Awareness

• By 2030, that number is expected to increase to almost one million, and by 2050, almost 1.7 million.
• In South Asian communities, an intricate tapestry of cultures, languages and traditions engenders a caregiving dynamic for those living with dementia.
• Dementia care in South Asian households is nuanced and complex and is shaped by cultural, familial and societal forces.

Caregiving in South Asian communities

• Strong family bonds: The South Asian community is characterized by its close-knit family structures, where family members often share caregiving responsibilities.
• Respect for elders: South Asian cultures traditionally hold elders in high regard.
• Multi-generational households: Many South Asian households often have multiple generations living under one roof.

Challenges to caregiving

• This can influence the decision-making process regarding caregiving arrangements.
• Language and cultural barriers: Language and cultural differences can pose significant challenges in accessing appropriate care and information about dementia.
• The constant demands of caregiving, coupled with the progressive nature of dementia, can lead to caregiver burnout and mental health issues.
• In South Asian communities, caregiving responsibilities often fall on daughters or other female relatives due to gendered expectations of their role in the family.

Supporting caregivers

• Acknowledging and supporting caregivers is crucial for a more equitable future.
• Financial support and legal protections further empower caregivers.
• It is imperative to address the unique challenges faced by South Asian care partners and individuals with dementia.

• So what makes a great climate leader and why are we not seeing more of them?
• For two years now I’ve been on a journey, a quest if you like, to find good climate leaders.

Missed opportunities and wasted time

• If we’d been on the right emissions reduction trajectory a decade ago, we’d have more time to deal with the problem.
• But we’ve wasted ten years.
• Over that period, probably 20% of all of the carbon pollution we’ve ever put into the atmosphere has been emitted.

A different style of leadership

• In my opinion, that is true leadership.
• […] it was about finding the big things that everyone could agree on and designing policy that brought everyone together.
• […] it was about finding the big things that everyone could agree on and designing policy that brought everyone together.
• On the subject of leadership, they share similar sentiments with Australia’s Dharawal and Yuin custodian and community leader Paul Knight.
• So in a species like ours, that’s what true leadership consists of.

What’s holding us back?

• The links are interwoven, with people moving from the fossil fuel industry to politics and back.
• And we still allow people to become extremely rich at the expense of all of us.
• I think that’s what’s holding us back.

Rise up

• And the story is usually somewhat similar: people realise they could lose something very precious.
• We heard it time and time again in the making of this documentary.
• For community campaigner Jo Dodds the trigger was the Black Summer bushfires, the near-loss of her house and the loss of her neighbours’ houses.
• The level of public awareness is far greater now than when I came to this issue in the early 2000s.

• Temu specialises in selling various everyday items, including clothing, toys and household goods, for extremely low prices.
• Shanghai-based company PDD Holdings launched the online marketplace late last year (initially in the United States) to cater to overseas customers.
• At the time of publishing this article, Temu was the most popular free iPhone app in the US, United Kingdom, Australia and Germany.

What are Temu’s secrets to success?

• Value Many Australians might associate “made in China” with cheap price tags and low quality.
• However, Temu’s consumers are beginning to view it as offering affordable products that do not necessarily compromise on quality.
• Temu claims it can offer these prices as a result of cutting out the middlemen in the supply chain.
• While the manufacturers provide the product details and the products themselves, Temu handles everything else – from customs processing to international shipping.

Sales promotion tactics

While Temu employs common sales tactics seen on other e-commerce platforms, it uses what is arguably the broadest array of these techniques. Here are just some examples:

Defending against manipulation

• It may still have lower-quality items, but this is common among all e-commerce platforms.
• Also, Temu’s business model is built around emphasising top-selling products, which helps filter out low-quality products.
• Exposed to such a wide array of marketing tactics, users might become more prone to overconsumption – which leads to environmental waste and post-purchase regret.
• Read more:
  Blind bags: how toy makers are making a fortune with child gambling

  Xiaoling Guo receives funding from Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.

• In her indictment, the prosecutor described Ilse Koch as “a sexy-looking depraved woman who beat prisoners, reported them for beatings, and trafficked human skin”.
• Ilse’s husband, Karl Koch, had been commandant of Buchenwald, one of the first and largest concentration camps within Germany’s 1937 borders, from August 1937 to October 1941.
• He would then briefly serve as a commander of Majdanek, another notorious concentration camp.
• Read more:
  It's not just about the rise in anti-Semitism: why we need real stories for better Holocaust education in Australia

Joined the Nazi party ‘early’

• She joined the Nazi party earlier than most of her peers, in 1932.
• At the time, the Nazi party appealed to young people because fascism seemed a viable solution to the deep economic recession that had followed the first world war, and had impoverished many German families.
• Koch lived with her family in a three-story villa on the grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
• The executions of Buchenwald prisoners, writes Jardim, occurred in multiple forms: “shooting, hanging, gassing, corporal punishment, experiments withholding food and [the] refusal of medical care”.

Tried for awareness and participation

• The officers who made up the military courts at Dachau were, writes Jardim, “honest and competent men”, but they were not lawyers or professional jurists.
• Dressed up and with her head held high, Margarete Ilse Koch entered the courtroom.
• She was the only woman among 31 indicted for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Buchenwald.
• And she was tried for her alleged awareness of the camp’s nature, and her voluntary and active participation in its enforcement.

‘A creature from some other tortured world’

• Ironically, the executions of 50,000 people at Buchenwald were “not wrongful according to the National Socialist system”.
• They became centres where food and other valuable items could find their way onto the black market.
• In the 1947 trials, American prosecutor Denson described Koch as “no woman in the usual sense but a creature from some other tortured world”, making her a powerful symbolic representation of Nazi crimes.
• The court concluded that there was no overwhelming or substantial evidence against Koch and commuted her sentence to four years imprisonment.

‘Diabolical’

• Mounting criticisms of the court’s finding of clemency erupted into public protests.
• However, in the same year as her release, she was charged again – this time by the Western German authorities.
• While Jardim cites original data from the trial, there is still some confusion about the exact numbers attached to Koch’s charges.

Women and war crimes

• Studies on Ilse Koch have possibly been more common than those on other women war criminals, because the media sensationalised her story.
• Ilse Koch on Trial reminds us that women, too, are capable of committing war crimes.
• While it’s normalised that men can kill, especially in war, women are still stereotyped as peaceful and nurturing – which is reflected in the gendered reactions to women war criminals.
• While no one denies Ilse Koch was guilty of terrible crimes, the most sensational atrocities attributed to her remain unproven.