismanagement.

Running out of foreign currency

Since the beginning of 2020 Sri Lanka’s demand for foreign currency has increased while its ability to earn foreign currency – through exports, loans and other capital inflows – has declined.

This is reflected in the steady decline in official foreign reserves held by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, falling from about US$8 billion to less than $U2 billion. (The Sri Lankan currency is “closed”, meaning it isn’t traded outside the country, so foreign exchange transactions have to go through the central bank).



As bad these figures are, the reality is worse.

Gross reserves aren’t the same as money in a bank account that can be used for payments. They include, for example, currency already committed to payments, and loans with conditions that limit imports from certain countries.

The actual amount of “usable” foreign currency is less. By early May it was barely US$50 million – a miniscule level for an economy that by the end of 2021 needed about US$75 million a day to pay for imports. This led to Sri Lanka’s government defaulting on a US$78 million interest payment in late May.

Declining currency inflows

Sri Lanka’s declining foreign currency inflows and increasing outflows are due to imports outpacing exports, Sri Lankans overseas sending less money home, the devastation of the tourism sector and higher debt repayments.

In two years Sri Lanka’s annual trade deficit has climbed from about US$6 billion to US$8 billion.



Two other key sources of foreign currency, money sent home by Sri Lankans living abroad and international tourism, were also hit hard.

At their peak, they more than offset the trade deficit for goods.

But since 2019 the value of remittances has fallen more than 20%. Income from tourism, devastated by the 2019 Easter bombings in which 269 were killed, has dropped almost 90% from its 2018 peak.



Propping up the exchange rate

Ordinarily a nation can avoid running out of foreign currency in two ways.

One way is to borrow money. Sri Lanka, however, was already heavily in debt before this crisis. Successive governments borrowed to finance infrastructure projects and prop up loss-making public utilities. With estimated annual debt service costs of US$10 billion, Sri Lanka is now a bad bet for lenders.

The second, and better, way is a floating exchange rate along the lines of those in Australia, Britain, Japan and the United States.

A floating rate helps to balance trade value because the currency’s value changes according to demand.

Technically Sri Lanka has a floating currency, but it is a “managed float” – with the government, primarily through the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, pegging and repegging the rupee’s value to the US dollar.

A government can do a number of things to maintain the value its currencies, but the main way is buy the currency itself, using foreign reserves. This is what Sri Lanka’s central bank did.

As foreign reserves ran down, the government adopted other riskier policies. Particularly disastrous was the April 2021 decision to ban fertiliser imports.

This was marketed as a policy to promote organic farming, but really it was about cutting demand for foreign currency.

The subsequent drop in agricultural production has only compounded the economic crisis.

Rising prices

Just as short-term solutions can create longer-term problems, so too can long-term solutions mean short-term pain.

Allowing the (pegged) rupee to depreciate more than 40% against the US dollar has pushed up inflation to 54%.



The help the Sri Lankan government is seeking from the International Monetary Fund is likely to hit people hard, at least initially.

Based on past experience, the IMF will want major commitments on government expenditure and other economic indicators before bailing out Sri Lanka.

But without action, life in Sri Lanka looks even more grim.

With shortages of imported raw materials, industrial output will shrink, creating a downward spiral of low output, low investment, and resultant low economic growth.



On the other hand, Sri Lanka has some natural advantages – from its natural beauty to the most literate population in South Asia. What it needs now is principled political leadership, competent economic management and the right policies.

Thilak Mallawaarachchi, Honorary Associate Professor, Risk and Sustainable Management Group, The University of Queensland and John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

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

Indian-Australian couple’s ‘Hero Packaging’ wins Best Online B2B Retailer Award

Vik and Anaita Sarkar at ORIAS (LinkedIn)
Vik and Anaita Sarkar at ORIAS (LinkedIn)

Vik and Anaita Sarkar, the husband and wife duo co-founders of Hero Packaging have won this year’s Australia Post Online Retail Industry Awards (ORIAS).

ORIAS is an industry event that “celebrates all that is truly good and inspiring among the top performers in Australian e-commerce.”

The judging panel observed that their decision was based on “how well the nominee demonstrated the implementation of B2C e-commerce principles and in particular the success in growing their B2B business via online/e-commerce channels.”

ik and Anaita Sarkar (Hero Packaging website)

Vik and Anaita are passionate and “committed to removing plastic from packaging and shipping in Australia and the world.” Their website notes:

“To date, we have saved over 16,000,000 plastic mailers from entering the planet. On a daily basis, we send over 4,000 HEROPACKs around the world, and it is increasing rapidly!”

Hero was created after Vik and Anaita realised that their first e-commerce retail business was using way too much plastic in packaging products.

“We started to feel incredibly horrified at the amount of waste we were creating (and we were just one business!). The real cherry on top of the plastic pie was when our 2 girls were in our office during school holidays and were sitting amongst a pile of plastic, playing with the bubble wrap. We knew there had to be something better.”

Hero Packaging product (Website)

The couple started doing some research on ways to minimise plastic usage. However, they were unable to find cost- and eco-friendly alternatives to plastic mailers. They note:

“From that moment, we were on a mission to create that solution. And after testing a bazillion different materials, we found a material that was compostable, but also water proof, super durable and acted like plastic in the shipping process, but would break down in a compostable environment.”

Anaita Sarkar at ORIAS (LinkedIn)

On winning this award, the couple said in a LinkedIn post that they “are incredibly honoured to have won.” They added:

“We didn’t expect it because we were up against some incredible finalists.”

Thanking the team behind their businesses success, Anaita said:

“What a lot of people don’t know is how much this means. I have looked up to the likes of Jane Lu Julie Mathers Mark Baartse for so long and dreamt of starting a business I’m proud of. I’ve been consuming and implementing e-comm skills and testing and failing and re-testing strategies for a long time so to hear our name being called out was a moment I’ll never forget.”

Hero Packaging has a Head Office in Sydney and distribution warehouses all over Australia. The couple are also planning to expand in to the US and Canadian market. 

#BoycottFlipKart trends on Twitter after t-shirt with Sushant Singh Rajput’s photo tiggers sentiments

Flipkart t-shirt controversy; Image Source: Curate The Australia Today
Flipkart t-shirt controversy; Image Source: Curate The Australia Today

An online shopping platform Flipkart had to cope with the anger of Twitterati in India due to a T-shirt it was selling. This normal-looking T-shirt has a picture of late Indian film actor Sushant Singh Rajput who died in mysterious circumstances two years back.

However, the caption ‘Depression is like Drowing’ was the reason for netizens to react so sharply. Thousands of people said they feel offended by the message which tries to draw a conclusion that the late Sushant Singh has died because of depression.

This group of people loosely tend to believe that instead, Mr Rajput was killed by the ‘Bollywood Mafia’. 

After screenshots of Flipkart’s page were shared by many social media users people filed grievances with Flipkart and one Twitterati @imrudrabha even served a notice against the online shopping platform for selling T-shirts with a misleading quote. 

Another social media user wrote, “Country has not yet come out of the shock of Sushant’s tragic death. We will keep raising our voice for justice. Flipkart should be ashamed of this heinous act and should apologise so that such an incident will not be repeated again.#BoycottFlipkart”

The Australia Today is given to understand that after social media outrage Flipkart has removed the item from its list.

Why women of colour often excluded from mainstream domestic violence services and policy?

Domestic violence and women of colour; Image source: @CANVA
Domestic violence and women of colour; Image source: @CANVA

Jenny Maturi, The University of Queensland and Jenny Munro, The University of Queensland

In Australia, the discussion around gendered violence is increasingly focused on diversity. However, policy and services continue to be based mostly on the experiences of white, Anglo-settler women.

Our research, published in the Journal of Intercultural Studies, involved interviews with 31 frontline workers. These workers came from mainstream domestic violence organisations, refugee resettlement organisations, and migrant organisations that support women experiencing violence.

Domestic violence and women of colour; Image source: @CANVA
Domestic violence and women of colour; Image source: @CANVA

Blaming ‘culture’

Our research revealed domestic and family violence in refugee and migrant communities is often racialised and blamed on “culture”.

Some workers indicated “culture” contributed to refugee or ethnic minority women “putting up with” violence, whereas Anglo-settler Australian women would, apparently, not.

One Anglo-settler worker from a mainstream domestic violence organisation said:

Maybe they’re not used to having freedoms and rights and protection […] I’ve just noticed that women from perhaps African countries or Middle Eastern countries, possibly refugee women […] have a much higher tolerance I would say to violence […] they put up with a lot before reaching out.

When white women seem to “put up with” violence, the conversation is not about their “culture”. Instead, the focus is on what might prevent them from leaving.

Domestic violence and women of colour; Image source: @CANVA
Domestic violence and women of colour; Image source: @CANVA

That includes economic vulnerabilities and homelessness, and fear for their or their children’s safety. It includes worries that the law and police may not be able to protect them.

Instead of focusing on systemic problems and broader social inequalities, many blame women’s cultural backgrounds as the reason for them not engaging with mainstream services.

That’s despite evidence migrant and refugee women experiencing violence often encounter particular barriers – such as deportation threats and financial or language barriers – when they do reach out.

Critiquing the ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ tag

The category of “culturally and linguistically diverse” reinforces the idea culture is something possessed by foreigners, refugees or ethnic minorities – rather than something all Australians have.

Quite a few service workers used “Australian” to refer to white Anglo-settlers when actually people of diverse ethnicities and identities are obviously Australian too.

Domestic violence and women of colour; Image source: @CANVA
Domestic violence and women of colour; Image source: @CANVA

The vague term “culturally and linguistically diverse” can set ethnic and cultural minorities apart from the majority. It can also homogenise them into a single, broad category. This can create the perception a single intervention will work for the entire group.

Domestic violence organisations, even migrant-specific ones, don’t have to collect client data on ethnicity, country of birth or visa pathways. Refugees and migrants are usually categorised simply as “culturally and linguistically diverse”. This limits our understanding of the unique experiences and needs of refugee and migrant women.

It’s time we critically reflected on whether the “culturally and linguistically diverse” terminology is still useful, or just entrenching inequalities.

Overwhelming small, migrant-led service providers

Instead of integrating diverse perspectives and needs into mainstream services and policy, a range of culturally and linguistically diverse-specific services have emerged.

“Mainstream” (typically Anglo-settler) Australians are usually referred to as “mainstream” services. “Culturally and linguistically diverse” peoples are increasingly referred to as “culturally and linguistically diverse” services.

Yes, there are few other options for services aiming to tailor support to cultural minorities. But we identified a number of consequences.

This approach seems to deepen assumptions and stereotyping based on “culture”. Workers in migrant services said they had clients referred to them only because the client was not fluent in English (even though all services can engage interpreters).

Domestic violence and women of colour; Image source: @CANVA
Domestic violence and women of colour; Image source: @CANVA

Some workers from cultural minority heritage said they were expected to take clients from cultural minority backgrounds on the assumption they shared their experiences or history.

Culturally and linguistically diverse-specific services are often small and underfunded compared to mainstream services.

This practice of referring refugee and migrant women can overwhelm smaller, migrant-led services. It also deprives mainstream workers of learning from women from diverse backgrounds.

We should stop referring women based on cultural stereotypes, or assuming that working with refugee and migrant women is not the job of mainstream services.

It’s time for change

Culture is often blamed for domestic violence in refugee and migrant communities.

The category “culturally and linguistically diverse” continues to reinforce assumptions. This contributes to “othering” and can lead to small services being overstretched.

It’s time the voices of refugee and migrant women experiencing domestic violence are heard and recognised in mainstream policies and programs. Policies and services should critically reflect on the cultures and inequalities within mainstream systems.

Jenny Maturi, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland and Jenny Munro, Lecturer, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland

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

Meet Doctor Rashmi who treats children of Indian Army personnel for free

Meet Doctor Rashmi who treats children of Indian Army personnel for free; Image Source: The Australia Today
Meet Doctor Rashmi who treats children of Indian Army personnel for free; Image Source: The Australia Today

Dr Rashmi Vishwakarma is a paediatrician practising in Bhopal, India. What is unique about her practice is that she does not charge any fees for a child whose either parent is serving in the Indian Army or is an Army veteran.

A sign at her clinic’s entrance says “No Consultation Fees for Kids whose Parents are in Army”. Dr Vishwakarma in fact does not charge any fees for serving or retired personnel from the Indian Airforce or the Indian Navy too.

(Image Source: Supplied)

Dr Vishwakarma says that since childhood she has had deep respect for the Armed Forces. In fact when she was in school, Dr Vishwakarma aspired to be in the Airforce and her school teachers helped her find out about the the scope for girls in the Airforce at that time.

In those days (1990s), women were only employed in the ground staff services in the IAF but Dr Vishwakarma wanted to become a fighter jet pilot hence didn’t pursue a career in that direction. She says now though that it was her lack of knowledge that led her to not go for ground services and for underestimating their work for the country.

(Image Source: Supplied)

Dr Vishwakarma says that even though she did not pursue a career in the Armed Forces, this feeling of gratitude that she felt for the Indian Army and the Armed Forces continued, and when she started her clinic, she made this rule that she will not charge consultation fees for their personnels’ kids.

In Dr Vishwakarma’s opinion, all civilians should respect the Army as we and our families are safe and able to have all the amenities because the Indian Army is safeguarding us in all the adverse situations.

“Each one of us must try to do our bit for Army personnel and their families. Their family too deserves a salute as they bear all the problems but still allow their family personnel to sacrifice his/her life for the wellbeing of their countrymen.” 

(Image Source: Supplied)

Dr Vishwakarma says that many people liked this idea and appreciated this step especially the Army personnel with some even getting emotional when they read the sign at the entrance of her clinic. She says there were a few though who felt why she is not charging them fees as Army personnel get a handsome salary, to which her response was,

“This is the only profession where they are ready to scarifice their lives for strangers so I opt to do this little bit for them. Honestly speaking, Army people are high on self respect and they want to pay fees and not want waiving of the fees.”

(Image Source: Supplied)

Dr Vishwakarma completed her school and college education in Bhopal. To enhance her skills she has worked in different places like Gurgaon, Hyderabad and also the Maldives. She told The Australia Today why she became a doctor,

“I don’t have any medical background in my family. But due to my immense interest in medicine, I opted for this field. This is also a career where I can serve mankind and try to reduce their sufferings.”

Dr Vishwakarma also has an artistic bent and says that painting, sketching and other art forms give her happiness. She loves reading books and also enjoys gardening.

“I have seen my mom and grandma utilising each and every second, so I try to do that.”

Painting by Dr Rashmi Vishwakarma (Image Source: Supplied)
Painting by Dr Rashmi Vishwakarma (Image Source: Supplied)


Australian researchers’ diabetes breakthrough could eliminate need for daily insulin injections

Dr Ishant Khurana (Supplied)

Australian researchers based at Monash University have published a paper entitled ‘Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy‘ in the Nature journal that could lead to the regeneration of insulin in pancreatic stem cells.

According to Diabetes Australia, this is the fastest-growing illness in the country. At present, 1.8 million Australians suffer from diabetes and 500 million have the disease globally. Diabetes Australia says that Australians need to rethink diabetes:

“Every year 700,000 people living with diabetes experience mental or emotional health challenges. That’s because living with diabetes is not easy. It’s not a choice. And there are no days off.”

The study is led by diabetes experts Dr Keith Al-Hasani, Professor Sam El-Osta, and Dr Ishant Khurana, from the Monash Department of Diabetes. The researchers have developed “a revolutionary method to regenerate insulin cells without the ethical concerns that are commonly associated with embryonic stem cells.”

Monash University notes that their research “may lead to a potential treatment option for insulin-dependent diabetes which is diagnosed in seven Australian children every day resulting in a lifetime testing of blood glucose and daily insulin injections, to replace the insulin no longer produced by a damaged pancreas.”

2021 group. L-R: Mr Jairo Arturo Pinzon Cortes, Ms Mie Jensen, Dr Keith Al-Hasani, Dr Ishant Khurana, Professor Sam El-Osta, Dr Jun Okabe, Dr Scott Maxwell, Dr Harikrishnan Kaipananickal (Monash University)

Dr Keith Al-Hasani, one of the authors of the research study, told ABC, that “there are different forms of diabetes and it’s a disease that requires relentless attention.”

For Type 1 diabetes, generally first presents when patients are children, up to five insulin injections per day are required as young people adjusted to the disease. Dr Al-Hasani adds that Adult sufferers can administer up to 100 shots a month to manage the illness.

Professor El-Osta observes that by the time an individual is diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes (T1D)  many of their pancreatic beta cells, which produce insulin, have been totally destroyed. He adds:

“Patients rely on daily insulin injections to replace what would have been produced by the pancreas. Currently, the only other effective therapy requires pancreatic islet transplantation and while this has improved health outcomes for individuals with diabetes, transplantation relies on organ donors, so it has limited widespread use.” 

Dr Ishant Khurana (Twitter)

Co-author Dr Khurana, a research fellow in the El-Osta research group at the Department of Diabetes, said: “we’re reprogramming cells that don’t generally produce insulin, to express insulin now.” He adds:

“This is a big breakthrough in the diabetes realm.”

Dr Khurana’s major research interests are understanding the role of epigenetic changes and transcriptional regulation implicated in human health and disease. As an expert in comparative analyses and biostatistics for the integration of epigenetic data, Dr Khurana’s work is critical for large-scale projects like these. In 2017, he was also the recipient of the ‘Young Investigator Award – East meets West Symposium.’

Insulin (Wikimedia commons)

Dr Khurana’s parents migrated to Australia from India in the early 1990s when he was 7 years old. He told The Australia Today that the stories about this “complex human disease” in India and the Pacific motivated him to take up this research field.

“The burden of this complex disease in our community and especially to discover the unknown motivated me to delve deeper into research.”

Dr Khurana points out that diabetes is very common in Fiji with almost 1 in 3 Fijians diagnosed with this disease. He adds:

“I am looking forward to working collaboratively with Indian and Pacific researchers active in this field to find solutions that would help the community.”

For the current project, the researchers are using a compound GSK126 which is approved for use to treat another condition by the US Food and Drug Administration. The researchers point out that so far this compound has not been used for diabetes treatment in Australia or elsewhere. 

As diabetes cases rise globally, researchers worldwide are facing the challenge of improving treatments. Monash researchers acknowledged that there is still a long way to go in diabetes research before a potential treatment could be used in humans. Dr Al-Hasani says that “more work is required to define the properties of these cells and establish protocols to isolate and expand them.” He adds:

“I would think therapy is pretty far away. However, this represents an important step along the way to devising a lasting treatment that might be applicable for all types of diabetes.”

Dr Khurana says the ultimate goal of their research is to eliminate the need for daily insulin injections.

Victoria becomes best-performing economy in Australia

City of Melbourne, Australia; Picture Source: @CANVA
City of Melbourne, Australia; Picture Source: @CANVA

Victoria has emerged as Australia’s best-performing state economy in the latest quarterly CommSec State of the States report.

Victoria has taken the number one position from Tasmania after more than two years. Behind the top grouping of four economies in the CommSec report are Western Australia, South Australia, and NSW, followed by the Northern Territory.

Each of the Australian states and territory economies was assessed on eight key indicators: economic
growth; retail spending; equipment investment; unemployment, construction work done;
population growth; housing finance and dwelling commencements.

List of Australia’s best-performing state economies

1. Victoria
2. Australian Capital Territory
3. Tasmania
4. Queensland
5. Western Australia
6. South Australia
7. New South Wales
8. Northern Territory

The report shows that Victoria has created an exceptionally strong job market. This has helped propel the state to the top of the list.

Victoria's Premier Daniel Andrews; Picture Source: The Australia Today
Victoria’s Premier Daniel Andrews; Picture Source: The Australia Today

Further, recent figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) have also shown that Victoria’s unemployment rate is at a near 50-year low of 3.2 per cent. The CommSec report shows that Victoria delivered the largest jobs growth of all states and territories in June, with more than 28,000 new jobs, boosting the total number of Victorians in work to a record high of more than 3.54 million.

CommSec Chief Economist Craig James (CommBank)

CommSec Chief Economist Craig James has explained that Victoria was closely followed by the ACT, Tasmania, and Queensland.

“Victoria may have moved to the top of the economic leader-board, but there is little to separate the top four economies. Victoria leads the way on two of the eight economic indicators. But showing how even the rankings are, the ACT and South Australia also each lead other economies on two of the eight indicators.”

James further added:

“When looking at annual growth to get a guide on economic momentum, Queensland had annual growth rates that exceeded the national average on all of the eight indicators.”

He says that the future economic performance would depend on how economies were affected by growing COVID-19 case numbers and also how they respond to rising interest rates.

Tasmania previously held the number one spot for the past nine quarters.

Do we care enough about COVID?

Covid-19 Outbreak Mask up Melbourne
Covid-19 Outbreak Mask up Melbourne

By Frank Bongiorno

The COVID-19 pandemic has already generated its own mythology. In Britain, they talk of the “myth of the blitz” – the idea of a society that pulled together in the second world war to withstand the bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe with pluck, bravery and humour.

In Australia, our COVID-19 myth is about a cohesive and caring society that patiently endured lockdowns, border closures and other ordeals. Like many myths, ours has some foundation in reality. It might be a poor thing when considered alongside wartime Britain’s wartime sacrifices, and you have to ignore the empty toilet paper shelves in the local supermarket, but it still has its own force. It might be especially potent in Melbourne, where the restrictions were most severe and prolonged.

The COVID-19 myth is now presenting its puzzles to true believers. If you imagined we all pulled together for the common good, and because we have the good sense to look after our own health, you are likely to find it strange that we are now apparently prepared to tolerate dozens of deaths in a day. The total COVID death toll is now above 11,000.

More than tolerate: there has been a preparedness to pretend nothing out of the ordinary is happening.

All of this seems a far cry from those days when we hung on the daily premiers’ media conferences and experienced horror as the number of new infections rose above a few dozen a day, a few hundred, and then a thousand or so. Have our senses been blunted, our consciences tamed?

Public discourse is never neutral. It is always a product of power. Some people are good at making their voices heard and ensuring their interests are looked after. Others are in a weak position to frame the terms of debate or to have media or government take their concerns seriously.

The elderly – especially the elderly in aged-care facilities – have carried a much larger burden of sacrifice than most of us during 2020 and 2021. They often endured isolation, loneliness and anxiety. They were the most vulnerable to losing their lives – because of the nature of the virus itself, but also due to regulatory failure and, in a few places, gross mismanagement.

Casual and gig economy workers, too, struggle to have their voices heard. On his short journey to an about-face over the question of paid pandemic leave, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at first said the payment was unnecessary because employers were allowing their staff to work from home. Yet the conditions of those in poorly paid and insecure work have been repeatedly identified as a problem for them as well as for the wider community, because they are unable easily to isolate.

Up to his point, however, our democracy has spoken: we want our pizzas delivered and we want to be able to head for the pub and the restaurant. And we are prepared to accept a number of casualties along the way to have lives that bear some resemblance to those of the pre-COVID era.

The “we” in this statement is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There is a fierce debate going on about whether governments – and by extension, the rest of us – are doing enough to counter the spread of the virus. Political leadership matters enormously in these things.

In the years following the second world war, Australia’s roads became places of carnage, as car ownership increased and provision for road safety was exposed as inadequate. It peaked around 1970, with almost 3,800 deaths – more than 30 for every 100,000 people. Road fatalities touched the lives of many Australians. If not for the death of my father’s first wife in a vehicle accident on New Year’s Day in 1954, I would not be around to write this piece today.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the coming of mandatory seatbelt wearing and random breath-testing helped bring the numbers down. Manufacturers made their cars safer. Public campaigns urged drivers to slow down and stay sober. These were decisions aimed at avoiding avoidable deaths, despite the curtailment of freedom involved. https://www.youtube.com/embed/nQ-IvxZiZYk?wmode=transparent&start=0

These decisions were also in the Australian utilitarian tradition of government, “whose duty it is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number” – as the historian W.K. Hancock famously explained in 1930. The citizen claimed not “natural rights”, but rights received “from the State and through the State”. Governments made decisions about how their authority could be deployed to preserve the common good and protect individuals – from themselves as well as from others.

Governments have during the present surge so far been willing to take what they regard as a pragmatic position that the number of infections and fatalities is acceptable to “the greatest number”, so long as “the greatest number” can continue to go about something like their normal lives.

But this utilitarian political culture also has its dark side. It has been revealed persistently throughout the history of this country – and long before anyone had heard of COVID-19 – as poorly equipped to look after the most vulnerable. The casualties of the current policy are those who have consistently had their voices muted and their interests set aside during this pandemic – and often before it, as well.

These are difficult matters for governments that would much prefer to get on with something other than boring old pandemic management. The issue is entangled in electoral politics – we have just had a federal contest in which major party leaders studiously ignored the issue, and the nation’s two most populous states are to hold elections in the next few months. Governments also realise that restrictions and mandates will meet civil disobedience.

But COVID cannot be wished away. At a minimum, governments need to show they are serious about it to the extent of spending serious money on a campaign of public information and advice on issues like mask-wearing and staying home when ill. They usually manage to find a sufficient stash of public money ahead of each election when they want to tell us what a beaut job they’ve been doing. They might now consider whether something similar might help to save lives.

Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

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

Indian Australian community celebrates Droupadi Murmu’s election as President of India with ‘Havan and Pooja’

Droupadi Murmu took the oath of office as the 15th President of India on Monday 25th July. A woman politician from the tribal (Janjatiye) community will be head of the Indian Republic for the very first time.

The ceremony of the assumption of office took place in the Central Hall of the Indian Parliament. Ms Murmu was escorted by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Vice-President and Chairman of the Rajya Sabha M Venkaiah Naidu, and Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to the Central Hall.

Oath of office to Droupadi Murmu was administered by the Chief Justice of India NV Ramana.

On July 22, the former Jharkhand governor Murmu registered a historic win over her rival Yashwant Sinha in the Presidential election, becoming the first woman tribal candidate and the second woman in the country’s history to occupy the highest office in the country.

Social media is flooded with congratulatory messages like, “It is a historic movement for India to elect the first member of the tribal (Janjatiye) community as President of India.”

Why shouldn’t we be proud of Mrs Droupadi Murmu’s election? questions Vikas Reddy a banking officer in Melbourne.

He told The Australia Today, “Australian or I should say western media portray a divide within the Indian community in the name of religion, caste and region.”

“This election is such demonstration of uniqueness of India that gives opportunity to all citizens regardless of their social-cultural background,”

said Mr Reddy.

Sri Durga Temple with 40 other Australian Hindu organisations performed a special ‘Havan and Pooja’ for the long life of the newly elected President of India Droupadi Murmu.

Gurpreet Verma is vice president of the management committee of Melbourne’s Shri Durga Temple.

Mr Verma told The Australia Today, “On behalf of the temple management committee I would like to invite the Honourable President of India to Sri Durga Temple for pooja-archna.”

“We will be very happy, privileged and honoured to host Madam President when she visits Australia in near future,”

added Mr Verma.

Perth-based organisation Sanmskruthi and NRI Rising Club also organised a celebratory program and explained to its members what Droupadi Murmu’s election means to Indian Australians.

Vijay Kumar Pillai from Sanmskruti told The Australia Today that Ms Murmu hailing from Santhal tribal and taking charge from Ramnath Kovind who comes from the Dalit community says everything about India’s real transformation.

NRI rising club’s Rohit Aeri Sharma says, “I don’t know any other country than India who is making all efforts to make every citizen feel empowered.”

The Australian business community also reacted with much enthusiasm and celebrated Ms Murmu’s election.

Sydney-based Sheba Nandkeolyar is the founder & CEO of MultiConnexions Group.

Ms Nandkeolyar wrote on social media, “#India you have done it again! You have made 1.3 billion Indians and the 31+ million diaspora living overseas proud of #NewIndia.”

#Talent does not discriminate be it #colour#race#religion#income#caste#age or #creed. So why should people be discriminative?

she added.

Gitesh Agarwal, Director -Corporate Affairs with HCL Technologies wrote, “Awe-inspiring. I share my birthday with the new President.. Here is believing… That the resilience comes built-in.”

Image

Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi congratulated Ms Murmu on her election as new President of the country and said she has emerged as a ray of hope for citizens, especially the poor, the marginalised and the downtrodden.

Who is Droupadi Murmu:

Born in a Santali tribal family on June 30, 1958 in Uparbeda village coming under Mayurbhanj district in Odisha, she had her education from Bhubaneswar and went on to work first as a junior assistant in the State Irrigation and Power Department from 1979 to 1983.

After this short stint as a clerk, she became a teacher at Sri Aurobindo Integral Education Centre at Rairangpur till 1997.

MS Murmu commenced her journey in the field of politics in 1997 by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She was first elected as the councillor of the Rairangpur Nagar Panchayat and then went on to become the chairperson of the same panchayat in 2000. Later, she also served as the national vice president of the BJP Scheduled Tribe Morcha.

She became a member of the council of ministers in the BJP and Biju Janata Dal coalition government in Odisha, first becoming the minister of state with independent charge for commerce and transportation from March 2000 to August 2002 and then minister for fisheries and animal resources development from August 2002 to May 2004.

A legislator from the Rairangpur assembly constituency in the years 2000 and 2004, she was conferred Nilkhantha Award for the best MLA by the Odisha assembly in 2007.

In 2015, Murmu became the first woman governor of Jharkhand. She also became the first woman tribal leader from Odisha to be appointed as the governor of a state.

However, during her political journey, she faced several lows in her life. Her husband Shyam Charan Murmu, passed away in 2014. She also lost both of her sons all in a span of just 4 years.

She devoted her life to serving society, empowering poor, downtrodden and marginalized sections of society. She has rich administrative experience and an outstanding gubernatorial tenure in Jharkhand. Murmu has made a special identity in public life by spreading awareness about education in tribal society and serving the public for a long time as a public representative.

The President of India is the head of state in India. He/She is considered the first citizen of the country, acting on the advice of the Council of Ministers. According to article 60 of the constitution, the primary duty of the President of India is to uphold, defend, and preserve the Indian constitution and the law. The president appoints the Chief Justice of India and other judges on the advice of the chief justice.

Cricket Australia signs $361m deal with Disney Star to broadcast in India

The World Champion Australian Women Cricket team; Image Source: Cricket Australia

Cricket Australia has announced a seven-year deal with Disney Star to broadcast in India and “other territories across Asia”.

The agreement is reported to be more than US$250m (A$361m) to broadcast men’s and women’s international cricket and the Big Bash League from season 2023-24.

Chief Executive Nick Hockley (Cricket Australia)

Cricket Australia’s Chief Executive Nick Hockley said in a statement that they are delighted to have secured the new partnership. He said:

“Disney Star is synonymous with the game in India, and we look forward to working with them to showcase the outstanding cricket played in Australia every summer.”

Cricket Australia is hopeful that Disney Star’s massive audience reach will provide enormous exposure for Australian cricket and for CA’s commercial partners in the world’s largest cricket market. Hockley added:

“There was significant interest in our rights and we are very grateful to our current rights holder, Sony, for their partnership, which will continue throughout this season.”

Disney Star’s Head of Sports, Sanjog Gupta (Twitter)

Disney Star’s Head of Sports, Sanjog Gupta, said in a statement that this deal would guarantee fans in India and other parts of Asia to continue seeing the finest cricket. he added:

“Cricket Australia represents some of the best content that the world of cricket has to offer. Some of the most memorable moments for Indian fans have been produced in Australia, and we look forward to elevating many more such moments.”

Disney Star network’s entertainment portfolio cuts across general entertainment, sports, films, infotainment, kids, and lifestyle content. Disney Star also recently won the TV broadcast rights for the T20 Indian Premier League from 2023-27.  

WHO declares Monkeypox a global health emergency. Here’s what that means

Monkeypox (WHO)

By Paul Hunter

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared the current monkeypox epidemic a global health emergency.

The committee of independent advisers who met on Thursday July 21 2022, were split on their decision on whether to call the growing monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) – the highest level of alert.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (Wikipedia)

The head of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, broke the deadlock and declared the outbreak a PHEIC. This is the first time the WHO director general has side-stepped his advisers to declare a public health emergency.

The first case of monkeypox was reported in a child in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire) in 1970. Since then, outbreaks have generally been small and traceable to an individual who recently returned from a country where the virus is endemic – that is, countries in west and central Africa. But the current outbreak is unlike any previous one outside of Africa in that there is sustained person-to-person transmission of the infection.

As of July 22, there have been 16,593 confirmed infections in 68 countries that have not historically reported monkeypox. Most infections have been reported from Europe. The large majority of infections have been in men who have sex with men, especially men who have sex with multiple partners.

Models presented to the WHO suggest the average number of people infected by a single infected person (the so-called R nought – remember this from the early days of the COVID pandemic?) is between 1.4 and 1.8 in men who have sex with men, but less than 1.0 in other populations. So although occasional infections can spill over into populations other than men who have sex with men, further significant spread is unlikely.

In Europe, in recent weeks there has been a slowing in the rate of increase in new monkeypox cases each week. The large majority of infections are still occurring in men who have sex with men.

In the UK, 97% of cases are in men who have sex with men, but it does look as though the rate of growth in the epidemic has fallen to zero or even become negative in recent weeks. But it is plausible that the apparent dip in new infections is the gap between consecutive waves.

Experts have recently been debating whether monkeypox is now a sexually transmitted disease. Even though monkeypox is undoubtedly spread during sex, labelling it as an STD would be counterproductive, as the infection could spread through any intimate contact, even when wearing condoms or without penetrative sex.

A graph showing cumulative monkeypox cases in the current outbreak
Cumulative confirmed monkeypox cases in the current outbreak. Our World in Data, CC BY

For and against declaring a global health emergency

Broadly, the WHO’s emergency committee arguments in favour of declaring a global health emergency included that monkeypox satisfies the requirement of a PHEIC under the WHO’s International Health Regulations: “an extraordinary event, which constitutes a public health risk to other States through international transmission, and which potentially requires a coordinated international response”.

Added to this are concerns that in some countries there is likely to be substantial under-reporting of case numbers, the occasional reports of infections in children and pregnant women, concerns that the infections could become endemic in human populations or be reintroduced into at-risk groups even after the current monkeypox pandemic is over.

Arguments against declaring it a global health emergency included the fact that the large majority of infections are currently being seen in just 12 countries in Europe and North America, and there is evidence of cases stabilising or even falling in those countries.

Almost all cases are in men who have sex with men and who have multiple partners, which provides opportunities to stop transmission with interventions targeted at this group. Another argument is that the severity of the disease outside appears to be low.

Although the emergency committee was not able to reach a consensus, Tedros took the decision to declare a PHEIC.

This declaration of a global health emergency will probably not lead to much change in control activities in the most affected counties outside of Africa. However, it may stimulate those countries that have seen few cases so far to ensure their health systems are better able to manage if the infection does spread within their countries. Hopefully, it may also stimulate funding for research and improvements in the capacity in endemic countries to manage the disease.

Paul Hunter, Professor of Medicine, University of East Anglia

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

423,559 Indian workers returned home between June 2020 and Dec 2021

Delhi airport (Wikimedia Commons)

A total of 423,559 Indians returned from 14 countries between June 2020 and December 2021 revealed the Indian government in Lok Sabha.

More than half of these workers returned from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. While, during the same period, a total of 141,172 Indian nationals went to work in six West Asian countries.

Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan (Twitter)

The Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan told the parliament in a written reply to a question. Citing figures from the Indian government’s eMigrate system, Muraleedharan said:

“While a large number of Indian workers, particularly in the Gulf, returned to India due to Covid-19, the economic recovery in that region and their increasing openness to travel from India has now seen a return by many of them.”

He further added that according to the eMigrate portal, a total of 416,024 Emigration Clearances (ECs) were issued for Emigration Check Required (ECR) countries between January 1, 2020 and June 30, 2022.

Image shared by Hardeep Singh Puri (Twitter)

Muraleedharan said that Modi government’s priority during the Covid-19 pandemic was ensuring that its impact on Indian workers was mitigated. He added:

“To that end, the [external affairs] ministry and all our missions in the Gulf were continuously engaged with the government of the Gulf nations to maintain the workers, ensure their welfare and facilitate financial payments due to them.”

The external affairs ministry, in collaboration with the civil aviation ministry, facilitated the repatriation of citizens stranded abroad during the pandemic through Vande Bharat Mission.

Earlier Minister for External Affairs Dr S. Jaishankar has said that “Vande Bharat mission where we brought back Indians from abroad in Covid crisis was daunting.”

India’s Union Minister for Housing & Urban Affairs & Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Hardeep Singh Puri too had acknowledged the importance of Vande Bharat Mission during Covid-19.

During this period, the largest number of Indians – 152,126 – returned from the UAE, followed by Saudi Arabia (118,064), Kuwait (51,206), Oman (46,003), Qatar (32,361), Bahrain (11,749), Malaysia (9,228), and Jordan (2,243). In addition, Indian workers also returned from Iraq (342), Lebanon (210), Thailand (18), Indonesia (7), and Afghanistan (1), and Sudan (1).

The largest number of Indians – 51,496 – travelled to Qatar for work, followed by Saudi Arabia (36,451), Oman (21,340), the United Arab Emirates (13,567), Kuwait (10,160), and Bahrain (8,158).

Partner charged with murder of Shereen Kumar after woman’s body found in bushland

Shereen Kumar Facebook

37-year-old Vincent Carlino has been charged with the murder of Shereen Kumar after a woman’s body was discovered in bushland off Lauire Road, Dural in Sydney’s Hills District. The 43-year-old Sydney mum was reported missing to the police on thursday morning.

According to the police co-ordinated searches of the surrounding areas were undertaken over the last three days, with assistance from PolAir and the Dog Unit as part of the investigation.

About 5.50pm on Saturday (23rd July) police located the body of a woman during the search in bushland off Laurie Road, Dural.

A crime scene was established, which is being examined by specialist forensic police.

The body is yet to be formally identified but is believed to be that of Ms Kumar.

The investigators arrested Vincent Carlino at a home on Taylors Road, Dural just after 11.30 pm on Saturday.

He was taken to Hornsby Police Station and charged with murder (DV). He was refused bail by the Parammatta Bail Court today (Sunday).

43-year-old Shereen Kumar was a part time model and had been featured in several magazines in Australia and overseas. She also ran a dog walking business with Mr Carlino who was her boyfriend.

Image Source: Shereen Kumar Facebook

Ms Kumar’s ex-husband, Gurpreet Beehan, told Daily Mail Australia that Ms Kumar was an incredible mother to their two kids and her death has left the family ‘heartbroken’.

Image Source: Shereen Kumar Facebook

In a cold July, Adelaide comes to life with art of light, sound and movement

Image Source: The Australia Today
Image Source: The Australia Today

By Catherine Speck

On cold nights in July, Adelaide audiences are flocking to an extraordinary festival of light and sound.

The top bill of the Illuminate festival is Wisdom of AI Light, an immersive digital performance in which the audience experiences art meshed with science at breakneck speed. Billed as a “digital renaissance”, it is much more than that.

Held in a large pop-up space, the creators are the Istanbul-based Ouchhh Studio who are exploring the limits of what machines can do.

Spurred on by Alan Turing’s Computing machinery and intelligence (1950), a host of digital artists have been exploring how machines replace the artist in thinking, making art and music.

Ouchhh Studio take the digital art revolution to a whole new level. Art history is a data set from which their artificial intelligence scientists, animators and designers create algorithms that produce stunning visual effects that dance over the walls and floor of the space.

Ouchhhh Studio, The Wisdom of AI Light, Tyr Liang/Xplorer Studio/Illuminate Adelaide

Every so often, Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic Mona Lisa (1503) or his Vitruvian Man (1490) appear, along with fragments from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-12) or Pieta (1498-99), only to dissolve into particles.

In the second part of the performance, the creators turn to the writings of Galileo, Einstein and other physicists. Snippets of their text and scientific symbols dance across the walls and floor, only to dissolve into computer language or abstract designs.

May be an image of tree and road

The partnership of the Ouchhh Studio with scientists at CERN and NASA is ground-breaking: their multi-sensory performance is a visual feast.

Painting trees with light

In the botanical gardens, the Montreal-based Moment Factory is presenting another after-dark spectacle, Light Cycles. The Moment Factory’s laboratory is in the forest. Trees, plants and built structures become their canvas.

Moment Factory’s Light Cycles. Tyr Liang/Illuminate Adelaide

A curated pathway through the gardens takes audience members on a journey where light, music and video interact. The world of every day slips away and nature comes alive.

At one point, you move through a maze of intersecting laser lights. At another, lights dance up and down giant trees accompanied by thumping music that emulates the fantasy-laden tree monsters of children’s stories.

Further on, a choreography of lights dances across a lake performing movements to rival contemporary dance. The finale is the changing light parade at the Palm House.

This deeply performative, immersive and experiential walk-through light and sound is utterly stunning.

Rewriting history

Illuminate Adelaide is also lighting up buildings throughout the city after dark. The façade of the Art Gallery of South Australia is host to Vincent Namatjira’s Going Out Bush.

The gallery’s classical columns become gum trees in the Hermannsburg style of watercolour painting made famous by Albert Namatjira, while Vincent weaves in and out of Country in his great-grandfather’s signature green truck.

Illuminate Adelaide featuring Going Out Bush by Vincent Namatjira, Art Gallery of South Australia. Courtesy the artist and Iwantja Arts, photo: Saul Steed

The imagery is, at one level, jocular and folksy. At a deeper level it is rewriting colonial history. The scene is set in Indulkana, the artist’s home in the APY (Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) Lands, where the local football team plays and the camp dog roams.

Colonial power, symbolised by images of Captain Cook and the Queen, becomes First Nations power. The heads of Captain Cook and the Queen are replaced by Vincent Namatjira’s: a nighttime dream or more?

Studies in melancholy

Within the walls of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Robert Wilson: Moving Portraits is on show. While not a part of Illuminate Adelaide, its focus is also light, sound and movement.

Wilson’s fascination is stillness – and the movement in stillness. His 23 video portraits are teasingly titled “moving portraits”.

Wilson is a major contemporary art world figure, best known for his collaboration with Philip Glass in Einstein on the Beach (1975), and most recently for his radical new interpretation of Handel’s Messiah (2020). In his highly innovative work across the performing and visual arts, the reductive forms of space and time are always at play.

Some of Wilson’s subjects for his highly staged, theatrical pieces in his Moving Portraits are actors because they are trained to hold a pose. The scenes created are frequently steeped in art history, cinema or literature as in Lady Gaga: Mademoiselle Caroline Riviere (2013).

Robert Wilson, born Waco, Texas, 1941, Lady Gaga: Mlle. Caroline Riviere, 2013, HD video, music by Michael Galasso. Courtesy of RW Work Ltd.

This video portrait, which draws on Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s famous 1806 portrait, replicates its costume and pose perfectly, but for Wilson it is a study in melancholy. The youthful Caroline Riviere died a year after Ingres’s portrait commission.

In filming, Lady Gaga held the pose for seven hours. The video portrait, which runs on a loop over several minutes, is intensely still and subdued. A tear intermittently runs down Lady Gaga’s face. A snow goose occasionally flies above to allude to the brevity and beauty of life.

Each Wilson video portrait is paired with objects from the gallery’s collection, for this one it is a Roman balsarium (c.50-200 CE), a delicate glass tear-collecting receptacle a mere 13cm high.

Wilson sees his portraits as opening up a psychological window for the viewer, the balsarium is uncanny in completing the effect.

In another intense portrait of Chinese expatriate writer and Nobel Laureate for Literature, Gao Xingjian, Writer (2005), space is compressed. The portrait zones in on his cropped face. Every facial line and skin pore are visible.

Robert Wilson, born Waco, Texas, 1941, GAO XINGJIAN, Writer, 2005, HD video, music by Peter Cerone. Courtesy of RW Work Ltd.

With his eyes closed, apart from the slight flicker of the eyelids, the face becomes a record of struggle and success. Text in French from Jean Paul Sartre, edges slowly across his face reading, in English, “solitude is a necessary condition for liberty”.

The video portraits extend to animals, the human-animal nexus a particular fascination for Wilson. This includes the intriguing Ivory, Black Panther (2006) which Wilson and his technicians filmed for 23 long minutes in a domestic setting, the panther’s eyes directed at these intruders.

Robert Wilson, born Waco, Texas, 1941, IVORY, Black Panther, 2006, HD video, music by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, text by Heiner Muelle, voice by Robert Wilson. Courtesy of RW Work Ltd.

The union between the humans and this potentially dangerous animal is palpable: the stillness is both unnerving and its drawcard.

Other moving portraits include a softer, more vulnerable Brad Pitt, Actor (2004), clad only in boxer shorts and socks, standing in the rain and holding a water pistol, a reference to Alfred Hitchcock.

Wilson works collaboratively. That starts with his subject, and extends to his creative team who, following the theatrically staged shoot, spend another two weeks editing and sound mixing. Each portrait comes with an accompanying soundtrack.

When looking at the Wilson video portraits, time slows down; the slight movement in the imagery, such as Winona Ryder’s feather on her hat swaying in her intriguing Winona Ryder Actress (2004), requires careful looking. Viewers in the exhibition space are being subtly inducted into Wilson’s mantra of “movement in stillness” in this deeply affective series which is poetry in motion.

A truly exquisite exhibition.

Illuminate Adelaide is at multiple venues until July 31. Robert Wilson: Moving Portraits is at the Art Gallery of South Australia until October 3.

Catherine Speck, Emerita Professor, Art History and Curatorship, University of Adelaide

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

More than two in five Australians face mental disorder in their lifetime, says ABS study

Depressed (Wikimedia commons)

More than two in five (43.7 per cent) Australians aged 16-85 years have experienced a mental disorder in their lifetime, says the latest findings released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

The National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing study used the World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview 3.0 diagnostic tool (CIDI 3.0 tool) to determine mental disorders.

Linda Fardell, head of health and disability statistics at the ABS, said in a statement that the new study paints a comprehensive picture of mental disorders in the community, and gives a snapshot of wellbeing. She said:

“At the national level, the Study shows that 43.7 per cent (8.6 million) of Australians aged between 16 and 85 have experienced a mental disorder at some time in their life. In 2020-21, one in five people (21.4 per cent) experienced a mental disorder. Anxiety was the most common group of mental disorders; 16.8 per cent of all Australians had an anxiety disorder, 7.5 per cent had an affective disorder such as depression, while 3.3 per cent had a substance use disorder.”

The study also shows that around 1.1 million (39.6 per cent) of young adults aged 16-24 years experienced a mental disorder in 2020-21. Ms Fardell added: 

“Almost half (46.6 per cent) of young females and one third (31.2 per cent) of young males aged 16-24 years had a mental disorder in 2020-21, with anxiety disorders being the most common type of disorder among young females and males.”

Ms Fardell further adds that the study also gives insights into the actions people took to manage their mental health.

“Some 17.5 per cent (3.4 million) of Australians had at least one consultation with a health professional for their mental health in 2020-21. General practitioners were the most common type of health professional consulted.”

According to the study, of people with a mental disorder in 2020-21, almost half (47.1 per cent) had at least one consultation with a health professional for their mental health.

In addition to these consultations, 4.4 per cent (or 864,100) of Australians accessed at least one digital service for their mental health, such as crisis support or counselling services and online treatment programs or tools.

This study was funded by the Department of Health and Aged Care as part of the Intergenerational Health and Mental Health Study.

The ABS will publish results from the second cohort (2021-22) of the study in 2023, as well as results from a combined sample on the ABS website.

If you or someone you know requires assistance or support, contact: Lifeline: 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue: 1300 224 636

Even in the political after-life, Morrison departs from the norm

Prime Minister Scott Morrison; Image Source: Supplied
Prime Minister Scott Morrison; Image Source: Supplied

By Joshua Black

In the past fortnight, former prime minister Scott Morrison has reemerged as a subject of public discussion. First, there was rumour about his interest in securing work with the Australian Rugby League Commission, which he promptly dismissed as “pub talk”.

Second, Morrison made his debut on the international lecture circuit with an address to the Asian Leadership Conference in Seoul. He seized that opportunity to criticise China and defend his own government’s pandemic legacy, suggesting “history would treat his government more kindly” than contemporaries have done.

Then the former prime minister went to Perth to deliver a sermon at the Victory Life Centre, the Pentecostal Church led by conservative former tennis star Margaret Court. In his 50-minute address, he stressed that Australians should put their trust in God rather than in governments or the United Nations. He also warned that prevailing feelings of anxiety – about the ongoing pandemic, the climate crisis or the cost of living – were part of “Satan’s plan”.

With that performance, Morrison has signalled that he will likely depart from the established conventions of post-prime ministerial life in Australia.The leadership instability of recent years in both major parties has generated a relatively high number of ex-PMs. Their behaviour, and the reactions they receive, tell us much about our political culture.

Australia has never had more than eight former prime ministers alive at one time, and in the mid-20th century, three of them died in office. Today there are seven of them still with us, all of whom have seen their reputations rise and fall.

Australia’s most successful former leaders have been those who deliberately try to embody generosity, magnanimity and a degree of bipartisanship. The first former prime minister, Edmund Barton, set that standard in 1903 when he resigned from the top job to continue his public service on the newly created High Court. His biographer Geoffrey Bolton suggested Barton enjoyed his transformation in public opinion from “Tosspot Toby” to that of a “well-regarded elder statesman”.

Several of Australia’s postwar leaders have emulated that model. Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser left the bitter politics of the dismissal behind them and dedicated themselves to humanitarian causes. Whitlam was Australia’s ambassador to UNESCO in Brussels, while Fraser campaigned against apartheid in South Africa before joining humanitarian group CARE Australia. Both were highly critical of their successors.

Kevin Rudd has spent the past decade immersing himself in the challenge of US-China bilateral relations, and campaigning against the impact of News Corp on Australian politics. In 2016, he unsuccessfully sought Australia’s nomination for the post of secretary-general of the United Nations.

In the recent past, Julia Gillard has similarly committed herself to causes such as the promotion of girls’ education in Africa, chairing mental health support service Beyond Blue, and helming the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London. Her erstwhile critics at The Australian newspaper admitted that this was no “miserable ghost”.

Conservatives have enjoyed their political afterlives too, albeit often in distinctly partisan ways. Earlier prime ministers such as George Reid and Stanley Melbourne Bruce were sent to London as Australia’s High Commissioner, working the British establishment. The aged Robert Menzies used his 12 years of retirement to write reminiscences, defend the British Empire from its inexorable decline, and enjoy the cricket. John Howard has studiously emulated Menzies (to the point of writing a book about him), although he remains a vigorous partisan campaigner during elections.

Even a highly unpopular leader can be rehabilitated in public opinion. Paul Keating’s “big picture” vision for Australia, which voters rejected heavily in 1996, looked more attractive after a decade of cultural division under the Howard government. By the same token, despite having lost his own seat in the landslide of 2007, Howard seemed a “byword for stability” during the leadership turmoil of the 2010s, and there was much nostalgia about him.

Under Gillard, Labor sank to new lows in the polls, but in the years since her removal in June 2013 her reputation recovered significantly, judged by some scholars to be the best prime minister post-Howard.

The public have had a little less tolerance for leaders who seem to be chasing money. John Gorton “raised a few eyebrows” with his whiskey advertisements, although Whitlam managed to get away with advertising spaghetti sauce because of his self-deprecating performance.

The popular Bob Hawke faced a fierce backlash in the 1990s following his explosive memoirs, his very public business investments, and his attempts to make money from short media appearances. It took time, some rewriting of history, and footage of beer consumption at the footy, to rekindle his love affair with the public.

Since Hawke, Australian politicians have followed their British and US counterparts by publishing memoirs in great volumes, but the lucrative international lecture circuit has been slightly less open to them.

It has been even more unseemly to be seen to act out of vengeance or bitterness. In the 1920s and 1930s, former prime minister Billy Hughes stayed in parliament and often caused significant headaches for his fellow non-Labor MPs, even voting to turf them out of office in 1929. Some felt him a “great statesman and patriot”, others a “renegade”.

Billy McMahon remained in parliament for ten years after his defeat in 1972, apparently with no aspiration to leadership. In the more recent past, Rudd and Tony Abbott both stayed in parliament after initially losing the confidence of their parties, yearning to retake the highest office.

Malcolm Turnbull left parliament immediately on being removed in August 2018, and as Aaron Patrick has recently argued, he was outwardly bitter at his removal and passionately critical of his successor at every turn. Bitterness is a public emotion that alienates former leaders from their supporters.

The job of a former prime minister is awkward, defined by the past rather than the future, and by the absence of formal power. It is a role without a script. The awkwardness is embodied in Shaun Micallef’s The Ex-PM, an ABC satire about a former prime minister who hires a writer to draft his memoirs, but finds he has no real story to tell.

But former leaders still have a meaningful role to play if they wish. They enjoy private offices, staff, and travel privileges subsidised by the public. They retain their extensive high-level contacts and enjoy an enormous public platform from which to speak. Parting shots at colleagues and embittered book tours reflect a fractious political culture, but can be forgiven if the offender makes peace, finds a new calling, or develops a stately persona above the partisan din. In time, if they appear magnanimous, generous and “above” daily politics, they can become a reassuring and encouraging presence within their partisan community.

By urging his audience not to trust in the institution of government itself, and by taking his Pentecostal rhetoric to such heights, Morrison is parting with former prime ministerial convention. The congregation may have approved, but his fellow Liberal MPs appeared less enthused.

Such indulgences are unlikely to re-cultivate the respect of the electorate.

Joshua Black, PhD Candidate, School of History, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University

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

Bollywood superstar Ranveer Singh’s nude photoshoot starts hilarious meme fest on social media

Ranveer Singh (Image source: Paper magazine)

Bollywood superstar Ranveer Singh’s recent nude photoshoot has ended-up creating a meme fest on social media.

The Indian actor posed naked in front of the camera naked for Paper magazine’s cover which dubbed him as “the last Bollywood superstar.” 

In his interview with the magazine, Ranveer Singh spoke about how the pandemic left a deep impact on him.

“Everything’s gone to shit. I understand that this journey of life is an agonizing f**king journey. It’s agonizing to just exist. I am hyper-sensitive to everything around me, it’s just the way I am, it’s how I’m wired.”

He further added:

“It’s so easy for me to be physically naked, but in some of my performances I’ve been damn f*ing naked. You can see my f*ing soul. How naked is that? That’s being actually naked. I can be naked in front of a thousand people, I don’t give a s*t. It’s just that they get uncomfortable.”

Some praised the Bollywood superstar while others used social media to post various reactions and rib-tickling memes since the release of the naked pictures.

Here are some memes:


Ranveer Singh was recently seen on Netflix’s Ranveer vs Wild with Bear Grylls.

He will star in Karan Johar’s Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani  and will also feature in Rohit Shetty’s Cirkus.

Helping Indian subcontinent students adjust to Australian universities, some tips

Over the past decade, the number of students from the Indian subcontinent has surged exponentially in the Australian higher education system. Given the importance of higher education for the Australian economy, these Indian subcontinent international students also represent a significant resource for both Australian universities and Australia.  

However, given the rise in numbers of Indian subcontinent students at Australian universities, is the local staff capable of addressing their distinctive cross-cultural needs?

To find an answer to this complex and under-researched topic, a team of interdisciplinary researchers from Central Queensland University (CQU) conducted semi-structured focus group interviews with the academic and professional staff to gain insights into their perceptions and experiences with Indian subcontinent students.

Dr Ritesh Chugh, one of the authors of this research paper, told The Australia Today that there’s a lot that needs to be done by both faculty and management at Australian universities. He says that this timely study has both practical and policy implications for all Australian universities. He adds:

“Given the large and growing numbers of subcontinent students enrolled in Australian higher education, this study is timely.”

The new research demonstrates that academic and professional staff strongly recognise the need to engage with Indian subcontinent students’ understandings of teaching and learning, including academic cheating or plagiarism. The researchers note:

“The ‘colonial hangover’ model of higher education, whereby the onus on acculturation is solely on the student is unsuitable as all participating staff considered themselves to have a significant role in alleviating subcontinent students’ cross-cultural challenges.”

Dr Monika Kansal, who is the lead author of this research paper, points to the following key areas based on multiple focus group interviews:

  • institutional actions to alleviate cross-cultural challenges
  • peer to peer mentoring
  • skills and mental health support services for Indian subcontinent students, and
  • staff training in cross-cultural awareness.

She is hopeful that a focus on the above areas by both the academic staff and university management could help alleviate the social and academic challenges faced by Indian subcontinent students. 

The research team says that recruiting Indian subcontinent students seeking immigration opportunities via university enrolment was a significant and interesting finding of the focus groups. They point out that most Indian subcontinent international students in Australia study management, commerce, engineering, information technology, or other technology-related subjects. The researchers note:

“Focus group participants suggested that a greater effort needs to be made by universities to ensure overseas agents and recruiters are providing the right information to potential students, including the temporary nature of their legal status in Australia and the requirement to observe the conditions of their student visas.”

Dr Chugh reiterates that Australian universities must ensure that overseas education agents provide correct information to prospective Indian subcontinent students both pre and post-arrival. 

The findings have been published in a research paper entitled “Alleviating cross-cultural challenges of Indian subcontinent students: University staff perspectives” authored by Monika Kansal, Ritesh Chugh, Anthony Weber, Stephanie Macht, Robert Grose, and Mahsood Shah.

Lucky to have influence of Indian culture while growing up: Clr Charishma Kaliyanda

Image Source: Charishma Kaliyanda Facebook
Image Source: Charishma Kaliyanda Facebook

Indian origin Charishma Kaliyanda was elected to the Liverpool City Council in 2017. She is a member of the Labor party. Charishma was born in Bengaluru, India but moved with her family to Australia in the early 1990s. She was named among the ’40 Under 40: Most Influential Asian Australians 2021′ and is a registered Occupational Therapist.

In a free flowing and candid interview with The Australia Today Charishma spoke about her journey into politics, the footprint of the Indian-Australian community in multicultural Australia and the importance of the Australia-India relationship. Catch the full interview with Councillor Charishma Kaliyanda here:

Rahul Kumar, a trainee nurse, attacked by armed group in Sydney

Rahul Kumar, crime victim: Image Source: 7News screenshot
Rahul Kumar, crime victim: Image Source: 7News screenshot

Rahul Kumar, a 30-year-old trainee nurse, was attacked by a group of armed thugs on Saturday afternoon.

Local community leaders fear that this attack on Rahul Kumar could be the start of another round of youth street fights.

Rahul was ambushed by a group of six people who carried bats and metal poles as he walked to his car outside Plus Fitness Westmead.

In the footage aired by 7 News, the attackers can be seen running toward their target Rahul from all angles. Rahul said:

“I was making my way to the car and some random people – there were six or seven people – they just attacked on me with the things they had.”

Rahul Kumar, crime victim: Image Source: The Australia Today
Rahul Kumar, crime victim: Image Source: The Australia Today

The attack left Rahul requiring stitches in his head, a broken arm, and some bruising. He added:

“My head was bleeding, my shirt was totally red in blood.”They bashed me badly.”

Rahul, who is now afraid to leave home, said his attackers were dressed in balaclavas and hoodies thus making it hard for him to identify them.

NSW Police told the media that the motive of the attack at this stage remains under investigation.

Foreign investors buying property to pay double fees from Friday 29 July

Foreign investors buying property in Australia; Image Source: @CANVA
Foreign investors buying property in Australia; Image Source: @CANVA

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has announced delivering Labor’s election commitment to increase foreign investment fees and penalties.

From Friday 29 July, foreign investment application fees will double.
This will generate an additional $455 million in Budget revenue over the forward estimates.

Mr Chalmers however reiterated that Australia still welcomes foreign investment that is in Australia’s interests.

“Foreign investment application fees ensure the cost of administering the foreign investment framework is not borne by Australians, and penalties encourage compliance with our rules,”

Treasurer further added.
Foreign investors buying property in Australia; Image Source: @CANVA
Foreign investors buying property in Australia; Image Source: @CANVA

“Australia continues to be an attractive place for investment. We have a lot to offer global investors including strong institutions, transparent regulations and a highly‑skilled workforce.”

“We welcome foreign investment in Australia because it plays a crucial role in Australia’s economic success and will continue to be important into the future.”

Treasury statements says that foreign investment fees will continue to make up only a small proportion of total foreign direct investment.

Treasurer Chalmers stressed that decisions like this are made necessary by the state of the Budget he has inherited from his predecessor.

Foreign investors buying property in Australia; Image Source: @CANVA
Foreign investors buying property in Australia; Image Source: @CANVA

“We will always put Australian interests first. That means ensuring Australians benefit from foreign investment in Australia,”

Mr Chalmers added.

Under the current economic environment tackling housing affordability and helping more Australians into home ownership is a significant challenge and the Albanese government takes it seriously.

Foreign investors buying property in Australia; Image Source: @CANVA
Foreign investors buying property in Australia; Image Source: @CANVA

The Albanese Government has an ambitious housing reform agenda to address this challenge. Changes to foreign investment fees and penalties will help to deliver this reform agenda including Help to Buy a new program to assist Australians into home ownership.

How to deal with hangry kids and try not to let it happen again – 3 tips from experts

Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA
Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA

Alison Spence, Deakin University; Alissa Burnett, Deakin University, and Georgie Russell, Deakin University

Like adults, children can get “hangry” – a combination of angry and hungry.
Hangriness may be caused by blood glucose levels dropping, leading to irritability, bad mood, anger or tantrums.

Children have smaller stomachs than adults so may become hungry again sooner. Some may not notice they’ve become very hungry until the moment of crisis.

So, what can parents do when hangriness strikes – and reduce the risk of it happening again?

Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA
Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA

What’s really going on?

First: is your child really hangry, or just angry? Feeding straight away isn’t always the answer. Ask yourself:

  • how long has it been since they last slept, and how was last night’s sleep? If they’re actually tired, a storybook, toy or cuddle might do. Consider whether their next meal can be earlier today – before they’re too tired to eat.
  • has anything else upset them? If so, act on this, rather than using food to distract or soothe.
  • how long has it been since they last ate? Did you miss a meal in the parenting rush? It happens! Maybe it’s time to pause for a healthy snack.

If it’s not long until lunch or dinner, you could:

  • just wait
  • let them start on the vegetable component of the meal, or
  • snack on some easy veggies (of age-appropriate texture) like a carrot, capsicum or cucumber.

Dinner could be trickier if they’ve filled up on yoghurt or biscuits, so try not to serve things they love (other than veggies) at this time.

If your child complains of hunger but only wants a particular food or refuses veggies, consider whether they really are hungry.

Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA
Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA

Try not to get foods and emotions too entwined

Many adults struggle with overeating to manage their emotions, a behaviour often learned in childhood.

It’s important to find other ways of improving moods so children don’t learn to rely on foods to manage emotions. Explore other activities like listening to music, playing, or having a cuddle. We can also teach children other non-food-based ways to manage their emotions, such as mindfulness and deep breathing.

Using food as a reward or to calm down can also lead to emotional eating. This may increase children consuming foods irrespective of hunger.

On the other hand, overly restricting food can have unintended effects and lead to emotional eating.

3 ways to reduce hangriness risk

1. Maintain a regular eating routine

For most young children, three meals and two snacks a day work well. Having these at predictable times helps children learn to eat at meal times and be able to wait until the next meal.

Try to limit grazing. Grazing can set up a cycle where children aren’t hungry at meal times, so eat little, but then become hungry (or hangry) again soon after.

This can frustrate parents who’ve prepared a meal that isn’t eaten and then feel pressured to prepare extra foods between meals. Grazing, even on nutritious foods, can also contribute to tooth decay.

2. Include foods that help children feel fuller for longer

Try to serve nutritious, substantial snacks. Including some protein and carbohydrates can help maintain their energy levels from one meal to the next.

Try natural yoghurt, milk, hummus, nuts/nut butter (of age-appropriate texture), eggs, oat muesli or wholegrain bread, to go with fruit or veggie snacks.

Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA
Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA

3. Encourage children to pay attention to their hunger and fullness cues

It can be tempting to pressure kids to eat more at mealtimes or offer different foods if they reject what’s served.

But this is unlikely to help in the long run and can create a rod for your own back. It can turn mealtimes into a battle and parents into short-order chefs.

Pressuring children to eat can override their ability to self-regulate; they can get into a habit of overeating instead of listening to their hunger and fullness cues.

Parents provide, kids decide” reminds us a parent’s role is to provide nutritious foods at regular intervals; it’s the child’s role to decide how much to eat.

If you include something at each mealtime you know your child will eat, such as a favourite vegetable, then they’ll likely eat something if they are hungry.

If they really don’t want to eat then maybe they aren’t hungry, and that’s OK.

Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA
Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA

Other tips include eating together, eating the same foods, modelling enjoyment of those foods, and turning screens off while eating.

This is general advice for healthy children, but some may have more interest or enjoyment in food, or be fussier, and may be particularly prone to difficult behaviour when hungry. If your child experiences severe fussiness, restricted eating, or you have concerns about their nutrition or health, speak with your child’s health nurse, doctor, or accredited practising dietician.

Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA
Hungry Child; Image Source: @CANVA

If you are finding it financially difficult to get enough nutritious food for your family, support is available to access food and low-cost recipes.

A good child’s health and nutrition are unlikely to suffer with occasional short bouts of hunger.

Yes, hangriness happens occasionally (it’s normal for children to test the boundaries!). But it’s OK to stay firm and ride it out. With an eating routine, there’s another meal not too far away.

Alison Spence, Senior Lecturer in Nutrition and Population Health, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition (IPAN), Deakin University; Alissa Burnett, Lecturer in Nutrition Sciences, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition (IPAN), School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, Deakin University, and Georgie Russell, Senior Lecturer, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition (IPAN), Deakin University

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

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