Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Ward, PhD candidate, University of Sydney

The ABC has announced it will not provide live radio coverage of the Olympics for the first time in 67 years for budgetary reasons, and because Australians now have the “increased ability to access Olympics coverage in other ways”.

The decision sparked a furious response from some, such as veteran sports broadcaster Quentin Hull, who deemed it a “national shame”.

But was the decision a snub to sports fans in favour of other types of broadcasting, or just a matter of hard-nosed accounting?

Funding cuts forcing difficult decisions

The ABC’s decision needs to be viewed in two contexts: internal competition for increasingly scarce resources, and a battle to define how sport now fits into the ABC’s charter obligations.

First, the money. The ABC’s financial situation is in dire straits, especially given the range of services it is now expected to provide.

In the past two decades, the ABC has transformed from a radio and television broadcaster to a multi-channel media organisation. It’s done this to meet the responsibilities of its comprehensive service charter, ensuring it reaches Australians across a range of new digital platforms (three digital television channels, digital radio services, podcasts and apps).

At the same time, the government has frozen the ABC’s budget for three years from 2019, which comes on top of earlier budget cuts. The decision not to send a radio team to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics is a direct result of these cuts.

Read more: The ABC didn’t receive a reprieve in the budget. It’s still facing staggering cuts

Prior to the federal election in May, and the funding freeze, the ABC expected to receive an extra $14.6 million in indexed funding for 2019-20, sufficient to cover occasional events like the Olympics and the current bushfires.

Now, it faces an $84 million shortfall over the next three years instead.

There’s an added problem created by the annual approval of divisional budgets.

This year, ABC Radio’s budget would have needed special top-up funding to meet the cost of the Olympics. Sources have told me this is estimated to be $1 million (for the rights and production costs).

Given top-up funding is not available in the current budget, executives would have had to make program or staff cuts elsewhere. That’s on top of the cuts already planned as a result of the budget freeze. They chose not to.

Sports fans may be outraged the ABC has chosen to ditch its Olympic radio coverage instead, but cuts anywhere else – say to regular religious or children’s programming – would have produced equally loud protests from other audiences.

A long history of sports coverage

Which leads to our second question: what is the ABC’s role in providing sports coverage in a multi-platform world?

For decades, the ABC and its constituents saw sports broadcasting as central to its charter roles: universal service, national identity and innovation.

The first ABC Annual Report noted in 1933 that the “keen national interest in sport” had inspired daily broadcasts of the “Bodyline” Ashes cricket series to a national network of 12 stations. Indeed, the ABC helped build a national audience for sports such as cricket and tennis, first on radio, and then on television.

Read more: Into the spotlight: media coverage of the Paralympic Games has come a long way

According to ABC historian Ken Inglis, the broadcaster believed sports broadcasting was its “most characteristic feature”, directly linked to its role in nation-building.

Sports broadcasts, especially of the Olympics, have also been opportunities for the broadcaster to try new programming approaches and delivery technologies. For instance, the use of shortwave and relay services enabled coverage of the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki – the first ABC Olympics coverage.

Yet, ABC sports broadcasting has always been contentious.

In 1948, ABC Chairman Richard Boyer argued to General Manager Charles Moses that there was too much sport on ABC Radio. Although Moses countered that these broadcasts brought audiences to the ABC, the “commission insisted that the time devoted to sport be reduced” and savings spent on other programs.

However, Boyer changed his mind somewhat after the ABC’s re-broadcast of the BBC coverage of the 1948 Olympics was widely criticised for focusing too little on Australian competitors.

In 1956, ABC’s coverage of the Melbourne Olympics became a major moment in Australian television, though for most Australians it was ABC Radio that ensured they were able to share in the event.

Decades later, when top-tier sports like cricket were being commercialised, the Dix Inquiry argued the ABC needed greater diversity in its sporting output, leading to increased broadcasts of women’s sport and the Paralympics from 1988.

However, less than a decade after battling SBS for the Ashes cricket rights in 2005, the ABC started to become more ambivalent about sports as a fundamental part of its charter activities. Since the early 2010s, ABC TV has moved almost completely out of sports.

ABC Radio, in contrast, had maintained a strong commitment to sports broadcasting throughout the 2000s – until now.

Where can Australians go now?

So, without the ABC’s involvement, will Australians still have audio access to the Olympics?

Southern Cross Austereo was earlier tipped to be in position to buy the commercial Olympic radio rights, following its coverage of the 2016 Rio Games.

Read more: ​The Coalition government is (again) trying to put the squeeze on the ABC

But as its parent company shares hit a five-year low in mid-October and it recently slashed jobs, there’s a chance it won’t follow suit for Tokyo. It’s not yet clear.

What is clear is that in the “anywhere, anytime, any device” age, radio is still important to many Australians. For people driving, exercising or working, radio remains a critical sports delivery platform.

The ABC has decided this will no longer be a priority. The question, then, is whether Australians who want to follow the Olympics on radio will have any options at all in 2020.

– ref. Nation-building to ‘national shame’: the ABC’s complex debate over its role as sports broadcaster – http://theconversation.com/nation-building-to-national-shame-the-abcs-complex-debate-over-its-role-as-sports-broadcaster-126924

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip Mosley, Research Fellow, Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute

Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder affecting one in 350 Australians.

It’s caused by the loss of cells deep within the brain that produce a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Degeneration of these neurons impairs the transmission of signals within the brain, affecting a person’s ability to control their muscles. Symptoms can include tremor, stiffness, slowness, and problems walking.

Read more: The sex gene SRY and Parkinson’s disease: how genes act differently in male and female brains

But many people with Parkinson’s disease also report troubling non-motor symptoms. These include depression, anxiety, psychosis, cognitive impairment, and addiction. These symptoms can be due to progression of the disease more widely within the brain, or can be side effects of treatment.

In our recently published research, we looked at why many people with Parkinson’s disease develop impulsivity (the tendency to act recklessly on the spur of the moment) and addictive behaviours, such as problem gambling or sex addiction.

Treatment

After diagnosis, the vast majority of people with Parkinson’s disease will take medication. The dose will generally increase over time as motor symptoms become more severe.

The mainstay of treatment is medication that restores depleted dopamine, called dopaminergic medication.

About one in six people treated with this medication will develop impulsive and addictive behaviours. These behaviours can include problem gambling, a preoccupation with sex or pornography, compulsive shopping or binge eating.

People who experience this phenomenon commonly describe “losing control” and being “driven” to engage in these behaviours against their better judgement, and despite significant interpersonal, financial and legal harms.

After an initial diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, facing these problems can be a devastating second blow for patients and their families.

Our research

We’ve known for some time about the association between dopamine and addictive behaviours. As well as facilitating movement in our bodies, dopamine contributes to the experience of pleasure, and plays a role in learning and memory — two key elements in the transition from liking something to becoming addicted to it.

But scientists and clinicians have been unable to say exactly why some people develop addictive behaviours after taking dopaminergic medication, while others don’t. This limits our ability to provide a personalised approach to our patients when discussing these treatments.

Read more: From blood letting to brain stimulation: 200 years of Parkinson’s disease treatment

We hypothesised brain structure, which varies between different people, was a key factor in determining whether or not addictive behaviours would follow after people received dopaminergic medication.

The progression of Parkinson’s disease affects brain structure differently in different people, depending on the spread of neurodegeneration within the brain. If we could capture this variability, perhaps we could link this to impulsivity and addiction.

We took a group of 57 people with Parkinson’s disease on dopaminergic medication and focused on two brain networks thought to be crucial for decision making: a network for choosing the best course of action and a network for stopping inappropriate actions. These networks connect regions of the brain within the frontal lobes, an area known to support higher-order features of personality such as judgement.

We used an advanced method of brain imaging called diffusion MRI, which allowed us to visualise the structure of connections between the different brain regions involved in these circuits. Using this technology, we could quantify if the strength of these connections had been affected by Parkinson’s disease.

Alongside the brain imaging, we created a virtual casino for our participants. We measured their level of impulsive behaviours through their tendency to place high bets, switch between poker machines and accept “double or nothing” gambles.

In contrast to traditional pen and paper tests for assessing impulsivity and addiction, we felt the virtual casino would simulate an environment closer to real life.

We then compared behaviour in the virtual casino to the connectivity of the choosing and stopping networks, to see if there was an association.

Separate to this testing, we followed the participants in our neuropsychiatry clinic to see if they developed addictive behaviours.

What we found

For the most part, the greater the strength of the choosing network and the weaker the strength of the stopping network, the more impulsive participants were. That is, they had a greater tendency to behave recklessly in the casino environment by placing large bets, trying lots of different poker machines and making “double or nothing” gambles.

With regards to addictive behaviours, 17 of our 57 participants developed these problems during clinical follow up.

Read more: What causes Parkinson’s disease? What we know, don’t know and suspect

Addicted participants expressed impulsive gambling behaviour in the virtual casino, as we would have predicted. However, their brain structures suggested they would be conservative (that is, they had a weaker choosing network and a stronger stopping network). Further, the size of the dose of dopaminergic medication didn’t appear to influence reckless behaviour in these individuals.

This suggests the neurodegeneration associated with Parkinson’s disease elicits a difference in the way the brain works in these people with addiction.

What these results mean

Our method of combining information from brain imaging and virtual gameplay allowed us to distinguish these people, which has not previously been possible and could have significant implications for clinical practice.

As we begin to grasp commonalities in brain structure among people on dopaminergic medications who develop addiction, we hope to share this information to help patients and their families make the most informed choice about their treatment.

Predicting those at risk would involve the routine use of diffusion imaging and analysis in clinical practice. While this would generate extra health-care costs, it could reduce the costs and harms of addiction.

We could then select particular drugs in preference to others, or even bring forward advanced therapies such as deep brain stimulation, which treats motor symptoms with focused electricity rather than dopaminergic medication.

In the meantime, for people with Parkinson’s disease taking dopaminergic medication, establishing a network of support from family and health professionals who can detect the early warning signs of addictive behaviours is important in limiting the long-term harms of addiction.

Read more: Is there such thing as an addictive personality?

– ref. Why do many people with Parkinson’s disease develop an addiction? We built a virtual casino to find out – http://theconversation.com/why-do-many-people-with-parkinsons-disease-develop-an-addiction-we-built-a-virtual-casino-to-find-out-126019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael James Walsh, Assistant Professor Social Science, University of Canberra

The concept of “home” refers to more than bricks and mortar. Just as cities are more than buildings and infrastructure, our homes carry all manner of emotional, aesthetic and socio-cultural significance.

Our research investigates music and sound across five settings: home, work, retail spaces, private vehicle travel and public transport.

Read more: Contested spaces: you can’t stop the music – the sounds that divide shoppers

We found our interview subjects often idealised home along the lines of what Rowland Atkinson terms an “aural haven”. He suggests, although “homes are … rarely places of complete silence”, we tend to imagine them as “refuge[s] from unwanted sound” that offer psychic and perceptual “nourishment to us as social beings”.

We explored the ways in which people shape and respond to the home as a set of “modifiable micro-soundscapes”. Through 29 in-depth interviews, we examine how people use music and sound to frame the home as a type of “interaction order”. Erving Goffman coined this term to capture how people respond to the felt “presence” of an other.

That presence can be linguistic or non-linguistic, visual or acoustic. It can cross material thresholds such as walls and fences. Goffman wrote:

The work walls do, they do in part because they are honoured or socially recognised as communication barriers.

Cultivating sonic havens through music

As we detail in our recent essay in Housing, Theory and Society, the type of listening that most closely matches the idea of the home as an aural haven is bedroom listening – by young people in particular. We found that, as well as offering “control” and “seclusion”, the bedroom gave listeners a sense of “transcendence” and immersed them in “deep” listening. One interview subject said:

When I get a new album … I like to experience [it] by … lying down on the floor… I’ll turn the lights off and I’ll just be engaging with the music, my eyes won’t be open.

Another reported putting on headphones to listen to special selections of music, despite not needing to. “Headphones… [is] a more intimate … kind of thing”, even in a bedroom setting.

Read more: Our brain-computer interfacing technology uses music to make people happy

When it came to music in shared spaces and in relation to neighbours, our interview subjects seemed both aware of music’s visceral powers and keen to respect the territorial or acoustic “preserves” of others. One young female sharing a house with her mother carefully curated the type of music played, and what part of the house it was played in. Her choices depended on whether her mother was home and whether she had shown interest in particular genres.

All respondents who lived in shared households expressed some kind of sensitivity to not playing music at night.

Another lived by herself in an apartment complex of five. She took deference towards neighbours seriously enough to “tinker away” on her piano only when she was sure her immediate neighbour wasn’t home. She “didn’t play the piano much” inside her flat and was only prepared to “go nuts” playing the piano in halls and other non-domestic settings.

Music as a bridging ritual

Another of our findings accorded with the microsociological focus on how people organise time and space in everyday life. We found evidence, for example, of how music was used to wake up, or to transition to the weekend, or as a “bridging ritual” between work and home.

One interview subject remarked that he is “dressed casually anyway” when he returns from work, so his mechanism for shifting to home mode is to listen “to music … pretty much as soon as I get home … unless I’m just turning around and going straight somewhere else”. In other words, he associated the boundary between home and non-home with music and the listening rituals of returning home.

Read more: Like to work with background noise? It could be boosting your performance

One of the themes in academic literature about media and the home is that electronic and digital media blur the boundary between the inside and outside of the home. There is no doubt radio, television and now various digital platforms bring the world “out there” into the immediacy and intimacy of our own domestic worlds. But, as Jo Tacchi noted of radio sound, those sounds can also be used to weave a sonic texture of domestic comfort, security and routine.

We also found interesting sonic continuities between our homes and how we make ourselves at home in non-domestic settings. As Christina Nippert-Eng writes:

Locked in our cars, commutes offer the working woman or man the legitimate equivalent of a teenager’s bedroom, often complete with stereo system and favourite music.

In short, sonic havens are simply “places where we can retreat into privacy”, inside or outside our literal homes.

– ref. Sonic havens: how we use music to make ourselves feel at home – http://theconversation.com/sonic-havens-how-we-use-music-to-make-ourselves-feel-at-home-126188

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lin Crase, Professor of Economics and Head of School, University of South Australia

The deal to crank up Adelaide’s desalination plant to make more water available to farmers in the drought-stricken Murray-Darling Basin makes no sense.

It involves the federal government paying the South Australian government up to A$100 million to produce more water for Adelaide using the little-used desalination plant.

The plant was commissioned in 2007 at the height of the millennium drought. It can produce up to 100 gigalitres of water a year – enough to fill 40,000 olympic sized swimming pools. But has been used sparingly, operating at its minimum mode of 8 gigalitres a year, because of the expense of turning seawater into freshwater.

Adelaide has continued to mostly draw water from local reservoirs and the River Murray, which on average has supplied about half the city’s water (sometimes much more).

But with federal funding, the desal plant will be turned on full bore. This will free up 100 gigalitres of water from the Murray River allocated to Adelaide for use by farmers upstream in the Murray Darling’s southern basin.

The federal government expects the water to be used to grow an extra 120,000 tonnes of fodder for livestock. The water will be sold to farmers at a discount rate of A$100 a megalitre. That’s 10 cents per 1,000 litres.

By comparison, the residential price for that water in Adelaide would be A$2.39 to A$3.70 per 1,000 litres.

The production cost of desalinated water is about 95 cents per 1,000 litres when there’s rainwater already stored, according to a cost-benefit study published by the SA Department of Environment and Water in 2016. That means the total cost for the 100 gigalitres will be about A$95 million.

So the federal government is effectively paying A$95 million to sell water for A$10 million: a loss to taxpayers of A$85 million.

What do we get for the money?

The discounted water provided to individual farmers will be capped at no more than 25 megalitres. The farmers must agree to not sell the water to others and to use it to grow fodder for livestock.

There are many different forms of fodder but livestock producers most favour lucerne hay because it is highly nutritious. But it is also more expensive than cereal, pasture or straw hay.

The amount of hay that can be grown with a megalitre of irrigation water depends on many things, but 120,000 tonnes with 100 gigalitres is possible in the right conditions.

In the Murray-Darling southern basin lucerne hay currently sells for A$450 to A$600 a tonne. That would make the market value of 120,000 tonnes of lucerne A$54 million to A$72 million.

It means, on a best-case scenario, the federal government will be spending A$85 million to subsidise the production of hay worth A$72 million to its producers.

Read more: Australia’s drought relief package hits the political spot but misses the bigger point

The reality of farming

In practice farms and farmers are incredible diverse, so not all irrigators will necessarily grow lucerne. Alternative fodders such as pasture or cereal hay generally have much lower market values. Which meaning the value of the fodder produced may be much less than the best-case scenario.

It’s worrying that this policy shows such little regard for farming realities. It appears to have been crafted on the premise that every farmer has the same land, the same equipment and the same needs.

Dictating the water must be used for a single purpose runs counter to the needs of the agriculture sector. If farmers could put it to a more effective use, why not allow it?

In addition, it’s not clear how all the monitoring will be done to maintain compliance over such a restrictive regime.

What measures will prevent farmers buying the discounted water and then simply selling an equivalent amount of any carry-over allocation at the going rate of up to $1,000 a megalitre?

Read more: Drought and climate change are driving high water prices in the Murray-Darling Basin

How will the government distinguish between the fodder grown with the 25 megalitres provided at low cost and any other fodder harvested on the same farm? How much will it cost to monitor and enforce such arrangements?

The difficulty of answering these types of questions is precisely the reason why countries in the former eastern bloc failed to adequately provide for their populations. Telling people what crop to grow, when to grow, how to water the crop and how it should be consumed has not worked in the past. Farm businesses that respond to prices and use inputs, including water, in a way that suits their long- term commercial needs are generally better off.

It seems a long way from the type of national drought policy Australia needs. It’s hard to see how a policy of this kind does anything other than waste a large amount of public money and disrupt important market mechanisms in agriculture in the process.

– ref. Up the creek: the $85 million plan to desalinate water for drought relief – http://theconversation.com/up-the-creek-the-85-million-plan-to-desalinate-water-for-drought-relief-126681

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona Andreallo, Lecturer in digital culture, University of Sydney

When thinking of sexbots, companionship might not be the first word that comes to mind. But sexbot advertising promises more than sex toys. It is also selling emotional intimacy: robots marketed as if they are capable of meeting both physical and psychological needs.

They are being sold as a solution to loneliness.

Sex robots started to come on to the market around 2010. Those available now have skin that is claimed to feel lifelike, heated orifices, and the ability to groan on touch. They may have customisable eye colour, skin tone, hair styles, orifices and accents. A 2017 survey suggested almost half of Americans think that having sex with robots will become a common practice within 50 years.

The British distributor of one such robot, “Samantha”, even argues aged care homes would benefit from adopting sexbots, saying, “If people had a companion and a sex aid in a Samantha, that would take massive pressure off carers and nurses.”

Read more: Sex robots are here, but laws aren’t keeping up with the ethical and privacy issues they raise

Our desires beyond sex

My research seeks to understand companionship between humans and sexbots. I examine sex robots as objects that humans have created to fill a void, which also reflect cultural understandings of human relationships.

A companion might be a trusted friend, a spouse, a short-term sexual partner, or a pet. Recently, sex workers have used #companion in social media posts as a way of avoiding censorship. But for the most part, when we use the phrase companionship we use it to refer to a long-term, sharing relationship.

The sexbot Roxxxy is made by engineer Douglas Hines, the owner of a New Jersey-based company that is called True Companion. Hines claims “sex only goes so far – then you want to be able to talk to the person”. Programmed with six personalities including Frigid Farrah and Wild Wendy, Roxxxy can also be further customised with apps. True Companion’s demonstration video opens with the question: “What if I could have my true companion? Always turned on and ready to play.”

Another sexbot, Emma, was created by the Chinese AI Shenzhen All Intelligent Technology Company Ltd (also known as AI-Tech or AI Technology). On the company’s website, she is marketed as a “real AI you can talk to.” She offers “warm hugs” and will “feel your feelings.” At the same time, she is advertised with a vagina that is 18cm deep and an anus that is 16cm deep.

The robot, “Harmony”, produced by RealdollX, an American firm, has advanced artificial intelligence that allows her to hold conversations, remember details, and tell jokes.

The manufacturers have keenly focused on the detail in her facial appearance and movement. She has the most advanced facial movement of sex robots to date, including the ability to blink and move her lips with speech.

Just one of the family?

In 2017, British based sexbot distributor Arran Lee Wright described his relationship with Samantha. In a TV interview, Wright called Samantha a “supplement to help people enhance their relationships” – not only couples, but as part of the family.

In “family-friendly” mode, sexbots are restricted from blurting out overtly sexual comments, and Wright claimed his children (then aged three and five) were fond of Samantha. The morning show hosts were outspokenly uncomfortable about this relationship.

While Wright talked about the place of Samantha in his family, Emma is marketed as a means to negate loneliness: she is the perfect girlfriend. A girlfriend to have picnics with; who can translate emails, remind you to take an umbrella, wake you up on time and tell you how great you are.

These claims of companionship are, of course, an exaggeration. The robot Emma cannot move itself, walk, or eat. Part of being in a relationship – familial or romantic – is the way we partake in everyday routines that make up important shared aspects of human lives.

And despite the tone of these ads, the imagery in the marketing of Emma is sexualised and reminiscent of soft-core pornography. She is clearly addressed to a hetrosexual man. She might be marketed as a companion, but she is a companion for a very specific demographic.

Artificially intelligent soulmates

The existence of robot pets such as Aibo and Paro shows that humans can experience emotional satisfaction from robot-human relationships. A pet robot baby seal has been found to calm people suffering from dementia and a child robot has supported children on the autism spectrum.

However, relationships between humans and pets differ from human to human ones. The power dynamic is different. Emma is presented as equal to human, but is submissive in the marketing. Social interaction is limited. Her passive gaze does not interact with the viewer. She remains a disempowered body that can only be gazed upon.

The unequal power balance in human/pet relationships might be a factor in the success of robot pets. And is not impossible some people might find a form of companionship in sex robots, but with current technical limitations, they can’t equate to the experience of human/human relationships.

Our fears and fascination with erotic objects can tell us a lot about cultural understandings of sexuality, companionship and technology. Humans look to technology as a solution to our own imperfections and struggles.

So perhaps the question isn’t can sexbots be companions, but what is a companion? And, can a solution to loneliness be bought?

– ref. Robots with benefits: how sexbots are marketed as companions – http://theconversation.com/robots-with-benefits-how-sexbots-are-marketed-as-companions-126262

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brian Oliver, Research Leader in Respiratory cellular and molecular biology at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research and Senior Lecturer, School of Medical & Molecular Biosciences, University of Technology Sydney

New South Wales and Queensland are in the grip of a devastating bushfire emergency, which has tragically resulted in the loss of homes and lives.

But the smoke produced can affect many more people not immediately impacted by the fires – even people many kilometres from the fire. The smoke haze blanketing parts of NSW and Queensland has seen air quality indicators exceed national standards over recent days.

Studies have shown there is no safe level of air pollution, and as pollution levels increase, so too do the health risks. Air pollution caused nine million premature deaths globally in 2015. In many ways, airborne pollution is like cigarette smoking – causing respiratory disease, heart disease and stroke, lung infections, and even lung cancer.

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

However, these are long-term studies looking at what happens over a person’s life with prolonged exposure to air pollution. With bushfire-related air pollution, air quality is reduced for relatively short periods.

But it’s still worth exercising caution if you live in an affected area, particularly if you have an existing health condition that might put you at higher risk.

Air quality standards

The exposure levels will vary widely from the site of the fire to 10 or 50 kilometres away from the source.

The national standard for clean air in Australia is less than 8 micrograms/m³ of ultrafine particles. This is among the lowest in the world, meaning the Australian government wants us to remain one of the least polluted countries there is.

8 micrograms/m³ refers to the weight of the particles in micrograms contained in one cubic meter of air. A typical grain of sand weighs 50 micrograms. When people talk about ultrafine particles the term PM, referring to particulate matter, is often used. The size of PM we worry the most about are the small particles of less than 2.5 micrometres which can penetrate deep into the lungs, called PM2.5.

To put this in perspective, Randwick, a coastal suburb in Sydney which was more than 25km from any of the fires yesterday, had PM2.5 readings of around 40 micrograms/m³. Some suburbs which sit more inland had readings of around 50 micrograms/m³. Today, these levels have already reduced to around 20 micrograms/m³ across Sydney.

We’re seeing a similar effect in Queensland. Today’s PM2.5 readings at Cannon Hill, a suburb close to central Brisbane, are 21.5 micrograms/m³, compared with 4.7 micrograms/m³ one month ago.

A number of health alerts were issued for areas across NSW and Queensland earlier this week.

While these numbers may seem alarming compared to the 8 microgram/m³ threshold, the recent air pollution in India’s New Deli caused by crop burning reached levels of 900 micrograms/m³. So what we’re experiencing here pales in comparison.

Bushfire smoke and our health

However, this doesn’t mean the levels in NSW and Queensland are without danger. Historically, when there are bushfires, emergency department presentations for respiratory and heart conditions increase, showing people with these conditions are most at risk of experiencing adverse health effects.

Preliminary analysis of emergency department data shows hospitals in the mid-north coast of NSW, where fires were at their worst, have had 68 presentations to emergency departments for asthma or breathing problems over the last week. This is almost double the usual number.

Read more: After the firestorm: the health implications of returning to a bushfire zone

One study looked at the association between exposure to smoke events in Sydney and premature deaths, and found there was a 5% increase in mortality during bushfires from 1994 to 2007.

But it’s important to understand these deaths would have occurred in the people most vulnerable to the effects of smoke, such as people with pre-exsisiting lung and heart conditions, who tend to be older people.

For people who are otherwise healthy, the health risks are much lower.

But as the frequency of bushfires increases, many scientists in the field speculate these health effects may become more of a concern across the population.

How to protect yourself

If you’re in an affected area, it’s best to avoid smoke exposure where possible by staying indoors with the windows and doors closed and the air conditioner turned on.

If you are experiencing any unusual symptoms, such as shortness of breath or chest pain, or just do not feel well, you should speak to your health care professional and in an emergency, go to hospital.

Read more: How rising temperatures affect our health

Once the fires have been put out, depending upon the region, local weather conditions and the size of the fire, air quality can return to healthy levels within a few days.

In extreme situations, it might take weeks or months to return to normal. But we are fortunate to be living in a country with good air quality most of the time.

– ref. How does poor air quality from bushfire smoke affect our health? – http://theconversation.com/how-does-poor-air-quality-from-bushfire-smoke-affect-our-health-126835

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Toni Noble, Adjunct Professor, Institute for Positive Psychology & Education, Australian Catholic University

More than 600 schools have been closed, and some damaged, in recent days as bushfires rage across Queensland and New South Wales. Some students have been urgently evacuated while in school. People have lost homes and animals and are experiencing significant distress.

Research shows somewhere between 7% and 45% of children suffer depression after experiencing a natural disaster. Children more at risk of depression include those who were trapped during the event; experienced injury, fear, or bereavement; witnessed injury or death; and had poor social support.

The Victorian Education Department commissioned us after the 2009 Black Saturday fires to train teachers in seven fire-affected regions in methods to foster resilience in children.

Read more: Mr Morrison, I lost my home to bushfire. Your thoughts and prayers are not enough

Teachers told us their students had experienced distressing emotions including high anxiety, fear and even panic during the event. Comments from teachers included:

Their world had changed forever; they became more fearful.

Some children were very frightened and for a long time stayed close to their parents.

Many children became scared and anxious about worldwide issues.

Their anxiety was triggered by the smell of smoke, a fire engine’s siren or a foggy day.

The teachers we interviewed also noted children’s profound sense of loss (of their homes, pets and livestock). Many students knew someone who had lost a family member or friend.

One teacher said:

The fires opened students’ eyes to what a disaster is. Not just something you see on TV.

We trained teachers using our Bounce Back program – a research-based social and emotional learning program first published in 2003. Most children are resilient and will bounce back quickly. Only a small minority may be at risk of ongoing anxiety and there are ways to minimise that risk.

How to help kids cope now

Try to stay calm and reassuring. Children take cues from the adults in their lives. If adults show fear and nervousness, children tend to mirror these emotions.

Try to focus on the small positives such as “we are all safe”. You can list the things that haven’t changed, such as your children’s friends. Reassure them other people such as family, friends, teachers and their community will help and that life will return to normal.

Everyone feels sad, anxious or upset when a bushfire burns near their home. By helping your child name their feeling, you are helping them feel more in control. Here are five steps to encourage your children to do this:

1. take notice when your child is feeling sad, frightened, angry or upset
2. encourage your child to talk about what’s troubling them, and listen and show you understand how they are feeling
3. name the emotion in words your child can understand – are they “worried”, “scared”, “a bit frightened” or “sad”?
4. help your child understand it’s normal to feel that strong emotion and help them to sit with their feelings
5. finish with a hopeful or optimistic statement they can do something to help make things feel better. This may include something physical (such as going for a walk or throwing a basketball through a hoop), something that creates positive feelings (like playing with a pet or friend, or drawing), or doing something kind or helpful for someone else.

Resilience is the capacity to bounce back after hardship.

To help your child bounce back, you can communicate that:

• life is mainly good but now and then everyone has a difficult or unhappy time
• although things aren’t good now and it might take a while to improve, it’s important to stay hopeful and expect things to get better
• you will feel better and have more ideas about what to do if you talk to someone you trust about what’s worrying or upsetting you
• unhelpful thinking (“our family will never get a nice home again”) isn’t necessarily true and makes you feel worse
• helpful thinking (“it might take a while to get our home back again but it will happen”) makes you feel better because it is more accurate and helps you work out what to do.

Read more: Ignoring young people’s climate change fears is a recipe for anxiety

Coping after the event

Children with strong emotional support, such as from family and friends, are better able to cope with adversity.

Friendships may be disrupted after bushfires because of family relocations. Helping children connect via social media or phone with friends can reduce their sense of isolation.

Getting children back to school and regular routines can be one of the best ways to help their resilience.

Teachers are encouraged to allow time for children to talk about the bushfires and their feelings about them during class.

The teachers who participated in the Bounce Back program after Black Saturday explicitly taught children the skills for being optimistic and resilient – such as to challenge their unhelpful thinking and understand everybody, not just you, experiences setbacks sometimes.

They also taught kids skills for regulating their emotions and everyday courage to face their fears.

They used circle-time discussions of picture books and media stories to allow them to talk about their own experiences in a safe way.

Read more: ‘It’s real to them, so adults should listen’: what children want you to know to help them feel safe

We held focus groups with children of different ages in five of the primary schools that used our Bounce Back program. The children told us they: “know now what to do when something goes wrong”; “focus on more positives”; “don’t think the worst now”; “know things change”; “have learnt that sometimes you just have to put up with it”; and “now feel it’s easier to get back up in bad times”.

While a disaster can be challenging for children, a supportive home and school environment, together with coping skills, can help children recover reasonably quickly and get back to normal life.

– ref. Bushfires can make kids scared and anxious: here are 5 steps to help them cope – http://theconversation.com/bushfires-can-make-kids-scared-and-anxious-here-are-5-steps-to-help-them-cope-126926

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Grace Moore, Senior lecturer in English, the University of Otago, New Zealand, University of Otago

Bushfire writing has long been a part of Australian literature.

Tales of heroic rescues and bush Christmases describe a time when the fire season was confined only to summer months and Australia’s battler identity was forged in the flames.

While some of these early stories may seem melodramatic to the modern reader, they offer vital insights into the scale and timing of fires and provide an important counterpoint to suggestions from some politicians this week that Australia’s fire ecology remains unchanged in the 21st century.

Read more: Mr Morrison, I lost my home to bushfire. Your thoughts and prayers are not enough

A contender for the first fictional representation of an Australian bushfire is Mary Theresa Vidal’s The Cabramatta Store (1850). Although she does not specify a month, Vidal is very clear regarding the season and the oppressive, sweltering heat:

It was one of the hottest days of an unusually hot and dry Australian summer. No breeze stirred the thin, spare foliage of the gum-trees, or moved the thick grove of wattles which grew at the back of a rough log hut.

Vidal’s account of the bushfire that ensues is evocative and intense:

The tall trees were some of them red hot to the top; the fire seemed to run apace, and every leaf and stack was so dry there was nothing to impede its progress.

Postcards from Australia

Vidal was not alone in treating fire as a fleeting, one-off incident. Other early accounts, such as Ellen Clacy’s 1854 romance story A Bushfire, or the prolific novelist William Howitt’s A Boy’s Adventures in the Wilds of Australia of the same year follow Vidal in depicting the bushfire as an isolated catastrophe.

Howitt’s novel takes the form of a notebook kept by Herbert, a recent young migrant, who recounts the wonder of his new life in the Bush. Though he doesn’t experience a fire at first-hand, Herbert regales the reader with another family’s bushfire adventure in lieu of his own. Yet in closing his account, dated January 14, he writes:

I wonder whether, after all, I shall see a bush-fire. During the last week we have seen lurid smoke by day, and a deep-red cloud by night … immense fires are raging in the jungle.

For Herbert, surviving a bushfire is a settler rite of passage and again, the dating of his entry emphasises the fire as a uniquely summer concern. The boyish narrator, though, cannot appreciate the trauma and severity of Antipodean fire.

An annual event

Over time, the settler community began to understand fire as a recurring phenomenon and the tone of fire stories shifted from a triumphant celebration of settler endurance, to a more brooding acceptance that the flames would return another year.

So season-bound was this understanding, a sub-genre of bushfire fiction emerged: the Christmas fire story. These works responded to the Victorian enthusiasm for yuletide tales, while at the same time highlighting the often horrific seasonal tribulations of bush-dwellers.

While there are many examples of Christmas fire stories, one of the best-known is Anthony Trollope’s novella Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874).

The plot, which takes place in the sugar-growing region of Queensland, revolves around the protagonist Harry’s deep fear of fire. Trollope highlights the hostility of the climate, the dangers posed by deforestation, and the deep-rooted anxieties that haunted migrant farmers each summer.

There are countless other works that allow us to map the Victorian era fire season.

Henry Kingsley’s sprawling 1859 novel The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn begins with another date reference:

Near the end of February 1857 … it was near the latter end of summer, burning hot, with the bushfires raging like volcanoes on the ranges, and the river reduced to a slender stream of water.

Once again here, the date identifies fires specifically with the summertime.

Climate emergency fiction

While 19th century fire stories offer a date-stamped and clearly defined fire season, today’s novelists work with a much less predictable set of environmental conditions.

The backdrops for the crime novelist Jane Harper’s thrillers The Dry (2016) and The Lost Man (2018) are tinder-dry rural communities, where years of drought mean fire could erupt at any moment.

Realist writing is capturing changing conditions, just as it did for settlers more than 150 years ago. Australia may always have been the “continent of fire”, as historian Tom Griffiths terms it, but literature shows us those fires are more prolific and less predictable now than ever before.

– ref. ‘Like volcanoes on the ranges’: how Australian bushfire writing has changed with the climate – http://theconversation.com/like-volcanoes-on-the-ranges-how-australian-bushfire-writing-has-changed-with-the-climate-126831

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanya M Howard, Senior research fellow, University of New England

It’s five years since government worker Glen Turner was murdered by a farmer in a confrontation over land clearing laws. Media reporting after his death frequently propagated the image of the “poor farmer” at the mercy of laws enforced by out-of-touch city elites.

This narrative of an urban-rural divide reared its head again in recent days, when Nationals leader Michael McCormack derided “inner-city raving lunatics” who linked the bushfire crisis to climate change. Such rhetoric may appeal to a conservative party base or media audience, but does little for rural communities in the long run.

As farmers face the ever-worsening impacts of drought and climate change, strong environmental protections are required to protect water and other resources. We must better understand how divisive narratives, often serving political interests, are devised and dispersed.

Nowhere is this narrative more frequently rolled out than in northwest New South Wales, where tensions over land clearing have triggered a complex interplay between the media, farmers and politicians – fuelled by the tragedy of Turner’s murder.

Land clearing is a hot-button issue

Land clearing is a serious global environmental concern, and eastern Australia is one of the world’s deforestation hotspots.

However, regulations to limit land clearing have long been opposed by farmers who say they affect profitability. This message has been politically potent in NSW, and in 2016 legislative reform removed key checks on native vegetation clearing.

Read more: Our nature laws are being overhauled. Here are 7 things we must fix

In the state’s northwest, native vegetation and koala habitat is at risk of extinction due to land clearing. Broad-acre farm machinery and technology works best in large, flat paddocks uninterrupted by trees. The high costs of these technologies feed the economic pressure to cultivate increasing areas of land.

But as climate change and drought increasingly bring dust storms, bushfires and water shortages to rural areas, natural resources such as water, soil and vegetation have never been more valuable.

Latte sippers vs poor farmers

Turner’s murder by farmer Ian Turnbull occurred at Coppa Creek in northwest NSW, in the shadow of pending reforms to environment laws. In the days afterwards, rural politicians publicly expressed outrage at land-clearing regulations and claimed Turner’s death was “brought about by bad legislation”.

Media reports in the period between the murder and Turnbull’s sentencing were essentially a de facto trial of the legitimacy of land-clearing laws. Several sources implied that the compliance regime was somehow to blame for Turner’s death. These results supported findings by Amnesty International and Global Witness that weak enforcement of environmental law increases the risks to those who work on the frontline of land-use conflicts.

The media narrative fed on a supposed contest between biodiversity and agricultural production. Some coverage drew on libertarian notions of property rights and autonomy to justify resistance to the law. This includes radio broadcaster Alan Jones, who reportedly told listeners that environment officials enforcing native vegetation laws displayed “the kind of behaviour that leads people to murder”.

A complicit media

In recent months, landholders in northwest NSW engaged a public relations company to launch a campaign to have historic land-clearing charges dropped.

The PR onslaught included recruiting 2GB radio presenter Ben Fordham to the cause and lobbying key NSW National Party figures John Barilaro and Adam Marshall.

In July this year, Fordham said struggling farmers penalised for cleared vegetation on their farms were being forced off their land, reportedly telling listeners:

They are facing the prospect of fines of a million dollars, and having land locked up for 100 years. They face fines of A$13,000 for every day they refuse to answer questions. Talk about bullies!

The state government has since announced an amnesty for hundreds of farmers who faced penalties under old land-clearing laws. It is logical to assume the farmers’ campaign, and its emphasis on city-country tensions, influenced the government’s decision.

But the divisive rhetoric, and the resulting government decision, does not serve farming communities and comes at the cost of a sound balance between production and conservation.

We must do better

Better understanding of how narratives of legitimacy and resistance are constructed is important for environmental policymakers around the world. This is especially true as climate change threatens social and economic conditions.

Rural communities need environmental regulation that acknowledges their existential concerns, such as access to water, arable land and economic markets. The broader Australian public need regulation that finds the best balance between production and environmental values.

Read more: Environment laws have failed to tackle the extinction emergency. Here’s the proof

In 1992, state and federal governments committed to a national strategy for ecologically sustainable development that “improves the total quality of life, both now and in the future, in a way that maintains the ecological processes on which life depends”.

We aren’t there yet. Political will can either help achieve these aims, or obstruct progress by stoking city-country tensions.

Note: A coronial inquest into the circumstance surrounding the death of Glen Turner was announced in 2017 but is yet to be held.

– ref. Farmers, murder and the media: getting to the bottom of the city-country divide – http://theconversation.com/farmers-murder-and-the-media-getting-to-the-bottom-of-the-city-country-divide-125735

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rick Sarre, Professor of Law and Criminal Justice, University of South Australia

Australians woke to the news last weekend that a 19-year-old Warlpiri man had been shot and killed by a police officer in Yuendumu, 300km north-west of Alice Springs.

A confrontation had occurred after two officers went to a property to arrest the man for breach of a condition of his suspended sentence. One report said the man lunged at the police officer as the pair approached him. Acting deputy commissioner Michael White said:

During that time a struggle ensued and two shots were fired and [the young man] sadly passed away later.

The community outrage has been swift, with a crowd of Yuendumu residents rallying outside the police station, demanding justice. The matter has now been classified as a death in custody.

Read more: Aboriginal woman Tanya Day died in custody. Now an inquest is investigating if systemic racism played a role

Why is this still happening in modern Australia? Surely police have learned lessons from past tragedies, and they’re trained today to use their guns as a last resort. After all, they have tasers and other non-lethal weapons, don’t they?

In attempting to answer these questions, it’s useful to make some observations about current police practice and the available research.

Most Australian police officers carry guns

The first observation about last weekend’s tragedy is a simple one. Firearm deaths occur in heated situations because police carry guns as standard issue.

In 1970, only the New South Wales Police Force was habitually armed. Over time, policies were introduced in each Australian jurisdiction that allowed police officers to gauge their own level of vulnerability and request a firearm in circumstances they perceived as dangerous. As the years passed, this became a very subjective assessment.

The consequence of this policy of accretion is that firearms are now carried by most patrol officers in all Australian states and territories most of the time.

Read more: Victorian police have ‘shoot to kill’ powers when cars are used as weapons: here’s why this matters

Police direction on “shoot to kill” is clear. An officer can use lethal force against another person when there’s a reasonable threat of death or serious injury to the officer, another officer or a member of the public. The difficulty is in determining the reasonableness of the threat. In the heat of the moment this, too, involves a highly subjective assessment.

So does the routine arming of police make the public safer? Yes and no.

A civilian is 14 times more likely to be shot and killed by a police firearm in the US than by a police firearm in Australia, and 42 times more likely to be shot and killed by a police firearm in the US than by a police firearm in Germany.

But police in all three nations routinely carry firearms. So, the mere arming of police doesn’t appear to be the key factor in civilian deaths. There must be something more at play.

Best practice for firearms training

There is. The research tells us the number of civilian deaths caused by police firearms varies according to four important factors: the extent of police militarisation; the rules that pertain to the use of lethal force; the standards of firearms training; and the gun culture in the society in which officers operate.

The most important one for Australian policymakers is the third of these: the standards of firearms training.

To that end, five key imperatives for firearm training emerge from the research:

1. Australian police policies must have clear and precise rules regarding the carriage and drawing of firearms, and there must be high standards of accountability for those who carry and draw them
2. uniform firearms training must be across all jurisdictions
3. this training must include best practice communication techniques such as negotiation skills and deescalation strategies, and clear instructions regarding non-lethal alternatives
4. strong collaborations must be in place between police and health professionals and other social services
5. body cameras should be compulsory on all operational officers.

If these initiatives and practices are in place, and entrenched, one can safely assert that fewer deaths at the hands of police will occur.

Read more: Shoot to kill: the use of lethal force by police in Australia

Police are employed to protect us. If that does not happen, such as in Yuendumu, then there’s something going wrong in our police training centres.

Firearms make police officers feel safer

There will be a coroner’s inquest into the young man’s death. It’s too early to say what evidence will be offered and what the consequences might be. But the coroner will not rule that deadly force can never be used.

As you might recall, the Lindt cafe siege coroner was told the sharp-shooter who had the murderer in his sights in December 2014 was directed not to use lethal force, a decision that may have had fatal consequences.

Yes, police today are trained to use their guns as a last resort. And yes, they have tasers and other non-lethal weapons at their disposal. But in the heat of the moment, with the lives of serving officers potentially on the line, judgements are made quickly. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it is never available when it is needed most.

So what does the evidence tell us about firearms and the safety of police officers themselves? Available research suggests there is no clear evidence guns make police safer, but officers feel safer with firearms at their disposal.

And what of the future? There is no going back to the days when police did not carry guns. So the training associated with their use needs to be unremitting. Australian lives are relying on it.

– ref. If Australian police officers are allowed to shoot to kill, they should be better trained – http://theconversation.com/if-australian-police-officers-are-allowed-to-shoot-to-kill-they-should-be-better-trained-126820

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Trisia Farrelly, Senior Lecturer, Massey University

New Zealand is ranked the third-most-wasteful country in the OECD. New Zealanders produce five times the global daily average of waste per person – and they are getting more wasteful, producing 35% more than a decade ago.

These statistics are likely to get worse following China’s 2018 ban on imports of certain recyclable products. China was the world’s top importer of recyclable plastics, but implemented the ban because it could no longer safely manage its domestic and imported waste. Unsurprisingly, in 2015, China was named the top source of marine plastic pollution in the world.

Since the Chinese market closed, 58% of New Zealand’s plastic waste now goes to Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam — all countries with weak regulations and high rankings as global sources of marine plastic pollution.

Waste-to-energy (WtE) incineration has been raised as a solution. While turning plastic waste into energy may sound good, it creates more pollution and delays a necessary transition to a circular economy.

Read more: We need a legally binding treaty to make plastic pollution history

Dirty plastics

Shipments of plastic recycling often arrive in developing countries unsorted and contaminated. Materials that cannot be easily recycled are commonly burned, releasing dioxins into air, soil and water. In response, South-East Asian countries have started returning dirty plastics to developed countries.

Several New Zealand councils have stopped collecting certain plastics for recycling offshore. They are sending them to landfill instead. Available data suggest that even before the China ban plastics made up roughly 15% of the waste in municipal landfills – about 250,000 tonnes a year. Much of this is imported plastic packaging.

Many New Zealanders are very or extremely worried about the impact of plastic waste. We cannot continue ignoring our role in the global plastic pollution crisis while dumping plastic in homegrown landfills or in developing countries.

Read more: We organised a conference for 570 people without using plastic. Here’s how it went

In the scramble to find alternatives, waste-to-energy (WtE) incineration has become a hot topic, particularly as foreign investors look to establish WtE incinerators on the West Coast and [other centres]in New Zealand. Some local government representatives have endorsed WtE proposals, or raised WtE as an election issue.

Less plastic good for climate

Like landfills, WtE incinerators symbolise the linear “take-make-waste” economy, which destroys valuable resources and perpetuates waste generation.

Globally, countries are moving to circular approaches instead, which follow the “zero waste hierarchy”. This prioritises waste prevention, reduction, reuse, recycling and composting and considers WtE unacceptable.

Some New Zealanders say Nordic countries have proven that incineration is the environmental silver bullet to our waste woes. But a recent study found these countries will not meet EU circular economy goals unless they replace WtE incineration with policies that reduce waste generation. Such policies include packaging taxes, recycling and recovery rate targets, landfill bans on biodegradable waste, deposit return schemes and extended producer responsibility.

Rejecting linear approaches is also good for the climate. Actions at the top of the waste hierarchy stop more greenhouse gases than those at the bottom.

In contrast, WtE incinerators can produce 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide per tonne of municipal solid waste burnt. New Zealand’s zero carbon act means we have a responsibility to ensure we do not increase our greenhouse gas emissions by investing in WtE incineration.

Incinerators also cannot magic away toxins in plastic waste. Even the most high-tech WtE incinerators [[release dioxins and other pollutants into the air]. Meanwhile, toxin-laden fly ash and slag are dumped in landfills to eventually leach into the environment and contaminate food systems.

Shifting responsibility for plastic waste

To address plastic pollution, it is easy to see how prevention and reduction work better than “getting rid of” plastic once produced. Many WtE proponents argue that incineration technology can be a temporary solution for the plastic waste we have already created.

But incinerators are not short-term fixes. They are expensive to build and maintain. Large-scale incinerators demand about 100,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste a year, encouraging increasing production of waste. Investors guarantee returns on their investment by locking councils into decades-long contracts.

The only real solution to our plastics problem is through regulation that moves New Zealand towards a circular economy. We can start by making the linear economy expensive by increasing landfill levies above the current $NZ10/tonne and expanding it to all landfills. We must also invest in better waste collection, sorting and recycling systems, including a national network of resource recovery centres.

Instead of burning or burying plastic that cannot be reused, recycled or composted, we can prevent or reduce it through targeted phase-outs. The government is proposing to regulate single-use plastic packaging, beverage packaging, electronic waste and farm plastics through mandatory product stewardship schemes. This would make manufacturers responsible for the waste they produce and provide incentives for less wasteful and toxic product design and delivery systems (e.g. refill stations).

All of these circular solutions will provide far more jobs than WtE incineration.

Without a swift, brave shift to a circular economy, New Zealand will remain one of the world’s most wasteful nations. Circular economies are developing globally and WtE incineration will only set us back by 30 years.

Hannah Blumhardt, the coordinator of the NZ Product Stewardship Council, has contributed to this article.

– ref. Why municipal waste-to-energy incineration is not the answer to NZ’s plastic waste crisis – http://theconversation.com/why-municipal-waste-to-energy-incineration-is-not-the-answer-to-nzs-plastic-waste-crisis-126824

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Simpson, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Macquarie University

It has been called “the robbery of the century”. Martin Shields and Nicholas Diable, two British investment bankers, are on trial in Germany for helping structure a massive tax evasion scheme, known as cum-ex trading, that has siphoned up to €55 billion (about US$60 billion or A$90 billion) from European public funds.

Let’s put that in perspective.

The world’s most successful diamond thieves, the “Pink Panther” group, are suspected of heisting jewels worth €334 million (about A$544 million). The largest bank job in history, a “cash withdrawal” from the Central Bank of Iraq by Saddam Hussein, is estimated to have been worth US$1 billion (about A$1.45 billion). The biggest ponzi scheme in history, by Bernie Madoff, defrauded investors of about US$20 billion.

So a €55 billion fraud is a very big deal.

Yet there’s a good chance you haven’t heard much about it. One reason is that, unlike video footage of someone ram-raiding a liquor store, financial fraud doesn’t make good television.

This specific alleged crime involves “cum-ex fraud”. If you have no idea what this is, you are not alone. It involves bafflingly complex transactions and jargon. Even the most basic cum-ex deal involves at least 12 transactions.

It’s one of those ironies that complexity not only helped hide this alleged crime in the first place, but also helps keep it out of the public eye now.

Let’s try to remedy this by getting to grips with what cum-ex trading is all about.

What is cum-ex trading?

The term cum-ex comes from the Latin – cum meaning “with” and ex meaning “without”. In this case, “with” and “without” refers to stocks with and without dividends.

The cum-ex trading in question took advantage of a loophole in German tax law and involved rapidly exchanging stock “with” and then “without” dividends between three parties. At least two of these parties then claimed tax rebates on taxes only paid once.

There are three key things at play here.

First is when companies pay dividends to shareholders. This usually happens quarterly when companies audit exactly who owns their stock, known as the Record Date.

Second, dividends are taxed differently for individuals and corporations (such as investment companies). In Germany, individuals pay 25% capital gains tax on all dividends. For corporations, however, their dividend income is combined with all other income. Then, once a year, they pay 15% corporation tax on their profit.

Third, capital gains tax is automatically deducted from all dividend payments. Institutional investors can therefore legitimately reclaim the capital gains tax that has already been deducted.

How cum-ex trading works

Shields and Diable were allegedly just part of a sprawling web of bankers, brokers, investors, asset managers, lawyers and consultants who, together, rapidly transferred company shares either side of the dividend Record Date. This made it almost impossible for Germany’s tax office to know exactly who did (or didn’t) own company shares at what time.

Simplified, cum-ex trading works something like this:

Party One, typically an asset manager who owns valuable company shares, “lends” its stock to Party Two, a bank. Under the agreement, the title and ownership of the stock is temporarily transferred to the borrower in return for a fee. Such practices are not only legal but a common part of “short selling”, the practice featured in the 2015 film The Big Short. Essentially, it is where an investor borrows a stock (for a fee), sells it, then buys it back later at a lower price to return it to the original – on the expectation the stock’s value will fall and a profit made.

Read more: Explainer: what is short selling?

Party Two then sells the shares with-dividend to Party Three fractionally before the Record Date. However, the shares are delivered without-dividend just after.

Timing, speed and complexity are key. Like a magic trick, the shares “disappear” fractionally before the Record Date and “reappear” with a new owner just after. The aim is to obscure exactly who – Party One, Two or Three – owns the stock on the Record Date. As a result, two parties can simultaneously claim ownership of the one stock.

Up until 2011, a loophole in the German tax code allowed both Party One (the owner of the original stock who had received the dividend and paid tax on it) and Party Three (the holder of the stock just after the Record Date) to claim a tax reimbursement. All colluding parties would then split the gains.

What of the trial?

Shields and Diable stand accused of 34 instances of “aggravated tax evasion” that cost German taxpayers up to €450 million (A$730 million) between 2006 and 2011. Indicating the complexity of the case, the charge sheet runs to 651 pages.

Shields, who is cooperating with prosecutors, has said in court that cum-ex trades took place on an “industrial scale” and involved a vast network of banks, companies, brokers, lawyers and financial advisers. Now a judge has to decide whether these cum-ex trades merely exploited a loophole or violated the law at the time.

In a sign of how twitchy high-profile banks are getting, the courtroom’s gallery has been packed with their legal representatives. They have good reason to be. The Cum-ex Files investigation by European media groups has evidence the practice continued in Germany until 2016, and also occurred in Switzerland, Austria, Finland, Spain, and France. It may even have spread as far as Australia.

Read more: Australia’s tax office can use global data leaks to pursue multinationals, High Court rules

Cum-ex deals illustrate perfectly how easily complexity is used as a tool in finance to misdirect, obfuscate and perplex. The complexity also plays a key role in clouding public understanding of these alleged crimes. It’s easier for the media to focus public attention on simpler crimes with clearly identifiable victims.

All this is why Shields and Diable, despite the staggering sums of money involved, face maximum prison sentences of 10 years, while “blue-collar” robberies often incur far heavier sentences and attract much more sensational media attention.

– ref. The robbery of the century: the cum-ex trading scandal and why it matters – http://theconversation.com/the-robbery-of-the-century-the-cum-ex-trading-scandal-and-why-it-matters-124417

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Mathews, Professor, School of Law, Queensland University of Technology

Two judges in the High Court of Australia this morning referred Cardinal George Pell’s application for special leave to appeal his convictions to a full bench of the High Court.

While not a full grant of special leave, this is favourable to Pell, as dismissing the application would have finalised the case and his convictions.

When the High Court hears the case in coming months, it can reject or grant the special leave application. If granted, it can then allow or dismiss the appeal.

The case is exceptionally complex and the final outcome is difficult to predict. Allowing leave to appeal does not guarantee the appeal will succeed. Here is what might happen next.

What happened with the convictions?

In December 2018, a jury unanimously found Pell guilty of five sexual offences against two 13-year-old choirboys, committed when he was Archbishop of Melbourne from 1996-97. The offences were one count of sexual penetration of a child aged under 16 through forced oral sex, and four counts of an indecent act with or in the presence of a child aged under 16. He was sentenced to six years’ prison with a non-parole period of three years and eight months.

What happened with the failed appeal?

In August 2019, Victoria’s Court of Appeal dismissed Pell’s appeal against these convictions by a 2:1 majority decision. The background is summarised elsewhere. The key issue was whether the verdicts were “unreasonable” or could not be supported on the evidence. The question was whether, given the evidence, it was “open to the jury” to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt the accused was guilty.

It is not enough to overturn a guilty verdict if the court merely finds a jury “might have” had a reasonable doubt. Rather, the court must find that, on its assessment of the evidence, it was not open to the jury to have been satisfied of guilt beyond reasonable doubt. So the evidence must have “obliged” the jury to reach a not guilty verdict. Because of the jury’s role as tribunal of fact, setting aside a guilty verdict is “a serious step” (see the case M v R).

The majority judges, Chief Justice Anne Ferguson and Justice Chris Maxwell, concluded the guilty verdicts were open to the jury. They did not have a doubt about the complainant’s truthfulness or the cardinal’s guilt. They made crucial findings after careful and cogent reasoning, considering each aspect of the defence case.

Read more: George Pell has lost his appeal. What did the court decide and what happens now?

First, the complainant was credible and reliable. His account was consistent and detailed. His recalled detail of the sacristy layout enhanced his credibility and independently confirmed his account, as it was not normally used by the archbishop.

Second, the majority judges evaluated each defence claim individually and collectively. They rejected the claim that the “opportunity” testimony (defence witnesses’ statements about where they, Pell and the choirboys would likely have been at relevant times) made the guilty verdicts unreasonable. Essentially, this testimony was not deemed sufficiently strong to make the verdict unreasonable or “not open”. Its effect was “of uncertainty and imprecision”. There was evidence showing “a realistic opportunity” for the offending.

The dissenting judge, Justice Mark Weinberg, gave extensive reasons. On his interpretation of the “opportunity” testimony – including statements by two witnesses about customarily being with Pell at relevant times – there was a “reasonable possibility” of an effective alibi for the first four offences. Weinberg himself had “a genuine doubt” about Pell’s guilt, thought there was a “significant possibility” the offences had not been committed, and inferred the jury ought to have had this doubt.

The application for special leave to appeal to the High Court

The High Court does not lightly give leave to appeal. It can only grant leave if:

• the proceedings involve a question of legal principle; or

• the interests of the administration of justice (generally, or here) require consideration of the earlier judgment.

Pell’s team made two arguments, relying on the dissenting judgment. First, they argued the majority’s approach to the “open to the jury” test was wrong, effectively requiring the applicant to exclude any possibility of the offending to have occurred, which reversed the onus and standard of proof. They also argued the majority’s belief in the complainant was not enough to overcome doubts raised by the opportunity testimony, and the alibi evidence had not been eliminated.

Second, they argued there was sufficient doubt about whether the offending was possible. This, they said, made the verdicts unreasonable, given the complainant’s account required them to be alone in the sacristy for five to six minutes. They argued that after mass and five to six minutes of “private prayer time” there was a “hive of activity” near the sacristy, and the majority incorrectly found it was reasonably open to the jury to find the offending happened during this period.

The director of public prosecutions argued there simply was no such error by the majority in applying the test, and the verdicts were not unreasonable.

In large part, the special leave application turned on the different approaches to whether the “opportunity evidence” was sufficiently strong to create enough doubt that it was “not open to the jury” to find Pell guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

What did the High Court say?

The transcript had not been released at the time of writing, but the two judges referred the application for special leave to hearing by a full bench (five or seven members) for argument as on an appeal. There, the full High Court can reject or grant the special leave application.

On one view, this is surprising. Applications arguing an unreasonable verdict in child sexual offence cases are typically dismissed (for example, O’Brien; in contrast GAX).

The High Court generally does not grant leave simply due to an alternative interpretation of the facts. The majority judgment in the appeal accurately stated the test. It applied the test by carefully analysing all the arguments and testimony individually and collectively, applying cogent reasoning in independently assessing the sufficiency and quality of the evidence. It weighed the evidence and expressed an independent conclusion about whether on all the evidence it was open to the jury to be satisfied of guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

On the other hand, the two High Court judges may reasonably feel there are important issues of legal principle and justice to consider, and that such a significant case warrants full consideration at all levels by the entire court.

What happens now?

The full hearing of the special leave application will occur in 2020. If leave is then granted, the appeal will proceed. If the appeal succeeds, the court can grant a new trial, or reverse or modify the prior judgment.

However, if special leave is refused at the full hearing, or granted but the appeal fails, the convictions stand and no further appeal is possible.

Read more: Triggering past trauma: how to take care of yourself if you’re affected by the Pell news

For the complainant and many survivors, especially of clergy abuse, this decision will be confronting. They will hopefully be able to draw on reserves of resilience, hope, and any support services if necessary, while awaiting the High Court’s final decision.

– ref. What did the High Court decide in the Pell case? And what happens now? – http://theconversation.com/what-did-the-high-court-decide-in-the-pell-case-and-what-happens-now-126757

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stanley Shanapinda, Research Fellow, La Trobe University

Yesterday, New South Wales and Queensland issued fire warnings classified as either “catastrophic”, “severe” or “extreme” – and these conditions will remain in the coming days.

Areas under threat include the greater Sydney area, northern New South Wales, the Northern Goldfields, and the Central Highlands. The declared state of emergency means human life is at great risk.

Those at risk should evacuate ahead of time, as mobile phone services may not be reliable when needed the most.

Service outages

People in dangerous bushfire situations often have the added burden of service outages. This can happen following fire damage to infrastructure (such as signal towers) that connects base stations that relay communications within the network. A break in this connection means no signal, or weak signal, for those on the ground.

Generally, radio waves used for mobile communication behave differently as they travel, based on various factors that affect signal strength. One factor is land geography, such as the height of hills. The signal may not be able to penetrate sand hills. Gum trees may also reflect, obstruct and absorb radio signals.

Read more: Where to take refuge in your home during a bushfire

The scenarios described above can be made worse by fire environments, based on the frequencies used. Flames can produce “plasma”, which reacts with the surrounding magnetic field, and this degrades signal strength.

Rural fire service operations may use frequencies in the 400-450MHz range to communicate, but these signals are weakened during fire, in which case they may use frequencies in the 100-180MHz range. At this wavelength, signal strength doesn’t degrade as badly and can sustain better communication.

Being far away from a mobile phone tower, often in rural areas, also results in degraded communication. Rural areas don’t receive as much coverage because installing cell towers in these areas is not particularly profitable, and towers are built based on revenue estimates. There is little incentive to build networks with additional capacity in rural areas.

Get out while you can

In bushfire situations, it’s crucial to leave affected areas early to avoid becoming stuck in mobile black spots. These are regional and remote areas that have been identified as not having mobile phone coverage.

Some mobile black spots where fire danger warnings have been issued include Mount Seaview and Yarras, not far from the Oxley Highway in NSW. The status of the fires there was reported “out of control” on Tuesday morning.

Read more: What has Australia learned from Black Saturday?

Optus is planning to roll out macrocells at these locations to expand coverage between the end of this year and the middle of next year. These are base stations that cover a wide area and are typically deployed in rural regions or along highways.

Until the macrocells are deployed, people living in mobile black spots, or who may be forced to pass through these areas due to fire, continue to be at risk. When passing through a fire-affected black spot, you are virtually unreachable.

Also, although the mobile black spot program will help to increase 4G coverage in rural areas, most rural areas, including many at high risk of bushfires, rely largely on 3G. When people need extra data capacity during emergencies, the network is incapable of handling the increased traffic load, as every device is trying to connect and download data at the minimum 3G capacity of 550Kbps.

Network overload

The network gets congested at times of catastrophe due to the high volume of mobile phone traffic experienced, which exceeds the available network capacity. The mobile network in Billy’s Creek in NSW, and the areas connected to it, experienced an outage yesterday.

Telstra’s services have also been affected. As of Monday, people in Billy’s Creek, Yarras and Nimbin (among other locations) were unable to send or receive messages, make calls or access the internet, and may not have been up to date with the latest fire information, unless through radio or television.

During bushfires last year, for every three calls attempted under Telstra’s network, one was eventually answered. Everyone trying to call at once is referred to as a “mass call event”. This creates “congestive collapse” in parts of the internet-based network, blocking new connections from being made.

During congestion, the performance of the network decreases because the internet packets that carry the calls or messages are dropped, or delayed, before they reach their destination. One solution is for operators to have signal boosters installed for the affected part of the network.

There’s an app for that, if you have good connection

In the same way, the “Fires Near Me Australia” web application is likely to suffer from internet packet deliveries being delayed.

The app may be overwhelmed if too many people try to access it at once, and may crash. In such scenarios, people should reboot their phones and keep trying to connect.

Some people have made complaints of not being able to download the app, and others of the app crashing, because their phone’s model was not new enough to support it.

If the fires spread to densely populated areas, available 4G capacities may be exhausted by the sheer volume of the traffic. And congestion is made worse by more incoming traffic from across the country, from concerned family and friends.

Preventative measures may no longer be an option for many. But in the future, people in fire-prone areas may benefit from buying a personal 4G or 3G mobile signal booster ahead of time.

Read more: How to keep your mobile phone connected when the network is down

– ref. As flames encroach, those at risk may lose phone signal when they need it most – http://theconversation.com/as-flames-encroach-those-at-risk-may-lose-phone-signal-when-they-need-it-most-126827

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Tiller, Ethical, Legal & Social Adviser – Public Health Genomics, Monash University

In the past week, news has spread of a Florida judge’s decision to grant a warrant allowing police to search one of the world’s largest online DNA databases, for leads in a criminal case.

The warrant reportedly approved the search of open source genealogy database GEDMatch. An estimated 1.3 million users have uploaded their DNA data onto it, without knowing it would be accessible by law enforcement.

A decision of this kind raises concern and sets a new precedent for law enforcement’s access to online DNA databases. Should Australian users of online genealogy services be concerned?

Why is this a big deal?

GEDmatch lets users upload their raw genetic data, obtained from companies such as Ancestry or 23andMe, to be matched with relatives who have also uploaded their data.

Law enforcement’s capacity to use GEDmatch to solve crimes became prominent in April last year, when it was used to solve the Golden State Killer case. After this raised significant public concern around privacy issues, GEDmatch updated its terms and conditions in May.

Under the new terms, law enforcement agencies can only access user data in cases where users have consented to use by law enforcement, with only 185,000 people opting in so far.

Read more: No, Mr Dutton, DNA testing ISIS brides won’t tell you who’s an Australian citizen

The terms of the warrant granted in Florida, however, allowed access to the full database – including individuals who had not opted in. This directly overrides explicit user consent.

GEDmatch reportedly complied with the search warrant within 24 hours of it being granted.

Aussies are also at risk

GEDMatch is small fry compared with ancestry database giants Ancestry (more than 15 million individuals) and 23andMe (more than 10 million individuals), both of which have DNA data belonging to Australians.

Australians who wish to have ancestry DNA testing have to use US-based online companies. Thus, many Australians have data in databases such as Ancestry, 23andMe and GEDMatch. The granting of a warrant to search these databases by US courts means those searches could include Australian individuals’ data.

Ancestry and 23andMe both have policies saying they don’t provide access to their databases without valid court-mandated processes.

Each company produces a transparency report (see here and here) which includes all requests for customer data that have been received and complied with. Currently, that number is low. But it remains to be seen how each would respond to a court-ordered search warrant.

Furthermore, while Australia currently doesn’t have it’s own genetic database (and no plans have been announced), the federal government’s commitment of A$500 million to the Genomics Health Futures Mission indicates a growing interest in the power of genomics for health.

If Australia wants to remain internationally competitive, a national genetics project is a natural next step.

We need DNA privacy legislation

In Australia, courts can approve warrants that intrude into private information, and entities can only protect data to the extent that it’s protected by law.

Thus, the privacy policies of companies and organisations that hold genetic data (and other types of private data) usually include a statement saying the data will not be shared without consent “except as required by law”.

The Australian Information Commissioner can also allow breaches of privacy in the public interest.

Read more: What does DNA sound like? Using music to unlock the secrets of genetic code

It has been more than two decades since Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja proposed the Genetic Privacy and Non-Discrimination Bill.

Although Australia has a patchwork of laws that protect citizens’ genetic data to an extent, we still have no specific genetic data protection legislation. A broader legal framework dealing directly with the protection of genetic information is now required.

Australian politicians have previously shown willingness to use genetic information for government purposes. As genetic advances strengthen the promise of personalised medicine, Australian academics continue to call for urgent genetic data protection legislation. This is important to ensure public trust in genetic privacy is maintained.

Ongoing concerns around genetic discrimination, and other ethical concerns, warrant an urgent policy response regarding the protection of genetic data.

What are other countries doing?

Globally, several DNA databases have amassed genetic datasets of more than 1 million individuals, including for research purposes and healthcare improvement.

Few databases outside the US have yet to reach the numbers needed to be useful for identification purposes.

However, many countries, particularly in Europe, have started establishing government-funded national databases of gene donor data, including Sweden and Estonia.

The Estonian Biobank is one of the most advanced national DNA databases. It has more than 200,000 donor samples.

With a population of around 1.3 million people, the biobank represents around 15% of the entire country’s population. And Estonian legislation currently prohibits the use of donor samples for law enforcement.

Read more: From the crime scene to the courtroom: the journey of a DNA sample

In contrast, the UK Biobank, doesn’t have specific legislation controlling its operation. It only allows law enforcement agencies access if forced to do so by the courts, leaving open the possibility of access under a court-ordered warrant.

The biobank currently has samples from around 500,000 individuals, but plans to collect at least 1 million more in future.

In Australia, accessing DNA testing is now easier than ever. But those accessing it through US-based companies, or uploading their data to US-based databases, should be aware of the potential uses of their genetic information.

And as we moves into an era of genomic medicine, urgent policy attention is required from the Australian government to ensure public trust in genomics is maintained.

– ref. If you’ve given your DNA to a DNA database, US police may now have access to it – http://theconversation.com/if-youve-given-your-dna-to-a-dna-database-us-police-may-now-have-access-to-it-126680

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Griffin, Lecturer, La Trobe University

Following the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, we are witnessing a wave of legal reforms across Australia aimed at helping survivors seek justice.

Most visibly, there is the National Redress Scheme, which provides victims access to counselling, a response from the institution where they were abused and payment of up to $150,000.

But for those who slip through the cracks of the scheme, as well as future victims, pursuing justice through civil litigation is still hugely important.

As traumatising as legal action can be, suing is not just a means to access compensation. It can also provide formal legal recognition of the abuse, and is a powerful way to hold the institution directly accountable.

Read more: In landmark ruling, Archbishop Philip Wilson found guilty of covering up child sex abuse

Legal hurdles for victims suing institutions

Historically, there have been several legal roadblocks for victims trying to sue the organisations where they were abused.

• Statutes of limitations can prevent lawsuits if it takes many years for victims to acknowledge the abuse and take action.

• It can also be hard to identify a legal entity to sue, given that many religious institutions are unincorporated. This hurdle is commonly known as the “Ellis defence”, after the case brought by an altar boy against the Catholic Church that failed for this reason.

• For an organisation to be held responsible for abuse, victims must establish a close connection between the abuser and institution. Institutional responsibility for employees’ wrongful actions – known as “vicarious liability” – typically covers carelessness in the workplace but doesn’t usually extend to serious criminal acts like assault. (A separate issue: historically recognised duties owed by schools and hospitals are also not owed by other organisations like churches.)

Since the royal commission identified these barriers in a 2014 report on redress and civil litigation, states and territories have begun introducing new laws to change their statutes of limitations and bypass the Ellis defence.

However, addressing the legal responsibility of institutions for the actions of individual perpetrators has proven more complex.

The confusion over liability in Victoria

Some states are moving forward with legal reforms in this area. NSW, for instance, overhauled its laws last year to extend vicarious liability to include non-employees like volunteers or religious officers who take advantage of their positions to carry out child abuse.

Tasmania has now introduced a bill taking a similar approach. Several other jurisdictions – ACT, WA and SA – have yet to take any action on this issue. They are still responding to the royal commission’s recommendations, so further legislation may be forthcoming.

Victoria, meanwhile, has taken a different approach that is leaving some victims behind. (It’s a model Queensland also now appears to be following.)

This is especially disappointing given Victoria actually led the way with legal reforms to help victims of child sex abuse, based on a 700-page report by a parliamentary inquiry that was set up before the royal commission.

The Victorian report looked in detail at the legal hurdles that victims face, but its recommendations showed a misunderstanding of the law when it comes to the liability of institutions where abuse occurs.

Specifically, it misunderstood how vicarious liability works.

Read more: The royal commission’s final report has landed – now to make sure there is an adequate redress scheme

What is vicarious liability?

Vicarious liability is a form of strict liability under which an employer can be held responsible for the actions of employees regardless of fault. This is so even when it has taken all reasonable steps to prevent the misconduct.

For example, a bus company may be liable for harm to passengers caused by a careless bus driver, even when it did everything it could to encourage safe driving.

However, previous court decisions have suggested it wasn’t possible for employers like schools to be held vicariously liable for the abuse of children by teachers. The reason: such liability doesn’t usually extend to serious criminal acts because they weren’t committed within the “course of employment”.

Victoria’s child sex abuse report recommended fixing this legal complexity by importing a model from discrimination law.

In this model, an organisation is presumed to be responsible for the acts of its employees but can escape liability by showing it took reasonable care to avoid the wrongful conduct.

Read more: The Catholic Church is investigating George Pell’s case. What does that mean?

Eager to remove the barriers faced by child sex abuse victims, the Victorian government changed its laws in 2017 to import the new model. But it ignored two key developments that happened while the new law was being debated in parliament.

First, the royal commission provided a more thorough analysis of the laws and recommended imposing strict liability on specific kinds of institutions responsible for the care, supervision or control of children.

Second, in 2016, a High Court case involving child sexual abuse at a boarding school, Prince Alfred College v ADC, signalled an entirely new approach courts will take with regard to vicarious liability in such cases.

The High Court stated that if an employer puts an employee in a position of trust, power and the ability to achieve intimacy with a victim, the organisation will be held liable if the employee takes advantage of the situation to abuse a child.

The High Court’s new approach also has its gaps. Victims who were abused by a contractor rather than an employee might struggle to establish vicarious liability. We’re also yet to see whether courts consider clergy as employees for this purpose.

More reforms are needed

Victorian MPs saw the state’s new laws as “balancing the interests” of organisations and victims of abuse. They also believed the laws avoided placing “undue burden” on organisations by allowing them to escape liability if they have taken reasonable care.

But this ignored the courts’ new approach to vicarious liability and the fact that strict liability may still apply to organisations that took reasonable care.

Ultimately, the Victorian government has done a disservice to survivors of child abuse and made the legal situation murkier rather than clearer for organisations and victims alike.

The bottom line is that Victoria – and other states and territories – still need further reform in this area if they really want to help victims of institutional child abuse achieve justice in the courts.

This story is adapted from a forthcoming article in the UNSW Law Journal by Laura Griffin and Gemma Briffa.

– ref. Victims of child sex abuse still face significant legal barriers suing churches – here’s why – http://theconversation.com/victims-of-child-sex-abuse-still-face-significant-legal-barriers-suing-churches-heres-why-126510

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Whitehouse, Bennett Chair of Autism, Telethon Kids Institute, University of Western Australia

It’s 25 years since the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) was published. The manual is the clinical “bible” that defines the criteria for the diagnosis of psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions, and was a landmark document for autism spectrum disorder.

The first mention of autism came in the third edition of the DSM in 1980, with the introduction of the diagnostic category of “infantile autism”. This label was generally only applied to children with substantial language impairment and intellectual disabilities.

In 1994, the DSM-IV recognised people could also show the core behaviours of autism without having significant language impairment or any intellectual disability. This change in how we described autism contributed to a surge in diagnoses.

Read more: Do more children have autism now than before?

There was also a surge in autism research, from around 96 studies in 1994, to 207 in 2000, and then 2,789 in 2018.

So, 25 years on, what have we learnt about autism?

The autism concept

In the 1990s, we viewed autism as one condition, with all children showing similar, severe difficulties with social and communication skills.

We now know the reality is very different.

In its most literal sense, autism is diagnosed when a person displays a set of behaviours typified by difficulties in social interaction and communication, as well as having more restricted interests and repetitive behaviours than we typically expect.

Read more: Why do some people with autism have restricted interests and repetitive movements?

The severity of the behaviours that characterise autism vary considerably between people. Social interaction and communication difficulties, for example, can range from having no verbal language to highly fluent language.

The frequency and intensity of autism behaviours – such as repetitive play with objects and repeated body movements like rocking and hand flapping – vary between mild and severe.

And intellectual abilities can range from significant disability to a very high IQ.

This variation is the so-called “autism spectrum”, which has also led to the worldwide movement of “neurodiversity”. This views neurological conditions such as autism as part of the natural spectrum of human diversity, and posits that this diversity should be respected rather than pathologised.

Neurodiversity challenges the medical model of autism as a disorder, instead viewing autism as an inseparable aspect of identity.

Autism is diagnosed by a team of clinicians, through a consistent and rigorous diagnostic process. While the dividing line between “typical” and “atypical” can be blurry, a diagnosis is made when the core behaviours of autism have a functional impact on an individual’s daily life.

It’s now clear that autism is not one condition in the sense that there is a common cause shared by all people on the autism spectrum.

Instead, autism is best thought of as an umbrella term which describes a range of different people, all with relatively similar behaviours, which may or may not be caused by the same biological factors.

Critically, autism is not just a childhood condition. While the behavioural characteristics of autism first emerge during childhood, they almost always persist into adolescence and adulthood, but often present in a different form.

Social difficulties in childhood might be shown through a preference to play alone, for example, while in adulthood this may be reflected by difficulty in maintaining social relationships.

Read more: We need to stop perpetuating the myth that children grow out of autism

The dramatic refinement of our understanding of autism from a severe childhood condition, to a cluster of complex and variable conditions that endure into adulthood, is a great achievement of scientific research and has driven all other research and policy advances.

Causes

In 1994, there was already a good understanding that autism originated from genetic differences.

Advances in genetic research in the late 1990s and 2000s – first by sequencing the human genome, then the dramatic reduction in the cost of this sequencing – led scientists to believe they would soon find the single gene that causes the brain to develop differently.

But after several decades of intensive research, the picture turned out to be far more complex.

There is now consensus that there is no one genetic difference shared by all individuals with autism. And rarely does one person possess a single genetic factor that leads the brain to develop differently.

There is also evidence to suggest other biological factors may play a role in the development of autism, including inflammation and hormonal factors. But the evidence for these factors remains preliminary.

Read more: What causes autism? What we know, don’t know and suspect

We now know a range of conditions, including Fragile X syndrome and tuberous sclerosis, have very clear genetic or chromosomal differences that can lead to autistic behaviours. In total, these conditions account for around 10% of all people on the autism spectrum.

Genetic factors are still very likely to underpin autism in the remaining majority of people. But the genetic differences are likely more complex, and require advances in statistical techniques to better understand why the brain develops differently for some children.

Therapies and treatments

In the 1990s, behavioural interventions for autism were dominated by applied behaviour analysis (ABA), an approach to therapy that helps children learn new skills.

While ABA remains prominent throughout the world, other therapeutic models have emerged, such as those based on developmental principles, those that target communication and those that use a combination of approaches.

While these therapies help the development of some children with autism, no one therapy model will be effective for all. The great advance of the last 25 years has been to provide families with alternate options if their original choice of therapy isn’t as beneficial as they hoped.

Read more: A guide for how to choose therapy for a child with autism

But pharmacological (drug) treatments have not seen as much progress. Despite substantial research investment, there remains no medication with good evidence for reducing the disability associated with the core social and communication difficulties of autism.

Pharmacological intervention in autism is primarily used to assist with other challenges that can be associated with autism such as anxiety, attention problems, epilepsy and sleeping difficulties.

Where to next?

Despite progress over the past 25 years, health and disability challenges remain pervasive for people on the autism spectrum, and our policy responses continue to be fragmented across health, disability and education systems.

Given the ever-marching advance of science, it’s impossible to predict the next 25 years of research. A key challenge for scientists is how we use the knowledge we create to lead to clear and tangible benefits for humanity.

This will likely require meaningful partnerships with autistic people and their families to better understand their priorities for their lives. We need to learn how the knowledge we’ve obtained, and that still to come, can best support each person to discover their own strengths and what they want for their lives.

– ref. It’s 25 years since we redefined autism – here’s what we’ve learnt – http://theconversation.com/its-25-years-since-we-redefined-autism-heres-what-weve-learnt-125053

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frédérik Saltré, Research Fellow in Ecology, Flinders University

For more than 3.5 billion years, living organisms have thrived, multiplied and diversified to occupy every ecosystem on Earth. The flip side to this explosion of new species is that species extinctions have also always been part of the evolutionary life cycle.

But these two processes are not always in step. When the loss of species rapidly outpaces the formation of new species, this balance can be tipped enough to elicit what are known as “mass extinction” events.

Read more: Climate change is killing off Earth’s little creatures

A mass extinction is usually defined as a loss of about three quarters of all species in existence across the entire Earth over a “short” geological period of time. Given the vast amount of time since life first evolved on the planet, “short” is defined as anything less than 2.8 million years.

Since at least the Cambrian period that began around 540 million years ago when the diversity of life first exploded into a vast array of forms, only five extinction events have definitively met these mass-extinction criteria.

These so-called “Big Five” have become part of the scientific benchmark to determine whether human beings have today created the conditions for a sixth mass extinction.

The Big Five

These five mass extinctions have happened on average every 100 million years or so since the Cambrian, although there is no detectable pattern in their particular timing. Each event itself lasted between 50 thousand and 2.76 million years. The first mass extinction happened at the end of the Ordovician period about 443 million years ago and wiped out over 85% of all species.

The Ordovician event seems to have been the result of two climate phenomena. First, a planetary-scale period of glaciation (a global-scale “ice age”), then a rapid warming period.

The second mass extinction occurred during the Late Devonian period around 374 million years ago. This affected around 75% of all species, most of which were bottom-dwelling invertebrates in tropical seas at that time.

This period in Earth’s past was characterised by high variation in sea levels, and rapidly alternating conditions of global cooling and warming. It was also the time when plants were starting to take over dry land, and there was a drop in global CO₂ concentration; all this was accompanied by soil transformation and periods of low oxygen.

The third and most devastating of the Big Five occurred at the end of the Permian period around 250 million years ago. This wiped out more than 95% of all species in existence at the time.

Some of the suggested causes include an asteroid impact that filled the air with pulverised particle, creating unfavourable climate conditions for many species. These could have blocked the sun and generated intense acid rains. Some other possible causes are still debated, such as massive volcanic activity in what is today Siberia, increasing ocean toxicity caused by an increase in atmospheric CO₂, or the spread of oxygen-poor water in the deep ocean.

Fifty million years after the great Permian extinction, about 80% of the world’s species again went extinct during the Triassic event. This was possibly caused by some colossal geological activity in what is today the Atlantic Ocean that would have elevated atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, increased global temperatures, and acidified oceans.

The last and probably most well-known of the mass-extinction events happened during the Cretaceous period, when an estimated 76% of all species went extinct, including the non-avian dinosaurs. The demise of the dinosaur super predators gave mammals a new opportunity to diversify and occupy new habitats, from which human beings eventually evolved.

The most likely cause of the Cretaceous mass extinction was an extraterrestrial impact in the Yucatán of modern-day Mexico, a massive volcanic eruption in the Deccan Province of modern-day west-central India, or both in combination.

Is today’s biodiversity crisis a sixth mass extinction?

The Earth is currently experiencing an extinction crisis largely due to the exploitation of the planet by people. But whether this constitutes a sixth mass extinction depends on whether today’s extinction rate is greater than the “normal” or “background” rate that occurs between mass extinctions.

This background rate indicates how fast species would be expected to disappear in absence of human endeavour, and it’s mostly measured using the fossil record to count how many species died out between mass extinction events.

The most accepted background rate estimated from the fossil record gives an average lifespan of about one million years for a species, or one species extinction per million species-years. But this estimated rate is highly uncertain, ranging between 0.1 and 2.0 extinctions per million species-years. Whether we are now indeed in a sixth mass extinction depends to some extent on the true value of this rate. Otherwise, it’s difficult to compare Earth’s situation today with the past.

In contrast to the the Big Five, today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming.

If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate.

Even considering a conservative background rate of two extinctions per million species-years, the number of species that have gone extinct in the last century would have otherwise taken between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear if they were merely succumbing to the expected extinctions that happen at random. This alone supports the notion that the Earth is at least experiencing many more extinctions than expected from the background rate.

It would likely take several millions of years of normal evolutionary diversification to “restore” the Earth’s species to what they were prior to human beings rapidly changing the planet. Among land vertebrates (species with an internal skeleton), 322 species have been recorded going extinct since the year 1500, or about 1.2 species going extinction every two years.

If this doesn’t sound like much, it’s important to remember extinction is always preceded by a loss in population abundance and shrinking distributions. Based on the number of decreasing vertebrate species listed in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, 32% of all known species across all ecosystems and groups are decreasing in abundance and range. In fact, the Earth has lost about 60% of all vertebrate individuals since 1970.

Australia has one of the worst recent extinction records of any continent, with more than 100 species of vertebrates going extinct since the first people arrived over 50 thousand years ago. And more than 300 animal and 1,000 plant species are now considered threatened with imminent extinction.

Read more: An end to endings: how to stop more Australian species going extinct

Although biologists are still debating how much the current extinction rate exceeds the background rate, even the most conservative estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity typical of a mass extinction event.

In fact, some studies show that the interacting conditions experienced today, such as accelerated climate change, changing atmospheric composition caused by human industry, and abnormal ecological stresses arising from human consumption of resources, define a perfect storm for extinctions. All these conditions together indicate that a sixth mass extinction is already well under way.

Read more: Mass extinctions and climate change: why the speed of rising greenhouse gases matters

– ref. What is a ‘mass extinction’ and are we in one now? – http://theconversation.com/what-is-a-mass-extinction-and-are-we-in-one-now-122535

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Glen Fuller, Associate Professor Communications and Media, University of Canberra

Once upon a time when something was simple to do we said: “It’s as easy as riding a bike.” But switching from driving a car to riding a bike as one’s main means of transport is anything but easy.

The well-documented obstacles holding people back from cycling include a lack of proper bike lanes, secure parking arrangements, end-of-trip facilities and bike-friendly public transport, as well as lack of convenient storage space.

Read more: The problem isn’t dockless share bikes. It’s the lack of bike parking

Despite these obstacles, people continue to try to make cycling a central part of their lives, with varying degrees of success.

While we know broadly what the impediments are, we don’t know how individuals confront them over time. We tend to approach this issue as an “all or nothing” affair – either people cycle or they don’t. Research is often framed in terms of cyclists and non-cyclists.

But, for most people, our research tells us it is a gradual process of transformation, with setbacks as well as small victories. The hesitant maybe-cyclist of today is potentially the fully committed cyclist of tomorrow. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true.

We have taken a lead from research into smoking, which sees failed quit attempts not as failures but as necessary steps on the road to success. Part of our research is interested in the faltering starts people make in transitioning from motor vehicles to bikes. Our aim is to help identify new intervention points for cycling policy.

Cycling enthusiast Samuel Beckett aptly summed up this in Worstward Ho:

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Where the bike is kept is telling

Our question is: how can we fail better? Building on research with 58 cyclists in the Wollongong region, we recently shifted our emphasis to another local government area, the City of Sydney.

We focused on people who want to cycle but have mostly failed so far. We carried out in-depth qualitative interviews with 12 participants, following up each with a go-along, where participants guide us through their regular travel routes.

To date, all participants convey good intentions to incorporate cycling into their lives. All say they want to resume cycling, yet none have succeeded.

Their attempts were inhibited by commonplace issues: lost confidence in their abilities, less enjoyment of cycling because of congestion, and experiences of a car accident or a near miss.

Our research has found that where bicycles are stored is a reliable indicator of the changing value of the bicycle in an individual’s everyday life. One can pinpoint where someone is in the course of their starting-to-cycle journey by locating where their bike is kept.

When things are going well the bike is near the front door ready for immediate use. As things get difficult, the bike migrates from the front to the back of the house, to languish in a spare room or the shed, before finally being put out on the curb as hard rubbish (or for “freecycling”).

Read more: People take to their bikes when we make it safer and easier for them

Storage is a key obstacle

Contrary to interpretations of data indicating inner-city residents are the most likely to cycle, we have found participants who live in small, inner-city dwellings face daunting storage issues that all too often defeat them. They have told us about storing the bicycle inconveniently inside the house, wedged in dining rooms, hallways and bedrooms.

The search for a place to store the bike increased the inconvenience of using it for transport until finally the bike was locked away, kept only as a sign of ongoing intention and hope. This inconvenience defeats successive start attempts before they’re seriously able to be revived.

For example, Greg (37) confirms the “pain” of poor storage options discourages him from riding more regularly:

So it’s called the room under the stairs, according to the real estate agent. I don’t know how … And that’s partly the pain of taking it out. I would take it out more often, but every time I have to take it out I have to delicately wheel it here where you are. And sometimes scratch the wall, and then out through the door and gate … I would keep it outside, but my partner won’t let me because he thinks it will be stolen. I would ride more if it was just there, and I’d hop on and off.“

Urban design for convenience matters

The languishing bike prompts us to ask questions about the urban design of convenience. It’s a key element of any active transport policy that aims to promote cycling and walking.

Something as simple as lockable bike hangars on residential streets might liberate intentions into actions. Such facilities would be everyday visual reminders to cycle and an added symbol that cars are not the only way of occupying roads.

Read more: Cycling and walking are short-changed when it comes to transport funding in Australia

We invite others who have started this journey to share and celebrate their stories of failing better, particularly those in the City of Sydney, by participating in our research.

– ref. Own a bike you never ride? We need to learn how to fail better at active transport – http://theconversation.com/own-a-bike-you-never-ride-we-need-to-learn-how-to-fail-better-at-active-transport-126112

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Kinsella, Professor of Literature and Environment, Curtin University

I start with a disclaimer: I am a UWA Publishing poet. I have published a book of poetry with them (as well as a novel), and have two books forthcoming with them in 2020 — The Weave, a collection of poetry co-written with Thurston Moore, and an edited and introduced volume, The Collected Poems of C.J. Brennan, the great, Sydney-dwelling, symbolist poet (1870-1932).

Now, with UWAP on the verge of being shut down, partly through what I and many others see as a misguided sense of what constitutes an interface between universities and the broader public, the fate of these books is unclear.

The University of Western Australia has proposed that “UWA Publishing operations, in their current form, come to an end” to be replaced by an open-source digital publishing model. The jobs of its employees and director Terri-ann White would likely be “surplus to requirements”. In a statement released late last week it said

Current publishing works already in train this year and next year are expected to continue, as will consultation on innovation that will assist UWA Publishing to adapt to the demands of modern publishing, with options to examine a mix of print, greater digitisation and open access publishing.

But even if contracted books are published, the closure of this publisher would be catastrophic for Australian poetry. It would be as if those books didn’t exist as something connected to a future vision of writing with purpose and community. It’s a way of killing a humanistic, inter-cultural conversation. It ignores the people who do so much to make these conversations happen.

Many voices

UWAP, especially since 2016, publishes many poetry books a year — a very unusual act of creative support and belief. Its dynamic list includes such essential voices as Ania Walwicz, Candy Royalle, Peter Rose, Quinn Eades, Kate Lilley, David McCooey, and so many other voices of the now, along with collected and selected “greats” like Francis Webb, Lesbia Harford, and Dorothy Hewett.

Yes, I speak here from the inside, as an author. Yet I also speak from the outside as a reader of poetry, and with the incredible feeling of loss I get as a reader, at this ill-thought out proposal.

UWAP publishes many “big name” writers and scholars, but also many marginalised voices and/or voices that might find it hard to publish through purely market-driven publishing houses. It is part of the country’s literary and scholarly collective conscience.

Poetry is an active ingredient of social justice not only in what it can say and talk about, but in the way that it places language under pressure, and questions how expression is used in general discourse, and why. Words of oppression are so easily accepted — poetry questions the uses and “deployment” of language.

UWAP, under Terri-ann White, is part of a clutch of poetry publishers in Australia — and there are not many — who make a commitment to poetry beyond the canonical, and with a strong sense of the need to enact this scrutiny of language. What is said in poetry is seen to matter, and I believe it does.

I will never forget speaking to the late Fay Zwicky in 2017, in her last weeks, about her forthcoming Collected Poems (UWAP, edited by Lucy Dougan and Tim Dolin) and her discussion of proofs and the book itself. A life’s work — one of the great bodies of poetry produced in Australia.

Zwicky had published volumes of poetry with other vital publishers in the Australia poetry community, University of Queensland Press and Giramondo. And then the collation of a life’s work — a big project that required so much attention and goodwill. It was clearly necessary, if not essential, to her.

One of the many titles on the UWAP list that had a remarkable effect on so many readers, and which I noted in the Australian Book Review’s 2018 Books of the Year feature, was a collation of Lisa Bellear’s poetry — Aboriginal Country. As I said then, “the emphatic, committed voice of this remarkable Goernpil woman, feminist, poet, photographer, and activist shines through.” Not to have had access to Bellear’s work is unimaginable now we have encountered it gathered in this way.

There is huge engagement in seeing such a work through to press. It was edited (by Jen Jewel Brown), supported and seen onto the shelves via UWAP. An act of belief and support, among many such acts in a given year; all necessary.

Vitally, UWAP’s poetry list effectively manages that seemingly complex interaction between local work and that from the rest of the country. It seems too often assumed that a WA publisher will necessarily only publish WA work. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a total believer in local publishing, but there’s also a strong necessity for a publisher that brings many localities together, as Magabala Books in Broome does with Australian Aboriginal writing.

UWAP publishes poets (and writers in general) from all over the country, and brings in some overseas titles as well. Terri-ann White actively takes her lists to readers and publishers outside Australia, and is an energetic and steadfast voice in international publishing for her authors, and for Australian and world literature.

To close UWAP would be a damaging of shared difference, of making community and discussion out of diverse voices.

While I have had the good fortune over the years to publish with some of the major poetry houses around the English-speaking world, I am especially proud and excited when a book of mine is selected for the UWAP list.

Shutting down UWAP would sever many ties and disrupt many conversations just begun, or prevent other conversations, especially of conscience, ever taking place.

– ref. UWA Publishing has helped take Australian poetry into the world. Its closure would be catastrophic for poets – http://theconversation.com/uwa-publishing-has-helped-take-australian-poetry-into-the-world-its-closure-would-be-catastrophic-for-poets-126821

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Humphery-Jenner, Associate Professor of Finance, UNSW

Myer is the in the clear, sort of, after Australia’s first judicial ruling on a securities class action.

It centred around allegations that Myer misled the market about its projected earnings.

The court found Myer had been misleading, but that because shareholders didn’t believe it, it didn’t harm them.

The ruling established important principles that will guide future judgments.

It isn’t enough for shareholders to show that there was a relevantly false or misleading statement or omission.

They need to also show it hurt them.

What Myer did

On September 11 2014, Myer’s chief executive Bernie Brookes indicated that he believed the net profit after tax for the 2015 financial year was likely to beat the previous year’s profit of A$98.5 million.

Five months later Brookes resigned, and on March 19 Myer cut the forecast to between $75 million and $80 million.

The class action alleged that Myer engaged in misleading conduct either because the initial September 11 2014 guidance was misleading or because – even if it was not misleading at the time – Myer allowed it to stand without correcting it.

Read more: What’s behind the rise in shareholder class actions

It argued the statement inflated the share price, causing buyers to pay too much for the shares and to lose money when the true state of affairs became known.

Myer argued it had no obligation to update the market after Brooke’s statement.

It said the market had already realised the profit would be lower than what he said. And, in any event, what he said was not misleading.

What Myer was obliged to do

The Corporations Act Section 1041E states that people must not make a false or misleading statement that is likely to (among other things) influence trading activity or market prices when that person knows, or ought to know, that the statement is not correct, or does not care whether the statement is correct.

Similarly, Section 1041H asserts that a person must not engage in misleading or deceptive conduct, which could include failing to correct erroneous statements.

Indeed, Section 769C says if a statement is made without reasonable grounds, it is deemed to be misleading.

Corporations Act Section 1041I says anyone who has suffered loss or damage by a contravention of the aforementioned rules can recover the amount of that loss or damage.

Read more: Explainer: what exactly must companies disclose to investors?

Also, Corporations Act Section 674 says firms must comply with continuous disclosure requirements, which include disclosing material price-sensitive information. The provision gives legislative force to the Securities Exchange continuous disclosure guidelines.

There are two overarching elements involved in securities litigation, both of which were issues in the Myer case:

• the defendant makes a false or misleading statement

• that false statement causes the plaintiff to suffer loss or damage.

Each needs exploring.

False or misleading?

At first glance, a statement is false or misleading merely if it is incorrect, especially so if it is about something currently known. But things are less clear when the statement is about the future or a forecast.

Under Section 769C, forecasts are held to be misleading if they are not based on reasonable grounds. Omitting information, or failing to correct information, can also be misleading if it creates or maintains a false impression.

Loss or damage?

Historically, in fraud type cases, the plaintiffs need to show that they “relied” on the false statement in making a decision. That is, they need to show they were directly misled.

Myer argued that the shareholders needed to show they actively “relied” on its statements when deciding to purchase shares.

The shareholders argued that the legislation does not require active reliance. They argued that it was enough to show that the false statement inflated the share price and that they bought at a price that was too high.

It was a win and a loss…

The court sided with the plaintiffs, finding that it was enough for them to show that the false statement (or misleading omission) inflated the share price, that they bought at a price that was too high, and they suffered a loss when the truth was revealed.

And it found Myer had been misleading by failing to correct a forecast it knew was erroneous. It had also violated the Exchange’s continuous disclosure standards.

But it found that Myer’s September 11 2014 forecast was not misleading at the time. It was in line with analysts’ forecasts, and in September 2014 Myer had reasonable grounds to make it.

Read more: How courts and costs are undermining ASIC and the ACCC’s efforts to police misbehaving banks and businesses

Damages would normally reflect the difference between what the shareholders paid and what they would have paid if the true state of affairs had been known.

But given the market, notwithstanding the statement form the Myer chief executive, knew about Myer’s declining profitability and given that that information was reflected in the price, shareholders weren’t damaged.

…with implications for the future

The judgment will make future shareholder class actions easier. They will know what they have to prove.

An unanswered question is whether Myer will simply get away with having misled the market, given that it prevailed in the case.

It may not. Regulators – such as the Australian Securities and Investments Commission – still have penalty mechanisms they can use to punish officers and directors for misleading conduct, even if shareholders don’t prevail in court.

– ref. Why Australia’s first securities class action judgment (sort of) cleared Myer – http://theconversation.com/why-australias-first-securities-class-action-judgment-sort-of-cleared-myer-125925

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Badlan, Postdoctoral Researcher, Atmospheric Dynamics, UNSW

As the east coast bushfire crisis unfolds, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Rural Fire Service operational officer Brett Taylor have each warned residents bushfires can create their own weather systems.

This is not just a figure of speech or a general warning about the unpredictability of intense fires. Bushfires genuinely can create their own weather systems: a phenomenon known variously as firestorms, pyroclouds or, in meteorology-speak, pyrocumulonimbus.

Read more: Firestorms: the bushfire/thunderstorm hybrids we urgently need to understand

The occurrence of firestorms is increasing in Australia; there have been more than 50 in the period 2001-18. During a six-week period earlier this year, 18 confirmed pyrocumulonimbus formed, mainly over the Victorian High Country.

Its not clear whether the current bushfires will spawn any firestorms. But with the frequency of extreme fires set to increase due to hotter and drier conditions, it’s worth taking a closer look at how firestorms happen, and what effects they produce.

What is a firestorm?

The term “firestorm” is a contraction of “fire thunderstorm”. In simple terms, they are thunderstorms generated by the heat from a bushfire.

In stark contrast to typical bushfires, which are relatively easy to predict and are driven by the prevailing wind, firestorms tend to form above unusually large and intense fires.

If a fire encompasses a large enough area (called “deep flaming”), the upward movement of hot air can cause the fire to interact with the atmosphere above it, potentially forming a pyrocloud. This consists of smoke and ash in the smoke plume, and water vapour in the cloud above.

If the conditions are not too severe, the fire may produce a cloud called a pyrocumulus, which is simply a cloud that forms over the fire. These are typically benign and do not affect conditions on the ground.

But if the fire is particularly large or intense, or if the atmosphere above it is unstable, this process can give birth to a pyrocumulonimbus – and that is an entirely more malevolent beast.

What effects do firestorms produce?

A pyrocumulonibus cloud is much like a normal thunderstorm that forms on a hot summer’s day. The crucial difference here is that this upward movement is caused by the heat from the fire, rather than simply heat radiating from the ground.

Conventional thunderclouds and pyrocumulonimbus share similar characteristics. Both form an anvil-shaped cloud that extends high into the troposphere (the lower 10-15km of the atmosphere) and may even reach into the stratosphere beyond.

The weather underneath these clouds can be fierce. As the cloud forms, the circulating air creates strong winds with dangerous, erratic “downbursts” – vertical blasts of air that hit the ground and scatter in all directions.

In the case of a pyrocumulonimbus, these downbursts have the added effect of bringing dry air down to the surface beneath the fire. The swirling winds can also carry embers over huge distances. Ember attack has been identified as the main cause of property loss in bushfires, and the unpredictable downbursts make it impossible to determine which direction the wind will blow across the ground. The wind direction may suddenly change, catching people off guard.

Firestorms also produce dry lightning, potentially sparking new fires, which may then merge or coalesce into a larger flaming zone.

In rare cases, a firestorm can even morph into a “fire tornado”. This is formed from the rotating winds in the convective column of a pyrocumulonimbus. They are attached to the firestorm and can therefore lift off the ground.

Read more: Turn and burn: the strange world of fire tornadoes

This happened during the infamous January 2003 Canberra bushfires, when a pyrotornado tore a path near Mount Arawang in the suburb of Kambah.

Understandably, firestorms are the most dangerous and unpredictable manifestations of a bushfire, and are impossible to suppress or control. As such, it is vital to evacuate these areas early, to avoid sending fire personnel into extremely dangerous areas.

The challenge is to identify the triggers that cause fires to develop into firestorms. Our research at UNSW, in collaboration with fire agencies, has made considerable progress in identifying these factors. They include “eruptive fire behaviour”, where instead of a steady rate of fire spread, once a fire interacts with a slope, the plume may attach to the ground and rapidly accelerate up the hill.

Another process, called “vorticity-driven lateral spread”, has also been recognised as a good indicator of potential fire blow-up. This occurs when a fire spreads laterally along a ridge line instead of following the direction of the wind.

Although further refinement is still needed, this kind of knowledge could greatly improve decision-making processes on when and where to deploy on-ground fire crews, and when to evacuate before the situation turns deadly.

– ref. Firestorms and flaming tornadoes: how bushfires create their own ferocious weather systems – http://theconversation.com/firestorms-and-flaming-tornadoes-how-bushfires-create-their-own-ferocious-weather-systems-126832

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Coral Gartner, Associate Professor, School of Public Health, The University of Queensland

More than 2,000 people in the United States have developed serious lung damage in a poisoning outbreak associated with the use of vaping devices this year. At least 39 people have died from the condition.

Most of those affected are young men. Their symptoms, which developed over a few days to several weeks, included cough, shortness of breath, chest pain, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, fever, chills, and weight loss.

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recently named this combination of symptoms – “e-cigarette or vaping product use associated lung injury”, or EVALI.

Importantly, they’ve now implicated vitamin E acetate, an ingredient added to illicit cannabis vaping liquids, as the most likely cause of EVALI.

1. What EVALI is and how it’s diagnosed

EVALI cases are characterised by pneumonitis (lung inflammation). Some cases have involved the accumulation of oil in the lungs, while others have involved an accumulation of white blood cells – a marker of the immune system responding to a threat.

To be classified as EVALI, cases have to satisfy the following criteria:

• having vaped or “dabbed” (inhaled a concentrated cannabis product) in the 90 days before symptoms started
• a chest image showing the presence of a substance denser than air in the lungs (pulmonary infiltrates) or pathology confirming acute lung injury
• absence of lung infection or any alternative plausible medical diagnosis that explains the symptoms.

Read more: It’s safest to avoid e-cigarettes altogether – unless vaping is helping you quit smoking

2. Why this new diagnosis was needed

When investigating the causes of an outbreak like this, it’s important to have a clear definition that determines who is and who is not likely to be part of the outbreak.

For example, some people who vape may develop similar symptoms from other lung conditions unrelated to vaping (for example, they may have influenza, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease due to a history of cigarette smoking).

If these people were included as outbreak cases it would be more difficult to identify the cause of EVALI.

3. The cause of EVALI

Cases have followed a typical acute outbreak pattern, with most occurring over a number of months. The peak was in September this year when 463 cases were admitted to hospitals.

This pattern indicates EVALI is a form of acute poisoning, rather than a condition that has developed from chronic vaping over many years. It’s most likely there’s something new in vaping products used by these patients that’s caused the spike in lung injuries.

Read more: How a person vapes, not just what a person vapes, could also play a big role in vaping harm

Most people with EVALI have either admitted using, or later been found to have vaped products containing tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the major psychoactive ingredient in cannabis. They have typically purchased these products from illicit sources.

Laboratory analyses of THC vaping product samples supplied by EVALI cases have found many of these contain vitamin E acetate (oil). Vitamin E acetate is sometimes added to illicit THC vaping products to dilute and then thicken the liquid to hide the dilution, in the same way other illicit drugs are “cut” with other substances to reduce their purity.

The CDC tested fluid samples collected from the lungs of 29 EVALI cases and found all samples contained vitamin E acetate.

One theory is the oil may be the direct cause of the lung injury, because some of these patients have been diagnosed with lipoid pneumonia (lung inflammation associated with oil inhalation). However, it increasingly looks like a chemical formed from the vitamin E acetate may be causing the toxicity. Research is continuing to test this hypothesis.

It appears increasingly unlikely standard commercially produced nicotine vaping products are a cause of EVALI.

Of 849 EVALI patients who provided information about the products they used, only 10% reported exclusive use of nicotine-containing products, while 78% reported using THC-containing products. Some EVALI patients who initially denied using THC vaping products were later found to have used them.

EVALI has not been evident in other countries with widespread use of nicotine vaping products but little use of THC vaping products, such as the UK.

Read more: Vaping likely has dangers that could take years for scientists to even know about

4. How EVALI can be treated

Many patients with EVALI have developed a severe illness that requires hospitalisation. In the most serious cases, treatment has involved intubation and mechanical ventilation because the patient cannot breathe on their own.

Most patients have been treated with corticosteroids to reduce the inflammation on the lungs. Antiviral and antibiotic medicines may also be given on a case-by-case basis.

EVALI patients are strongly advised to avoid vaping and cigarette smoking, so treatment may be needed to address dependence on nicotine and/or cannabis, such as behavioural support and non-inhaled nicotine replacement therapies like nicotine gum and patches.

5. How you can avoid EVALI

The US authorities recommend consumers do not use any cannabis or THC vaping products, especially those purchased illegally.

Only one EVALI case has been reported outside the US, in Canada, but it’s difficult to rule out the possibility illicit THC vaping products sold in other countries may also be contaminated with the causative agent.

Read more: Vaping: As an imaging scientist I fear the deadly impact on people’s lungs

– ref. Vaping-related lung disease now has a name – and a likely cause. 5 things you need to know about EVALI – http://theconversation.com/vaping-related-lung-disease-now-has-a-name-and-a-likely-cause-5-things-you-need-to-know-about-evali-125730

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maggie Ivanova, Senior Lecturer, Drama, Creative and Performing Arts, Flinders University

Review: The Dark Master and Totes Adorbs ♥ Hurricane, OzAsia Festival, Adelaide, 22 October – 8 November

In theatre, the play text tends to drive the storytelling. The interpretation of this text, known as dramaturgy, determines the artists’ approaches to dialogue, characterisation, movement, set design, and other production elements. Dramaturgy’s purpose is to help the audience imagine a world on stage, and to understand how this world works.

In some performances, however, the visual production elements – not the text – take the lead in creating the world on stage. This visual dramaturgy enables artists to present alternative narratives by stimulating the spectators’ emotional and physical engagement and by creating immersive experiences.

Visual dramaturgy has been part of Japanese performance culture for centuries. Its reliance on spectacle is responsible for the popularity of kabuki dance-drama, which many believe gave rise to fan culture in Japan. The close spectator-performer relationships in kabuki became possible through innovations in theatre architecture, especially the hanamichi, a rampway extending into the auditorium.

More recently, we can see the importance of visual storytelling in Japanese culture in manga, where emotional intensity and supernatural encounters are presented as something quite palpable. While western comics and graphic novels tend to favour dialogue-driven action, in manga, visual representations of characters and their emotional and physical states take centre stage.

Read more: The deep influence of the A-bomb on anime and manga

Visual dramaturgy remains central for contemporary artists in Japan, as was thrillingly demonstrated through two key works at this year’s OzAsia festival

The Dark Master

The Dark Master is Kuro Tanino’s stage adaptation of a manga of the same title. Presented by theatre group Niwa Gekidan Penino, it is set in Osaka at a small traditional eatery catering mostly to locals, who come to enjoy a delicious meal, read a newspaper or watch a baseball game over a beer.

The chef/owner (Susumu Ogata) is getting on in years. Though his desire to cook remains strong, his body is beginning to give up on him. At least, this is what he tells the 28-year-old Tokyo backpacker (Koichiro F.O. Pereira) who stumbles in one evening, hungry and in search of adventure.

The chef seizes the opportunity to recruit his replacement. So does the eatery: the front door locks by itself, thwarting the young man’s attempts to leave. The backpacker becomes the eatery’s new owner. The chef withdraws to the second floor, never to be seen again. However, for the next 33 days, he will give his apprentice cooking lessons via a minute earpiece planted in his ear. The arrangement is exhilarating and unnerving.

The audiences’ sensory engagement deepens when appetising smells (the cooking on stage is real) mingle with live, multi-angle video projections showing the young man’s training. Through our own earpieces, we listen in on the chef’s covert cooking instructions, responding with gasps and laughter to comic blunder and culinary spectacle. Surtitles on separate screens provide translation.

Visual dramaturgy produces a hyperreal, immersive experience akin to becoming one with the young chef.

Totes Adorbs ♥ Hurricane

Delight in experiencing Totes Adorbs ♥ Hurricane, the latest work from Toko Nikaido’s Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker, comes partly from sheer astonishment: did that angel just shoot me with a water rifle? Are they flinging around tofu and … seaweed?!

The performers’ frenzied dance numbers give a tantalising nod to berserker warriors in Scandinavian mythology who would shape-shift to non-human form in the frenzy of battle.

We are all transformed into pop-culture berserkers.

Performers and spectators alike are whirled into a shrine to partake in a euphoric spectacle amid pop-culture icons and idols: skeleton spectres in the woodblock prints of Kuniyoshi Utagawa appear side by side with anime, video-game characters, and animoji. Digital projections flicker past continuously in a deliberate overload of colour, lights, and glitter.

What appears on the surface as unruly indulgence conceals the careful choreography of dance sequences, songs, and the swift on-stage transformations – hengemono – associated with the best of visual dramaturgy in kabuki. Performers character-shift before our eyes, flinging discarded costumes into the audience. Also carefully choreographed is this audience: we are ingeniously drawn into the spectacle, transforming into the actors of our dreams.

Meaning where logic fails

The Dark Master and Totes Adorbs ♥ Hurricane reflect two disparate arms of contemporary Japanese performance: one of hyperreal theatre, and one of underground idol performance. Yet they both showcase the immense creative potential of visuals to create meaning on stage.

When visual dramaturgy leads, the spectators’ sensory and physical engagement cuts through performance conventions and helps us discover meaning in those in-between states and spaces, where experiences ring true even when language and logic fail.

– ref. Kitchen aromas and angels with water guns: Japanese visual storytelling comes alive at OzAsia – http://theconversation.com/kitchen-aromas-and-angels-with-water-guns-japanese-visual-storytelling-comes-alive-at-ozasia-126353

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Peterson, Associate Professor, Flinders University

Review: OzAsia Festival, Adelaide, 22 October – 8 November

The most exciting work at OzAsia cuts across genres, styles, and cultures to create something distinctive and new: a work of art that could not exist without equality in the exchange between Western and Asian cultures. Under artistic director Joseph Mitchell, this brief has extended to engagement with the Middle East.

Perhaps because dance exists without language it has long been the place where Asia and the West have met most successfully. But funding and time are required to make such deep engagement between cultures possible. No surprise, then, Europe has become the centre for the generation of such work and three of the most outstanding works in this year’s festival were by European-based choreographers.

Two are of South Asian or Middle Eastern heritage while the third has a long history of deep engagement with Asia.

What the Day Owes to the Night

French choreographer Hervé Koubi grew up without full knowledge of his Algerian roots. His thrilling What the Day Owes to the Night reflects his coming to terms with that knowledge.

Working with non-professional dancers, hip-hop and breakdancing from the streets of North Africa link up with Afro-Brazilian capoeira, wrapped in the spectacle of Sufi-style, whirling dervish dance.

The superbly fit and athletic all-male cast are shirtless. Skirts billow out when they twirl: patterns of extraordinary beauty and complexity. Perpetual motion, they twirl for impossible periods of time upside down on their heads.

The work is explosive and powerful. Bodies are thrown into the air and across the stage. The dancers are superbly masculine, but also graceful and generous with one another. It was a work that overwhelmed the senses in its technical genius, exuberance, and joy.

Vessel

Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet’s Vessel extends from a collaboration with Japanese sculptor Kohei Nawa, exploring the ways dance and sculpture can come together.

The stage is a shallow pool of water surrounding a thin sculptural object, stark in its whiteness, resembling the top of a volcano. Dancers appear as non-human: heads tucked in front or behind, completely out of view. These headless forms attach to one another, fuse, and are expelled by some mysterious organic force.

It is a hypnotic evocation of the power of Japan’s volcanic islands, reflecting Jalet’s long-standing personal connection with Japanese aesthetics, myth and religion.

Japanese cultural and religious systems reflect the natural world. In Vessel, organisms are perilously fragile. They are birthed, mutated, and expelled over moments in a larger cosmic time. We are in a state of altered consciousness. Anything is possible.

Outwitting the Devil

Akram Khan, born in the UK of Bangladeshi parents, has a long history of work that extends the choreographic language of traditional dance forms. Building on the North Indian classical dance form of kathak, communicating stories through gesture and movement, he has generated a new kind of contemporary dance.

Outwitting the Devil draws on the Epic of Gilgamesh to offer a parable for our times. A tale of violence where a powerful, proud man unleashes terrible forces by taking on the natural world. Ultimately, all is lost. Nothing remains of civilisation except smouldering ruins.

Read more: Guide to the classics: the Epic of Gilgamesh

Khan offers a model for how dance can fuse cultures and movement vocabularies to create something new that defies categorisation.

Mythili Prakash uses the angular vocabulary of Bharata Natyam, descended from Hindu temple dancing; Jasper Narvaez’s fluid movement and effortless leaps reflect his training at the Ballet Philippines Dance School; Sam Asa Pratt’s commanding physical presence extends from his background in hip-hop; James Vu Anh Pham’s movement, seemingly outside the range of human possibility, draws from many years of working with contemporary dance company Chunky Move.

This is intercultural work in which the dance cultures embedded in the bodies of performers is essential to the telling of the story.

Visceral performance

These works are intensely visceral. What the Day Owes to the Night produced a whirling, vibrating energy that remained in the body after the show. Jalet’s Vessel unfolded like an organism over geological time and Khan’s work ended with epic destruction and nearly unbearable sadness and heartbreak: both felt like they had permanently rearranged my DNA.

All show how works by master choreographers living outside of the Asia-Pacific region can successfully fuse Asian and Middle Eastern aesthetics and sensibilities and generate new stories and ways of moving. Koubi’s work a desert ritual, Jalet’s the forces of nature, and Khan’s the fall of civilisation.

When these elements are harnessed by thought, care, openness and generosity of spirit, and when the time needed to create such work is funded, what dance can do for the human spirit and soul is revealed.

– ref. Desert, volcano, the fall of civilisation: this year’s OzAsia festival fused worlds in dance – http://theconversation.com/desert-volcano-the-fall-of-civilisation-this-years-ozasia-festival-fused-worlds-in-dance-126435

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin Sinclair, Research Fellow, NICM Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University

Endometriosis is a chronic, inflammatory condition where tissue similar to the lining of the uterus is found outside of the womb. It affects around one in ten women of reproductive age, causing pain, infertility and gastrointestinal symptoms.

Women often report difficulty getting their pain and other symptoms under control, despite medication or even surgery.

Our research, published today, found one in ten Australian women with endometriosis reported using cannabis to manage their pain and other symptoms.

Read more: I have painful periods, could it be endometriosis?

What did our study find?

We surveyed 484 women with surgically diagnosed endometriosis about the self-management strategies they used.

Of the respondents, who were aged 18 to 45, 76% reported using self-management techniques in the past six months. This included the use of heat packs (70%), dietary changes (44%), exercise (42%), yoga or pilates (35%) and cannabis (13%).

Out of all of the self-management techniques, cannabis was rated as the most effective for managing pain.

Women who reported higher levels of pain were more likely to use cannabis than those with milder symptoms. This may be because they couldn’t get relief through other measures.

Respondents who used cannabis also reported improvements in other symptoms including gastrointestinal problems, nausea, anxiety, depression and sleep.

One in ten cannabis users reported side effects, which included anxiety, drowsiness and tachycardia (fast heart rate). This is consistent with other research.

How could cannabis help treat endometriosis symptoms?

The endocannabinoid system (ECS) is a complex regulatory system comprised of various receptors, chemicals that bind with these receptors, and enzymes. It helps maintain balance (homeostasis) in our bodies and is important for a wide range of actions, including metabolism, inflammation and immune function.

The ECS is distributed throughout most organs in the human body, but is more abundant in the central nervous, immune and female reproductive systems.

Chemicals from cannabis, including the cannabinoids tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), can interact with the ECS and other receptor types. This suggests a mechanism for how cannabis may alleviate pelvic pain in women with endometriosis.

Read more: Marijuana is a lot more than just THC – a pharmacologist looks at the untapped healing compounds

Emerging research shows medicinal cannabis can help manage a number of conditions, including chronic pain in adults, the spasticity of multiple sclerosis, intractable epilepsy (where seizures can’t be controlled with medication) and chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting.

Research is still in its infancy in women with pelvic pain, but one study found women with pelvic pain may benefit from using medicinal cannabis. It may also allow them to reduce their opioid pain-killer intake.

Is it legal?

Medical practitioners in Australia can legally prescribe medicinal cannabis through regulated pathways such as the Special Access Scheme Category B and the Authorised Prescriber Scheme. These pathways are typically used by doctors for unapproved medicines.

According to discussions with prescribing doctors and patients, approvals for medicinal cannabis for pain associated with endometriosis have been successful through these regulated, legal channels.

However, at the time our survey was administered, in late 2017, it’s likely most women who were using cannabis accessed it illicitly. No Special Access Scheme approvals had been granted for endometriosis at the time. Further, most women we surveyed reported smoking cannabis, which is very rarely prescribed by doctors in Australia.

Despite the perception that “natural” equals safe, cannabis use does come with risks. These should be discussed with and monitored by medical professionals.

Why do women resort to cannabis and self care?

Both surgical and pharmaceutical treatments are commonly used for endometriosis.

Surgery can reduce pain, at least in the short to medium term.

Recent reviews have found hormonal treatment options can be effective at managing pain but these are often discontinued or avoided due to significant side effects, such as headaches, mood swings and depression.

Non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen don’t seem to be effective at alleviating pain from endometriosis.

Read more: Endometriosis costs women and society $30,000 a year for every sufferer

In the US, opioids (oxycodone and codeine) are commonly prescribed for endometriosis. Rates of opioid prescription are much lower in Australia but it’s still relatively common among women. This puts women at risk of dependence and potential overdose.

Women with endometriosis report wide-ranging negative impacts on their daily lives, from having to reduce their social activities to problems going to work or studying. It can also cause poor mental and emotional health and affect their sexual and romantic relationships.

So what needs to happen next?

Our survey data shows Australian women are already using cannabis for endometriosis-associated pain, regardless of legality, and with few reported side effects.

However, these survey responses are self-reported so there may be issues such as recall bias. This can lead to over or underestimation of either benefits or harms.

Given women with endometriosis are often suffering without adequate pain control, well designed clinical trials are urgently needed to determine how effective and safe quality-controlled medicinal cannabis might be in treating the symptoms of endometriosis.

Read more: CBD: Rising star or popular fad?

– ref. 1 in 10 women with endometriosis report using cannabis to ease their pain – http://theconversation.com/1-in-10-women-with-endometriosis-report-using-cannabis-to-ease-their-pain-126516

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katina Zammit, Deputy Dean, School of Education, Western Sydney University

When I was younger I decided to learn Greek. I learnt the letter-sound correspondences and could say the words – the sounds, that is. But although I could and still can decode these words, I can’t actually read Greek because I don’t know what the words mean.

Being able to make the connection between the letters, their combinations and the sounds that make up the words wasn’t all I needed to be able to read. It was an easy way to learn but it didn’t provide me with the whole picture.

As we read, and understand what we are reading, we don’t just use our knowledge of the letter-sound correspondences, which you may know as phonics or phonemic awareness, we also use other cues. These include our knowledge of the topic, the meaning of words in the context of the topic, and the flow and sequence of the words in a sentence.

Good readers use a full repertoire of skills, each dependent on the other. And a whole language approach to teaching reading is about arming new readers with this repertoire.

What is the whole language approach?

A whole language approach to teaching reading was introduced into primary schools in the late 1970s. There have been many developments in this area since, so the approach has been adapted and today looks quite different from 40 years ago.

To begin with, let’s dispel some myths about a whole language approach to teaching reading. It is not learning to read individual words by sight. Nor is it learning a list of vocabulary only.

A whole language approach to teaching reading is not opposed to teaching the correspondence of a letter or letters to sounds to help sound out unfamiliar words. Nor is it opposed to learning how to blend sounds together to decode a word by using the first letter/s of a word, the end of the word and the letter/s in the middle.

Read more: Reading progress is falling between year 5 and 7, especially for advantaged students: 5 charts

But just knowing sounds is not the same as knowing how to read. In 2000, the US National Reading Panel’s analysis of scientific literature on teaching children to read found systematic phonics instruction (teaching sounds and blending them together) should be integrated with other reading instruction to create a balanced reading program.

The panel determined that phonics instruction should not be a total reading program, nor should it be a dominant component.

In 2011, the UK introduced a mandatory phonics screening check, for year 1 students, to address the decline in literacy achievement in the middle years of school. Children were prepared for the test using a government-approved synthetic phonics program. But in 2019 around 25% of year 6 students failed to reach the minimum requirements in reading.

Read more: The Coalition’s $10 million for Year 1 phonics checks would be wasted money

Australia’s own national inquiry into teaching literacy noted the same conclusions as the US national reading panel.

This view aligns with the whole language approach in the 21st century, which advocates a balanced way of teaching reading in the early years. This includes:

• explicit teaching of decoding skills (how to break up a word to work out how it is pronounced)
• connecting the decoding of word/s to their meaning
• learning to read frequently used words that can’t be sounded out or broken up into different sounds (the, were)
• learning the meaning of new words from the context they are in (looking at the words before and after and at what the sentence is about)
• understanding what the text being read is about (literally and interpretively)
• building a wide vocabulary
• understanding how images and words work together
• promoting a love of the English language and an interest in reading.

Let’s not put kids off reading

The whole language approach provides children learning to read with more than one way to work out unfamiliar words. They can begin with decoding – breaking the word into its parts and trying to sound them out and then blend them together. This may or may not work.

They can also look at where the word is in the sentence and consider what word most likely would come next based on what they have read so far. They can look beyond the word to see if the rest of the sentence can assist to decode the word and pronounce it.

We do not read texts one word at a time. We make best guesses as we read and learn to read. We learn from our errors. Sometimes these errors are not that significant – does it matter if I read Sydenham as “SID-EN-HAM” or “SID-N-AM”? Perhaps not.

Does it matter that I can decode the word “wind” but don’t pronounce the two differently in “the wind was too strong to wind the sail”? Yes, it probably does.

Teaching children to read or to see reading with a focus on phonics and phonemic awareness gives them the illusion “proper” reading is mere decoding and blending. In fact, it has been argued this can put children off reading when entering school. While some gain may occur in the first years, over time achievement deteriorates for children in high-performing and low-performing schools.

Read more: Enjoyment of reading, not mechanics of reading, can improve literacy for boys

A whole language approach doesn’t argue against the importance of phonemic awareness. But it acknowledges it is not all that should be included in reading instruction.

It is important to assess children’s reading from the beginning of schooling and continually determine how they are progressing. Teachers can then select specific strategies to improve individual children’s reading competence and increase their skills to build fluent and confident readers.

A whole language approach to teaching reading advocates for teaching phonics and phonemic awareness in the context of real texts – that use the richness of the English language – not artificial, highly constructed texts. However, it also acknowledges this is not sufficient. Being able to decode the written word is essential, but it isn’t enough to set up a child to be a competent reader and to be successful during and after school.

Read the accompanying article on teaching to read using explicit phonics instruction here.

– ref. Reading is more than sounding out words and decoding. That’s why we use the whole language approach to teaching it – http://theconversation.com/reading-is-more-than-sounding-out-words-and-decoding-thats-why-we-use-the-whole-language-approach-to-teaching-it-126606

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pamela Snow, Professor and Head, Rural Health School, La Trobe University

Being able to read means being able to make meaning from printed words. At a functional level, we read to get the message – such as how many times per day to take our medication – but in a literate society reading provides much more. A successful reader is someone who can access the thoughts, opinions, memories, theories, desires, experiences and feelings of others.

Reading is a transformative experience. But it is also a “biologically unnatural” process humans have been doing for only a brief time in evolutionary terms. Unlike acquiring spoken language, children need to be taught how the English writing system works and how to master the code for both reading and spelling.

The written English code

Written English is considered a code because letters and letter combinations (graphemes) represent spoken speech sounds (phonemes). The English alphabet has 26 letters, which represent 44 speech sounds. This means some letter combinations (graphemes) comprise more than one letter. For example, in the first sound of “ship” two letters, “s” and “h”, make one grapheme that represents the phoneme “sh”.

For beginning readers, being able to connect graphemes to their corresponding phonemes is not an intuitive, natural process.

Learning the complex code is best done through explicit and systematic phonics instruction. This involves directly teaching children to associate graphemes with their corresponding phonemes.

Instruction starts using a clearly defined (systematic) sequence of letters, starting with only a few correspondences reflecting simple code (such as single letters) and progressively moving to complex code, such as “ng” and “ough”, once mastery is achieved at each level.

Once children have learnt a few grapheme-phoneme correspondences, they will be explicitly shown how to segment words (containing only known correspondences) into their constituent parts and blend them together to decode and read the word. At this point, children will be able to read short decodable books.

Read more: Explainer: what’s the difference between decodable and predictable books, and when should they be used?

All children must learn to decode. Without decoding skills, children could not read made-up words such as Harry Potter’s “quidditch”. Nor could they read unfamiliar names (of places such as Oodnadatta) or medication names (such as azithromycin) as these have no other cues to guide the reader to pronunciation.

Why phonics works

Synthetic phonics instruction aligns with the two strongest and most well-regarded theoretical frameworks in contemporary reading science.

The first is the simple view of reading developed in 1986, which has more recently (2018) been reformulated as the cognitive foundations of learning to read. This holds that reading comprehension is made up of two mutually dependent and essential processes: being able to decode words and being able to understand what connected text means.

The simple view theory had provided valuable insights into the cognitive processes necessary for reading comprehension. Evidence also shows the model to be a valid means of sub-classifying children as “able readers”, “poor decoders” and/or “poor comprehenders”.

The second framework is dual route theory (developed in 2012). This refers to the fact some words readers encounter are already stored as recognisable letter strings in their long-term memory. We instantly recognise these words when we see them, through the lexical route.

But unfamiliar words need to be decoded, via a phonological (sound-based) route, using knowledge of how letters and letter combinations (graphemes) map onto speech (phonemes). As we become more skilled as readers, we access more words automatically.

Dual route theory aligns with cognitive load theory. This is the idea that there is only so much information a human brain can hold at any one time unless there is a dedicated and structured opportunity to practise and rehearse it.

In line with this, the workings of the English writing system are best taught explicitly and systematically, so beginning readers are not put into the unfortunate and unnecessary situation of being cognitively overloaded. The risk of cognitive overload is high when the code is shown to children in an unsystematic, unstructured way or, even more worryingly, if it is assumed children will intuitively understand the code simply by exposure to written text.

Read more: Explainer: what is explicit instruction and how does it help children learn?

Instruction should also include an emphasis on morphology (word building, such as happy, unhappy, unhappily) and etymology (study of word origins), so students recognise patterns and relationships between words.

Although knowing how to decode words is fundamental to becoming a reader, teaching children to crack the code should also be done alongside instructional practices that ensure rapidly expanding vocabularies and world knowledge, so children can bring language skills and background knowledge to the task of comprehending what they read.

Covering all bases

A significant proportion, close to 40%, of children manage to learn to read without explicit and systematic phonics instruction (or with phonics instruction of variable impact) due to a confluence of biological and environmental advantages. These children may receive less structured initial reading instruction that encourages them to use a variety of strategies, such as picture and context cues, before attending to the graphemes within a word.

Read more: Reading progress is falling between year 5 and 7, especially for advantaged students: 5 charts

The remaining 60% of children taught in this way are highly vulnerable to falling behind as readers. And the proportion of vulnerability increases with the level of disadvantage.

No teacher of children in their first year of school can reliably identify, in the first term, which children will struggle with reading and which will get there seamlessly. To wait until a year (or more) has passed and then try to back-fill and close this gap shows a poor understanding of the importance of making every day count in children’s early learning.

We should be teaching 95% of children to read successfully, so need to be using high-impact teaching approaches from the outset, with all children.

If not explicit and systematic phonics instruction, what is the teacher’s time being spent on? Teaching words from flash cards for children to learn as wholes without any analysis of what is happening within the word? Or promoting inefficient strategies (ironically those used by weak readers) such as trying to work out what “kind” of word might work?

Even more bizarrely (and unhelpfully), children might be encouraged to “get their mouths ready” to read an unfamiliar word. It is not a child’s mouth that needs to be ready for learning to read, but her brain.

We must provide and promote reading instruction approaches that ensure the overwhelming majorly of children learn to read in the early years of school, regardless of their starting point.

Read the accompanying article on the the whole language approach to teaching reading here.

– ref. Why every child needs explicit phonics instruction to learn to read – http://theconversation.com/why-every-child-needs-explicit-phonics-instruction-to-learn-to-read-125065

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thijs Dhollander, Post-doctoral neuroscientist, Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health

While looking at the MRI brain scan of a 29-year-old woman that had been taken for a different study, researchers in Israel recently stumbled upon a scientific mystery. The woman appears to have no olfactory bulbs.

People like me and most of you have two of these bulbs: they sit right above your nasal cavities, snuggled up against the bottom of your brain. They’re small but important little processing boxes: the nerves in your nose that pick up scents around you feed into these bulbs.

The far end of each bulb has a “cable” sticking out (the olfactory tract) that sends processed information deeper into the almighty computer of the brain. The brain then makes further sense of things.

All of these delicate components work together, granting you the sense of smell! Some brains do have damaged olfactory bulbs or none at all: this is sometimes seen in people with anosmia, an inability to smell.

But back to our 29-year-old woman who appears to lack olfactory bulbs. It turns out her sense of smell is perfectly fine. So what’s going on here?

The researchers – a team led by Professor Noam Sobel from the Department of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science – asked me (all the way across the world at the Florey Institute in Australia!) to help them study the mystery, and the results have just been published in the journal Neuron.

Read more: Curious Kids: How do we smell?

Discovering new mysteries

As a scientist, the second best thing is to solve great mysteries. But the absolute best experience is to discover new mysteries. Solving a mystery is an achievement; discovering a new mystery is the start of an adventure.

I still remember vividly when Tali Weiss and Timna Soroka, the lead authors of the work about the missing olfactory bulbs, approached me at a scientific conference in Paris, and told me about their odd finding. It took me at least half an hour to understand what they were exactly describing, because I’m an engineer, not a neurobiologist.

But it turned out an engineer like me was just what they needed: I’m an expert who invents new ways to analyse certain types of MRI brain scans. Though I work in neuroscience, I have a background in computer science, not biology or medicine. This is multidisciplinary science in action.

When they told me about missing olfactory bulbs, I first couldn’t believe it. To me, it sounded like they were saying the wiring from the nose to the brain was “cut”. But then they explained me what’s currently thought to be the function of the olfactory bulb, and that their images showed these little processing boxes were apparently “missing” along the cable from nose to brain. Aha! Ok, still weird though. And so I got dragged into this mystery.

As the 29-year-old woman was also left-handed, they started scanning other left-handed and similarly aged women. It only took nine such scans to discover another person without apparent olfactory bulbs, but a good sense of smell. The plot thickens!

Among the experiments, a massive open data set of very high quality was also checked: of 1,113 people (606 women), three others were found without apparent olfactory bulbs, but with the sense of smell. None were men. One was left-handed.

So what did we learn? Well, likely that we need to go back to the drawing board regarding our understanding of the sense of smell, and the role of the olfactory bulb in it.

But we’re also asking questions about the extent to which we can see and identify things on some of these images. This is the kind of research that provides us many more new questions than answers. Exciting!

Read more: Mapping the brain: scientists define 180 distinct regions, but what now?

Fancy brain images

As I said earlier, I’m an engineer. Projects like these only succeed when scientists collaborate across disciplines, combining all their individual skills towards a joint effort. I’ve helped the other researchers in this work to process and understand one of the kinds of data they collected, diffusion MRI data, using new methods I developed over here in Australia.

We also use these methods to help plan brain tumour surgeries, and they allow for some pretty impressive visualisations of the brain’s internal wiring!

– ref. Some women seem to lack a key brain structure for smell — but their sense of smell is fine – http://theconversation.com/some-women-seem-to-lack-a-key-brain-structure-for-smell-but-their-sense-of-smell-is-fine-126496

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison Holland, Senior Lecturer in Australian History, Macquarie University

When the minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, recently announced a co-design process for creating an Indigenous “voice to government”, it was characterised as a shift in rhetoric.

Yet, on closer inspection, it was less a shift than a consolidation of the Liberal Party’s rhetoric on Indigenous affairs over the past two years.

In fact, Morrison was talking about a co-design model to improve local and regional Indigenous decision-making and options for constitutional recognition in the lead-up to the federal election this year. His government has also emphasised collaborating with Indigenous people to improve Closing the Gap targets.

Given the 15-year absence of such collaboration since the disbanding of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), Morrison’s talk of “empowering partnerships” has been welcomed in some quarters. He has also used the language of accountability.

However, there are two issues here: Morrison has initiated significant changes in Indigenous affairs without consultation with Indigenous groups, and, as this suggests, there is a serious gap between rhetoric and practice.

Read more: Ken Wyatt’s proposed ‘voice to government’ marks another failure to hear Indigenous voices

A new approach to Indigenous policy-making

When Wyatt ruled out an enshrined Indigenous advisory body in the constitution, disappointed Indigenous leaders accused the government of “wheeling back” the consultative process after a decade-long public process.

Indigenous Labor Senator Pat Dodson suggested that, for things to change, Morrison needed an epiphany.

According to the Liberal Party, he has had one. In fact, the Morrison government claims to have turned a new page when it comes to Indigenous affairs.

Morrison unveiled this new approach in his 2019 Closing the Gap report. Rejecting a top-down model as unworkable, he said the government would rely on partnerships to drive sustainable, systemic change.

Read more: The government is committed to an Indigenous voice. We should give it a chance to work

To this end, he has been building an infrastructure of his own. Last December, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) announced a new partnership with a group of 40 Indigenous representative bodies called the Coalition of Peaks to refresh the Closing the Gap process.

This was hailed as a historic development, despite the fact there’s been a long history of inter-governmental partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

In addition, within a month of the Coalition’s election victory this year, Morrison established the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Since then, $5.2 billion in funding allocated for the controversial Indigenous Advancement Strategy has been transferred to the new agency.

The former vice-chief of the defence forces, Vice Admiral Ray Griggs, a non-Indigenous Australian, also came out of retirement to head it. With a team of 1,200, he is now responsible for coordinating Indigenous policy development, advising Morrison and Wyatt on the priorities of Indigenous people and promoting reconciliation.

Around the same time, the former Indigenous peak body, the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, was left to crumble due to lack of government funding.

Top-down and selective

Is this systemic change? Though the government emphasises partnerships, accountability and evidence-based policies, Morrison is actually taking a selective and top-down approach. He is also ignoring key Indigenous advice and evidence.

For instance, Morrison has sidelined the work and achievements of the Referendum Council by mischaracterising its call for a Voice to Parliament as a “third chamber”.

His party has also used the rhetoric of failure in describing the the Uluru Statement – the council’s extensive, deliberative response to the question of constitutional recognition.

In addition, instead of empowering Indigenous communities, he and Wyatt are dividing them. Wyatt has said, for instance, he is interested in hearing from all Indigenous people on the co-design process toward an Indigenous voice, not just the leaders, or “influencers”.

At the same time, he has handpicked a senior advisory group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous members to lead the co-design effort – an apparent contradiction of this “bottom-up” approach.

Many Indigenous communities have also already developed models for engaging with state governments. Some worry these efforts could now be overtaken by Wyatt’s co-design process. It was hardly surprising that one Indigenous leader in NSW said:

Given the yards we’ve made and the buy-in we’ve got in the communities, it would be awesome if the Commonwealth just said, ‘You know what? It’s already there, we’re just going to come in and build on that’.

Evidence points to failures of government policies

The Morrison government also says it is committed to acknowledging the historical experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and taking an evidence-based approach to Indigenous policy-making.

But there is ample historical evidence showing that governmental policies have been a leading cause of Indigenous disadvantage, poor health and disempowerment.

Read more: A new inquiry into Indigenous policy must address the root causes of failure

If Morrison is serious about addressing the extremely high rates of Indigenous suicide, he would know that disempowerment, lack of self-esteem and identity, loss of community control and even loss of their own leaders are key drivers of this crisis.

If he took the high rates of Indigenous domestic violence seriously, his government would not have defunded shelters for victims in the Northern Territory.

He would also know what the Lowitja Institute advised to the Closing the Gap steering committee this year – that the principle of self-determination must apply in all Indigenous policy.

In contrast to the noisy reverberations of the Uluru Statement, Morrison has been making quiet changes in the Indigenous policy landscape. And Wyatt is travelling a well-mapped road with a predetermined destination.

The volumes of data on Closing the Gap targets obscure the important fact that a government-led approach does not constitute a new page in Indigenous affairs.

Indigenous people know what drives success in Indigenous policy-making – not a co-design process with governments, but the ability to design and implement their own solutions. Indigenous people must lead and governments must support.

– ref. The government’s ‘new page’ on Indigenous policy is actually just more of the same – http://theconversation.com/the-governments-new-page-on-indigenous-policy-is-actually-just-more-of-the-same-126179

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joshua Zadro, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Sydney

Patients might not be getting the best advice about which treatments do or don’t work, according to our study published today. We found professional societies are more likely to call out other health professionals for providing low-value treatments rather than look in their own backyard.

Our study in BMC Health Services Research looked into recommendations under the global Choosing Wisely public health campaign. We found professional societies are reluctant to publish recommendations against treatments and procedures that generate income for their members.

But they are much more comfortable at recommending against treatments that generate income for members of other professional societies.

Read more: Less is the new more: choosing medical tests and treatments wisely

How does the Choosing Wisely campaign work?

Choosing Wisely aims to reduce the use of medical tests, treatments and procedures that provide little-to-no benefit, or in some cases can harm.

It then recommends patients question their doctors about whether these so-called low-value tests, treatments or procedures are necessary.

To take part in the Choosing Wisely campaign, professional societies publish recommendations relevant to their members.

For example, a surgical society could list a surgical procedure of questionable effectiveness. A physiotherapy society could also list a poorly justified physiotherapy treatment. This ensures recommendations raise awareness of low-value care among the practitioners most likely to provide this care.

However, an ongoing concern is whether professional societies focus on low-value care provided by their members or whether they tend to make recommendations for care provided by others, outside their own society.

Many low-value tests, treatments and procedures also generate substantial income for the practitioner who provides them. So societies might be reluctant to recommend against or “call out” these examples of low-value care because of fear of affecting their members’ bottom line.

What did we do?

To investigate these concerns, we evaluated all Choosing Wisely recommendations worldwide since the campaign began in 2012.

We reviewed 1,293 recommendations from eight countries, including Australia, to investigate the proportion of recommendations that target income-generating treatments. We also investigated whether recommendations on income-generating treatments were more likely to come from societies involved, or not involved, in providing this care.

Read more: Needless treatments: spinal fusion surgery for lower back pain is costly and there’s little evidence it’ll work

Treatments or procedures that attract a fee-for-service and are performed outside a routine encounter with a practitioner were considered income-generating for the practitioner performing the treatment. Examples included arthroscopic surgery of the knee and shoulder, cesarean section, removing a breast lump and radiotherapy.

We then examined each recommendation and determined whether the society making the recommendation was targeting a treatment routinely provided by members of their society or members of another society.

There were over 230 professional societies with Choosing Wisely recommendations across medicine, surgery, diagnostic testing and allied health. Examples of professional societies from Australia included the: Royal Australian College of General Practitioners; Royal Australasian College of Surgeons; Australian Physiotherapy Association; and Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia.

Here’s what we found

Overall, we found only 20% of Choosing Wisely recommendations target income-generating treatments. But more importantly, of these recommendations, most target treatments provided by practitioners that are not members of the society making the recommendation.

For example, the Australian Rheumatology Association recommends against arthroscopy for knee osteoarthritis, a surgical intervention that rheumatologists don’t perform (this is generally carried out by orthopaedic surgeons):

Do not perform arthroscopy with lavage and/or debridement or partial meniscectomy for patients with symptomatic osteoarthritis of the knee and/or degenerate meniscal tear.

Meanwhile, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, whose members perform arthroscopy, doesn’t recommend against the procedure. Instead, it points the finger at clinicians who routinely provide insoles:

Don’t use lateral wedge insoles to treat patients with symptomatic medial compartment osteoarthritis of the knee.

Why does it matter?

Choosing Wisely aims to reduce waste in health care. But when societies mainly look for waste in fields other than their own, their recommendations are likely to have less impact.

To illustrate this, eight societies of orthopaedic surgeons have collectively published 48 Choosing Wisely recommendations. But only nine of these recommendations target low-value surgery routinely performed by orthopaedic surgeons. Most of these are from the Netherlands Orthopaedic Association (five out of nine recommendations).

Read more: Antibiotics for colds, x-rays for bronchitis, internal exams with pap tests – the latest list of tests to question

By shying away from publishing recommendations that target ineffective and expensive interventions performed by their own members, professional societies are not acting in line with the spirit of the campaign.

Choosing Wisely could have a large impact on redirecting health-care spending from low-value care to recommended care, thereby improving the lives of millions. But for the campaign to realise its potential, ensuring future recommendations focus on the care provided by members of the society making the recommendation is a good place to start.

Dr John Farey, a surgical registrar affiliated with the Institute for Musculoskeletal Health and the Sydney Local Health District, co-authored this article.

– ref. Dodgy treatment: it’s not us, it’s the other lot, say the experts. So who do we believe? – http://theconversation.com/dodgy-treatment-its-not-us-its-the-other-lot-say-the-experts-so-who-do-we-believe-124638

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Abou-Nemeh, Lecturer in Early Modern History, Victoria University of Wellington

This week New Zealand’s parliamentarians will vote on the third reading of the End of Life Choice Bill.

Much public discussion on the merits of euthanasia has centred around the role of the medical practitioner as healer. Some doctors and conscientious objectors worry that physician-assisted suicide will alter the relationship between doctors and their patients. They argue it is unethical, often invoking the Hippocratic oath.

The oldest code of medical ethics, the oath dates to around the fourth century BC and is still sworn by doctors today. It specifically forbids physicians from administering lethal drugs, among its other precepts.

Some critics of the bill present religious and moral objections against euthanasia, while proponents have focused on the trauma and pain of terminally ill patients and their families. All these arguments have a long history.

Read more: In places where it’s legal, how many people are ending their lives using euthanasia?

The art of dying well

Like the Hippocratic oath, euthanasia (in its literal meaning of “good death” in ancient Greek) first appeared around the fourth and third century BC. Ancient Roman emperors, at death’s door, were known to consume wine, drugs and other palliatives to ease their dying. Good emperors were believed to deserve a dignified death, and often staged them.

In pre-modern Europe, experiencing a good death and intentionally shortening the agony of dying were separate matters. From 1400 on, there was a thriving trade in advice books on the art of dying. These instructed readers on how to prepare their souls for a “good death” and the Christian afterlife.

Prayers, rituals and information about what to expect offered practical guidance for attaining salvation. Christian theologians saw euthanasia as “a blessed and peaceful death of the faithful”.

Whether and how people sought to hasten or ameliorate death is less clear. Scholars only began considering the doctor’s role in enabling euthanasia in the late 16th century.

Early ideas about assisted dying

In 1605, English lawyer, statesman and natural philosopher Francis Bacon wrote that the physician’s office extends to matters of health as well as dying. In his words, a physician ought “not only to restore health, but to mitigate dolours, and torments of Diseases”. If there was no hope of the patient’s recovery, everything should be done “to make a fair and easie passage out of life”.

Bacon called this “fair and easie passage” euthanasia. Importantly, he distinguished between “outward” euthanasia and the soul’s peaceful transition to the afterlife. While the latter remained the purview of the spiritual realm, Bacon placed the former within medicine’s province.

Until recently, historians believed active euthanasia did not exist in pre-modern Europe, but historian of medicine Michael Stolberg has challenged this notion.

A physician in 1660s Antwerp, Michiel Boudewijns, wondered whether doctors could help their terminal patients die. While moved by patients in agony, Boudewijns urged Christian doctors to observe the fifth commandment and the Hippocratic rule of “do no harm”. He cautioned his colleagues against undertaking risky procedures and acting on compassion to expedite death in hopeless cases.

Read more: How hypothetical designs can help us think through our conversations about euthanasia

A matter of trust

Physicians also feared patients would lose trust in them if they knew they shortened dying patients’ lives. It was not until the late 17th century that facilitating dying sparked public debate among scholars. In 1678, Caspar Questel, a Silesian lawyer active in Saxony, wrote about assisted dying in the homes of ordinary people.

Methods to accelerate dying ranged from acts of faith and folklore to illegal actions. Questel had discovered that family members, nurses, nuns and other carers removed the pillow from under the head of the dying person. It was a widespread custom that was believed to quicken death.

Other forms of assistance included opening a window so the soul of the dying person would be encouraged to leave the body and meet God, placing lit candles around the gravely sick and placing the dying on the ground or putting them outdoors. More fatal actions involved suffocating the dying with a pillow or cutting their veins. Exercising empathy for the suffering of the dying was weighed against the risk of being charged for their premature deaths.

In present-day New Zealand, if this week’s vote is in favour of euthanasia, the option for assisted dying will still need to be ratified in a referendum next year.

Clearly, cultural customs, prevailing medical ethics and beliefs about death and the afterlife have evolved over time. Today discussions about euthanasia involve a wider range of participants than in pre-modern Europe. The distance between learned professionals and everyone else has narrowed. Civil rights, legal precedents and protections have given us a new language and ethics through which to understand fraught issues concerning our health, body and death.

– ref. As NZ votes on euthanasia bill, here is a historical perspective on a ‘good death’ – http://theconversation.com/as-nz-votes-on-euthanasia-bill-here-is-a-historical-perspective-on-a-good-death-126580

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cris Brack, Associate Professor, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University

Trees die. You don’t have to like it, but they do. And this comes as a surprise to some. A senior public servant once told one of us (Brack): “Trees don’t die; people kill them.”

Of course sometimes we kill trees, especially in urban areas where trees are regularly removed for reasons of safety or urban development.

Read more: Our cities need more trees, but that means being prepared to cut some down

But more concerning than the death of a tree is how we waste them afterwards. In municipalities around the world, the trees are chipped into mulch. Not just the leaves and skinny branches and bark, but the whole tree.

It’s the least valuable, indeed least respectful, thing you can do with a tree.

In contrast, the wood can be rescued and used to craft furniture and other unique objects that honour the trees and their legacy of timber.

For those more poetically inclined, trees are literally made of our breath. By chipping them, we are wasting the breath of our past and making it harder to breathe in the future.

Read more: Trees are made of human breath

Chipping trees means releasing carbon to the atmosphere as the mulch breaks down. It’s also a waste of high-quality timbers such as oak, ash, elm and cedar, which, ironically, Australia imports by the shipload.

When made into furniture, for example, the tree is transformed, the carbon stays bound and we have something both functional and beautiful.

Urban forests can keep on giving

Salvaging quality timber is such an obvious win-win, you’d think everyone would do it. Sadly, there are many obstacles, including the difficulties of coordinating multiple public and private stakeholders and agencies.

To better understand the challenges and opportunities for urban timber rescue in Australia, we hosted a symposium at Australian National University in September 2019. Forestry researchers, public officials, craftspeople, teachers, students, conservation activists and city parks employees attended. They identified key values and concerns critical to reclaiming and distributing urban timber.

The symposium included a demonstration of how a portable (Lucas) mill could be quickly set up near a tree to cut it into useful timber. Operators can minimise waste by using bespoke cutting patterns to get the most valuable timber from each tree.

Participants from California described the Sacramento Tree Foundation’s Urban Wood Rescue program. Arborists, residents and the city work together to intercept logs from the waste stream. The timber is then made available to the public.

This program benefits from public trust that stems from decades of active tree planting across the city and genuine concern for the health of the urban forest. Recognising that the recovered wood is too good to waste is a natural extension of residents’ respect for their living trees.

Craftspeople and teachers from Canberra and other Australian cities discussed how providing quality timber to school students supports their love of making and develops their skills. One participant spoke of high school students being thrilled to work with such beautiful timber. They normally make do with cheap construction pine or broken-down pallets.

Rescuing and transforming the timber can bring people together to teach, learn and create. The object then captures not just carbon but a sense of the history of the tree and the place where it lived.

This is what the Witness Tree Project in Canberra, spearheaded by Eriksmoen, set out to do. Wood was rescued from just six of hundreds of trees scheduled for removal. The timber was distributed to six local woodworking artisans and furniture makers.

Their task was to creatively reconstruct a narrative of each tree and its neighbourhood. They transformed the trees into unique objects that delivered anecdotes and collective memories of local history and culture, culminating in a public exhibition.

Katalin Sallai created the Witness Tree Bench of Kingston from a Himalayan cedar. The circular planter, containing a sapling of the same species, is the diameter of this tree when it was felled in 2013. The unfurling spiral arc of the bench seat describes the potential diameter of Himalayan cedar in ideal natural conditions.

Many references to Kingston, one of Canberra’s oldest suburbs, are embedded and engraved in the surface, including coins commemorating the queen’s 1954 visit. The bench is both an educational tool, describing the differences between a city tree and a rural tree, and a celebration of its own tree’s life and provenance as a witness to local history.

Read more: Loving emails show there’s more to trees than ecosystem services

The recent symposium was also told of the positive effects of having living trees in our surroundings, including improved mental health, reductions in crime and better air quality. But this isn’t lost when the trees die. Recent research has shown wooden furniture and fittings in offices or homes can benefit mental health and reduce stress and sick days.

Seeing urban trees given a second life can also help ease eco-anxiety. Every tree removal can add to the sense of helplessness, but putting those trees to good use may create feelings of empowerment.

Four steps you can take

So don’t despair or whine when a tree is removed. Instead, make sure the wood isn’t squandered. Otherwise you are wasting your breath – twice!

Here’s what you can do:

• raise awareness: tell people trees do die naturally, and city trees have shorter lives than their rural kin

• demand action: tell your local representative that community trees are squandered on woodchips

• buy local: buy products made from locally salvaged wood, not imported timber

• get radical: if you’re the protesting type, chain yourself to a log to stop it being chipped.

Read more: Where the old things are: Australia’s most ancient trees

– ref. When a tree dies, don’t waste your breath. Rescue the wood to honour its memory – http://theconversation.com/when-a-tree-dies-dont-waste-your-breath-rescue-the-wood-to-honour-its-memory-125137

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elaine Stratford, Professor, University of Tasmania

In this series, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.

We are all touched by relationships with animals — as domestic and working companions, wild inspirations, threats, or pests.

Some of us may know about the enduring worth of organisations such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Fewer of us may know about the 19th century foundations for animal advocacy among ordinary women beginning, more often, to find their voice in the public sphere.

The life of Frances Deborah Levvy (14 November 1831–29 November 1924) is worth revisiting because her ethical, political, and journalistic contributions speak to our current concerns for the more-than-human world.

Read more: Hidden women of history: Flos Greig, Australia’s first female lawyer and early innovator

A mainstay of the New South Wales’ branch of the Women’s Society for the Protection of Animals, Frances, with her sister Emma Clarke, founded Australia’s first Bands of Mercy. Membership of the Bands required pledging on entry:

I promise to protect all animals from ill-treatment with all my power. When I am compelled to take the life of any creature, I will spare all needless pain.

The Bands of Mercy were based on the Bands of Hope, formed in the United Kingdom to support the temperance movement and, like them, were formal voluntary organisations in communities. Founded in 1875, they helped young people learn about and model the humane treatment of animals, coming under the RSPCA from 1882, the same year they were introduced into the United States. It was Levvy who then introduced Bands of Mercy in Australia in the mid-1880s, growing the membership from 15 to over 20,000 people over her life.

Born in Penrith, Frances was one of four children of Barnett and Sarah Levey, the former a watch-maker and theatre director, both from London. When Levey died in 1837, his widow converted from Judaism to Christianity, which appears to have shaped Frances’s moral and religious outlook. On their mother’s death Frances and her sister Emma adopted the surname Levvy. After moving to Newtown in Sydney in 1874 with her sister, Frances later went to Waverley where she lived – single and focused on her mission – until her death in 1924.

Clues to what motivated Levvy’s lifelong dedication to the humane movement are found in The Daily Telegraph of Tuesday 30 January 1906. There, the reporter describes Levvy in ways that map onto ideas emergent at the time that women’s apparently natural propensity to nurture in the private sphere could spill into the public arena and contribute to social progress.

Levvy is painted as having:

a gentle, persuasive manner … intensely in earnest in her whole-hearted and disinterested wish to save our dumb [sic] friends from ill-treatment … the right woman in the right place. It is so eminently a woman’s work which she has undertaken, to inculcate gentleness and kindness in the hearts of the children of our city …

When asked by the reporter if she thought animals have souls, Levvy replied:

It seems to me that it is not at all improbable. There is an evident wish to believe it.

‘Loving friend of dumb animals’

Over several decades, Levvy effectively harnessed the printed word’s power to influence how animals were treated. She developed and edited a monthly periodical, The Band of Mercy and Humane Journal (1887–1923), which inspired offshoots such as The Band of Mercy Advocate (1887–1891).

Levvy was equally adept at building community networks, and coalitions and defying moral strictures regarding the public conduct expected of “ladies”. As one report on her work (replete with deeply gendered and class-based assumptions) noted:

The draymen and vanmen at the wharves and the drivers at the cab stands are regularly visited by this loving friend of dumb animals, from whom they receive copies of the Band of Mercy journal. This paves the way for a little general conversation on the subject of kindness to animals, and then some particular instance is … [introduced]; a horse has gone lame or has a sore shoulder, which should be dressed with a decoction of tannin — or the flies are stinging and worrying, and it is suggested that … pennyroyal added to a pint of olive oil should be passed lightly over the horses to secure their immunity from this pest.

It has been suggested that Levvy’s “greatest capacity was for writing” and my own research shows that an astute use of the periodical press ensured her work was known and supported. The editors of Boston’s The Woman’s Journal, wrote glowingly of her work in 1888, noting her journal provided “a place of record for the good deeds done”. In 1906, it described the journal as having “the distinction of being the first newspaper of the kind in Australia”.

The power of the press is worth stressing here, because it underpinned growing freedoms of speech and capacities to challenge the status quo that Levvy tapped into. Debates in the press around animal protection touched on fashion (and its relationship to prescriptive forms of femininity and consumerism) and sport (with its association with betting).

Seeing young people as agents of change

In her writing and activism, Levvy often turned to children and, through them, to women — whose power she thought should extend from private to public spheres.

The 1906 report in The Daily Telegraph also describes how she gave lessons on animal protection at schools. She educated boys about the most humane method of transit of stock by rail, or training a colt to harness and saddle. And she set the following essay topics for mixed sex, upper level classes:

Does civilisation in any way depend on possession of animals? Give reasons, state requirements, and value of poultry-keeping, incubator, food, incidental diseases. Is it suitable work for women and girls? Bee-keeping: Requirements and value. Hives, honey-producing flowers, food in winter, etc. Is it suitable work for women and girls? Is the exhibition of wild animals in travelling menageries consistent with humanity? Give your reasons.

Levvy, herself, reflected in 1906 (in relation to her work on equine welfare):

The difference between now and twenty years ago … is most marked. It is hardly ever now that one sees a sore-backed, lame, miserable-looking horse in the streets. Look at the cab horses and cart horses, what fine, well-kept animals they are.

After Levvy’s death on 24 November 1924, the former NSW Minister for Education, Joseph Carruthers, paid tribute to her and announced a school essay competition in her name. Internationally, the Bands of Mercy began to lose momentum between the world wars, and languished after 1945. Although Peter Chen has provided a detailed time-line of developments in animal welfare in Australia, he does not record a date for when they ceased here.

Levvy was of her time. She was, for example, deeply immersed in the progressive, democratising, and evangelical impulses that marked the 19th century.

But she was, I think, also ahead of her time, being among those women who understood and used the power of the press for socially transformative ends, and who recognised that young people are not citizens in waiting but active and influential agents for change.

At a time when the treatment of both animals and children was often questionable, and often based on narrow ideas of them as property, her actions and ideas were quietly radical and highly effective.

– ref. Hidden women of history: Frances Levvy, Australia’s quietly radical early animal rights campaigner – http://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-frances-levvy-australias-quietly-radical-early-animal-rights-campaigner-125940