By Roger Chao

The Silent Truth

In the tumult of a raging battle, beneath the echoing cries,

Where shadows merge with fading lights, the silent truth belies.

A world not split by borders, nor by rifles drawn in dread,

But bound by shared existence, in the spaces tear-stained red.

We gather here as fragments of a once harmonious whole,

Diverse in thought and creed, yet one in heart, in soul.

For pain, it knows no language, nor sorrow a flag does claim;

In every mother’s weeping eyes, the tears fall just the same.

The earth beneath our feet, soaked with the ages’ cries,

Does not discern the victor, nor the truth amongst the lies.

It absorbs each drop of blood as if to cleanse our skin,

Hoping perhaps that from this soil, peace might grow within.

Can you hear the echoes of the fallen, whispering in the breeze?

Their voices carry stories across the oceans, through the trees.

They speak of dreams unfulfilled, of lives too swiftly taken,

They sing a sombre lullaby of the lost and the forsaken.

For what is war but a mirror reflecting our darkest fears,

A testament to what is lost through forgetting our common tears.

A child’s laughter silenced before it can fully form,

A lover’s bed left cold and empty, never to be warm.

Imagine now a world untouched by the scourge of war’s design,

Where the morning dew whispers of peace, and all our hopes align.

Where children’s laughter fills the air, free from the shadow of fear,

And the old are left to ponder life, with no more need for tears.

Let us then lay down the arms that serve only to divide,

And walk the path of understanding, with our hearts open wide.

For we are one beneath the stars, in the sun’s eternal light,

Divided not by our differences, but bound by our shared plight.

So remember this silent truth, not anger, hate or blame,

That the dreams and hopes and fears we share, are proof we are the same.

And never again shall division, see the light of day,

For in unity, we find strength, and in humanity, our way.

UNSW Media Release

Australia’s rising cost of living is squeezing household budgets, and with high fuel prices and public transport costs increasing, many Australians face the reality that the expense of commuting to work may no longer be financially sustainable.

The Australian Commute report showed that the average daily cost for an Australian to get to and from work is $20, totalling $5020 annually. Collectively, this translates to a national expense of $43.2 billion a year. The cost of public transportation is also increasing; Opal fares rose by 3.7 per cent in October 2023, as reported by Transport for NSW.

Associate Professor Evgenia Dechter from the UNSW Business School says that the complex relationship between commuting costs and salaries is primarily based on preferences and household constraints.

“Individuals make choices based on their preferences, budgets and time constraints,” she says.

“Subject to constraints, some prioritise shorter commutes by living closer to work hubs, even if it means higher housing costs and lower quality housing. Others prioritise better living arrangements and may accept longer commutes.”

This raises the question: With rising economic pressures and commuting costs, will Australian cities transform to be more commuter-friendly, or will work arrangements undergo a fundamental shift?

The economic impact of commuting

While salaries may indirectly reflect commuting choices, A/Prof. Dechter acknowledges the growing economic pressure on workers as well as the current cost of living crisis combined with high inflation rates.

“For many households, the current economic conditions imply tighter budget constraints, putting immense pressure on workers, which may in turn affect their commuting and employment choices,” says A/Prof. Dechter.

“Traditionally, commuting costs haven’t been directly factored into salaries, but some employers are starting to explore ways to compensate for them.

“Employers offering remote work options are a positive development in mitigating commuting costs.

“Remote, hybrid and flexible work arrangements may not only alleviate the financial burden on employees but also potentially broaden the talent pool for firms struggling to find workers,” she says.

While salaries may indirectly reflect commuting choices, A/Prof. Dechter acknowledges the growing economic pressure on workers as well as the current cost of living crisis combined with high inflation rates.

“For many households, the current economic conditions imply tighter budget constraints, putting immense pressure on workers, which may in turn affect their commuting and employment choices,” says A/Prof. Dechter.

“Traditionally, commuting costs haven’t been directly factored into salaries, but some employers are starting to explore ways to compensate for them.

“Employers offering remote work options are a positive development in mitigating commuting costs.

“Remote, hybrid and flexible work arrangements may not only alleviate the financial burden on employees but also potentially broaden the talent pool for firms struggling to find workers,” she says.

City infrastructure is not designed for everyday commuting

The travel-to-work challenge is further amplified by the design of Australian cities, with urban sprawl leading to longer commutes and a need for more suitable housing options near workplaces.

“The ugly truth of the matter is the shape of our cities is far from ideal to support sustainable and efficient commuting,” says Professor Philip Oldfield, a leading expert in architecture from the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture at UNSW.

According to the Regional Movers Quarterly Index released in late 2023 by the Commonwealth Bank and Regional Australia Institute, this trend is reflected in a significant shift in migration patterns. The report highlights a 12.6 per cent increase in the population moving from capital cities to regional areas compared to pre-pandemic figures.

The rising cost of living may not be the only reason why it’s harder for Australians to travel to work. Prof. Oldfield says that cities are expanding outwards with residential densities decreasing.

“It’s often cheaper and easier to build housing on the edge of cities rather than trying to ‘infill’ gaps in the city. In Sydney, 21 per cent of homes built in Greater Sydney were on the city edge across the last decade. We call this urban sprawl, and it’s apparent in virtually all cities worldwide,” says Prof. Oldfield.

Using Sydney as an example, Prof. Oldfield says we don’t see enough family-friendly and three-bedroom apartments built near city centres and places of work.

“This is because developers are creating apartments for those who purchase them – which tends to be owner-investors, and not those who ‘actually’ live in them, which includes families with children. Owner-investors prefer one- and two-bedroom apartments and that’s why these get built.

“The impact of this is that families may want to stay in centrally located neighbourhoods, but because of a lack of family-friendly apartments, they either have to ‘cram in’ to two-bedroom units not suited to the family dynamic or move further afield where more ‘conventional’ and affordable detached homes are located,” says Prof. Oldfield

Prof. Oldfield explained that the knock-on effect is if they move further away, commute times increase, which can increase costs and lost time and subsequently make working at home more attractive.

The power of hybrid and flexible work

With the economic and urban landscape placing a strain on wallets, hybrid work arrangements are becoming increasingly popular.

Dr Andrew Dhaenens, an expert in workplace relationships from UNSW Business School, says that working from home and with more flexible hours is increasingly becoming more attractive.

“For those with longer commutes and caregiving responsibilities, working from home offers a significant financial benefit,” he says.

“There’s also a perception among employers that remote workers are more productive, further incentivising flexible work models.”

Dr Dhaenens says employers are becoming more accommodating to hybrid and flexible work patterns, yet employees are facing new pressures to spend more time in offices.

The Hybrid & Flexible Working Practices 2023 report showed that almost half of the employers say that they have a minimum requirement for full-time employees to be at the workplace between three and five days a week, up from 37 per cent during the same period in 2022.

Dr Dhaenens says that hybrid and flexible work is key to easing financial pressures and believes that hybrid models will likely stay the norm.

“Employees save on commuting costs, lunches out, and public transport fares, but they also gain time back from their commute to spend more time with friends and family.”

“Additionally, we know that work-life balance is key to employee wellbeing and productivity,” says Dr Dhaenens.

While some employers require employees to be in the office for a set number of days, Dr Dhaenens emphasises the negative impacts of return-to-office mandates and believes hybrid models will likely be here to stay.

“Both employers and workers are still adjusting to remote work, and new management strategies will emerge to ensure effective collaboration and communication, but an additional day in the office often comes at a direct cost to employees,” says Dr Dhaenens.

Only this month, the near comatose US President, Joe Biden, made a casual, castaway remark that his administration was “considering” the request by Australia that the case against Julian Assange be concluded. The WikiLeaks founder has already spent five gruelling years in London’s Belmarsh prison, where he continues a remarkable, if draining campaign against the US extradition request on 18 charges, 17 incongruously and outrageously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

Like readings of coffee grinds, his defenders took the remark as a sign of progress. Jennifer Robinson, a longtime member of Assange’s legal team, told Sky News Australia that Biden’s “response, this is what we have been asking for over five years. Since 2010 we’ve been saying this is a dangerous precedent that’s being set. So, we certainly hope it was a serious remark and the US will act on it.” WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson found the mumbled comment from the president “extraordinary”, hoping “to see in the coming days” whether “clarification of what this means” would be offered by the powerful.

On April 14, the Wall Street Journal reported that Canberra had asked their US counterparts whether a felony plea deal could be reached, enabling the publisher to return to Australia. “Prosecutors and a lawyer for Assange have discussed a range of potential deals, including those that include pleading guilty to a felony under the espionage law under which he was indicted, and those of conspiring to mishandle classified information, which would be a misdemeanor, people familiar with the matter have said.”

Last month, the UK High Court gave what can only be regarded as an absurd prescription to the prosecution should they wish to succeed. Extradition would be unlikely to be refused if Assange was availed of protections offered by the First Amendment (though rejecting claims that he was a legitimate journalist), was guaranteed not to be prejudiced, both during the trial and in sentence on account of his nationality, and not be subject to the death penalty. That such directions were even countenanced shows the somewhat delusionary nature of British justices towards their US counterparts.

On April 16, Assange’s supporters received confirmation that the extradition battle, far from ending, would continue in its tormenting grind. Not wishing to see the prospect of a full hearing of Assange’s already hobbled arguments, the US State Department, almost to the hour, filed the assurances in a diplomatic note to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). “Assange,” the US Embassy in London claimed with aping fidelity to the formula proposed by the High Court, “will not be prejudiced by reason of nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing.”

Were he to be extradited, “Assange will have the ability to raise and seek to rely upon at trial (which includes any sentencing hearing) the rights and protections given under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.” An obvious caveat, and one that should be observed with wary consideration by the High Court judges, followed. “A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the US Courts.”

The US embassy also promised that, “A sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed on Assange. The United States is able to provide such assurance as Assange is not charged with a death-penalty eligible offense, and the United States assures that he will not be tried for a death-eligible offense.” This undertaking does not dispel the threat of Assange being charged with additional offences such as traditional espionage, let alone aiding or abetting treason, which would carry the death penalty.

In 2020, Gordon Kromberg, the chief Department of Justice prosecutor behind the case, told the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales that the US “could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information.” There was also the likelihood that Assange, in allegedly revealing the names of US intelligence sources thereby putting them at risk of harm, would also preclude the possibility of him relying on such protections.

That the zealous Kromberg will be fronting matters should Assange reach US shores is more than troubling. Lawyers and civil rights activists have accused him of using the Eastern District Court of Virginia for selective and malicious prosecutions. As Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept observed with bleak accuracy in July 2021, “[r]ather than being pushed into obscurity by these efforts, today he is serving as a key figure in one of the most important civil liberties cases in the world.”

The High Court also acknowledged Kromberg’s views at trial regarding the possibility that the First Amendment did not cover foreign nationals. “It can fairly be assumed that [Kromberg] would not have said that the prosecution ‘could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment’ unless that was a tenable argument that the prosecution was entitled to deploy with real prospect of success.” These latest assurances do nothing to change that fact.

A post from Assange’s wife, Stella, provided a neat and damning summary of the embassy note. “The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty. It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a US citizen. Instead, the US has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can ‘seek to raise’ the First Amendment if extradited.”

BREAKING:

“The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty. It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution's previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he… pic.twitter.com/lu7bkw0M5u

— Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) April 16, 2024

Whether the justices are duly satisfied by the latest diplomatic manoeuvre, one non-binding in any tangible or true sense on prosecutors and judges in the US, awaits testing in the hearing on May 20. For Assange, the wheels of judicial torture have been prolonged.

By Frances Goold

Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day?

25 November 2023 – 28 April 2024*

Art Gallery of New South Wales

North Building

Lower level 2

Lower level 4, The Tank

Hovering resplendent over the forecourt of the old sandstone building (now the South Building) is Louise Bourgeois’s giant spider, Maman. This surreal, sci-fi giant sculpture provides a paradoxically protective, almost balletic entrée to an astonishing exhibition of sculptures, paintings, sewn works, and drawings by the late French American artist, scheduled to close at the end of this month after a five-month run.

Smaller spiders of similar grace robust beauty are to be found elsewhere: in The Tank, located on Level 4 of the new North Building, where the ‘Night’ section of the conceptually divided show is exhibited, and on Level 2, where works associated with ‘Day’ are exhibited in rooms of almost Zen quietude.

Louise Bourgeois, Maman, Art Gallery of NSW

But it is Maman which theatrically announces the first solo exhibition to be held at the revamped and extended art museum, Sydney Modern, artfully linking the two buildings following a long gestation and difficult birth – much like Bourgeois’s own.

Growing up in France in a family of tapestry restorers she is said to have learned to use a needle and thread when other kids her age were learning to use a knife and fork. But it was also a dysfunctional and disturbed household during the post-WW1 years until she found refuge at the Sorbonne at nineteen, attracted to mathematics and geometry as subjects valued for their stability and “rules nobody could change”.

Upon her mother’s death in 1932 Bourgeois switched her intellectual focus to art, attending artist studios and academies until, after graduating from the Sorbonne in 1935, she opened her own gallery in Paris where she met her future husband, the art historian Robert Goldberg. They relocated to New York in 1938, where they raised a family, she resumed her studies, and both re-established their respective careers.

There is no way to sum up the intense creativity of Louise Bourgeois other than to urge you to see some of her vast legacy before it disappears. Given the harrowing and traumatic events of the past week in Sydney, its imminent closure and departure is a fittingly sober exit from the building of a body of work but not the spirit of an artist whose unique practice sought to express and transform her own personal emotional trauma and to inspire others to do the same.

With so little time remaining there are, however, one or two fragile pathways to comprehending some of Bourgeois’s psychological and aesthetic concerns and convictions. One poignant example is to be found amongst her ‘Day’ collection on Level 2, where the viewer can slow down and peruse the gentle flow of her exquisite ‘samplers’, annotated paintings, and drawings.

Here Bourgeois tells the story of a boy caught inside a terrible fight between his parents:

“He kept alive. And he went over to the closet and brought back a broom and he started cleaning. At that point something broke inside of me and I started crying and you know, I never cry. Something broke inside.”

She describes how making art is about a moment when is performed “a symbolic action…you begin to work on the sculpture” as a means of redirecting and channelling the feeling state into something else, something constructive and transformative. She adds:

“… there are many symbolic actions of course, the different qualities are everything. The symbolic action can take many many forms. Some people will become perfectionists in whatever they are doing or they can write, they can write a story or they can work on the house.”

In the next picture she concludes, “We are talking about sublimation and the gift of sublimation.”

Topiary 4 1999

How timely are the artist’s reminders of how we can somehow, sometime, begin to bear the unbearable and find other ways to express our feelings and emotions when words fail – a methodology now standard practice in art therapeutic work with distressed and traumatised children incapable of putting their overwhelming experiences into words.

In its other more searing and confronting aspects it’s an adult show – both visually and conceptually – but there is much to surprise and intrigue the young if only for its rambling, unpredictable scale, and the myriad feelings evoked in a place of safety. The architectural and institutional robustness of the buildings in which the works are housed allows for moments of deep contemplation of a particular work to a point of intimacy, as if in private conversation with the artist; in that moment one may be struck by a disarming sense that the artist is in direct communication with you as viewer. And there is something oddly comforting about this, leaving even her monsters tenderised and approachable. Perhaps in this lies both the particularity and universality of Louise Bourgeois’ special magic.

This is an important show, spanning seventy years of a disciplined, fiercely independent artist’s creative life, which began in France in 1911 and ended in New York in 2010. It spans the productive years of a compulsive yet contemplative artist whose artmaking was inextricably entwined with family trauma and random tragedy, that ultimately made its way from ‘darkness’ to ‘light’ through the sheer persistence of her uniquely gifted and unorthodox expression.

By our glistening autumn harbour is the final week of a big show by a tiny woman who has not simply created monumental art but, in an abiding, maternal, tetchy, spidery way, produced both great and small works that make profound and moving statements about what it means to be vulnerable and, it follows, what it means to be human.

* * * * *

*For this final week or so a special 2-for-1 offer is available for visits after 5pm on Wednesdays 17 and 24 April during Art After Hours when the whole Gallery is open until 10pm, and after 5pm on Friday 26 to Sunday 28 April when the exhibition and shop will remain open until 10pm for the final weekend of Louise Bourgeois, with curator tours and a pop-up bar on the Friday and Saturday nights.

Despite growing momentum to increase female representation in Australia’s national parliament, it continues to be a male dominated domain. New research from Monash University explores why young women still feel reluctant to become a member of the national parliament.

The research, Investigating the ambitions of young women to run for national parliament: the case of Australia, found that for many young women the appeal of becoming an MP was significantly curtailed by beliefs that the institution maintains stereotypical gender norms as well as a masculine, misogynistic culture. Many women were also more likely to doubt their ability to participate in politics than their male counterparts.

Dr Zareh Ghazarian, Head of Politics and International Relations at Monash University, said gender-based inequality of opportunity is diminishing the political ambition of young women.

“Our research shows that young women feel parliament is not a place for them. Social constraints, sexism and toxic parliamentary culture is contributing to entrenched gender disparity,” Dr Ghazarian said.

The research utilised data from the Our Lives longitudinal research study that follows a large cohort of young Queenslanders from adolescence into adulthood. The cohort of 28–29 year olds were interviewed in the weeks prior to the May 2022 election. Of the 47 participants, 27 were female and 20 were male.

The interviews focused on participants’ views on Australian politics as well as their thoughts on women’s representation. The interviews also explored the ambitions of young people to be active in Australian politics.

With misogyny and gender-based violence prominent issues in the lead up to the 2022 election, participants were deeply concerned about how safe the national parliamentary workplace was, particularly for women. Recent allegations of sexual misconduct in parliament was the issue that most concerned women and had a significant impact on their political ambition.

While the research found participants were critical of the status quo, there was a concerning degree of acquiescence about the situation. Participants were reluctant to stand up to, and tackle, the issues from within. Instead, they preferred to avoid such a toxic environment altogether.

“This highlights a deeply unhealthy element in Australian politics whereby individuals, especially women, are choosing not to participate in democratic processes. It is critical that greater efforts be made to advance the political ambitions of women to stand for election to the Australian Parliament,” Dr Ghazarian said.

The research concluded that greater efforts be made to advance the political ambitions of women to stand for election to the Australian Parliament. This may be done through building the confidence and opportunities for women to participate, while changing broader attitudes to the role of women in politics. Recommendations included targeted school-based education programs, as well as advocacy projects that empower young people, particularly women, to engage with, and participate in, politics from an early age.

“Without addressing these entrenched issues, women’s political under representation and an exclusionary masculine culture will continue to mar young people’s political ambitions and the practical operation of Australia’s liberal democracy.”

Monash University Media Release

Shaping the future of health across Asia and the Pacific

The World Health Summit Regional Meeting 2024 in Melbourne, Australia from 22-24 April will bring together stakeholders from all relevant sectors of global health – under the theme ‘Shape the future of health across Asia and the Pacific’.

For the first time the World Health Summit Regional Meeting is being held in Australia, and the three-day meeting is hosted by Monash University, Melbourne. With more than 40 sessions and over 150 speakers from around the world, the goal will be to address strategies to improve global health and health inequities in the Asia-Pacific region.

Topics include:

• The health of Indigenous Peoples
• Achieving health equity for women and girls
• Accelerating towards sustainable and resilient health care services
• Clinician-led health system reform
• Putting lived and living experience at the centre of mental health care
• Priorities for education, training and a future-proof health workforce
• The impact of AI when ancient ways of knowing and new technology collide
• Protecting and improving health in an increasingly divided world
• Global preparedness for the next pandemic
• Leadership opportunities in SDGs and health
• Misinformationitis: the impact of tech on health (open public session)

Speakers include:

• Saia Ma’u Piukala, Regional Director for the Western Pacific, World Health Organization (WHO)
• Ged Kearney, Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care
• Helen Clark, Former Prime Minister of New Zealand and Former Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme
• Titilola Duro-Aina, Pacific Chief of Health, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
• Atonio Rabici Lalabalavu, Minister of Health and Medical Services, Fiji
• Papaarangi Reid, Deputy Dean Māori & Head of Department, Te Kupenga Hauora Māori, University of Auckland
• Michael Marmot, Director, UCL Institute of Health Equity
• Adeeba Kamarulzaman, President and Pro-Vice Chancellor, Monash University Malaysia
• Ajay Tandon, Lead Economist, World Bank
• Tay Choon Hong, CEO, Health Promotion Board, Singapore

Co-Presidents of the WHS Regional Meeting 2024, Professor Sophia Zoungas, Head of the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University said the calibre of people attending the Summit “gives us real hope that we will be able to address some of the health inequities that exists in the Asia-Pacific region so that we can move towards the SDG of universal health care,” she said.

Co-President, Professor Christina Mitchell, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, added that “the Summit Regional Meeting comes at a pivotal time – of serious geopolitical conflict, climate change, infectious disease outbreaks, ongoing health equity challenges facing Indigenous communities globally, and a diminishing healthcare workforce, all hugely important issues that will be tackled at the meeting,” she said.

Monash University Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Sharon Pickering, said Monash was proud to be convening the Summit as an important opportunity to make progress on addressing the world’s public health challenges.

“We are delighted to host the 2024 World Health Summit Regional Meeting that will bring together world leaders in public health to strengthen international collaboration on addressing our urgent global health challenges,” Professor Pickering said.

“As a top-50 global university and a leader in medical and health research, Monash is committed to working in collaboration with our partners for community benefit, and I’m hopeful the Summit will lead to strong commitments towards improving health access and equity in the Asia-Pacific region. I wish all our expert speakers and attendees safe travels and a warm welcome to Melbourne.”

Monash is a founding member and key contributor to the M8 Alliance of Academic Health Centers, Universities and National Academies that is the academic foundation of the World Health Summit.

All information on speakers, program, participation is available here: www.whsmelbourne2024.com

If you are unable to join in person: All sessions will be available as recordings afterwards here.

Plan International Press Release

One year on since the conflict in Sudan began the country faces a “catastrophic humanitarian crisis”, according to girls’ rights organisation Plan International.

The conflict, which began on 15 April last year, has now killed over 13,900 people and left 25 million people in need of humanitarian assistance – 14 million of these are children. Over 8.4 million people have been displaced, of whom 1.7 million have fled to neighbouring countries, this includes refugees who had previously sought safety in Sudan.

“A year into this devastating conflict, children in Sudan, especially girls, continue to live through a catastrophic humanitarian crisis every day. They’ve witnessed unimaginable horrors, and many have lost family or friends. Most children have not been able to attend school for nearly a year. Ongoing fighting also means that Sudan could be in famine within a month – we are witnessing malnutrition levels rise at alarming speed’ says Mohammed Qazilbash, Country Director for Plan International Sudan.

“This crisis is not isolated to Sudan – our offices in Chad, CAR, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Egypt are responding to the consequences of this conflict. If a political solution to the crisis in Sudan is not found, the entire region could be destabilised. In Chad for example, this is the first time we are seeing so many schoolteachers settling there as refugees which is concerning because these are the people you count on to rebuild a country and its population.”

As the conflict spreads to new areas inside Sudan, families are constantly on the move, seeking safety. The high numbers of people fleeing their homes means that after facing unimaginable trauma, many are enduring overcrowding and poor conditions at displacement camps.

Plan International is particularly concerned that schools across Sudan have been closed for a year, with more than 170 school buildings now being used to shelter displaced people. This means that an entire generation of 20 million children – a population close to the entire size of Australia – is missing out on their right to an education.

The consequences of this conflict will have a devastating impact on the development of children and their mental well-being. Children out of school are at increased risk of sale, sexual abuse, exploitation, family separation, abduction, trafficking, and recruitment and use by armed groups.

“The biggest concern for the children is their unclear future, they don’t know if they will have the chance to go back to school again, or back to their homes,” says Hawa Eltigani, Plan International Sudan’s Child Protection in Emergencies Specialist.

“The language spoken by many children is what I would call ‘conflict language’. Children are just talking about guns, shooting. They now know different types of guns, of planes. There’s also a lot of retraumatising because adults are constantly speaking about the conflict in front of the children who are now not hearing anything else.

“Most of the children are moving from one place to another as the war spreads. As soon as they have settled somewhere, the conflict starts there, triggering trauma [once again].”

Since the start of the conflict, which has created the world’s largest displacement of children, Plan International has responded by providing mobile, child friendly spaces, where children are encouraged to play, draw, sign and use techniques such as storytelling to support them process their trauma.

In the regions of North Darfur and South Kordofan, Plan International has recently launched a project designed to provide classrooms for informal education at a gathering point for displaced people.

14-year-old Mai has been able to attend these classes; “I started learning the basic subjects included mathematics, Arabic, English and Islamic. I received a school kit, a mat for sitting on in the classroom and food for me and my friends. I want to continue studying to reach my dream of becoming a great person that can help my people.

“I believe that with a space for learning, we will shine and do our best to succeed. I will never stop going to my lessons as it’s a new space for me and my friends. I enjoy chatting about new things, apart from the conflict. I’m enjoying being back in school and making new friends.”

The humanitarian and girls’ rights organisation is appealing for €11million in funding from donors, to continue to reach children and their families with life-saving humanitarian assistance.

In Australia, humanitarian organisations including Plan International Australia are calling on the Australian Government to urgently provide $50 million in new and additional funding to the humanitarian catastrophe occurring in Sudan. Australia’s peers have recognised the urgency and scale of this crisis. The European Union, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany having all committed more than $160m each to the Sudan response, compared to Australia’s $20.45 million to date.

We are calling on the Australian Government to double its contribution to the humanitarian emergency fund, from $150 million to $300 million, to meet the needs of hundreds of millions of people impacted by the massive increase in emergencies, conflicts and disasters that have unfolded around the world in recent years.

Plan International Australia has also launched an emergency Sudan appeal to help children and families engulfed in this invisible crisis.

By James Moore

The first criminal trial of an American president is likely to bring more division, and even suffering, to the country he proposes to once more lead. The salaciousness of the story that has brought him before the bar of justice will further demean the highest office in the land, which tends to bear the imprimatur, “Leader of the free world.” The nation’s entire population, already agape over the reportage, will hear details of sex with an adult film actress while the future first lady was home with a new baby, and how money was paid to keep the porn star quiet about a tryst with the man who would be president.

I wonder if a $130,000 payoff to cover up extramarital sex can make our political divisions even more acutely dangerous. The accused’s anger is not likely to be constrained by a courtroom and he will send out emails to supporters, many who are struggling to pay their own bills, to give him money because none of this is fair and he’s a victim, and they will send their cash and credit and debit card payments to a man who claims to be among the world’s richest. Even our horror and embarrassment will become transactional, which is unsurprising for a president who has specialized in bankruptcies and failed businesses. Pollsters say a felony conviction for cooking his books to hide the bribe will cost him support, even among his red-hatted minions.

The former president laces his reelection rhetoric with terms like “bloodbath” and phrases suggesting “all hell will break loose,” determined to suggest a dystopia awaits Americans if they do not end his prosecutions and restore him to the White House. Little imagination is required to envision a scenario where the republic comes undone, at least partially, after a conviction of the serial adulterer and the reelection of the incumbent. Anger on the right might manifest in violence, though the notion of a civil war seems improbable. Putting on camouflage clothes, grabbing a gun, and shooting fellow citizens randomly only makes you a criminal, not a patriot. Our differences cannot be resolved by an internal American conflict involving combat, but they are too stark to be simply swept from the room by an electoral vote.

I do not understand how any citizen can support a man who ridicules the handicapped, calls members of the military “suckers and losers,” fails to pay the vendors who work on his projects, demeans women with blunt sexual allusions and brags about taking away their right to control their bodies, continues to claim he won an election that more than 60 courts said he lost, and lied, according to the Washington Post, more than 30,000 times during his four years in office. What does it take to disqualify him from the job in the minds of MAGA men and women? Is it okay for a president to pathologically lie and believe in a reality that exists only in his troubled mind? There is no remaining rational right wing when every Republican officeholder hurries to Florida to politically genuflect before a man who sprays his face orange and brown when he arises in the morning.

The verdict in the New York trial, and the outcome of November’s election, will not end the great American political rift. In fact, it will likely deepen. New theories of stolen votes will circulate, regardless of the lack of proof, and MAGA warriors will add fanciful implications to the hackneyed mantra of, “Take our country back.” Who took it from us? Perhaps, we gave it away to a conman. The former president’s campaign operatives are already scheming methodologies for challenging the vote while there are, undoubtedly, Q-Anon clowns and angry incels just waiting to take to the streets with their patriotic delusions. We might all be Americans, but we are of different types, and the middle ground has been washed away by a sea of vitriol.

The idea of a new Civil War seems preposterous to me. A more likely scenario that occurs over the course of decades is a kind of “Balkanization” of this country, a breakup into regions that are each independently governed and influenced by relationships with foreign powers. Imagine the traditionally liberal Northeast aligned, economically and politically with Europe, the West with Asia-Pacific influences, Mexico and cartels might gain some control in the Southwest, and Central and South America pull strings in Dixie and the Southeast. That’s a movie I’d like to see, and not completely improbable if we cannot reconcile deep differences in our politics and public discourse.

Alex Garland’s new movie, Civil War, suggests a modern version of the War Between the States is not impossible. The trailers make the film appear more like a war movie than an examination of how failed political debates can lead to catastrophe. Audiences are more compelled by bang, bang and explosions than watching politicos argue until guns are pulled, I suppose. There is one scene in the trailer, however, which implies a contemporary cause for the fictional conflict. Austin actor Jesse Plemons, one of the combatants, confronts a small family on the run from the violence, and decides he needs to know their allegiances. When he is told, “But we’re Americans,” Plemons is not satisfied.

“Yeah,” he says. “But what kind of Americans are you?”

The idea that there is more than one kind of American is as disturbing as it is factual, and violence and brutality related to our politics has been inescapable. Some of this can be passed off as the growing pains of a nation, but almost thematically, killing each other over what we believe is the best for our country, has never abated. There is no better example of this than the American life of Robert Todd Lincoln, the slain president’s eldest son, which presents a thread that connects numerous historical tragedies. The only son of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln to survive into adulthood was present at three presidential assassinations, and they were not the only sorrows and heartbreak attendant to his life.

On April 14, 1865, Lincoln had been invited by his parents to attend the play, “My American Cousin,” but declined the offer, claiming he needed rest. The Harvard trained lawyer had often publicly lamented that he’d had no more than ten minutes conversation with his father while he was serving as president, and that may have added more tears and emotional weight the next morning as he knelt crying by the bedside where his father had died. The president, of course, had taken a bullet to the head from Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln had led the nation through a great battle to save its union of states and end human slavery, an idea incomprehensible to most Southerners of influence.

Robert Lincoln had dropped out of law school while hoping to serve in the Army during the war. His mother refused to countenance his plans and compromised with the president that their son might serve on the staff of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, which put the young Lincoln at Appomattox Court House when the articles of surrender were signed by Robert E. Lee. What he must have seen even at the edges of the war’s great battlefields was a loss and sadness wrought of politics and compounded by his family’s tragedies. Edward Lincoln, Robert’s younger brother, died at age 4 from consumption, a name given to tuberculosis prior to proper diagnosis; sibling Willie Lincoln died from typhoid fever at age 12 while living in the White House, and the youngest Lincoln child, Thomas, known affectionately as Tad, passed at age 18 from an undisclosed illness.

Robert Lincoln had moved to Chicago with his widowed mother and his youngest brother to practice law before he was cajoled into returning to Washington by President James Garfield. He was serving as Secretary of War and meeting with Garfield as the president departed the train station in the national capitol city on July 2, 1881. Lincoln was only 40 feet distant when the president was gunned down by Charles Guiteau, just sixteen years after Robert’s father had been slain. Garfield passed 80 days after being shot from surgical complications. Contemplating the loss of his three brothers who were already deceased, his presidential father, and Garfield, Lincoln was quoted by a New York Times reporter as asking, “My god, how many hours of sorrow have I passed in this town?”

Robert Todd Lincoln at the Dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, May 1922

He was to accumulate more hours of sorrow, losing his own son, Abraham Lincoln II, to a post operative infection at just 16 years of age. Robert, at that time, was serving President Benjamin Harrison in England as Minister to the Court of St. James. After returning to the states, Lincoln went to work for the Pullman Palace Car Company, a manufacturer of passenger cars for trains, and eventually became CEO. He was traveling with his wife from New Jersey to Chicago and decided to stop in Buffalo at the Pan-American Exposition, a type of World’s Fair promoting trade between North American countries. A messenger was waiting for the Lincoln’s with a telegram when the train arrived that said McKinley had been shot twice in the abdomen a few hours earlier at a public appearance in Buffalo and was in serious condition. Lincoln went immediately to the president’s bedside and was assured the would-be assassin, Leon Czolgosz, had failed to take down McKinley. Unfortunately, the president died seven days later, also of infection.

Lincoln, though, lived a long life and was present for the dedication of the memorial to his father on the Washington Mall in 1922, and died four years later just shy of his 83rd birthday. Almost exactly a century after the murder of his father in Ford Theater, another president was killed by the country he was serving. The assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is still rending the garments of American politics because the facts of what happened are seemingly unknowable after botched investigations and misinformation, a process now borne digitally to voters with the express purpose of distorting their perceptions of reality. We are a nation that often seems to kill its best and brightest, or at least have found no way in our body politic to deploy effective means of prevention. Who knows what kind of country we might have become had JFK, RFK and MLK lived to inspire and guide our government and its policies? There is sufficient cause to wonder how the republic itself has survived.

Which may not happen if we fall again for the lies of 2016.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

Charles Darwin University Media Release

Compulsory income management (CIM) in the Northern Territory is perceived to be ineffective in reducing harm, can contribute to situations of family violence and is incompatible with the needs of welfare recipients, a new study led by Charles Darwin University (CDU) has found.

The study, conducted by members of CDU’s Faculty of Health alongside Monash University, interviewed 26 participants who are experts in social welfare programs or policies, highly experienced in providing support to welfare recipients, or have an in-depth understanding of CIM in the lives of welfare recipients.

CIM was established in the Northern Territory in 2007 and restricts a portion of a participants income support payment which cannot be used to gamble, purchase alcohol and other prohibited products. The BasicsCard is still active in the NT, alongside the Enhanced Income Management program launched in March 2023.

The participants were asked a series of questions about their thoughts on the long-term role and impact of CIM in the Northern Territory.

The findings explored the impact of CIM on social harms, regional and remote areas, the administrative burden it places on individuals and organisations, CIM as the dominant source of welfare provision, and CIM as a method of social control.

Lead author and CDU Senior Lecturer in Professional Practice – Families and Communities Dr Steven Roche said the study concluded CIM was considered a punitive approach to reducing harm and was incompatible with the needs of welfare recipients.

“The findings detail CIM’s negligible impact on behaviour change around social harms and suggest that CIM can exacerbate issues such as family violence, where CIM is weaponised by men who use violence in situations of family violence,” Dr Roche said.

According to Dr Roche, study participants detailed how welfare recipients found ways to bypass CIM to purchase prohibited items, how CIM doesn’t prevent or reduce family violence, and how it doesn’t address the underlying issues of harm from alcohol and other drugs.

“A key theme also identified among participants was the challenges that CIM could create for welfare recipients residing in regional and remote areas,” Dr Roche said.

“CIM was viewed by participants as exacerbating the existing cost of living pressures, particularly in remote areas where consumer choice is limited, and travel is expensive.”

Dr Roche said participants considered CIM a “top-down approach” with little effort made to work with communities to identify ways to address social harms among welfare recipients.

“A policy reform agenda involving genuine community consultation is desperately needed to better understand the complexities of CIM in the NT that holds principles of community-based policy development at its heart,” Dr Roche said.

Perspectives on the ongoing impact of compulsory income management in the Northern Territory was published in The Australian Journal of Social Issues.

Walking stiffly, largely distracted, and struggling to focus on the bare essentials, US President Joe Biden was keeping company with his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, when asked the question. It concerned what he was doing regarding Australia’s request that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be returned to Australia.

Assange, who has spent five tormenting years in Belmarsh Prison in London, is battling extradition to the US on 18 charges, 17 tenuously and dangerously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

The words that followed from the near mummified defender of the Free World were short, yet bright enough for the publisher’s supporters. “We’re considering it.” No details were supplied.

To these barest of crumbs came this reaction from from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on ABC’s News Breakfast: “We have raised on behalf of Mr Assange, Australia’s national interest, that enough is enough, that this needs to be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve raised it at each level of government in every possible way.” When pressed on whether this was merely an afterthought from the president, Albanese responded with the usual acknowledgments: the case was complex, and responsibility lay with the US Department of Justice.

One of Assange’s lawyers, the relentless Jennifer Robinson, told Sky News Australia of her encouragement at Biden’s “response, this is what we have been asking for over five years. Since 2010 we’ve been saying this is a dangerous precedent that’s being set. So, we certainly hope it was a serious remark and the US will act on it.” Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, also told Sky News that the statement was significant while WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Kristinn Hrafnsson thought the utterance “extraordinary”, cautiously hoping “to see in the coming days” whether “clarification of what this means” would be offered by “those in power” and the press corps.

The campaign to free Assange has burgeoned with admirable ferocity. The transformation of the WikiLeaks founder from eccentric, renegade cyber thief deserving punishment to prosecuted and persecuted scribbler and political prisoner has been astonishing.

The boggling legal process has also been shown up as woefully inadequate and scandalous, a form of long-term torture via judicial torment and deprivation. The current ludicrous pitstop entails waiting for a UK Court of Appeal decision as to whether Assange will be granted leave for a full reconsideration of his case, including the merits of the extradition order itself.

The March 26 Court of Appeal decision refused to entertain the glaringly obvious features of the case: that Assange is being prosecuted for his political views, that due process is bound to be denied in a country whose authorities have contemplated his abduction and murder, and that he risks being sentenced for conduct he is not charged with “based on evidence he will not see and which may have been unlawfully obtained.” The refusal to entertain such material as the Yahoo News article from September 2021 outlining the views of intelligence officials on kidnapping and assassination options again cast the entire affair in a poor light.

Even if Assange is granted a full hearing, it is not clear whether the court will go so far as to accept the arguments. The judges have already nobbled the case by offering US prosecutors the chance to offer undertakings, none of which would or could be binding on the DOJ or any US judge hearing the case. Extradition, in other words, is likely to be approved if Assange is “permitted to rely on the First Amendment”, “is not prejudiced at trial (including sentence) by reason of his nationality” and that he “is afforded the same First Amendment protection as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty not be imposed.” These conditions, on the face of it, look absurd in their naïve presumption.

Whether Biden’s latest casual spray lends any credibility to a change of heart remains to be seen. In December 2010, when Vice President in the Obama administration, Biden described Assange as a “high-tech terrorist” for disclosing State Department cables. He failed to identify any parallels with previous cases of disclosures such as the Pentagon papers.

Craig Murray, former British diplomat and Assange confidant, adds a note of cautious sobriety to the recent offering from the president: “I’m not going to get too hopeful immediately on a few words out of the mouth of Biden, because there has been no previous indication, nothing from the Justice Department so far to indicate any easing up.”

For all that, it may well be that the current administration, facing a relentless publicity campaign from human rights organisations, newspapers, legal and medical professionals, not to mention pressure from both his own party in Congress and Republicans, is finally yielding. Caution, however, is the order of the day, and nothing should be read or considered in earnest till signatures are inked and dried. We are quite a way off from that.

By James Moore

We were young when we lived near the Rio Grande and sometimes on Fridays the boss took us out on his boat and a few of my colleagues were pulled on water skis. I mostly remember the children sitting on their haunches in the canebrakes and how they stared at us with dark confused eyes. I assumed they wondered about the strange world along the north bank and the people who had boats for toys and never worried about food or where they might sleep at night.

There were times we slept on the beach down where the big river meets the Gulf, and we drank cold beer and watched the gulls as they whirled around the shrimp boats. In the mornings before the sun was above the coastline, I ran along the levees that were filled with water to grow the orange and grapefruit trees and I saw the open gates that let the water into the aloe and vegetable fields. When it got too hot, I jumped off the levee into the canal and swam with the slow current, kicking with my running shoes.

Our first season in the sub-tropics of Texas a moderate hurricane spun up from the Bay of Campeche and flooded the valley with torrential rains for a few days. Roads were closed and in the big colonias the farmworkers were washed out of their houses and into the mud. In the summer, giant thunderstorms rose across the fields and the humid air felt too thick to breathe. Wind across the Gulf and up through the palm rows felt like a hot, fuzzy cloth on the skin.

There seemed to be water everywhere in the Rio Grande Valley, though I never saw a lake, which was more than confusing. There were resacas, small bodies of water like ponds that were oxbow lakes cut off from the river, but the nearest big inland body of water was northwest up the border toward Laredo. Falcon Lake, however, was a reservoir that had been backed up behind a dam on the Rio Grande. During a long drought I took a small motorboat out on the water there with a camera crew, and we floated through an old stone church that had been disappeared beneath the water off the shore of the town of Zapata.

My childhood had been spent surrounded by water. The Great Lakes were in every direction, except to the south, and there were recreational lakes in such abundance it often felt like there was one at the end of every street. My parents found jobs in a factory town when they came up from the South, but we were of very modest means and I did not see a Great Lake until I was 18 and hitchhiked over to stand on a shoreline, even though we lived only an hour from Huron. In school, I had stared at pictures of the freighters filled with iron ore that moved across the big waters and I had always wanted to see one of the leviathans as a boy. Instead, on those rare days when my parents had time and the slightest amount of residual energy, we might go to a nearby lake for relaxation. There were untold thousands of crystalline blue bodies of water, too many, in fact, for each to have a name.

I always assumed an abundance of water was available in the world, but as I moved my journalistic and peripatetic soul around Texas, I came to the crushing comprehension that water was more precious than oil. All the water that will ever be is the water that exists presently, and it is readily apparent Texas was a bit shortchanged by geology. During a 250-million-year period of the Paleozoic Era, 600-350 million years ago, Texas was awash in vast inland seas to the West of the Llano uplift, which is in the central part of the state. Today, there are only rivers that have been dammed to create reservoirs. Underground aquifers also provide water, but they are increasingly mismanaged and endangered.

The rivers I knew in my youth ran mostly wild and free and we rented or found old and dented aluminum canoes to ride their rapids on weekends from college. The White River, Pine, and Au Sable moved placidly and sometimes rapidly through birch and white pine forests, running past cabins and under country roads toward the big lakes. There was no need for dams with such an endless surplus of water, but every river in Texas seems to be stopped to provide water for communities and agriculture, and even offer flood control. I believe the state’s only remaining unimpeded rivers are the Devil’s and the much fought over Pecos, which is a timid stream coming down from New Mexico and across the Chihuahua Desert to the Rio Grande at Lake Amistad.

Even barricaded, though, Texas rivers can be deadly. The weather seems too often to be about extremes, almost bombast in this state. Biblical floods and epic droughts torture the landscape of Texas. Rainfall in extreme amounts has its power amplified by the characteristics of runoff. The ground west of the Balcones Escarpment, a geographic break in the land that runs from near San Antonio to Fort Worth, is mostly rock and does not adequately absorb moisture. Water races downward to arroyos that feed rivers and can generate giant waves racing down riverbeds.

I saw the consequences of hard rain on rock many years ago when floods moved through the watersheds of the Pedernales and Guadalupe Rivers. In 1983, young campers in Pedernales Falls State Park were swept away by a flood in the night, and five died. Warning horns were later installed on the riverbank to let people know downstream of approaching high water. The sedate Blanco River, which lowers itself out of the Texas Hill Country through tall stands of cypress trees and long limestone cliffs, rose 28 feet in 90 minutes in late May of 2015, and killed more than a dozen people, many sleeping in riverside vacation homes. The water crested at 40 feet above flood stage when 13 inches of rain had fallen in the upstream watershed.

The most tragic flash flood incident in recent memory, however, was in 1987 on the Guadalupe River near Comfort. A group of campers from a Dallas church were cut off from safety as the water rose. An attempt to cross a low concrete bridge in their bus turned deadly when the engine stalled. A young student athlete named John Bankston Jr. rescued several of the smaller children by carrying them out on his back as the water kept climbing up the side of the bus. He was unable to save himself, however, and was taken away by the rushing water and died with nine of his friends that morning. His body was the only one not recovered.

I will never forget flying up and down the river in a helicopter with John Bankston Sr., convinced he was going to find his son alive, clinging to a tree, even five days later. Thirty-seven years after the tragedy, the river has not given up all of its dead and no trace of Bankston Jr. has ever been found.

Texas is, however, as deadly dry as it is wet. Historic droughts are becoming dangerously recurrent as the state’s population dramatically increases with in-migration from the West and North. Newcomers, accustomed to green lawns and irrigation systems for their yards, move up into the arid Hill Country and plant thirsty St. Augustine grass. Every new home is another straw sipping from the reservoirs, which, increasingly in the added heat of climate change, have turned into what a Texas drought expert refers to as “giant evaporation ponds.” In fact, evaporation rates of surface water in the Hill Country are approximately 57 inches per year.

A significant portion of water in Texas that is not consumed by lawn sprinklers, washing cars, or getting flushed down toilets, is evaporating from the surface of lakes. The city of Las Vegas, Nevada is trying to stop the waste of water on what it describes as “ornamental grass.” The definition does not include front lawns but put an end to watering medians on roadways and grass berms between sidewalks and pavement. The Southern Nevada Water Authority says there are eight square miles of “non-functional turf” in the Vegas area and eliminating its irrigation will reduce water consumption by about 15 gallons per person, per day.

A similar policy would help Texas conserve water.

“The easiest and quickest thing you can do – after patching up leaks – is restrict ornamental lawns,” said Alyssa Burgin of the Texas Drought Project. “Our major cities are growing so fast – we have to restrict it NOW. Folks who come here from elsewhere, where there is water, are just going to have to adapt. Heck, people who move to San Antonio from Bell County, where HOA/deed restrictions against xeriscaped lawns are enforced even when state law now states otherwise – are just going to have to adapt, because when the aquifer goes down, you’re going to go brown. Period.”

Storing water below ground, protected from summer heat in the Southwest, is also an effective strategy. The practice of aquifer storage and recovery is being used in San Antonio and Kerrville with considerable success. A billion gallons of fresh drinking water are stored in the Kerrville aquifer facility, which was the first deployed in Texas and only the third in the entire country.

The frenzy of dam building that began after the historic drought of the 1950s has not solved our water problem in Texas. There are more than 200 dams in the state but every year they seem to approach dangerously low levels of storage. Because of our southern geographic coordinates on the map, Texas did not experience the southward movement of the ancient ice masses and, consequently, there are no glaciated bodies of water in the state, just small freshwater ponds, and little lakes, which has prompted a dependence on reservoirs.

The other problem, which legislators refuse to confront, is Texas does not have a uniform statewide water usage policy. We rely on outdated frontier water laws that preserve claims of “first in time, first in right,” and the “right of capture.” The latter expression, almost self-explanatory, means you own whatever water is under your land if you have a pump to bring it up. The right of capture empowers you to pump dry an aquifer you share with a neighbor simply because you might have the resources to buy a pump, and she does not. Obviously, there is no argument to be made that this approach serves a common good in the parched American West.

The Ogallala Aquifer, as an example, is being pumped dry by farmers pulling up water from beneath their land to irrigate crops that would not otherwise survive. Ogallala, a vast inland and underground sea that stretches from South Dakota to the South Plains of Texas, might take millennia to recharge if it is drawn down toward dry. Without the Ogallala, the cotton and wheat fields stretched across the Texas Panhandle and down through the Cap Rock will disappear, if the rains don’t come.

The Ogallala Aquifer

I remember an exploratory trip through Western Nebraska that led to reporting on an irrigation project in the sand hills. Center pivot rigs were crawling up and down the low hills, spitting out water and nitrate fertilizer. The project seemed absurd, but a western beef producer had decided to vertically integrate its business and grow its own corn for cattle feed, and the sand hills were close to operations, easily fertilized, and abundant water in the form of the Ogallala was just below the surface. The operation, even through my youthful eyes, seemed astonishingly stupid. The nitrates leached into the groundwater, polluted the aquifer, reduced its volume, and became health risks for anyone drinking water from an Ogallala source.

Why do we allow such things to happen?

My personal belief is that the north and the Midwest will undergo an economic and population resurgence in the coming decades because of water. Single states with thousands of lakes can support businesses and families far more affordably than the desert Southwest. Phoenix and Los Angeles consume most of the water of the Colorado River and leave nothing more than a sand bar at the Gulf of California because the river is used up before its arrival. Arizona diverts Colorado River water into the Salt River Project canals for delivery to Phoenix, one of the hottest, driest, and fastest growing cities in the entire world.

Why has America not devised a sustainable strategy for water use? I cannot understand the lack of attention to such a critical issue, though, I am a desert rat now, drawn for decades to the high, dry expanses of the American West, the long, jagged horizons, and impossible sunsets. The bright red buds of an ocotillo in spring or a blooming prickly pear will make anyone believe it is possible to thrive in an arid land. Even glorious desert flora need water, though.

We are all haunted by waters.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

By Callen Sorensen Karklis

Dear Readers,

Seventeen years ago I was inspired by the change that the 2007 federal election saw after the aggressive rollout of WorkChoices, and the fear with it that everyday people’s working rights would be taken away. In Kevin Rudd I saw the promise of change from somebody with a vision on climate action, restoring workers’ rights, policy reforms that would bring Australia into the 21^st century, bringing in the NBN and Fair Work and apologizing to the Stolen Generations which for me was important as a First Nations Quandamooka person.

During high school I had a part-time job in retail, hearing everyday people’s personal issues no matter how mundane or extreme. I decided then that I’d one day become involved in politics. I joined my union and became active in helping the Australian Labor Party upon finishing school. My first involvement was in the 2012 Qld State Election, which was brutal. I saw the Bligh Government decimated by 44 seats from 51 to a rump of 7 seats in Opposition when Campbell Newman was elected in a super majority landslide, no thanks to the GFC asset sales backlash! What transpired, however, under Newman was more asset sales but on steroids!

The LNP sadly defeated the former progressive coalition of Independents, Labor, and Greens under the Hobson led Redland City Council in 2012 as well after a term in office. This saw the LNP on all three levels of government by 2013 locally. Unfortunately, the LNP pushed hard on overdevelopment proposals such as building at Ramsar wetlands in Toondah Harbor.

I became heavily involved in the ALP branches of my area and Young Labor climbing the party executive ladder as an organizer assisting the Labor Left with the naïve view, I could change the world piece by piece in the fight for progressive rights for all. All while starting my studies at Griffith University studying political studies, international relations, and business.

I ended up campaigning for the ALP at the 2014 by-elections and 2015 Qld State Election where we saw the rise of Annastacia Palaszczuk and her Labor Left deputy Jackie Trad. As the party gained traction electorally locally and in QLD however, I discovered while becoming involved in policy roles that the ALP had U-turned its previous opposition to the Toondah Harbor development proposals and expanding it from a proposed 800 units to 3600 units in Ramsar Wetlands.

Plans of old proposed by the “Sir Joh” Nationals white shoe brigade era of government in the 1970s–80s built the Raby Bay and Gold Coasts on the power of money, brothels, and white snow. The Goss and Beattie State Labor era policies to protect Ramsar Wetlands were being abandoned. Upon discovering this I joined with groups such as Redlands 2030, Labor LEAN, CARP, Save Straddie, and later Birdlife Australia, KAG, the ACF, and local Indigenous elders in council to fight against the development of Ramsar Wetlands.

In the fight to Save Toondah I became disillusioned with the ALP, including on the unfolding Adani issue and left the party in a public spat across media headlines in 2017–2018. I took it upon myself to fight a tough campaign to run for City Council in Redlands against the LNP aligned incumbent. I ended up amid bitter infighting among the ALP as a colleague and friend in my local FEC and I competed against each other against the LNP incumbent during the Covid council election in 2020. We both lost and learnt lessons in our campaign. I gained 19% of the vote. I ended up helping a TEAL run for the seat of Oodgeroo on the Toondah issue helping the union movement during the Pandemic with both workers and students losing their livelihoods during lockdowns.

Rejoining the ALP in 2020 I worked briefly for former Brisbane Labor leader Cr Peter Cumming and assisting Labor during the 2022 Federal Election. Sadly, my final stray with the ALP was human rights breaches on youth offenders, rental, and cost of living crisis due to increasing inflation. It was the Toondah issue that pushed me further into community radio and journalism while I also contemplated on how to find the best cause fighting for my people as an Indigenous person. This is why I left the ALP to join the Greens. On the plus side the campaign harnessed how I developed my skills in campaigning and enhancing my advertising skills which I worked in briefly, whilst eyeing for the right candidates to assist.

While I commend the actions of the ALP Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek in rejecting the Toondah PDA and doing the right thing, I lost faith with Labor for the Toondah PDA for happening in the first place. That said, there were good people in Labor, particularly LEAN and former State Ministers like Rod Welford and Pat Comben advocating with unionist and ALP party members to say “NO!” to the development against Labor MPs and RCC Crs Labor and LNP alike in favor of the development. What we saw was a stacked rort against the everyday working taxpayer and locals being passed the buck for a shitty idea! Greenies like Jono Sri, Michael Berkman, Amy MacMahon, Emerald Moon, the Mazlins, Larissa Waters, Penny Allman Payne, Carmen Lawrence and Max Chandler Mather did great by pushing hard on Labor to do the right thing in all levels of government. They were supported by progressive Independents in Redlands like Cr Wendy Boglary, Cr Lance Hewlett, Cr Paul Bishop and former Cr Craig Ogilvie and Cr Adelia Berridge. But it wasn’t politicians that won the day, it was pure people and grassroots that won the day!

Groups like Redlands 2030, ACF, and Birdlife Australia coordinated large, coordinated protests in Cleveland with thousands in attendance; numbers not seen since the anti-Raby Bay and original Toondah protests in the 1980s at GJ Walter park, Raby Bay Harbor, and RCC council chambers in Cleveland. This created large mass media attention including roadside actions, rallies, letters to the editor, media interviews, letters to politicians, mass petitions with the highest gaining over 70,000 signatures, and heaps of letterbox drops, street stalls, shopping centre stalls, and door knocking constituents. Yes, this was exhausting, time-consuming and extremely taxing including on one’s personal mental health, but it was certainly rewarding in the people we met along the way!

The Current Politics of the Proposal

We applied the same skills and tactics of a hard fought 10-year campaign to finally flip the Redland City Council elections. We were 2 votes short of a majority in Redland City Council, but we were successful in flipping the Mayoral race away from the LNP for the first time in 12 years as Redlands has only had three non-LNP Mayors since 1991. We applied the same tactics of grassroots people power to get a progressive TEAL up as Mayor. The QLD State Government remains coy on the issue having previously supported it until the change of Premier.

The LNP majority re-elected Cr Julie Talty as Deputy Mayor who served under the Williams LNP council era in 2020-2024 who also ran against ALP MP Mick De Brenni in Springwood. Because Mayor Jos Mitchell was short of the 2 required votes she could not overrule the majority needed to disclosures the Williams LNP led Council made in after 2012. (Which prevented Jos from being able to speak out against the development.)

In true Australian spirit reminiscent to a story straight out of classic 1997 Aussie film The Castle when the Kerrigan family took on a developer from destroying their home and neighborhood from an airport expansion, the Toondah saga has been a long 10 years for many locals since 2014. But as the family lawyer points out “It’s the Vibe!” in this case Saving Toondah, it’s the vibe! But we need your help as progressive readers to send a powerful message to the minister! To have community voices heard not just in the Redlands but Australia wide!

With 10 days given for a right of reply for all parties involved in this debacle

You can have your say with Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek here: EPBC Act Public Portal

Minister Plibersek is asking the community right now if she should continue to reject the development at Toondah Harbour. Please send her a short quick email supporting her to save the bay: Her email address is: minister.plibersek@dcceew.gov.au

Kind Regards, Callen Sorensen Karklis

Progressive contributor to The Australian Independent Media Network

“Together we can SAVE TOONDAH!”

The latest building activity data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics has confirmed there is still a long way to go before Australia overcomes the housing crisis.

Master Builders Chief Economist Shane Garrett said work started on just 163,285 new homes during 2023, a 10.5 per cent reduction on the previous year.

“During 2023, detached house starts dropped by 16.4 per cent to 99,443. This is the lowest in a decade.

“The final three months of the 2023 quarter saw higher density home starts drop for the third consecutive quarter.

“A total of 62,720 higher density homes were commenced during 2023 overall – the worst performance in 12 years.

“The mismatch between the supply of new homes to the rental market and demand for rental accommodation is particularly worrying.

“Rental inflation continues to accelerate at a time when price pressures across the rest of the economy have been abating,” Mr Garrett said.

Chief Executive Denita Wawn said today’s result means that 934,400 new homes have been started across Australia over the past five years.

“Yesterday, Master Builders Australia released its latest industry forecasts which showed we are on track to fall over 110,000 homes short of its Housing Accord target.

“When it comes to signing new contracts, the pen is not making it to paper as the investment does not stack up.

“Since 2019 we have seen the cost of home building increase by 40 per cent.

“Governments need to work to change this. The cost of delivering projects needs to go down and the time to completion must be shortened.

“To achieve these targets, builders are ready to take on the challenge, but clearing the barriers on the road is necessary to get the job done,” Ms Wawn said.

Remorseless killing at the initiation of artificial intelligence has been the subject of nail-biting concern for various members of computer-digital cosmos. Be wary of such machines in war and their displacing potential regarding human will and agency. For all that, the advent of AI-driven, automated systems in war has already become a cold-blooded reality, deployed conventionally, and with utmost lethality by human operators.

The teasing illusion here is the idea that autonomous systems will become so algorithmically attuned and trained as to render human agency redundant in a functional sense. Provided the targeting is trained, informed, and surgical, a utopia of precision will dawn in modern warfare. Civilian death tolls will be reduced; the mortality of combatants and undesirables will, conversely, increase with dramatic effect.

The staining case study that has put paid to this idea is the pulverising campaign being waged by Israel in Gaza. A report in the magazine +972 notes that the Israeli Defense Forces has indulgently availed itself of AI to identify targets and dispatch them accordingly. The process, however, has been far from accurate or forensically educated. As Brianna Rosen of Just Security accurately posits, “Rather than limiting harm to civilians, Israel’s use of AI bolsters its ability to identify, locate, and expand target sets which likely are not fully vetted to inflict maximum damage.”

The investigation opens by recalling the bombastically titled The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World, a 2021 publication available in English authored by one “Brigadier General Y.S.”, the current commander of the Israeli intelligence unit 8200.

The author advances the case for a system capable of rapidly generating thousands of potential “targets” in the exigencies of conflict. The sinister and morally arid goal of such a machine would resolve a “human bottleneck for both locating new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.” Doing so not only dispenses with the human need to vet, check and verify the viability of the target but dispenses with the need to seek human approval for their termination.

The joint investigation by +972 and Local Call identifies the advanced stage of development of such a system, known to the Israeli forces as Lavender. In terms of its murderous purpose, this AI creation goes further than such lethal predecessors as “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which identifies purportedly relevant military buildings and structures used by militants. Even that form of identification did little to keep the death rate moderate, generating what a former intelligence officer described as a “mass assassination factory.”

Six Israeli intelligence officers, all having served during the current war in Gaza, reveal how Lavender “played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war.” The effect of using the AI machine effectively subsumed the human element while giving the targeting results of the system a fictional human credibility.

Within the first weeks of the war, the IDF placed extensive, even exclusive reliance on Lavender, with as many as 37,000 Palestinians being identified as potential Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants for possible airstrikes. This reliance signalled a shift from the previous “human target” doctrine used by the IDF regarding senior military operatives. In such cases, killing the individual in their private residence would only happen exceptionally, and only to the most senior identified individuals, all to keep in awkward step with principles of proportionality in international law. The commencement of “Operation Swords of Iron” in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 led to the adoption of a policy by which all Hamas operatives in its military wing irrespective of rank would be designated as human targets.

Officers were given expansive latitude to accept the kill lists without demur or scrutiny, with as little as 20 seconds being given to each target before bombing authorisation was given. Permission was also given despite awareness that errors in targeting arising in “approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.”

The Lavender system was also supplemented by using the emetically named “Where’s Daddy?”, another automated platform which tracked the targeted individuals to their family residences which would then be flattened. The result was mass slaughter, with “thousands of Palestinians – most of them women and children or people not involved in the fighting” killed by Israeli airstrikes in the initial stages of the conflict. As one of the interviewed intelligence officers stated with grim candour, killing Hamas operatives when in a military facility or while engaged in military activity was a matter of little interest. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

The use of the system entailed resorting to gruesome, and ultimately murderous calculi. Two of the sources interviewed claimed that the IDF “also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians.” Were the targets Hamas officials of certain seniority, the deaths of up to 100 civilians were also authorised.

In what is becoming its default position in the face of such revelations, the IDF continues to state, as reported in the Times of Israel, that appropriate conventions are being observed in the business of killing Palestinians. It “does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist.” The process, the claim goes, is far more discerning, involving the use of a “database whose purpose is to cross-reference intelligence sources… on the military operatives of terrorist organizations.”

The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, stated how “deeply troubled” he was by reports that Israel’s bombing campaign had used “artificial intelligence as a tool in the identification of targets, particularly in densely populated residential areas, resulting in a high level of civilian casualties.” It might be far better to see these matters as cases of willing, and reckless misidentification, with a conscious acceptance on the part of IDF military personnel that enormous civilian casualties are simply a matter of course. To that end, we are no longer talking about a form of advanced, scientific war waged proportionately and with precision, but a technologically advanced form of mass murder.

MITOCHONDRIAL DISEASE A $1 BILLION HIT TO AUSTRALIA’S ECONOMY

A groundbreaking new study has revealed for the first time the true cost of mitochondrial disease (mito), stripping more than $1 billion from Australia’s economy each year.

Commissioned by the Mito Foundation, the first of its kind Preventable burden of mitochondrial disease report by the Centre for International Economics details the economic impact of the rare and debilitating genetic disorder that affects around 4,500 Australians.

There are around 124,000 Australians with a genetic risk factor for mito, who could be experiencing the early effects of the disease without knowing they have it.

Mito Foundation CEO Sean Murray said the report’s findings are a major step towards understanding the wider impact of mitochondrial disease, which can lead to better treatment and greater prevention.

“This report is a groundbreaking development in the fight against mitochondrial disease because for the first time we are able to see just how much it is costing Australians,” Mr Murray said.

“This research has shown that more than 80 per cent of the $1 billion cost of mito is due to the lost quality-of-life of those who either die from the disease or have to live with the pain and disability it causes. This severely impacts their ability to contribute to society in ways that most of us wouldn’t think twice about.

“The productivity cost of mito alone is $196 million, but we can reduce the impact. Improving how mito is diagnosed, ensuring access to prevention options and increasing research into new treatments are all part of the solution.”

Each year 10 children and 70 adults lose their lives to mito in Australia, with those living with the condition being robbed of a combined 1,805 years of better health.

Emily Wells, a 26-year-old aged care nurse with mito, said the findings will come as no surprise to those who experience the effects of the disease daily.

“When I was finally diagnosed with mito I cried with relief. No one could pinpoint why I was so fatigued, why my white blood cells were high for months or why I would get pain in my legs. But after around seven years of pain and wondering what was wrong, I finally had a diagnosis that I could start to move forward from,” Emily said.

“Mito is very difficult to explain because it affects everyone differently. Even when I end up in hospital, many doctors don’t fully understand the disease.

“I love my job as an aged care nurse, but recently I had a flare-up in my nerves. Normally I would take a couple of days to rest and recuperate and then go back to work, but I’ve now been off work for around three months, which is hard on my workplace and also myself financially.

“They always say listen to your body, because I knew something was wrong, and there are Australians who are probably having a similar experience right now. I want everyone to be aware of mito and its impacts so that we have earlier diagnosis and a better understanding of how to manage the disease.”

Mito Foundation is calling on the government, researchers and health professionals to work with the mito community to do the following:

• Remove barriers to genetic testing, including banning the use of genetic test results by life insurance companies.
• Improve the health workforce’s ability to recognise symptoms of mito, including encouraging GPs to complete the Maybe It’s Mito training.
• Continue to support the mitochondrial donation program, mitoHOPE.
• Provide funding for the expansion of reproductive genetic carrier screening to improve access to testing, counselling, and reproductive support services.
• Grow a network of accessible Centres of Expertise in mito to provide multi-disciplinary care.
• Secure sustainable funding of Mito Foundation’s support services.
• Support an increase in the number of clinical trials in Australia by funding further targeted research.

Mito Foundation is the only organisation in Australia dedicated to supporting people affected by mito.

Its work ranges from raising funds for pioneering research to providing support services for patients and their families.

To donate to Mito Foundation, or for more information on the impact of mito, visit mito.org.au