The government has shaved its forecasts for both economic growth and the projected surplus for this financial year in its budget update released on Monday.
The Australian economy is now expected to grow by only 2.25% in 2019-20, compared with the 2.75% forecast in the April budget.
The projected surplus has been revised down from A$7.1 billion at budget time to $5 billion for this financial year.
By 2022-23 the surplus is projected to be tiny A$4 billion, less than half the $9.2 billion projected in April.
The revenue estimates have also been slashed, down from the pre-election economic and fiscal outlook (PEFO) by about $3 billion in 2019-20 and $32.6 billion over the forward estimates.
The official documents sought to put as positive a spin as possible on the worse economic figures:
Australia’s economy continues to show resilience in the face of weak momentum in the global economy, as well as domestic challenges such as the devastating effects of drought and bushfires.
While economic activity has continued to expand, these factors have resulted in slower growth than had been expected at PEFO.
The revised figures forecast growth will be 2.75% next financial year.
The impact of the drought is reflected in the fact farm GDP is expected to fall to the lowest level seen since 2007-08 in the millenium drought.
The downgrades will fuel calls already being made by the opposition and some stakeholders and commentators for economic stimulus.
But the government, which since the budget has brought forward some infrastructure and announced spending on aged care and drought assistance, is continuing to resist pressure for stimulus now, wishing to hold out until budget time.
The budget update – formally called the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook (MYEFO) – contains more bad news for workers’ wages.
Wages are forecast to rise in 2019-20 by 2.5%, compared with the forecast of 2.75% in the budget.
Employment growth remains at the earlier forecast level of 1.75% for this financial year, but the unemployment rate is slightly up in the latest forecast, from 5% at budget time to 5.25% in the update.
In its bring forward of new projects, the government is putting an extra $4.2 billion over the foreword estimates into new transport infrastructure projects.
Its extra spending on aged care will be almost $624 million over four years, in its initial response to the royal commission. This is somewhat higher than the $537 million announced by Scott Morrison in November.
While the projected surplus has been squeezed, the government continues to highlight the priority it gives it, saying that despite the revenue write downs, it expects cumulative surpluses over $23.5 billion over forward estimates.
Spending growth is estimated to be 1.3% annual average in real terms over the forward estimates. Payments as a share of GDP is estimated at 24.5% this financial year, reducing to 24.4% by 2022-23, which is below the 30 year average.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the update showed “the government is living within its means, and paying down Labor’s debt”.
he said “the surplus is never been an end in itself, but a means to an end. An end which is to reduce interest payments to free up money to be spent elsewhere across the economy.”
The government’s economic plan was “delivering continued economic growth and a stronger budget position.
“MYEFO demonstrates that we have the capacity and the flexibility to invest in the areas that the public need most.”
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dwan Price, Molecular Biologist and Postdoc @ Deakin AIRwatch pollen monitoring system., Deakin University
Food allergens are the scourge of the modern school lunchbox. Many foods contain proteins that can set off an oversized immune reaction and one of the fiercest is the humble peanut.
Around 3% of children in Australia have a peanut allergy, and only 1 in 5 of them can expect to outgrow it. For these unlucky people, even trace amounts of peanut can trigger a fatal allergic reaction.
But what sets the peanut apart from other nuts? Why is it so good at being an allergen?
To answer this, we have to explore the pathway from allergen to allergy, and just what it is about an allergen that triggers a response from the immune system.
Before coming into contact with the immune system, an allergen in food needs to overcome a series of obstacles. First it needs to pass through the food manufacturing process, and then survive the chemicals and enzymes of the human gut, as well as cross the physical barrier of the intestinal lining.
After achieving all of this, the allergen must still have the identifying features that trigger the immune system to respond.
Many food allergens successfully achieve this, some better than others. This helps us to understand why some food allergies are worse than others.
The most potent allergens – like peanuts – have many characteristics that successfully allow them to overcome these challenges, while other nuts display these traits to a lesser extent.
Strength in numbers
The first characteristic many allergenic foods have, especially peanuts, is strength in numbers. Both tree nuts and peanuts contain multiple different allergens. At last count, cashews contain three allergens, almonds have five, walnuts and hazelnuts have 11 each and peanuts are loaded with no less than 17.
Each allergen has a unique shape, so the immune system recognises each one differently. The more allergens contained in a single food, the higher the potency. Additionally, many of these allergens also have numerous binding sites for both antibodies and specialised immune cells, further increasing their potency.
Stronger through scorching
The first hurdle for a food allergen is the food manufacturing process. Many nuts are roasted prior to consumption. For most foods, heating changes the structure of proteins in a way that destroys the parts that trigger an immune response. This makes them far less potent as allergens.
This is not the case for many tree nuts: allergens in almonds, cashews and hazelnuts survived roasting with no loss of potency.
And for the major peanut allergens, it’s even worse. Roasting actually makes them more potent.
From here, the allergen will have to survive destruction by both stomach acid and digestive enzymes within the human gut. Many nut allergens have the ability to evade digestion to some degree.
Some simply have a robust structure, but peanut allergens actively inhibit some of the digestive enzymes of the gut. This helps them safely reach the small intestine, where the allergens then need to cross the gut lining to have contact with the immune system.
This is where peanut allergens really stand apart from most other allergens. They have the ability to cross the intestinal cells that make up the gut lining. Given their relative sizes, this is like a bus squeezing itself through a cat flap.
Peanut allergens accomplish this remarkable feat by altering the bonds that hold the gut cells together. They can also cross the lining by hijacking the gut’s own ability to move substances. Once across, the allergens will gain access to the immune system, and from there an allergic response is triggered.
Peanut allergens attack the bonds that hold intestinal cells together.Dr Dwan Price, Author provided
The combination of multiple allergens, numerous immune binding sites, heat stability, digestion stability, enzyme blocking, and the effect on the gut lining makes peanut a truly nasty nut.
Where to from here?
This leaves us with a nagging question: if peanuts are so potent, why doesn’t everyone develop a peanut allergy? We still don’t know.
Recently, a potential vaccine developed by researchers from the University of South Australia has shown promise in reprogramming the immune system of mice and blood taken from people with peanut allergy. Will this translate to a potential treatment for peanut allergy? We will have to wait and see.
For now, the more we learn about the action of allergens, and the more we understand their effects on our body, the more we can develop new ways to stop them. And eventually, we might outsmart these clever nuts for good.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn J. Whitaker, Senior Lecturer in New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity
This article is part of a series exploring gender and Christianity
“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” is a line I’ve heard more than once in Christian circles. The Bible is often evoked to support so-called traditional views about gender. That is, there are only two binary genders and that is the way God intended it. But is this really the case?
Claims about gender in the Bible usually begin with the creation narratives. But the Adam and Eve story is also not as straightforward as it might appear when it comes to gender, namely because in English, we miss the Hebrew wordplay.
Adam is not a proper name in Hebrew, but rather the transliteration into English of a Hebrew word a-d-m. Using the imagery of God as potter, “the adam” is a humanoid being created out of the adamah (the earth).
Biblical scholar Meg Warner writes we might best translate this person as “earth creature”. The first human appears genderless.
In fact, gender roles are only introduced into the story when a counterpart is made for the earthling, when this human being is separated into two. At that point, they both become gendered: “Eve” is called woman (ishah) taken from the man’s (ish) rib.
Some Christians have read a gender hierarchy into this text as Eve is called a helper – or “helpmate” in the old English versions – for Adam. This term, “helper”, does not indicate a subordinate status. It is a word frequently applied to God in the Bible, and so without any sense of inferiority.
On the sixth day, God created a gender spectrum
There’s no doubt traditional male-female gender roles are common in the Bible. After all, this is an ancient text that reflects the values of the societies from which it emerged.
In these societies, masculinity was the ideal and polygamy not uncommon. This makes it all the more astonishing there are moments of gender subversion and gender diversity found within the Bible’s pages.
Another creation story is found in the very first chapter of Genesis 1. It states:
God created the human in God’s image, in the image of God s/he created him; male and female God created them.
At first glance, this might seem obvious: God made two different, discrete sexes. But if we look at this line in its context, we see this creation account follows a poetic structure made up of a series of binaries that indicate the breadth of God’s creation: light and dark, seas and dry land, land creatures and sea creatures.
In the structure of the Genesis poem, these binaries are not discrete categories, but indications of a spectrum.
The sea and dry land merge on tidal plains. Some animals inhabit both land and sea. Darkness and light meet in the in-between spaces of dusk and dawn. God didn’t create night or day, but night and day, inclusive of everything in between.
If we apply this same poetic logic to humanity, a case can be made for sex and gender diversity built into the very fabric of creation. A creative diversity categorically called “good” by God.
Intersex and asexual affirmations
Queer and feminist scholars have highlighted other moments of gender subversion in the biblical text.
For instance, Jacob is “smooth” and “stays in the tent” – traditional female attributes in the ancient world. Yet he is chosen over his hairy, hunter brother to lead God’s people. Rabbi Jay Michaelson describes Jacob as “gender non-conforming”.
The Adam and Eve story is also not as straightforward as it might appear when it comes to gender.Shutterstock
Megan DeFranza is a theologian who works on the place of intersex people in Christianity. While acknowledging that intersex is a modern term, she argues we find traces of intersex persons in the Bible in the language of eunuchs.
Jesus’ comment in Matthew 19:12 that “some are born eunuchs” is acknowledgement he was aware of intersex people and passes no judgement on those who don’t fit traditional male-female sex categories. In this passage, Jesus both affirms heterosexual marriage as well as intersex and asexual persons.
This is not an isolated case of affirmation. Isaiah 56 speaks of God being pleased with eunuchs who come to the temple and in Acts 8, a eunuch is fully included in the new Christian community through baptism. In neither case is change required of them before they can join the community in worship.
Being an ancient text, the Bible obviously doesn’t use the same language nor reflect contemporary understandings of gender, including transgender or intersex persons.
So we cannot simply pull a sentence or two from the Bible as if it offers the final word on sex and gender. Not only does the Bible reflect a pre-scientific worldview but also because the multiplicity of voices will never be captured in this kind of proof-texting.
What we can say is that the Bible affirms in various ways the potential goodness of all humanity and the inclusion of those who diverge from male-female gender norms.
While many churches remain unsafe places for transgender and gender-diverse people, it is imperative to highlight these subversive moments in an otherwise patriarchal text that challenge narrow perspectives, both then and now.
Less than 1% of these people have been permanently resettled. This means more refugees than ever are living with insecure or temporary visas.
Our research, published today, shows living in this state of uncertainty is associated with poorer mental health outcomes, compared to refugees with secure, or permanent, visas.
But the news isn’t all bad. Insecure visa holders are also more likely to be engaged with the wider community.
In Australia, refugees have two potential resettlement pathways. Some will be granted refugee status before arriving in Australia and provided with permanent visas.
The rest arrive in Australia without a valid visa and subsequently apply for refugee status. They may only be granted temporary visas (for example, temporary protection visas, safe haven enterprise visas, or bridging visas) and may never receive a permanent visa. So there’s a large group of insecure visa holders living in the Australian community.
Insecure visa status is linked to poorer mental health
We surveyed 1,085 Arabic, Farsi, Tamil and English-speaking people from a refugee background. Our sample comprised 76% secure visa holders and 24% insecure visa holders. We compared the mental health, past and current experiences, and social engagement between those with a secure visa and those without.
We measured participants’ mental health outcomes based on their responses to standardised questions. Scores that indicated the presence of a mental illness were classified as a “probable diagnosis”.
In line with previous research on this topic, we show insecure visa holders reported significantly higher rates of mental illness compared to secure visa holders.
For example, around 49% of insecure visa holders had a probable diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) versus 30% of secure visa holders. Further, about 43% of insecure visa holders had a probable depression diagnosis versus 17% of secure visa holders.
Refugees with insecure visas who engage with social groups report higher levels of mental health.From shutterstock.com
Insecure visa holders reported having experienced twice the number of traumatic events before coming to Australia, compared to secure visa holders. They were especially likely to have been exposed to interpersonal trauma, such as torture or sexual assault.
Notably, insecure visa holders showed greater severity of mental health symptoms even after accounting for important factors such as prior exposure to trauma.
Insecure visa holders were 2.4 times more likely to report suicidal intent (that is, having a plan and/or having taken steps to end their life) compared to those with secure visa status.
Despite demonstrating substantially poorer mental health, insecure visa holders were no more functionally impaired in their daily lives (for example, in taking care of household responsibilities and other day-to-day tasks) compared to secure visa holders.
The importance of social connection
We also looked at our study participants’ social engagement. Insecure visa holders reported higher levels of engagement with social groups across the wider Australian community than secure visa holders: for example, they were more likely to be actively involved in sports groups and to volunteer for charity groups.
Insecure visa holders were also more likely to receive assistance from a charity or NGO, and non-refugee members of the Australian community, compared to secure visa holders.
We found this social engagement was associated with mental health benefits for insecure visa holders. For example, insecure visa holders who were members of more groups reported less suicidal intent than insecure visa holders with low group membership.
Ultimately, implementing more inclusive policies, which aim to facilitate a sense of permanence and security, is critical for supporting the mental health and well-being of refugees.
And despite experiencing significant psychological symptoms, refugees with insecure visas strive to form social connections and be productive members of the Australian community, which benefits their mental health.
So these findings also point to the role of the Australian community. Many of us will be able to empower refugees through fostering social connections.
Christmas is just around the corner. If you’re wondering what to get your child, your friends’ children, your nieces, nephews or basically any very young person in your life – I highly recommend picture books.
Many people can remember a favourite book when they were a kid. Some of my favourites were the Berenstain Bears with Papa Bear trying, unsuccessfully, to teach his children how to ride a bike or gather honey.
Sadly, a 2011 report from the UK showed the number of young people who say they own a book is decreasing. The report also showed a clear relationship between receiving books as presents and reading ability.
Children who said they had never been given a book as a present were more likely to be reading below the expected level for their age.
There are lots of benefits of reading aloud to young children, including developing children’s language and print awareness. These include knowing that the squiggles on the page represent words, and that the words tell a story.
Such knowledge gives children a head start when they go on to reading at school.
Adults should discuss ideas in books with children, as they occur, as opposed to just reading a book from start to finish. Talking about the pictures, or what has happened, can lead to rich conversations and enhance language development.
The more words you know, the simpler it is to recognise them and comprehend the meaning of the text. Children who read more become better readers and more successful students.
It’s important to have conversations with your kids about what you’re reading.from shutterstock.com
2. Books can increase children’s maths and science skills
Picture books show children maths and science concepts through a story, which helps kids grasp them easier.
Some books (like How Many Legs and How Big is a Million) explicitly explore concepts such as numbers. Other stories, like the Three Little Pigs, have concepts embedded in them. Children can learn about the properties of materials when adults talk about the strength of hay, sticks and bricks.
A study in the Netherlands found kindergarten children who were read picture books, and were engaged in discussions of the maths concepts in the books, increased their maths performance, compared to a control group of children who weren’t read these books.
Three Little Pigs can teach children about the properties of hay, bricks and sticks.from shutterstock.com
Early Learning STEM Australia has created a booklist which gives parents and teachers ideas for books that contain STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) ideas. These include:
Lucy in the City, where a cat loses her way home and an owl helps her
Dreaming Up, which contrasts children’s constructions with notable works of architecture.
3. Books are mirrors and windows
Nearly 30 years ago, children’s literature professor, Rudine Sims Bishop, wrote how books can be windows, through which we see other worlds. These windows can become sliding doors when we use our imaginations and become part of them.
Books can also be mirrors, when we see our own lives and experiences in them. In this way, they reaffirm our place in the world.
Books can help kids see into other worlds.from shutterstock.com
Children need both types of books to understand people come from different cultures and have different ways of thinking and doing things. Books can show that children of all cultures are valued in society.
Children who never see themselves represented in books may feel marginalised. Unfortunately, the majority of books feature white children or animals, so many children only experience books as windows.
Examples of books that show the lives of Indigenous children include Big Rain Coming and Kick with My Left Foot (which is also a great book about left and right).
4. Books can counter stereotypes
Children learn gender stereotypes from a very young age. Research shows by the age of six, girls are already less likely than boys to think girls are “really, really smart” and they begin to avoid activities thought to be for “really, really smart” children.
Picture books can challenge these and other stereotypes. Reading books that portray atypical behaviours such as girls playing with trucks or with girls in traditional male roles such as being doctors, scientists or engineers, can change children’s beliefs and activities.
Children who have more books at home end up more educated.from shutterstock.com
The City of Monash in Melbourne has created a list of children’s picture books that promote gender equality and challenge gender stereotypes. This includes one of my favourite books, The Paperbag Princess, who saves herself from a dragon and decides not to marry the prince after he complains she is a mess.
5. Just having more books makes you more educated
A study that looked at data from 27 countries, including Australia, found children growing up in homes with many books got three years more education than children from bookless homes. This was independent of their parents’ education, occupation and class.
Adults need to model good reading habits and their enjoyment of reading. Giving children a love of reading can be the best present we ever give.
With summer holidays around the corner, many Victorians may be thinking about offering their homes through a home-share platform, such as Airbnb, while they get away themselves. Airbnb’s terms of service describe home-share arrangements as a “licence”. Legally, a licence can be terminated at any time and a guest who does not leave is a trespasser.
However, in 2016 the Victorian Supreme Court decided home-share arrangements may constitute a lease. This decision indicates residential tenancy law may apply to all home-share arrangements where the host is away from the premises.
This would impose significant legal obligations on hosts, who would be regarded as landlords. Guests, if considered tenants, would have all the associated legal protections.
For example, if a guest refuses to leave the premises, the host/landlord would have to follow the eviction process required by tenancy law. This has happened in California. Australian courts will eventually have to decide this issue.
How did the court arrive at its decision?
The court’s decision involved a tenant who offered the premises to guests on Airbnb. The court decided the tenant had breached the terms of the lease by subletting the premises. The tenant was evicted, as tenants cannot sublet without the landlord’s consent under tenancy law.
The court focused on the relationship between the tenant and the guest and determined that the host had given “exclusive possession” of the premises to guests. In Victorian tenancy law, exclusive possession is required to create a lease.
The court said it did not matter that each guest’s stay was only a few days, or that the Airbnb terms described the arrangement as a “licence” rather than a lease.
Although the court’s decision applied to tenants in this case, logically the decision applies to all whole-of-premises home-share arrangements, including where the host owns the premises. This is because the legal test for creating a lease is the same as that for creating a sublease.
The decision is controversial because home sharing on Airbnb is similar to boarding arrangements (where the host provides accommodation and services such as cleaning), hotel rooms and serviced apartments. These arrangements are usually regarded as a licence, not a lease. This is because the host has access to the property during the guest’s stay (for example, to do cleaning), so exclusive possession is not given to the guest.
In fact, Airbnb arrangements are unlike typical tenancy agreements. They specify check-in and check-out times, furniture, linen and towels are usually provided, and “house rules” (for example, on noise levels and smoking) may restrict the guest’s use of the premises.
The situation may be different in other Australian states and territories, which, unlike Victoria, exclude from residential tenancies legislation agreements for the purpose of a holiday. However, not all home sharing is done for holiday purposes. For example, it’s also used for travel for business.
Legal uncertainty remains
The court’s decision means tenants who provide rented premises on Airbnb without the landlord’s consent may breach their own tenancy agreement and be evicted. However, the court stated that the particular circumstances of each case must be examined.
For example, hosts who provide only part of the premises (such as a bedroom and shared used of a kitchen) but who continue to reside in the premises will not be subletting. This is because they have not provided exclusive use of the premises.
However, if the host is away from the premises, then residential tenancy law may regulate home-share arrangements. This would give guests (now considered a tenant) stronger legal protections, including protection from eviction. The decision shows a court can ignore the description of the arrangement in an agreement if it determines exclusive possession has been provided.
Airbnb provides support to hosts and guests in the case of a dispute over a stay. It also provides compensation to hosts (akin to insurance) if guests damage the property or cause the host financial loss. However, if a host is found to have obligations under residential tenancy law, these obligations belong to the host/landlord, not to Airbnb.
The contentious aspect of the Supreme Court’s decision is its treatment of short-term hotel-like accommodation as a lease. However, it strongly suggests that residential tenancy law may regulate whole-of-premises home-share arrangements. That’s likely to come as a shock to Airbnb hosts – owners and renters alike.
As Christmas shopping ramps up, you may be getting a lot of emails offering you attractive discounts for a short period only. You may see flash sales or special deals that exhort you to “buy now” to avoid missing out.
These digital “time-limited” offers, as they are called, are actually an old sales tactic.
Those in the game of selling cars, for example, have long used the trick of alluding to that other very interested buyer who’s likely to return and snap up the bargain that’s before you. Telephone salespeople routinely offer deals that must be accepted during the call. Want time to think about it? Too bad.
Online time-limited sales work on the same basis, but with technology taking it to a whole new level. Now retailers can bombard you with offers that are highly customised and super-short – a deal, perhaps, for something you might have been searching online for, and now available at a discount only until midnight.
But for these tactics to work, our research suggests, requires finding a Goldilocks zone between being too pushy and not all. Time needs to be limited to deter you from searching elsewhere for a better deal. But paradoxically you also need enough time to convince yourself that buying is the best decision.
Experimenting with time limits
To find out what makes time-limited offers effective, I and my colleagues Robert Sugden and Mengjie Wang from the University of East Anglia ran experiments to see what leads people to accept or reject such offers.
What we found is that these offers leverage risk-aversion. That is, the more you dislike risk, the more likely it is you will take the bait and buy now.
In our experiments, using university students, we asked participants to complete 30 “price search” tasks. These tasks involved giving participants a “budget” and asking them to buy a product from six different price offers, shown to them sequentially with a few seconds between each. Any unspent money they got to keep.
Time-limited offers seek to deter you from searching elsewhere for a better deal.www.shutterstock.com
In half of the tasks they could consider all six offers before making their choice. In the other half, one of the first three offers would be time-limited, lapsing after either four or 12 seconds, which they could only accept before the next offer appeared.
We also varied, when participants accepted a time-limited offer, between showing them no more offers or showing all remaining offers immediately. This was to test if greater feedback (increasing the possibility of regret) reduced the probability of a time-limited offer being chosen.
Participants then did 15 related risk-taking tasks based on their choices in the tasks with time-limited options. This helped us determine what was going on with their choices.
A time paradox
Overall our results point to choosing time-limited options being linked to risk aversion. People generally prefer to secure a certain cake now over the uncertain possibility of a better cake in the future. We really do believe the old proverb that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
But there was a catch – and a big one. Somewhat paradoxically, people also need to think things through to jump on the time-limited offer. Time-limited offers were accepted more when participants had 12 seconds to decide rather than four seconds.
This indicates people need enough time to reflect on the task to decide they are better off going for the “safe” deal.
As we warn in our paper, one should be wary about extrapolating too directly from laboratory behaviour to real markets, but our results suggest time-limited offers do not rely on limits to the consumers’ ability to make a rational decision. When they work it is because they are mechanisms of search deterrence – restricting the consumers’ opportunities to compare available offers – amplified by risk aversion.
So businesses may be shooting themselves in the foot when they create offers that are too short, too pushy. If you’re like most people, you need time to reflect on the risk of not buying. If the offer is too fast and furious, you’re likely to just be turned off.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamin Nickl, Lecturer in International Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, University of Sydney
Jojo Rabbit is not Disney Studios’ first foray into Hitler parody. In 1943, it produced der Fuehrer’s Face – an anti-Nazi film inside Donald Duck’s nightmares.
Now, Disney is the Australian distributor of Jojo Rabbit, a story of a young boy whose imaginary friend (and buffoonish life coach) is Adolf Hitler.
In this dark satire, from the Polynesian-Jewish-New Zealand director Taika Waititi who brought us Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Nazi Germany is in its waning days. The Germans have all but lost the second world war but 10-year-old Johannes “Jojo” Betzel (Roman Griffin Davis) believes he, and he alone, will be the Aryan hero to turn the tide.
The boy’s imaginary friend, a hilariously incompetent Hitler (played by Waititi in blue contact lenses and the trademark moustache), cheers him on. When asked to kill a rabbit to get into the Hitler Youth, Jojo baulks, though he does almost manage to kill himself in a grenade stunt.
“You’re still the bestest, most loyal little Nazi I’ve ever met,” the fantasy Fuhrer enthuses.
Through children’s eyes
Themes and images of children have often been central in films exploring WWII. Steven Spielberg famously used “the girl in red coat” to create a powerfully moving symbol of innocence in Schindler’s List (1993).
Germany Year Zero (1948) focused on the life of children in Berlin.Tevere Film
Immediately after the war, a stream of films, including Roberto Rosselini’s Germany Year Zero (1948), Gerhard Lamprecht’s Somewhere in Berlin (1946), and Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948) looked at wartime trauma through injuries acquired by children.
Like Jojo’s grenade mishap, their wounds were permanent.
In war films, children’s perspectives don’t diminish the ghastliness of war. Quite the contrary. When war and its pervasive horror spills over from the battlefield and intrudes on their youth, viewers are appalled at its spread.
Containing that disease of war, curing it even, is where Waititi’s takedown of fascist group-think truly begins.
How will Jojo escape the brainwash army of Reichswehr propaganda parrots like Rebel Wilson’s Fräulein?
There are several steps. The first one for Jojo is finding out his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl in the attic.
Scarlett Johansson gives an enchanting performance as a single mum who tries to keep the embers of humanity and love in Jojo’s heart alive as he gets lost in Nazi doctrines of vile anti-Semitism.
Scarlett Johansson tries to counter Nazi brainwashing.Twentieth Century Fox
Jojo starts falling for Elsa Korr (Thomasin McKenzie), the hideaway in his attic, as her humanity – and his pre-pubescent hormones – triumph over fascist indoctrination. Through Jojo’s eyes, we see Elsa turn from monster into human as he comes back from the brink of fanatic hatred.
Waititi hides that innocent, simple love story under slapstick and a ton of special effects. The latter don’t always work. And some of the jokes fall flat.
But what works is the message that Jojo is both manipulated and self-manipulating. His Nazi hate is a cage of his own making, and Elsa is the key to unlocking it. She teaches him that empathy for those who we think are different from us is powerful.
Irreverent or irresponsible?
Hitler comedies have a long history. In 1940, Charlie Chaplin released The Great Dictator. Mel Brooks created The Producers in 1968.
Like Waititi, those filmmakers experienced how mining sombre Holocaust themes and hateful iconography for the ridiculous splits public reactions along extreme lines. The critics bemoaned that Levy committed only halfheartedly to a funny Hitler, making the film the worst thing a comedy can be: too harmless.
Wnendt faced another issue. He intercut his film with hidden camera footage of Germans reacting to the lead actor dressed as Hitler. People thought this was too much realism.
Waititi says he didn’t look at these forerunners and didn’t do any research on Hitler. He looked to literature instead.
Jojo Rabbit uses the masterful dramatic novel Caging Skies by New Zealand-Belgian author Christine Leuens as source material. The book doesn’t have the same generous scoops of comedy and tragedy found in Ladislav Fuks’ Mr. Theodore Mundstock, or in The Nazi and the Barber by Edgar Hilsenrath.
It’s all the more reason to recognise what Waititi has tried to accomplish. He had to negotiate between a book adaptation, Holocaust memory, and Hollywood.
Commenting on his motivation for making the film, Watiti, whose mother is Jewish, said: “I just want people to be more tolerant and spread more love and less hate”.
Jojo Rabbit opens across Australia on Boxing Day, check listings for advance screenings.
At the December 12 UK election, the Conservatives won 365 of the 650 House of Commons seats (up 48 since the 2017 election), Labour 202 (down 60), the Scottish National Party (SNP) 48 (up 13) and the Liberal Democrats 11 (down one).
The Conservatives won 56% of the seats and will have an 80-seat majority over all other parties. It is the Conservatives’ largest seat haul since 1987, and Labour’s lowest since 1935.
Popular votes were 43.6% Conservatives (up 1.2%), 32.1% Labour (down 7.9%), 11.6% Liberal Democrats (up 4.2%), 3.9% SNP (up 0.8%), 2.7% Greens (up 1.1%) and 2.0% Brexit party.
The Lib Dems thus lost a seat despite a 4% vote share increase, while the Greens won one seat and Brexit party none – that’s first-past-the-post. The Conservative vote share was the highest since 1979 for any party. Labour had a lower vote share in 2015.
In Scotland, the SNP won 48 of the 59 seats (up 13), the Conservatives six (down seven), the Lib Dems four (no net change) and Labour one (down six). Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson lost her seat. On popular votes, the SNP led the Conservatives by 45% to 25%, an 8% swing to the SNP.
The election means Britain will Leave the European Union by January 31 under Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, which was blocked by the previous parliament. Johnson has promised not to extend the transition period to implement a trade deal beyond December 2020, so January 2021 is likely to be when the real Brexit occurs.
This election was a realignment along Brexit referendum leave/remain lines that had been predicted to occur in the 2017 election. A key problem for Labour was that, while “leave” won the referendum by a narrow 51.9% to 48.1% margin, it carried 64% of seats owing to remainers clustering in the big cities.
I wrote for The University of Melbourne’s Election Watch that working class voters, who supported leave by 64-36, were likely to deliver Johnson a majority. There were many traditional Labour seats that flipped to the Conservatives, such as former Labour PM Tony Blair’s old seat of Sedgefield.
In the December 5-6 YouGov poll, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had a net -47 approval rating, while Johnson was at -13. Corbyn was at -34 with remainers and -67 with leavers, while Johnson was respectively at -61 and +42. Labour’s vote fell with both leavers and remainers, as this chart shows.
Much of Corbyn’s problems were caused by his reluctance to move from Labour’s successful 2017 pro-Brexit policy; this reluctance hurt him with remainers while leavers detested any move towards remain. As I argued in this Poll Bludger article, an explicitly pro-remain Labour leader would probably have been destroyed by accusations of betraying the Brexit referendum.
Corbyn’s left-wing agenda had far less appeal in 2019 than 2017 owing to greatly improved real wage growth. Before the June 2017 election, annual real wage growth had fallen to -0.5%. In the latest available data, real wage growth is up 1.7%. With the US economy continuing to perform well, it would be inadvisable for Democrats to select a left-wing nominee, such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
It’s not just UK Labour that has suffered from the desertion of lower-educated working class voters: the left unexpectedly lost the last US presidential election and last Australian federal election owing to this. Swings to the left among better-educated voters are not compensating yet.
After performing badly at the last three UK elections and the Brexit referendum, the UK polls did well this time. Most polls had the margin between the Conservatives and Labour at nine to 12 points, and four polls had it at either 11 or 12 points – the actual margin is 11.5 points.
Trump’s ratings rise
In the FiveThirtyEight aggregate, Donald Trump’s ratings with all polls are currently 41.9% approve, 53.2% disapprove, a net approval of -11.3%, up 1.4% since my November 20 US politics article. With polls of registered or likely voters, Trump’s ratings are 43.1% approve, 52.7% disapprove, a net approval of -9.6%, up 1.4% since November 20.
In the FiveThirtyEight impeachment tracker, 47.4% support removing Trump from office and 45.8% are opposed (46.8-45.2 support November 20).
In current general election head to head polling according to RealClearPolitics averages, Trump trails Joe Biden by 9.8%, Warren by 7.2%, Sanders by 8.4% and Pete Buttigieg by 4.1%.
In a Quinnipiac poll conducted in early December, Trump had a 54-42 approval rating on the economy – a record high for him. If the US economy continues to be strong until the November 2020 election, Trump has a good chance of re-election, especially given his likely Electoral College advantage.
In November, the US economy created 266,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate slipped 0.1% to just 3.5%. The US conducts two employment surveys every month: the headline jobs growth is from the establishment survey, and the unemployment rate from the household survey.
In this case, the household survey was weaker, with just 83,000 jobs added and the drop in unemployment explained by a fall in participation.
Owing to inflation of 0.3% in November, there was no real change in wages in that month. Over the year to November, real weekly and hourly wages were up a modest 1.1%.
Democratic contest
Seven weeks from the February 3 Iowa caucus, Biden leads in the national RealClearPolitics Democratic average with 28.4%, followed by Sanders at 18.2%, Warren at 15.8%, Buttigieg at 9.2% and Michael Bloomberg at 5.2%. No other candidate has more than 3%.
In Iowa, it’s Buttigieg 22.5%, Sanders 19.3%, Biden 18.0% and Warren 16.3%. In New Hampshire (February 11), it’s Sanders 19.0%, Buttigieg 17.7%, Biden 14.3% and Warren 13.3%. Biden continues to dominate in South Carolina (February 29) with 35%.
The next Democratic debate will be held on December 19; seven candidates have qualified. There will be four debates in January and February 2020, with the first on January 14.
Australian Newspoll: 52-48 to Coalition
Newspoll has become completely conducted using online methods; previously, it used a mixture of online methods and robopolling.
Since my last Conversation article, there have been two Newspolls by the new method. In late November, the Coalition took a 51-49 lead, (50-50 in the final Newspoll using the old method in early November).
In the latest Newspoll, conducted December 5-8, the Coalition had a 52-48 lead, a one-point gain for the Coalition. Primary votes were 42% Coalition (up one), 33% Labor (steady), 11% Greens (down one) and 5% One Nation (steady).
Scott Morrison had a net approval of -3, up six points. Anthony Albanese had a net approval of -1, also up six points. Morrison led as better PM by 48-34 (46-35 previously). The new Newspoll series appears to give the leaders harsher personal ratings than the old one.
Voters were asked to rate the leaders according to nine attributes. You can read about those results at The Poll Bludger.
So for all the talk of narrowing polls, tactical voting, and possible shocks leading to a hung parliament, Boris Johnson achieved a crushing victory over Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party in the UK’s general election of 2019. With an 80 or so seat majority in the House of Commons, Johnson can now deliver on his core promise to “get Brexit done”.
He can also shape the broader social and economic environment in tune with the instincts of those around him. They are, almost to a man and a woman, hard-right libertarian figures with a barely concealed contempt for the welfare state, the National Health Service, social benefits and all the other elements that compose the post-war consensus.
One of the tricks Johnson managed to pull off in this election was to paint himself as a saviour of public services, and and a leader untarnished by ten years of Tory austerity policies. The British public is in for a rude awakening when it finds out Johnson’s brand of rambling One Nation populism was a cover for a much tougher and more conservative agenda than many voters realise.
So the puzzle that many commentators are trying to figure out is how it is that a right wing figure of this kind could get one over on Corbyn who pitched his entire campaign on the promise to protect the health service and promote public ownership of key sectors such as the railways and the post office?
What became clear as the night unfolded is that former Labour constituencies in the Midlands and the north of the country have been, and still are, in favour of Brexit. Johnson promised to get Brexit done, and Labour did not. For much of the electorate, this was enough of a reason to cross well established political divides and tribal loyalties.
But it’s also clear that many voters didn’t trust Jeremy Corbyn. They saw him as too beholden to sectional interests, too evasive, too metropolitan and too left wing. Johnson, by contrast, came across as a capable if lovably bumbling figure who was able to articulate not only a clear line on Brexit, but also to distance himself from the legacy of destructive Tory policies. In the end it was Corbyn, not Johnson, who proved to be political Vegemite.
This proved a winning formula across England and most of Wales. But elsewhere, the story was rather different. In Scotland, the Nationalists improved their result from 2017, often at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, and indeed the latter’s leader Jo Swinson, who lost her seat to the Scottish National Party (SNP).
This sets up an important byline for 2020 which is the matter of Scottish independence. With Brexit now almost certain to go forward at the end of January 2020, the pressure will immediately mount to allow Scotland to have another independence vote on the back of the SNP’s crushing performance.
The Scottish National Party’s strong performance, led by Nicola Sturgeon, will lead to a push for independence vote.AAP/EPA/Robert Perry
While the picture is less clear in Northern Ireland, the overall trend was towards increased support for the nationalist parties at the expense in particular of the Democratic Unionist Party, which similarly lost its parliamentary leader Nigel Dodds.
While the dynamics in Northern Ireland are quite different from those of Scotland, the realisation that Brexit will now take place is bound to provoke a sustained debate on the need for a border poll on the future of Northern Ireland itself. This may take some years to resolve, but the line of travel is becoming clearer, and it points towards the reunification of Ireland. Johnson’s triumph may thus herald the break-up of the UK – to be greeted, it seems, by English indifference.
But the clearest takeaway remains the state of progressive politics in the UK. The centrist Liberal Democrat party had a very bad election. The Green party managed to increase its share of the vote but only managed to win one seat. The Labour Party was sent packing in many of its traditional working class heartlands in the North.
As long as progressive and left politics is spread amongst these various parties, it seems unlikely that we can expect a recovery any time soon, certainly as far as electoral politics is concerned. The Labour Party will now hunker down to decide whether it is going to row back towards the centre under a leader such as Kier Starmer, or whether it is going to maintain the more radical position associated with Corbyn, McDonnell and the Momentum faction that now dominates many local constituency parties.
With the victory of Johnson demonstrating the importance of a charismatic and effective leader, attention will turn to the next generation of Labour politicians. It is difficult at this juncture to be confident there is a serious challenger waiting in the wings of the current Labour Party who can provide an effective counterpoint to the ebullient Johnson. But it must. More of the same will not turn the tide.
The right does not have a monopoly on effective communicators and charismatic leaders. But what it does have is a keener appreciation of the dynamics of the moment: that policies do not sell themselves; they have to be sold by someone who has an ability to connect, to articulate a position that voters feel comfortable with, and which chimes with their own experience, values, hopes and fears.
Some call this populism. But the reality is simpler: this is – and always has been – the formula for winning elections. It’s a formula the left would do well to memorise.
Scott Morrison has rejected or sidelined a number of recommendations from the long-awaited Thodey review of the public service that might have constrained his and his government’s power.
Not surprisingly, a proposal to ensure changes to the machinery of government “are well planned and evaluated” received short shrift.
The Thodey panel urged there be “principles to inform the Prime Minister’s deliberations” on such changes, and evaluations of how changes had worked should be published.
“Noting” the recommendation, the government’s terse response said: “Decisions on machinery of government changes are a matter for the Prime Minister and will be guided by the Prime Minister’s judgement”.
The report was released on Friday, with a point-by-point response.
But Morrison had already preempted it with his announcement of an extensive shake up of departments and departmental heads, as well as earlier setting out his views on the service.
His changes, announced this month, cut the number of departments from 18 to 14. But they have raised questions about how a department such as infrastructure, transport, regional development and communications will operate, given it will have four cabinet ministers and several juniors.
The wide-ranging Thodey panel’s Independent Review of the Australian Public Service has made 40 recommendations; the government says it agrees fully or “in part” with a majority.
But while only a minority were rejected outright or “noted”, these, plus the rejected sections of those accepted “in part”, have sent a very clear message: the government has no intention of countenancing reforms that would circumscribe its power.
For example, it has rejected the recommendation to clarify and reinforce the public service’s leadership roles and responsibilities. Its response was that things are fine and further clarity in legislation unnecessary.
A suggestion for putting more process around the appointment and termination of secretaries did not go down well. After all, Morrison has just sacked five secretaries.
“The Government considers that current processes and arrangements governing the appointment and termination of secretaries and agency heads work effectively,” the response said, adding a commitment to the “apolitical nature of the APS.”
A proposal for a legislative code of conduct for advisers, with enforcement provisions, was dismissed. “The government expects all ministerial staff to uphold the highest standards of integrity and it uses a range of mechanisms to ensure they are held to account for these standards,” was the response.
The idea ministerial offices should have at least half of their ministerial policy advisers with public service experience also fell on deaf ears.
A recommendation for the public service to work closely with the states to jointly deliver improved services received the thumbs down.
Under the recommendation the Council of Australian Governments would set and publicly report on certain national priorities “with clear, shared metrics for success”. But the government said “existing arrangements are effective”.
Dealing with the inquiry led by David Thodey, a former CEO of Telstra, which was set up by Malcolm Turnbull, seems to have been a somewhat fraught process. Some months ago the panel was told to reflect on the priorities the Prime Minister had set out. Then the release of the final report has been held off until after Morrison’s announcement of his restructuring.
Morrison’s emphasis is heavily on the public service’s delivery role, which he wants substantially improved. He sees its advisory role primarily in terms of how best to implement an agenda set by the government.
His foreword to the government’s response repeats his now oft-stated point: “In the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, it is the Ministers who are accountable to the public. It is Ministers who provide policy leadership and direction”.
In its review, the Thodey panel says the public service is not broken, but it “is not performing at its best today and it is not ready for the big changes and challenges that Australia will face between now and 2030”.
The service needs to
work more effectively together
partner with the community and others to solve problems
make better use of digital technologies and data to deliver services
strengthen its expertise and professional skills
use dynamic and flexible means to deliver priorities responsibly
improve leadership and governance arrangements.
Stressing the need to strengthen the service’s capability, the report says the impact of doing this “will be profound. By 2030, the APS can be a place where the most talented, motivated people aspire to work”.
For their last video for the year, University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini and Michelle Grattan look backwards to the big issues which have shaped political discourse. They discuss the surprise election results, and the ongoing natural disasters which have become increasingly political issues. They also discuss the biggest issues the government faces as we go into 2020.
This article is part of our Gender and Christianity series.
To understand contemporary Christian ideas about gender, and specifically masculinity, we need to go all the way back to the values that shaped Christian origins in the first century.
The pattern across Greek, Roman and Jewish society was that men were the heads of households, and households were the primary economic unit. Women managed the internal affairs, while men managed the external ones.
Most men, at around 30 years old, married a girl barely more than half their age. With such an age difference, the girls were less experienced and less emotionally mature. So men believed themselves to be superior to women – a fallacious conclusion that, to them, seemed obvious.
Females were failed males, argued Plato, and people often read Genesis in the Bible as saying man was made in God’s image, while woman was made in man’s.
Paul, one of the most influential Christian leaders, argued that male and female, slave and free, were all loved by God and were one in Christ, but women should dress like women, even in leadership, and should normally leave public discourse to men.
This tension – between equality and the conformity to social norms – still has a long way to go for women in some Christian circles and in the wider community.
For men, how they saw themselves shaped how they saw God, and they saw God shaped how they saw themselves. This also had implications for how they saw women.
Jesus is the exception
Powerful men, kings and fathers were most often used to portray God. Greek sculpture, Roman macho ideals and oriental images contributed to an image of God who behaved just like such men: he was concerned primarily with power and control and, at best, fatherly benevolence.
But other voices challenged such masculine models – including Jesus of Nazareth. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus declares:
The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.
In a three-step narrative, it depicts Jesus’ disciples reflecting traditional aspirations of power, arguing who would be the greatest, wanting the top jobs and trying to persuade Jesus that to be the Messiah he has to win, not lose.
Every time, Jesus refutes their values. Mark then subverts their assumptions by depicting Jesus as a king enthroned on a cross and wearing a crown of thorns. This turned the disciples’ values upside down. Here was a model of being a person, including being a man, which put love and service at the centre.
A 19th century depiction of Jesus by artist Bernhard Plockhorst. Jesus challenges the Christian view of masculinity.Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Elsewhere, Jesus had appealed to parental compassion, arguing we need to see God as caring and compassionate, not as aloof and unforgiving, much less obsessed with power and control.
Such a radical alternative model of masculinity was difficult to sustain.
What often prevailed was the notion that Jesus was, in effect, an exception to the masculine ideal and the way God is. This notion is still alive and well for many today, who see God’s love and forgiveness as only temporary, and believe God will finally resort to violent punishment of those who refused to respond.
Such violence, sometimes horrendously depicted as being tormented with fire, was deemed fair, because God is just and had made the options clear. This is a view many will still defend.
Two opposing Christian views of masculinity
So there’s not one Christian view of masculinity, but at least two. They are diametrically opposed and reflect two very different understandings of God.
One sees greatness in power and control and the right to exercise violence when one is in the right, and is depicted predominantly in male terms.
The other sees greatness in love and compassion; it confronts violence and abuse of power.
What people value in their God, they value in life. Today, this might mean men can conclude that if they are right, they, too, have the right to be dominating. That may show itself in physical cruelty, but also in the subordination or exclusion of women.
In religious contexts, it can be associated with appeals to the authority of the Bible above reason and reasonable love, whether in church communities or in the home.
But where people give priority to reason and the reasonable love that lies at the heart of the Christian tradition, the effect for both men and women is liberating.
Significant social changes also play a role here. If, in the first century, women were deemed inferior and lived pregnancy to pregnancy, nearly half of them not surviving beyond the age of thirty, over the past half century effective contraception has helped even the playing field for women to engage in leadership as much as men. Though sadly that is still not the case in many communities including churches.
For many men, schooled in traditional models of masculine superiority, this has caused a crisis of identity.
Despite the advent in the 20th century of pop psychology, which gave men permission to cry, many still have not made it.
Sadness morphs into anger and anger, violence, towards others and sometimes towards themselves. We need to call out the myth of masculine superiority and the abuse it generates.
Calls are growing for a national bushfire plan, including from former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who says they are an issue of national security and the federal government must provide hands-on leadership.
It’s true that more people are living in high-risk bushfire areas, emergency services are stretched and the climate is rapidly changing. Future crises are inevitable. We must consider the prospect of a monstrous bushfire season, the likes of which we’ve never seen.
But bushfires aren’t the only catastrophe Australia must prepare for. If we are to create a national crisis plan, we must go much further than bushfire planning.
In the decade since Victoria’s Black Saturday fires, we have improved fire predictions, night-time aerial firefighting, construction codes and emergency warnings. All of these have no doubt saved many lives.
There are calls for more resources to fight fires, as part of a coordinated national plan. But few people have proposed an all-encompassing vision of such a plan.
For a start, it should not be confined solely to bushfires. Far more people die during heatwaves and residential housefires. Tropical cyclones, floods and hail each cost our economy more.
Any plan must provide a strategic vision across these various facets for at least the next ten to 20 years.
A national firefighting force?
Calls for a national firefighting force to supplement existing state resources are fundamentally short-sighted. A national force – quite apart from the level of duplication it would create – would spend much of its time idle.
Even during severe fires, such as those now raging, there would be limits to its usefulness. At a certain point, the size and energy of the fires means no amount of firefighting technology will extinguish them all.
Research conducted by Risk Frontiers, the Australian National University and Macquarie University through the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre, has focused on better planning and preparedness for catastrophic events.
This research concludes it is unrealistic to resource the emergency management sector for rare but truly catastrophic events. It is wildly expensive to remain 100% prepared for the worst-case scenario.
Depsite the smoke blanketing Sydney, we need to think beyond bushfires.AAP Image/Neil Bennett
Instead of simply scaling up existing arrangements, we need to think differently.
Bush firefighting could be improved by innovation and research. Future investments must focus on rapidly detecting and extinguishing ignitions before they spread out of control.
Everyone is responsible
States and territories are traditionally responsible for emergency management in Australia. But almost by definition, a catastrophic disaster exceeds one’s capacity to cope – inevitably drawing on nationwide resources.
This means preparing for catastrophic disasters is everyone’s responsibility.
Existing plans allow for assistance across state borders, and between state and federal governments. But there is no national emergency legislation defining the Commonwealth’s role, or assigning responsibility for responding to a truly national disaster.
The Australian Defence Force has a well-defined support role in natural disasters, but should not be relied on due to its global commitments.
However, resource-sharing between states could benefit from more investment in programs that enable emergency services to work better together.
Bushfire haze at the SCG in Sydney during a cricket match.AAP Image/Craig Golding
International help in massive emergencies also needs better planning, particularly around timing and integration with local agencies.
Non-government organisations, businesses and communities already make valuable contributions, but could play a more central role. We could look to the US, which successfully uses a whole-of-community approach.
This might mean emergency services help community organisation provide aid or carry out rescues, rather than do it themselves. These organisations are also best placed to make sure vulnerable members of the community are cared for.
The most important task is to reduce the risk in the first place. The vast majority of disaster-related spending goes on recovery rather than risk reduction. Calls from the Productivity Commission and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) for more disaster mitigation funding have been largely ignored.
The federal government’s recent National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework highlights the need to identify highest-priority disaster risks and mitigation opportunities.
This would see priority investments in flood mitigation and strengthening of buildings against cyclones in northern Australia. (This will also help address insurance affordability.)
Land-use planning needs to be improved to reduce the chance that future developments are exposed to unreasonable risks.
Finally, communities have the most critical role. We must understand our local risk and be ready to look after ourselves and each other. Governments at all levels must facilitate this spirit of self-reliance. Local leadership is crucial to any crisis plan and communities need to be involved in its construction.
Eastern Australia’s bushfire crisis has triggered emotional arguments for throwing resources at the problem. But planning must be careful and evidenced-based, taking into account the changing face of natural disasters.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kath Albury, Professor of Media and Communication, Faculty of Health, Arts and Design, Swinburne University of Technology
Popular commentary on dating apps often associates their use with “risky” sex, harassment and poor mental health. But anyone who has used a dating app knows there’s much more to it than that.
Our new research shows dating apps can improve young people’s social connections, friendships and intimate relationships. But they can also be a source of frustration, rejection and exclusion.
Our study is the first to invite app users of diverse genders and sexualities to share their experiences of app use, safety and well-being. The project combined an online survey with interviews and creative workshops in urban and regional New South Wales with 18 to 35 year olds.
While dating apps were used to meet people for sex and long-term relationships, they were more commonly used to “relieve boredom” and for “chat”.
The most popular apps used were Tinder (among LGBTQ+ women, straight women and men), Grindr (LGBTQ+ men), OK Cupid (for non-binary participants), and Bumble (straight women).
Dating apps are commonly used to relieve boredom and for chat.Oleg Ivanov/Unsplash
We found that while app users recognised the risks of dating apps, they also had a range of strategies to help them feel safer and manage their well-being – including negotiating consent and safe sex.
Safe sex and consent
The majority of survey participants frequently used condoms for safe sex. Over 90% of straight men and women frequently used condoms.
Just over one-third of gay, bisexual and queer men frequently used PreP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) to prevent HIV transmission.
Half (50.8%) of straight people said they never or rarely discussed safe sex with potential partners on dating/hook-up apps. Around 70% of LGBTQ+ participants had those conversations to some extent.
Amber (22, bisexual, female, regional) said she was “always the one that has to initiate a sex talk over messages”. She used chat to discuss what she liked, to assert her need for condom use, to give an account of her own sexual health, and to feel “safer”.
Some gay and bisexual men’s apps – such as Grindr and Scruff – allow for some negotiation around sexual health and sexual practices within the profile. Users can share HIV status, treatment regimes, and “date last tested”, as well as stating their preferred sexual activities.
Red flags
Many participants discussed their practices of reading a profile for “red flags”, or warning signs that their physical or emotional safety might be at risk. Red flags included lack of information, unclear photos, and profile text that indicated sexism, racism, and other undesirable qualities.
Apps that require a mutual match before messaging (where both parties swipe right) were perceived to filter out a lot of unwanted interaction.
Many participants felt that red flags were more likely to appear in chat rather than in user profiles. These included pushiness and possessiveness, or messages and pictures that were too sexual, too soon.
Charles (34, gay/queer, male, urban), for example, defined red flags as:
nude photos completely unsolicited or the first message that I get from you is just five pictures of your dick. I would think that’s a straight up signal that you’re not going to respect my boundaries […] So I’m not going to have an opportunity to say no to you if we meet in real life.
Negotiating consent
Consent emerged as a key concern across all areas of the study. Participants generally felt safer when they were able to explicitly negotiate the kinds of sexual contact they wanted – or didn’t want – with a prospective partner.
Of 382 survey participants, female respondents (of all sexualities) were 3.6 times more likely to want to see app-based information about sexual consent than male participants.
Amber, 22, recommended negotiating consent and safe sex via chat:
It’s a fun conversation. It doesn’t have to be sexting, it doesn’t have to be super sexy […] I just wish it was easier just to discuss sex in a non-sexual way. Most of the girls that are my friends, they’re like, “it’s way too awkward, I don’t talk about sex with a guy”, not even when they’re having sex.
However, others worried that sexual negotiations in chat, for example on the topic of STIs, could “ruin the moment” or foreclose consent options, ruling out the possibility that they might change their mind.
Chelsea (19, bisexual, female, regional) noted:
Am I going, “okay so at 12 o’clock we’re going to do this” and then what if I don’t want to?
Safety precautions
When it came to meeting up, women, non-binary people and men who had sex with men described safety strategies that involved sharing their location with friends.
Ruby (29, bisexual, female, urban) had an online group chat with friends where they would share details of who they were meeting with, and others described telling female family members where they planned to be.
Anna (29, lesbian, female, regional) described an arrangement she had with her friends for getting out of bad dates:
If at any point I send them a message about sport, they know that shit is going down […] So if I send them a message like, “How is the football going?” they know to call me.
While all participants described “ideal” safety precautions, they did not always follow them. Rachel (20, straight, female, regional) installed an app for telling friends when you expect to be home, but then deleted it.
Amber said:
I tell my friends to only meet up in public even though I don’t follow that rule.
Managing disappointment
For many participants, dating apps provided a space for pleasure, play, connecting with community or meeting new people. For others, app use could be stressful or frustrating.
Rebecca (23, lesbian, female, regional) noted that apps:
definitely can send someone into a deep depression as well as an ego boost. If you’ve been on the app and had little to no matches or no success, you begin to question yourself.
Henry (24, straight male, urban) felt that many straight men experienced apps as a space of “scarcity” in contrast to “an abundance of choice” for women.
Regina (35, straight, female, regional) suggested that app users who felt unsuccessful were likely to keep this to themselves, further increasing feelings of isolation:
I think when people are having a hard time with the apps they are quite private about it. They’ll only share with friends who they know are regular or current users and might disclose their use – even bordering on addiction to swiping – in a sensitive moment.
Participants shared a range of personal strategies for managing the distress associated with app use including taking time out, deleting apps, turning off “push” notifications and limiting time spent on apps.
While most participants welcomed more attention to apps among health professionals and public health agencies, they cautioned them against defining apps as “risky” spaces for sex and relationships.
As Jolene (27, queer, female, urban) said:
app dating is just part of regular dating life and therefore health promotion should fully integrate it into their campaigns, rather than it be something niche or different.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Grimmer, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, University of Tasmania
Australian shoppers are set to spend $52.7 billion this Christmas. In the words of the retail industry, we are “stampeding” to empty our wallets, both online and in stores.
The shopping frenzy is not good for the planet. It generates a mountain of waste including plastics, and decorations, wrapping paper and party paraphernalia only used once. It also involves thousands of air and road miles to transport goods, which creates up to 650kg of carbon dioxide per person.
But amid the spending spree, consumers are becoming more concerned about environmental impacts. A recent survey of shoppers found one-quarter would prefer to receive a “socially conscious or eco-friendly” Christmas gift.
If you’re one of those people, read on to find out what Australian retailers are doing to help the environment.
Supermarkets are leaders in the retail field on climate action.AAP/Tracey Nearmy
The climate crisis
Responding to climate change is in the interests of retailers. The Department of the Environment and Energy has warned Australian businesses will be affected by higher temperatures, altered rainfall, bushfires, heatwaves, drought and storms. These can affect food production, the movement of goods and people’s ability to shop, among other things.
In Australian retail, supermarkets are leading the way on climate action.
Coles recently announced a deal with renewables developer Metka EGN. The supermarket giant will buy around 10% of its electricity from three new solar plants in New South Wales.
Woolworths has a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 60% below 2015 levels by 2030, and is installing natural refrigerants, or reducing refrigerant leaks, to reduce pollution.
Other retailers are also getting on board. Officeworks, in partnership with Greening Australia, is planting two trees for every one used, based on the weight of paper products bought by customers. It aims to both repair the environment and tackle climate change.
A YouGov report found 75% of Australian adults have thrown clothes away in the past year; 30% tossed more than ten garments. As fabrics break down, they release approximately three to four times their mass in methane and other greenhouse gases.
Zara stores are reducing their electricity and water use.AAP
Some major clothing retailers are responding. For example H&M offers a garment recycling service to prevent clothes from going to landfill. Customers hand in a bag of old clothes which are either reused, reworn or recycled. H&M is also among several global brands to offer clothing rentals.
By the end of this year, all Zara clothing stores, including in Australia, will be eco-efficient. Such stores use at least 20% less electricity and 40% less water than conventional stores.
Turning the tide on plastic
In Australia, Coles and Woolworths were heavily criticised recently over their plastic toy giveaways.
Woolworths responded with the Discovery Garden promotion which gave out free plants. However Coles relaunched its plastic promotion, Little Shop minis, claiming a poll revealed 96% of customers who collected the items still had them, and the packaging could be recycled.
Woolworths is the first Australian retailer to commit to introducing TerraCycle’s zero-waste resusable packaging system, Loop. Shoppers would purchase certain products in packing that can be returned and reused.
Woolworths and Coles also dumped single use plastic bags in 2018, before many state governments had legislated for a ban.
Non-grocery retailers are also getting on board. For example IKEA now allows shoppers to return, recycle and reuse old furniture.
Coles and Woolworths are acting on plastic bag waste.AAP
Why retailers are acting
There are compelling financial reasons for retailers to go green.
So people who care about the environment are more likely to shop with retailers who have a higher level of environmental performance. If the values differ, this creates mental discomfort in the consumer known as cognitive dissonance, and they are likely to shop elsewhere.
But the retailer’s actions must be authentic. Consumers are becoming more alert to the problem of greenwashing, when businesses make misleading claims about their green credentials.
And retailers can always do more. The World Economic Forum says for supermarkets, this should include all stores moving towards becoming packaging-free, selling only local, seasonal produce and clearly labelling all products to indicate their carbon footprint.
Supermarkets should aim to become packaging-free.AAP
An eco-friendly Christmas
A number of online resources can help you have an eco-friendly Christmas. Buy goods produced locally, re-use or don’t use wrapping paper, reduce food waste with better storage and compost what you must dispose of. Recycle wrapping, send an e-card or gift voucher instead of a physical card or present, and plan well to avoid buying excess presents and food.
Be mindful of giving for giving’s sake. About $400 million was spent on unwanted gifts last Christmas, many of which probably went to landfill. The most unwanted presents included underwear, socks, pyjamas, candles and novelty items.
Or perhaps avoid the retail frenzy altogether, and consider having a present-free Christmas. The planet, and your wallet, will thank you.
The Autonomous Region of Bougainville, a chain of islands that lie 959 kilometres northwest of Papua New Guinea’s capital, Port Moresby, has voted unequivocally for independence.
The referendum saw 85% voter turnout during three weeks of voting, with 97.7% of voters choosing independence from Papua New Guinea over the second option, which was remaining, but with greater autonomy from PNG. As the Bougainville Referendum Commission stated, the numbers told an important story, reflecting the support for independence across genders and age groups.
It’s a momentous event, not only because it could a new country, but also because the referendum marks an important part of a peace agreement signed almost 20 years ago. The 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement ended the deeply divisive nine year conflict (1988-1997) that lead to the deaths of approximately 20,000 people, or about 10% of Bougainville’s population.
The referendum, however, is non-binding. The ultimate outcome will be determined by a vote in Papua New Guinea’s National Parliament following negotiations between the Papua New Guinean government and the Autonomous Bougainville Government.
But as former President James Tanis said to me hours after the result was announced:
we survived the war, ended the war, delivered a successful referendum, what else can now stop us from becoming a successful independent nation?
China’s interest in Bougainville
For the broader region, an independent Bougainville has a number of implications. Firstly, it sends a strong signal for other self-determination movements across the Pacific, including in New Caledonia which will hold a second referendum for independence in 2020.
There are also geopolitical implications. The referendum has taken place during a period of heightened strategic anxiety among the Pacific’s so-called traditional partners – Australia, New Zealand and the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, France and Japan.
There have long been concerns China will seek to curry influence with an independent Bougainville. As one Bougainvillean leader informed me, Chinese efforts to build relationships with Bougainville’s political elite have increased over the past few years.
Beijing’s interest in Bougainville is two-fold: first, it is seeking to shore up diplomatic support in the Pacific Islands region, thereby reducing support for Taiwan which lost a further two Pacific allies this year. And second, to access to resources, namely fisheries and extractive minerals.
Although it will be tempting for many in Canberra, Washington and Wellington to view an independent Bougainville through the current strategic prism – adhering to narratives about debt-trap diplomacy – doing so undermines the importance of local dynamics and the resilience of Bougainville people.
An independent Bougainville navigating a more disordered and disruptive international environment will need nuanced grounded advice, rather than speculation.
The road ahead for Bougainville will be challenging and it will need its friends – particularly New Zealand and Australia.
The much vaunted respective “Pacific Reset” and “Pacific Step Up” policies provide entry points for the kind of genuine engagement and support that Bougainville will require in the coming years.
Celebration with cautious anticipation
Following the result’s announcement, Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape said his government had heard the voice of Bougainvilleans, and the two governments must now develop a road map that leads to lasting political settlement.
And Bougainville Referendum Commission chairman Bertie Ahern urged all sides to recognise the result and said the vote was about “your peace, your history, and your future” and reflected “the power of the pen over weapons”. Acknowledging the result is non-binding, Ahern said:
the referendum is one part of that ongoing journey.
And here lies the challenge. The post-referendum period was always going to be one of celebration, cautious anticipation and the management of expectations.
As one of Bougainville’s formidable women leaders told me, there are concerns about security in the post-referendum period as expectation turns to frustration if there are perceived delays in determining Bougainville’s future political status.
What’s more, the negotiations are likely to take a long time, since there’s no deadline they’re required to meet.
There are, however, critical milestones that still need to be hit first. This includes the Autonomous Bougainville Government elections, the first elections following the referendum, so will likely see intensified politicking as politicians jockey for a potential role in building an independent Bougainvillean state.
The Papua New Guinea’s national elections are also scheduled for 2022. The risk in both cases is that Bougainville’s future becomes a political pawn.
An independent Bougainville will face significant challenges and diverse choices.
Not least of which is Bougainville’s economic security and the choices that will need to be made about the Panguna Mine, the gold and copper mine at the heart of much of the conflict, and fisheries, once the new nation’s 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone is created.
A young nation built on a past mired by the extremes of resource nationalism, Bougainville has difficult decisions to make about how it secures its economic self-reliance.
Humans have a “natural” lifespan of around 38 years, according to a new method we have developed for estimating the lifespans of different species by analysing their DNA.
Extrapolating from genetic studies of species with known lifespans, we found that the extinct woolly mammoth probably lived around 60 years and bowhead whales can expect to enjoy more than two and a half centuries of life.
Our research, published today in Scientific Reports, looked at how DNA changes as an animal ages – and found that it varies from species to species and is related to how long the animal is likely to live.
The ageing process is very important in biomedical and ecological research. As animals grow older, they experience a decline of biological functions, which limits their lifespan. Until now it has been difficult to determine how many years an animal can live.
DNA is the blueprint of living organisms and it is an obvious place to seek insights into ageing and lifespan. However, no-one has been able to find differences in DNA sequences that account for differences in lifespans.
Lifespans among vertebrates varies greatly. The pygmy goby (Eviota sigillata) is a small fish that lives only eight weeks, whereas individual Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) have been found that lived for more than 400 years.
Knowing the lifespan of wild animals is fundamental for wildlife management and conservation. For endangered species, lifespan can be used to understand what populations are viable. In industries such as fisheries, lifespan is used in population models to determine catch limits.
However, the lifespan of most animals is unknown. Most estimates come from a small number of individuals living in captivity whose ages at death were known. For long-lived species it is difficult to obtain a lifespan as they may outlive a generation of researchers.
Over the past few years researchers have developed DNA “clocks” that can determine how old an animal is using a special type of change in the DNA called DNA methylation.
DNA methylation does not change the underlying sequence of a gene but controls whether it is active. Other researchers have shown that DNA methylation in specific genes is associated with the maximum lifespan of some mammals such as primates.
Despite DNA methylation being linked to ageing and lifespan, no research until now has used it as a method to estimate the lifespan of animals.
In our research, we have used 252 genomes (full DNA sequences) of vertebrate species that other researchers have assembled and made publicly available in an online database. We then compared these genomes to another database of known animal lifespans.
Using this data, we found that we could estimate the lifespan of vertebrate species by looking at where DNA methylation occurs in 42 particular genes. This method also lets us estimate the lifespans of long-lived and extinct species.
Using DNA analysis, scientists can now estimate the lifespans of long-lived and extinct species.CSIRO, Author provided
Extinct species
We found the lifespan of the bowhead whale, thought to be the world’s longest lived mammal, is 268 years. This estimate is 57 years higher than the oldest individual that has been found, so they may have a much longer lifespan than previously thought.
We also found the extinct woolly mammoth had a lifespan of 60 years, similar to the 65-year span of the modern-day African elephant.
The extinct Pinta Island giant tortoise had a lifespan of 120 years by our estimate. The last member of this species, Lonesome George, died in 2012 at age 112.
Interestingly, we found Neanderthals and Denisovans, which are extinct species closely related to modern humans, had a maximum lifespan of 37.8 years.
Based on DNA, we also estimated a “natural” lifespan modern humans of 38 years. This matches some anthropological estimates for early modern humans. However, humans today may be an exception to this study as advances in medicine and lifestyle have extended the average lifespan.
As more scientists assemble the genomes of other animals, our method means their lifespans can readily be estimated. This has huge ecological and conservation significance for many species which require better wildlife management.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Evans, Professor of Governance and Director of Democracy 2025 – bridging the trust divide at Old Parliament House, University of Canberra
A new, ongoing survey on how young Australians understand and imagine their democracy is already challenging long-held stereotypes.
The survey – conducted for Democracy 2025 – will eventually draw on the 90,000 students and teachers who engage with the Museum of Australian Democracy’s learning program, Ignite.
Here, we capture some key findings from the baseline survey of 857 school visitors, aged 12 to 17, who travelled to the museum from all over Australia this year.
Our findings are optimistic – they challenge the idea that young voters are apathetic, and show that future voters are champions of democracy, committed to changing the direction of Australian politics.
In short, it’s not that young people don’t like politics; rather, they want to do politics differently to older generations and want to see a different agenda of change.
Democracy is safe
The responses captured in the chart below show two thirds of future voters believe democracy is the best option for the future government of Australia.
Most of the remaining respondents are not sure, and only a small percentage think democracy is not the best option. No respondents answered “definitely not”.
Contrary to the argument there has been a generational decline in support for democracy, these findings suggest that if you look at those approaching voting age, democracy is safe in their hands.
This good news is reinforced by the findings shown in the chart below, with two-thirds expressing some interest in politics. Yet compared to current voters, nearly twice as many young voters say they have no interest in politics.
That interest will most likely grow as future voters reach adulthood, not least because there are key issues they feel passionately about.
We also asked future voters to identify the top issues they cared about most. Mental health, bullying, gender equality and climate change were identified as the most important issues, and recognition for Indigenous Australians came fifth.
While future voters we surveyed were wedded to the same core issues, female respondents felt more strongly about each issue. We also found there were greater differences over equal gender rights and Indigenous recognition.
Other issues of concern to older generations, such as job security, cost of living or Australia becoming a republic, were not viewed as pressing. Even age-appropriate issues such as lowering the voting age to 16 years or abolishing university tuition fees didn’t register.
These choices are interesting. Do they tell us about how young Australians view their lives now, and how they see future challenges? Or do they reflect the success of school debates on these issues?
It’s also worth noting these issues are not at the forefront of the core political agenda. Future voters might be about to reshape politics around a small “l” liberal policy agenda.
Where future voters learn about politics
Another question we asked was where future voters get their information about politics. We expected the internet to be top here, but were surprised by the focus on traditional sources such as school, TV, family, friends and the community.
Is the internet seen as a source of entertainment, rather than political engagement? Or is this finding part of the standard story of socialisation, where political understanding is mostly taken from sources closer at hand?
In any case, it’s clear young Australians are informed through mainstream sources and are not captured by internet radicals or fake news.
We also wanted to know if future voters think they are being well prepared for their role as citizens? This involves understanding their rights and responsibilities, their role as voters and their participation options.
There is another positive message to be taken from the chart below, in that it shows almost half of future voters think they are being well prepared for this role.
But it also tells us about half our respondents fall into categories suggesting they’re not sure, or very clearly believe they’re not being prepared for the future.
In school report terms, citizenship education could be given the assessment: “reasonable progress is being made, but must try harder”. We may need to re-ignite the way we teach or talk about politics to future voters.
While we’ve provided only a glimpse of the findings we have generated, there is still considerable food for thought and debate. Not least, we show that far from demonising young Australians, we should consider them the sail of Australian democracy, not the anchor.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Francesco Paolucci, Associate Professor; Head of Health Policy Program, Sir Walter Murdoch School of Public Policy and International Affairs, University of Newcastle
Private health insurance has come under intense scrutiny in recent months, as it becomes clear health insurers are failing to stop the exodus of young people dropping their cover.
Legislated age-based discounts began in April 2019 but haven’t achieved their aim of keeping young people in private health insurance. In July to September, the largest decreases in coverage were for people aged between 25 and 34, and in particular 25- to 29 year-olds, with more than 7,000 people in that age group dropping their private health insurance cover in that period.
This trend should come as no surprise. We’ve known since the 1970s that young people drop out of private health in voluntary insurance markets, especially those with an underlying universal public system such as Medicare. If too many young people exit the system, premiums go up for everyone.
This was also confirmed by last week’s Grattan report, which argued private health insurance premiums should be made cheaper for Australians aged under 55.
This could lead to unaffordable premiums for the elderly or the sick. But this potential problem can be addressed through other measures.
Community versus risk rating
In Australia, private health insurance operates under a legislated “community rating” system. Insurers are forced to charge everyone the same premium for the same cover, irrespective of their age, gender or health status.
This means the young and healthy subsidise older, sicker Australians. Young people end up paying high premiums, relative to their underlying health risk and, as we’ve seen, this encourages the young and healthy to drop their cover.
This would mean those who are at low risk (based on their age and other risk factors) pay lower premiums, and those who are at high risk (older people who are more likely to have health problems) pay higher premiums than they currently do.
How do you make it fair?
Risk ratings for private health insurance would challenge the principle of solidarity and affordable access to coverage. These are the reasons community ratings were established in the first place.
Responding to last week’s Grattan Institute proposal to move towards age-based premiums, Private Healthcare Australia chief executive Rachel David told Nine newspapers the community rating rule was “critical to keeping health care affordable for our ageing population”.
To solve the problem of older and higher-risk members being priced out of private health insurance, private health insurance rebates would need to be redirected.
Rebates are currently a means-tested percentage off the price of your insurance premiums. These discounts are based on income/age and are irrespective of your health needs.
Under a risk-rating scheme, the rebates would need to become risk-based rebates. The rebates would be provided based on a person’s health status, such as their age and health conditions, to discount their insurance premiums.
Risk-based rebates would help tackle equity, as those who face higher premiums would get greater rebates.
An additional rebate would apply to people whose expenses are above a certain threshold, to provide additional financial support for those who face the higher premiums. This would help ensure higher premiums don’t become prohibitive.
Such a move would require redistributing the A$9 billion in taxpayer subsidies that currently flow to the private health insurance system.
Risk-based payments are often criticised because of the extensive data requirements consumers would need to disclose, including more personal details, information about the person’s past claims and the illness for which they’ve been diagnosed.
Risk-based systems are also criticised because of the sophistication of the techniques needed to calculate (and subsidise) individuals’ risk correctly.
It is possible to make Australia’s private insurance system more sustainable and stop young people leaving the system by relaxing the community rating restrictions and adjusting the rebate system.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Luke Zaphir, Researcher for the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project; and Online Teacher at Education Queensland’s IMPACT Centre, The University of Queensland
This is the second of two essays exploring key theories – cognitive load theory and constructivism – underlying teaching methods used today.
Constructivism is an educational philosophy that deems experience as the best way to acquire knowledge.
We truly understand something – according to a constructivist – when we filter it through our senses and interactions. We can only understand the idea of “blue” if we have vision (and if we aren’t colour blind).
Constructivism is an education philosophy, not a learning method. So while it encourages students to take more ownership of their own learning, it doesn’t specify how that should be done. It is still being adapted to teaching practice.
The philosophy underpins the inquiry-based method of teaching where the teacher facilitates a learning environment in which students discover answers for themselves.
One of the earliest proponents of constructivism was Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, whose work centred around children’s cognitive development.
Piaget’s theories (popularised in the 1960s) on the developmental stages of childhood are still used in contemporary psychology. He observed that children’s interactions with the world and their sense of self corresponded to certain ages.
For instance, through sensations from birth, a child has basic interactions with the world; from two years old, they use language and play; they use logical reasoning from age seven, and abstract reasoning from age eleven.
Jean Piaget observed children discover the world in stages that correspond with their age.from shutterstock.com
Before Piaget, there had been little specific analyses on the developmental psychology of humans. We understood that humans became more cognitively sophisticated as they aged, but not exactly how this occurred.
Piaget’s theory was further developed by his contemporary, Lev Vygotsky (1925-1934), who saw all tasks as fitting into:
tasks we can do on our own
tasks we can do with guidance
tasks we can’t do at all.
There’s not a lot of meaningful learning to be made in the first category. If we know how to do something, we don’t gain too much from doing it again.
Similarly, there’s not much to be gained from the third category. You could throw a five year old into a calculus class run by the most brilliant teacher in the world but there just isn’t enough prior understanding and cognitive development for the child to learn anything.
Most of our learning occurs in category two. We’ve got enough prior knowledge to make sense of the topic or task, but not quite enough to fully comprehend it. In developmental psychology, this idea is known as the zone of proximal development – the place between our understanding and our ignorance.
Using the zone for learning
Imagine asking ten-year-old students to go about adding every number from 1 to 100 (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 and onwards). They could theoretically do this by brute force addition which will likely bore and frustrate them.
A constructivist inspired teacher might instead ask: “is there a faster way of doing it?” and “is there a pattern of numbers?”
With a bit of help, some students might see that every number pairs with a corresponding number to add to 101 (1 + 100, 2 + 99, 3 + 98). They end up with 50 pairs of 101, for a much easier, faster sum of 50 x 101.
The pattern and easy multiplication might not have come intuitively (or even at all) to most students. But facilitation by the teacher pushes their existing knowledge into a meaningful learning experience – using a completely mundane problem. It then becomes a process of discovery rather than monotonous addition.
In a group, each student contributes their individual capabilities to solve a given problem.from shutterstock.com
Medical students began using constructivist pedagogies in US and Australian universities in the 1960s. Instead of teachers showing students exactly how to do something and having them copy it (known as explicit instruction), tutors prompted students to form hypotheses and directed them to critique one another.
Learning methods based on constructivism primarily use group work. The emphasis is on students building their understanding of a topic or issue collaboratively.
Imagine a science class exploring gravity. The question of the day is: do objects drop at different speeds? The teacher could facilitate this activity by asking:
“what could we drop?”
“what do you think will happen if we drop these two objects at the same time?”
“how could we measure this?”
Then, the teacher would give students the chance to conduct this experiment themselves. By doing this, teachers allow students to build on their individual strengths as they discover a concept and work at their own pace.
Do objects drop at different speeds?from shutterstock.com
Experiments in science class, excursions to cultural landmarks in history class, acting out Shakespeare in English – these are all examples of constructivist learning activities.
What’s the evidence?
Constructivist principles naturally align with what we expect of teachers. For instance, teacher professional standards require them to build rapport with students to manage behaviour, and expert teachers tailor lessons to students’ specific cultural, social and even individual needs.
Explicit instruction is still appropriate in many instances – but the basic teaching standard includes a recognition of students’ unique circumstances and capabilities.
Constructivism can be seen as merely a descriptive theory, providing no directly useful teaching strategies. There are simply too many learning contexts (cultures, ages, subjects, technologies) for constructivism to be directly applicable, some might say.
And it’s true constructivism is a challenge. It requires creative educational design and lesson planning. The teacher needs to have an exceptional knowledge of the subject area, making constructivist approaches much harder for primary school teachers who have broader general knowledge.
A major challenge for constructivism is the current outcomes-focused approach to learning. Adhering to a curricular requirement for assessment at certain times (such as end-of-term tests) takes the focus away from student-centred learning and towards test preparation.
Explicit instruction is more directly useful for teaching to the test, which can be an unfortunate reality in many educational contexts.
An an education philosophy, constructivism has a lot of potential. But getting teachers to contextualise and personalise lessons when there are standardised tests, playground duty, health and safety drills, and their personal lives, is a big ask.
On Monday the Australian government will release the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO). This will – as required by the Charter of Budget Honesty – provide an update on the key assumptions made in this year’s budget, and track the implications of decisions made since the budget for the projected surplus.
There are two things you can count on about MYEFO.
First, the government will have to pare back its forecasts for economic growth, wages growth and employment growth.
Second, no matter what the economic reality is, the forecast for a budget surplus will remain.
The government has made economic management – as measured by the rather dubious criterion of budget balance – the central plank of its electoral strategy. As the Australian National University’s 2019 Australian Election Study revealed, voters preferred the government’s economic policies to Labor’s by a wide margin (47% to 21%, with 17% thinking there was no difference). On the management of government debt, the margin was 44% to 18%.
But the economy isn’t doing very well. GDP annual growth is 1.7%, not the 2.75% forecast in the budget. The unemployment rate is 5.3%, compared to the forecast of 5.0%. Wage growth is 2.2%, not the 2.75% forecast.
Iron ore supplements
The forecast budget surplus for the fiscal year to June 2020 will be made to hang together, thanks to a higher-than-forecast iron ore price.
That price – which determines the dollar value of Australia’s biggest export and hence the tax revenue it generates – is not reflected in the GDP figure, which only takes into account volumes.
The iron-ore price is now US$92.50 a tonne. The budget assumed the average price would be $US88 for the 2020 budget year, thanks to a reduction in the international supply of iron ore caused by a tailings dam bursting in January at the Córrego do Feijão mine near the town of Brumadinho in southeastern Brazil.
The dam’s collapse released a tsunami of sludge that destroyed farms, houses, roads and bridges, and killed 272 people.
The river of sludge released by the dam spill in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil, January 26 2019.Antonio Lacerda/EPA
Ensuing mine shutdowns reduced iron ore output from operator Vale (the world’s biggest iron ore miner) by about a third. This in turn led to the price of iron ore this year being very high, as the following chart illustrates.
The Australian government sensibly assumed the Brazilian mine would come back online and the ore price would revert to $US55 per tonne by March 2020.
But just think about the 2020-21 fiscal year. The government’s own sensitivity analysis shows for the full 2020-21 budget year a difference in the iron ore price of US$10 a tonne translates to a A$3.7 billion difference in the budget bottom line.
That has helped this year, but it also shows how dependent the budget’s relatively small A$7.1 billion “underlying cash balance” is on a commodity price that’s out of our control.
Yet, given the political non-negotiability of the surplus, we can expect assumptions that stretch credulity to maintain a surplus forecast.
Some action?
This is all against a backdrop of calls for fiscal stimulus from the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Business Council, every mainstream economist and recently Australia’s top chief executives.
But any stimulus meaningful enough to boost the ailing economy would blow the budget surplus. And the assumptions have already been stretched to breaking point, so there’s very little room for the government to manoeuvre.
The government will probably announce some sort of “investment allowance” – where companies get a modest tax break for specific types of investments in the short term. As I have argued before, this will do something to boost investment and the economy generally, but not nearly as much as a full-scale reduction in the company tax rate to 25% for all businesses.
But the government can’t afford to do a proper tax cut because of its devotion to a wafer-thin surplus.
The danger of too little action
In the end, what the government ends up announcing will really be an allocation of responsibilities. It will determine how much of the work of economic recovery it will do itself, and how much it will want to palm off to the Reserve Bank.
The downside of the former is losing the budget surplus.
The downside of the latter is that the Reserve Bank will have no choice but to cut the cash rate to 0.25% in early 2020 and then embark upon a bond-buying program – i.e. “quantitative easing” or “QE”.
As even Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe has himself admitted, more aggressive monetary policy brings with it the (further) risk of asset-price bubbles and financial instability.
Right now the government is putting all its chips on the surplus. Will that turn out to be a good bet? Time will tell.
2020 will reveal much about the future of the Australian economy and whether we manage to escape dramatic problems like a recession.
We live in interesting times – but perhaps more in the “Ancient Chinese curse” kind of way than any of us would like.
It seems like every time we switch on the idiot box we are confronted with news footage of another disaster. Bushfires in Australia. A hurricane in North America. A tsunami in Indonesia.
Part of this, of course, is merely a reflection of the sensationalist rationale of commercial news in the first place – in order to sell advertising space, this news needs to be sufficiently engaging to keep people from switching the channel.
But the unfortunate reality of global warming means that natural disasters are becoming more frequent and more severe. And Hollywood cinema has kept pace, offering some recent spectacular depictions of natural disaster in the context of global warming.
Climate change is central to the narrative of the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow directed by Roland Emmerich. In it, a changing climate leads to a series of extreme storms in a precursor to a cataclysmic shift into a new Ice Age.
The 2015 film San Andreas, meanwhile, looks at the effects of a massive earthquake throughout California.
Geostorm (2017) posits a scientific response to global warming – through the international development of a planetary network of satellites that can control the weather – and what happens when it becomes weaponised.
The latest in this genre of big budget, Hollywood eco-disaster movies is Moonfall slated to begin production in 2020. Emmerich will be directing the $150 million project, which follows a team attempting to stop the moon from colliding with earth after it has been struck by an asteroid.
The script has been co-written by Emmerich and his regular collaborator Harald Kloser – with whom Emmerich wrote the disaster epic 2012, a 2009 film about the race to save the planet as the earth’s core heats up.
Emmerich has described Moonfall as a cross between 2012 and Independence Day (minus the extra-terrestrial element). It’s unclear whether global warming will feature directly in its plot, but given Emmerich’s record of making ecologically aware films, it seems likely.
How, then, do such films help and/or hinder us in managing our anxieties regarding the progressive deterioration of the planet? As natural disasters become more commonplace, is there a point at which we will become too distressed by the real to reproduce it as entertaining spectacle?
A woman wears a mask to protect herself from bushfire-related smoke haze in Sydney this month.Paul Braven/AAP
‘Bad stars’
The term disaster, with its etymology from ancient Greek for “bad star,” has always elicited cosmic allusions. Disaster suggests that the universe is awry; the planets are out of alignment, bad stars are causing chaos and disorder.
The secularisation of disaster in the modern era, through the notion of risk and insurance, attempts to sever this connection to the word’s planetary origins, envisioning it on the scale of the manageable “accident”, which can be insured against.
Yet, in the context of global warming, and following the large-scale atrocities of the 20th century such as the two world wars, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Holocaust, it’s clear that disasters are far from manageable. One of the ways we have sought to manage our anxieties about disaster is through popular film.
A photo made available by the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum shows a view of the mushroom cloud photographed from the ground during the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan in 1945.Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum handout/EPA
The Hollywood disaster film genre has undergone, roughly, two major cycles. The first was in the 1970s. It included blockbuster melodramas like The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, and the Airport films (so brilliantly parodied in Flying High).
These cinematic disasters were often instigated by some kind of natural element – an earthquake, or a tidal wave. But they were also often structured around the malfunctioning of technologies in human-built environments (The China Syndrome being a prime example).
The heroes in these films were usually strong, hard-boiled men. Gene Hackman in The Poseidon Adventure, for example, leads, as though by sheer willpower alone, a group to safety following the capsizing of the eponymous ship. As viewers, we are awed by his grim determination in overcoming adversity amid often stark images of people dying.
The second cinematic cycle begins in the 1990s with ecologically sensitive films like Twister, which follows a group of meteorologists as they chase violent tornadoes across Oklahoma, and Dante’s Peak, about the disastrous effects of the eruption of a volcano on a small Washington town. Such films prefigure later, more explicit global warming eco-disaster films, like Emmerich’s masterful The Day After Tomorrow.
While the earlier disaster films were characterised by their ensemble casts and soap-opera like structures, these newer ones dedicate more energy towards showing the disasters (using elaborate CGI and high definition), and imagining social and governmental responses to them.
Affectively, they depend upon the pathos of groups working together to overcome adversity. As in a Christian vigil, the viewer of these films takes solace from participating in this community of suffering.
The Vigil, 1884. Oil on canvas, by John Pettie.Wikimedia Commons
The pleasure of disaster on film
On one level, popular film as “entertainment” offers us reprieve from the petty banalities, inconsistencies and disappointments of everyday life, by giving us a vision of a world ordered into timely narrative. Events are tied together in a fundamentally meaningful fashion.
We are able to defer the concerns of the ordinary for a couple of hours, and participate in a viscerally stimulating and pathos-laden experience. The unwieldy disasters we see in the real world are thereby represented in a contained fashion, allowing us the illusion of conceptual and emotional mastery. But at the same time, this process pacifies us, numbing us to, and distracting us from, reality.
Similarly, our response to disaster films is ambivalent. On one hand, we enjoy watching the ultimately effective responses of the state to the disaster. In The Day After Tomorrow, for example, following some initial bumbling, the US government saves millions of Americans by organising a deal for US migration to Mexico(!)
On the other hand, epic images of full-scale disaster are the visual and visceral centrepieces of these films, and awe and terrify us. Indeed, our most intense pleasure in these films emerges from their sublime images of destruction.
Watching San Francisco fall to pieces in San Andreas is awe inspiring. In The Day After Tomorrow, one of the most sublime sequences involves the ocean swelling and rolling through Manhattan, gathering people and vehicles in its stead after crashing into the Statue of Liberty.
Watching San Francisco fall to pieces in San Andreas is awe-inspiring.New Line Cinema, Village Roadshow Pictures, RatPac-Dune Entertainment
These pleasures in destruction and restoration occur within the context of a more saccharine kind of empathy we feel with the masses of faceless victims. By the films’ endings, we can take solace in the images and acts of community building and collective overcoming. Along with the victims, we mourn worlds destroyed, and are hopeful about worlds beginning to be rebuilt.
The economics of disaster
Hollywood disaster films often feature antagonists who are stubborn bureaucrats and greedy capitalists, but also US presidents who are calm, compassionate and measured, taking an appropriate amount of time to decide how to act and then acting decisively.
In The Day After Tomorrow, this is firstly President Blake (Perry King), who makes cool-headed decisions about the future of America and dies when his motorcade is caught in a storm and destroyed. Later, President Becker (Kenneth Welsh) is magically transformed from a pig-headed obstructionist after he assumes the presidency.
Perry King in The Day After Tomorrow (2004).Twentieth Century Fox, Centropolis Entertainment, Lions Gate Films
This, of course, contrasts with real-life presidential responses to disaster. In 2017, following Hurricane Maria’s devastating effects on Puerto Rico, Donald Trump criticised Puerto Ricans for the economic burden Maria gifted the US government, while simultaneously implying the event wasn’t very bad – not a “real catastrophe” compared to Katrina. This was all while delivering his emergency address on Puerto Rican soil!
At a time in which solidarity and compassion were expected, Trump was criticised by many for making the issue about the US’s economic burden; and yet, like many things Trump does, this inadvertently raised some critical issues surrounding the economics of disaster in the modern era.
US President Donald Trump speaks next to Puerto Rico’s Governor Ricardo Rossello and US First Lady Melania Trump at the Luis Muniz aerial base in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in October 2017.Thais Llorca / POOL/EPA
The imagination of disaster – its preempting, in a sense, its prediction – offers insurers (and the reinsurers who back them), following rapidly updated actuarial tables, a unique opportunity to capitalise on risk.
At the same time, disasters are a boon to some capitalist investors, who are able to buy into the development of new infrastructure for a profit.
Disaster in this way is a chief “innovator”, sucking up surplus capital, offering the most literal realisation of what conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter celebrated as one of the virtues of capitalism – its capacity for “creative destruction”.
Technology and disaster
French philosopher Paul Virilio has argued that the invention of every technology is simultaneously the invention of its accident. The invention of the car, for instance, invents the car crash. While the disaster film is acutely aware of these failures built into every technology, the genre’s relationship towards technology is more complex than outright critique.
Perhaps the most striking ambivalence of disaster films concerns the role – and virtues – of technology in facilitating and overcoming disaster. This is explicitly worked through in “man-made” disaster films like The China Syndrome, The Towering Inferno, and, more recently, Deepwater Horizon.
Natural disaster films like The Day After Tomorrow and Geostorm envision global warming as the product of devastating technological practices, and offer technological solutions to this. In Geostorm, the network of satellites that control the weather malfunction, and rapidly become the cause of even greater disaster as the film progresses.
Geostorm (2017) envisions global warming as the product of devastating technological practices, and offers technological solutions to this.Warner Bros., Electric Entertainment, RatPac-Dune Entertainment
And yet, at a higher level, these films are entirely dependent on cutting edge visual and aural technologies to stage the awe inspiring disasters in the first place. They also require a great deal of investment – of capital, and human labour – and, therefore, create a great deal of waste.
Disaster cinema, in unconsciously teasing out the relationship between technophilia and technophobia, forces us to confront one of most pressing dilemmas of the age of the Anthropocene: should we reflect on and think through the causes of disaster, or use technology to act in the hope of preventing future disasters?
A discourse of technological “solutions” to climate change fits squarely into the logic critiqued by philosopher Timothy Morton in his book Dark Ecology.
Technology, in the first place, depends on the extraction of power from nature, and the conversion of the natural into waste-creating power. Suggesting that something can cohere with a technological “problem: solution” framework is thus perhaps part of the problem itself.
Indeed, the myth that there can be a “growth”-oriented solution to global warming is convincingly undone in one of the key academic works on global warming discourse, Anneleen Kevis and Matthias Lievens’ The Limits of the Green Economy.
By studying Hollywood’s mediations of disaster – its attempts at containment and emotional management – we can perhaps begin to learn something about the ongoing tensions and contradictions that define ecological existence in modernity.
The future of disaster
The sheer frequency of contemporary natural disasters raises the question – is there a point at which we will lose our appetite for watching them staged on film?
I suspect the answer is a resounding “no.” Following September 11, it was commonplace to hear people say the footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre looked like it was from a movie. But what movie? The documentary photo-realism of the footage barely resembled Hollywood’s slick action and disaster spectacles.
More notably, Hollywood films began to adopt the September 11 style after the event itself, with the hand-held, found-footage style realism of films like Cloverfield becoming a cliche by the end of the first decade of the 21st century.
This, once again, exemplifies the comforting finitude popular film narratives offer viewers. The more frequent disasters become, the greater will be the need for emotional management by the corporations that produce popular news and entertainment.
The more desperate people become about global warming – and the emergence of grassroots activist groups like Extinction Rebellion suggests people are becoming increasingly desperate – the more popular media corporations will assuage our anxieties with carefully ordered, pacifying spectacles.
For the last week or so, people have been walking around Sydney with their heads down, eyes red from the smoke, wearing masks to filter the air.
Pedestrians are seen wearing masks as smoke haze from bushfires in New South Wales blankets the CBD in Sydney this week.Steven Saphore)/AAP
This is like something from a disaster film – and similar scenes of the effects and aftermath of catastrophe are continuing to appear around the globe.
Yet, there is no evidence this will curb Hollywood’s appetite for disaster. In fact, cultures and societies – like individuals – have historically attempted to deal with collective trauma by replaying and restaging it in art, from the Chauvet cave paintings to The Longest Day. This may make people feel both better and more helpless at the same time.
Scott Morrison is picking up that Australia’s devastating, prolonged fires are producing a soured, anti-government mood among many in the community.
It may not be entirely rational for people to turn on politicians in such situations. The actual fighting of the fires, driven primarily at state and local levels, appears to have been efficient.
But the government has invited anger in terms of the broad debate by being so inactive and partisan about climate change over years.
Morrison is struggling to navigate his way through these fraught days before Christmas. He’s stressing unity – “I want to reassure Australians, that the country is working together … to deal with the firefighting challenge”. He’s refusing to meet calls for a national summit or a COAG meeting on the fire effort, but he’s highlighting the federal government’s co-ordinating activities.
He’s placing the most positive spin he can on what Australia is doing on climate change, but all the time emphasising Australian emissions are only a tiny portion of the global total “so any suggestion that the actions of any state or any nation with a contribution to global emissions of that order is directly linked to any weather event, whether here in Australia or anywhere else in the world, is just simply not true”.
The fires are putting pressure on the government by elevating the climate issue and opening new division among Liberals. Only this time – and importantly – the internal wedge is coming from the left rather than the right of the party. The PM is being pushed to do more, rather than being held back.
Morrison is no longer able to gloss over the climate debate. The big question for the next year or two is whether he will reposition the government.
As former treasury secretary Ken Henry has argued, “today’s catastrophic bushfires, and rapidly vanishing water security, again following years of drought, put the present government in a similar position” to when John Howard moved on climate change in 2006.
Morrison is the ultimate pragmatist and so, if he sees it in his interest, he may well be willing to readjust. Not radically, nor quickly. Just enough, as and when he judges it, to satisfy middle ground voters.
He did a little of this before the election, when he topped up funding for “direct action” and advanced pumped hydro, although some read more into the shift than was there.
This week NSW Liberal environment minister Matt Kean bluntly called out his federal colleagues’ dancing around the climate-fires link.
“Let’s not beat around the bush … let’s call it for what it is. These bushfires have been caused by extreme weather events, high temperatures, the worst drought in living memory – the exact type of events scientists have been warning us about for decades that would be caused by climate change,” said Kean, who is the leader at state level of the moderate faction.
“There has been a lot of talk since the federal election about ending the climate wars. I think that that talk has been misplaced. It’s not time to end the climate wars. It’s time to win the climate wars.”
Kean also notably acknowledged the “leadership” on the issue of Malcolm Turnbull (who again prodded the bear on Monday’s ABC Q&A).
One federal Liberal says, “for a long time [Kean’s line] is where the overwhelming majority of the party has stood [but] nobody was willing to say it. The community is so concerned it has given us the cover to come out and say it”. The MP points to the impact of the issue in Liberal heartland seats in Sydney and Melbourne.
The federal government has repeatedly derided the Victorian and Queensland Labor governments for what it argues is their excessive ambition on renewables and emissions reduction. Kean has flagged NSW plans to strengthen its stand. The federal government is clearly exposed as the odd player out.
Yet it is the states’ targets for renewables that are helping the national effort on emissions reduction, according to figures just released by the environment and energy department in its report “Australia’s emissions projections 2019”.
Looking at Australia’s progress towards its 2030 Paris target of a 26-28% reduction on 2005 levels – which, incidentally, can only be reached via the much-criticised course of carrying over Kyoto credits – the report has revised down its 2018 estimate for projected 2030 emissions.
Reasons for this revision include the boost to the “direct action” fund and “stronger renewables deployment”. A factor in the latter was “the inclusion of 50% renewable energy targets in Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory”.
The projection is now for Australia to have renewables generating 48% of its electricity by 2030 – very close to the Labor policy of 50% of which the government was so critical.
Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s speech at the United Nations COP25 conference in Spain this week showed how, as the inevitable transition to clean energy progresses, the government is conflicted. Regardless of years of scepticism about renewables from the federal Coalition, Taylor in Madrid lauded Australia’s achievements in this area.
“In Australia, an unprecedented wave of low emissions energy investment is already underway,” he boasted.
“Last year, renewable investment was Australia’s highest on record at A$14.1 billion, which is world leading investment given our population. Renewables are now more than 25% of our electricity supply in our National Electricity Market.”
Reality is gradually proving stronger than ideology as the energy mix changes, but not entirely. The debate around a new coal-fired power station goes on. The government before the election promised a feasibility study into a possible venture in Queensland, and the Nationals continue to push for action.
If a feasibility study left the way open for a coal-fired station, would the government be willing to provide any financial help or guarantee a portion of the energy output? Given the reluctance of private capital, that would likely be the only way it could happen.
There was a certain irony in Anthony Albanese touring coal country in central Queensland this week, given the climate debate.
Visiting Emerald, Rockhampton and Gladstone among other stops, Albanese was beginning his mission to reconcile the strands in Labor’s climate messages, after Bill Shorten failed to do so, costing vital Queensland votes.
This week Albanese has been talking up the domestic transition to renewables, while providing reassurance to the coal areas by declaring the world will continue to want Australian coal for the foreseeable future.
He says the role of government in relation to new coal mines is to make the environmental judgements; if they pass that test, then such projects live or die on their ability to raise private finance. On Adani, he says it has its approval and he’s urging it to get on with providing the jobs (the company says it is doing so).
As to a new coal fired power station: he believes it would not get private finance.
Very aware Shorten was smashed for trying to walk in different shoes on climate and coal when he was in the inner city and in regional Queensland, Albanese is aiming for a story to which he can get a favourable reception all round the country.
That won’t be easy. Then nothing is, for anyone, on the climate issue.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katharine Kemp, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, UNSW, and Co-Leader, ‘Data as a Source of Market Power’ Research Stream of The Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation, UNSW
Today, the federal government responded to the recommendations of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) “world-leading” Digital Platforms Inquiry.
The response, however, is a less-than world-leading roadmap for reform.
Few dispute the ACCC’s inquiry was ground breaking, as it held to account tech giants including Google and Facebook, and the power they wield over media, advertising and consumers.
But the government’s plan for reform lags behind other major global jurisdictions, where greater privacy protections have been enacted.
The recommendations, and the response
The ACCC spent 18 months on the Digital Platforms Inquiry, publishing its hefty final report in July.
In the report, 23 recommendations were made. These include wide-ranging reforms to consumer protection and privacy laws.
In today’s announcement, the government supported six of these recommendations in their entirety and ten “in principle” (with plans for further reviews).
It “noted” five others, and rejected two.
A lagging Privacy Act
In its final report, the ACCC highlighted that Australia’s privacy laws did not give consumers the same protections granted in other comparable countries and the European Union.
For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), gives European consumers more choices and more complete information about how their personal data is used.
The ACCC’s recommendations on privacy sought to align Australia’s privacy laws with the GDPR. This included imposing higher standards for consumer consent and privacy notices, and introducing rights to erase personal data in certain situations.
The government does support higher penalties for breaches of the Privacy Act, and will act on that recommendation sometime next year. However, there will be another 18 months of inquiry into whether any other improvements to the Privacy Act are actually required.
The government also supported, in principle, a new statutory tort (law) of serious invasion of privacy, which was also recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission in 2014.
Similarly, the ACCC’s report proposed a private right of action (which allows an individual to sue directly) on privacy matters. This right is currently only available to the regulator. The government supports this recommendation in principle, but it is “subject to consultation and design of specific measures”.
The reality is, privacy best practice standards are evolving rapidly around the world, while Australia lags behind. Australian web and app-based businesses have to design their services to comply with overseas legislation.
To its credit, the government made a commitment of A$26.9 million over four years to fund a new unit in the ACCC.
This unit will monitor and report on the state of competition and consumer protection in digital platform markets.
Its first task will be to conduct further inquiries into the advertising technology (ad-tech) sector, in line with an ACCC recommendation. Ad-tech facilitates personalised targeted advertisements, such as those presented by Facebook and Google.
The key issue, from a platforms perspective, was the ACCC’s proposal to have a voluntary code of practice regarding the power imbalances between digital platforms and news media businesses. A voluntary code means the industry has the opportunity to develop new rules itself.
The government has directed the ACCC to work with stakeholders to develop and implement voluntary codes to address this power imbalance, and the ACCC must provide a progress report on code negotiations in May next year.
The code must be finalised no later than November. If agreement isn’t reached, the government has reserved the right to impose a mandatory code.
The government will also work with the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), in a staged process to reform media regulation.
The objective is to have a “platform-neutral” regulatory framework covering both online and offline delivery of media content (for example, having common rules for Netflix and free-to-air television).
In practice, this “staging” is likely to lead to the first legislation being introduced into parliament in late 2020.
What was left out?
One of the recommendations the government rejected was the proposed mandatory ACMA take-down code, which would assist copyright enforcement on digital platforms. The rejection was on the basis that major copyright owners and users identified “unintended effects” of such a code.
The government also rejected the proposal that philanthropic funding of journalism should be tax deductible, mainly because it is in the process of implementing a deductibility framework, introduced in 2017.
The ACCC also recommended the prohibition of unfair contract terms. It repeated this proposal in the context of small businesses and consumer loyalty schemes.
The government noted this, and promised there will be consultation on a range of policy options to strengthen unfair contract term protections.
The was also a “note” response on the recommendation to prohibit certain unfair trading practices. There is currently work underway through Consumer Affairs Australia and New Zealand exploring such a prohibition.
The government deferred adopting a change to search engine and internet browser defaults. Instead, the ACCC will monitor and report back on Google’s roll-out of options in Europe.
The ACCC also proposed changes to merger law. These were intended to address what in Europe is called a “killer acquisition”.
The government anticipates further public consultation on this proposal.
Unfortunately, the government’s plan for further legislative reviews offers only the mere possibility of improvement to consumer privacy protections. And even if these eventuate, they are more than eighteen months away.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lidia Morawska, Professor, Science and Engineering Faculty; Director, International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (WHO CC for Air Quality and Health); Director – Australia, Australia – China Centre for Air Quality Science and Management (ACC-AQSM), Queensland University of Technology
Bushfire smoke has now been blanketing parts of Australia for months. This week the air quality in Sydney reached new lows, reported to be 12 times hazardous levels in some parts of the city on Tuesday.
Beyond being stifling and unpleasant, people are experiencing irritated eyes and breathing difficulties.
We’ll only fully understand the longer term health effects in the weeks and months to come.
When the situation is as bad as it has been in Sydney over the past few days, people stop asking questions about whether air pollution has an impact on health; we know it has. The question on everybody’s mind now is: how can I protect myself and my family?
Our natural instinct tells us if the conditions outside are bad, we should seek refuge inside. The indoor environment provides some protection against bushfire smoke and outdoor air pollution in general, but the degree of protection depends on the type of building and importantly, its ventilation.
Buildings such as shopping centres, most modern office buildings and hospitals are equipped with heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, which incorporate air filters.
The efficiency of these systems depends on the filter technology and the size of the filtered particles. Smaller particles are generally more difficult to catch and remove, but sophisticated technology can achieve this. It varies, but what we call HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) filters can remove close to 100% of airborne particles.
The particles we’re concerned about in bushfire smoke are ultrafine particles. So these are likely to be removed with HEPA filters, but could get through less sophisticated filters.
The smoke haze is a result of ongoing bushfires outside of Sydney.Steven Saphore/AAP
Residential homes and apartments are not commonly equipped with HVAC systems. Instead, they’re naturally ventilated, typically by opening the windows. So in residential houses, the indoor concentrations of pollutants are often close to the outdoor concentrations, particularly when the windows are open.
Even if the windows are closed, outdoor pollutants will penetrate indoors if the building is “leaky”, meaning there are cracks the air can get through. This is the case in many old buildings, particularly those built from timber.
Air purifiers
One option to improve the quality of indoor air is to use air purifiers. Air purifiers use a system of internal fans to pull the air through a series of filters that remove airborne particles. The air purifier then circulates the purified air back into the room.
But again, the protection offered by purifiers can range from low to very high. As with filtration systems, the level of protection depends on the type of purifier you have. Those equipped with HEPA filters are much more efficient.
Their effectiveness also depends on the volume of air the purifier services, the setting (one room or several interconnected rooms), the ventilation rate (this is measured by how many times the whole volume of air is exchanged per hour) and how it is set to operate (continuous or intermittent).
To put this in context, operating a purifier equipped with a HEPA filter in a typical bedroom would significantly reduce the concentration of air pollution in the bedroom, most likely to a safe level. However, operating a less efficient purifier in a large, open plan house is not likely to help much.
Face masks
Many people consider face masks to be the best protection against air pollution. But for the most part, they merely provide a false sense of security.
Firstly, a mask is only effective if it’s properly fitted: if the fit is not perfect, most of the small particles, such as those present in the pollution plume from bushfires, will get through.
Secondly, the efficiency of the mask depends on the behaviour of the person wearing it. This includes how long you wear the mask for and how often you take it off. Considering wearing a mask is uncomfortable – particularly when it’s hot – it’s not easy to keep it on all the time.
Industrial style masks are more fitted than simple fabric masks, so can be more effective – but still depend on the wearer’s behaviour. These are not practical to wear all the time.
And if it’s questionable whether a mask will protect an adult, it’s even less likely to protect a small child. A child cannot be expected to tolerate the inconvenience and discomfort of correctly wearing a mask.
In summary, indoors we are protected to some degree from outdoor air pollution, so consider staying inside where possible – particularly if you have an existing health condition.
You might like to wear a mask or invest in an air purifier. These may help to some degree, but are emergency measures that don’t in themselves represent a solution.
While the air quality is likely to improve in Sydney and other affected regions as these fires ease, our changing climate means we can only expect to be in this situation more and more. The only real way forward is to address the climate crisis urgently and decisively.
Grant Robertson, New Zealand's Minister of Finance. Image courtesy of https://www.labour.org.nz/grantrobertson
Dr Bryce Edwards.
In his big-spending infrastructure announcement yesterday, Grant Robertson reinforced what many political commentators say about him – he’s electorally smart, but way too conservative to be a genuine leftwing minister of finance. Robertson does what is right for winning votes, but not necessarily what is in the interests of the country or even Labour’s own constituency.
The spend-up on infrastructure is electorally smart. It answers critics from across the political spectrum who complain that this government has not addressed the infrastructure deficit brought about by previous National and Labour governments.
That’s why plenty of economists have given the package a thumbs-up. For example, Donal Curtin has blogged to say, “It was, from an economic perspective, completely correct” – see: Give that man a DB. And he suggests any opposition to the announcement is suspect: “Show me someone who disagrees with this boost, and I’ve a better than average chance of showing you a nutter.”
There has also been widespread endorsement of the general package from across the political spectrum. The Herald’s business editor Liam Dann pointed to this accomplishment: “Today’s announcement was ‘welcomed’ by BusinessNZ, The Employers and Manufacturers Association and the Council of Trade Unions. Getting the thumbs-up from these three in one afternoon is no mean feat” – see: What a time to be a finance minister (paywalled).
Dann also gave credit to the Government’s adroit timing and packaging of the new spending: “The Government gets to make a pre-Christmas splash with surplus spending headlines, it gets another bite in the quiet news vacuum of the New Year when it announces the highly anticipated specifics of new transport spending. And it still leaves plenty of fiscal headroom for voter-friendly acts of budget generosity later in 2020.”
Similarly, Herald political editor Audrey Young suggests that the lack of detail in Robertson’s announcement will work in the Government’s favour: “That will come in early January to kick-start the Government’s election year. Robertson presented the outlines of a turbo-charged capital spending plan with enough lack of detail at present to avoid providing a target for the National Opposition. But essentially, Robertson and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will be able to announce the details of a $7.6 billion in new capital spending at the start of election year” – see: Robertson sets up Govt nicely for election year (paywalled).
She also suggests that this was all deliberately designed as an election year gambit: “Robertson denied that delaying the big reveal until 2020 is anything to do with election year – he would say that, wouldn’t he?”
She says the Finance Minister “failed to identify one single shovel ready project. Or even reveal how many of those will be started next year. Given the Infrastructure Commission has a list of over 500 projects, worth $21 billion, Mr Robertson could’ve plucked a few of those out of the hat and said work would be starting soon.”
Business journalist Pattrick Smellie also says that the configuration of yesterday’s announcement means “it is almost inconceivable that the government doesn’t have an election year hip pocket splurge of some sort up its sleeve for the ordinary New Zealand family” – see: Why so conservative, Grant?
Smellie suggests the Government has cleverly left itself with plenty of room to manoeuvre because the announcement relates to one-off capital spending and not increasing operational spending, which means that next year could see increases for welfare beneficiaries and possible tax cuts via a shift in income tax brackets.
The focus of the Government’s increased capital spending on transport, and roading in particular, is also seen as clever. Hamish Rutherford labels the new-found fashion for roads “pragmatic” because, “Although building new roads may be less transformational than the Government hoped, it may also be smart politics. Not only are such projects popular with many voters, they can provide measurable productivity gains” – see: Grant Robertson promises a wall of transport demand into the future (paywalled).
Rutherford also explains that for a government that needs to find projects that are almost ready to go, and with fewer construction industry capacity restrictions, roading is the perfect area to spend on.
Similarly, Thomas Coughlan argues that the Government’s spending decisions are being influenced by partisan strategic gain: “this Government’s funding of additional roads robs National of the oxygen it needs in opposition. The party is yet to release its transport policy document. But Robertson’s announcement today of $6.8b in additional transport spending could steal National transport spokesman Chris Bishop’s thunder by gazumping some of Bishop’s promises” – see: Politics and economics are strange bedfellows, but they’ve made $12b of magic.
Why the announcement is conservative
Although on the surface, Grant Robertson’s announcement involves massive amounts of new spending, many commentators have been underwhelmed by it. According to Thomas Coughlan’s article above, although economists have approved of the announcement, the level of new spending was “not nearly as much as they’d wanted”. He cites KiwiBank senior economist Jeremy Couchman as believing “the Government still had more room to lift borrowing to tackle the infrastructure deficit.”
Similarly, journalist Bernard Hickey wrote this morning that the amount of spending is “nowhere near enough to fill a yawning and growing infrastructure deficit”, and points out that new debt levels will barely increase on what they are now.
Westpac’s economists also dismissed the significance of the new expenditure, labelling it a “bit of a damp squib”, and suggesting that because “the spending would be spread over many years have only a small impact on the economy” – see Tom Pullar-Strecker’s Infrastructure boost cheers business groups but economists fear lag.
The same article reports the Infometrics firm as arguing that given current low debt levels, the “Government could have announced a much larger investment”.
Pattrick Smellie suggests the levels of new spending could be considered “unduly conservative – even miserly”. He says “Having raised expectations the government could push out the ratio of net Crown debt to 25 percent of gross domestic product from the current 20 percent limit, the forecasts unveiled in today’s Budget Policy Statement look tame” – see: Why so conservative, Grant?
The focus of the spending should have been entirely different, according to leftwing political commentator Chris Trotter, who has written a scathing blog post, labelling Robertson’s announcement “disgraceful” with a “courage and compassion deficit” see: Grant Robertson spends up large – on the Establishment!
He asks what Greta Thunberg, or even the Greens, would have to say about the fact that only a tiny fraction of the new spend – $200m – is being allocated “to making the Zero Carbon Act mean something”. Instead, the bulk of the money is going on roading.
Trotter believes the Greens should be outraged: “the Greens’ response to his announcement is just plain sad. To be clear, their transport champion, Julie Anne Genter, has been humiliated. The road transport lobby has effortlessly outmanoeuvred whatever policy wonks she’s had pitching the case for rail.”
He is also astonished that none of the $12bn is being spent on welfare, despite this government claiming to be “transformational”, and the Prime Minister preaching the “politics of kindness”. For Trotter it’s a betrayal of Labour’s voters: “Never mind that pouring money into the pockets of our poorest citizens is the fastest and most effective way of delivering our economy a much-needed shot of adrenaline. No, never mind all that. Finance Minister Robertson and Social Welfare Minister Carmel Sepuloni have no intention of upsetting the Establishment by giving beneficiaries anything remotely resembling a Christmas present.”
Finally, Gordon Campbell makes the economic and compassionate case to the Minister for Child Poverty Reduction, Jacinda Ardern, that increased government spending should actually be going on implementing the recommendation of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group – see: On welfare vs infrastructure spending.
The pacific island nation of Samoa has been making headlines over the past month due to a significant measles outbreak. At last count, 4,995 measles cases had been recorded, and 72 people, mostly young children, had died.
The actual number of cases and deaths is likely to exceed this, because not everyone with measles will present for medical treatment, and not all deaths occur in hospital.
Tragically, 40% of recorded deaths have been in babies under one year old, and nearly 90% among children less than five.
With a population of 200,000, Samoa has fewer people than Geelong or Hobart. So a significant proportion of the population has been affected. More than one in five Samoan babies aged six to 11 months have contracted measles during this outbreak, and more than one in 150 babies in this age group have died.
Fortunately, with increasing vaccination coverage, we’re now finally seeing signs the number of new measles cases in Samoa is slowing.
Contagious but preventable
Measles causes a fever with cough, runny nose and red eyes, followed by a rash. Around one in three cases develop complications, most often diarrhoea and pneumonia.
Measles is probably the most contagious virus affecting humans. In a susceptible population – that is, people who have neither been vaccinated nor had measles previously – a single person with measles would infect 12 to 18 others.
A rash is one of the defining symptoms of measles.From shutterstock.com
The most frustrating and tragic thing about this outbreak is that a safe and effective vaccine is available. A single dose of measles vaccine (MMR or MMRV vaccine is used in Australia) provides protection to between 95% and 98% of recipients, while two doses protect 99% of vaccinated people.
Because measles is so infectious, about 94% of the population need to be vaccinated to stop it spreading. “Herd immunity” means unvaccinated people, including those unable to be vaccinated due to young age or specific medical conditions, are protected.
These deaths were caused by human error and not the vaccine per se. The vaccines were inadvertently mixed with expired muscle relaxant anaesthetic instead of water.
This tragic incident resulted in the suspension of the national measles vaccination program and loss of confidence in vaccine safety. Because of this, vaccine coverage for one-year-old children for the first dose of measles vaccine fell from 76% in 2012 to 31% in 2018.
When a traveller re-introduced measles to Samoa in August this year, these unvaccinated children made it possible for measles to gain a foothold and spread throughout the country.
The first laboratory-confirmed measles cases were reported in September, and an outbreak was declared in October. In the face of rising measles cases and deaths, the Samoan government declared a state of emergency on November 15, setting the scene for a campaign of mandatory vaccination.
The government shut down on December 5 and 6 during a door-to-door vaccination campaign. People who had not been vaccinated were asked to leave a red flag or cloth outside their home.
Official estimates indicate 93% of the population have now been vaccinated. Achieving vaccination rates over 95% among children aged six months to four years will be key to stopping this measles outbreak.
Health workers preparing vaccination packages ready for mobile distribution.National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre, Author provided
Aiding the public health response
This outbreak has placed enormous pressure on hospital staff and the Samoan health system. Samoa’s largest hospital has more than doubled its usual capacity, including duplicating an emergency department, paediatric wards and intensive care unit in old hospital wings.
In response to a request from Samoa, the Australian Medical Assistance Team (AusMAT) has been in Samoa since early November. For two weeks in November, I was part of AusMAT’s “team bravo”, which included 34 specialist nurses, doctors and public health experts.
AusMAT set up a temporary ward in Apia, Samoa, to treat young patients.National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre, Author provided
AusMAT is one of several teams that have travelled from overseas to help Samoa manage this outbreak.
My role as a public health specialist included working with local and international staff on case diagnosis, analysis and reporting of measles cases and deaths, and identifying the most important groups to receive urgent vaccination.
Measles vaccines have been in widespread use in Australia since the early 1970s. The last recorded measles death in Australia was in 1995, and in 2014 the World Health Organisation declared Australia had eliminated measles.
Despite this, travellers regularly re-introduce measles to Australia, which can spread to susceptible people they come into contact with. As recently as this week, Victoria has been the subject of a measles warning, after three people were diagnosed in Melbourne.
High vaccine coverage (in 2018, 94.6% of five-year-old Australian children were fully vaccinated) means a measles outbreak of this magnitude would not occur in Australia at present. However, Samoa’s experience is a reminder there’s no room for complacency around vaccine preventable diseases.
Auckland City from Bayswater. Image by Selwyn Manning.
The case for a complete relocation of Auckland’s Waitematā Harbour freight port is far from established. Nevertheless, Auckland will grow over the long term, and the freight operations need to move away from the area close to the downtown Ferry Terminal.
This area should become like Sydney’s Circular Quay. The question is: where is Auckland’s equivalent to Sydney’s Botany Bay? This question has become pressing, with Prime Minister Ardern declaring that the port must shift.
There is another option that should be added to the present list of options. The option is Māngere Inlet, the portion of Manukau harbour between Māngere Bridge, Southdown and Ōtāhuhu; Port Southdown.
While the capital costs for this option would be higher than other options, most likely, the operational benefits would be higher, and the ongoing operational costs would be lower. The essential component of this option would be the construction of a ship canal across the Ōtāhuhu portage.
History:
A ship canal in Auckland is not a novel idea. The first formal proposals for such a canal date to around 1850. The debates peaked in the 1900s’ decade. Legislation preserving land‑rights for such a purpose was eventually repealed, in 2010. It was in the 1890s that the Manchester Ship Canal and the Keil Canal were built. The first Welland Canal in Canada – which allows ships to bypass Niagara falls – opened in 1829. The present Welland Canal was completed in 1932, and carries trans‑Atlantic as well as domestic shipping. In April this year, I enjoyed a stay in the old Pilot Lodging which overlooks this ship canal at Port Colborne.
In September 2019, Lisa Truttman published The Canal Promoter, available from:
Ms Truttman outlines the various canal proposals, in the context of an account of the life of one of the most prominent canal promoters, David Bruce Russell. The booklet is an important addition to the growing body of material exploring Auckland’s history. For my purposes here, however, I will just cite Truttman’s final paragraph:
Today [2019], there still exists a Local Purposes Reserve (Canal) along the old line delineated in 1850 from the Ōtāhuhu Cemetery on one side and the Portage Canal Foreshore Reserve on the other at the Tāmaki River side, bisected by Great South Road, and ending at Saleyards Road. Much of it is used by adjoining buildings encroaching onto it, carparks, storage yards and the like. With the repeal of the 1908 Auckland and Manukau Canal Act in 2010, there is no intention of land being taken … under the Public Works Act, for a canal. So, the reserve at Ōtāhuhu remains, more or less, simply as a historical anomaly.
These historical proposals all differ, in one major respect, from my Māngere Inlet proposal. Past writers saw such an isthmus canal as a means of access to the Waitematā from the west. They were not at all envisaging a day when the Waitematā port itself might need to be disestablished. Rather they wanted to shorten the sea routes to Auckland from Australia and from the South Island. And – before the Panama Canal – the main sea route from the United Kingdom. Indeed, in the 1900s most passions were exercised over where the canal should be, not whether it should be. The route through New Lynn – though requiring more earthworks than Ōtāhuhu – would have created a more direct shipping route from the Manukau Heads to Port Waitematā.
The economic case for a canal to solve this Auckland access problem diminished with the growth of the railways and the motorways, and more latterly, with the growth of international trade with Asia. Further, the once important coastal shipping industry became only a faint shadow of its former self.
My proposal is for Māngere Inlet as an east coast harbour. The reserve at Ōtāhuhu should remain reserved.
The ‘Port Southdown’ Proposal:
The proposal is that a new Auckland port be created in Māngere Inlet, through the construction of a dyke to the west of the inlet (the site of the old Onehunga bridge could have been a possibility), and a ship canal to the east, presumably at the site of the Ōtāhuhu portage. While a Tāmaki canal itself would be quite small compared to the foreign canals cited – therefore not über‑expensive – other substantial costs would be the re‑acquisition of land, and the construction of tunnels and bridges to allow existing roads and rail lines to cross the canal. There may also need to be a partial relocation of existing railway infrastructure, and of the fuel pipeline to Wiri.
A possibility could be to have a lock running through the dyke. However, there are already coastal shipping facilities at Onehunga. Container transhipment by land from Onehunga to Southdown should not be a problem. The new (low) Māngere Bridge, for which construction started last month, would be incompatible with shipping. Rather, the Māngere side of this facility is intended to have a recreational focus.
The Operational Benefits of the Māngere Inlet site:
Māngere Inlet is the site that best links with the Auckland’s existing industrial locus. It is close to the present Southdown landport; close to Auckland International Airport; close to the Ōtāhuhu railfreight hub; close to both Auckland’s motorways; and close to Auckland’s main southern hinterland. A container port in the Inlet would not conflict with other land uses, because this is already a contaminated industrial zone.
In a future low‑carbon world, shipping and rail will need to displace road haulage. It means that there will be a substantial revival of coastal shipping, given the constraints on rail expansion in New Zealand. A Tāmaki canal – giving Auckland a new east coast port – can facilitate coastal transhipment between Auckland, Northland and Bay of Plenty.
The Operational Costs:
I expect that there will be a need for ongoing dredging of Māngere Inlet. However, with no river outlets into the new harbour basin, the accumulation of silt may not prove to be the major problem it is in many foreign ports.
Such a low‑cost operation contrasts substantially with the operational costs associated with getting substantially more freight into (and out of) Auckland by land. These high operational costs are all characteristics of the Northland, Bay of Plenty, and Firth of Thames proposals.
The Capital Costs:
These are the cost of construction (canal, dyke, and new port facilities), of initial dreging, of land acquisition, and of building new road and rail links under and over the canal. (And maybe a railway over the dyke – from Onehunga to Middlemore – with a branch to the airport.)
While probably higher than for the other options, these costs may not be much higher if the other options are costed properly. For example, the costs to the residents of West Auckland that would arise from intensive rail and road freight construction (and operations) from Northland would need to be properly included in the Northland option that the present government appears to be favouring.
A Level Playing Field:
A Tamaki‑Southdown‑Māngere proposal – such as that outlined here – should be included as an option for a relocation site for Port Waitematā. The comparative cost‑benefit analysis should be equitable, with due consideration for differences in the long‑term operational benefits and costs, with transport sustainability – impact on climate change among other things – firmly in mind.
The cost of running the 2017 UK general election was estimated at £140 million (A$270 million). It’s likely to be higher this time. In 2017, the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats spent nearly £38 million (A$73 million) on their campaigns, much of it on social media, and again it’s likely to be higher this time.
So once the votes have been counted and receipts processed, what will we have learnt about UK politics, and Britain’s place in Europe?
Ultimately, and regardless of the final vote tally, UK politics has never been more paradoxical, fragmented and contradictory. The UK political system was designed to build strong parliamentary majorities for long, five-year terms.
Indeed, the 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act was introduced to entrench this tradition, yet proved irrelevant. If we include the 2016 European Union referendum – the Brexit vote – this is the fourth time Britons have been to the polls in five years.
So what can we expect this time? On some polls, the nation looks headed for another hung parliament, with no clear majority of either of the major parties. While many voters, especially outside the main metropolitan centres, seem disillusioned and angry with politics, voter turnout has increased for the past four elections, with a respectable 68.8% turnout in 2017.
Other polling has the Conservative Party, led by Boris Johnson, holding a relatively steady lead of about 43%, with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour hovering about 10% below. Yet, for a national election, the result is likely to be decided on a highly regional, fragmented and seat-by-seat basis.
Johnson’s campaign is based on the slogan “Get Brexit done”. On one level, this is savvy politics, tapping into longstanding voter frustration. Yet Johnson is a charlatan, prone to hyperbole, and voters remain wary of him.
Johnson, after all, promised he would rather be “dead in a ditch” than ask for another Brexit extension, if the third deadline of October 31 2019 was not met. Moreover, he hung the Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist party (DUP), his erstwhile coalition partners, out to dry with his last Brexit deal.
While the Conservatives have sought to buttress their Brexit plans with some increased public spending, including the dubious pledge of 50,000 new nurses (a disputed figure since it already includes 20,000 existing nurses), these promises are neither trusted nor credible. Strikingly, while Johnson employs the rhetoric of “one nation” Tory-ism, former prime minister John Major and other Conservative heavyweights have refused to back him.
Corbyn, in contrast, has been running an altogether different campaign. He would rather run on any other issue except Brexit. His “Brexit-neutral” policy is an agonised compromise between his own Euroscepticism, the estimated 30% of Labour voters who voted “leave”, and the vast majority of (especially London-based) remainers.
Corbyn has consolidated his 2017 agenda, with another big-vision, high-cost program. These include ambitious claims to build free broadband internet for the whole UK, increasing health spending and widescale nationalisation.
The sums involved are significant, and the electorate remains largely unconvinced. Yet, in another irony, Labour’s plans would still not take the UK to either French or German levels of investment in public services.
Corbyn, like Johnson, has also presided over mass defections from his party and lacks the support of former leaders.
The Scottish National Party, led by Nicola Sturgeon, will seek to exploit anti-Tory and Labour feeling in Scotland.AAP/EPA/Robert Perry
Overall, UK politics is undergoing a fundamental realignment, masked by the electoral maths and first-past-the-post voting system. While the Liberal Democrats were expected to make major inroads under Jo Swinson’s leadership, this has failed to materialise. Johnson has also been helped significantly by the decision of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party not to contest Conservative seats.
Despite the promise of a new politics from breakaway party Change UK – The Independent Group, it has rather fizzled out. Ironically, this is a strangely familiar two-party race in large parts of England. Yet, regionally, if the Scottish National Party builds on its result – it holds 35 of the 59 seats in Scotland – it may dominate in staunchly “remain” Scotland.
So, what might happen? There are at least three potential scenarios.
First, a clear Johnson victory, in which the Conservatives win a strong majority of the 650 seats. This would rely on a collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote and the Corbyn “surge” to fail.
Second, a hung parliament, in which Johnson, like Theresa May before him, would need to eke out a deal to secure power. This might rely on a new healing relationship with the DUP.
Third, a Corbyn win, in a minority “rainbow” coalition on the back of a promise of a second referendum. Again, paradoxically, these might all lead to further Brexit paralysis.
While Johnson did win a majority for his withdrawal agreement, it’s far from clear, even with a strong majority, if a “hard” Brexit can be avoided. Basically, a hard Brexit would cuts all ties and links with the EU, and the UK would be bogged down trying to negotiate a new trade deal with Europe. Yet, even if Brexit is paralysed, Scottish independence will certainly inch closer.
A further EU referendum might also expose what we know already: on many issues, the UK remains deeply divided. Whatever the result, there are underlying cultural and social changes taking place across the UK, and the party system is nowhere close to catching up to them.
The ultimate paradox for Johnson is that all this electoral activity might not have changed anything at all.
Our team has discovered a cave painting in Indonesia that is at least 44,000 years old and which may cast new light on the beginnings of modern religious culture.
This ancient painting from the island of Sulawesi consists of a scene portraying part-human, part-animal figures hunting wild pigs and small buffalo-like animals with spears or ropes.
Hunting scene at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4. The top image shows a photostitched panorama of the rock art panel (images enhanced using DStretch). The bottom image is a digital tracing of the rock art scene.Ratno Sardi (top); Adhi Agus Oktaviana (bottom).
As we report today in Nature, our dating study shows this is the world’s oldest known representational artwork (as the images depicted are figurative in nature).
The depiction of the part-human, part-animal hunters may also be the earliest evidence of our capacity to conceive of things that do not exist in the natural world. This ability is a cornerstone of religious thought and experience with origins long shrouded in mystery.
Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art.
Sulawesi’s ice age art
The new cave art site is named Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 and our Indonesian colleagues discovered it in December 2017. It is one of hundreds of cave art sites in the Maros-Pangkep limestone karst region of South Sulawesi.
Map of Sulawesi showing the location of the cave art site Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4.Kim Newman
In 2014, we announced that a cave (Leang Timpuseng) in Maros-Pangkep harbours one of the world’s oldest rock art motifs, a hand stencil created at least 40,000 years ago.
First discovery of 40,000-year-old cave art in Sulawesi.
We also recently reported on a figurative painting of a banteng (a species of wild cattle) dating to at least 40,000 years ago from a Kalimantan cave on the adjacent island of Borneo.
Palaeolithic cave art discovery in Kalimantan, Borneo.
Until now, this painting was the earliest known figurative motif on the planet.
A team effort to date the art
Rock art is very challenging to date.
Fortunately, we were able to collect small mineral growths that had formed over the paintings at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4. We dated this “cave popcorn” using uranium-series analysis, which calculates ages by measuring the radioactive decay of elements.
We conducted our study in collaboration with researchers from several Indonesian institutions, including Indonesia’s National Research Centre for Archaeology (ARKENAS) and scientists from the culture heritage preservation department (BPCB) in Makassar.
The dating of four “popcorns” returned ages between 35,100 and 43,900 years.
So the art in this Indonesian cave was created at least 44,000 or so years ago!
Why is this art important?
Our results show the painting at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 is the oldest figurative art in the world.
Aside from the extraordinary antiquity of this painting, this is the first time a detailed visual narrative or “story” has been identified in cave art at such an early period.
The standard view in Europe is that humanity’s first rock art consisted of simple geometric symbols, which evolved into the sublime figurative paintings of animals from France and Spain from around 35,000 years ago. In this view, the first scenes and human-animal hybrids (known as therianthropes) came along much later.
But the art at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 suggests the major components of an advanced artistic culture were already present in Sulawesi 44,000 years ago: figurative art, scenes, and therianthropes.
It’s possible “complex” art like this was already being made somewhere in Asia (or Africa) even longer ago.
The dawn of human spirituality
The early portrayal of therianthropes at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 is fascinating.
Hunting scene at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4. A group of small part-human, part-animal figures is apparently capturing an anoa (a buffalo-like creature native to Sulawesi) with what seem to be ropes or spears.Ratno Sardi
In Western culture we are most familiar with part-human, part-animal images like werewolves. But therianthropes often have great religious significance.
A therianthropic figure in the hunting scene at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4. This motif appears to represent a human figure with bird-like head and beak.Ratno Sardi
For example, ancient Egyptians revered and feared many deities and demons whose physical forms combined animals and humans, such as the jackal-headed god of death, Anubis, and the sphinx, which had a lion’s body and a human head.
When did we first develop the capacity to dream up such extraordinary creatures?
Up until now the earliest known image of a therianthrope in world archaeology was the “Lion-man” from Germany, a figurine of a human with a feline head carved from a mammoth’s tusk. Nazi archaeologists unearthed this artefact in 1939 and it is said to be 40,000 years old.
At 44,000 years or more, the figures from Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 predate “Lion-man”. They may represent the earliest indication of our ability to imagine the existence of non-real entities like therianthropes.
This ancient world is disappearing
This Sulawesi cave art is a gift from the dawn of human culture. But it is crumbling away before our eyes.
Our rock art surveys with our Indonesian colleagues have uncovered many new cave sites in Maros-Pangkep with spectacular figurative paintings that still await dating. We have also observed the alarming deterioration of this art at almost every location.
Monitoring by BPCB confirms the limestone cave wall surfaces on which the paintings were made are peeling off, erasing the art. This process is happening quickly: at some sites, patches of art 2–3 cm wide vanish every couple of months.
It would be a tragedy if these exceptionally old artworks should disappear in our lifetime. We need hard scientific data that can tell us why this globally significant rock art is deteriorating and what we can do about it – and we need it now.
Why are women with diabetes and their babies at greater risk?
Women with diabetes have an increased risk of pregnancy complications, particularly if they’re among the more than 60% whose pregnancies are unplanned.
Harm can be to the mother, such as preeclampsia, where her blood pressure increases, her body swells and her liver and kidneys may be damaged. If left untreated, preeclampsia can lead to seizures and loss of mother and baby.
Pregnancy can also affect the mother’s diabetes directly, from changes in how her body uses insulin.
Early in pregnancy, women may become more sensitive to insulin and be more likely to have extremely low blood sugar levels (becomehypoglycaemic), severe enough to lose consciousness.
Later in pregnancy, hormones released from the placenta make the body more resistant to insulin, which can make controlling her blood glucose much more difficult.
Babies are at a greater risk of malformations due to sub-optimal levels of glucose they may be exposed to in the womb.from www.shutterstock.com
If higher blood glucose levels continue or the mother has extreme blood glucose levels, this may lead to miscarriage, stillbirth or the baby dying shortly after birth.
So it’s no wonder the childbearing years can be daunting.
1. Think about contraception early, even if you want a baby
Are you planning to become pregnant? If “yes”, then contraception is important to make sure you’re ready for pregnancy, and when it happens, there’s the greatest chance of a healthy baby (see point 2). If “no” and you are sexually active, or soon will be, then you also need effective contraception.
So, start discussing contraception early in your childbearing years, ideally before you become sexually active. You can do this either through your diabetes team or your regular health-care provider.
Long-acting reversible contraception, like this intrauterine device, is recommended for women with diabetes.from www.shutterstock.com
Long-acting reversible contraception (for instance, intrauterine devices or implants) are strongly recommended as these have the lowest failure risk and minimal, if any, impact on your diabetes.
Some oral contraceptives are less effective than long-acting reversible contraception and can lead you to gain weight (which can impact how well your diabetes is managed). Weight gain may also increase your risk factors for heart disease, and increases the risk of pregnancy complications, such as having a large baby.
2. If you want a baby, find a pre-pregnancy diabetes management service
A pre-pregnancy diabetes management service is a one-stop-shop that looks after your pre-pregnancy care including contraception (see point 1) to make sure the time for conception is right for you.
Using one of these services has been shown to reduce the risk of your baby being malformed by 75% or dying before or at birth by 66% compared to those that do not receive such pre-pregnancy care.
So ask your health-care provider if there is a service like this in your area, and if there is, ask for a referral well before trying to conceive.
At a pre-pregnancy diabetes service, you will get advice and support on all aspects of diabetes from a multidisciplinary team including: a diabetes specialist, a diabetes educator and dietitian, linked with obstetric or gynaecology services.
This includes the impact pregnancy can have on diabetes complications; the impact of diabetes on your baby and pregnancy outcomes; miscarriage and IVF; folic acid supplementation (see point 5); and medication safety (see point 6).
But these services are not available in all areas. Before our diabetes contraception and pre-pregnancy service opened in 2018, few clinics in NSW specialised in diabetes pre-pregnancy care.
3. Choose the right health-care provider for your pregnancy
Once you know you’re pregnant, ask your GP to refer you to a diabetes specialist team of health-care professionals experienced in managing diabetes in pregnancy. This team will work with an obstetric team.
Such a multi-disciplinary approach means endocrinologists, obstetricians trained in high-risk pregnancy care, dietitians and diabetes educators, among others, will be looking after you.
Early referral is essential, preferably before eight weeks gestation. This is to allow your insulin to be carefully managed to avoid uncontrolled changes in glucose that, as mentioned earlier, can affect you and your baby.
Every woman should have access to diabetes specialist services through a hospital, but in rural and remote areas this may be some distance away.
Although there may be some telehealth options, it is important that ongoing management and particularly the birth are planned with that diabetes specialist team as soon as possible. Your GP will need to refer you.
4. Keep healthy glucose levels before and during pregnancy
Whichever health professional or team of health professionals looks after you, maintaining your blood glucose levels within range as much as possible before and during pregnancy is vital.
It helps women with diabetes fall pregnant safely, reducing the chance of miscarriage. If you are using IVF, fewer miscarriages will mean fewer rounds of IVF.
Healthy glucose levels also provide a growing baby an environment where it will flourish, reducing the chances of pregnancy complications.
one hour after eating level, less than 8.0 mmol/L, and
two hours after eating, less than 7 mmol/L.
Naturally, these may need to be higher if hypoglycaemia is a problem.
If you have type 1 diabetes and are planning pregnancy, are pregnant or have very recently had a baby, you now have access to a free glucose sensor, a wearable device that monitors your glucose continuously. With this device, you should aim to be within 3.5-7.8mmol/L more than 70% of the day.
At present there is not enough evidence to support using a continuous glucose monitoring during pregnancy if you have type 2 diabetes. But glucose monitoring remains very important before breakfast and after meals.
Pregnant women with diabetes are recommended to take a high dose of folate (5 milligrams daily, as opposed to 0.4-0.5 milligrams in women without diabetes.
That’s because the risk of having a baby with a neural tube defect is raised in women with diabetes.
So if your health-care professional doesn’t raise this, mention it yourself and buy a folate supplement from your local pharmacy.
6. Ask about your medications
It’s important to talk to your health-care provider as soon as you know you are pregnant so they can advise whether it is safe to continue taking your existing diabetes medication.
Metformin does not cause malformations but does cross the placenta. It’s used where the benefits from improved glucose control outweigh any possible theoretical long-term risks to the baby.
Other oral medications to lower blood glucose are generally not approved for use during pregnancy.
This is the first of two essays exploring key theories – cognitive load theory and constructivism – underlying teaching methods used today.
Explicit guidance and feedback from teachers is more effective in teaching students new content and skills than letting them discover these for themselves.
This is a premise of cognitive load theory, which is based on our knowledge of evolutionary psychology and human cognition, including short- and long-term memory.
The theory holds that most children will acquire “natural” skills – such as learning to listen to and speak a native language – without schools or instruction. We have specifically evolved to acquire such knowledge automatically. It is called “biologically primary knowledge”.
But there is another category of knowledge – “biologically secondary knowledge”, which we have not evolved to acquire. It consists of virtually every topic taught in schools from reading and writing to science and maths.
Cognitive load theory is concerned with the acquisition of secondary knowledge.
The theory now underpins the method of explicit instruction – where a teacher will explicitly provide students with information or demonstrate a way of doing things – a common means of teaching in schools. Cognitive load theory explains why this method works.
But if other people aren’t available, secondary knowledge can be discovered during problem solving – such as engaging in research. Such discovery, or inquiry, works but is slow and inefficient. It should only be used when we cannot obtain needed information from others.
Whatever way it’s acquired, new secondary information must first be processed by our working (or short-term) memory. We use working memory when we are paying attention to something. But this memory resource is severely limited in capacity and duration.
When faced with new, secondary information, working memory can process no more than about two to three items of information at any given time and for only about 20 seconds.
Once the new information has been processed by working memory, it can be transferred to a long-term memory that has no known capacity or duration limits.
We can only process two or three bits of new biologically secondary information in our short-term memory at any one time.from shutterstock.com
Think of what you are doing now. You are faced with an immensely complex set of squiggles on a screen. The reason they don’t appear complex to you is because of the enormous amount of information you hold in long-term memory.
Information which has been processed in working memory and stored in long-term memory can be transferred back to working memory to generate action and thought appropriate to a given context. That is what we do when we read.
Cognitive load theory uses this cognitive system to generate teaching methods.
The ‘worked example’ effect
Probably the best-known teaching method is based on the “worked example effect”. This occurs when students who are shown how to solve a particular problem or write a specific essay learn better by studying an example first, instead of generating a solution themselves.
A colleague and I showed this in 1985. One group of students were shown a series of problems and their worked example solutions. Another group wasn’t given example solutions.
The first group performed significantly better on a subsequent test of similar problems to the example. Subsequent work demonstrated the same effect on transfer problems that differed from the example, than the group who had to come up with the the solutions themselves.
Studying a worked example reduces the working memory load compared with generating a solution yourself. When solving a problem, you will inevitably consider a large number of possible moves, many of which do not assist in reaching the solution.
But when the solution is provided by a worked example, you are shown exactly which moves are relevant and you don’t have to consider a large number of alternative moves that lead to dead ends.
The problem solutions can be stored in long-term memory.
Once lots of problems and solutions are stored in long-term memory, we are in a better position to work out a solution to a new problem that can be related to previously learned solutions.
Basically, to think deeply, we need lots of knowledge stored in long-term memory.
Other examples
To reduce unnecessary cognitive load, teaching must be properly structured. Learning is impeded, for instance, if students need to unnecessarily split their attention between several sources of information such as a diagram and text. But learning is facilitated by physically integrating the diagram and text.
Think of a geometry diagram with statements underneath it saying things like “Angle ABC = Angle DBE (vertically opposite angles are equal)”.
Experiments have demonstrated that the very simple act of placing the statement on the diagram itself (putting “Angle ABC” next to where angle ABC actually is) reduces the cognitive load.
But if the text is redundant to the diagram, it should be eliminated altogether. For example, if you are teaching how the blood flows through the heart, lungs and body you might provide a diagram with arrows indicating the direction of flow.
A statement such as “blood flows from the left ventricle to the aorta” is redundant because it should be clear from the diagram. Studies have shown giving students the diagram alone reduces the cognitive load compared to students who are given a diagram with redundant text.
These effects can only be shown if the information studied is complicated. If a student is learning the symbols of the chemical periodic table (Fe stands for “iron”), it does not matter how the information is presented because the cognitive load is low.
heart.
What are the alternatives?
Alternatives to cognitive load theory, such as teaching critical thinking, often place a heavy emphasis on learning new problem solving or thinking strategies. Unfortunately, there are few randomised, controlled trials demonstrating their effectiveness.
Cognitive load theory assumes that, for example, critical thinking is biologically primary and so unteachable. We all are able to think critically if we have sufficient knowledge stored in long-term memory in the area of interest.
A car mechanic can think critically about repairing a car. I, and I dare say most of you reading cannot. Teaching us critical thinking strategies instead of car mechanics is likely to be useless.
A private member’s bill, moved by Labor MP Josh Burns, recently called on the Australian government “to help build more affordable homes” in response to the growing homelessness crisis. A premise of the bill is that a lack of social housing is a major cause of homelessness and increasing the supply is a key element of solving the problem. The government’s response was that one solution is to encourage social housing tenants to find paid work, so they can move into private rental housing.
The problem with this argument is it overlooks the major barriers to entering the private rental market for low-income households. It also does not excuse the failure to invest adequately in building more social housing.
There is certainly a shortage of social housing. About 140,600 applicants were on the waiting list for public housing and 8,800 households were wait-listed for state-owned-and-managed Indigenous housing as at June 30 2018. Another 38,300 applicants were waiting for mainstream community housing as at June 30 2017 (the most recent publicly available data). Together, these tenure types comprise most of Australia’s social housing.
Tenure in social housing was once effectively unlimited provided tenants paid their rent and maintained their property. But waiting list pressures have led to a new approach. In his response to the private member’s bill, the assistant minister for community housing, homelessness and community services, Luke Howarth, argued:
There needs to be more responsibility […] from state governments to help people who are able to get back into the workplace to then move on from social housing so that it will provide a flow-through effect for people currently on the waiting list.
Howarth’s argument is consistent with much state and territory policy. For example, the NSW Future Directions policy explicitly commits to “upskilling” tenants to enable them to live in private rental housing.
Tacitly overlooked in such “pathways” policies are the barriers to entering private rental. Across Australia less than 26% of private rental properties are affordable for households on a minimum wage. Less than 4% are affordable and appropriate for households on income support.
Prejudice and discrimination against tenants perceived to pose a greater risk to landlords’ investments make access even more difficult.
Low-income households in the private rental market also face insecure tenure. “No-grounds terminations” are permitted in all states and territories except Tasmania and, from July 1 2020, Victoria (except at the end of the first fixed term).
Under “no grounds” termination, landlords can evict tenants for no stated reason at the end of a fixed-term lease and at any time on a periodic lease. Fear of retaliatory eviction makes it less likely tenants will assert their legal rights.
Even if private rental access and affordability were certain, many social housing tenants are not in a position to undertake employment. In 2017–18, about 398,900 households were in social housing in Australia. Many of them relied on the disability support pension (21%) or the age pension (19%) as their main source of income.
Long-standing targeting of social housing to greatest need means tenants are disproportionately likely to have low educational qualifications and limited marketable skills. They face considerable employment challenges, not the least of which is stigmatisation.
It is also worth considering what “employment” realistically looks like for social housing tenants seeking to enter or re-enter the workforce. It’s likely to be as casualised labour in the gig economy.
As social policy researchers Greg Marston and Catherine McDonald have argued, we cannot assume exiting welfare for the labour market leads automatically to social and economic security. Precarious, intermittent, low-wage employment does not offer a sound basis for sustaining a private tenancy.
Of course, social housing tenants should be supported to find work and to move out of social housing if they want to. But the evidence would suggest tenant choice is not the motivation here. Rather than creating “pathways” as a way of managing social housing waiting lists, governments would have greater impact on the housing crisis if they invested much more in social housing.
In addition to providing more social and affordable housing, governments must act on the systemic problems in the private rental market. This includes developing nationally consistent tenancy legislation to provide more protection for tenants, including against no-grounds evictions, and providing the resources to properly enforce such laws.
The board of Australia’s second-biggest bank is in for some stick at its annual general meeting today, as Westpac shareholders vent their displeasure at the scandal involving breaches of anti-money-laundering rules.
But though it will be uncomfortable, with enough shareholders likely to vote against the remuneration report to trigger a vote to spill the entire board, a full-blown revolution is not on the cards.
With the number of shares held determining how many votes each shareholder gets, major investor support is enough to suppress most shareholder uprisings.
This, and a fundamental problem facing all collectives, currently limits the potential of shareholders to hold corporations to account, both through choosing to hold shares or not, as well as through voting power.
Ethical divestment
Decisions by shareholders to avoid profiting from business considered unethical arguably goes back centuries, with religious communities consciously avoiding investments in slavery, arms, alcohol, tobacco and gambling – so-called sin stocks.
Since the the 1980s secular funds have extended this idea to the more expansive agenda of social and environmental sustainability. One thread of this ethical investment trend has led to the divestment movement.
Fossil fuel divestment advocates outside the Australian Stock Exchange on the day of Whitehaven Coal’s annual general meeting in November 2013.Greenpeace/AAP
The movement’s rationale is that divestment increases the cost of capital. It’s effectiveness, however, is a matter of debate. Bill Gates is among the critics, calling divestment “a false solution”. One argument is that it simply means companies end up being owned by shareholders only interested in profits. It has also been argued fossil fuel divestment might even cause emissions to rise.
Shareholder activism
Shareholder activism takes a different approach to divestment. It’s about immersion rather than aversion. It involves shareholders directly engaging with directors and executives of companies to effect change from within.
Unlike ethical investment, the roots of shareholder activism are not altruistic. Historically to be called an activist shareholder was no compliment. It probably meant you were a hedge fund focused solely on reaping bigger profits. This was typically done by pressuring boards and management to sell off under-performing assets and disburse the cash to shareholders.
To date, little activism has been motivated by altruistic purposes. That’s partly to do with a fundamental problem that limits the ability of activism to influence corporate behaviour for non-financial reasons.
Economists call it the free-rider problem. In essence it’s the problem of individuals having little incentive to contribute to a collective resource when they can enjoy its benefits even if they don’t.
How this applies to shareholders was first outlined by Harvard academics Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means in their seminal 1932 book The Modern Corporation and Private Property.
Ownership of public corporations is generally diffused between a significant number of shareholders. Individual shareholders have little incentive to monitor senior management, because of the cost they bear while others reap benefits.
Ironically, corporate boards are meant to mitigate this free-rider problem. Their job is monitor management on behalf of shareholders. But Westpac’s anti-money-laundering scandal adds to the evidence the system might be broken. The allegations suggest a board incapable or unwilling to effectively monitor senior management in complex and sprawling conglomerates.
Shareholder engagement and activism should play an increasingly important role in shaping corporate behaviour, improving the quality of board monitoring and addressing the free-rider problem.
Big institutional shareholders in particular could be more active in ensuring boards have skilled, competent directors. They could also foster a culture of openness by supporting directors to challenge senior management without fear of putting their tenure at risk.
In the 12 years since New Zealand introduced the retirement fund KiwiSaver, nearly three million New Zealanders have enrolled and 30 KiwiSaver providers are now collectively managing NZ$57 billion in investments.
In the year to Sept 2019, fund providers earned NZ$479.8 million in fees, with each member charged an average of NZ$132 per year.
Our research explores the gap between initial expectations and reality, and shows that New Zealanders miss out on tens, and in some cases hundreds, of thousands in retirement savings.
The New Zealand government introduced KiwiSaver in 2007 to address a lack of retirement savings. The savings scheme takes employee and employer contributions and gives them to a private fund manager to invest. Members can either choose a fund manager or are assigned one at random. The government also makes a contribution, which we included in our calculations, but note that not everyone is receiving what they are entitled to.
Managing a fund costs money, and with nearly NZ$57 billion invested, New Zealanders have paid NZ$479.8 million in fees to fund managers. Fees are often quoted to members in a way that makes them appear deceptively small.
For instance, the average KiwiSaver growth fund will cost 1.25% per year. The equivalent UK fund would likely cost around 0.92%. To many New Zealanders, this difference may sound inconsequential, which has motivated a recent move to quote fees as dollar amounts on annual statements.
Fees are a double-edged sword. They erode retirement savings by reducing monthly contributions and the future compounding of those savings. The result is tens of thousands less in retirement.
For example, a 25-year-old member in the average growth fund with an income of NZ$50k is likely to pay NZ$50k in fees over the life of their KiwiSaver. They will retire with about NZ$255k in savings. In contrast, the cheapest growth fund would charge just under NZ$15k in fees over the same period, and would result in over NZ$300k in savings at retirement.
Economies of scale
While policymakers debate whether New Zealanders pay too much, our research looks at economies of scale. When the government established KiwiSaver, policymakers thought the high fees KiwiSaver providers were charging would reduce as more people invested.
They expected that as funds increased in size, the costs of running them would be spread over larger pools of funds and it would become cheaper to manage the investments. These cost savings would then be passed on to members.
We collected data on the total fees charged by KiwiSaver providers along with the assets under management and the number of members a fund has. Our project included 24 fund providers and over 267 individual funds (across five risk groups) between 2013 and 2018.
If there are economies of scale present, then as a fund gets larger, either by increasing the amount of money or by increasing the number of members, the fees should increase by a less than proportional amount. Put differently, a 1% increase in size should result in a less than 1% increase in fees.
But this is not the case. When we consider the amount of money invested, a 1% increase in the assets under management results in about a 1% increase in fees. In other words, as the total sum invested in KiwiSaver increases, we can expect total fees to increase at the same rate. This means KiwiSaver providers are either not seeing any cost savings at all as they get bigger or are refusing to pass these savings onto investors.
When we consider the number of members in a fund as the measure of size we see some evidence of economies of scale. A 1% increase in members results in a 0.93% increase in fees, a small reduction in the fees.
Unfortunately, large increases in KiwiSaver members are unlikely. KiwiSaver already has over 80% of eligible New Zealanders enrolled. In 2019, the number of members grew by 3% across all funds. Future economies of scale won’t be large.
The expected cost savings have not materialised and seem unlikely to. The total amount of KiwiSaver fees providers collect looks set to continue to increase at a steady rate. For members, the consequence will be expensive funds (compared with their peers in other countries) and far less in retirement savings come age 65.
Nick Broomfield’s latest documentary, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love tells the story of the fabled relationship between Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, which unfolded after they met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960.
It was there that they lived and loved for the best part of a decade, and where Cohen wrote the poetry, novels and eventually songs, that made his reputation.
Their romance was captured in the 1967 song So Long, Marianne from Cohen’s debut album, and entrenched in a 1969 record sleeve image of Ihlen wrapped in a towel while seated before Cohen’s typewriter. Here, we were presented with the Norwegian muse behind the songs.
Cohen and Ihlen were all but separated by the end of the 1960s. But as if bringing their storied romance full circle, they both passed away within three months of each other in 2016, although not before Cohen sent an urgent letter to the dying Ihlen.
That note — heard in the film being read to Ihlen on her death bed — provides the emotional climax to Marianne & Leonard, seeming to bridge the decades its author and recipient had been apart. It asks viewers to believe they had remained in love; anticipating their reunion in the afterlife.
Broomfield has a particular interest in the lives of music celebrities. He has previously trained his cinematic eye on Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Whitney Huston, and Biggie and Tupac. Yet, his interest in Cohen and Ihlen is more than professional. As he recounts in voice-over, he was briefly Ihlen’s lover when he found himself on Hydra in the late 60s, while Cohen was shuttling between the island, Montreal, New York and Nashville.
Cohen could no more contain his ambitions to Hydra than he could contain his affections to Ihlen, and he eventually left both behind. As with Cohen, Broomfield’s island romance was seemingly formative, and he kept in contact with Ihlen as she negotiated her painful break-up with the musician. Broomfield thereby became an observer of the damage done to those who find themselves caught in the slipstream of fame, a role he retains in the film.
Two incompatible genres
Marianne & Leonard is an intriguing meeting of two seemingly incompatible genres — the documentary, with its claims to reality; and the romance, which allows for the improbable.
A portrait of Marianne Ihlen.Copyright Nick Broomfield
A nod to realism early in the film, with an attribution of “the early sixties” attached to archival film footage, proves incorrect. (The age of Ihlen’s child, born in 1960, dates the footage to at least 1967). But on one level, such oversights hardly matter. The film is not so much interested in locating the specific origins of Ihlen and Cohen’s relationship, as it is in emphasising the timelessness of their romance.
Yet, Marianne & Leonard struggles to fill its 97 minutes of screen time. There is only a sparse amount of footage of either Cohen or Ihlen on Hydra, and only a fragment of them together in the same frame. Only by careful cinematic editing can Cohen and Ihlen be presented as a couple in this film.
The pair together.Copyright Aviva Layton
Broomfield then faces the narrative challenge of maintaining interest in the now-distant relationship across nearly five decades in order to reach Ihlen’s demise and the reconciling letter. The film addresses this task by detouring through Cohen’s well-documented career, supported by ex-band mates speaking to camera.
By contrast, Ihlen’s subsequent marriage and domestic life are quickly summed up and dispensed with. There is little of substance said about her other than how she occasionally positioned herself to support other creative types such as singer Julie Felix, and Broomfield himself.
So whereas Cohen is afforded limitless agency as his fame advances, Ihlen remains fixed in the role of the beautiful ingénue, the muse, the part-time lover.
A visual refrain running through the film is of the blazingly blonde Ihlen pictured in slow-motion, wistfully looking out across the Aegean from aboard a yacht.
While this time-bound imagining sets a sympathetic tone towards Ihlen, Marianne & Leonard is more admiring in its representation of Cohen as a man active in the world, singing and seducing his way across the globe while struggling with the inner demons that drive his spiritual longing and lust in equal measure.
Harder truths
Broomfield does not shy away from the hurt Ihlen and her son suffered while Cohen pursued his art and his “appetite” (a coy term the musician uses for his unappeasable sexual desire). But, neither does it confront the harder truths of the license taken by, and conceded to, creative men.
Leonard Cohen writing.Copyright Axel Jensen Jr
When applied to great artists, myth and romance are frequently more appealing than reality.
Accordingly Marianne & Leonard recounts a romantic ideal that audiences might wish for, and which its subjects themselves burnished over the years. And viewers familiar with the storyline will likely leave the cinema with their biases confirmed.
For those who think of Cohen as the finest singer-songwriter of his generation, there is plenty of material to support that claim and attest to the resulting adulation. For those who approvingly — or otherwise – regard Cohen as a “ladies’ man” (to half conjure the title of his ill-fated record with producer, Phil Spector), that judgement is also borne out.
For others who admire Cohen as a poetic searcher, his years in a Buddhist monastery are also accounted for, even if this section of the film has little to do with the love story at its heart.
And for those inclined to see Cohen and Ihlen as being blessed by eternal love, then the film will play straight to their romantic expectations.
Viewers will not, however, learn much about Ihlen herself, beyond her entrenched representation as Cohen’s Hydra lover and “muse”.
The NSW Law Reform Commission will hand down its final recommendations for a reformed definition of sexual consent in the new year, following draft proposals in October.
The commission’s inquiry is largely the result of the advocacy of Saxon Mullins, who was let down by the legal system when the man accused of raping her, Luke Lazarus, was acquitted in a judge-only trial. A jury had earlier convicted him.
The point of legal contention was whether Lazarus believed on “reasonable grounds” Mullins was consenting. The jury in the first trial ruled Lazarus had no grounds for believing Mullins consented, therefore finding him guilty.
But following an appeal, judge Robyn Tupman ruled Lazarus did reasonably believe he had consent, referring, among other details, to Mullins’ supposed failure to do anything “physical to prevent the sexual intercourse from continuing”.
Much of the debate since the beginning of the review has focused on whether the law in NSW should adopt an “affirmative” approach to sexual consent. With a legal model of affirmative consent, Mullins’ case might have had a different outcome.
Affirmative consent is broadly supported in the community, and adopting it would bring the law in NSW more in line with the current approaches in jurisdictions like Victoria and Tasmania.
But, how this works as law in a rape trial is less clear. The NSW commission should take note that the wording of Victoria’s legislation in particular offers limited protection in court.
What is affirmative consent?
The model of affirmative consent is based on the idea all people have the right to have sex or not have sex. A person who wants to have sex with another person must actively confirm, by “taking steps”, that the other person also wants to have sex.
They could ascertain this via verbal agreement or active participation, as opposed to passive submission. The question of whether an alleged perpetrator had reasonable grounds to believe the complainant was consenting could be answered more clearly if these steps were an expectation of every sexual encounter.
Affirmative consent means taking active steps to confirm the other person wants to have sex.From shutterstock.com
In conducting its review into consent law in NSW, the commission looked to the way consent law operates in other states.
It gave the highest praise to approaches in Victoria and Tasmania, despite a lack of empirical evidence to show how these laws are working in practice.
Victoria
Myself and colleagues looked at 15 rape trials from the County Court of Victoria between 2008 and 2015 to explore how affirmative consent translates into legal practice.
Our findings raise concerns about whether the law in Victoria is able to change the way “rape myths” – falsities which blame women for being raped and excuse men’s predatory behaviour – play out in trials.
Despite using language that reflects an affirmative approach to consent, the way Victoria’s law has been written fails to implement the standard in practice.
The Victorian Crimes Act defines consent as “free agreement”. A person who does not “reasonably believe” the other person consents should be found guilty of rape.
It’s not, however, until the act defines what a reasonable belief means that there is specific reference to the “steps taken” by the initiator of sex, for example, asking the other person if they want to have sex. The act says:
whether or not a person reasonably believes that another person is consenting to an act depends on the circumstances
without limiting subsection (1), the circumstances include any steps that the person has taken to find out whether the other person consents…
The cumulative impact of these two sections of the law is that a person seeking sex does not need to take any steps to make sure the other person actually wants to have sex.
Further, there is no test of reasonableness of the steps themselves. So, if a person took unreasonable steps – for example, claiming they thought about consent, but did not do or say anything to make sure the other person was consenting – this could constitute a “step” in the eyes of the law. This effectively renders the premise of affirmative consent redundant.
Tasmania
In Tasmania, a belief in consent is not honest nor reasonable if the accused “did not take reasonable steps in the circumstances” to ensure the other person was consenting.
This approach avoids the two biggest pitfalls of the Victorian law, because first, steps are mandatory, and second, those steps must be reasonable steps. Under Tasmanian law the “steps” need to be more proactive to be considered reasonable. In a Tasmanian court, a person will have to identify actions they took to make sure they had consent.
The Tasmanian approach embeds affirmative consent into law, a feat not achieved in Victoria. So in delivering its final recommendations, the NSW commission would be best placed to take cues from Tasmania.
Affirmative consent is a good thing. But the way the legislation is worded is important.From shutterstock.com
A promising proposal
In its draft proposals, the commission suggested these laws sit under a set of “interpretive principles” to make them easier for jurors to apply.
These principles reflect the core values of the affirmative approach to sexual consent. They state: “sexual activity should involve ongoing and mutual communication, decision-making and free and voluntary agreement between the persons participating in the sexual activity.”
The inclusion of these principles will be important in making affirmative consent law in NSW.
Further, the commission has provided some clarity around the vague idea of “taking steps”, a key concern raised in earlier submissions. The draft proposals suggest defining steps as “whether the accused person said or did anything to ascertain if the other person consented”.
This language means that, unlike the ruling of the NSW Court of Appeal in Mullins’ case, a “step” will constitute more than just the accused “thinking” about consent. Instead, the commission frames a “step” as a physical act, achieved through actions and words.
Yet, the draft proposals have not responded to the ongoing concerns with Victorian law. They don’t lend support to mandating that the accused demonstrate to the court that they took steps to ensure they had consent. It’s important this be addressed in the final recommendations, or NSW will not be moving towards a model of affirmative consent.
