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Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Health
- Daily Mail
What Australians need to know about the virus on the rise in China that has sparked Covid-style lockdowns
A leading Australian doctor has downplayed concerns that a major virus outbreak in China could spark a global health crisis, but warned the real threat lies in how the Chinese Government handles the situation. More than 7,000 cases of the mosquito-borne virus chikungunya have been confirmed in southern China, with the majority found in the Shunde district of Foshan. The outbreak began in late July, prompting authorities to impose Covid-style lockdowns in some affected areas. No deaths have been reported so far. Dr Nick Coatsworth, one of Australia's most prominent medical experts, told 2GB's Ben Fordham that Australians shouldn't panic. 'I think China needs to be concerned but I don't think we need to share that concern in Australia,' he said. Dr Coatsworth said the virus itself wasn't his main worry, but rather the Chinese Government's track record on transparency during potential pandemics. 'The thing I worry about is not the virus but I continue to worry about the transparency of the Chinese government if there is a new virus,' he said. 'Unfortunately, we saw no signs after the pandemic. We saw the Morrison government try very hard to get some insight into what actually happened at Wuhan and ultimately that failed. 'That the bigger issue for the world than this chikungunya virus at the moment.' Australia has its own version of chikungunya, the Ross River virus. While the virus cannot be transmitted directly from person to person, people can become infected when mosquitoes feed on an infected person and then bite someone else. If a pregnant woman is infected around the time of delivery, the baby can also be infected at birth, which often results in severe illness. 'I've seen cases of chikungunya in returned travellers to Australia so that's something we'd have to look out for,' Dr Coatsworth said. 'I don't think it's going to be something like Covid where it spreads around the world in a pandemic fashion.' Though not usually fatal, chikungunya can cause a sudden onset of fever, severe joint pain, muscle aches, headaches, nausea, fatigue and skin rashes. While most people recover within a week or two, joint pain can linger for months or even years. In rare cases, chikungunya can progress to severe dengue-like illness, which may result in internal bleeding, organ failure, and even death. The virus has also been linked to eye, heart, and neurological complications. Newborns, the elderly, and people with underlying health conditions are at increased risk of severe illness, and there is also some evidence linking chikungunya infection to long-term health problems like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. There is currently no cure or specific treatment for chikungunya, but symptoms can be managed with acetaminophen (paracetamol) and by staying hydrated. Dr Coatsworth explained that the word 'chikungunya' literally means 'to double over or bend over' - a reference to the posture of sufferers due to intense joint pain. 'Some people can get some finny side-effects with their nerves and nervous system,' he added. He said the biggest issue with it originating in China was that it's being transmitted in very densely populated areas that can make an epidemic very difficult to control. There are currently two vaccinations which protect against the virus; IXCHIQ for those aged between 18 and 64 and Vimkunya for those 12 years and older.
ABC News
4 days ago
- Business
- ABC News
Jim Chalmers treads middle path between unions and business on artificial intelligence
It was only last week the prime minister stood in front of three grieving parents to announce YouTube would be included in his social media ban for kids. One father was cradling an urn as he blamed social media for the loss of his daughter. It was a powerful example of a government, with bipartisan support, scrambling to catch up after the horse bolted on a new technology. Another was the News Media Bargaining Code, introduced by the Morrison government to force Google and Facebook to cough up for news content driving clicks on their sites. Leaving aside arguments about the effectiveness of both moves, they represent attempts at retrofitting regulation to put the social media genie at least partly back in the bottle. Which brings us to the current debate around how to regulate — or not — artificial intelligence. If the treasurer's reform roundtable kicking off in two weeks achieves nothing else, it has at least sharpened a long overdue debate about what role government should play in setting the rules of the road for AI. This technology is already upon us. AI is involved whenever we use search engines, digital assistants (think Siri or Alexa), streaming services (think Netflix), and social media. Banks, big tech, and cyber security firms are all racing to roll it out. Even the care sector is quickly developing ways to harness the opportunities. The Brotherhood of St. Laurence, a social justice organisation that provides aged care, disability and other community services, recently ran an eight-week trial of an AI tool. The results were overwhelmingly positive. Staff involved found AI saved them about an hour a day, which could then be spent focusing more on teams and participants. The technology also improved accessibility for staff with language barriers or neurodiversity. "AI has great potential to help community organisations work smarter, reach more people, and tackle long standing barriers to access and equity — if it's done right", Executive Director Travers McLeod told the ABC. "Used responsibly, AI can free up human time in a way that can generate impact for the communities in which we work and support." The benefits are clear, but McLeod also notes the importance of "strong ethical guardrails and a clear framework for lawful and ethical AI use, along with its environment impact, especially in the care economy". "AI must be used as an accelerant of equity and better outcomes for all, not in a way that grows inequity and poverty," he said. This is where the role of the government comes in. Some of these AI "guardrails" already exist in the care sector. Some exist in other sectors too. There's a federal Privacy Act, some states have a Human Rights Act, some industries have professional guidelines. There is, however, no single set of rules for the entire economy governing the "ethical" use of AI or how it can be used to replace human workers. This is the debate now raging ahead of the treasurer's roundtable. At one end of the spectrum sits the ACTU, which wants a national artificial intelligence act, and a new national AI authority to oversee "mandatory enforceable agreements" in every workplace, to ensure staff are consulted before technology is rolled out. At the other end of the spectrum, business groups and the Productivity Commission want as little additional regulation as possible. They argue existing rules are enough and don't want to slow down a technology viewed as crucial for Australia's future success. Treasurer Jim Chalmers is pitching himself as something of a Goldilocks on this. He says he wants to find the right balance "between over-regulating and under-regulating". This "sensible middle path", as Chalmers calls it, charts a course on AI regulation between those who want to "let it rip" and those who want to "pull the doona over the head". This sounds perfectly reasonable, but notably, it still represents a rejection of the union movement's position. Before this roundtable has even begun, the treasurer has said no to one of the ACTU's biggest demands. Indeed, the treasurer is openly siding with the Productivity Commission on this. "The PC's broad directions are largely consistent with the directions that I set out on the weekend." That is, that AI should be treated "as an enabler, not an enemy." This fundamental difference between the union movement and the Labor government over AI could become a bigger point of friction beyond this month's roundtable, given we're only at the start of the AI transformation. AI will increasingly change the way we live and work. There are bound to be jobs lost. Hopefully, new roles will also be created. Where this transformation leads to is difficult to predict, but the path is unlikely to be smooth. Having put its stake in the ground, the ACTU will now be there whenever jobs are lost, demanding much tougher AI rules than the government is willing to accept. The government is trying to strike the right balance between preventing mass redundancies forced by AI, while also preventing Australia falling behind those countries rapidly embracing the technology. Chalmers is optimistic the benefits will ultimately outweigh the risks. He won't want to be a prime minister 10 years from now trying to retrofit regulation after the AI horse has bolted. David Speers is national political lead and host of Insiders, which airs on ABC TV at 9am on Sunday or on iview.
ABC News
5 days ago
- Politics
- ABC News
Net zero? That's so 2021! Why the Paris Agreement is under fire from the political left and right - ABC Religion & Ethics
You can hear Garrett Cullity discuss the ethics and politics of net zero with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens this week on The Minefield. Australia's roller-coaster ride with climate policy is now turning, predictably, into a tussle over net zero. Under the Morrison government, Australia eventually got around to adopting a net zero target in 2021. Now there are calls to abandon it. The net zero project, according to the critics, is a scam. These criticisms come from both the political left and the political right. From the left, the complaint is that the adoption of net zero targets is a smokescreen for business as usual. A net zero target is a commitment that any greenhouse gas you emit into the atmosphere will be balanced by the amount you remove, by some future date — 2050 being the most popular. But then it's just a license to keep burning fossil fuels, pumping the emissions into the atmosphere, while promising to figure out some way of removing them later on. Meanwhile, from the right, the complaint is that tying ourselves to a net zero target is domestically destructive and geopolitically naïve. With global emissions still rising, the United States has now pulled out of the Paris Agreement while China (which is responsible for 35 per cent of global emissions) operates 1,100 coal-fired power stations (Australia has 19) and builds more new ones than at any time in the last decade, all the while telling the world it will reach net zero by 2060. Thus, while we cripple our own industrial capacity and burden the regions with an expensive energy transition, China presses ahead burning as much coal as it needs to satisfy our consumer demand for solar panels and electric cars. These criticisms are unsurprising, and they get their force from the fact that there's some truth in them. But they're more unrealistic than the climate policies they criticise. To understand why, we need some context — from philosophy and from history. The collective action problem Anthropogenic climate change shares some features of what philosophers and social scientists call a 'collective action problem', with one crucial difference. A collective action problem is a situation where, if each member of a group serves his or her own interests best, everyone ends up worse off than they would have been had they exercised more restraint. That might sound impossible, but it's actually common. Overfishing, pollution, vaccination, traffic congestion — a lot of problems we face as groups have that structure. However many fish others are catching, you will be individually better off maximising your catch; but if everyone does that, there are fewer fish to catch. In small groups, we can solve collective action problems by relying on pro-social emotions: a sense of fairness, pride in what we achieve as a group, and shame at the idea of being a bludger. Indeed, according to some philosophers, this is fundamentally where morality comes from — it is a set of pro-social emotions and dispositions favoured by evolution because it helps groups to cooperate and thereby solve those problems. However, as groups get larger, those solutions tend to stop working. To solve large-scale collective action problems, we need effective regulation: a set of rules spelling out how many fish you're allowed to catch, together with effective penalties for breaking the rules. The problem of global climate change is especially difficult for two main reasons. First, it is truly global in scale, deeply implicated in the way the global economy works, and diffused: the effects of climate change are spread across the world. But we have no effective global regulator to enforce a set of global climate rules and penalties. The second reason comes from the way in which climate change is different from collective action problems, in a crucial respect. Is it really true that if we took the action that is necessary to prevent climate change from worsening, that would be better for everyone ? Not so. If you're old and rich, you're better off taking all the advantages of lavish resource use, and leaving the problems to be dealt with later, by someone else. Ordinary collective action problems can get solved when there's a powerful enough regulator available to impose effective rules, and it's in everyone's interest to agree to this. But with global climate change, neither of those things is true. There's a powerful incentive for each generation to take the benefits of unrestricted resource use and pass the buck to the next one. From Kyoto to Paris What, then, can we do? The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was adopted in 1992 and came into effect in 1994, formulated a set of principles for international climate action and a schedule of annual meetings — the Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings that happen each November. Since then, two main strategies have been attempted. The first one failed, and we're now trying another one. The first legally binding international climate treaty was agreed at Kyoto in 1997. There, the idea was to negotiate national emissions reduction targets with agreed penalties for non-performance. This suffered from two fatal flaws: a lack of ambition and a lack of buy-in. The Kyoto Protocol was signed by 37 countries plus the European Union; the United States signed but later pulled out. The other signatories did meet their targets, which averaged a 5 per cent reduction in emissions levels below 1990 levels, to be achieved by 2012. (Australia was a signatory, and we continue to boast about having met our target. We're quieter about the fact that what we negotiated was an 8 per cent increase in emissions between 1990 and 2012.) The signatories did not, however, include China and India — and overall global emissions rose by 44 per cent in that period. So clearly, negotiating binding targets with penalties attached has not been a success. This was tried again at the 2009 COP 15 in Copenhagen and the process broke down altogether. Since then, the world has taken a different tack, which was formalised at the 2015 COP 21 as the Paris Agreement. The idea behind the Paris Agreement has been to get as much participation as possible, with each of the 193 parties to the agreement publishing its own 'nationally determined contribution' (NDC), with a self-imposed emissions reduction target, an accompanying action plan, and a reporting schedule, carrying a commitment to update the NDC every five years, but no liability for non-compliance penalties. The aim, in other words, is to start from a baseline of widespread participation, secure initial commitments that can be politically delivered, and then ratchet up the level of ambition gradually through a timetable of regular reporting and target-resetting. In the period leading up to 2015, there was another significant development in climate science and policy. Starting in 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the UN body with the task of summarising climate science to inform policy — shifted away from talking simply about emissions reductions and began saying instead that net emissions must be reduced to zero in order to stabilise global temperatures. National net zero targets have consequently become a prominent part of the NDCs made under the Paris Agreement: more than 100 countries now have them. Generally, the target date is 2050 (though China's is 2060 and India's 2070). At the same time, net zero targets have been adopted by 20 per cent of the world's cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants, and over half of the world's 2,000 largest companies. How much credence should we give to critics? Against this historical background, let's return to the critics. The left-wing critics smell a rat when they see how enthusiastically the talk of net zero has been taken up by government and big business. In their minds the IPCC, having realised that our current emissions trajectories give us no hope of containing emissions to tolerable levels, has fallen back on the idea that somehow we can address climate change by investing in 'negative emissions technologies' for removing greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. The big emitters have eagerly seized on this as a way of creating the illusion of action. And one has to admit, when you find Clive Palmer's Waratah Coal proposing a new 'carbon-neutral' coal-fired power station, alarm bells ring. On the other hand, the right-wing critics — which include, of course, Clive Palmer — complain that we are being played for mugs by China, and that pursuing net zero will simply rip jobs out of the regions, blight the landscape with wind turbines and drive up power prices, for the sake of making urban teal voters feel good. Similar voices are currently being raised across the world, as Greg Sheridan approvingly notes. Are these criticisms themselves realistic? Climate change is a global problem; it requires a global solution; and currently there is one available vehicle for working towards it: the UNFCC process, with its national targets. We might prefer that the process or the problem itself were different, but it's not. Given the chequered history of international climate action, we're entitled to reserve judgement about whether this will work. But given the scale and complexity of the problem we are faced with, there's something risible in the idea that Australia should walk away now, concluding that the global attempt to solve it has failed. It's especially ridiculous in a country that dragged itself reluctantly to a net zero commitment as late as 2021 then to turn around four years later when faced with the discipline of setting an interim target, declare this to be too hard and to be the fault of the country that burns our exported coal, and to walk away while complaining that other countries are not acting in good faith. All countries now face three options regarding national net zero targets: rejection — abandon the targets altogether; — abandon the targets altogether; lip service — declare a net zero target for the sake of international decorum, but take no serious action to implement it; — declare a net zero target for the sake of international decorum, but take no serious action to implement it; provisional commitment — set the target, make a plan for implementing it, but give yourself the option of bailing out if there's a danger of being suckered by your international partner-competitors. Currently, Australia has worked its faltering way to provisional commitment, with its target of reducing net emissions by 43 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. From here, we could still fall back on lip service if necessary, to avoid being done over by ruthless competitors. But it's hard to see how it could really be in the national interest to go all the way to rejection. It is true that lip service, unlike rejection, would carry the inconvenience of encouraging your electorate to demand that you actually take action to meet your target. So it would require some degree of political skill, of a rather unattractive kind, to execute. But there are no evident ways in which the national interest would be better served by rejection than by lip service, which retains freedom of manoeuvre and makes you less of a pariah. Moreover, without being too naïve, there are some grounds for thinking that international climate action could ultimately succeed. We did control the damage that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were doing to the ozone layer. And the increasingly obvious badness of what lies in store if we don't solve the climate problem actually supplies some reasons for believing we will eventually do so. Most people aren't as selfish as a pure Hobbesian model of human motivation would have it. People everywhere tend to care about the future of their children, grandchildren and communities. No nation — China or any other — is populated by people who will be happy to consign their descendants to a climate apocalypse. If that's true, then there are three powerful reasons for staying engaged in the current UNFCC process, and adopting a strategy of provisional commitment to a net zero target: it can help create momentum towards actually solving the problem; it can help create momentum towards actually solving the problem; it creates goodwill in international alliances, which are useful outside the context of climate discussions as well as within them; it creates goodwill in international alliances, which are useful outside the context of climate discussions as well as within them; and if the world community does go in the direction of a green economic transition — and there are some signs that it will — it's smarter for us to do so earlier rather than later. Why climate change is a political problem Once you've noticed the structure of collective action problems, you tend to spot them all over the place — they really are part of the human condition. One place you find them is in Coalition party rooms. There, the battle being fought is over which of the first two options to retreat to: lip service or rejection. As we've seen for decades, there are Coalition politicians whose power bases give them incentives to advance their own individual political interests in ways that are worse for the Coalition as a whole, because they tend to pull it apart. We should be used to this by now, and there's little point in lamenting it. After all, this is going to be part of our political landscape for the foreseeable future. In a democracy, there will always be a place for climate contrarianism, for as long as there is such a thing as climate policy. We also need political leaders who are tested in the proving-ground of intra-party politics to develop political skills of a high order. The hardest part of the global climate problem is not technical or economic: engineers have produced low-emissions technologies, and economists have plenty of advice on how to create incentives for us to use them. The hardest part of the problem is political . It requires somehow pulling 200 countries in the same direction, while they are antagonists over other issues. Succeeding in doing this will require political virtuosity and statecraft of the highest order. Those are skills that don't come around very often. However, at least there's this crumb of consolation. When the great politicians we need do arrive, the problem will still be there for them to solve. Garrett Cullity is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory at the Australian National University. Christian Barry is Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Labor was in a climate crouch. It now has the chance to stand up to News Corp and put the national interest first
In 2021, the Labor party was in a bit of a climate crouch. It needed policies that could be presented at the 2022 election as credible steps towards addressing the century's greatest social and economic challenge after nine years of the Coalition doing next-to-nothing, or less. It also felt it needed to not leave itself exposed to another round of damaging climate scare campaigns from its opponents in the Morrison government, industry lobby groups and the media, particularly at News Corp. It had experienced too many of those, from claims that a lamb roast would cost more than $100 and Whyalla would be wiped from the map, to baseless attacks in 2019 that its policies would cost an economy wrecking $60bn and, ludicrously, stop people enjoying weekends. Labor's response was to make like a three-banded armadillo and, should danger arise, prepare to roll itself into a ball with few potentially sensitive areas left exposed. In policy terms, that meant offering just two firm emissions reduction commitments – introducing a $20bn off-budget fund to 'rewire the nation' to allow for more renewable energy, and adopting and revamping a failed Coalition policy to cut industrial pollution. Its position was backed by a report that suggested electricity prices and emissions would be much lower under Labor than under the Coalition. It worked. These policies may not have won Labor the 2022 election, but they helped ensure it didn't lose it. The campaign was defined by Scott Morrison's failures, including on global heating. Climate-focused independents slayed Liberal MPs in previously safe seats and Anthony Albanese became prime minister. Once in power, the climate change minister, Chris Bowen, and the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, oversaw additional policies to support large-scale clean energy and cleaner cars and provide tax credits for new green industries. While some would take a while to take effect, they could make a meaningful difference. It was a start. But Russia invaded Ukraine, sending global fossil fuel prices skyward, and household electricity bills in Australia went up, not down. Inflation – a global phenomenon – made governing challenging. At the start of this year, Labor was under siege, with public and private polling suggesting it was headed for a historic first-term loss. The party once again took a defensive approach on climate before an election. It released just one policy: a battery subsidy scheme. And then the world turned again. Donald Trump moved into the White House, interest rates eased and the Liberal party under Peter Dutton ran a disastrous election campaign not helped by an unbelievable nuclear energy plan. Albanese won in a landslide. Three months on, Australia's climate political landscape is barely recognisable from four years ago. The power dynamic is reversed. Where Labor once feared being attacked, it is now the aggressor, mocking the Coalition as it toys with tearing itself apart over whether its lesson from the loss will be to drop its support for Australia cutting emissions to net zero by 2050. Nearly everything about the opposition's climate debate is a charade. It went to the election planning to increase climate pollution by abolishing Labor's climate policies and introducing none of its own for at least a decade. It opposed net zero but just didn't own up to it. And the election result makes it largely irrelevant for the next 2 ½ years anyway. With Barnaby Joyce as its most vocal climate policy advocate, its internal fight is being held miles away from where most Australians live or how they think. Meanwhile, parties and candidates that openly back the case for deep cuts in emissions – Labor, 'teal' independents and the Greens – share a clear majority of the primary vote. It doesn't mean everyone who voted for one of these groups wants the same thing, or that political support for their policies will necessarily be endless. But it does suggest there is an opportunity here – that most people are open to Australia being much more aggressive on climate if the case that it is good for the country and its people is well made. The timing couldn't be better. Big decisions are looming, including on Australia's emissions reduction target for 2035 and the policies that will be needed to back it up. Labor backbenchers are arguing it should be ambitious. The evidence of the past couple of weeks is that, wherever it lands, the government should expect fierce resistance. Take News Corp's national flagship, The Australian. Since parliament returned late last month, it has dedicated significant space to what is basically a campaign against climate action dressed up as news coverage. Its approach is not new. The costs of acting and the challenges that come with renewable energy are over-emphasised and exaggerated. The costs of not acting, including the opportunity cost of continuing to back fossil fuels over clean alternatives, are ignored. The level of international action – a valid area for sceptical scrutiny – is painted in the worst possible light. The global climate science consensus is rejected, downplayed or not mentioned. The implicit message is that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a weird, leftwing pursuit, rather than a serious and inevitable challenge that needs to be addressed. Who needs solutions when you have kneejerk ideological certainty? Privately, members of the government are scathing of how the country's biggest newspaper publisher reports on the climate crisis. They also acknowledge the company is less influential than it used to be. But Canberra is a small place, Australia a limited media market, and old habits are hard to shake. A key question for Albanese and his cabinet colleagues will be whether they are willing to just ignore the company's one-sided framing and avoid being fooled into believing it represents a mainstream public that it needs to factor in. Put another way: Labor will need to decide if it has ditched the crouch. The government is about to receive long-awaited advice from the Climate Change Authority on the 2035 target. It is likely to include a target range, based on what the authority's board considers ambitious and achievable. It's been consulting on a cut of 65% to 75% below 2005 levels. Given where the electorate and future economy sit, there is a strong case for Labor to set a target at the ambitious end of that range and stretch to get there. Some emissions cuts – through better energy efficiency and reducing potent methane leaks at fossil fuel sites – are cost effective and just waiting to be made. Others would be tougher, requiring the government to acknowledge that local emissions from expanding export coal and gas industries are substantial and can't be written off forever as someone else's problem – and that new green industries in hydrogen, steel and other commodities are likely to struggle to flourish until their polluting competitors decline. An ambitious climate goal would be demanding. But it could also trigger a range of positives. Who knows? If well-handled, they might even include the government being rewarded by the bulk of the population, who have now hinted more than once it is what they want.
