Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thomas Duff, Postdoctoral Fellow, Forest and Ecosystem Science, University of Melbourne

In this record-breaking bushfire season, notifications from emergency managers have become a familiar feature of Australian life. Terms like “out of control” and “contained” are regularly heard as descriptions of the status of fires, but what do they actually mean?

These terms vary slightly between Australian states and territory, but as similar firefighting strategies are used Australia-wide, the meanings are comparable.

The status of a fire is a description of the stage of the firefighting effort, not the nature of the fire or its likelihood of being a threat. This means that to understand what actions to take when an active fire is nearby, it’s important to follow the advice of your local fire and emergency information sources.

Read more: We have already had countless bushfire inquiries. What good will it do to have another?

‘Going’ or ‘out of control’

A fire described as “going” or “out of control” is one where parts of its perimeter are burning and have the potential to spread into unburnt areas.

The perimeter is the focus as it is where unburnt fine fuels (consisting of the litter on the forest floor, shrubs and bark) are being ignited and burning rapidly. The flames of these subside quickly, so the majority of a fire’s interior consists of blackened area where only heavy fuels such as logs and branches continue to burn.

A fire will be given the status “going” when it is first detected or reported to emergency authorities. The status may also be used for fires that were controlled and subsequently breakaway (escape control).

“Going” fires will typically be the subject of concentrated firefighting effort to prevent growth and minimise the impacts to things of value (i.e. lives, property, infrastructure and ecosystem services). However the term is inclusive of all fires that are able to spread, so encompasses everything from shrubs burning under a tree hit by lighting to intense firestorms.

Contained or “being controlled’

A “contained” fire is one with a complete containment line around its perimeter. “Being controlled” will have a complete or near-complete containment line. Containment lines (also called control lines or firelines) are the main way to stop bushfires spreading.

While our images of firefighters involve hoses spraying water against the flames, water is, in fact, inefficient because of the vast amounts needed to douse the large amounts of burning vegetation and the difficulty of maintaining supply in rugged terrain.

Instead, to stop fires spreading, firefighters create containment lines where all fuels are removed in bands adjacent to the fire’s perimeter. This prevents the fire reaching unburnt vegetation, starving the flames of new material to burn.

So how are containment lines created? Typically, with heavy machinery (often bulldozers), which scrape away all burnable material around the edge of the fire so nothing but mineral soil remains. In rugged terrain, this may be done by hand, by specialist crews using tools such as rakehoes and chainsaws.

Where there are existing areas of low fuel in the landscape, such as roads, bodies of water or previously burnt areas, firefighters may also include these as part of their containment strategy.

The containment line is built next to the burning fire edge, so the more intense or erratic a fire is, the more difficult and dangerous it is for crews to work.

Read more: Some say we’ve seen bushfires worse than this before. But they’re ignoring a few key facts

It’s not safe to construct a line where fires are spreading rapidly, producing many embers, behaving erratically, have deep flames or are exhibiting firestorm-type behaviours (where the fire is so intense it can generate extreme winds and even lightning).

At such times firefighters will either move to parts of the fire where behaviour is less intense (typically where the wind is pushing the flames away from unburnt fuel), apply indirect firefighting methods such as backburning (burning areas in front of the advancing fire) or retreat and focus on protecting life and property.

The exceptionally hot, dry and windy conditions of the 2019/20 fire season have resulted in many rapidly expanding bushfires that have overwhelmed the capacity of firefighters to build containment lines.

As a fire is being contained, crews will be assigned to patrol the already constructed parts of the line to prevent escapes. The burning-out of unburnt fuels within the containment lines may be done to reduce the chance this ignites and causes issues at a future date.

Under control, or ‘patrol’

A fire that’s “under control” has a full containment line around it, and there has been a degree of consolidation so fire escaping outside the lines is unlikely.

This consolidation is called “mopping up” or “blacking out”, and consists of crews working along the edge of the fire to extinguish or stabilise any burning material in the fire area within a set distance of the line.

Fire elevates the risk of trees falling, so at this stage there may also be work to identify and treat dangerous trees.

After line consolidation is complete, routine patrols to prevent escapes will continue for days to weeks until the fire is deemed safe.

Read more: Bushfires won’t change climate policy overnight. But Morrison can shift the Coalition without losing face

Safe

The final status applied to bushfires is “safe”. This is where deemed that no sources of ignition within containment lines have the potential to cause escapes.

Once a fire is declared safe, it’s assumed no longer necessary to maintain patrols and the fire can be left alone.

After the fire season it’s common for management agencies to rehabilitate the containment lines, to restore the site to its prior condition to protect biodiversity values and water quality.

The status of a fire can change – even fires thought to be safe occasionally break away when hot and windy weather returns. Regardless of whether there are known fires in your area, it is important to have a bushfire survival plan and to pay attention to the advice of your local fire and emergency information sources

– ref. Out of control, contained, safe? Here’s what each bushfire status actually means – http://theconversation.com/out-of-control-contained-safe-heres-what-each-bushfire-status-actually-means-129539

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Grant Jun Otsuki, Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Artificial intelligence-based (AI) programs are quickly improving at writing convincingly on many topics, for virtually no cost. It’s likely in a few years they’ll be churning out C-grade worthy essays for students.

We could try to ban them, but these softwares are highly accessible. It would be a losing battle.

Long-form writing, especially essay writing, remains one of the best ways to teach critical analysis. Teachers rely on this mode of assessment to gauge students’ understanding of a topic.

Thus, we need to find ways to help students of all disciplines thrive alongside advanced automation and smart systems, rather than resist them. This involves training students to work with AI tools, rather than banning them.

What are AI-powered text generators?

In February 2019, GPT-2, an AI-powered text generating system was released by OpenAI. Those interested can try the system themselves by following these instructions, or experiment with Talk to Transformer, an online tool made using GPT-2.

The idea behind GPT-2 is similar to the predictive text function on a smartphone. A machine learning system was given 8 million web pages, and told to look at blocks of text to predict what word would come next.

The system compared its guess with the actual text to “learn”. This was repeated billions of times, resulting in the GPT-2 software.

Read more: From Twitterbots to VR: 10 of the best examples of digital literature

Often within minutes, GPT-2 can generate texts that look like they were written by a human. They’re grammatically correct, thematically coherent, engaging and even informative.

I gave GPT-2 this prompt: “The global system of university ranking has recently…”. Here are some sentences it generated:

The global system of university ranking has recently been the subject of heated debate, with many arguing that it is becoming increasingly irrelevant. In a report published in May, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that the system has become increasingly irrelevant, with the gap between the best and the worst universities in the world narrowing in recent years. The OECD found that in the past decade, the average quality of a university’s research output has fallen to its lowest level since the late 1970s.

There are several signs of a non-human hand at work, notably the repetition of “increasingly irrelevant”. There’s also the matter that no such OECD report exists. It was dreamt up by the machine.

That said, with a few revisions, the text could probably pass as being authored by a human.

There are a number of systems similar to GPT-2, including Google’s BERT, ERNIE2.0, XLNet and Facebook’s RoBERTa. But GPT-2 has caught on with tinkerers across the web – lauded for its power and ease of use in generating new texts.

Available now near you

GPT-2 comes in forms that let anyone use it easily, even without a powerful computer. Such tools are a looming problem for schools and universities.

In an experiment, I fed the system 188 student papers on Keith Basso’s book Wisdom Sits in Places, written for an anthropology course I teach. GPT-2 “learned” for about thirty minutes, after which it generated some paragraphs.

One begins:

In this essay, I will show how conceptions of wisdom connect with place-names in Wisdom Sits in Places, by explaining how place-names serve as moral compass. I will also cover the cultural sphere of “notions of morality”, which is explained by the stories behind the place-names.

The text reads like an essay. It’s divided into four paragraphs and describes what appears to be examples from the book.

Read more: Technology and regulation must work in concert to combat hate speech online

I would have failed the text as is. The writing isn’t perfect, and in places the writer seems to lose their train of thought. However, with slight human revision, an essay worthy of a C would be within reach.

Adapt, don’t resist

People are already experimenting with GPT-2 for poetry, text-based role-playing games, and plays written in a Shakespearean style. Worryingly, it could also produce endless streams of fake news.

What can institutions do about such “plagiarised” work flooding their classrooms?

One response would be to ban AI tools. Leaders of 40 universities in the UK have taken this approach against essay mills, pushing to make them illegal. Essay mills are run by people who charge students a fee in exchange for completing their work.

But it’s unclear how such a ban could be enforced once AI software is as easy to access as Candy Crush. Institutions could look to existing rules against academic misconduct, but accurate detection becomes a problem. As AI-generated texts get better, how will we prove (without watching them) that a student did or didn’t write a text themselves?

We can’t, so we should take a page from cyborg chess play, where players embrace chess-playing computers to become better themselves.

Rather than pretending AI doesn’t exist, it might be time to train people to write with AI.

Most good writers don’t write in isolation; they talk and revise their work with others. Also, 90% of writing is revision, which means the ideas and arguments in a text change and develop as a writer reads and edits their own work.

Thus, systems such as GPT-2 could be used as a first-draft machine, taking a student’s raw research notes and turning them into a text they can expand on and revise.

In this model, teachers would evaluate a work, not just on the basis of the final product, but on a student’s ability to use text-generating tools.

Powerful AI tools could one day help us analyse and communicate complex ideas.

What should we judge our students on?

All of the above prompts a question we need to consider if we’re to live in an AI-friendly world: why do we teach students to write at all?

One major reason is many jobs rely on being able to write. So, when teaching writing, we need to think about the social and economic implications of a type of text.

Much of today’s media landscape, for instance, runs on the continuous production and circulation of blog posts, tweets, listicles, marketing reports, slide presentations, and e-mails.

While computer writing might never be as original, provocative, or insightful as the work of a skilled human, it will quickly become good enough for such writing job, and AIs won’t need health insurance or holidays.

If we teach students to write things a computer can, then we’re training them for jobs a computer can do, for cheaper.

Educators need to think creatively about the skills we give our students. In this context, we can treat AI as an enemy, or we can embrace it as a partner that helps us all learn more, work smarter, and faster.

– ref. OK computer: to prevent students cheating with AI text-generators, we should bring them into the classroom – http://theconversation.com/ok-computer-to-prevent-students-cheating-with-ai-text-generators-we-should-bring-them-into-the-classroom-129905

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Howard Whitton, Visiting Fellow, University of Canberra

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has asked the head of his department to investigate whether Bridget McKenzie violated ministerial standards when she dispensed sports grants to clubs in marginal seats and those being targeted by the Coalition in last year’s election.

It is generally accepted by Australians that “public office is a public trust”. The nature and extent of that trust, however, is continuously being debated.

This is especially true in an age of virtually unlimited potential for scrutiny of governments, and unlimited scope for the court of public opinion to take submissions (and make judgements) about ministerial conduct – well-founded or otherwise.

The late (and much lamented) John Clarke once told me his main role as satirist-in-residence to the nation was to remind the Australian people how fragile their democratic institutions are.

Almost a decade later, we are told on good authority that a significant proportion of young Australians do not trust “government”, to the point where many might well prefer military rule.

This is one reason why codified and enforceable standards of ministerial ethics and conduct will remain relevant – and expected – in our country.

Early steps toward enacting standards

Australia hasn’t always had a set of ethical standards for ministers and government officials. It is a relatively recent phenomenon which came about during Prime Minister John Howard’s time in office in the 1990s.

The idea was first broached in 1978 when Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser commissioned Nigel Bowen to conduct a review of conflict of interest matters involving officials.

Read more: Will heads roll? Ministerial standards and Stuart Robert

Instead of regulation, however, the committee sought to rely on the “court of public opinion” to deter unseemly conduct by MPs.

In the next few years, the culture of government in Australia began changing radically, and quickly.

When the Fraser government introduced both the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act and the Freedom of Information Act, the opportunities for public scrutiny of ministerial decision-making – and conduct more generally – significantly affected public expectations about the way “the business of government” was done.

At a stroke, new standards of conduct by decision-makers at all levels were needed for the first time, for a new era of accountability and “speaking truth to power”.

Standards put forth by Howard and Faulkner

While the Hawke Labor government chose not to bring in new ministerial standards in 1983, Howard did so in 1996 – 20 years after Bowen.

After Howard introduced his ministerial code of conduct, a significant number of ministers were forced to resign over various conflict of interest matters, and the code was amended to be less onerous.

Read more: The Barnaby Joyce affair highlights Australia’s weak regulation of ministerial staffers

Against this backdrop, Opposition Senator John Faulkner introduced draft ethics and integrity standards to the Labor shadow cabinet. It was adopted as party policy in 2001.

The Faulkner standards, which I co-authored with George Thompson on Faulkner’s staff, drew on public ethics principles, legal definitions and community norms regarding the integrity expected of public officials.

The standards recognised several challenges for parliament in policing its own members, chiefly that parliament had not enacted a code of conduct itself and had recently passed laws prohibiting it from expelling an MP for misconduct.

It therefore became the responsibility of the prime minister to enforce the standards.

The Rudd government endorsed these standards of ministerial ethics when it came into power in 2007. And each prime minister since then has endorsed a version of the standards, largely unchanged.

Challenges of enforcing standards

Every version of the standards has reminded ministers of their ethical and fiduciary duty to respect the trust placed in them by the public, and maintain public trust in parliament and our system of government.

Yet, challenges remain when it comes to interpreting and enforcing the standards. Notably, the standards impose a “waiting period” for former ministers and their staff to take up certain forms of employment after leaving office.

Yet, no government has sought to introduce statutory bans on specific jobs for former officials. There is also a lack of specific information about what forms of employment conduct are, and are not, permissible.

Read more: Many professions have codes of ethics – so why not politics?

This lack of specifics emerged as a notable problem in the recent cases involving Christopher Pyne, Julie Bishop and Andrew Robb after they took up new roles that raised questions after leaving office.

There were similar problems in earlier cases involving former Labor ministers who left office. This requires immediate remedy.

In the two decades since the Howard code, new ways of thinking about integrity in public office – and ministerial conduct, in particular – have also emerged.

The common law offence of “misconduct in public office” has become extensively used in North America in cases involving unethical and prohibited conduct by government officials, such as abuse of office, bribe-taking, vote-buying, unlawful lobbying and conflicts of interest.

There has also been a major revival in the prosecution of this offence in the UK, Hong Kong and Australia in recent years, generally for corruption cases.

The offence now ranks as the charge of choice for anti-corruption investigators and prosecutors in a host of jurisdictions, yet it has been the subject of relatively little academic research or recent commentary.

Personal responsibility for conduct

But ethics standards can only do so much – MPs and former ministers, in particular, must also take responsibility for their own conduct, irrespective of any formal sanctions which might apply.

It is always the minister’s personal responsibility to uphold the letter and the spirit of the oath of office, because of what that oath represents.

As former US Senator Alan Simpson once said:

If you have integrity, nothing else matters. And if you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.

– ref. Why we need strong ethical standards for ministers – and better ways of enforcing them – http://theconversation.com/why-we-need-strong-ethical-standards-for-ministers-and-better-ways-of-enforcing-them-130372

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Penelope Bryant, Consultant in Paediatric Infectious Diseases and General Paediatrics, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

Australian children have one of the highest rates of antibiotic use in the world. More than half have received at least one course by their first birthday.

While antibiotics are one of the miracles of modern health care, they have some drawbacks. The overuse of antibiotics increases the risk of bacterial resistance in the wider community. For individual children, antibiotics may have side effects, particularly if used inappropriately.

We also have some research about the effects of antibiotic use in early life on longer term health, such as in increasing the risk of asthma, inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn’s disease, and obesity.

New research from New Zealand has found children given antibiotics in the first one to two years of their life may be at a greater risk of having a higher body-mass index (BMI) or becoming obese by the age of four or five.

But the risk is small, and not a reason to withhold antibiotics from a child if they really need them. Let’s take a look.

Read more: Antibiotics before birth and in early life can affect long-term health

Existing research

A number of studies have suggested antibiotic use, both during pregnancy and in early childhood, may be linked to various chronic conditions, including asthma, gastrointestinal diseases such as Crohn’s disease and coeliac disease, and juvenile arthritis.

Antibiotics in pregnancy have also been associated with an increased risk of serious infections in children.

These reported effects of antibiotics are likely to arise in part from their disruption of the microbiome – the microbial community in our gut. Antibiotics kill off not only the bacteria causing the infection, but also bacteria in the microbiome, including the ones that do us good.

The make-up of our microbiome affects the immune system and is central to harvesting, storing and using energy from food. Scientists believe disruption of the microbiome can affect metabolism.

There’s a lot of evidence from animal studies linking antibiotics with increased weight, and antibiotics have been used as growth promoters in meat production for decades. The possible link between antibiotics and obesity in humans is an area of intense interest.

Childhood obesity predicts obesity in adulthood. And as children are among the highest users of antibiotics, several studies have focused on whether antibiotics in pregnancy and early life are associated with childhood BMI and obesity.

Read more: Health Check: should kids be given antibiotics in their first year?

However, these studies are often small, rely on parent recall for antibiotic use, and don’t account for confounders, such as the mother’s weight or socioeconomic disadvantage.

Some studies have also shown no association between antibiotic use and childhood obesity. But these have also had limitations, so the link between antibiotics and obesity has remained unclear.

New research

Two new studies from New Zealand, published yesterday, looked at children from two cohorts – the B4 School Check and Growing Up in New Zealand – hoping to answer this question.

They were large, carefully conducted studies using national antibiotic dispensing data and standardised measurements. The B4 School Check study included more than 150,000 children and their mothers, and the Growing Up in New Zealand study more than 5,000 children.

Both studies found antibiotics taken at every stage through pregnancy and early childhood (one to two years) had an effect on obesity at four years old. The proportion of children who were obese increased with increasing numbers of courses.

For example, if you had a group of four-year-olds who had received more than nine antibiotic prescriptions in their lives, and a group who had received none, there would be twice as many children in the antibiotic group who were obese.

The results suggest antibiotics in the first years of life – a period when the microbiome is changing rapidly and most susceptible to outside influences – may have a strong association with later obesity.

Read more: These 3 factors predict a child’s chance of obesity in adolescence (and no, it’s not just their weight)

Both studies attempted to adjust for important confounders. The Growing Up in New Zealand study adjusted for family demographics, screen time and other lifestyle factors, but the association between antibiotics and BMI remained.

The B4 School Check study tried to control for unmeasured confounders (such as genetics) by looking at twins and siblings where only one child was obese. In doing this, they found the association between antibiotics and weight diminished.

However, because of potential limitations in a sibling study design, such as differing confounders operating in each sibling, sharing of microbiome between siblings, and the smaller sample size, it’s not possible to rule out the overall finding antibiotics are associated with increased weight gain.

Making sense of the findings

The average four-and-a-half-year-old girl weighs 17.2kg. In both studies, the average weight is over 18kg, so they are already heavier cohorts.

If the adjusted findings (that is, all confounders already taken into account) from the Growing Up in New Zealand study are applied to a four-and-a-half-year-old girl – with no antibiotics, she weighs an average of 18.65kg (already nearly 1.5kg above average weight). If she has received four to six courses she weighs 18.99kg (adding 340g). Both these weights are still within the normal range according to the World Health Organisation and the standards used in the two studies.

The argument could be made these small changes may not be important at an individual level, but may be relevant at a population level or as children get older.

Read more: Let’s address the perfect storm of factors leading to obesity in disadvantaged children

While they don’t provide definitive answers, these two studies contribute high-quality data to the debate. There appears to be some small effect of antibiotics on the metabolism, particularly in the first couple of years of life, when the microbiome is most vulnerable to disruption.

However, this is in addition to many other more important and modifiable factors we know are risk factors for obesity.

Even if the antibiotic association is real, the Growing Up in New Zealand study points out the effect is small in early childhood, especially when compared with factors such as the mother’s weight and socioeconomic disadvantage.

So should I give my baby antibiotics?

Parents can sometimes find the decision of whether or not to give their children antibiotics a difficult one. They may be worried about possible side effects, or the threat of antibiotic resistance in the wider community.

These concerns can all be discussed with a GP, who will advise, based on the child’s illness, the most appropriate course of action.

Although antibiotics should be used only when needed (for example, they shouldn’t be used for viral infections, only bacterial ones), concerns about obesity should not play a significant role in the decision to use antibiotics.

Not using antibiotics when they are clinically indicated will not prevent obesity, and could be harmful to the child.

– ref. The link between antibiotics and obesity in children doesn’t mean you need to avoid antibiotics – http://theconversation.com/the-link-between-antibiotics-and-obesity-in-children-doesnt-mean-you-need-to-avoid-antibiotics-130392

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Barnes, Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Monash University

Parents are a child’s first and most important teachers. Parent involvement in their child’s learning can help improve how well they do in school. However, when it comes to helping kids with homework, it’s not so simple.

While it’s important to show support and model learning behaviour, there is a limit to how much help you can give without robbing your child of the opportunity to learn for themselves.

Be involved and interested

An analysis of more than 400 research studies found parent involvement, both at school and at home, could improve students’ academic achievement, engagement and motivation.

School involvement includes parents participating in events such as parent-teacher conferences and volunteering in the classroom. Home involvement includes parents talking with children about school, providing encouragement, creating stimulating environments for learning and finally – helping them with homework.

Read more: What to do at home so your kids do well at school

The paper found overall, it was consistently beneficial for parents to be involved in their child’s education, regardless of the child’s age or socioeconomic status. However, this same analysis also suggested parents should be cautious with how they approach helping with homework.

Parents helping kids with homework was linked to higher levels of motivation and engagement, but lower levels of academic achievement. This suggests too much help may take away from the child’s responsibility for their own learning.

Help them take responsibility

Most children don’t like homework. Many parents agonise over helping their children with homework. Not surprisingly, this creates a negative emotional atmosphere that often results in questioning the value of homework.

Homework has often been linked to student achievement, promoting the idea children who complete it will do better in school. The most comprehensive analysis on homework and achievement to date suggests it can influence academic achievement (like test scores), particularly for children in years seven to 12.

But more research is needed to find out about how much homework is appropriate for particular ages and what types are best to maximise home learning.

Read more: Too much help with homework can hinder your child’s learning progress

When it comes to parent involvement, research suggests parents should help their child see their homework as an opportunity to learn rather than perform. For example, if a child needs to create a poster, it is more valuable the child notes the skills they develop while creating the poster rather than making the best looking poster in the class.

Instead of ensuring their child completes their homework, it’s more effective for parents to support their child to increase confidence in completing homework tasks on their own.

Here are four ways they can do this.

1. Praise and encourage your child

Your positivity will make a difference to your child’s approach to homework and learning in general. Simply, your presence and support creates a positive learning environment.

Our study involved working with recently arrived Afghani mothers who were uncertain how to help their children with school. This was because they said they could not understand the Australian education system or speak or write in English.

However, they committed to sit next to their children as they completed their homework tasks in English, asking them questions and encouraging them to discuss what they were learning in their first language.

In this way, the parents still played a role in supporting their child even without understanding the content and the children were actively engaged in their learning.

2. Model learning behaviour

Many teachers model what they would like their students to do. So, if a child has a problem they can’t work out, you can sit down and model how you would do it, then complete the next one together and then have the child do it on their own.

3. Create a homework plan

When your child becomes overly frustrated with their homework, do not force them. Instead, together create a plan to best tackle it:

• read and understand the homework task

• break the homework task into smaller logical chunks

• discuss how much time is required to complete each chunk

• work backwards from the deadline and create a timeline

• put the timeline where the child can see it

• encourage your child to mark completed chunks to see the progress made on the task

4. Make space for homework

Life is busy. Parents can create positive study habits by allocating family time for this. This could mean carving out one hour after dinner for your child to do homework while you engage in a study activity such as reading, rather than watching television and relaxing. You can also create a comfortable and inviting reading space for the child to learn in.

Parents’ ability to support their child’s learning goes beyond homework. Parents can engage their child in discussions, read with them, and provide them with other ongoing learning opportunities (such as going to a museum, watching a documentary or spending time online together).

– ref. How to help your kids with homework (without doing it for them) – http://theconversation.com/how-to-help-your-kids-with-homework-without-doing-it-for-them-126192

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elyse Warner, Lecturer in Health and Social Sciences, Deakin University

Children’s living environments in Australian capital cities have changed significantly in the past ten years. This is particularly the case for the growing numbers of families raising children in private, inner-city, high-rise housing. Our study of one such area shows families rely heavily on their neighbourhoods to meet their children’s needs and make up for a lack of space in the home. Many saw access to green, natural spaces as vital.

Families represent half of all Australian apartment dwellers, and nearly half of them have children, according to 2016 Australian Census data. The number of families living in apartments increased by 56% between the 2011 and 2016 censuses. Despite its growing popularity, there is evidence this type of housing is not meeting the needs of Australian families.

The City of Yarra is a Victorian municipality that has had a six-fold increase in the number of apartments over the past ten years. A household survey found residents in high-density areas of the municipality were less satisfied with their neighbourhood as a place to raise children.

Read more: Apartment life for families means living at close quarters, but often feeling isolated too

In our recently published research, apartment-dwelling families described “living outside the house”. Unlike suburban families who could spend more time in their own homes, the families in this study depended on local environments due to the limited space within apartment complexes.

However, aspects of this environment were challenging. More needs to be done to support families raising children in these settings.

Seeing neighbourhoods through parents’ eyes

The use of Photovoice allowed us to “walk a mile in the shoes” of parents raising children in private, high-rise dwellings in Yarra. Parents were given up to three weeks to photograph aspects of apartment living and surrounding environments they saw as benefiting or challenging them when raising preschool children. The photographs were then discussed in individual interviews and a group session to help us explore their key experiences.

Access to green, natural spaces was non-negotiable for families in our study to counterbalance the confines of apartment-living. Several parents photographed the river environs. One parent explained its importance for her mental well-being this way:

If I was in our development and not close to these kinds of things I couldn’t live there, it just feels so vital, so important to me that because of how we live. I need nature, I need space, I need to be able to have that really accessible, otherwise it would make living how we’re living not doable at all.

Read more: With apartment living on the rise, how do families and their noisy children fit in?

Our findings also revealed natural spaces supported children’s well-being. Ranging from play areas to learning spaces, places to take risks to sites to engage with animals, all of these are key for children’s health and development.

Unsurprisingly, public playgrounds were important for apartment-dwelling families. However, local cafes were equally noted as valuable places for families to gather.

If you go out for a coffee on Sunday morning you can see lots of kids playing around, running around … especially living in a place like this there’s no backyard or trampoline or anything like that, so this is what people do in this area, just go out with kids and let them run around a little bit.

Access to local schools and young children’s exposure to traffic, however, were two aspects of high-density living the families had to balance against the benefits of continuing to live and raise their children in these neighbourhoods.

Our finding that parents had difficulty accessing local schools and child care further supports the argument that private high-rise housing in Australian cities has been designed without considering children as residents.

Read more: More children are living in high-rise apartments, so designers should keep them in mind

Aligning with previous overseas studies, including from New Zealand and the Netherlands, young children’s exposure to traffic was a particular concern in our study.

Families adapted by cycling along bike paths and using online shopping. Ultimately, though, they taught their children to adapt to their environment from a young age. As one parent put it, they have to “grow up quick (and) know how to look after themselves”.

How to improve neighbourhoods for families

Families wanted green spaces to be protected rather than overshadowed by increasing development. They argued that more local traffic calming measures were required. They also wanted child-care facilities and preschools to provide high-quality outdoor space to make up for the lack of outdoor space in apartment complexes.

Finally, they noted missed opportunities to provide more family-friendly spaces. For example, more cafes, restaurants and community spaces could be incorporated at the street level of large apartment complexes.

The implication for policy is state government apartment design guidelines need to go further to consider the environments surrounding apartment complexes. Implementing the recommendations from a checklist developed for child-friendly high-density housing in Western Sydney would be a good start.

Read more: ‘Children belong in the suburbs’: with more families in apartments, such attitudes are changing

– ref. ‘I need nature, I need space’: high-rise families rely on child-friendly neighbourhoods – http://theconversation.com/i-need-nature-i-need-space-high-rise-families-rely-on-child-friendly-neighbourhoods-128618

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vanessa Cavanagh, Associate Lecturer, School of Geography and Sustainable Communities, University of Wollongong

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.

I remember brushing my teeth over the green enamel sink. I would gaze out the window at a prominent grandmother and ponder her age. This grandmother had soft pink skin, smooth and dimpled, and incredible curves that burled in places. She stood at least 25 metres tall.

She was one of the sentinel trees which stood strong on the property where I grew up in Colo Heights, northwest of Sydney, at the edge of Darkinjung Country.

Belonging to the Angophora costata family, she, like me, is part of human and non-human kinship networks that connect us with Country.

To begin to understand this connection, you might start by thinking about how every native tree on this property grows in its perfect place. Thousands of generations of evolution caused for it to grow right there. Each plant belongs to that very soil, and under that particular sky. Each plant is connected to the next, also growing in its own perfect way. Just like this grandmother tree, the plants are all families to each other. A community that is woven together with every element of nature participating.

This is Country. It includes the plants, the animals, the weather, rocks, fire, soils, waters, air, all of planet Earth. The powerful celestial beings too. They are all crucially important, in their belonging place.

Humans are part of this community, evolving together. Our relationships with each other, human and non-human, helped us thrive as the longest continuous culture on Earth. There is much to learn from honouring this connection.

These are not new thoughts. I am not trying to be a clever person. Indigenous people have shared this story for millennia. Indigenous people have adamantly protested against greedy environmental destruction.

A layered coincidence

I returned home to Colo Heights in the first week of 2020 to review the damage the Gospers Mountain bushfire caused.

The Rural Fire Service had done a brilliant job protecting the main house.

But for this grandmother tree, the combination of ongoing drought and persistent flames ended her reign at the far edge of the yard. The sight of this old tree with her crown removed brought warm, stinging tears to my eyes. It was a deep hurt of losing someone far older and wiser than me. Losing someone who was respected and adored. Someone with knowledge I cannot fathom or comprehend. When I told my mum that evening she reacted similarly, a personal and family loss. To others she might just be a big tree.

Yet we know too, that Country is powerful and will recover. These trees return to the earth, and their legacy will regenerate, we each have our cycles.

It’s not inconsequential I’m having these experiences of fire right now. I’m an Aboriginal woman and scholar, researching the ways in which Aboriginal women are, and are not, involved in cultural burning practices in New South Wales. I explore and promote the layers of meaning — historical record, educational tool, and cultural expression — Aboriginal women’s stories reveal, such are present in my own stories.

A childhood immersed in nature

My parents bought our 25-acre heavily forested property in the late 1960s, 35 kilometres from the closest town. Buying this property in Colo Heights was important for Mum and Dad because they wanted their kids to grow up in the bush, to have that connection. They also wanted to have the security of owning a place of their own, away from departmental housing and government interference in Aboriginal cultural welfare. Thus, it became a place for extended family to come to, to avoid the controlling gaze of others.

My late father, a Wonnarua man, started a 40-year career as a labourer and heavy machine operator in the NSW Department of Main Roads as it was known then. He also volunteered in the local RFS over four decades, and he was captain for some of this time.

Mum is a Bungum Bundjalung woman, a life-long social justice advocate and a vocal feminist. Before having us kids, Mum was involved in the lead-up to the 1967 Referendum doing advocacy work and attending demonstrations. When I started high school, Mum returned to paid work in Aboriginal women’s refuges.

50 years hasn’t slowed Mum down. I can’t recall a childhood summer when my parents didn’t spend days volunteering at the RFS shed. It was something most families participated in, and a real strength of our rural community. My brother still volunteers with Colo Heights RFS. He is one of many Aboriginal fire fighters across the nation.

My parents gave me my love of the bush, and a strong sense of justice, which undoubtedly inspired me to pursue a career in environmental conservation.

At 20 years of age I secured my first job with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. As part of the firefighting responsibilities of this role, I trained as a tree-feller and Remote Area Fire Team member — getting winched in and out of fires by helicopter.

I saw some amazing places while putting in fire containment lines, or mopping-up and blacking-out after bushfires. I’ve seen firsthand the devastation bushfires can wreck. But seeing the land around my childhood home destroyed, brought a different type of grief.

The aftermath

It has been one month since the fire passed through Colo Heights. Returning has been an incredibly emotional journey. With me is my partner, our two kids and their cousin who was evacuated from his home.

The fire had burnt right up to our letterbox and spread across most of the property. The fruit trees my Mum and Dad planted – blood plums, pears, bush lemons – all burnt out. A farm shed, water tanks, pipes and electricity poles, were also compromised. There is so much work to do.

The blackened ground is blanketed with a thick layer of dead leaves, dropped by the grandmother trees and her kin. The two-toned fallen leaf suggests some fell immediately after the fire, while others died and fell later.

Walking sounds like stepping on thousands of brittle eggshells. I hope if it rains, the leaf litter slows the erosion. This Country is wounded, it’s sandy and fragile.

As we follow the track that meanders towards the rear of the property, we notice a pink stain on the ground and low branches. During the fire event a water bomber plane dropped retardant to slow the fire’s spread and ferocity. Despite these efforts, many trees have been stripped bare of foliage.

Prior to the bushfire, the forest canopy would have created ample shade, making dappled light along the track. This time as we walk, the stark light of the brightly overcast sky causes me to squint as I look up at the non-existent canopy. I’m hurting for those old grandmother trees with their crowns removed.

There are signs of life, though. Familiar responses of native plants to fire: nuts bursting open and setting seed, vivid epicormic growth bursting through the charred bark. Birds were calling and we see a few small animals: beetles, a huntsman spider, a cicada shell hitched to a blackened tree. Occasionally there are patches of green.

But the fire has stripped away the forest kilometre after kilometre, across ridges and into gullies. There’s little for larger animals to eat, drink, or places for them to live.

Country is so dry, I wonder if much will survive. Country is already sick from drought; this fire adds to the illness.

Time to listen

Sitting quietly, we hear a large tree crashing down and echo through the gully. Another granny whose reign had ended.

“Will it grow back Mum?” my son asks.

The reassuring mother he needs in the face of all this devastation, replies: “I really hope that it’ll recover, but us humans need to do better in the way we live with Country. That’s why I take you and your sister to those Indigenous Fire workshops and teach you about Country.”

Returning to the bushfire site makes me reflect on all the training I received in the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and how it was founded on Western scientific methods.

At the time, I was one of only two Aboriginal people working in the department locally, and there were only a handful of women in these roles.

The positions I held in this department changed over the years. As I moved into heritage management and research roles, I was able to promote greater inclusion of Aboriginal women. In undertaking my PhD, I continue to empower Aboriginal perspectives in my work, specifically highlighting Aboriginal women.

Indigenous knowledge and local expertise must take precedence in the forward management of natural environments both in Australia and globally. As stated in the State of the Environment report:

the critical importance of Indigenous land management to the ongoing maintenance of biodiversity is increasing and becoming better understood.

This is true for all of Country: river and sea Country, sky Country and astronomical knowledge, human and non-human. Indigenous knowledge and systems provide valid models of sustainable existence.

The success of this requires Indigenous people and systems leading the process, and more roles for Indigenous people across environmental conservation practice, policy and research. Fundamentally, however, Indigenous knowledge should not be excerpted and cropped into models that don’t suit.

Fire will continue to be part of our relationship with Country, and we need to take notice of what isn’t working. Indigenous people have been contributing to debates on fire over several decades. There is growing interest in Aboriginal fire knowledge. Where cultural burning has been initiated, Indigenous people experience benefits, including in the south east of the continent.

Working together

The need for stronger, fairer collaboration is obvious. Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can work together. For example, my PhD research contributes to broader bushfire research, through its attachment to the NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub.

The preliminary results of my research suggest Aboriginal women are, and wish to engage in cultural burning in NSW. The Aboriginal women I have spoken to demonstrate an awareness of gendered influences to their full participation, such as trying to gain access into a male-dominated field.

The women I’ve spoken to also want to respect cultural protocols and fire knowledge integrity. Perhaps the greatest outcome of my research thus far, has been the opportunity to promote and amplify that cultural burning can and should involve Aboriginal women where appropriate.

Women’s engagement must be encouraged for all Indigenous caring for Country activities. There must be opportunities made for Aboriginal voices, and Aboriginal women’s voices to be heard and listened to.

Mother

The intricate network of kinship between humans and the non-human needs to be restored to help heal Country and protect it into the future. Though regulatory frameworks are challenging, conversations about fire can provide a space to share knowledge and spark conversations about nature, risk and healing.

As an Indigenous person, researcher and parent (including as an Auntie within a large family) I want us to take better care of our Mother Earth. Future generations need Indigenous leadership, in this space and many other spaces, right now.

– ref. Friday essay: this grandmother tree connects me to Country. I cried when I saw her burned – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-this-grandmother-tree-connects-me-to-country-i-cried-when-i-saw-her-burned-129782

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

Bridget McKenzie’s future is looking bleak, her position having worsened significantly this week.

At its heart, the McKenzie affair is simple. Before last year’s election, the then-sports minister allocated grants to sporting organisations on an overtly political basis, rather than following the objective ranking determined by an assessment process under the program’s guidelines.

It was a clear misuse of taxpayers’ money.

Defences the government offered after she was exposed in last week’s blunt Audit Office report were spurious.

It insisted, for instance, this was different from the notorious “sports rorts” affair that claimed Keating government minister Ros Kelly, who’d famously used a “great big whiteboard” in her pork-barrelling operation. The truth is, it’s little different.

This week Nine newspapers revealed McKenzie had been given membership of a gun club she funded, and she failed to comply with declaration-of-interest provisions.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison could find it easier to get rid of McKenzie on the grounds of this non-disclosure than for rorting the grants scheme, which would involve the government admitting the impropriety of a pretty endemic practice.

The statement of ministerial standards, which covers disclosure, says a minister

may be required to resign if the prime minister is satisfied that they have breached or failed to comply with these standards in a substantive and material manner.

In political terms the situation is complicated.

Prime ministers these days hate giving scalps to the opposition. And McKenzie’s blond head has certain layers of protection.

Read more: VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on Morrison’s ‘miracle’ election win – and Labor’s leadership search

She’s in cabinet not because she’s Morrison’s pick but as deputy leader of the Nationals, elected by her party. Unless Nationals’ leader Michael McCormack consented, Morrison could be stirring trouble with the junior Coalition partner if he insisted she go.

The Nationals could say: what about Liberal Energy Minister Angus Taylor, who’s mired in the mess of an allegedly forged document, currently being investigated by the federal police?

Also, in distributing grants on a political basis McKenzie was likely acting according to the expectations of others around the government. MPs were lobbying for sporting organisations in their electorates. Morrison has admitted his office would have passed on representations.

The fact McKenzie is a senior woman adds to the political difficulty.

The prime minister has launched a couple of investigations into the affair.

Attorney-General Christian Porter is obtaining advice on whether McKienzie actually had the legal power to make the decisions herself – a question raised but not answered in the Audit Office report.

Crucially, Phil Gaetjens, secretary of the Prime Minister’s department, is examining whether she has breached the ministerial code (which on any ordinary reading she certainly has).

Everything is suddenly hanging on the Gaetjens’ probe. Morrison, who seems to have now noticeably distanced himself from McKenzie, said on Thursday: “I will look at that [Gaetjens] advice and take whatever action is necessary”.

Offsetting the downsides of ditching a senior minister, there could be benefits for the government if McKenzie went, beyond lancing this nasty boil.

There’s been speculation it could open the question of McCormack’s leadership but that’s unlikely.

Read more: Bushfires won’t change climate policy overnight. But Morrison can shift the Coalition without losing face

McKenzie, who’s been a poor performer, has sharp critics within her own party. If the Nationals made Water Resources Minister David Littleproud deputy and McCormack promoted one of the women newly elected last year (for example Perin Davey or Susan McDonald, both senators like McKenzie) that could strengthen their frontbench.

The removal of McKenzie would also provide the opportunity for a ministerial reshuffle, and a chance to shift Taylor. But would Morrison feel constrained, unwilling to concede a point to Taylor’s critics? Some say so.

Parliament meets the week after next, with the government in bad shape, thanks to Morrison’s missteps during the fires, the government’s defensiveness on climate change and the ministerial scandals.

Morrison has taken a predictable polling hit in the wake of his Hawaiian holiday and subsequent problems.

The longer-term risk for him is that some, perhaps many, voters have re-thought the generally positive views they had of him before the election. This goes deeper than just immediate criticism.

We can’t know whether he can erase this negative perception. But it does call for a rethink about his prime ministerial durability.

Remember how after his unexpected May victory there was much talk about Morrison being in the box seat for the 2022 election? Recent events suggest bets at least should be more heavily hedged.

Memories of Kelly also bring to mind the experience of Prime Minister Paul Keating. Like Morrison, Keating performed the political “miracle” of triumphing at what had appeared an unwinnable election.

In the same way as Morrison a generation later, Keating won in 1993 through his sheer ability as a campaigner, bolstered by the personal and policy vulnerability of his opponent.

Read more: Against the odds, Scott Morrison wants to be returned as prime minister. But who the bloody hell is he?

But then Keating lost (by a big margin) in 1996. He’d dodged a bullet in 1993, but the electorate kept the gun loaded and fired when it saw no good reasons against doing so.

Few recent prime ministers have proved durable, even when they appeared set up to be so.

Bob Hawke was, and John Howard too. But Kevin Rudd, after a strong win in 2007, was brought down in a party coup before he could fight the following election. It was all too late by the time Labor reluctantly reinstalled him, to replace the undurable Julia Gillard.

Tony Abbott followed the path of Rudd, winning from opposition only to be removed before the next election.

One might have expected the popular Malcolm Turnbull to have lasted. But no; after doing badly in 2016 he was ousted in 2018.

Morrison is fortunate on several fronts. His current troubles are early in the parliamentary term. A rule change he executed in the run-up to the election protects him from being brought down in a coup. Anyway, he hasn’t a rival hunting him.

On the other hand, despite being a relatively new PM, he is leading a government in its third term.

Morrison has plenty of time and opportunity to recover. But if the next election goes to Labor, this summer of actual and political disaster might be looked back upon as a decisive turning point.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Bridget McKenzie has made herself a sitting duck – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-bridget-mckenzie-has-made-herself-a-sitting-duck-130474

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bronwyn Carlson, Professor, Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University

Review: The Visitors, directed by Frederick Copperwaite for Sydney Festival

Sydney Festival has really outdone themselves this season with a spectacular line-up of Indigenous shows to choose from including The Visitors.

A warm greeting from Ali Murphy-Oats, the managing director of Moogahlin Performing Arts Company, and a welcome onto Gadigal Country by Uncle Charles (Chicka) Madden set the scene for what can only be described as an outstanding evening.

Uncle Chicka is a respected Gadigal Elder who has spent most of his life serving the Aboriginal community as Director or the Aboriginal Medical Service, Secretary of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, Director of the Aboriginal Hostels NSW and as a life member of the Redfern All Blacks.

Written by Muruwari playwright Jane Harrison who also wrote Stolen and Rainbow’s End, The Visitors imagines a group of Indigenous leaders discussing what to do about the strange vessels on the horizon.

That fateful day

It is 1788 and six senior law men (with one young man sent as a representative) witness the arrival of the First Fleet. The play features a talented cast: John Blair, Damion Hunter, Colin Kinchela, Nathan Leslie, Leroy Parsons, Glenn Shea, Kerri Simpson.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival, this play is timely and fresh given the paucity of publicly available sources that document first encounters from an Indigenous perspective.

Visitors had come and gone for many years and the play includes reference to Cook’s visit 18 Summers prior. But previous visitors always left.

The script involves much discussion about whether to engage in war or allow the visitors to come ashore. After lengthy debates the men notice that the visitors are landing. They make the fatal decision to welcome them.

The Visitors’ dialogue is witty and satirical. The men at its centre describe the visitors in derogatory ways that mirror the way colonisers described us – “wretched people” with nothing to offer.

The set is beautifully designed with large trees framing the meeting place. Fog drifts in, allowing the audience to imagine a time long ago by the ocean. The sound of the sea and birds amplifies the experience.

The men are dressed in suits symbolising their status in contemporary terms. They are given clan names that relate to Country such as Eel clan or Bay people. This avoids any contest around traditional boundaries and clan names.

Personalities, but where are the women?

Aboriginal protocols are clear – the men pay respect to Country as they each arrive. Formal proceedings begin with being welcomed onto Country, just like what the audience experienced before the performance.

Formalities aside, there is also a lot of humour in this play. Fun is made of one of the men who has complained he can’t connect with his new wife. Grandfather Elder examines him and concludes that his new wife probably just doesn’t like him.

Personalities are clear – something that is often missed in colonial writing of Indigenous peoples. We are human, we laugh, we disagree and we engage in combat, revenge, grudges, and all manner of human frailty.

The experience could have only been improved by the inclusion of Aboriginal women in the cast. The women, we are told, are away on Women’s Business and although they are often referred to, are missing from the decision making process.

In one scene one of the men refers to women as “spoils” of battle and in another, after hearing the younger man simulate the mooing of a cow, a comment is made that it sounds like his wife. Perhaps this is just banter between men, however, historically a range of tropes have been used to typecast Aboriginal women into roles imagined by the colonisers.

The women’s absence suggests there was — or is — a lack of senior Aboriginal women knowledge holders. The truth is far from this assumption.

There is ample evidence Aboriginal women were involved in early interactions, amicable and otherwise, with early settlers. For example, it is believed local fisherwoman Barrangaroo — noted for her presence and authority — was present at the first meeting between settlers and her Cammeraygal people at Manly in 1788, and also participated in warfare with settlers at North Harbour in November 1788.

She is remembered in early colonial documents as having a commanding presence, inciting respect and fear in those around her. Likewise across the country, there are stories of Aboriginal women emerging including their heroic efforts to defend Country.

This criticism notwithstanding, there is much to highly recommend this play. Funny, informative, sombre, real, imagined and very enjoyable, I would encourage everyone to see it.

The Visitors runs at Carriageworks until 26 January

– ref. The Visitors review: a witty imagining of what went before that fateful encounter – http://theconversation.com/the-visitors-review-a-witty-imagining-of-what-went-before-that-fateful-encounter-129794

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian M. Mackay, Adjunct assistant professor, The University of Queensland

The World Health Organisation has postponed its decision about whether to classify the new Wuhan coronavirus as a global health emergency. It wants to gather more information and will meet again at midday on Thursday in Geneva (late Thursday night, Australian time).

In the meantime, China has barred people from leaving Wuhan from 10am today, local time:

There’s so much we don’t know about the virus, which increases the level of concern from public health officials.

So what do we know so far?

Origins in Wuhan

We first heard about cases of pneumonia caused by a new virus in December from authorities in Wuhan, China – a city of 11 million people.

What started as a cluster of 27 people with pneumonia – with common symptoms including fever, dry cough, chest tightness and difficulty breathing – has spiralled to 582 confirmed cases, including medical staff, and 17 deaths.

The cases span 13 provinces in mainland China as well as Thailand, Japan, South Korea, the United States, Taiwan and Macau.

Read more: Mystery China pneumonia outbreak likely caused by new human coronavirus

This is all occurring during peak influenza season in China so there are some illnesses around that may appear similar to coronavirus. It’s also a time when millions of people in the region travel home to family for Lunar New Year celebrations, potentially carrying the virus to new places, as we’ve already seen.

We are yet to see a confirmed case in Australia, but that could change any minute. Test results of a Brisbane man who was suspected of having the virus came back clear.

Development of a diagnostic test

China was extraordinarily efficient and open in identifying the virus, a new strain of coronavirus, within just over a week. Chinese scientists sequenced the virus’s genetic code and, within days, shared that information with the world.

This allowed researchers from Germany to rapidly develop and openly share a suite of specific nucleic acid tests that sensitively identify the virus by detecting small amounts of its ribonucleic acid (or RNA, similar to DNA). Researchers in Hong Kong and from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control then published their own different tests.

We already live among coronaviruses

Four other human coronaviruses (HCoV-22E, HCoV-OC43, HCoV-NL63 and HCoV-HKU1) cause colds, flu-like illnesses and more severe respiratory diseases such as pneumonia. Viral pneumonia is a combination of virus infection of the lungs and our body’s immune response to that damage.

Newborns, the elderly, immunocompromised people and those with underlying disease are at particular risk.

There are also two more infamous coronaviruses that jumped from animals to infect human hosts: SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome).

Read more: Explainer: what is the MERS outbreak in South Korea?

The new Wuhan coronavirus seems to cause less severe disease than the SARS coronavirus, which is now extinct after its single dramatic outbreak in 2002-4.

MERS was less severe than either, unless the patient was already burdened with underlying disease. MERS continues to transmit from camels to humans, but it’s relatively easy to avoid infection and vaccines are in development.

Because we are at such an early stage of discovery and characterisation of the new Wuhan virus, it’s very difficult to compare it to other viruses or to draw any strong conclusions about how it transmits, and its impact on humans.

How does it spread?

We don’t know where the new virus came from originally. We think it originated in animals, but testing so far has not confirmed a specific animal host. Analysis of the genome suggests it has only recently emerged in humans. So which host were humans exposed to? And how was it transmitted to humans?

Once we know where it came from we can track down and remove the source of the virus.

Read more: Scientists still searching for causes of mysterious pneumonia outbreak in China

Some evidence suggests it can also spread between people. We don’t yet know how, but we can make some guesses.

It seems to be a respiratory virus, given the disease primarily involves the lungs, so it’s likely to spread through the same routes as colds and flu: sneezes and coughs propelling droplets into the air or onto hands that then touch other surfaces, or by touching our eyes, nose or mouth after contact with contaminated surfaces.

We also don’t know how easily it spreads. Initially it seemed to require prolonged and close contact, making it harder to catch in day-to-day life. However, there are more recent indications that it spreads more easily between people.

What we know and don’t know

Up to January 22, 17 deaths have tragically occurred from 582 cases (about 3%). This is lower than the proportion who die from influenza-associated pneumonia, which one study estimated to be 10%. It’s a crude comparison, but one we can at least mull over for now.

The number of virus cases is likely to be an underestimate, but we don’t know by how much.

At the moment, colds and flu-like illnesses are common in China. There are also many causes of viral pneumonia – 135 people with pneumonia arrived in Hong Kong from Wuhan between December 31 to January 22. To date only two cases have tested positive for the new virus; most had an influenza virus or other viruses.

So far, we know the new Wuhan coronavirus causes pneumonia and therefore places an extra burden on hospitals. It’s likely transmitting from human to human, but may also still be transmitting from animal to humans. And it can be tested for by professional laboratories.

Read more: Snakes could be the original source of the new coronavirus outbreak in China

For now, health authorities are ensuring we are prepared and watching the situation while we await further details.

If or when it does come to Australia, you can protect yourself in the same way as you would against other respiratory illness: by being vigilant about hand-washing and practising good cough and sneeze etiquette, which means coughing or sneezing into your flexed elbow or into a tissue, and washing your hands.

– ref. Should we be worried about the new Wuhan coronavirus? – http://theconversation.com/should-we-be-worried-about-the-new-wuhan-coronavirus-130366

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Cull, Senior Lecturer in Accounting and Financial Planning, Western Sydney University

Australia’s unprecedented bushfires have cemented its rural firefighters at the heart of the nation’s identity.

It’s not just that these men and women put themselves in the line of fire. It’s that these “firies” are almost all volunteers, battling blazes for sheer love of their local community.

Relying on volunteers isn’t unique to Australia’s rural firefighting brigades. Other countries with large numbers of volunteer firefighters include Austria, Germany, France, the United States, Japan and China.

But Australia arguably relies on these volunteers to an extent unparalleled in the world, due to the country’s sheer size and the extent to which it is prone to bushfire. In terms of sheer scale of fires, only the vastness of Russia and Canada can compete, and neither has a climate and ecology quite so primed to burn.

Read more: Some say we’ve seen bushfires worse than this before. But they’re ignoring a few key facts

Almost 1% of the population volunteers

About 195,000 Australians volunteer with the nation’s six state and two territory bushfire services. The most populous state, New South Wales, has the largest number (71,234). The Australian Capital Territory has the fewest (a little more than 400).

The numbers reflect how many people live in rural areas and the degree to which those communities face bushfire risk. Thus Tasmania has 5,000 volunteer fighters despite having a smaller population than the ACT, because relatively more live in small towns.

On raw figures, Australia has the ninth-largest number of volunteer firefighters by nation, after China, Russia, the United States, Japan, Vietnam, Germany, Poland and Austria.

Comparing raw national figures doesn’t necessarily capture the special place of rural firies in Australia. Austria and its neighbours, for example, have cultures of volunteer municipal firefighting brigades that go back nearly a thousand years and cover structural fires as well.

Australia’s voluntary fire brigades are focused on bushfires. If we were to exclude the 71% of the Australia population that live in major cities, the proportion of Australia’s rural population volunteering with a bushfire service is more like 4.5%. This indicates how central these brigades are to local communities.

It hard to put a precise number on the value volunteer firefighters make to Australia’s economy, but it is significant. The amount and quality of volunteer work is, of course, variable. But let’s assume each volunteer gives 150 hours of their time a year. This is likely conservative, given estimates of the time volunteers have given up this season. At the average weekly Australian wage (including superannuation guarantee), the volunteers contribute about A$1.3 billion to the community.

Read more: Australia can expect far more fire catastrophes. A proper disaster plan is worth paying for

Operations and funding

Even though most firefighters in the rural fire services are volunteers, there are still significant costs. The NSW Rural Fire Service, for example, maintains more than 2,000 brigades with their own stations, vehicles and other running costs. It also employs 965 paid staff in administrative and operational roles. Capital investment of $42 million for stations and equipment was made in 2018-19 in addition to running costs.

The following breakdown is indicative of the running costs facing every state or territory service.

While funding depends on the individual state or territory, in general the services are funded by levies, imposed through state and territory laws.

Victoria’s Country Fire Authority, for example, is funded under the Country Fire Authority Act (1958) through a property levy. It is collected by local councils and passed on to the state government, which then distributes it to the authority. The levy includes a fixed component plus a variable rate based on a property’s market value.

New South Wales also has a levy tied to council rates (under the Rural Fires Act 1997). But most funding comes from a levy on insurance payments (imposed under the Emergency Services Levy Act 2017). In the 2018/19 financial year these levies raised about $440 million combined. State and federal governments kicked in a further $50 million, with $26 million in “other income” – mostly recouped costs from interstate and overseas deployments and use of its aircraft by other agencies.

The role of donations

Donations have not historically been a major funding source for any state or territory fire service. But in times of crisis the public often want to do their bit by giving money.

In the 2017-2018 financial year, for example, the NSW Rural Fire Service & Brigades Donations Fund received $768,044 in donations. Now it has $50 million or so coming its way due to comedian Celeste Barber’s bushfire appeal.

Read more: How to donate to Australian bushfire relief: give money, watch for scams and think long term

It’s possible many of those giving to Barber’s fundraiser didn’t realise their money would only go to New South Wales brigades. It’s also possible many thought they might help volunteers directly, such as through reimbursements for taking leave without pay. Others want to ensure volunteers don’t have to buy their own equipment.

Volunteers won’t necessarily benefit directly in the way donors might like. This is not to say donations won’t help, though. Volunteer brigades might benefit from money for new vehicles or computers, for example.

The sacrifices made by Australian volunteer firefighters have only added to the “firies” mythos. Fire services have been flooded with record numbers of applications. As the threat of bushfires increases, the national love affair with volunteer firies is likely to only intensify.

Which is something no elected politician would be wise to ignore.

– ref. Value beyond money: Australia’s special dependence on volunteer firefighters – http://theconversation.com/value-beyond-money-australias-special-dependence-on-volunteer-firefighters-129881

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ryan Storr, Lecturer in Sport Development, Western Sydney University

As play heats up at the Australian Open this week, so, too, has the debate around Australia’s most decorated tennis player, Margaret Court, and whether she should be feted on the 50th anniversary of her Grand Slam achievement.

In recent years, Court has actively used her platform to vilify LGBT + people, criticise the family of another Australian player, Casey Dellacqua, and her partner, and compare transgender children to the work of the devil.

Tennis Australia has distanced itself from Court’s comments and reinforced its commitment to include LGBT+ people in tennis at every opportunity. Tennis Australia CEO Craig Tiley has also made clear the organisation would celebrate her achievements on the tennis court next week – and on the tennis court alone.

The controversy over Court has dogged the tournament for years. Some tennis fans believe she should rightly be recognised for her stellar career, while others argue Tennis Australia should rename Margaret Court Arena in light of her views.

How to honour Court – if at all

The issue has been particularly contentious this year on the 50th anniversary of her Grand Slam in 1970. Tournament organisers are grappling with how to honour Court’s historic Grand Slam, while simultaneously emphasising that her comments are not welcome in sport and are hurtful and damaging to LGBT+ people.

Even current tennis players appear to share the predicament. When asked about it, Roger Federer said

She’s obviously an incredible tennis champion, one of the most successful ever. I know this subject also tears apart a lot of opinions and minds. So I think Tennis Australia, they got to do what they got to do. I honestly really have no opinion on that.

Unfortunately, Tennis Australia does need to have an opinion on it.

In comments to ABC Perth this week, Court has not sought to put the controversy behind her.

I wish the press would stick to my tennis. I’ve had so many people touch me on the shoulder and say thank you for being my voice. I haven’t had anyone say ‘I hate you’. I teach what the Bible says and you get persecuted for it.

Tennis Australia has faced fresh criticism from its apparent inaction on the issue, particularly around the renaming of the stadium.

A recent article in The New Yorker asks

does the name ‘Margaret Court’, even affixed to a tennis arena, no longer mostly call to mind a great athlete but rather a relentless, hurtful bigot?

Navigating LGBT+ inclusion in sport

However, Tennis Australia is not the only sporting organisation dealing with negative commentary around the LGBT+ community and homophobic slurs.

Rugby Australia recently had to deal with the Israel Falou case, and Cricket Australia handed a Melbourne Stars player, Marcus Stoinis, a A$7,500 fine for using a homophobic sledge during a Big Bash League match.

The idea that sports should play a role in facilitating social change is becoming more prominent. Recent survey data from Swinburne University shows the Australian public believes sports organisations do more for the greater good than government, religious organisations or business.

This highlights the need for these organisations to show strong leadership on social issues, including LGBT+ equality.

Read more: Best on ground: why Australians think sporting bodies provide strongest leadership for public good

Discrimination is bad for business

There is certainly a moral argument for standing up against discrimination and trying to bring more inclusivity to sport. But there’s increasingly a solid business case to do so, as well.

Research from the US has found that when sports bodies actively engage with LGBT+ inclusion and have appropriate policies in place, it can boost organisational effectiveness.

Further, our forthcoming research at Western Sydney University highlights the business benefits of growing LGBT+ supporter groups in sport, including new fans, as well as revenue from memberships, matches and merchandise.

Stars like Court are high-profile sport ambassadors and are often used to boost participation efforts at the grassroots level. They impact everything from sport policies to funding models aimed at inspiring a new generation of players.

While Court has no doubt alienated many tennis fans – gay and straight alike – Tennis Australia is now making efforts to win them back through new activities and events.

One example is the staging of an LGBT+ tennis tournament dubbed the “Glam Slam” during the Australian Open, which brings together 200 LGBT+ players from 35 countries. The event will conclude with the men’s and women’s finals being played on Show Court 3 on the final Sunday of the Open.

And in the spirit of openness, the organiser of the event has even invited Court to take part.

Also new this year, Tennis Australia has installed gender-neutral bathrooms at Rod Laver Arena.

Initiatives like these resulted in Tennis Australia taking home the title for Australia’s most LGBT+ inclusive sport organisation at last year’s Pride in Sport Awards.

Tennis Australia will likely continue to have to deal with the negative attention brought by Court, particularly if it refuses to rename the arena. However, through efforts like the Glam Slam, it can help attract more LGBT+ people to tennis and this will hopefully lead to a more inclusive and tolerant sport in the decades to come.

– ref. Can Tennis Australia honour Margaret Court and promote LGBT+ inclusivity at the same time? – http://theconversation.com/can-tennis-australia-honour-margaret-court-and-promote-lgbt-inclusivity-at-the-same-time-130281

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle O’Shea, Senior Lecturer Sport Management, Western Sydney University

Regular exercise is important for Indigenous women’s health, as it protects against obesity and chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. These conditions are more prevalent among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people than non-Indigenous people.

Exercise is also good for community social interaction, especially if women join a sporting club or association.

Women’s physical activity benefits whole communities. Active mothers and aunts are important role models for their children and peers; while women’s involvement as sport leaders, coaches and participants can empower Indigenous girls to participate in sports at community to elite levels.

Read more: Why are so few professional sport coaches from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities?

Yet participation is low. In 2012, only 23.3% of Indigenous women played sport, walked for fitness or leisure, or were physically active in the previous 12 months. This compares with two-thirds (66.7%) of non-Indigenous women.

More recent statistics are difficult to come by, but the subject of low physical activity rates for Indigenous Australian women has long been of concern and was a major focus of a parliamentary inquiry in 2013.

What are the barriers to participation?

Prior to colonisation, physical activity was intertwined with women’s lives through activities such as gathering food and swimming.

Despite this rich history, women’s participation in sport and physical activity has decreased over time for a number of reasons.

For some older Indigenous women we interviewed for our research, past racist beliefs and practices continued to inhibit them. One woman recalled not being able to learn to swim as a child at her local pool. This was back when Australian pools were sites of segregation. Now, as an adult, she is too scared to learn.

Read more: Are sports programs closing the gap in Indigenous communities? The evidence is limited

Racism or vilification based on skin colour continues to affect Indigenous women’s involvement in sport, with many of our participants describing negative and hurtful experiences.

For women living in remote Indigenous communities, transport costs and logistics significantly impacted their participation in organised sport. The costs of registering for a sporting team, for example, and having to purchase a team uniform meant they were unable to compete.

Ongoing effects of colonisation have resulted in some women rejecting calls for them to become involved in “westernised” sport, instead preferring activities that are more culturally acceptable, such as music and crafts.

Our research also found that some Aboriginal people viewed time spent participating in sport and physical activity as “selfish” because it took them away from their family care commitments and responsibilities.

These traditional roles tended to typecast Indigenous women as “enablers” or “helpers” for others, rather than as sport participants. So women often took on non-participatory roles at the canteen or BBQ, for instance, or facilitated sport for the children or men in their families.

What can be done?

First, governments need to fund programs that meet Indigenous women’s needs, and are designed with input from Indigenous women.

Such programs are more likely to succeed if they are family-friendly and community-based, as Aboriginal women participate at a greater rate when activities include their friends and peers.

The Indigenous women we interviewed, for example, favoured fun runs, carnivals and community competitions.

Indigenous-women-only classes and activities offered by local Indigenous organisations were also valued for their cultural safety. These were comfortable spaces and a place for activity and respite.

Second, scholarship opportunities for Indigenous boys have facilitated their participation in elite sport, particularly the AFL and NRL. Similar programs should be developed for Indigenous girls.

Read more: In both schooling and sport, Australia has slowly come to recognise its Aboriginal talent pool

Finally, our recent research suggests technological tools such as fitness trackers can empower Indigenous women to become more physically active.

Having information about the number of steps they walked and buzzing activity reminders increased daily physical activity and had positive impacts on women’s mental health.

These research findings underscore the importance of empowerment. Programs and interventions foisted on Indigenous women are unlikely to benefit them as individuals or their communities. Instead, healthy and active sisters and aunties are powerful role models.

– ref. Sport can be an important part of Aboriginal culture for women – but many barriers remain – http://theconversation.com/sport-can-be-an-important-part-of-aboriginal-culture-for-women-but-many-barriers-remain-120418

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Bowman, Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science, University of Tasmania

Australia’s bushfire crisis has been unprecedented, so it demands an unprecedented national response. Never before has such a large area been burnt by multiple fires in a single fire season, including bushland in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.

Victoria has already announced a state inquiry, and it’s inevitable there will be more to come. But some firefighters and other fire experts have raised legitimate concerns about the value of a national fire inquiry. Many fear Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s proposed national royal commission could end up being as ineffectual as past inquiries.

We’re not legal experts, so we can’t tell you whether a national royal commission or another type of federal inquiry is preferable. But as fire experts, despite sharing others’ concerns, we believe Australia does need a national fire inquiry – if it leads to real action.

For it not to be a waste of time and money, a national inquiry must be far-reaching, and its terms of references must include how Australia adapts to escalating bushfire risks, driven by a changing climate. It also needs to address the federal government’s current, largely hands-off role in bushfire management, and how that could change to better support existing state-based fire management.

A national fire inquiry should also consider a new role for the federal government in three crucial areas:

• creating a national civil bushfire defence force

• filling vital gaps in what we know about the science and costs of fires

• building community capacity to adapt to bushfires.

A national bushfire defence force

Currently the federal government does not have a direct role in firefighting, beyond providing funding, Australian Defence Force personnel, and supporting a national aviation program. The primary role of the federal government has been more indirect, through funding to support firefighting and recovery programs.

A national inquiry would need to determine if the current state and territory based approach is now appropriate in a more bushfire prone world, or whether there should be more directly coordinated and funded federal firefighting capacity. For instance, a national civil bushfire defence force could provide manpower to assist with major bushfire campaigns. Such a civil defence force would solve some long-term issues, such as our heavy reliance on ageing, state-based, volunteer firefighter forces.

The federal government could give members of a national bushfire force consistent training, equipment, remuneration, and protection of their rights. This could be akin to the army reserve, enabling effective nationwide integration of casual firefighters with professional state-based forces. An inquiry would need to ask if there are approaches from other nations that can be adapted to Australian circumstances.

Read more: There’s no evidence ‘greenies’ block bushfire hazard reduction but here’s a controlled burn idea worth trying

The missing science and costs on fires

Australia has no national bushfire database, so it is impossible to track trends in bushfire activity, cost and impacts. Instead, individual states have developed their own approaches that cannot be readily blended to build a national picture. For this reason, there remains uncertainty about the extent of the current bushfires that have crossed state borders.

A national scientific monitoring facility would fill a critical gap in Australian bushfire science, by reporting on the timing, cause, geographic extent and severity of bushfires across all land tenure, vegetation and fuel types. Such basic data are essential to determine the trends in bushfire extent, changes in causes of fires (particularly lightning and arson, which have been hotly debated topics this summer), carbon emissions from bushfires and effectiveness in reducing fuel loads.

All of that missing data is essential to understand the effectiveness of fuel management in reducing the spread or intensity of wildfires and associated greenhouse emissions.

The new national monitoring facility could also track spending on bushfire fighting, fuel management, and the economic impact of bushfires. Such national data are essential for cost-benefit analyses to ensure taxpayers’ money is spent effectively.

Read more: Firestorms and flaming tornadoes: how bushfires create their own ferocious weather systems

Building community capacity to adapt

To substantially reduce loss of life and property from bushfires, individuals and communities need to be well prepared. Yet this requires much greater training and investment in local groups. Programs for community preparation are currently run by overstretched bushfire management agencies.

A well-funded national program could build a network of community groups to manage fuels in surrounding bushland, and prepare their communities for bushfires. Such groups could create community safe places, and deploy smart phone apps to help locals before and during emergencies.

The program could also support Indigenous communities in cultural burning, and enable Aboriginal fire practitioners to undertake fuel management, and train both Indigenous and non-Indigenous fire managers.

Read more: Strength from perpetual grief: how Aboriginal people experience the bushfire crisis

This community-based program should be a separate entity from bushfire agencies, to build a new culture and identity. This could be done by learning from other government-funded, community-led schemes such as Landcare.

There is a real risk a national inquiry could get bogged down in politics, or not lead to real change. But – if it’s done right – a national inquiry could lead to much-needed federal action and investment in bushfire preparation, prevention, research and recovery. These are all critical steps in bushfire adaptation, and warrant national leadership.

As we’ve just seen this summer, the old approaches are broken.

– ref. Australia needs a national fire inquiry – these are the 3 key areas it should deliver in – http://theconversation.com/australia-needs-a-national-fire-inquiry-these-are-the-3-key-areas-it-should-deliver-in-130374

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Prue Gonzalez, Lecturer in Environmental Management, Charles Sturt University

Universities across Australia – including in Canberra, Wollongong and Newcastle – have had to close their campuses in the past few months as a result of bushfires.

But the deep and long-lasting impacts of the crisis are set to pose a challenge for Australian universities beyond just the immediate response.

Of the more than one million university students in Australia, we estimate about 95,000 in 2020 will be from regions directly affected by the bushfires.

Most of these students will attend regional universities, but they will be present in all universities throughout Australia. The sheer magnitude and scale of the bushfires mean the number of students indirectly impacted will be much higher.

Read more: You’re not the only one feeling helpless. Eco-anxiety can reach far beyond bushfire communities

Tragedies and disasters can have an emotional and cognitive impact on learning.

So, how can universities support students and staff during times of collective crisis?

Studies of the impacts of disasters on university students have largely focused on hurricanes, earthquakes and acts of terrorism. Although each disaster is different, these studies show some simple steps can make a big difference when supporting university students and staff.

September 11 attacks, 2001

Six months after the September 11 attacks, US researchers set out to explore what college students thought of the most common lecturer responses to the tragedy, and which of these students found most helpful.

Of the 484 Carnegie Mellon University students surveyed, 62% said their lecturer addressed the attacks. Some lecturers held a one minute silence, or had a brief discussion with their class. Others incorporated the event into the lesson or decided to do a class project. Some lecturers offered to talk privately with students or made a point of asking after the well-being of their families and friends.

Acknowledging a disaster in a way we are comfortable with can build emotional well-being and resilience.

Read more: A familiar place among the chaos: how schools can help students cope after the bushfires

When asked what teaching approaches they found most helpful, 78% of students appreciated when their lecturer mentioned ways to support emergency relief efforts. And 69% said they found coping strategies such as being offered an extension on an assignment or being excused from class particularly helpful.

The general conclusion from the students’ perspective was to “do something, just about anything”.

Atlantic hurricane season, 2004

During a 44-day period in 2004, four hurricanes (Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne) raged through Florida, USA at the beginning of the autumn teaching semester. They destroyed homes, businesses, college campuses and roadways.

One study examined stress among 107 college students who had been exposed to natural disasters after Hurricane Charley and Frances. Researchers also looked at adjustments made by two faculty members in attempts to reduce student stress while maintaining academic standards.

Adjustments included changing exam schedules, relaxing classroom attendance policies, reducing lecture time; and providing students with notes, study guides and additional in-class study time.

Read more: Bushfires can make kids scared and anxious: here are 5 steps to help them cope

Most (63%) students said they experienced moderate to extremely high levels of stress after the disaster. Half of those surveyed indicated they suffered lost wages or income and 65% sustained some damage to their residences.

When asked about the adjustments, 84% of the students agreed or strongly agreed the quality of their education was not compromised by them. All the students surveyed either strongly agreed or agreed that overall the adjustments had reduced stress.

Christchurch earthquakes NZ, 2010

Fewer than 12 hours after the Canterbury earthquake in New Zealand, the University of Canterbury activated a communication strategy. It provided its 15,830 students with support and logistics information, such as daily road closures.

All students received a personalised daily email, alongside multiple daily updates to the university website. The university also created a dedicated social media site.

Six weeks after the earthquake, 3,571 university students had completed a survey to gauge their well-being and the role of the communication provided.

Most students (more than 75%) said the earthquakes had some, or a significant, effect on their study. But the majority (93%) reported feeling “OK again” at the time they completed the survey.

Read more: Massacre is now part of Christchurch’s identity, so how does a city rise above that?

Nearly all students (97%) were satisfied with the news and updates provided by the university, particularly the regularity of website updates, the daily emails, and the fact the information was always current. Suggestions for improvement included using text messaging and radio updates.

Nearly all (95%) students reported being satisfied or very satisfied with the communication they received from the university.

It doesn’t have to be complicated

While each of these disasters unfolded and impacted students and university staff in different ways, the studies show a lecturer’s response doesn’t need to be complicated. It can be as much as acknowledging a tragic event has occurred, showing support and empathy and offering flexibility.

As academic staff, we also need to acknowledge the impact of the crisis on ourselves by adjusting our expectations of self. For instance, we may need to triage how we spend our time, identifying things that need our attention and others that can wait. Or we could consider talking with family, friends or joining a support group.

Many universities offer support and resources for staff, students and communities in times of crisis. Consider contacting the university counselling centre for support, whether personal or in the classroom.

This article was written with the assistance of Phillip Ebbs and Patrick Edsall.

Information sheets about taking care of yourself after the bushfires can be found at the Australian Psychological Society.

– ref. From 9/11 to Christchurch earthquakes: how unis have supported students after a crisis – http://theconversation.com/from-9-11-to-christchurch-earthquakes-how-unis-have-supported-students-after-a-crisis-130047

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daniel Daly, Research Fellow at the Sustainable Buildings Research Centre, University of Wollongong

Everybody wants an energy-efficient home. After all, an energy-efficient home is comfortable to live in, without large energy bills. These can be important factors for prospective home owners or renters. Our review of international research found energy-efficient homes typically fetch a higher price.

An energy performance rating is one way to show how “energy hungry” a home could be. In many countries, it is mandatory for the seller to obtain and disclose a home’s rating. For European Union countries, this has been the case for ten years.

But that’s not the case in most of Australia. Only one of the states and territories – the ACT – has a regulated scheme to disclose the energy-efficiency rating of housing to prospective buyers.

Read more: Australia’s still building 4 in every 5 new houses to no more than the minimum energy standard

Disclosing energy ratings is standard practice in the commercial building sector in Australia. Previous research showed this increases the value of buildings with higher energy ratings (a price premium). Our recent review of international research looked to see if a similar effect exists in the residential sector.

What does the research show?

The majority (23) of the 27 relevant studies we reviewed found more energy-efficient homes fetch higher prices than less energy-efficient, but otherwise comparable, homes. So what sort of price premium do houses with a higher energy rating attract? It’s typically around 5% to 10%.

Price effects were considered in two ways. The first involved comparing rated versus unrated residences. The second compared higher-rated residences with lower-rated ones. In both cases, a price premium was found to exist.

The reported price premium varied substantially by study, country and real estate market. One study, in Belfast, found a 27% price premium for higher-rated buildings. Another in the Netherlands found a price premium of 2.7% for similarly higher-rated dwellings.

Only one study looked at Australia (the ACT scheme, which has operated since 2003). It found a 2.4% price premium for a six-star house and a 9.4% premium for a seven-star house compared to a 3 star home. For Australia, with a median house price of $773,635 in late 2019, the ACT results equate to potential price premiums of $18,500 and $72,721.

Obviously, it isn’t just the energy rating of a house that affects its price. Location, size, age and other relevant features of a property influence the final price. Researchers use a statistical method, called hedonic regression, to estimate the effects of all these factors. A home energy rating was included as one of these factors.

The studies we reviewed were published between 2011 and 2019, covering 14 countries and ten energy performance rating schemes. Most of the studies (18) considered the European Union’s Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). Although there are differences in how each EU country defines and manages these certificates, they are broadly comparable, in that they use a standard A (high) to G (low) grade.

How would this system benefit Australia?

This system would obviously be good for people trying to sell (or wanting to buy) energy-efficient homes, but it’s also good for our society. It has been estimated almost half the homes that will be in use in 2050 have already been built. If we are to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions from our cities and built environment, we need to tackle our existing building stock.

Read more: Making every building count in meeting Australia’s emission targets

A scheme that allows owners to capitalise on the energy efficiency of their home would change the economics of retrofitting existing homes. Owners would have a clear incentive to improve energy performance without the need for large government subsidies.

Unfortunately, there is no agreed method to measure energy-efficiency for the majority of existing Australian homes (i.e. those outside the ACT). This means there is no simple way for prospective owners or renters to make an informed decision about the likely comfort and future energy bills for a home.

Read more: Greenwashing the property market: why ‘green star’ ratings don’t guarantee more sustainable buildings

Other countries have already shown the path forward. Key steps include:

1. define a nationally consistent rating tool for existing homes. The Victorian government has developed the Victorian Residential Efficiency Scorecard. This voluntary tool provides owners with a star rating for the overall energy performance of their home. It also provides specific information on its performance during hot weather, as well as recommendations on how to improve that performance

2. provide a framework for owners to voluntarily disclose the certified energy performance of their home at the point of sale or lease. Only owners of higher-rating homes will be likely to do this voluntarily

3. legislate for mandatory disclosure of a home’s energy rating when it’s being sold or leased

4. introduce minimum standards of energy performance for rental properties. Once a property’s energy performance is rated and disclosed, the government has a powerful policy lever to drive improvement of the energy efficiency of the existing building stock. For instance, in the UK, owners are obligated to improve the energy performance of any property they wish to offer for rent to at least grade E (on an A-to-G scale).

Our review of international academic literature suggests home buyers typically value a more energy-efficient home. When presented with easily accessible information in the form of an energy performance rating, they are willing to pay more.

Hence, energy rating disclosure policies can help consumers make informed decisions that will result in lower energy bills and more comfortable homes. At the same time, by allowing sellers to capitalise on energy-efficiency improvements through a certified rating, government can support reducing carbon emissions from our existing building stock.

To ensure we realise these societal and environmental benefits, all levels of government should co-ordinate to enact appropriate nationally consistent legislation.

Read more: Low-energy homes don’t just save money, they improve lives

The author would like to acknowledge Michelle Zwagerman for her contribution to this article.

– ref. Homes with higher energy ratings sell for more. Here’s how Australian owners could cash in – http://theconversation.com/homes-with-higher-energy-ratings-sell-for-more-heres-how-australian-owners-could-cash-in-128548

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Cull, Senior Lecturer in Accounting and Financial Planning, Western Sydney University

Australia’s unprecedented bushfires have cemented its rural firefighters at the heart of the nation’s identity.

It’s not just that these men and women put themselves in the line of fire. It’s that these “firies” are almost all volunteers, battling blazes for sheer love of their local community.

Relying on volunteers isn’t unique to Australia’s rural firefighting brigades. Other countries with large numbers of volunteer firefighters include Austria, Germany, France, the United States, Japan and China.

But Australia arguably relies on these volunteers to an extent unparalleled in the world, due to the country’s sheer size and the extent to which it is prone to bushfire. In terms of sheer scale of fires, only the vastness of Russia and Canada can compete, and neither has a climate and ecology quite so primed to burn.

Read more: Some say we’ve seen bushfires worse than this before. But they’re ignoring a few key facts

Almost 1% of the population volunteers

About 195,000 Australians volunteer with the nation’s six state and two territory bushfire services. The most populous state, New South Wales, has the largest number (71,234). The Australian Capital Territory has the fewest (a little more than 400).

The numbers reflect how many people live in rural areas and the degree to which those communities face bushfire risk. Thus Tasmania has 5,000 volunteer fighters despite having a smaller population than the ACT, because relatively more live in small towns.

On raw figures, Australia has the ninth-largest number of volunteer firefighters by nation, after China, Russia, the United States, Japan, Vietnam, Germany, Poland and Austria.

Comparing raw national figures doesn’t necessarily capture the special place of rural firies in Australia. Austria and its neighbours, for example, have cultures of volunteer municipal firefighting brigades that go back nearly a thousand years and cover structural fires as well.

Australia’s voluntary fire brigades are focused on bushfires. If we were to exclude the 71% of the Australia population that live in major cities, the proportion of Australia’s rural population volunteering with a bushfire service is more like 4.5%. This indicates how central these brigades are to local communities.

It hard to put a precise number on the value volunteer firefighters make to Australia’s economy, but it is significant. The amount and quality of volunteer work is, of course, variable. But let’s assume each volunteer gives 150 hours of their time a year. This is likely conservative, given estimates of the time volunteers have given up this season. At the average weekly Australian wage (including superannuation guarantee), the volunteers contribute about A$1.3 billion to the community.

Read more: Australia can expect far more fire catastrophes. A proper disaster plan is worth paying for

Operations and funding

Even though most firefighters in the rural fire services are volunteers, there are still significant costs. The NSW Rural Fire Service, for example, maintains more than 2,000 brigades with their own stations, vehicles and other running costs. It also employs 965 paid staff in administrative and operational roles. Capital investment of $42 million for stations and equipment was made in 2018-19 in addition to running costs.

The following breakdown is indicative of the running costs facing every state or territory service.

While funding depends on the individual state or territory, in general the services are funded by levies, imposed through state and territory laws.

Victoria’s Country Fire Authority, for example, is funded under the Country Fire Authority Act (1958) through a property levy. It is collected by local councils and passed on to the state government, which then distributes it to the authority. The levy includes a fixed component plus a variable rate based on a property’s market value.

New South Wales also has a levy tied to council rates (under the Rural Fires Act 1997). But most funding comes from a levy on insurance payments (imposed under the Emergency Services Levy Act 2017). In the 2018/19 financial year these levies raised about $440 million combined. State and federal governments kicked in a further $50 million, with $26 million in “other income” – mostly recouped costs from interstate and overseas deployments and use of its aircraft by other agencies.

The role of donations

Donations have not historically been a major funding source for any state or territory fire service. But in times of crisis the public often want to do their bit by giving money.

In the 2017-2018 financial year, for example, the NSW Rural Fire Service & Brigades Donations Fund received $768,044 in donations. Now it has $50 million or so coming its way due to comedian Celeste Barber’s bushfire appeal.

Read more: How to donate to Australian bushfire relief: give money, watch for scams and think long term

It’s possible many of those giving to Barber’s fundraiser didn’t realise their money would only go to New South Wales brigades. It’s also possible many thought they might help volunteers directly, such as through reimbursements for taking leave without pay. Others want to ensure volunteers don’t have to buy their own equipment.

Volunteers won’t necessarily benefit directly in the way donors might like. This is not to say donations won’t help, though. Volunteer brigades might benefit from money for new vehicles or computers, for example.

The sacrifices made by Australian volunteer firefighters have only added to the “firies” mythos. Fire services have been flooded with record numbers of applications. As the threat of bushfires increases, the national love affair with volunteer firies is likely to only intensify.

Which is something no elected politician would be wise to ignore.

– ref. Value beyond money: Australia’s special dependency on volunteers to battle bushfires – http://theconversation.com/value-beyond-money-australias-special-dependency-on-volunteers-to-battle-bushfires-129881

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sue Rabbitt Roff, Researcher, Social History/Tutor in Medical Education, University of Dundee

James Mollison, the founding director of the National Gallery of Australia, died on Sunday at the age of 88. He was a pivotal force in Australian art collecting, believing Australian galleries should work to educate both the public and our artists.

Mollison was born in Wonthaggi, Victoria, in 1931. When he left school in the late 1940s he approached the National Gallery of Victoria for what we would now call an internship.

He was taken on by Dr Ursula Hoff, who had just been given a permanent position at the NGV as Keeper of Prints after six years on temporary contracts. Mollison wrote in his personal tribute to Hoff in 2014:

Many of us at the Australian National Gallery have sought Dr Hoff’s opinion, drawing on a tradition of teaching that I know has continued for forty years.

A great gallery for the nation

It is a fair bet Mollison attended Sir Kenneth Clark’s lecture on The Idea of a Great Gallery at the NGV on January 27 1949.

The British art historian was a great admirer of Hoff, and her promotion was largely due to his power to make or break careers – his letters supporting her are in the Tate Archive in London.

Clark spent the war years making the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square – founded in 1824 – a truly public space for Britons and others to see and learn about art, despite the Blitz.

In his Melbourne lecture, Clark urged the gallery to purchase experimental work, saying: “[This] seems to me particularly necessary in this country, where you have a young and vital and adventurous school of painting.”

To “guide and stimulate” Australian artists, he said, they needed:

[…] a sight of the best modern work, something which still has about it the thrill of experiment. They are trying to discover a fresh way of seeing, and they must be allowed to study the work of those European and Latin American artists who are doing the same.

Following his informal internship with Hoff, Mollison trained as a secondary school teacher, becoming an education officer at the NGV in 1960. After a short stint at the NGV, he became a bureaucrat with the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, working under three prime ministers – Gorton, McMahon and Fraser.

During this time, it was decided to build a national art gallery in Canberra – a building which had been long advocated for. It is an indication of the respect in which he was held that Mollison was appointed acting director in the 1970s.

Finally, with the endorsement of Fraser, he was confirmed as full director in 1977.

1973

1973 was a particularly memorable year for Australia’s accumulation of cultural capital: Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for literature on the same day the Queen opened the Sydney Opera House.

In Canberra, Mollison was authorised by Prime Minister Whitlam to pay A$1.3 million for Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles: then the highest price ever for a contemporary work of American art.

Blue Poles still hangs at the NGA, where it is now speculatively valued at A$350 million.

Read more: Here’s looking at: Blue poles by Jackson Pollock

It seems Mollison was following Clark’s advice to buy experimental art to educate Australian artists. Prior to the opening of the gallery, Mollison also collected works such as Woman V by Willem de Kooning, Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, and significant works by Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker.

My research has traced the purchase of Blue Poles by Mollison and his colleagues through connections to the London gallerist Bryan Robertson, another of Clark’s proteges, who promoted both Australian artists and Jackson Pollock by exhibiting them at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Barely a year after the sale, Robertson was offered the position of associate director of the NGV, given without an interview on the basis of Clark’s reference. However, Robertson didn’t take the post because of his “dread, really. Of going off to the other side of the world.”

After Blue Poles

The controversy over the price paid for Blue Poles overshadowed Mollison’s directorship, but he continued to acquire both contemporary Australian art and overseas works with what was regarded as a good eye.

In 1990, Mollison left Canberra for the NGV in Melbourne, where he stayed until 1995.

The NGV is now 22nd on the list of the world’s most visited art museums. More than 2.5 million cross its doorstep each year. Despite Blue Poles and the Ned Kellys, the NGA comes in 86th, with 928,000.

When I interviewed the American art collector Ben Heller in 2018, he said one major reason why he sold Blue Poles to the Australians was they promised him:

No child could graduate [from school] without going to Canberra to see Blue Poles.

Even though Mollison started his career as a public art teacher, that promise seems to have been lost – although the painting did tour Australia (complete with armed guard) before being put in storage to wait for its gallery to be built.

The acquisition of Blue Poles divided the art world and the Australian public who paid for it. But certainly it was an educational exercise, which was probably the legacy James Mollison wished to leave.

– ref. James Mollison: the public art teacher who brought the Blue Poles to Australia – http://theconversation.com/james-mollison-the-public-art-teacher-who-brought-the-blue-poles-to-australia-130285

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has ordered the secretary of his department, Phil Gaetjens, to advise whether deputy Nationals leader Bridget McKenzie breached the ministerial code of conduct in the sports rorts affair.

A statement from the prime minister’s office on Wednesday night said Morrison had referred the highly critical auditor-general report to Gaetjens last Friday “for advice in relation to any actions in the application of the statement of ministerial standards”.

This referral was not announced at the time.

The statement also said media reports revealing McKenzie had approved a grant to a clay target shooting club without publicly disclosing her membership of it had also been referred to the department.

The audit report on the $100 million sports grants scheme found the “award of grant funding was not informed by an appropriate assessment process and sound advice”.

Read more: So the government gave sports grants to marginal seats. What happens now?

It said McKenzie, then sports minister, targeted marginal Coalition seats and Labor seats in the government’s sights in allocating grants before the election, rather than following the priority rating provided by the expert assessment process.

Nine newspapers revealed on Wednesday that McKenzie approved a $36,000 grant for the Wangaratta Clay Target Club without publicly disclosing she was a member of the club.

McKenzie was given membership when she visited the club in January, before the grant was announced in February. Her office has said she did not put her membership on the public parliamentary register because it was a gift and below the value set for disclosure.

Sources said that in June she declared in her ministerial statement of interests – which is private – her membership to several gun organisations, including the clay target association of which the Wangaratta club is an affiliate.

In his foreword to the statement of ministerial standards, Morrison says:

All parliamentarians are required to disclose private interests to the parliament.

Given the additional powers of Ministers and Assistant Ministers, I expect them to provide me with additional information about their private interests to ensure there are no conflicts with their roles as ministers.

The statement further says:

Ministers must declare and register their personal interests, including but not limited to pecuniary interests, as required by the Parliament from time to time.

Ministers must also comply with any additional requirements for declarations of interests to the Prime Minister as may be determined by the Prime Minister, and notify the Prime Minister of any significant change in their private interests within 28 days of its occurrence.

Failure to declare or register a relevant and substantive personal interest as required by the Parliament constitutes a breach of these Standards.

The Wednesday statement from the prime minister’s office said Morrison would “continue to follow due process”.

He has also asked Attorney-General Christian Porter to advise on the issue raised in the audit report of whether McKenzie actually had legal authority to make the decisions on the grants.

Read more: Nationals elect Bridget McKenzie as new deputy

Porter on Wednesday defended McKenzie, saying, “had Bridget McKenzie’s final approval process not gone into the mix, then less Labor electorates would have gotten the money”.

The opposition continued to call for her resignation or sacking.

Meanwhile, Morrison announced that the secretary of the health department, Glenys Beauchamp, will retire at the end of next month and is going on leave from Friday.

The Mandarin, noting Beauchamp has been a board member of the Australian Sports Commission, said “the official date of her retirement falls the day before Senate estimates comes back … where those with knowledge of the grants program will likely be questioned.”

– ref. Scott Morrison orders probe into whether Bridget McKenzie breached ministerial code – http://theconversation.com/scott-morrison-orders-probe-into-whether-bridget-mckenzie-breached-ministerial-code-130403

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kenley Kuoch, PhD Candidate in Psychology, Swinburne University of Technology

Most of us don’t give much thought to going to the toilet. We go when we need to go.

But for a small minority of people, the act of urinating or defecating can be a major source of anxiety – especially when public restrooms are the only facilities available.

Paruresis (shy bladder) and parcopresis (shy bowel) are little known mental health conditions, yet they can significantly compromise a person’s quality of life.

We don’t know how many people have shy bowel, but research has estimated around 2.8%-16.4% of the population are affected by shy bladder. The condition is more common in males.

Our research explored the thought processes that underpin these conditions, with a view to understanding how they might best be treated.

Read more: So many public toilets are a last resort – why not a restful refuge?

What are the symptoms?

Most of us will feel a little “grossed out” from time to time when using public toilets. But what we’re talking about here is different and more serious.

People with shy bladder and shy bowel experience significant anxiety when trying to go to the toilet, especially in public places like shopping centres, restaurants, at work or at school. Sufferers may also experience symptoms in their own home when family or friends are around.

Their anxiety can present in the form of increased heart rate, excessive sweating, rapid breathing, muscle tension, heart palpitations, blushing, nausea, trembling, or a combination of these.

Symptoms range in severity. Some people who are more mildly affected can experience anxiety but still be able to “go”, for example when the bathroom is completely empty. Others may urinate or defecate with difficulty – for example their urine stream may be inconsistent. Some people will sit on the toilet and not be able to go at all.

In severe cases, sufferers may hold it in until they get home. This is uncomfortable and can even have health consequences, such as urinary tract infections.

Read more: Why queues for women’s toilets are longer than men’s

Sufferers report difficulties relating to employment, relationships and social life. For example, they might avoid travelling, going to parties, or attending large events like sports matches because of their symptoms.

Unfortunately, people with shy bladder or shy bowel will often feel shame and embarrassment, making them less likely to seek help.

It’s a type of social anxiety disorder

The DSM-5, a manual designed to help clinicians diagnose mental health conditions, classifies shy bladder as a sub-type of social anxiety disorder.

The DSM-5 doesn’t make specific mention of shy bowel, but with more research we hope to see it included in the future.

Social anxiety disorder is characterised by an excessive fear of social situations, including contact with strangers. People with the condition fear scrutiny by others, whether negative or positive evaluation.

We wanted to understand whether the thought processes that underpin shy bladder and shy bowel are similar to those demonstrated in people with social anxiety disorder.

Read more: Explainer: what is social anxiety disorder?

Our research

We canvassed 316 undergraduate students in an online survey on shy bladder and shy bowel. Some 72 participants (22.8%) self-reported symptoms of either one or both conditions.

We found these symptoms were influenced by particular patterns of thinking, including:

• a misinterpretation or distortion of information (for example, interpreting laughter in the restroom as being directed towards them)

• fears around potential perceived negative evaluation (for example, a fear of being criticised for taking too long to defecate, or for sounds and smells produced during urination or defecation)

• fears around potential perceived positive evaluation (for example, a fear of being evaluated too positively for a strong urine stream).

Using statistical modelling, we found fear of negative evaluation was the factor most strongly associated with shy bladder or shy bowel symptoms.

Treatment

While our study was small and more research is needed, the thought processes we identified as underpinning shy bladder and shy bowel are very similar to those we know predict social anxiety symptoms.

As such, people with shy bladder or shy bowel may benefit from the sorts of treatments that help people with social anxiety disorder.

Cognitive behavioural therapy, for example, is known to reduce social anxiety symptoms.

The best way to help people with these conditions will be addressing the thought processes behind shy bladder and shy bowel, especially concerns around the perceptions others might evaluate or criticise one’s urination or defecation.

As well as targeting unhelpful thinking, like all anxiety conditions, reducing avoidance through gradual exposure work (putting oneself in anxiety-inducing situations where one will build confidence and tolerance around anxiety) is also likely to help.

Read more: What’s the best way to go to the toilet – squatting or sitting?

If you can’t do what you need to do in a public restroom, know you’re not alone and you’re not going crazy. Shy bladder and shy bowel are genuine anxiety conditions and can have significant effects on your day-to-day functioning.

Discussing these symptoms with your doctor and/or mental health professional is likely to be an important step to freeing yourself from these conditions.

– ref. Can’t do what you need to do in a public toilet? You’re not alone – and there’s help – http://theconversation.com/cant-do-what-you-need-to-do-in-a-public-toilet-youre-not-alone-and-theres-help-127719

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Roger Patulny, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Wollongong

Humans are more connected to each other than ever, thanks to smartphones, the web and social media. At the same time, loneliness is a huge and growing social problem.

Why is this so? Research shows social media use alone can’t cure loneliness – but it can be a tool to build and strengthen our genuine connections with others, which are important for a happy life.

To understand why this is the case, we need to understand more about loneliness, its harmful impact, and what this has to do with social media.

The scale of loneliness

There is great concern about a loneliness epidemic in Australia. In the 2018 Australian Loneliness Report, more than one-quarter of survey participants reported feeling lonely three or more days a week.

Studies have linked loneliness to early mortality, increased cardio-vascular disease, poor mental health and depression, suicide, and increased social and health care costs.

But how does this relate to social media?

Read more: How to be a healthy user of social media

More and more Australians are becoming physically isolated. My previous research demonstrated that face-to-face contact in Australia is declining, and this is accompanied by a rise in technology-enabled communication.

Enter social media, which for many is serving as a replacement for physical connection. Social media influences nearly all relationships now.

Navigating the physical/digital interface

While there is evidence of more loneliness among heavy social media users, there is also evidence suggesting social media use decreases loneliness among highly social people.

How do we explain such apparent contradictions, wherein both the most and least lonely people are heavy social media users?

Research reveals social media is most effective in tackling loneliness when it is used to enhance existing relationships, or forge new meaningful connections. On the other hand, it is counterproductive if used as a substitute for real-life social interaction.

Thus, it is not social media itself, but the way we integrate it into our existing lives which impacts loneliness.

I wandered lonely in The Cloud

While social media’s implications for loneliness can be positive, they can also be contradictory.

Tech-industry enthusiasts highlight social media’s benefits, such as how it offers easy, algorithimically-enhanced connection to anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time. But this argument often ignores the quality of these connections.

Psychologist Robert Weiss makes a distinction between “social loneliness” – a lack of contact with others – and “emotional loneliness”, which can persist regardless of how many “connections” you have, especially if they do not provide support, affirm identity and create feelings of belonging.

Read more: A month at sea with no technology taught me how to steal my life back from my phone

Without close, physical connections, shallow virtual friendships can do little to alleviate emotional loneliness. And there is reason to think many online connections are just that.

Evidence from past literature has associated heavy social media use with increased loneliness. This may be because online spaces are often oriented to performance, status, exaggerating favourable qualities (such as by posting only “happy” content and likes), and frowning on expressions of loneliness.

On the other hand, social media plays a vital role in helping us stay connected with friends over long distances, and organise catch-ups. Video conferencing can facilitate “meetings” when physically meeting is impractical.

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram can be used to engage with new people who may turn into real friends later on. Similarly, sites like Meetup can help us find local groups of people whose interests and activities align with our own.

And while face-to-face contact remains the best way to help reduce loneliness, help can sometimes be found through online support groups.

Why so lonely?

There are several likely reasons for our great physical disconnection and loneliness.

We’ve replaced the 20th century idea of stable, permanent careers spanning decades with flexible employment and gig work. This prompts regular relocation for work, which results in disconnection from family and friends.

The way we build McMansions (large, multi-room houses) and sprawl our suburbs is often antisocial, with little thought given to developing vibrant, walkable social centres.

Read more: Size does matter: Australia’s addiction to big houses is blowing the energy budget

Single-person households are expected to increase from about 2.1 million in 2011 to almost 3.4 million in 2036.

All of the above means the way we manage loneliness is changing.

In our book, my co-authors and I argue people manage their feelings differently than in the past. Living far from friends and family, isolated individuals often deal with negative emotions alone, through therapy, or through connecting online with whoever may be available.

Social media use is pervasive, so the least we can do is bend it in a way that facilitates our real-life need to belong.

It is a tool that should work for us, not the other way around. Perhaps, once we achieve this, we can expect to live in a world that is a bit less lonely.

– ref. Does social media make us more or less lonely? Depends on how you use it – http://theconversation.com/does-social-media-make-us-more-or-less-lonely-depends-on-how-you-use-it-128468

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Beeson, Professor of International Politics, University of Western Australia

As unprecedented bushfires continue to ravage the country, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his government have been rightly criticised for their reluctance to talk about the underlying drivers of this crisis. Yet it’s not hard to see why they might be dumbstruck.

The human race has never had to grapple with a problem as large, complex or urgent as climate change. It’s not that there aren’t solutions available. There are already some hopeful signs of an energy transition in Australia. As Professor Ross Garnaut has explained, it would be in Australia’s economic interests to become a low-carbon energy superpower.

To successfully tackle climate change will require some painful transitions domestically, and unprecedented levels of international coordination and cooperation. But that isn’t happening. Global action to cut emissions is falling far short of what’s needed – and meanwhile, though it’s controversial to mention, the world’s population quietly climbs ever higher.

Our growing population challenge

The United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2019 report forecast that by 2027, India will overtake China as the world’s most populous country.

By 2050, the UN predicts that the world’s population will be nearly 10 billion, up from 7.7 billion now. Nine countries are expected to be home to more than half of that growth: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt and the United States. The population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to double by 2050 (a 99% increase), while Australia and New Zealand are expected to grow more slowly (28% increase).

Given how difficult climate politics have been here in Australia, why would we expect it to be any more politically feasible in say, India, which claims the right to develop as we did? However self-serving Australian coal supporters’ arguments about lifting Indians out of poverty are, the underlying questions of national autonomy and the ‘right’ to develop are not easily refuted.

Even talking about demography is asking for trouble – especially if it becomes caught up with questions of race, identity and the most fundamental of human rights, the right to reproduce.

While reducing population growth is plainly important in the long-term, it isn’t a quick fix for all our environmental problems. In the meantime, research has shown that supporting education for girls in poor countries is one of the single most important things we can do now to address this issue.

How Australia can show leadership

I think we need to understand that global emissions don’t have an accent, they come from many countries and we need to look at a global solution… – Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Insiders, ABC, 12 January 2020

This is the central defence of business as usual: there’s no point in Australia making huge sacrifices and ‘wrecking’ (or transforming, depending on your perspective) the economy if no one else is doing so. We contribute less than 2% to global greenhouse emissions, so – some claim – we can’t make any real difference.

As outlined in my 2019 book, Environmental Populism: The Politics of Survival in the Anthropocene, nations such as Australia can play a useful role by showing what an enlightened country, with the capacity and incentive to act, might do. If we don’t have the means and the compelling environmental reasons to make tough but meaningful policy choices, who does?

But even in the unlikely event that Australians collectively retrofitted the entire economy along sustainable lines, there would still be a lot of the world that wouldn’t, or couldn’t even if they wanted to. The development imperative really is non-negotiable in India, China and the more impoverished states of sub-Saharan Africa.

Will China lead the way?

From the privileged perspective of wealthy Australians, the ‘good’ news is that the ecological footprint of the average Ethiopian is seven times smaller than ours. India’s average is even less, despite all the recent development. However, people in India and Ethiopia may not think that’s a good thing.

One of the paradoxical impacts of globalisation is that everyone is increasingly conscious of their relative place in the international scheme of things. The legitimacy of governments – especially unelected authoritarian regimes like China’s – increasingly revolves around their capacity to deliver jobs and rising living standards. Where governments can’t deliver, the population vote with their feet.

As naturalist Sir David Attenborough warned last week, Australia’s current fires are another sign that “the moment of crisis has come”. He called on China for the global leadership we’ve been missing:

If the Chinese come and say: ‘Not because we are worried about the world but for our own reasons, we are going to take major steps to curb our carbon output […]’, everybody else would fall into line, one thinks. That would be the big change that one could hope would happen.

China has arguably already made the biggest contribution to our collective welfare with its highly contentious, now abandoned one-child policy. China’s population would have been around 400 million people larger without it, pushing us closer to the crisis Sir David fears.

To be clear, I’m not advocating compulsory population control, here or anywhere. But we do need to consider a future with billions more people, many of them aspiring to live as Australians do now.

Looking ahead, will Australians try to keep living as we do today? Or will we decide to set a new example of living well, without such a heavy ecological footprint? Resolving all these conundrums won’t be easy; perhaps not even possible. That’s another discomfiting reality that we may have to get used to.

– ref. As Earth’s population heads to 10 billion, does anything Australians do on climate change matter? – http://theconversation.com/as-earths-population-heads-to-10-billion-does-anything-australians-do-on-climate-change-matter-129139

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig Batty, Professor of Creative Writing, University of Technology Sydney

Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner has won many awards since it was published in 2017, including the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Australian Book Industry Award General Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

While the title may speak of a provocative premise – what is a trauma cleaner? Are there really jobs like this? – it’s not just the content that makes it a wonderful read, it’s also the writing style. Every word, every sentence, is carefully considered, re-considered and re-considered some more, resulting in what can only be described as beautiful language.

I was truly blown away by the power and precision of the prose. Sounds, tastes and smells emanate from the page, creating a visceral experience of protagonist Sandra’s extraordinary, often traumatic, life.

Orchestration of words

Krasnostein uses exquisite turns of phrase. Language is used to excavate facts and polish ideas that are hard to get rid of – things that stick. As Krasnostein writes, the book is “a catalogue of the ways we die physically and emotionally, and the strength and delicacy needed to lift the things we leave behind”.

Introducing her subject, Krasnostein writes:

During my time with Sandra, I met a bookbinder, a sex offender, a puppeteer, a cookbook hoarder, a cat hoarder, a wood hoarder […] I heard Sandra bend and flex language into words and idioms she made her own: “supposably”, “sposmatically”, “hands down pat!”

It is this careful and playful orchestration of words – facts transformed into a scintillating narrative – that makes the book hard to put down. Every page lures you in, making you hungry for more.

Beneath the beautiful language, resonance strikes and asks us to think of our own lives. Expressions hit like a sudden gust of wind. They bring tears to your eyes. We are not asked to feel sad, but to feel what was, and still is, being experienced by these people – to feel the complexity of the circumstances.

Imagine Ailsa, the girl who loves to bake, the woman whose cakes are light and high and whose dark religion tells her to fear her effeminate son […] Imagine that baby as a boy frozen in his bed, straining to read the sound of a motor in the driveway over the noise of his own racing heart.

Krasnostein’s language evokes in us the visceral aspects of a situation – the pain and pleasure of those involved. She says of Sandra, then still Peter, practising his female voice in the shower when wife Linda is out: “the refrain of thrumming along his veins that signifies his only certainty and which says: you don’t belong here”.

Later, of his eventual parting from wife and children towards a new life as Sandra:

When he steps around the food flung on the floor or smells the milk turning in bottles in the sink, or when cries momentarily shatter his sleep like a glass flung against a wall, he doesn’t really notice because in his mind he is dancing at [gay club] Annabel’s with Joe.

Krasnostein is adept at laying out facts with no judgement or flourish, allowing their trauma to speak to us individually. She refuses to manipulate her readers, instead touching the facts lightly with a sense of perspective: “she will never fear what is ahead of her, only what is behind her”.

From one trauma to the next, we learn of the murder of Sandra’s girlfriend, Maria, by a nightclub bouncer. Krasnostein uses repetition to speculate on his motives:

Maybe he has it in for her. Maybe he has it in for dykes. Maybe he’s jealous of her. Maybe he’s jealous of the girlfriend. Maybe he’s repulsed that he’s jealous of either of them […] Maybe he just wants to feel the force of bone on muscle.

Krasnostein gives us story perspective in a light, non-manipulative way. That last line is sparse yet stark, simple yet powerful.

And then this, which winds all the facts into a clean knot that represents the very core of Sandra’s life journey: “Sandra does not need a physics lesson to understand that time dilates; life taught her early that some seconds are cruelly quick and others are tortuously slow”.

Krasnostein pores over language, refining it until it says the most it can in the fewest words possible. “Something you might try to ignore, like a full bladder on a cold night”. “What chips some people like a mug cracks others, like an egg”. “The couch is a grave”.

Writing of writing

The Trauma Cleaner also speaks about the process of its being written, with authority and poignancy:

I scrap draft after draft of my timeline and even when I am assisted in my task by Sandra’s recollection, the narrative remains a tangled necklace. Events link into one another only so far before they halt, abruptly, as some great knot where they loop over each other so tightly that some seem to disappear altogether.

In some ways, the narrative arc of the book is not Sandra’s own journey, but Krasnostein’s understanding of Sandra and what she represents for all of us. This is achieved with a lightness of touch, the author never getting in the way of the reader’s own interpretations.

Krasnostein writes at the start of the book:

And here it hits me what it is we are doing by telling this story. It is something at once utterly unfamiliar and completely alien to Sandra: we are clearing away the clutter of her life out of basic respect for the inherent value of the person beneath.

And then at the end of the book, after we have witnessed all of Sandra’s trauma, humour and resilience, an ordaining of our protagonist in language that is at once beautiful and beatific: “Sandra, you exist in the Order of Things and the Family of People; you belong, you belong, you belong”.

– ref. Inside the story: The Trauma Cleaner – a beautiful meditation on death and decay – http://theconversation.com/inside-the-story-the-trauma-cleaner-a-beautiful-meditation-on-death-and-decay-127436

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aaron J. Cavosie, Senior research fellow, Curtin University

The world’s oldest remaining asteroid crater is at a place called Yarrabubba, southeast of the town of Meekatharra in Western Australia.

Our new study puts a precise age on the cataclysmic impact – showing Yarrabubba is the oldest known crater and dating it at the right time to trigger the end of an ancient glacial period and the warming of the entire planet.

What we found at Yarrabubba

Yarrrabubba holds the eroded remnants of a crater 70 kilometres wide that was first described in 2003, based on minerals at the site that showed unique signs of impact. But its true age was not known.

We studied tiny “impact-shocked” crystals found at the site, which show the crater formed 2.229 billion years ago (give or take 5 million years).

This new, precise date establishes Yarrabubba as the oldest recognised impact structure on Earth. It is some 200 million years older than the next oldest, the Vredefort impact in South Africa.

More intriguing, the geological record shows the Earth had glacial ice before the time of the impact – but afterwards, ice disappeared for hundreds of millions of years. Was the Yarrabubba impact a trigger for global climate change?

Read more: Target Earth: how asteroids made an impact on Australia

How to date an asteroid hit

An asteroid strike is one of the most violent geologic events. In an instant, Earth’s crust is squeezed to unimaginable pressures, before exploding and ejecting carnage across the landscape. Large impacts leave behind scars the size of a small city.

The basin formed by an impact will partly fill with molten and pulverised rock from the Earth and from the asteroid itself. The edge of the crater forms a ring of mountains; over time erosion gradually erases the story.

Today, Yarrabubba has been worn down into a minor feature on a barren landscape.

To place the Yarrabubba event in a geologic context, we had to find its age. To find the age, we had to look carefully at minerals in the rocks shocked by the impact.

Geologists date events using “isotopic clocks” in minerals like zircon and monazite. These minerals contain small amounts of uranium, which gradually decays into lead at a known rate.

Asteroid strikes raise the temperature in rocks they hit, causing minerals to lose their accumulated lead, which resets the clock. After impact, the isotopic clocks start ticking again as new lead accumulates.

So by measuring the isotopes of uranium and lead in these minerals, we can calculate how much time has passed since the impact.

At Yarrabubba, we identified tiny crystals of zircon and monazite – each about the width of human hair – with textures that show they had been heated by a massive impact.

We analysed the amounts of lead and uranium isotopes in these crystals using mass spectrometry, and found their clocks had been reset 2.229 billion years ago (give or take five million years). That’s when we realised Yarrabubba coincided with a major change in Earth’s climate.

A different Earth

The Yarrabubba impact occurred during a period in Earth’s history called the Proterozoic eon. Long before plants, fish, or dinosaurs, life at this time consisted of simple, multicellular organisms.

These simple bacteria had already begun changing the composition of air. Previously dominated by carbon dioxide and methane, Earth’s atmosphere gradually became oxygenated by life about 2.4 billion years ago.

As oxygen levels built up, rocks started weathering more, and the atmosphere cooled down. And then ice came, plunging Earth into globally frigid conditions.

Read more: Ancient asteroid impacts yield evidence for the nature of the early Earth

Earth has repeatedly dipped into glacial conditions over the last 4.5 billion years. We know about these periods because of deposits of solidified rock and mud that were ground up by glaciers as they bulldozed across Earth’s surface.

Studies have found multiple periods in Earth’s history in which glacial deposits occur in rocks of the same age across many continents. These deposits may represent worldwide glacial conditions, often referred to as a “Snowball Earth” event.

In these periods, ice forms from the poles well into the tropics, covering nearly all of Earth.

There is geological evidence that Earth was in an icy phase during the Yarrabubba impact. Rocks in South Africa show that glaciers were present at this time. But it’s not clear if the amount of ice was similar to today, or if it covered the world.

Fire and ice

So we found Earth’s oldest preserved impact crater, and worked out when the asteroid hit. We also know Earth had ice at the time, but not how much.

To understand the effect of the impact on an ice-covered world, we used computer models based on the physics of shockwaves to estimate how much ice would end up in the atmosphere as water vapour. As it turns out, it’s quite a lot.

Our models show that if the Yarrabubba asteroid hit an ice sheet 5 kilometres thick (not an unreasonable estimate), more than 200 billion tons of water vapour would be ejected into the atmosphere. That’s about 2% of the total amount of water vapour in today’s atmosphere, but would have been a much bigger fraction back then.

Water vapour is a serious greenhouse gas. It’s responsible for about half of the heat absorption from solar radiation today.

Global climate models don’t yet exist for the Proterozoic Earth, so we don’t yet know for sure if the Yarrabubba impact pushed the planet past a tipping point that led to more warming and the end of a possible Snowball Earth.

– ref. We found the world’s oldest asteroid strike in Western Australia. It might have triggered a global thaw – http://theconversation.com/we-found-the-worlds-oldest-asteroid-strike-in-western-australia-it-might-have-triggered-a-global-thaw-130192

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jemma Holt, Research Fellow/ Acting Executive Officer (Research), Tasmania Law Reform Institute, University of Tasmania

Juries are supposed to consider evidence without influence or bias from the outside world. However, the widespread access to and use of the internet and social media threatens to undermine this, with significant consequences for our criminal justice system and those within it.

Given courts cannot effectively police smart-phone use they must adapt to it. This week the Tasmania Law Reform Institute completed its year long inquiry into courts and the information age, and has recommendations as to how they can adapt.

Read more: Jurors and social media: is there a solution?

The right to a fair & unbiased trial by your peers

An accused person’s right to a fair trial is the most fundamental principle of our criminal justice system. It is a phrase that describes a system that affords an accused person many protections. That system relies on jurors being impartial and returning a verdict that is based solely on the evidence that is presented within the courtroom.

In the past this was readily easy to achieve. Juror communications during trial hours and even after them could be controlled. News about the trial was generally a local affair, and even when it attracted national attention, the journalists needed to be in the court’s jurisdiction to report, so they and their employers were subject to the court’s authority.

The shift in the way people access news, information and communications in the modern age has changed this reality.

Almost every Australian has access to the internet via their smartphone or other devices, social media use is habitual among much of our population, and the internet is a ubiquitous source of information for most people.

Jurors are no different – in fact, they represent the wider Australian community these statistics describe. While jurors’ smart phones are removed from them during trial, they cannot be before or after the trial period, nor at the beginning or end of the day. As a result jurors may intentionally, or simply by habit seek out or communicate information about the trial.

Read more: All about juries: why do we actually need them and can they get it ‘wrong’?

Use and misuse of social media

Between 2018 and 2020 the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute conducted an inquiry into juror misuse of the internet and social media during trials. The institute concluded there is likely to be a high, but unquantifiable and undetectable level of misuse.

However, there is evidence across Australian jurisdictions that jurors have used their internet connected devices to:

• research legal terms or concepts or other information relevant to the trial. A West Australian juror in a drug-related trial obtained information online about methylamphetamine production

• research the accused, witnesses, victims, lawyers or the judge. Two South Australian jurors sitting in a blackmail trial against multiple defendants conducted online searches about the accused which disclosed past outlaw motorcycle gang affiliations

• communicate with people involved in the trial. Multiple New South Wales jurors on a long-running fraud trial became Facebook friends, sharing posts such as a digitally altered photo of one of the jurors wearing a judge’s wig

• publish material about the trial on the internet or social media. A NSW juror sitting in a sexual offending trial posted on Facebook the day before the guilty verdict was returned: “When a dog attacks a child it is put down. Shouldn’t we do the same with sex predators?” This post was accompanied with a photograph that showed images of rooms and implements by which lawful executions are carried out.

Misuse is under-reported. In those few instance where reports are made, fellow jurors, rather than court officers, tend to be the ones who raise the issue. Indeed, it is an important part of their role.

While jurors across Australia are currently told not to conduct online research, wilful disobedience is only part of the problem. It can also involve unintentional acts by jurors who believe they are doing the right thing.

For instance, jurors accessing online news, entertainment or social media sites can be passively influenced by information relevant to the trial. Jurors often misunderstand their role and conduct independent research in the genuine belief their actions are in the pursuit of “fairness” or discovering the truth.

Educate, inform & encourage self-regulation

The law reform institute ultimately concluded it is impossible for, and beyond the capacity of courts to completely police juror internet use. It has thus recommended not reforming the law, but rather strengthening and standardising juror education and directions. These recommendations are divided across two stages of jury selection, as part of an overall strategy:

• pre-selection: prospective jurors should receive improved training and information about the role of the juror and the risks of internet use

• post-selection: once a jury has been selected, judges need to explain to jurors what dangers arise from using the internet to access and publish on social media, seeking information about the case, parties, court officers, lawyers, and self-conducted research into legal concepts or sentences. The report has recommended the court adopt minimum standard directions, but also have the flexibility to make specific directions relevant to any particular trial.

The report recommended certain current practices and laws should remain unchanged, including:

• removing phones from jurors while they are in court (even though the effect is limited it avoids juror distraction)

• leaving contempt (punishment) laws in place for those jurors who intentionally ignore court training and directions. That might include monetary fines and, in severe cases, imprisonment.

This process is aimed at encouraging self-regulation among jurors, by educating them how to curtail their internet use and why it’s so important.

Read more: Trial by social media: why we need to properly educate juries

– ref. Juries need to be told how they’re allowed to use the internet to ensure fair trials – http://theconversation.com/juries-need-to-be-told-how-theyre-allowed-to-use-the-internet-to-ensure-fair-trials-130127

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christine Carson, Senior Research Fellow, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Western Australia

In the days before antibiotics, deaths from bacterial infections were common. Seemingly minor illnesses could escalate in severity, becoming deadly in a matter of hours or days.

These days, antibiotics can be life-savers. In the community, they’re commonly used to treat bacterial infections of the lung, urinary tract, eye, throat, skin and gut.

But they’re not needed for all bacterial infections – many infections will resolve on their own without treatment.

And of course, antibiotics don’t treat viral infections such as colds and flus, or fungal infections such as tinea or thrush.

Read more: When should you take antibiotics?

Even when antibiotics are necessary, they’re not a one-size-fits-all treatment: not all antibiotics kill all types of bacteria.

What type of bacteria is causing the infection?

If your doctor suspects you have a serious bacterial infection, they will often take a urine or blood test, or a swab to send to the pathologist.

At the lab, these tests aim to detect and identify the bacteria causing the infection.

Some methods only need to detect bacterial DNA. These DNA-based approaches are called “genotypic methods” and are quick and highly sensitive.

Other methods involve attempting to culture and isolate bacteria from the sample. This can take one to four days.

What antibiotic can fight the infection?

If antibiotic treatment is necessary, the isolated bacteria can be used in a second series of tests to help determine the right antibiotic for your infection. These are called antimicrobial susceptibility tests.

Like the tests that first detected the bacterium causing your infection, they can be done using DNA-based (genotypic) methods or by culturing the bacterium in the presence of various antibiotics and assessing what happens (phenotypic methods).

Genotypic tests tend to identify which antibiotics won’t work so they can be ruled out as treatment options; ruling out the ones that won’t work leaves the ones that should work.

For phenotypic tests, the bacterium is regrown in the presence of a range of antibiotics to see which one stops its growth. A range of concentrations of each antibiotic are often used in these tests.

Why you sometimes get a script without testing

Whichever tests are done, the results may not be available for a couple of days. In the meantime, your doctor will probably get you started on an antibiotic that is most likely to be effective. This is called empiric therapy and is the “best guess” treatment while they wait for test results.

Empiric antibiotic choice is based on the doctor’s prior experience with that type of infection, as well as clinical guidelines developed from evidence about that infection type, and ongoing surveillance data from the pathology lab about the types of bacteria generally causing that infection, and which antibiotics those bacteria are susceptible to.

When available, the test results will either confirm the initial choice, or influence the doctor’s decision to prescribe a different antibiotic.

Take urinary tract infections (UTIs), for example. Most are caused by E. coli and there are antibiotics that reliably treat these infections.

Data from the thousands of pathology tests performed each year on the E. coli from other people’s UTIs helps inform the doctor’s choice of empiric antibiotic for you, as do the clinical guidelines.

The doctor can therefore be reasonably confident in prescribing that antibiotic while you wait for the test results from your urine sample. You’ll either get better and need no further intervention, or you’ll come back to the doctor, by which time your test results should be available to fine-tune the choice of antibiotic.

Read more: Health Check: I’m taking antibiotics – when will they start working?

Why it’s important to get the right antibiotic

Naturally, you want to receive an antibiotic that will effectively treat your infection. But what’s wrong with taking an antibiotic that does the job too well or, conversely, is ineffective?

Antibiotics that are too strong will not only clear your infection but will also kill other good bacteria, disrupting your microbiome and possibly causing other knock-on effects.

On the other hand, an ineffective antibiotic will not only fail to treat the infection adequately, it can still cause side effects and disrupt your microbiome.

A broader consideration for the judicious use of antibiotics is that overuse, or ineffective use, contributes unnecessarily to the development of antibiotic resistance. All antibiotic use promotes resistance in other bacteria they come in contact with, so minimising and optimising their targeted use is important.

The right antibiotic choice for your infection is a complex decision that must often be made before key additional evidence to support the decision is available.

As test results become available, the treatment antibiotics may be refined, changed or even stopped.

Read more: We can reverse antibiotic resistance in Australia. Here’s how Sweden is doing it

– ref. I’m taking antibiotics – how do I know I’ve been prescribed the right ones? – http://theconversation.com/im-taking-antibiotics-how-do-i-know-ive-been-prescribed-the-right-ones-122868

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Will Steffen, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University

Those who say “I told you so” are rarely welcomed, yet I am going to say it here. Australian scientists warned the country could face a climate change-driven bushfire crisis by 2020. It arrived on schedule.

For several decades, the world’s scientific community has periodically assessed climate science, including the risks of a rapidly changing climate. Australian scientists have made, and continue to make, significant contributions to this global effort.

I am an Earth System scientist, and for 30 years have studied how humans are changing the way our planet functions.

Read more: Conservation scientists are grieving after the bushfires — but we must not give up

Scientists have, clearly and respectfully, warned about the risks to Australia of a rapidly heating climate – more extreme heat, changes to rainfall patterns, rising seas, increased coastal flooding and more dangerous bushfire conditions. We have also warned about the consequences of these changes for our health and well-being, our society and economy, our natural ecosystems and our unique wildlife.

Today, I will join Dr Tom Beer and Professor David Bowman to warn that Australia’s bushfire conditions will become more severe. We call on Australians, particularly our leaders, to heed the science.

The more we learn, the worse it gets

Many of our scientific warnings over the decades have, regrettably, become reality. About half of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef have been killed by underwater heatwaves. Townsville was last year decimated by massive floods. The southeast agricultural zone has been crippled by intense drought. The residents of western Sydney have sweltered through record-breaking heat. The list could go on.

All these impacts have occurred under a rise of about 1℃ in global average temperature. Yet the world is on a pathway towards 3℃ of heating, bringing a future that is almost unimaginable.

How serious might future risks actually be? Two critical developments are emerging from the most recent science.

First, we have previously underestimated the immediacy and seriousness of many risks. The most recent assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that as science progresses, more damaging impacts are projected to occur at lower increases in temperature. That is, the more we learn about climate change, the riskier it looks.

Read more: ‘This crisis has been unfolding for years’: 4 photos of Australia from space, before and after the bushfires

For Australia, a 3℃ world would likely lead to much harsher fire weather than today, more severe droughts and more intense rainfall events, more prolonged and intense heatwaves, accelerating sea-level rise and coastal flooding, the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and a large increase in species extinctions and ecosystem degradation. This would be a tough continent to survive on, let alone thrive on.

The city I live in, Canberra, experienced an average seven days per year over 35℃ through the 1981-2010 period. Climate models projected that this extreme heat would more than double to 15 days per year by 2030. Yet in 2019 Canberra experienced 33 days of temperatures over 35℃.

Second, we are learning more about ‘tipping points’, features of the climate system that appear stable but could fundamentally change, often irreversibly, with just a little further human pressure. Think of a kayak: tip it a little bit and it is still stable and remains upright. But tip it just a little more, past a threshold, and you end up underwater.

Features of the climate system likely to have tipping points include Arctic sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet, coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest, Siberian permafrost and Atlantic Ocean circulation.

Heading towards ‘Hothouse Earth’?

These tipping points do not act independently of one another. Like a row of dominoes, tipping one could help trigger another, and so on to form a tipping cascade. The ultimate risk is that such a cascade could take the climate system out of human control. The system could move to a “Hothouse Earth” state, irrespective of human actions to stop it.

Hothouse Earth temperatures would be much higher than in the pre-industrial era – perhaps 5–6℃ higher. A Hothouse Earth climate is likely to be uncontrollable and very dangerous, posing severe risks to human health, economies and political stability, especially for the most vulnerable countries. Indeed, Hothouse Earth could threaten the habitability of much of the planet for humans.

Tipping cascades have happened in Earth’s history. And the risk that we could trigger a new cascade is increasing: a recent assessment showed many tipping elements, including the ones listed above, are now moving towards their thresholds.

It’s time to listen

Now is the perfect time to reflect on what science-based risk assessments and warnings such as these really mean.

Two or three decades ago, the spectre of massive, violent bushfires burning uncontrollably along thousands of kilometres of eastern Australia seemed like the stuff of science fiction.

Read more: View from The Hill: Morrison should control that temper in Liberal climate debate

Now we are faced with more than 10 million hectares of bush burnt (and still burning), 29 people killed, more than 2,000 properties and several villages destroyed, and more than one billion animals sent to a screaming, painful death.

Scientists are warning that the world could face far worse conditions in the coming decades and beyond, if greenhouse gas emissions don’t start a sharp downward trend now.

Perhaps, Australia, it’s time to listen.

– ref. Scientists hate to say ‘I told you so’. But Australia, you were warned – http://theconversation.com/scientists-hate-to-say-i-told-you-so-but-australia-you-were-warned-130211

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Briony Towers, Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University

Children and young people have been deeply impacted by the current bushfire crisis. Schools have been destroyed and thousands of houses have burnt down. Hazardous air pollution is causing major public health concerns and the devastating impacts on animals and wildlife is leading to emotional distress.

Many children – like 11-year-old Finn who drove a boat with his mother, brother and dog on board to safety – have been directly involved in the emergency response. Vast numbers of tourists have also been affected, many of them children.

This shows how essential it is for all children and young people, regardless of their geographic location in Australia, to have appropriate education about bushfire prevention, mitigation, preparedness and response.

Recommended for 80 years

The 1939 report of the royal commission into the Victorian Black Friday bushfires noted:

probably the best means of prevention and protection is that of education, both of adults and children.

It recommended that all schools, in the city and country, make “fire prevention a real part of the curriculum”.

Similar recommendations were later made by the Bushfire Review Committee following the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires and the 2004 National Inquiry on Bushfire Mitigation and Management.

But despite this history, the final report of the 2009 royal commission into Victoria’s Black Saturday fires noted those recommendations were never fully implemented. The commission handed down recommendation six, which attempted to rectify those past failures:

Victoria [should] lead an initiative of the Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs to ensure that the national curriculum incorporates the history of bushfire in Australia and that existing curriculum areas, such as geography, science and environmental studies include elements of bushfire education.

Following this, Victoria took the lead during consultations on the Australian Curriculum in 2012. It obtained agreement from other states to include elements of bushfire education in the curriculum.

As a result, year five geography in the Australian Curriculum now includes “the impact of bushfires or floods on environments and communities, and how people can respond”. More specifically, this content includes:

• mapping the location, frequency and severity of bushfires or flooding in Australia

• explaining the impacts of fire on Australian vegetation and the significance of fire damage on communities

• researching how prevention, mitigation and preparedness minimise the harmful effects of bushfires or flooding.

This content, or slight variations of it, is found in all state and territory curricula.

The Australian Curriculum for year six science now includes “recognising that science can inform choices about where people live and how they manage natural disasters”, and science in year nine includes “investigating how ecosystems change as a result of events such as bushfires, drought and flooding”.

Read more: We have already had countless bushfire inquiries. What good will it do to have another?

However, the implementation and effectiveness of this curriculum has not been reviewed at a state, territory or national level since it was developed. Given the curriculum isn’t always taught in the same way as it is written, we should not assume bushfire education is being delivered as intended, or that it is being delivered at all.

What works best

One problem with the Australian Curriculum content statements is that they are relatively abstract and detached from children’s lived experiences.

One of the authors conducted interviews with children aged 8-12 to find out their knowledge of bushfire emergency responses. Children revealed many misconceptions about bushfire safety, which often came from a lack of knowledge about bushfire behaviour.

For example, children often assume bushfires only travel through direct flame contact and think a nonflammable physical barrier (such as a river, a road or a brick wall) will prevent a bushfire from reaching their property. But burning embers can travel many kilometres ahead of the fire front and ember attack is a major cause of home ignitions.

Such misconceptions are best addressed by making bushfire education more relevant to their own lives. Children need to explore and understand vulnerability to bushfire in their own communities as well as their capacity for reducing risk.

Read more: A familiar place among the chaos: how schools can help students cope after the bushfires

Bushfire education in schools is also more effective when taught across the curriculum, rather than as isolated topics. One example is the bushfire education program at Victoria’s Strathewen Primary School for students in grades five and six. It incorporates science, art, civics and citizenship, design, English and geography.

A recent evaluation of the program showed it increased children’s knowledge of local bushfire risks and the actions people can take to manage them. It also helped increase children’s confidence for sharing their knowledge with others, gave them a sense of empowerment and reduced bushfire-related anxieties.

The program’s benefits extended to families, including increased bushfire planning at home with more participation from children in the process.

Other research shows teachers can better develop curricula that is sensitive to local social, environmental and cultural contexts when they have technical support from emergency services. They also need access to local expertise in topics such as bushfire behaviour, emergency management planning, and Indigenous cultural burning.

Read more: Aboriginal fire management – part of the solution to destructive bushfires

Rather than another royal commission, Australia would benefit from an expert panel review of bushfire education. This would examine the best ways to enable teachers to deliver bushfire education that draws on local capacities for bushfire management including Indigenous practices; promotes children’s participation in bushfire safety activities; and leverages community partnerships with schools.

Students need to become life-long bushfire learners, rather than memorising content from 2020 which will go rapidly out of date in our changing climate.

– ref. Bushfire education is too abstract. We need to get children into the real world – http://theconversation.com/bushfire-education-is-too-abstract-we-need-to-get-children-into-the-real-world-129789

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jolanda Jetten, Professor, School of Psychology, ARC Laureate Fellow, The University of Queensland

If you’ve ever dreamt of fame and fortune, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle turning their backs on the royal lifestyle might seem churlish. So too their desire to be “financially independent”.

As a senior royal, Harry is at the height of his popularity – a popularity that marrying Markle has only amplified.

On top of the millions he has inherited from his mother and great grandmother, he gets millions more annually, both from his cut of the “sovereign grant” paid by the British government and the allowance from his father (from the revenues of Duchy of Cornwall estate).

Harry and Meghan aren’t exiting the family firm penniless, but if they stayed they would be looked after in luxury for the rest of their lives.

Read more: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle: why half in, half out just isn’t an option for royals

Madness? No. Research suggests Harry and Meghan would be well and truly in their right minds to be sick of royal fame and fortune.

Psychologists, economists and philosophers have confirmed three things. First, money can’t buy happiness. Second, we want to feel we have earned our success and popularity. Third, being looked after from the cradle to the grave has its downsides.

In short, having everything handed to you on a platter just isn’t satisfying.

Money doesn’t buy happiness

Even though this statement is arguably a cliché, there is good evidence it’s true. While money buys happiness up to a point, the positive effects of money on happiness level off once individuals have obtained enough wealth to live a comfortable life.

This relationship has been observed at the country level, with multiple studies showing that, once a nation reaches a certain level of wealth, national happiness does not increase in parallel with extra wealth. This is known as the Easterlin paradox. According to economist John Helliwell, a co-editor of the World Happiness Report, the social context – marriage and family, ties to friends and neighbours, workplace ties, civic engagement, trustworthiness and trust – is more important than wealth.

One reason given for why wealth doesn’t buy individuals any more happiness after a certain point is that money becomes both a reason and means to distance ourselves from others. To paraphrase Christopher Ryan, author of Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, what people tend to do with extra money is buy separation, whereas researchers “have concluded again and again that the single most reliable predictor of happiness is feeling embedded in a community”.

Extraordinary wealth, then, sets us against what we are programmed to do by evolution: seek out the company of others and band together in a community. Research has repeatedly shown this has a huge mental health cost.

Read more: Loneliness is a social cancer, every bit as alarming as cancer itself

Importantly, too, how we earn our money affects how much we enjoy it. Research among more than 4,000 millionaires in the US, for example, showed those who were “self-made” were moderately happier than those who inherited their wealth.

Read more: Measures of happiness tell us less than economics of unhappiness

Taken together, these factors help explain why Harry and Meghan’s wealth might, psychologically speaking, be more curse than blessing.

The popularity paradox

Most of us, particularly teenagers, crave popularity. According to a YouGov poll, Harry is the second-most-popular member of the British royal family – pipped only by Queen Elizabeth. Some are convinced he won’t keep this popularity without his royal status.

Why would someone want to give up being liked and loved by stepping out of the limelight?

Because psychological research shows people feel less pride in their achievements if they attribute it to external reasons. In this case, that would being born as a royal for Harry, and being pretty and marrying into a royal family for Meghan. For their popularity and success to mean something, they would need some “internal attribution” – that it has something to do with their own abilities, effort and skill.

In a world that values meritocracy, as Alain de Botton argues, we need to “own our success” — the very thing Harry and Meghan cannot do as royals.

Trapped by certainty

Most of us aspire to being financially secure for the rest of our lives. Many of us would give a lot to know what lies ahead.

But while there is comfort in some sense of security and predictability, knowing exactly what the future holds might be a curse. This is because humans thrive also on feeling a sense of freedom and choice.

So just as having no certainty can take its mental toll, so does feeling one’s future is totally predetermined and that you have no real control over the way your life will unfold.

Psychologists call the motivation to regain a freedom after it has been lost reactance – and this might be something strong within someone, for example, who has lost freedom due to marrying into a high-profile family.

Seizing control

Do the reasons above explain why Harry and Meghan have left the royal fold? We can’t say that. Only they know their motivations.

But what we do know is that all the research points to fortune, fame and security not necessarily leading to a good, happy life. These things can in fact be burdens, bringing out our worst, not our best.

Read more: The paradox of happiness: the more you chase it the more elusive it becomes

That happiness comes more from community connection, merit, effort and making our own decisions is good news for the rest of us. Let’s hope it works out for Harry and Meghan too.

– ref. The science backs Harry and Meghan turning in their royal privilege. Fame and fortune aren’t the keys to happiness – http://theconversation.com/the-science-backs-harry-and-meghan-turning-in-their-royal-privilege-fame-and-fortune-arent-the-keys-to-happiness-130132

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danielle Wood, Program Director, Budget Policy and Institutional Reform, Grattan Institute

In public, the government is crab-walking away from its commitment to a budget surplus, saying since the bushfires that other things have become more important.

Asked directly on Tuesday whether he was prepared to sacrifice this year’s projected surplus to help the bushfire recovery effort, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said:

Our focus is on delivering the services and support to people in need. That’s what we’ve been doing.

But less-publicly, and little noticed in the pre-Christmas release of the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook just before Christmas, the government has quietly buried long-standing targets for restraining spending.

Jettisoning these targets provides it with more wriggle room to increase spending to respond to things such as the bushfires and to boost the economy should it need to in 2020 and beyond.

Read more: 5 things MYEFO tells us about the economy and the nation’s finances

Under the Charter of Budget Honesty Act 1998 every government must release a fiscal strategy statement alongside the Budget.

The statement is a list of the government’s budget targets. One long-standing target is “to achieve surpluses on average over the economic cycle”. Others relate to spending, tax collections, and public debt.

They are not binding but they provide a useful guide to the government’s thinking.

A looser straitjacket

Revisions to these targets can signal changes to the government’s approach.

In the pre-Christmas Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), the government significantly scaled back its targets – both in number and ambition.

For example, the budget repair strategy it adopted in 2014 committed it to “deliver budget surpluses building to at least 1% of GDP by 2023-24”.

Read more: Surplus before spending. Frydenberg’s risky MYEFO strategy

The strategy has been reproduced in every budget since then, although in 2017 the 2023-24 deadline was extended to “as soon as possible”.

In December’s MYEFO more wriggle room was added, with the surpluses of at least 1% of GDP to be reached only “when economic circumstances permit”.

Spot the difference

Another component of the original repair strategy was that “new spending initiatives will be more than offset by reductions in spending elsewhere in the budget”.

In other words: if the government wanted to announce a new spending policy, it had to find savings elsewhere to cover the cost.

Targets missing

This target does not appear in MYEFO. A softer replacement says the government intends to “pursue budget savings to make room for spending priorities”.

This relaxing of the purse strings is already evident: the new spending measures in MYEFO on aged-care home packages, bringing forward infrastructure spending, and drought assistance are significant costs that were not paid for by spending reductions elsewhere.

Nor has the government provided any indication that its bushfire relief measures will be funded through savings.

Gone: the commitment to cut the government’s share of the economy over time

The budget repair strategy also required improvements in the budget position due to favourable economic circumstances to be “banked to the bottom line”. That target has now been removed all together.

The medium-term (10-year) fiscal strategy has also been amended to remove some of the more ambitious spending-control targets.

One was to reduce the government’s share of the economy over time.

That target has now gone, even though shrinking government spending as a share of the economy is crucial to the budget projections of growing surpluses and declining net debt over the decade.

The obvious question is – why?

The government is making big spending easier

The government might argue that it no longer needs a budget repair strategy because it expects to a deliver a surplus this year.

But its strategy was always more ambitious than a single surplus.

It wanted to reach continuing surpluses of 1% of GDP. Surplus forecasts of between 0.2% and 0.4% of GDP over the next four years indicate it is still well short of achieving them.

More likely is that it recognises that some of its targets were going to be difficult to meet.

Read more: The big budget question is why the surplus wasn’t big

It has already failed on a number of occasions to offset new spending with savings. Around half of this year’s upside from stronger-than-expected commodity prices and employment growth was used to fund tax cuts and extra spending rather than banked to the budget bottom line.

As the Parliamentary Budget Office has pointed out, it becomes even harder to hold down spending as the budget improves.

This is all the truer amid the need for bushfire reconstruction.

It’s better to shift goal posts than repeatedly fail to score

Another possible explanation is that the government is clearing the way for fiscal stimulus. To date it has relied on the efforts of the Reserve Bank and state governments to boost lacklustre economic growth.

Reserve Bank governor Phil Lowe, along with many economists, has argued that it should do more.

In taking off its self-imposed spending straitjacket, it is giving itself room to heed the governor’s call.

Read more: We asked 13 economists how to fix things. All back the RBA governor over the treasurer

– ref. New year, new strategy? Unheralded change to budget targets creates space for stimulus – http://theconversation.com/new-year-new-strategy-unheralded-change-to-budget-targets-creates-space-for-stimulus-129690

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sophie Pezzutto, PhD Candidate in Anthropology, Australian National University

“Porn is the billboard. Cam is the product,” my housemate and porn performer in Las Vegas tells me.

She makes most of her money from camming: a form of live streaming, where viewers tip for a sexual performance via webcam. For her, performing in porn films is now more of an ad rather than a source of income.

Performers today are better thought of as internet entrepreneurs, generating income from a range of activities beyond porn and using social media to market themselves.

Or, as I have named them, “porntropreneurs”.

Due to internet piracy and the widespread availability of online amateur pornography, today’s commercial porn studios face ever-narrowing profit margins. The studios are no longer able to provide a stable income and regular shoots for most porn performers.

Porn performers now earn income from camming, self-produced videos, subscriptions from monetised social media platforms such as OnlyFans, escorting, phone sex, sexting, dating “sugar daddies” and selling their underwear to fans online.

Read more: Why adult video stars rely on camming

Once, porn stars were simply performers. Now, being successful means managing a small online business – requiring a whole new range of skills to succeed.

Performers today have to be technically savvy in operating numerous online platforms and apps like OnlyFans and NiteFlirt. They have to be responsive to changes in remuneration models and algorithms, and prioritise the most profitable income streams to optimise revenue and minimise workload. They also have to be self-disciplined when it comes to scheduling and producing their own productions.

It’s all about the brand

In this online world, porntropreneurs crucially rely on self-branding as the glue that holds their diverse range of sexual and erotic services together.

Just as Apple invests resources in marketing to garner a devout following, a strong personal brand allows performers to attract loyal fans with a promise of high-quality content and the fulfilment of a particular fantasy. This, in turn, helps performers to stand out from the many amateur pornographers who constantly upload free material.

“Fans seek you out to learn more about you,” one performer tells me. “You are a fantasy and you’re building that world for them.”

From platinum blonde Baywatch bombshell, to 1950s pinup model, to tattooed rock chick, to Midwestern girl-next-door, porn is about selling fantasies. The ability to embody a particular fantasy especially well is what distinguishes the porn performer from the porn star.

To brand themselves and create this online persona, porntropreneurs use social media in much the same way other online influencers do.

Performers organise photo shoots for their various social media accounts, do Q&As with fans on Instagram, post behind-the-scenes material on Twitter, and vlog about their daily lives on YouTube.

“I do [Instagram] stories every three hours,” a performer says. “It’s a lot of work. Doesn’t matter if you’re ill, you have to do it. Consistently.”

More content shared translates into more followers, which ultimately means more income. Viewers click on links during videos or in posts that take them to websites where they can buy clips or join the current cam show.

Similar to other social media influencers who advertise sponsored products, performers may lock in sponsored partnerships from sex toy brands, beauty clinics and even marijuana dispensaries.

In many instances, performers have to be careful as social media platforms increasingly target sex workers and shut down their accounts.

“It’s frustrating, because you’ll see these movie stars naked in sexual ways on their Instagram posts, and everybody will be like ‘You’re a beautiful, strong woman! How brave of you to do this!’ and then I pose in an artistic way and my stuff gets flagged,” one performer laments.

Porn is a mirror of our times

Pornography is a set of cultural practices reflective of our political, economic, technological and social circumstances.

From being a battleground against rapid social and economic changes in the late 1800s to becoming a flashpoint in the 1970s and ’80s around issues of sexism and violence against women, porn has always been about more than just smutty images. It is part of society, and so reflects society.

The rise of the porntropreneur can, in a similar vein, be used to understand some of the broader economic and social issues of today. From freelance journalists to aspiring academics, professionals in today’s gig economy are expected to be independent, flexible, constantly online, always hustling and able to market themselves.

Porn performers, as my research shows, are no different.

– ref. The rise of the ‘porntropreneur’: even hustlers need side hustles in the gig economy – http://theconversation.com/the-rise-of-the-porntropreneur-even-hustlers-need-side-hustles-in-the-gig-economy-129067

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Harvey-Smith, Professor and Australian Government’s Women in STEM Ambassador, UNSW

Engineering skills underpin the functioning of our societies and economies. As we face the global challenges presented by a changing climate, food and water scarcity, loss of biodiversity and globalisation, these skills will only become more important.

In Australia, we have a high demand for qualified engineers but we train relatively few compared with similar industrialised nations.

As a consequence, about half of Australia’s engineers come from other countries. While skilled migration is an important and largely positive element of our economy, relying on skilled workers from overseas could leave us vulnerable to factors outside our control.

Extending the talent pool

One part of the engineering pipeline problem is the lack of diversity in those who engage with the subject.

Industry values diversity because it boosts innovation and improves financial performance. Despite numerous outreach and engagement programs and initiatives, however, only a small fraction of undergraduate engineering students are women.

In vocational training, the number is less than one in ten; at universities it’s around one in six.

This enormous disparity means women are missing out on designing the future. It also means that engineering challenges are being tackled from a narrow set of perspectives.

A search for new ideas

In 2019 the deans of engineering at Monash University, the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales created the Engineering for Australia Taskforce. The goal of the taskforce is to find ways to boost the numbers of women applying for university engineering programs.

The taskforce has two major concerns. First, engineering enrolments do not reflect the diversity of the Australian population, particularly gender diversity. Second, engineering has a low visibility in schools and society in general.

Read more: Study of 1.6 million grades shows little gender difference in maths and science at school

Today, the taskforce launched a new report that explores what factors affect girls’ participation in engineering.

The report is authored by Professor Deborah Corrigan and Dr Kathleen Aikens from Monash University. Based on a review of international peer-reviewed research, they argue that engineering urgently needs to rebrand itself.

What can be done

The report identifies three key actions:

• Create an inclusive vision for STEM and engineering to address stereotypes. This vision will invite and welcome excluded groups to see engineering careers as a real possibility

• Work with the education sector to create a STEM and engineering identity in schools, by making engineering activities prominent, positive and relevant

• Evaluate engineering intervention programs to find out what works.

Potential interventions could involve changes to the school curriculum, adding extracurricular activities or through media campaigns, or something else.

Engineering identity

The lack of an “engineering identity” in schools is a persistent problem and one that resonates particularly strongly with me.

As Australia’s Women in STEM Ambassador, I have visited schools and observed science classes in every state and territory of Australia. I have seen students carrying out sophisticated engineering projects that tackle important societal and environmental challenges.

Often, students don’t recognise that what they are doing is engineering. Students either don’t understand what engineering is, or they don’t see engineering as an attractive career.

Read more: ‘Walking into a headwind’ – what it feels like for women building science careers

Ask a year 9 student if she wants to design a system for rare pygmy possums to safely cross a highway, and you will probably get an enthusiastic yes.

Ask the same student if she wants to be a mechanical engineer, and the response may be lukewarm at best.

So identifying engineering by name where it happens in schools, emphasising the social context of engineering and socialising female role models in engineering are all important steps.

Plan and evaluate

As with all educational interventions, it is vital to plan carefully based on specific desired outcomes and evaluate how effective the program has been.

This will ensure dollars are well spent, and also provide a framework for future educational programs. Evaluation lets us learn the best ways to engage target groups in strategically important areas of training or study for Australia’s economy.

The Engineering for Australia Taskforce report provides important engineering-specific information. Its recommendations are consistent with those of the Australian Academy of Science’s broader Women in STEM Decadal Plan, which aims to guide interventions to boost STEM engagement.

The taskforce, my office (the Office of the Women in STEM Ambassador) and the broader STEM sector will be working hard to implement these recommendations across Australia. Together, we can achieve a more inclusive, creative innovation sector and a more resilient economy.

– ref. Australia needs more engineers. And more of them need to be women – http://theconversation.com/australia-needs-more-engineers-and-more-of-them-need-to-be-women-130282

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicola Hancock, Lead, Mental Health Stream, Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) promises a life-changing opportunity for Australians living with disabilities to get the supports they need to engage and participate fully in their communities.

The size, complexity and rapid roll-out of the NDIS meant that teething problems would inevitably arise.

An independent review, released yesterday, shows these problems are particularly serious for people with mental illnesses – also known as psychosocial disabilities.

People with a mental illness were the last group to be included in the NDIS. Initial planning focused on physical and intellectual disability, failing to recognise the unique needs and challenges of people with psychosocial disabilities.

While some refinements have occurred in the years since the roll out, more changes are needed to make it easier for eligible Australians with a severe mental illness to get into the NDIS, and then get the supports they need.

Read more: The NDIS is changing. Here’s what you need to know – and what problems remain

Why it’s hard to get into the NDIS

To gain access to the NDIS, people need to gather and submit evidence to prove that their mental illness results in a disability.

Sometimes a mental illness does not have a long-term effect on the person’s ability to study, work or look after themselves. These people don’t have a psychosocial disability and they don’t need the NDIS.

However mental illnesses – including schizophrenia, depression, and a range of other types of illness – do often have a long-term effect on a person’s ability to do these everyday activities. This is when their mental illness results in a psychosocial disability and the NDIS is needed.

To gain access to the NDIS, they also need to prove that this disability is permanent.

This can be incredibly difficult.

Many people with a severe mental illness don’t recognise they have an illness or disability and don’t access supports and treatments.

They may be unaware that they’re potentially eligible, or too unwell or fearful to engage with the NDIS, unless someone reaches out and builds their trust over time.

People with psychosocial disabilities often live transient lives, disconnected from or only sporadically involved with mental health services. This means they won’t have the evidence they need to prove permanency.

Another barrier is that psychosocial disabilities, unlike other types of disability, typically fluctuate. Many people – whether they have schizophrenia, depression or another mental illness – have times where they’re unable to do even the most basic tasks needed to look after themselves and just getting out of bed is a struggle, while at other times their illness has less impact.

Finally, a mismatch between the NDIS language of disability, and the strengths-focused language that mental health services use, can create additional barriers to accessing the system.

While NDIS requires the person to be “permanently impaired”, clinicians strive to focus on hope and the potential of living a meaningful life. So they avoid using hopeless language such as “permanent”. If clinicians don’t use disability-related language in evidence they provide, the person is likely to be assessed as ineligible.

How to make it easier to get into the NDIS

The proposed solutions in this week’s independent review mirror those suggested by the more than 80 Australian mental health organisations that participated in our two national studies.

There is now strong evidence on what would make it easier for people with psychosocial disabilities to access the NDIS. This includes:

• assertive yet respectful and skilled outreach to those who are hard to engage

• stronger, more targeted support to help people navigate the NDIS

• better training and support for assessors to understand the fluctuating nature of psychosocial disabilities

• assessments that consider a span of time, not just how a person is functioning in the moment.

Read more: The NDIS is delivering ‘reasonable and necessary’ supports for some, but others are missing out

They are on the NDIS, now what?

Even if a person has successfully navigated the application process and are assessed as eligible, they might encounter problems accessing services that meet their needs.

These problems can include:

• inappropriate NDIS plans: a lack of understanding of mental illness can lead to plans that are more relevant for a person with a physical disability. (An NDIS plan is a package of services allocated to a particular person based on their initial NDIS assessment)

• inability to coordinate services: depending on the complexity of a person’s disability, they may need help to organise appropriate services. But this help isn’t always available. This can result in the person not using the funding in their plan

• thin markets: appropriate services may not be available because they’re either not offered nearby, or are too expensive to be accessible through NDIS funds. This is a particular problem for people in rural and remote regions

Read more: Women, rural and disadvantaged Australians may be missing out on care in the NDIS

• poorly trained workforce: untrained support workers often provide services with limited supervision, raising issues of both quality and safety

• inflexible plans: NDIS plans often aren’t flexible enough to account for the fluctuating needs of people with mental illnesses.

The NDIS needs a new, psychosocial-specific stream with trained assessors, increased flexibility of plans and recognition of the need for support coordination.

For the NDIS to live up to its potential it needs not only flexibility, but ongoing input from experts, including people living with mental illnesses and their families.

– ref. It’s hard for people with severe mental illness to get in the NDIS – and the problems don’t stop there – http://theconversation.com/its-hard-for-people-with-severe-mental-illness-to-get-in-the-ndis-and-the-problems-dont-stop-there-130198