Health News at Your Fingertips

Daniel Hurst

Some more reaction is rolling in after yesterday’s Quad summit in Tokyo. Interestingly, the Australian government won support from India, Japan and the US to include the following line in the joint leaders’ statement:

We welcome the new Australian Government’s commitment to stronger action on climate change, including through passing legislation to achieve net zero by 2050 and lodging a new, ambitious Nationally Determined Contribution.

Wesley Morgan, a Climate Council researcher and research fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, said today that the Quad leaders’ summit was “the first of many important steps on the road to repairing Australia’s international climate reputation, which was in tatters after years of failings from the former Morrison government”.

Morgan said the new Albanese government’s decision to place climate change at the centre of Australia’s foreign policy and acknowledge it as a threat to national security had already delivered “crucial economic and strategic dividends for Australia”.

Morgan cited the prospect of a reset with Pacific island states, improved relations with the US, and a signal from the EU’s special envoy for the Indo-Pacific about the prospect of progress on the free trade agreement between Australia and the EU.

Morgan said:

Right now, it’s safe to say that we can hold our heads a little higher. However the new Australian government has a mandate to go even further and faster, which would deliver even more economic and strategic dividends.

Cheryl Durrant, a Climate Councillor and former director of preparedness and mobilisation at the Australian Department of Defence, said Australia was “now back in step with its allies on climate change”.

Durrant said the latest developments were “encouraging” and climate change needed “a strategically coherent response”.

The new government has pledged to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030 on 2005 levels, compared with the former government’s formal target of a 26% to 28% cut. But it has so far stopped short of calls from the Pacific for even more ambitious action and specific curbs on fossil fuel projects.

Benita Kolovos

Victorian government working towards free flu shots, Daniel Andrews says

Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, says the state government is working with pharmacists and doctors to make the flu shot free for everyone in the state.

The Queensland government has already made the jab free amid soaring influenza rates in the state, while the New South Wales government is taking steps to do the same.

Currently in Victoria, the flu shot is free for those considered most vulnerable to the flu, including children aged between six months and five, people aged over 65, pregnant women and those with underlying health conditions.

Andrews said the government would have more to say about increasing the eligibility for a free vaccine soon:

We’re working with the Pharmacy Guild and the AMA on that very issue. It’s really important that we talk to them, they’re the ones who predominantly undertake that work. They’re the ones who are distributed and actually provide those jabs. So, we’re in detailed discussions with them and when we have more to say we will … Our vax rates for flu are higher than other states, I want them higher still. But at the same time, it’s really important that we don’t just make announcements, we’ve got to have a plan, a detailed plan before we go down that path and the best people to talk to are the ones who do that work and that’s GPs and surgeries and pharmacists.

Detected cases of influenza in Victoria have surged in recent weeks. There have been 11,906 cases this year so far.

Western Australia has recorded 12,419 new Covid cases. There were two deaths overnight, a man in his 70s and woman in her 80s.

Ben Raue

Six electorates still up in the air as Labor sits on 74 seats won

Labor has won 74 seats, with the Coalition on 56 and fifteen members of the crossbench, with six seats still in play.

In four of these seats, it’s a straightforward Labor vs Liberal contest.

In the Labor-held seat of Gilmore, Liberal candidate Andrew Constance leads by just 145 votes.

Liberal minister Michael Sukkar leads in Deakin by 729 votes. Sitting Labor MP Brian Mitchell leads in Lyons by 703 votes, and Liberal MP James Stevens leads in Sturt by 1,261 votes.

Then there are two more complex races where Labor, Liberal and Greens are all polling similar numbers. The key count in these seats will be the three-candidate-preferred count, after all minor candidates are excluded. If the Liberal or Greens candidate comes third in either seat, Labor will win. If the Labor candidate comes third, the Greens will win. Neither seat can be won by the Liberal candidate.

In Brisbane, sitting Liberal National MP Trevor Evans is in clear first place, with Labor’s Madonna Jarrett just 34 votes ahead of Greens candidate Stephen Bates. Scrutineering data suggests the Greens will catch up to Labor on preferences, which would then unlock Labor preferences to elect the Greens. So this makes the Greens the slight favourite.

In Macnamara, the three candidates are very tightly clustered, but Labor MP Josh Burns is leading on 32.3%, ahead of the Greens on 29.8% and the Liberal Party on 29.0%. It seems likely that Burns will stay in first place and win with strong preferences from whoever comes third, but it is still quite tight.

If these six seats go to the party currently favoured, the final count will be:

• Labor – 76 (+7)
• Coalition – 59 (-17)
• Greens – 4 (+3)
• Centre Alliance – 1
• Katter’s Australian Party – 1
• Independents – 10 (+7)

The Australian Capital Territory has recorded 934 new cases.

Tamsin Rose

Consent-focused education campaign to begin on social media and Tinder ahead of new laws coming into effect in NSW

Videos showing young people having “simple” and “easy” consent conversations will begin appearing on social media platforms and the dating app Tinder from today as part of an education campaign to coincide with the new New South Wales consent laws coming into effect next week.

The campaign was designed to demonstrate successful consent conversations and is being targeted at 16 to 24-year-olds. The state’s attorney general, Mark Speakman, said the new laws strengthened the affirmative consent model and the campaign videos were important to help change the culture in NSW.

He said:

Under the new laws, a person does not consent to sexual activity unless they do something or say something to indicate consent and a person won’t have a reasonable belief that there is consent unless they do something or say something to find out that that consent operates.

Changing the law is one thing, but at the end of the day, what’s even more important is changing community attitudes, and empowering our citizens to seek consent every time – particularly young people.

Speakman said a “racy” 18+ version of the campaign would be running on popular dating app Tinder. The campaign videos were created over nine months with the help of experts, young people and campaigners like the survivor advocate Saxon Mullins, who said the ads were tackling the issue head on – unlike the now-infamous federal government milkshake consent video.

One of the important aspects of this campaign is that it says exactly what is happening. There is no talking around the issue. Talking around the issue feeds into that uncomfortable awkwardness that people sometimes feel trying to initiate these conversations. That’s the main difference between that and some other campaigns we’ve seen that have tried to be coy in a space where you cannot be coy.

Rains to continue across Australia in the months ahead

If you’re in a part of Australia that has been relatively wet of late, it looks like things are not going to change much in the coming months.

So what’s going on? Well, the La Niña in the Pacific which influences spring and summer rainfall is lingering longer than forecast. But what’s ahead is a negative phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole.

What’s a dipole? Well in this case, it’s comparing the relative warmth of sea-surface temperatures in the west of the Indian Ocean versus the east. The negative phase means there’s more convection off WA, and that’s where the extra moisture for the rest of the country is going to come from.

Places east of the ranges, such as Sydney, will actually turn a bit drier – we hope. But where we’re looking at wet, east Africa is leaning dry – perhaps disastrously – for millions of people.

The Bureau of Meteorology, meanwhile, has released a special climate analysis of just how wet the end of February and early March were for south-east Queensland and parts of NSW. Here’s our version of the report:

For those wondering what role climate change is playing in the big wet, it’s wise to ignore a statement in one of the newspapers (guess which) today that “science still can’t attribute any single weather event to climate change”.

The climate is obviously very complex, but as the atmosphere can hold (and then dump) 7% more moisture per degree of global heating, the case is actually the other way around: every weather event is influenced by how we’re energising the system.

Or as the special BoM report states: “Observations show that there has been an increase in the intensity of heavy rainfall events in Australia.

“The intensity of short-duration (hourly) extreme rainfall events has increased by around 10% or more in some regions in recent decades, with larger increases typically observed in the north of the country.”

With the land warming faster than the oceans, global heating is also contributing to making heatwaves more frequent, more severe and lasting longer, as the World Meteorological Organization noted earlier this week:

Worth keeping in mind for those who don’t see the point of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, and why some might be asking for the new Labor government to do more.

Queensland has recorded 5,584 new cases and 10 deaths overnight:

Josh Taylor

Australia’s eSafety commissioner: ‘Freedom of speech is not the same thing as a free for all’

Comments made by Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, at the World Economic Forum this week about a “recalibration” of human rights and free speech have been picked up by right-wing conspiracy theory accounts on YouTube, but the full context makes it more clear.

Inman Grant said:

I think we’re gonna have to think about a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online, you know, from freedom of speech to the freedom to, you know, to be free from online violence, or the right of data protection to the right to child dignity.

Earlier, Inman Grant pointed out when she was at Twitter, the free-for-all on the platform meant many marginalised voices were being silenced due to online abuse:

What I saw every day when I was at Twitter was that marginalised voices and voices of women and those of intersectional factors, were being silenced.

So, freedom of speech is not the same thing as a free for all. And what we have done is we have drawn a line and we have said, if this veers clearly into the lane of serious online abuse – and I have to prove serious intent to harm, as well as the fact that it’s menacing, harassing, and offensive in all cases, so a very high bar – but it tackles that content that clearly veers into that lane and it’s designed to silence.

Later in the panel discussion Brett Solomon, the executive director of digital rights group Access Now, pushed back against the idea of more eSafety commissioners in other countries in charge of removing content.

He said:

A state-centric online policing framework can actually be a dangerous precedent that leads to greater insecurity and greater lack of safety for the populations that I work for and that I work with.

We have concerns about this idea of online policing that comes from the state because particularly as you say, when we move from content that we speak about, or content or data about us, when it actually becomes about our identity, when it becomes about our biometrics, our irises … our faces and our gait and all of the things that are going to happen with 5G and the metaverse, then it becomes even more important that we have the proper regulations and frameworks in place.

Inman Grant defended her powers, pointing out that there was a lot of discerning involved:

Some of our cases take two weeks and nothing is black and white. It requires a regulatory investigation and there are four different levels … I have to be transparent in terms of what I report, but I can be challenged. I’ve got an internal review process.

People can go to the ombudsman, the tribunal or the federal court and, you know, discretion, fairness, and proportionality have to be displayed and I need a statement of reasons, it has to hold up in a court of law, but I appreciate your point: that someone, somewhere else that doesn’t have the same regard for democratic principles or the same ability to discern and investigate and just say, well, we’ll take down this content.

Karen Andrews: ‘The people we lost in droves were predominantly women’

Next, I wanted to go back to Karen Andrews’ appearance on News Breakfast, where she acknowledged that the party had lost a huge number of female voters and said the Liberals had to “understand what happened”.

She thought the party didn’t “represent their views” and that was a “harsh reality”:

I don’t think the answer is whether we tack right or tack left. The reality is that the people we lost in droves were predominantly women – educated women.

They were women who were financially secure. They were unhappy – unhappy with the Liberal party and they chose to take their vote elsewhere. They didn’t generally take them to Labor. They took them to the Greens party. We need to understand why that happened and we need to address that issue. We have had issues with how women feel, [how] they are treated by the Liberal party. We have to turn that perception around and we have to make sure that that is not the reality.

Look, a lack of empathy is probably a word that has been used, but I think it’s better to say these disaffected women in particular did not think that [we] were the party that represented their views. They were not happy to be associated with the Liberal party brand. That is a very harsh reality but it is the reality.

We need to take that on board. We need to make sure that these women in particular, but not exclusively women, know they have been heard by us. The issues that are important to them we need to tackle – we need to make sure that we have a strong policy position. I do hope that we take the time that’s needed to put in place the proper policy settings.