Month: April 2022

The rapid electrification of our homes, businesses and vehicles, powered by renewable energy, must be urgently pursued by the next federal Government as a new scientific paper reveals the world can still keep global warming below a catastrophic two degrees.

The scientific journal Nature has produced the first study to rigorously quantify the climate impact of emissions reduction pledges made before and during the global COP26 conference in November. It finds there is a 50 per cent chance of keeping warming below 1.9 or 2 degrees by the end of the century.

Research released last year by Rewiring Australia chief scientist, Dr Saul Griffith, demonstrated that rapid price reductions in already available technologies enables rapid decarbonisation of the domestic economy and that this would be more cost effective than other forms of carbon reduction, in fact financially positive for consumers over this decade.

Dr Griffith said no nation was better placed than Australia lead the way, through decarbonising the domestic economy by replacing fossil fuel powered cars, heating and stove tops with renewable powered, electric versions.

“Australia can lead the world in harnessing the power of the sun to run our homes and cars, smashing carbon emissions and obliterating energy bills at the same time,” Dr Griffith said.

“The national pledges made by Australia, America and other countries fail to factor in how the declining costs of EVs, solar, batteries and efficient household appliances can combined as a package that zeros energy emissions for households.

“Electrifying our homes and vehicles is the fastest and cheapest path to decarbonising our domestic economy. By 2030 it will save close to $5,000 per year per household on their energy bill and reduce domestic emissions by 40 per cent.

“This election is the perfect opportunity for a party or candidate to commit to electrification. The first step is to pilot the electrification of an entire suburb or street, where we replace all gas appliances and combustion engine vehicles with renewable powered electric versions.

An analysis released by the Australia Institute found that for the 2020-2021 financial year, different levels of Government provided more than $11.6 billion in fossil fuel subsidies.

“This is entirely counter-productive,” Dr Griffith said. “We are doling out subsidies to energy sources that are choking the planet while we leave proven technologies sitting on the bench. Subsidising fossil fuels also makes the world more unstable and dangerous, strengthening the hand of petro-states and oligarchs.

“Redirecting just a fraction of fossil fuel subsidies to households would allow them to rewire their homes and adopt the latest zero-emission technology while saving thousands every year on their energy bills.

“This should be a no-brainer.

The decision of both major parties not to lift JobSeeker is brutal and has relegated millions of Australians to continuing to live under the poverty line, said the St Vincent de Paul Society.

Yesterday, Labor confirmed it will go to the federal election with a policy that maintains the JobSeeker payment of just above $640 per fortnight for a single person without children – an identical position to that of the Coalition.

St Vincent de Paul Society National President Claire Victory said the decision was both cruel and unnecessary.

‘It is crushingly disappointing that voters at this election will not be able to choose a party of government that wants to lift Australia’s brutally low JobSeeker rate,’ Ms Victory said.

‘It is simply immoral for a nation as wealthy as Australia to allow millions of people to languish beneath the poverty line.

‘We’re constantly told that lifting the JobSeeker rate would act as a disincentive to work, but the research doesn’t bear that out and in my decades of engaging with people experiencing poverty I’m yet to find anyone who’s able to work but chooses to remain on JobSeeker. It’s clear that the current JobSeeker rate is actually designed to punish people.’

Ms Victory said while it was understandable that both parties were cautious about increasing national debt, there were ways to boost JobSeeker without impacting the budget bottom line.

Recent modelling by the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods, commissioned by the St Vincent de Paul Society, found an increase to JobSeeker of $150 per fortnight, along with a 50 per cent increase to Commonwealth Rent Assistance, could be easily paid for through minor tax changes that would only marginally affect highest income-earners.

‘This research shows there is no justification for being so brutal with people who cannot find sufficient work. While acknowledging the need to be cautious about adding to national debt, there are many ways Australia could fund a boost to JobSeeker that lifts recipients out of poverty and restores their dignity, without affecting the budget bottom line.

‘There is abundant wealth in this country to fund an income increase to those who most desperately need it. The fact that neither party has the political courage to advocate for such a change is deeply disappointing.’

The St Vincent de Paul Society’s Federal Election statement includes a suite of practical and compassionate policies to create A Fairer Australia.

https://www.vinnies.org.au/page/News/National_Media_Releases/National_media_releases_2022/A_Fairer_Australia–federal_election_statement_2022/

Like Plato’s Cave, where fires reveal the portrait of an otherwise hidden reality, researchers have for the first time used a stalagmite’s chemical signal to reveal the nature of Australia’s historic wildfires, identifying differences before and after European settlement.

“For around 50 years, researchers have focused on the climate record contained in cave stalagmites,” says Prof Andy Baker, project chief investigator from UNSW’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences. “However, hiding in the shadows all along was this geochemical record of past fires.”

The stalagmite used in the study, findings of which are published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, was extracted from Yonderup cave in Western Australia and preserved a record of fires, climate conditions and the intervening years since its formation, allowing researchers to link local fires with any climatic antecedents.

“We found that the largest fire event in the [stalagmite] record, in approximately 1897, coincided with a decades-long drought period known as the Australian Federation drought,” says Dr Liza McDonough from ANSTO and lead author of the study, conducted with UNSW and other universities. “The intensity of this fire was likely caused, at least partially, by these dry conditions.

“We also know that this [the largest fire] occurred a few decades after Indigenous cultural burning would have been suppressed by Europeans, so the fire was also probably exacerbated by a build-up of understorey vegetation and dry combustible material on the forest floor due to removal of Indigenous land management practices.”

The researchers interpret the pre-European period captured in the stalagmite record as characterised by regular, low-intensity fires, while its post-European record depicts infrequent, high-intensity fires, which they speculate could be due to management practices.

This is the first study in which a stalagmite’s geochemistry has been used to describe historical fires. The technique relies upon the stalagmite’s composition, the variation in its elements and the order in which they were laid down.

“Nutrients such as phosphorus, and trace metals are found in bushfire ash and, in theory, can dissolve into waters that eventually infiltrate underground caves. Our research provides the first evidence that water containing high concentrations of these dissolved ash-derived elements can also alter the chemistry of a stalagmite and result in the preservation of signals from past fire events,” says Dr McDonough.

Why had stalagmites not been previously discovered as archives of past fires? “We realised we needed to use the highest resolution geochemical techniques available, as stalagmites grow very slowly. In one year, a stalagmite increases in height by the same thickness as that of a sheet of paper. The geochemical trace left by a fire would be even thinner.”

It’s not just historical fires that are recorded in stalagmites but also the annual accumulation of years, much like tree rings.

“In regions with high seasonality,” Dr McDonough says, describing the stalagmite’s record of time, “wet winters can lead to a flush of organic matter into the dripwaters that form stalagmites. This causes annual dark bands alternating with light calcite bands in summer. This means that these stalagmites can be easily and precisely dated by counting back the annual layers.”

While the particular portion of stalagmite used in this study is relatively young, allowing scientists to peer back just 260 years, the range of time promised by other stalagmites and other speleothems (cave ornaments) stretches back much further, thousands or even tens of thousands of years.

This new technique opens the possibility of speleothems, and their chemical record, to describe historical fire and climatic events around the world “potentially anywhere we might find caves”.

Dr McDonough says the technique also grants new perspectives on climate change. “Speleothems record increasing or decreasing rainfall rates and changes in evaporation and their potential influence on local fire events, whether they’re becoming more or less frequent through time.

“Further investigation of the combined climate and fire records captured in stalagmites will allow us to understand the climatic conditions required for large bushfires to occur, which is essential to properly prepare for and mitigate the impacts of large fire events.”

The authors would like to respectfully acknowledge the Whadjuk Noongar people, the traditional custodians of the land at Yanchep where this study was conducted, for whom the land has strong mythological, ritual and ceremonial significance.

Australia should follow the European example and introduce a Youth Job Guarantee, according to a new report from the Australia Institute which reveals the true extent of youth employment devastation during the pandemic.

Despite representing just 14 per cent of workers, the new report, ‘Youth unemployment and the pandemic’, shows young people (aged 15-24) bore 39 per cent of the job losses in the 2020 lockdowns and a staggering 55 per cent of job losses in 2021.

The report also finds that while young people were twice as likely to lose their job in the pandemic, stimulus spending was disproportionally directed toward industries with minimal youth employment, including $2.7 billion to the aviation sector, $780 million to the Homebuilder grants program, and $2.9 billion to the “gas-fired recovery.”

“We’ve heard a lot this week about the headline unemployment rate of four per cent, but virtually nothing about youth unemployment which has now risen to 9.3 per cent,” said Eliza Littleton, research economist at the Australia Institute.

“It’s small wonder youth unemployment is so high when you consider how hard the jobs of young people were hammered during the pandemic and how little support they received. For example, our research shows hospitality and retail make up 42 per cent of youth employment, but received just 18 per cent of JobKeeper payments.

“Even the young people who can find work now are increasingly being required to sign up to casual or ‘gig’ based jobs that offer no sick leave, paid leave, or other entitlements.

“If we want to turn this around, we need real youth employment policies, like those we see in Japan, Germany, and Israel. Our research shows that in those nations, youth unemployment only rose during the pandemic between 1.5 per cent and 1.9 per cent. Countries with less supportive policies like the United States, Ireland, and Australia experienced increases of between 4.5 per cent and 12.4 per cent.

“Youth employment policy in Australia focuses too much on resume writing and not enough on creating more jobs.

“A Youth Job Guarantee would ensure that every young person who registered as unemployed gets access to either a job, a paid internship, or a training opportunity. The precedent has been set in a number of European countries. It would require the Australian government to fund private sector job creation and public sector graduate programs, alongside better, de-privatised employment services.

“It’s time to stop thinking of unemployed young people as a cost and start seeing them as a lost opportunity. If the 249,000 young people who want to work could be productively employed, they would earned $7.1 billion per year and increase GDP by $13.7 billion,” Ms Littleton said.

The new report was commissioned by Youth Action, the peak advocacy organisation representing young people and youth services in NSW, and draws on extensive consultation sessions with a diverse range of young people.

“This report highlights that young people in NSW bore the brunt of job losses, with Western Sydney and Regional NSW the hardest hit,” said Kate Munro, CEO of Youth Action.

“The pandemic has amplified pre-existing problems in the labour market for young people – there aren’t enough jobs and what jobs there are come with very little security.

“There are plenty of options for government to act. We need job guarantees, protections for casual workers, increasing income support, and better resourcing for public employment services providers.

“Young people are way overrepresented in the casual economy where they have fewer rights. If this remains the case they will continue to bear the brunt of economic downturns,” Ms Munro said.

The Australian Dental Association has congratulated the Greens for addressing the seismic inadequacy in our dental health system.

But it says that Adam Bandt’s dental pitch which will cost $8 bn a year or $77bn over a decade to provide Medicare funded dental services, will be a challenge for any government to implement.

“While we applaud the Greens for addressing this enormous problem,” said Dr Mark Hutton, ADA President, “what’s important and financially more palatable for either election-winning party, as a first step, is to address the oral health travesties within the aged care system.

“You only have to look at the pictures attached to this release to understand this massive problem – they are typical of the issues we know go on in aged care homes.

“Dentures left in for weeks, teeth not cleaned for days and sometimes weeks, broken teeth lacerating gums and tongues, extensive tooth decay, advanced gum disease fast-tracking the person to potentially fatal aspirational pneumonia, fillings falling out, pain, swelling and oral cancers in all stages.

“It’s a horrific roll call of neglect. What if this was your mum or dad? Wouldn’t you want something done? This is the nation’s mums, dads, granddads and grandmums all lying there suffering pain, neglect, disease, trauma – and the current government is ignoring the issue, hoping it will go away.”

With its ‘Stop The Rot’ campaign, the ADA is urging the major parties to urgently adopt as part of their election promises and post-election health strategies these measures which will go a long way to fixing the immediate problems.

Here are the facts:

The Royal Commission into Residential Aged Care heard evidence of the appalling state of dental and oral health in Australia’s residential aged care facilities.

There are nearly 190,000 of Australia’s most vulnerable people living in residential care. Many are suffering due to poor dental and oral health and a lack of access to appropriate services.

More follows….

The recommendations from the Royal Commission’s report have been ignored.

Residents in aged care cannot access appropriate dental and oral care through the public dental system because it is patently underfunded.

The ADA is demanding all parties to ‘Stop The Rot’ by committing to three policy outcomes:

1. To fund direct access to public and private dental services that maintain the basic dental and oral healthcare standards in aged care facilities
2. To deliver a training package to ensure that staff in aged care services are skilled to be able to care for residents daily oral health needs and to identify when dental services are required
3. To include an oral health assessment in the over 75 health check performed by GPs.

“These policy outcomes are crucial for the health and well-being of residents in aged care but are immaterial in budgetary terms,” said Mark Hutton.

“We hope the main parties realise what needs to be done and adopt our recommendations in their pre and post-election health strategies. After all, they will all be old one day too.”

Did you know:

-1 in 4 over 75s have teeth affected by decay,

• 1 in 3 aged 55-74 have untreated tooth decay and 1 in 4 in those aged over 75,

-1 in 2 aged 55-74 years have periodontal or gum disease, rising to over 2 in 6 in the over 75s

-1 in 5 over 75 have complete tooth loss.