Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jagannath Adhikari, Sessional Lecturer, UNSW

Reducing emissions from deforestation and farming is an urgent global priority if we want to control climate change. However, like many climate change problems, the solution is complicated. Cutting down forests to plant edible crops feeds some of the world’s hungriest people.

Read more: UN climate change report: land clearing and farming contribute a third of the world’s greenhouse gases

More than 820 million people suffer from hunger, and about 2 billion people face moderate food insecurity – meaning they do not always know when their next meal will come.

After a decade of slow decline, climate change is driving this number up again, particularly in Africa and Asia, where competition over land for both farming and forest conservation is acute.

But villagers in the Himalayas are turning to a traditional practice that can slow land clearing and feed people: growing and collecting food from the forests.

Food in the forest

My research in the Himalayan region, where high population density means farmland is very scarce, investigated how people used their forests as a food source.

An “edible forest” is one in which people have planted trees and crops that can produce food in the forest, as well as harvesting what naturally grows. In fact, this is a traditional practice in the Himalayan region. A farmer I interviewed in Siding village, at the base of Mardi Himal – one of the peaks in Annapurna Himalayan range – told me:

I go to [the] forest when food is scarce at home. I collect vegetables, fruits, nuts, medicinal herbs, spices, roots and tubers. Sometimes I also collect wild honey, bamboo shoots and mushroom, which is consumed at home and also sold in the market. Occasionally, we also get wild meat.

Traditionally, these villagers see forest and farms as an extension of each other rather than distinct categories, and manage them so they support each other.

Generally, people plant trees useful for households – for their wood, for example, or fruit – in the forest close to the villages, and preserve those grown naturally.

The community itself protects the forest, in the past even pooling grains and cash to hire a guard if needed.

This forest food is supplementary, becoming more important in scarce times and as a buffer during famine. Taking wood for fuel or timber is strictly regulated, but there are no restrictions on gathering food, to the great benefit of the poorest.

Collecting food is mainly the work of women, who gather a few things whenever they go into the forest for firewood or animal fodder. They have a great deal of knowledge about edible plants. Men take part by hunting for honey and wild animals. Children, too, go to the forest in their free time to gather berries and tubers.

Sometimes villagers collect these foods to sell in nearby markets as a seasonal source of cash.

Modern bureaucracy

The centralised forest management and curtailment of traditional rights of the communities that came with modern forest bureaucracy in the Himalayan region distanced people from the forest. This also led to rapid deforestation between the mid-1960s to 1980s.

This trend was reversed in the early 1990s, when community rights came to the forefront and communally managed forestry gained a strong foothold. This helped reduce poverty. Yet it is still hard for locals to grow food in the forests as they once did. One farmer told me,

We do not destroy forest when collecting these things, but conservation regulation is making this collection difficult.

We need power to move from centralised governments to local stewardship and local knowledge. Government oversight would still be required to protect the local interests, but any new mechanism needs to be developed in consultation with local communities. Research institutions could play a role in finding better ways to meet the interest of local communities when they manage their forest.

A new category of land use

Edible forests are a departure from standard schemes to reduce emissions from deforestation and land degradation, in which developed countries pay less developed countries to preserve or replant their forests.

Read more: Two years after the earthquake, why has Nepal failed to recover?

If people are actively planting and harvesting in a forest, it may not qualify as protected or conserved land. Conversely, if a local community depends on their forest for food, they may hesitate to register for a formal scheme, for fear they will lose a valuable resource.

If reforestation schemes can be expanded to take into account planting that doesn’t compromise tree coverage, we can encourage rapid growth of edible forests and speed up our response to climate change. It will help meet goals like food security, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, and reducing desertification and land degradation that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recommended for sustainable land management in the light of climate change.

Climate migration

Climate change and food insecurity are the main drivers of migration away from rural areas in developing countries, which brings its own challenges for sustainable land management.

Wages sent home by those who move away is a huge part of food security and reducing poverty for many people. In 2018 about US$530 billion was transferred to low- and middle-income countries between family members, compared with US$162 billion in development aid.

Read more: Want to beat climate change? Protect our natural forests

This flow of money means families with marginal land – like farmland on hill slopes in Nepal’s case – can afford to slowly convert it to plantations or forests. Migration and remittances – which contribute some 28% of Nepal’s gross domestic product – helps increase forest coverage, especially in marginal lands vulnerable to erosion and landslides.

There is an opportunity to increase planting in these lands, which have been abandoned for farming. If official reforestation policies can acknowledge and support edible forests, we could see the Himalayan region lead the pack on a new way of thinking about forests and food.

– ref. ‘Edible forests’ can fight land clearing and world hunger at the same time – http://theconversation.com/edible-forests-can-fight-land-clearing-and-world-hunger-at-the-same-time-122540

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Margaret Kristin Merga, Senior Lecturer in Education, Edith Cowan University

Reading aloud can help young children learn about new words and how to sound them. There’s great value too in providing opportunities for children to enjoy regular silent reading, which is sustained reading of materials they select for pleasure.

But not all schools consistently offer this opportunity for all of their students. We regularly hear from teachers and teacher librarians who are concerned about the state of silent reading in schools.

Read more: Read aloud to your children to boost their vocabulary

They’re worried students don’t have enough opportunity to enjoy sustained reading in school. This is important, as many children do not read at home.

For some young people, silent reading at school is the only reading for pleasure they experience.

Silent reading silenced

Research suggests silent reading opportunities at school are often cancelled and may dwindle as students move through the years of schooling.

Where silent reading opportunities still exist, we’re often told that the way it is being implemented is not reflective of best practice. This can make the experience less useful for students and even unpleasant.

Yet regular reading can improve a student’s reading achievement. Reading books, and fiction books in particular, can improve their reading and literacy skills.

Opportunity matters too, as the amount we read determines the benefits we get from reading. Regular reading can help with other subjects, such as maths.

So, what should silent reading look like?

Here are ten important things we need to do to make the most of silent reading in our schools.

1. Enjoyment is the focus

Enjoyment of reading is associated with both reading achievement and regular reading.

If we want young people to choose to read more to experience the benefits of reading, then silent reading needs to be about pleasure and not just testing.

2. Students choose the books

Young people should not be prevented from choosing popular or high-interest books that are deemed too challenging. Books that are a bit too hard could motivate students to higher levels of achievement.

Students have reported enjoying and even being inspired by reading books that were challenging for them, such as J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings.

Silent reading of text books or required course materials should not be confused with silent reading for pleasure.

3. The space is right

Like adults, children may struggle to read in a noisy or uncomfortable space.

Schools need to provide space that is comfortable for students to enjoy their silent reading.

4. Opportunities to chat (before or after)

Discussion about books can give students recommendations about other books and even enhance reading comprehension.

But silent reading should be silent so all students can focus on reading.

5. Inspired by keen readers

If students see their teachers and teacher librarians as keen readers this can play a powerful role in encouraging avid and sustained reading.

School principals can also be powerful reading models, with their support of silent reading shaping school culture.

6. Students have access to a library

Even when schools have libraries the research shows students may be given less access to them during class time as they move through the years of schooling.

Not all students are given class time to select reading materials from the library.

7. It happens often

This is particularly important for struggling readers who may find it hard to remember what they are reading if opportunities for silent reading are infrequent.

These students may also find it difficult to get absorbed in a book if time to read is too brief.

8. Paper books are available

Reading comprehension is typically stronger when reading on paper rather than a screen.

Screen-based book reading is not preferred by most young people, and can be associated with infrequent reading. Students can find reading on devices distracting.

9. There is a school library and a teacher librarian

Teacher librarians can be particularly important in engaging struggling readers beyond the early years of schooling. They may find it hard to find a book that interests them but which is also not too hard to read.

Librarians are also good at matching students with books based on movies they like, or computer games they enjoy.

10. We need to make the school culture a reading culture

Reading engagement is typically neglected in plans to foster reading achievement in Australian schools.

Practices such as silent reading should feature in the literacy planning documents of all schools.

Allowing students to read for pleasure at school is a big step toward turning our school cultures into reading cultures. Students need opportunities to read, as regular reading can both build and sustain literacy skills.

Read more: There’s a reason your child wants to read the same book over and over again

Unfortunately, literacy skills can begin to slide if reading is not maintained.

We need people to continue to read beyond the point of learning to read independently, though research suggests this message may not be received by all young people.

Where children do understand reading is important, they may be nearly twice as likely to read every day. So silent reading is important enough to be a regular part of our school day.

This article was co-authored by Claire Gibson, a librarian who’s studying a master in education by research at Edith Cowan University.

– ref. 10 ways to get the most out of silent reading in schools – http://theconversation.com/10-ways-to-get-the-most-out-of-silent-reading-in-schools-123531

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lili Pâquet, Lecturer in Writing, University of New England

In Dervla McTiernan’s book, The Scholar, published earlier this year, women are consistently used as the “fall guys” for men with high aspirations. Two young women are killed when they uncover fraud. Another female colleague is then framed for the murders.

Before writing crime fiction, McTiernan worked as a lawyer for 12 years, for international companies like the one in The Scholar. Her background lends her book authority, even though it’s fiction.

McTiernan joins a batch of crime writing women bringing professional clout to their books. Others are Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, Marcia Clark, Alafair Burke, Anne Holt, and Lisa Scottoline. This list is a tiny fraction of the trailblazing authors.

Crimes close to home

Last week, Elizabeth Farrelly wrote that “crime fiction is the morality drama of our time” that can “heighten and dissect the battle of good against evil enacted daily in our living rooms, cities and streets”. She compared crime books about violence against women with Australia’s deplorable record on domestic violence and rape.

In books written by ex-justice professionals, we are asked to examine our cultural and moral compasses. These authors don’t just write about serial killers – who are thankfully more common in the pages of crime books than in real life – they more often focus on murders by spouses, family members or colleagues of the victim. Some push for changes to how rape trials are prosecuted. They focus on the justice system problems that women face, as victims and as professionals.

The stories also ask us to question how we perceive professional women. These authors’ characters, who often have much in common with their creators, face a barrage of harassment on the job. Lisa Scottoline’s fictional all-women law firm is consistently targeted by abusive prank callers. In her latest book, Feared, the firm is sued for “reverse” sexual discrimination.

What’s the appeal?

Australians are avid readers of crime fiction. In a 2017 study, 48.5% of respondents read crime fiction, making it the most popular genre for enjoyment.

While researching my book on the topic, I had the opportunity to read Dorothy Uhnak’s fan letters, held at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. Readers (many of whom were prison inmates) repeatedly told Uhnak that her books touched on inequalities in the justice system that rang true for them, and reading her work was therapeutic.

Cosy vs hardboiled

Female crime writers have historically been pigeonholed as writing “cosy crime” novels as opposed to more graphic masculine representations of “hardboiled” detectives.

We are used to reading about women as amateurs, from Agatha Christie’s spinster sleuth, Miss Marple, to Janet Evanovich’s bumbling and untrained bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum. Since the 1970s, more authors have written about women as hardboiled private detectives.

Now, we are increasingly seeing women characters in professional roles. When the author is also a professional, she has even more authority. She has “insider knowledge.” Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones surveyed women who read feminist crime series and found that readers identify with the struggles of characters who are realistic professional women. Often, the fictional investigations have similarities to real ones the author has worked on. Central Park 5 prosecutor turned crime author Linda Fairstein received pointed criticism about these similarities.

The force

In Australia, ex-police officer Y.A. Erskine’s debut The Brotherhood tells the story of rookie cop Lucy Howard who is blamed when a senior sergeant is killed on a routine call-out. She can’t join the brotherhood of the Tasmanian police force, because, in her words, she doesn’t have the “standard-issue penis”. She is an outsider inside the system.

In Erskine’s follow-up, The Betrayal, Lucy is raped by a colleague. When she makes a complaint, she is vilified and blamed for tarnishing the reputation of the police. The complaint is briefly investigated before being dropped.

Another Australian ex-cop writing crime is P.M. Newton. Her debut, The Old School (notice the theme in the titles?), follows Australian-Vietnamese officer, Nhu “Ned” Kelly. She deals with the racism and corruption of her male colleagues before being shot by one of them.

Newton’s following book, Beams Falling (a reference to Dashiell Hammett’s Flitcraft parable within The Maltese Falcon), tracks Ned’s struggle with post traumatic stress disorder. While fictional detectives usually bounce back quickly after violence, Ned never fully gets over the trauma, and her work offers little support.

Ex-cop Karen M. Davis, has also created a character damaged by her policing experience. Davis’ Lexie Rogers has been stabbed in the neck, and fears facing her attacker in court – a fear exacerbated by her insider knowledge of the justice system. Davis has spoken about how she retired from the police because of trauma, and began writing as a kind of catharsis. Erskine has spoken out about how the rape of Lucy in her books is based on her own unreported rape by a colleague.

These authors have seen the inside of the criminal justice system, its flaws and the experience of women within it. They bring this cachet of lived experiences to their crime fiction. Bestsellers by Marcia Clark or Anne Holt could spark moral reflection, validate women’s experiences, and be part of the cultural shift needed to end violence against women.

– ref. From crime fighters to crime writers – a new batch of female authors brings stories that are closer to home – http://theconversation.com/from-crime-fighters-to-crime-writers-a-new-batch-of-female-authors-brings-stories-that-are-closer-to-home-123770

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

Scott Morrison was frank, when quizzed at a news conference during his visit to Washington, on whether he would be seeking to travel to China in the next year.

“Well, you have to be invited to go,” he said.

With Australia-China relations at a low point – due to Australia’s foreign interference legislation, the banning of Huawei from 5G network and other issues – there’s no indication when an invitation might come.

Not that the Prime Minister wants to seem anxious.

He referred to his encounters with the Chinese leadership in the margins of summits, as well as senior level meetings in the areas of foreign affairs, defence and trade.

Pressed on whether he would like to be invited, Morrison said: “Well of course we would go if there was an invitation to attend.

“But it’s not something that is overly vexing us because we have this partnership. We continue to work closely with China,” he said. “So it’s not an issue that’s troubling me at all.”

Amid the glamour and glitter and the mutually admiring exchanges of rhetorically hype between Donald Trump and Morrison, China and Iran were the central policy issues of interest.

Morrison made clear that Australia and the United States brought differing economic perspectives on China. He was keen to encourage a deal to end the US-China trade war, but also to show understanding of Trump position.

He praised Trump’s “natural instinct of restraint” on Iran, despite the President making reference to his nuclear arsenal. Morrison also stressed Australia’s present commitment was strictly limited to the protection of the sea lanes.

He did not explicitly rule out further involvement if the situation escalated, rather saying nothing like that had been asked and people should not get ahead of themselves.

Read more: As Scott Morrison heads to Washington, the US-Australia alliance is unlikely to change

The theme of the Morrison visit is repeated over and over – renewing and modernising the deep connection between the two countries, which is now cast as looking from one century of “mateship” to a second century of it. Leaders of more powerful nations would visit America, Morrison said, “but you won’t find a more sure and steadfast friend, a better political mate, than Australia”.

From where Trump sits, Australia and its PM could hardly tick any more boxes.

The US has a trade surplus with Australia. Australia, as Morrison emphasised, would be spending 2% of GDP on defence – that is, an ally putting its weight. And, as Trump emphasised, it is buying a great deal of defence equipment from the US.

Then there is the fact that Morrison is right up Trump’s alley as a leader – a conservative who has won an election against the odds.

No wonder Trump had a ready reply when reminded of George W Bush dubbing Howard “a man of steel” – Morrison is “a man of titanium”.

On China, the President dwelt on the pain the US was imposing. “They’re having a very bad year, worst year in 57 years. … We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars of tariffs. … They’ve lost over three million jobs there. Supply chain is crashing. And they have a lot of problems. And I can tell you, they want to make a deal.”

Morrison highlighted Australia’s strategic partnership with China. “We have a great relationship with China. China’s growth has been great for Australia.

“But we need to make sure that we all compete on the same playing field,” he said.

On the Middle East, when asked “are you open to further military action against Iran or is the Australian commitment solely contained to a freedom of navigation patrol exercise?” Morrison replied: “As the President said … there are no further activities planned or requested for assistance from Australia, so the question to that extent is moot”.

He praised the “calibrated, I think very measured response” of the US, as the administration announced further sanctions.

“Obviously at any time when issues are raised with us as an ally, we consider them on their merits at the time in Australia’s national interests,” Morrison said at their joint news conference.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Being a Trump ‘bestie’ comes with its own challenges for Scott Morrison

Speaking at his news conference for the travelling media Morrison said there were no discussion of anything beyond the present commitment.

“I think people need to be careful about getting ahead of themselves and in running off on where these things might go. I mean these matters … are dealt with I think in a very iterative way, and I think that’s what you’re seeing.”

Morrison announced a five year $150 million investment for the Australian Space Agency to “foster the new ideas and hi-tech skilled jobs that will make Australian businesses a partner of choice to fit out NASA missions” to return to the Moon and travel to Mars.

He said the investment would bring more jobs, new technologies and more investment.

“We’re backing Australian businesses to the moon, and even Mars, and back,” he said.

“We’re getting behind Australian businesses so they can take advantage of the pipeline of work NASA has committed to. There is enormous opportunity for Australia’s space sector which is why we want to triple its size to $12 billion to create around 20,000 extra jobs by 2030.”

The announcement prompted Malcolm Turnbull to tweet:

Morrison repeatedly dismissed as “gossip” – but did not deny – a Wall Street Journal report that he had wanted his close associate Hillsong founder Brian Houston invited to the state dinner but the Americans had vetoed him.

Houston said: “I have had no invitation to the White House and I have had no discussion with the prime minister or anyone else about this”.

Houston received an adverse finding from the royal commission into child sexual abuse. It found that “in 1999 and 2000, Pastor Brian Houston and the National Executive of the Assemblies of God in Australia did not refer the allegations of child sexual abuse against Mr Frank Houston [ Brian’s father] to the police”.

– ref. View from The Hill: To go to China you have to be invited: Morrison – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-to-go-to-china-you-have-to-be-invited-morrison-123978

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

University of Canberra Deputy Vice-Chancellor Leigh Sullivan discusses Scott Morrison’s new family law inquiry with Michelle Grattan. They also speak of the developments in the Tamil family from Biloela’s case, and the UN barring Australia from speaking at the upcoming climate change summit.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the family law inquiry – and the UN climate change summit – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-the-family-law-inquiry-and-the-un-climate-change-summit-123928

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dries Verstraete, Senior Lecturer in Aerospace Design and Propulsion, University of Sydney

Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz

Electric cars, trains, trams and boats already exist. That logically leads to the question: why are we not seeing large electric aircraft? And will we see them any time soon?

Why do we have electric cars and trains, but few electric planes? The main reason is that it’s much simpler to radically modify a car or train, even if they look very similar to traditional fossil-fuel vehicles on the outside.

Land vehicles can easily cope with the extra mass from electricity storage or electrical propulsion systems, but aircraft are much more sensitive.

Read more: Zero-carbon electric transport is already in reach for small islands

For instance, increasing the mass of a car by 35% leads to an increase in energy use of 13-20%. But for a plane, energy use is directly proportional to mass: increasing its mass by 35% means it needs 35% more energy (all other things being equal).

But that is only part of the story. Aircraft also travel much further than ground vehicles, which means a flight requires far more energy than an average road trip. Aircraft must store onboard all the energy needed to move its mass for each flight (unlike a train connected to an electrical grid). Using a heavy energy source thus means more energy is needed for a flight, which leads to extra mass, and so on and on.

For an aircraft, mass is crucial, which is why airlines fastidiously weigh luggage. Electric planes need batteries with enough energy per kilogram of battery, or the mass penalty means they simply can’t fly long distances.

Read more: Why battery-powered vehicles stack up better than hydrogen

Short-range planes

Despite this, electric aircraft are on the horizon – but you won’t be seeing electric 747s any time soon.

Today’s best available lithium ion battery packs provide around 200 watt-hours (Wh) per kilogram, about 60 times less than current aircraft fuel. This type of battery can power small electric air taxis with up to four passengers over a distance of around 100km. For longer trips, more energy-dense cells are needed.

Short-range electric commuter aircraft that carry up to 30 people for less than 800km, for instance, specifically require between 750 and 2,000Wh/kg, which is some 6-17% of kerosene-based jet fuel’s energy content. Even larger aircraft require increasingly lighter batteries. For example, a plane carrying 140 passengers for 1,500km consumes about 30kg of kerosene per passenger. With current battery technology, almost 1,000kg of batteries is needed per passenger.

To make regional commuter aircraft fully electric requires a four- to tenfold reduction in battery weight. The long-term historical rate of improvement in battery energy has been around 3-4% per year, doubling roughly every two decades. Based on a continuation of this historical trend, the fourfold improvement needed for a fully electric commuter aircraft could potentially be reached around mid-century.

While this may seem an incredibly long wait, this is consistent with the timescale of change in the aviation industry for both the infrastructure and aircraft design lifecycles. A new aircraft takes around 5-10 years to design, and will then remain in service for two to three decades. Some aircraft are still flying 50 years after their first flight.

Read more: We can’t expand airports after declaring a climate emergency – let’s shift to low-carbon transport instead

Here come the hybrids

Does this mean long-distance flying will always rely on fossil fuels? Not necessarily.

While fully electric large aircraft require a major, yet-to-be-invented shift in energy storage, there are other ways to reduce the environmental impact of flying.

Hybrid-electric aircraft combine fuels with electric propulsion. This class of aircraft includes design without batteries, where the electric propulsion system serves to improve the thrust efficiency, reducing the amount of fuel needed.

Hybrid-electric aircraft with batteries are also in development, where the batteries may provide extra power in specific circumstances. Batteries can then, for instance, provide clean take-off and landing to reduce emissions near airports.

Electric planes are also not the only way to reduce the direct carbon footprint of flying. Alternative fuels, such as biofuels and hydrogen, are also being investigated.

Biofuels, which are fuels derived from plants or algae, were first used on a commercial flight in 2008 and several airlines have performed trials with them. While not widely adopted, significant research is currently investigating sustainable biofuels that do not impact freshwater sources or food production.

Read more: Explainer: what are biofuels?

While biofuels do still produce CO₂, they don’t require significant changes to existing aircraft or airport infrastructure. Hydrogen, on the other hand, requires a complete redesign of the fuelling infrastructure of the airport and also has a significant impact on the design of the aircraft itself.

While hydrogen is very light – hydrogen contains three times more energy per kilogram than kerosene – its density is very low, even when stored as a liquid at -250℃. This means that fuel can no longer be stored in the wing but needs to be moved to relatively heavy and bulky tanks inside the fuselage. Despite these drawbacks, hydrogen-fuelled long-distance flights can consume up to 12% less energy than kerosene.

This article is part of The Covering Climate Now series

This is a concerted effort among news organisations to put the climate crisis at the forefront of our coverage. This article is published under a Creative Commons licence and can be reproduced for free – just hit the “Republish this article” button on the page to copy the full HTML coding. The Conversation also runs Imagine, a newsletter in which academics explore how the world can rise to the challenge of climate change. Sign up here.

– ref. Climate explained: why don’t we have electric aircraft? – http://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-dont-we-have-electric-aircraft-123910

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Roger Crisp, Professorial Fellow, Dianoia Institute of Philosophy, Australian Catholic University

As world chiefs and youth leaders gather in New York at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, many of us as individuals are feeling powerless and overwhelmed. Making big personal changes can appear costly in terms of happiness. And anyway, why should I bother when any difference I can make will be negligible?

As we contemplate our future, we can seek insight from the great philosophers of the ancient world to guide our choices.

Virtue

Socrates wrote nothing, but many of his ideas found their way into the dialogues of his star pupil, Plato. The main character in these dialogues is indeed Socrates himself. In Plato’s most famous work, the Republic, Socrates suggests that he and those around him discuss the most important question there is: how one should live?

One of his interlocutors rather aggressively suggests that the answer is obvious: you should do anything that gives you money, power, and pleasure, and ignore all the constraints of so-called morality, which is just a con dreamed up by the powerful to keep us in our place.

The conflict between the personal goods that Thrasymachus (a sophist and character in The Republic) lists and virtue – or doing what’s right – is at the heart of the climate crisis. Should I take this highly paid job with an international oil company, or work for a local environmental charity? Shall I buy a new SUV, or donate the money and put up with the inconvenience of public transportation?

A harmonious soul

Socrates has some snappy responses for Thrasymachus, but they don’t really work, so he starts to develop a more sustained argument based on the idea of “the soul” – that set of qualities that make us the kind of living beings we are.

There are three main aspects to the soul: reason, desire, and spirit (or emotion). Socrates suggests that the best souls will have reason in charge, shaping and directing the desires with the help of the emotions. So though I may want to be sitting right up there in that SUV, feeling powerful and loving the admiring looks I get from passers-by, what I should ask is whether this is what I have strongest reason to do.

Thrasymachus will of course say: “Obviously, yes!” But Socrates compares souls to cities, and he compares the souls of people like Thrasymachus, who follow their desires wherever they lead, to tyrannies.

While it might seem great to be a tyrant, Socrates predicts that tyrants will slide into a frenzied search for ever greater power and pleasure, never tasting true freedom or friendship. His idea is that you are essentially a rational being, and if you are led by your desires then you are not actively living a life at all. Politicians, take note.

The apparent conflict between personal goods and virtue, then, is only apparent, since you will be not truly happy without virtue. And there does seem to be some modern support for the Socratic view from modern “positive psychology”. This relatively new field suggests many people who care about others and commit themselves to moral goals, report higher well-being and a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Having this sense of life’s purpose has even been associated with a lower risk of death.

Read more: Explainer: what is positive psychology and how can you use it for yourself?

The doctrine of the mean

But at a time when change is needed, how do I decide exactly what the virtuous thing to do is? Here we can learn from Plato’s most famous pupil, Aristotle.

Aristotle sees that human life consists in various spheres, and that each sphere can often be characterised in terms of a feeling or an action. Take anger. To live virtuously, you have to feel anger in the right way – at the right time, for the right reasons, towards the right people and so on. And there are two ways you can go wrong, by feeling anger in the wrong way, or by failing to feel anger in the right way. The moral life, then, consists in our attempt to hit the sweet angry spot between the two ways that anger can go wrong.

The analysis works in the same way with actions. Generosity is to do with giving away money, and that should be done in the right way. If you don’t do it in the right way, then you are stingy; if you do it in the wrong way, then you are wasteful.

In terms of our climate, this relates to the releasing of CO2. So the central environmental virtue is eco-sensitivity. Someone who releases carbon in the wrong way (leaving their engine running while they visit the shops, for example) is eco-insensitive, and there might also be cases of eco-oversensitivity (refusing to call an ambulance, say, for someone who needs urgent help).

Aristotle notes that we are often more attracted to one particular vice, and here that is of course eco-insensitivity. What we should do, then, is reflect on our own practice. If we think we are tending towards that vice, we should try to come closer to the mean. We don’t have to aim at perfection. We can take one step at a time in the right direction. And – if Socrates is right – we will find that you have not sacrificed much, if anything, of your happiness as you do so.

Modern virtues

Since ancient times, other virtues have been added to the list, and hope is another important virtue in facing the environmental crisis.

The ancients did not really consider cases in which a group of people are doing something terrible, though each individual’s contribution makes no perceptible difference. One of the central environmental virtues here is collaborativeness, which leads us in the direction of political as well as personal action.

We are also more aware than the ancients were of the moral significance of allowing things to happen, as opposed to actually doing something about them. We need to take “negative responsibility”, not just stand by and watch as our planet is damaged.

Virtuous action is needed, from the individual up. But by looking to the ideas of the ancient philosophers we can recognise that, at least as far as the climate is concerned, morality requires only small shifts in each moment rather than the seismic shifts that many might fear.

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

– ref. Be excellent: how ancient virtues can guide our responses to the climate crisis – http://theconversation.com/be-excellent-how-ancient-virtues-can-guide-our-responses-to-the-climate-crisis-123854

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

Health authorities in the United States are investigating 530 cases of lung illness, including seven deaths, reportedly connected to vaping. Some of these patients have been diagnosed with lung inflammation caused by inhaling oil.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has advised many samples tested have contained tetrahydrocannabidol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, as well as significant amounts of vitamin E.

No cases of vaping-related lung disease have been reported in Australia to date. But we know a small proportion of people in Australia do vape (about 1.2% of the population), and may therefore be worried about developing this serious lung disease.

Of people who vape, it’s those relying on the practice to avoid smoking cigarettes who may find the current headlines most confronting.

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

Vaping as an alternative to smoking cigarettes

Many experts regard the delivery of nicotine through vaping to be less risky than smoking traditional cigarettes, because it avoids most of the harmful combustion products inhaled through cigarette smoke.

Whether vaping works to help people quit smoking continues to be debated, although some clinical trials show it is more effective than other quit aids such as nicotine patches. We know some people who vape in Australia are doing so because they used the practice to quit smoking cigarettes.

While vaping products containing nicotine are banned in Australia, some people source them illegally or obtain a prescription to bring them in from overseas. For others, the behavioural features of vaping nicotine-free products may be enough to prevent them going back to smoking cigarettes.

The widespread reports of an outbreak of a sudden-onset and serious lung disease associated with vaping may leave this group wondering if they would be better off ditching vaping and returning to smoking.

The simple answer is, no, they wouldn’t. Research shows vaping poses less of a danger to our health than smoking traditional cigarettes. But that doesn’t mean it’s without risk.

The chemicals in vapour

Most commercially produced vaping liquids contain water soluble liquid (propylene glycol, glycerol), nicotine (though not in Australia), and flavourings. The liquid is heated by the vaping device to produce a mist that’s inhaled into the lungs.

Other substances can also be used in vaping devices. Vaping cannabis extracts and concentrates such as THC oil (known as “dabbing”) has increased in recent years, particularly in the US, where 11 states have legalised recreational cannabis use and over 30 have legalised medical cannabis. It’s likely these sorts of products are in circulation among people who use cannabis illicitly in Australia, too.

Cannabis vaping liquids are often oil-based, unlike most nicotine vaping liquids. Many come from the black market and may be contaminated with pesticides, fungi and heavy metals. There may also be serious risks posed by added ingredients, such as vitamin E oil, a focus of the current US investigation. This additive is used to dilute and then thicken the liquid to hide the dilution.

The risks from inhaling these vaporised cannabis liquids are not fully known, but likely differ from vaping water soluble liquids.

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

No single chemical has been identified as the cause of all cases in the US outbreak. This may be impossible because for some cases there is no vaping liquid leftover to test, some cases used multiple products, and some people don’t want to admit to using illicit substances.

But based on evidence of a strong association between the cases of illness and vaping illicit cannabis liquids, the FDA recommends consumers “avoid buying vaping products on the street, and to refrain from using THC oil or modifying/adding any substances to products purchased in stores”.

There have been calls in Australia to ban all vaping products in response to the US outbreak. But because most of the outbreak cases have admitted to vaping illegal THC oil liquids, this would be unlikely to prevent similar cases from occurring here.

No recall of commercial nicotine vaping products has been issued in the US, suggesting the regulator does not currently suspect those products are responsible for the outbreak.

The short-term risks associated with vaping commercial nicotine liquids appears to be very low. The long term risks are less certain but there is widespread agreement vaping nicotine liquids is less risky than smoking cigarettes.

This isn’t the first time vaping has raised health concerns

In 2009, the FDA tested 18 e-cigarette cartridges and found diethylene glycol, an ingredient in anti-freeze, at 1% in one cartridge. However, subsequent studies have either not detected this contaminant, or found it at the trace levels allowed in medicines.

There were also fears vapers could develop bronchiolitis obliterans, a serious and irreversible lung disease, because research found diacetyl, a flavouring added to give a buttery taste, in some vaping liquids.

This disease was nicknamed “popcorn lung” after microwave popcorn factory workers, who were exposed to airborne diacetyl, developed the condition. The urban myth that vaping causes popcorn lung persists, despite no cases being reported from vaping.

Cigarette smokers are actually exposed to more diacetyl from tobacco than are vapers from vaping diacetyl-containing liquid. Nevertheless, the UK banned diacetyl as an ingredient in vaping liquids in 2016 as a precaution.

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

Other potentially harmful chemicals have been found in the vapour from commercially produced nicotine vaping products. These include metals, acrolein and formaldehyde. But again, these chemicals are found in much higher levels in cigarette smoke, along with more than 5,000 other chemicals, including many carcinogens.

One study that compared the harmful chemicals in nicotine vapour and cigarette smoke estimated the lifetime cancer risk from smoking was 250 times that from vaping.

So, what’s the take home message?

Vaping should not be seen as a harmless practice. Cell and animal studies indicate vaping may adversely affect lung tissue, although it’s uncertain how these effects translate into disease risk in humans. Across the board, we still have a lot to learn about the health effects of vaping long term.

People who do not smoke tobacco should not begin vaping. However, for someone who smokes tobacco, the choice is more complicated because of the very high risks from smoking. Ideally, the safest option is not to smoke or vape, but the priority for smokers should be to stop smoking.

Read more: Don’t ban e-cigarettes, sell them under tight regulation

Professional support from Quitline and medicinal nicotine products or prescription medicines can help. But those who have tried and failed to quit, and have switched instead to vaping, should not return to smoking on the basis of these cases in the United States.

To reduce risks to their health, people who vape should avoid any liquids that contain oils, and especially avoid cannabis/THC liquids. Only purchase vaping products from reputable manufacturers, such as those that comply with European regulatory standards. Working towards stopping vaping is also recommended, if this can be done without relapsing to smoking.

– ref. It’s safest to avoid e-cigarettes altogether – unless vaping is helping you quit smoking – http://theconversation.com/its-safest-to-avoid-e-cigarettes-altogether-unless-vaping-is-helping-you-quit-smoking-123274

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amanda Gardiner, Lecturer, Edith Cowan University

In August, a 24-year-old woman appeared before the Western Australian District Court after pleading guilty to concealing the birth of her newborn baby in 2018.

The charge of concealment of birth refers to hiding the dead body of a child after their birth in order to conceal the fact that they were born.

Concealment of birth is a complex charge. It does not investigate how a child has died, or seek to ensure conviction in this matter; instead, it focuses only on whether the body of a baby has been hidden. The charge is also separate from the charges of infanticide or murder.

The unnamed young woman, who was sentenced to a 12-month intensive supervision order, had repeatedly denied being pregnant, concealed her pregnancy and had given birth in secret before placing the body of her child in a box in her bathroom.

During the trial, both the prosecutor and Judge Stephen Scott believed the charge to be a first in Western Australia.

In fact, there has been a long history of women being charged with, and prosecuted for, concealment of birth both within WA and the rest of Australia. And while it may seem a relic from a bygone era, it still happens today, and needs greater research attention.

How common is concealment of birth?

In Western Australia, charges of this kind have been brought before the courts from European colonisation. My PhD research investigated 55 cases linked to infanticide and concealment of birth in WA between 1829 – 1901. Exploration of the TROVE newspaper database provides hundreds of examples across Australia, and the Prosecution Project highlights many more. In some instances, pregnancies were so successfully concealed that when children were found dead after birth, they were never linked to their parents.

Within a historical context, the link between these cases was the shame surrounding illegitimacy and the legal frameworks that prosecuted women who gave birth outside of marriage. While we may live in a society that no longer outwardly condemns women who give birth outside of marriage, powerful social pressures still exist that leave some women feeling unable to access the support they need to access terminations or admit to being single and pregnant.

This means that while it is rare, concealment does still occur.

My research unpacks the history of concealment and explores the striking similarities between a modern-day case of concealment undertaken by a 24-year-old Irish backpacker in 2014 and the case of an unmarried woman in 1832.

In 2014, Caroline Marie Quinn had been travelling with friends in the Kimberley. Quinn “did not realise that she was pregnant” when she went into labour. She appears to have given birth alone, and when her child died due to unexplained circumstances she hid the corpse for several days.

No-one in the sparsely populated Hall’s Creek community or any of Quinn’s friends noticed her pregnancy, nor did they realise that she had given birth to a baby until the body of the child was discovered hidden in a hotel room several days later. The case was not brought to the authorities until Quinn’s friends took her to the local hospital and staff notified police.

Charged with concealing the birth of a child, Quinn was granted leave by the chief magistrate to return home to Ireland while she awaited her trial, as “without trivialising the matter, nothing more serious was alleged than the concealing of the birth”.

She was not required to return to Australia to attend trial and all charges against were dropped as the prosecutor felt “it was not in the public interest” to proceed with legal action.

The WA Criminal Code Act Compilation Act 1913 regarding “concealing the birth of a dead child” states:

Any person who, when a woman is delivered of a child endeavours, by any secret disposition of the dead body of the child, to conceal its birth, whether the child died before, at, or after its birth, is guilty of a crime, and is liable to imprisonment for 2 years.

Yet, the legalities surrounding this issue are complex and often come down to individual cases. It can also be difficult to pin down statistics on the frequency of pregnancy concealment nationally.

What can be done to help women and children?

So, why are are there still cases of women concealing pregnancies and what can be done about it?

Shame is timeless. It runs like a viral code through the centuries to resonate within the legal response to women who conceal the birth of their children in Western Australia.

Read more: Some women feel grief after an abortion, but there’s no evidence of serious mental health issues

Despite the isolated nature of the state, the nearly 400 years since the laws surrounding concealment of birth were was formed in England, and the varying locations where these women lived and worked, their stories are remarkably alike.

While it is certainly not the case that all concealed pregnancies will lead to the death of a child, little is known about the risk factors linked to pregnancy concealment in Australia. Increasing knowledge in this area should start with a closer look at historical cases, and investigating ways to support women who find themselves in these traumatic circumstances.

– ref. What is the charge of concealment of birth and why is it still happening in Australia? – http://theconversation.com/what-is-the-charge-of-concealment-of-birth-and-why-is-it-still-happening-in-australia-122876

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caio Seguin, PhD candidate, University of Melbourne

Brain regions exchange information by sending and receiving signals through a network of nerve connections.

This exchange is crucial to all aspects of the brain’s functioning, including how we experience the world, form and retrieve memories, and make decisions.

But scientists don’t have a clear idea of how signals find their way through the brain’s complicated wiring.

To understand this problem, our research team spent the past three years studying how brain regions communication with each other, and what we found can help us better understand how our brains function.

Using non-invasive MRI scans, we reconstructed the network of nerve fibre bundles of the human brain. This gave us a model of brain wiring, which we used to investigate how signals may travel between the brain’s regions.

In our research, published in Nature Communications, we discovered that based on how our brains are wired, certain regions are better at sending electrical signals, while others are better at receiving them.

Read more: Like sightseeing in Paris – a new model for brain communication

This is an important discovery because it helps us understand how neural traffic is directed in the brain.

Malfunctions in brain communication may be the cause of many debilitating mental health conditions such as depression and schizophrenia. By understanding how brain regions communicate with each other, we can potentially develop new treatments for such diseases.

Two-way connections

In the brain, a nerve bundle connects two regions and allows signals to travel between them.

These connections can be one-way, where signals only travel in a single direction, or two-way, which allows communication both ways.

Scientists discovered this a long time ago by dissecting the preserved brains of humans and other animals.

Non-invasive MRI scans can tell us which brain regions have nerve bundles connecting them, but we can’t know whether they are one or two-way connections.

Also, if they’re one-way connections, we don’t know the direction of movement. This is a limitation of current brain scan technology.

Because scientists cannot tell the difference between a one or two-way connection in the brain, they usually assume all nerve bundles are two-way connections. This is a reasonable simplification in many cases, and has helped us understand a lot about the brain.

Read more: The brain and the gut talk to each other: how fixing one could help the other

But this simplification makes it difficult to study the direction in which electrical signals are travelling. While we can study communication between two parts of the brain, it’s hard to know which region is sending signals and which is receiving them.

Our research helped us get around this problem.

Senders and receivers in the brain

To better understand, imagine you’re on vacation in Paris and decide to rent a car and go for a drive. You’re driving without a destination in mind when you serendipitously arrive at the famous Arc de Triomphe.

This is not a coincidence. Cities are designed so that important places are easy to get to from many locations. While it may be easy to drive from the car rental agency to the Arc de Triomphe, starting from the famous landmark and accidentally coming back to the agency is less likely.

Our research shows brain communication may work in a similar way. We found that certain regions are, on average, quickly accessible from everywhere else in the brain. We call these regions “receivers”.

Other regions are, on average, good at efficiently reaching most places in the brain, but may not be so easy to get to. We call these regions “senders”.

We found that the division of the brain’s regions into senders and receivers matches previous ideas about how the brain operates.

Senders are in charge of sensory signals such as visual or auditory information. They are the first regions to deal with information coming from the outside world, and can efficiently send this data to the rest of the brain.

On the other hand, receivers are important for complicated thoughts and problem solving. They act as meeting points for information coming from many other regions. They then collect and process this data, with the goal of ensuring our decisions make sense with what is going on in the outside world.

New possibilities

Our research shows that knowledge about sender and receiver regions in the brain can be obtained from a two-way connection model of the human brain’s wiring. Importantly, we reconstructed the wiring using non-invasive MRI scans.

Until now, scientists thought that understanding how the brain’s wiring directs neural traffic was only possible by dissecting the brains of humans and other animals after their death.

Our research introduces possibilities to better understand brain functioning in living people, and how disruptions in neural communication may lead to mental disorders.

– ref. Your brain has ‘landmarks’ that drive neural traffic and help you make hard decisions – http://theconversation.com/your-brain-has-landmarks-that-drive-neural-traffic-and-help-you-make-hard-decisions-123751

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Miranda Kaye, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney

Over the next 12 months, a joint parliamentary committee will examine Australia’s family law system. It will be led by conservative Liberal MP Kevin Andrews and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.

But it would appear the driving force behind this new inquiry is Hanson’s recent unsupported claim that women are frequently making up allegations of domestic violence in family courts.

Read more: The long history of gender violence in Australia, and why it matters today

The Greens and Labor do not support the inquiry. In fact, the Greens described it as “a sop to One Nation by the government” and Labor suggested the prime minister had “done a deal with One Nation”.

It is the latest in a string of inquiries into the family law system and its failings.

In fact, there have already been two very recently: the 2017 House of Representatives inquiry into a “better family law system to support and protect those affected by family violence”, which made 33 recommendations, and the Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry released just this year, which made 60 recommendations to the government. The government has not responded to either of those reports.

We do need to hear more about family violence, not less. But we need action, not yet another inquiry.

No evidence backing Hanson’s claims

There is no evidence, beyond anecdotes, to support Hanson’s claims. In fact, studies conducted in Canada and Australia in the early to mid 2000s found false allegations about child abuse were rare. When they did occur, they were more likely to come from fathers who did not have the primary care of the children.

Read more: Domestic abuse or genuine relationship? Our welfare system can’t tell

We have heard all this before. Similar concerns about false allegations were a significant influence on then Prime Minister John Howard’s 2006 reforms to family law.

The research following those changes found the measures designed to address false allegations – for example imposing costs orders, and assessing whether parents were “friendly” about their former partner’s contact with children – only served to silence women. One of the reports, which recommended changes to these provisions, noted:

family violence must be disclosed, understood, and acted upon. […] The family law system, and each component in it, needs to encourage and facilitate the disclosure of family violence, ensure that it is understood, and act effectively upon that understanding.

In other words, there is still a need to enhance the quality and nature of information about family violence provided to the courts.

Inquiries are not the same as research

Family law cases are complex. Those that go all the way to a final hearing before a judge often involve multiple issues, of which family violence is one. They frequently also involve concerns about child abuse, drug and alcohol use, mental health, parenting capacity and neglect.

The courts rely on a range of information and evidence to help them reach a decision. Hanson suggests protection orders have some power in the decisions, but they are just one of the various factors courts will assess to determine the best interests of children and the need to protect them from family violence.

It is critical any focus on false allegations also includes a consideration of the responses to those allegations. Research has found male perpetrators of family violence engage in a range of tactics to deny, minimise and shift blame about violence.

A parliamentary inquiry is not a research exercise. To suggest it will be able to provide clear evidence about the extent of false allegations (or false denials) is simply untrue.

Parliamentary inquiries receive submissions from a range of people, including members of the public. And in the context of family law, the submissions are likely to come from those who are unhappy with their experience. This is not a representative sample from which it will be possible to draw firm conclusions.

Read more: See What You Made Me Do: why it’s time to focus on the perpetrator when tackling domestic violence

The composition of the inquiry, and the terms of reference, are not likely to encourage victims of family violence, or those working in the services that support them, to come forward and make submissions.

We need action on family violence

The multiple inquiries preceding this announcement show there is a pressing need to address the fragmentation that results from Australia’s federal system, in which family law is a federal concern, while domestic violence orders and child protection are state or territory matters.

This fragmentation results in gaps in information and responses to domestic and family violence.

Also pressing is the need to address the high cost and delays in the family law system. In its report, the Australian Law Reform Commission found 33% of matters pending in the Family Court in June 2018 had been filed over a year ago, and a further 48% had been filed more than two years ago. These delays are mainly a result of under-funding of the courts over a number of years.

Read more: An innovative way to counter domestic violence: provide housing for abusers

Delays are a problem for everyone in the family law system, but they create particular concerns for families with family violence, as interim orders are made without the benefit of full and adequate evidence.

Delays exacerbate costs, and together provide a powerful incentive to settle. And there is concern parties may settle for outcomes that are not safe or satisfactory.

These pressing needs are well documented in earlier reports which include recommendations about how to address them. Action on these recommendations is needed rather than further inquiries.

– ref. We don’t need another inquiry into family law – we need action – http://theconversation.com/we-dont-need-another-inquiry-into-family-law-we-need-action-123758

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Barbara Allen, Senior Lecturer in Public Management, Victoria University of Wellington

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

For three years in a row, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report has identified climate change as the gravest threat for global business and industry.

The disruption of supply chains in food, medicines and even recycling from climate-related events poses innumerable problems for nations. But one way of dealing with various facets of climate change is levering change through central government procurement.

Policies that govern supply and how goods, construction and services are procured are increasingly important as the capacity to mitigate through government purchasing choices faces greater pressure.

As New Zealand is considering zero carbon legislation, new government procurement rules take effect in October.

The rules include broader outcomes, connecting wider social and environmental priorities to procurement processes. This is the first time New Zealand lays out specific rules about how the government plans to use its own purchases to help fulfil its wider promises.

Read more: Why our response to climate change needs to be a just and careful revolution that limits pushback

Charging ahead with EVs

A cabinet paper on effective government procurement policy, released in late 2018, laid out four outcomes, one of which focused on supporting the transition to a net zero emissions economy and meeting the government’s goal of significantly reducing waste by 2020.

The policy’s priorities include reducing the emissions profile of the government vehicle fleet and reducing emissions from fossil fuels used in electricity generation and in direct production of industrial heat. Describing the government’s intention, Economic Development Minister David Parker said:

We are looking beyond just the price of what we purchase, to ensure procurement is contributing to the transition to a low-carbon economy, inclusive growth and prosperity.

The government’s commitment is to make its own vehicle fleet emissions-free by 2025-26. When replacing vehicles, chief executives of government agencies must purchase vehicles with emission profiles substantially below their current fleet average.

The government fleet – at 14,995 vehicles (with only 0.24% electric) – has a job on its hands. But already it is reporting that emissions have dropped between April and July 2019. The reduction is partly due to 400 fewer vehicles and minor shifts in driving patterns.

Read more: Will politicians take action and try to save the planet from climate change?

This is a gutsy move, especially given cost implications and market challenges. But jurisdictions such as Germany and Sweden have promoted renewable sources for some time through legislation and multiple instruments including procurement that supports innovation. Others, such as Transport London, have been shifting to electric public transport fleets.

New Zealand has been conservative in its approach to linking procurement with objectives beyond “best value”, which is nearly always interpreted as least cost. But times are changing. A growing number of people in most agencies are trying to raise the profile of procurement beyond a purchasing exercise.

Procurement as opportunity and responsibility

Leaving the market to decide how taxpayer funds are spent through a clunky contracting process is missing an opportunity to procure the best services and infrastructure, as well as increasing workforce skills. Research on sustainable procurement has grown and the topic now features at the OECD.

There are different targeted approaches. One is an “emissions dashboard”, which shows the average emissions profile of each agency’s fleet and tracks emission reductions. But dashboards are only indicative, given the inevitable variation in reporting across organisations and the underlying reasons why an agency might have a high emissions rating.

Australia’s Indigenous procurement policy has used a very targeted approach requiring 3% of government contracts go to Indigenous business by 2027. Māori Development Minister Nanaia Mahuta has been looking at the potential for something similar in New Zealand. A report on the benefits of indigenous procurement policies is expected.

Planning to replace vehicle fleets is a tangible use of the procurement lever to move towards lower emissions. But to support a fairly rapid change, supply chains need to be taken into consideration to ensure enough electric vehicles are available.

While there are many technical issues to resolve, New Zealand’s approach to procurement is a step in the right direction. Procurement can’t do everything at once, but it is an important instrument that needs to be directed at policy problems, underpinned by research and evidence.

– ref. Procurement’s role in climate change: putting government money where policy needs to go – http://theconversation.com/procurements-role-in-climate-change-putting-government-money-where-policy-needs-to-go-122197

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Moscova, Senior Lecturer in Anatomy, UNSW

Women’s nipples have long been a source of fascination and controversy, from celebrity gossip stories of wardrobe malfunctions and “nip slips” to feminist movements for gender equality. Nipples even became a fashion accessory.

Men’s nipples are a different story. While they don’t tend to attract the same type of controversy, people have long been fascinated about why men have them. The question even made it into a popular science book.

So, if (most) men don’t breastfeed, why do men have nipples? The answer lies partly in how we develop in the womb. We’ll get to male breast milk later.

Read more: No, you’re not ‘hardwired’ to stare at women’s breasts

A long time ago, when you were an embryo …

Very early in development, embryos of both sexes have primitive structures that can develop into either male or female reproductive organs (or rarely into a bit of both).

Several genes determine whether the baby ends up with either male or female reproductive organs. A gene called SRY (sex-determining region Y) on the short arm of the Y chromosome is considered the master gene.

This is activated when the embryo is around seven weeks old. When activated, it eventually leads to the development of male reproductive organs and the disappearance of the primitive female reproductive duct.

As females don’t have a Y chromosome, the primitive female reproductive duct continues to develop into female reproductive organs while the primitive male reproductive duct disappears.

But breasts and nipples start to form before the SRY gene has been activated, between weeks four and six. This is when two ridges called mammary crests or milk lines extend between the primitive armpit and the groin.

So, later in male development, even as most of the mammary crest disappears, the cells around the chest that form primitive nipples and areola smooth muscle remain. These remaining cells go on to form the final breasts and nipples.

Once you’re born

At birth, boys’ and girls’ nipples and breasts look alike. It’s only at puberty, under the influence of hormones, when they begin to change. The nipples of both enlarge but female nipples enlarge more. At the same time, the ducts of the male breasts shrink while female breasts enlarge and remodel. By adulthood, male nipples are smaller and less variable than female ones.

From an evolutionary standpoint, some argue male nipples remain, not because they present any advantages for a male, but because they do no harm. There is no benefit in eliminating them.

When development goes wrong

Sometimes, as with any other body structures, development can go wrong. Around one in 20 people have supernumerary (or extra) nipples. This occurs when parts of the mammary crest remain. Often these nipples are purely cosmetic and resemble nothing more than a small pigmented mole. Only rarely are they fully functional. The highest number of nipples ever recorded on a human male is seven.

Read more: An extra organ or body part is more common than you think

Some men can produce milk

Intriguingly, sometimes males can produce milk. In many cases, this may be caused by recovery from starvation, medical conditions that cause hormonal imbalances, or medications. The milk men produce in these circumstances is very similar to that of lactating mothers.

How do men benefit from having nipples?

Unless you’re one of the rare men who can use their nipples to breastfeed, men benefit from this seemingly redundant body part for a much more common reason.

Nipples respond to sexual stimulation in both sexes. One study found over half the male participants reported feeling enhanced sexual arousal in response to nipple stimulation. There is even one report describing a heterosexual man who requested breast enlargement to increase sexual function of his nipples.

How about ‘man boobs’?

But for some men, breast enlargement can be the unexpected consequence of being overweight or obese. And as we are seeing more obesity in western populations, we’re seeing a rise in “man breasts” or “man boobs”, which are mostly being made up of fat deposits.

Breast enlargement in men, or gynaecomastia, can also be caused by a hormone imbalance with a relative excess of oestrogens (female hormones) compared to androgens (male hormones). This mostly affects adolescent boys and usually resolves on its own, although it can persist in as many as one in 10 men. In these cases, it can be associated with depression, anxiety, disordered eating, body image problems and reduced self-esteem.

Men get breast cancer too

Unusually, men can develop breast cancer and it can have serious consequences.

Only 0.5-1% of all breast cancers are diagnosed in men. However, lower awareness of the disease in men means it is more likely to be at an advanced stage when diagnosed. That’s why lumps and changes in men’s nipples (for example, nipple discharge or skin ulcerations such as cracks in the skin), should be checked by a doctor to rule out cancers.

Read more: Breast cancer campaigns might be pink, but men get it too

As we’ve seen, men’s nipples deserve as much attention as women’s nipples. Although, this is unlikely to distract the celebrity gossip columnists from their selective obsession with this part of the female anatomy.

– ref. Why do men have nipples? – http://theconversation.com/why-do-men-have-nipples-120893

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Holmes, Director, Climate Change Communication Research Hub, Monash University

One of the great paradoxes of climate change communication in Australia is that politicians command the most attention on the issue, yet are among the least trusted sources of climate information.

Research has shown that domestic politics has the strongest influence on Australian media coverage of climate change. In contrast, in India and Germany media attention is driven by factors such as international climate meetings and the activities of environmental advocacy groups.

Read more: There’s a good reason we’re moderating climate change deniers: uninformed comments undermine expertise

In Australia, the four most trusted information sources on climate change are climate scientists, farmers, firefighters, and weather presenters, according to Monash University research.

This suggests people want to hear more from scientists about climate change – if only they had greater visibility. Farmers and firefighters may have won the public’s trust because they work at the frontline of climate change, in figuring out how to grow our food with diminishing rainfall or put out fires in an ever-expanding fire season.

Of this exclusive group, only weather presenters have the distinction of being both trusted and skilled communicators, and having access to large audiences. As such, they can play a very important role in delivering factual, apolitical information to millions of Australians.

Our research at Monash shows that even Australians concerned about climate change have surprisingly low levels of climate literacy, relative to the immense scale of the problem. This is not to say that simply giving people more facts will improve their knowledge – the assumption that underpins the “deficit model” of science communication. Facts, in themselves, will not necessarily influence people. But when they are delivered by trusted sources they can be very powerful.

People still love the nightly news

In the age of ubiquitous media coverage, it is remarkable that television remains the single largest source of news in Australia. People enjoy the ritual of news delivered at a dependable time that marks the end of the working day.

Veteran news anchors and weather presenters can fill the same place in a viewer’s day for decades, providing a sense of constancy. Weather presenters in particular deal with variations of the same serialised story, and many find that incorporating climate information improves the bulletin.

Monash University’s Climate Change Communication Research Hub has engaged weather presenters to present climate information in more than one-third of Australia’s media markets across three major networks.

Similarly in the US, the Climate Matters project, established in 2008, has engaged more than 500 weather presenters to present climate information, aided by research from the Center for Climate Change Communication.

Read more: ‘This situation brings me to despair’: two reef scientists share their climate grief

Just as these broadcasters present the day’s observed temperatures, they also present observed climate trends over a longer time scale.

The research hub offers graphics and information that weather presenters may use. Channel Seven weather presenter Jane Bunn and the ABC’s Paul Higgins, both of whom are broadcast in Melbourne, were the first to sign up to the Australian pilot program. See video below.

In an article in The Age newspaper in February this year, Bunn said she wanted to communicate only “the facts, quietly put through in a straightforward way that people can understand”.

This point touches on another finding of our research – that the public is most receptive to information that is “non-persuasive” or does not attempt to advocate one way or another.

Bunn told The Age that viewers were “generally fascinated with weather trends anyway and this is just giving them more of what they want”.

Weather presenters get it

When surveyed, 91% of Australia’s 75 weather presenters were interested in presenting local historical climate information.

Those participating in the Australian program generally present observed climate trends over 30-50 years: more than 30 years, because that is what the science says is needed for a strong climate signal, but less than 50 years because most people don’t care about the time scale beyond that.

The Monash project examines long-term climate trends in each month of the year, such as how many March days in Sydney have been hotter than 25℃, or the coldest September night Melbourne has experienced.

Notably, the project presents only local trends in climate relating to cities, towns and regions in Australia. Our research consistently shows that audiences connect with local information much more than national and global data, because the local information is seen to be far more relevant.

Audiences may also link the information to stories about local extreme weather events associated with climate change, such as floods and more violent storms.

Audiences hungry for more in weather reports

The appetite of Australians for information about climate trends is also very high. A 2017 survey of Australian television audiences found that about 88% of respondents were interested in learning about the impacts of climate change in a weather bulletin. Almost 85% would continue watching their main news program if it started presenting climate information.

More importantly, 57% of respondents said they would switch from their regular news program that wasn’t presenting on climate change to a rival channel that did.

Read more: Climate explained: Why are climate change skeptics often right-wing conservatives?

The communication of climate information to audiences can help overcome a little-understood phenomenon known as “pluralistic ignorance”, sometimes also referred to as “perception gap”. It refers to the fact that while more than 75% of Australians say they are concerned about climate change, just 50% believe others have the same level of concern.

This phenomenon is more common in nations such as Australia and the US where there is a strong denialist lobby, or merchants of doubt – groups that may be small but can strongly influence a person’s confidence to discuss climate change in their everyday life. The point is that if others are perceived to be unconcerned, it leads to strong self-silencing among the vast majority of Australians.

So if trusted sources such as weather presenters can show leadership in the public conversation by normalising climate information, this will help bridge the perception gap – and hopefully prompt more discussion of how to respond to the climate crisis.

– ref. We want to learn about climate change from weather presenters, not politicians – http://theconversation.com/we-want-to-learn-about-climate-change-from-weather-presenters-not-politicians-123761

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachael Sharman, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of the Sunshine Coast

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

Thousands of school students across Australia are expected to join in the global protest today calling for action on climate change.

This isn’t the first time students in Australia have rallied against climate change – many took to the streets in March. But today is expected to be one of the biggest protests as they’ll be joined by others, including many workers.

Read more: Everyone’s business: why companies should let their workers join the climate strike

The participation of our school students is a sign of how seriously they see climate change. As the organising website says:

We are striking from school to tell our politicians to take our futures seriously and treat climate change for what it is – a crisis.

By the end of this century, average temperatures on the surface of our planet are predicted to be more than two degrees Celsius or higher than today. The average level of the ocean surface could be more than a metre higher. Such changes will challenge the ways we live now.

There are plenty of evidence-based projections of future climate readily available, such as the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But then there are denial, scepticism and misconceptions about climate change that confuse people and create unnecessary fear and anxiety, especially in school-age students.

Young people are still developing their ability to critically reason, contextualise and realistically assess risk. They are vulnerable to emotion-charged information and less likely to understand the possible agendas of people with differing ideas.

Fear and anxiety about climate change

Anxiety is a form of fear we experience when a threat is not immediate or catastrophic but has the potential to be so. It can be useful when it mobilises us to act on a problem.

Two important criteria underpin both fear and anxiety. You find yourself faced with a potentially dangerous situation that appears to be uncontrollable and unpredictable.

Either unpredictability or uncontrollability on their own can lead to a fear or anxiety response. In concert together they form a perfect storm of stress and confusion.

Looking at climate change through this emotional lens, we can certainly see the element of uncontrollability. Some climate scientists and activists believe we have started a chain reaction that is almost irreversible.

Most climate scientists are careful not to talk about predictions of future climate and favour model-informed projections. That still gives us an idea of the nature of our future world, at least for most of the rest of this century.

This knowledge encourages the perception that we can control or mitigate certain aspects of climate change. From a human point of view, this brings us some relief.

But the anxiety related to the impending climate change should not be underestimated. Some researchers list it as a top concern for population mental health.

It is therefore not surprising that many of our younger generations feel particularly anxious about the impacts of climate change.

On the one hand, teenagers are especially sensitive to fear-based messages as they have a tendency to catastrophise – they imagine the worst possible outcome.

For example, in the last century, it was the threat of a nuclear war that caused anxiety in many children.

Fast forward to today and climate change is seen as the next big threat for future generations.

How to ease the anxiety

Today’s school students know they will inherit the fallout of climate change. They will live to see their children and grandchildren doing the same. So they have reason to be concerned, and anxiety may mobilise useful action.

So what can we reasonably say to teens who are feeling shut out of the debate and experiencing heightened anxiety about their future?

Adaptation is one of the most valuable skills of the human species. Understand that we can and must adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Read more: Why attending a climate strike can change minds (most importantly your own)

Climate change isn’t new so we will need to work together to care for the Earth and one another. Importantly, taking an interest in understanding why and how things happen helps us to manage them (rather than sticking our collective heads in the sand and engaging in denial).

While there is genuine cause for some anxiety, a fear reaction that is out of place or disproportionate to the actual threat serves very little actual purpose other than leaving a person in great distress.

Listening to the valid concerns of school students, and engaging them in discussions about the mitigation and adaptation strategies we will need to adopt, will go some way towards easing their fears and anxieties.

– ref. Ignoring young people’s climate change fears is a recipe for anxiety – http://theconversation.com/ignoring-young-peoples-climate-change-fears-is-a-recipe-for-anxiety-123357

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kyllie Cripps, Scientia Felllow and Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law UNSW Sydney, UNSW

In Western Australia more than half the children placed in state care are Aboriginal. The state government committed this month to reducing this over-representation, in a move that parallels the Closing the Gap Refresh draft target nationally. Despite concerns about another stolen generation, Australia has yet to act on a root cause – the difficulty Indigenous women escaping family violence face in finding safe housing.

Read more: Why controversial child protection reforms in NSW could lead to another Stolen Generation

Our research shows domestic violence and housing are linked as a cause of child removal.

Every year governments spend millions addressing Indigenous intergenerational trauma. Child removal is an important cause of this trauma.

Care for children is a cornerstone of Aboriginal cultures. Child removal often has severe mental and physical health effects, with risks of substance use, homelessness and incarceration.

Read more: Aboriginal mothers are incarcerated at alarming rates – and their mental and physical health suffers

Consequences are similar for children, who also suffer from cultural dislocation. Yet Indigenous children are admitted to out-of-home care at 11 times the rate for non-Indigenous children. Far from declining, rates are increasing – by 21% between 2012 and 2017.

This issue is not primarily one of isolated remote communities. The rate of Indigenous children in out-of-home care is highest in our major cities.

Why are children removed?

Contrary to public discourse, sexual abuse accounts for only a tiny percentage of substantiated notifications. Proportions are below those for non-Indigenous children (see chart below).

Emotional abuse, which includes the child’s exposure to family violence, accounts for most notifications. The second-most-common type is neglect. This occurs at more than double the non-Indigenous rate and includes inadequate, insecure or unsafe housing.

Read more: Child protection report lacks crucial national detail on abuse in out-of-home care

Mothers have nowhere to go

In situations of family violence many Aboriginal woman face an impossible situation when trying to protect their children. If they stay with the perpetrator they risk notification for emotional abuse. If they leave but cannot find suitable housing, they risk allegations of neglect.

This dilemma applies to all low-income women, but it is most acute for Aboriginal women. The combination of discrimination and low income means few find private rental housing. Crisis services are often full. The bottlenecks in the homelessness system result in long waits for transitional accommodation.

Waiting times for scarce public housing are long. Many also face delays in being added to priority wait lists due to housing debt – even though this is often a result of their partner’s financial abuse.

These women are often trapped in a revolving door between crisis centres, homelessness and returning to an unsafe home. This is a factor in their high rates of injury and early death.

Delays in being appropriately housed can prevent children from ever being returned to their parents. Child protection timelines generally allow only 12 months before removal can become permanent.

A policy blind spot

Housing’s critical role at the intersection of child protection and domestic violence has yet to be recognised in public policy. The national Fourth Action Plan to reduce violence against women and their children refers to “inadequate housing and overcrowding” as a factor in Aboriginal family violence. Despite this, it offers no specific guidelines or strategies to overcome these problems.

Read more: The latest action plan to tackle violence against women isn’t perfect, but it takes a much-needed holistic approach

The Closing the Gap policy focus on housing is limited to reducing overcrowding. While critical, this misses the relationship between housing shortages and family violence and its impact on mums being separated from their children. And the Refresh targets are uncertain and underdeveloped.

Without specific housing targets, it is hard to see how the other targets to reduce violence and overrepresentation in out-of-home care will be met.

As Indigenous policy is realigned under the Closing The Gap Refresh the Australian government must act on this missing link. It should increase the number of crisis beds and consider targets to reduce the numbers of Aboriginal women and children turned away from crisis accommodation.

Programs should support timely access to secure housing. This is especially important for women seeking to reunify with children in state care.

Within the Safe at Home program, special funds should be made available for housing safety upgrades so Aboriginal women can remain in their own homes.

Beyond this, what’s needed are holistic solutions that work with the whole family, including the perpetrator. These solutions need to be developed and delivered in partnership with Aboriginal people, communities and services, building on the strengths of individuals and communities to overcome the impacts of violence and intergenerational trauma.

The short-term nature of funding is also a problem. Investment needs to go beyond political cycles. Current short-term funding arrangements undermine trust in services and greatly reduce their capacity and potential effectiveness.

Given the long-term intergenerational costs of child removal and domestic violence, such measures should prove cost-effective. More importantly, they would reduce violence against women and the over-representation of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care.

– ref. Another stolen generation looms unless Indigenous women fleeing violence can find safe housing – http://theconversation.com/another-stolen-generation-looms-unless-indigenous-women-fleeing-violence-can-find-safe-housing-123526

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin., Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Newstart recipients and other Australians on benefits get their half-yearly pay rise today (and also on March 20). This one is vanishingly small.

Announced very quietly by Social Services Minister Anne Ruston earlier this week, it amounts to just A$3.30 per fortnight for someone on the Newstart unemployment benefit.

That’s $1.65 per week, less than 24 cents per day.

It’s enough to buy about 36 peanuts – or more if you buy them in bulk.

More galling still for Australians on Newstart, age and disability pensions will increase by twice as much – $6.80 per fortnight, an increase the government was keener to highlight in its press release than the increase in Newstart.

It is hard to comprehend how it could have come to this. Back in 1997 Newstart and the pension were about the same in dollar terms. Each was probably somewhat less than a single person needed to live on.

How did it come to this?

Then the Howard government effectively froze Newstart, forevermore increasing it only in line with inflation (which back then was typically 2.5% per year) while using a formula that lifted pensions in line with wage growth or inflation, whichever was the bigger (back then wages were growing by more than 3% per year).

The difference wasn’t big, but over the past two decades it has compounded. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd helped it along in 2009 by a one-off $64 per fortnight increase in the single pension, unmatched by an increase in Newstart.

It means that from today the single pension will be $850.40 per fortnight, while the single Newstart payment will be $559 – a mere two-thirds of the pension.

And it’ll get worse.

Because inflation is low, and each low increase is off what is now a much lower base than the pension, Newstart increases are small while pension increases are twice as big.

Read more: FactCheck: do 99% of Newstart recipients also receive other benefits?

If prices and wages continue to grow at the rates they have over the past decade (2.1% per year for prices, 2.7% for wages) by 2070 Newstart will be just half of the pension. By the end of the century it’ll be just two fifths of the pension.

If it can’t continue, it won’t

Herbert Stein was an economic advisor to US presidents Nixon and Ford. These days he is best remembered among economists for Stein’s Law, which says pithily:

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

It’s a warning against the dangers of extrapolations of the kind I have just done, and also a guide to the future. A Newstart rate of just two fifths of the pension, way below everyone else’s standard of living, would be intolerable.

The formula will change well before it gets that bad. It’ll have to.

John Howard himself said so last year:

I was in favour of freezing when it happened, but I think it has probably gone on too long.

The question is how it will change. Labor promised a review and an increase during the last election.

The Coalition is holding firm, although it can’t if it continues to remain in office.

A decade ago the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warned that Newstart was low enough to raise “issues about its effectiveness in providing sufficient support for those experiencing a job loss, or enabling someone to look for a suitable job”.

The Australian Council of Social Service wants the government to lift Newstart by $150 per fortnight to $709, still well short of the pension, and afterwards to lift it in line with the pension and wages, so that it never falls further behind.

It wants the same for Youth Allowance, Austudy, Abstudy, Sickness Allowance, Special Benefit, Widow Allowance and Crisis Payment, which all move in line with Newstart.

The hit to the budget would be $3.3 billion per year, small enough to be funded by projected surpluses.

Read more: Are most people on the Newstart unemployment benefit for a short or long time?

And it would get smaller. Deloitte Access Economics says that after some years about $1.5 billion per year would return to the budget in extra tax as Newstart recipients and the other beneficiaries spent what they were given and boosted economic growth.

They’d have to.

– ref. It’s Newstart pay rise day. You’re in line for 24 cents, which is peanuts – http://theconversation.com/its-newstart-pay-rise-day-youre-in-line-for-24-cents-which-is-peanuts-123856

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Warren Hogan, Industry Professor, University of Technology Sydney

The budget was for practical purposes in neither deficit nor in surplus in 2018-19, the final figures released by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann on Thursday reveal.

The underlying cash deficit was just A$690 million, which, on the scale of Commonwealth budgets, is close to nothing: 0.0% of GDP.

It’s a $3.5 billion improvement on the forecast made just five months ago in the April budget, and a $13.8 billion improvement on the original estimate for 2018-19 in Scott Morrison’s May 2018 budget.

Read more: Were you paying attention on budget night? Test yourself with this quiz

If there is a surprise in the result, it is that there wasn’t a surplus despite booming commodity prices, stronger than expected employment growth and a massive $4.5 billion saving on the roll out of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Underperformance abounded.

Company tax receipts haven’t changed much from the April estimate, despite much stronger than forecast commodity prices at the end of the financial year. Tobacco taxes came in at just $12.1 billion despite a forecast of $12.9 billion five months ago.

The tax boost is dwindling

Tax receipts from individuals were a little higher than expected in April, due mainly to higher taxes from capital gains and dividends. Personal income taxes were a little lower than expected, perhaps suggesting that the efforts of the Tax Office to make sure individuals pay more tax may have run its course.

If so, it’s good news for the economy, as it suggests consumers might start to enjoy stronger growth in post-tax incomes.

Here’s how Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe expressed his concerns about the Tax Office’s recent success to the Economic Society in May:

Over the past year, tax paid by households increased at a much faster rate than did income; almost 10%, compared with 3.25% – that is a big difference and it is unusual.

Where to now?

With the budget effectively in balance, a surplus in the financial year ahead seems all but assured. With government finances in good health, the next question is what to do with the surplus.

There is, as one commentator said after the release of the final outcome, “a mountain of debt to be repaid”.

That is currently the plan, but there is also a growing call for the government to spend more or cut taxes further to lift consumer spending and economic growth and take pressure off the Reserve Bank.

Neither option grasps the important opportunity that restored government finances present.

The surplus should be used for something special…

Australia’s most serious economic challenge is to reignite productivity growth and get the benefit of that into everyone’s pay packet via higher real wages.

With the election out of the way, now is the perfect time to re-set the economic policy agenda.

Structural reform is politically difficult. Getting out of bad industries and work practices into better ones is painful and hard to sell. But it works. It’s what the Hawke government did for us in the 1980s.

What’s needed is to encourage businesses to invest in technologies and work practises that maximise the output of every hour that people spend at work.

It requires a 20 year view, and it is best done by compensating losers. That’s expensive and can only really be done when finances are in good order, as they have just become.

…not simply spent

Right now the case for short-term stimulus isn’t particularly clear.

We are still waiting to see the effects of the tax refund boosts announced in the 2018 and 2019 budgets. We also need to wait a little longer to see what the impact of rate cuts and the easing of rules governing lending on the housing market and consumers.

The early signs are mixed. The only strong reaction we are seeing is in the Sydney and Melbourne property markets. Auction clearance rates are surging to boom-time levels and property prices are on the rise again.

Read more: Cutting interest rates is just the start. It’s about to become much, much easier to borrow

Consumption seems to have stabilised and consumer attitudes to their own financial positions remain healthy. The latest employment numbers show continued growth while the Treasurer noted that the proportion of working age population on welfare is at its lowest in 30 years.

Until it is clear that the economy is faltering, or employment growth is threatened, I very much doubt that this government will contemplate short-term fiscal stimulus.

It shouldn’t. There are more important uses for its money.

– ref. The big budget question is why the surplus wasn’t big – http://theconversation.com/the-big-budget-question-is-why-the-surplus-wasnt-big-123689

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

This week NBN Co announced pricing changes for the National Broadband Network.

It includes a new plan boasting a download speed of 1 gigabit per second and an upload speed of 50 megabits per second for $80 a month.

These are 20-fold improvements on the maximum NBN speeds now. Almost a decade since the first customers were connected, NBN Co is thinking about a genuinely 21st century offering in terms of speed and price.

The NBN is late, over budget and slow. Australia places 58th globally for fixed-line broadband speed. Not only do the NBN’s advertised speeds lag international standards but the actual speeds often don’t come close to what is promised.

Read more: Logged out: farmers in Far North Queensland are being left behind by the digital economy

Customer interest as a result has been unenthusiastic. NBN Co may well need to take a massive write-down on its assets because they don’t look like they’re worth A$50 billion.

All of this was entirely predictable, based on politicians failing to remember three basic lessons from Economics 101.

1: Technology often outstrips imagination

The history of innovation is littered with examples of remarkably important things being invented with no clear purpose in mind, or by accident, and then exceeding our wildest expectations.

Penicillin and vulcanised rubber (which led to the tyre for automobiles) were both invented by accident. The world wide web was developed as a means of communication among particle physicists. Most of us carry around in our pocket a computer (mobile phone) roughly as powerful than the world’s faster supercomputer circa 1985. Those have turned out to be pretty useful.

When the Coalition decided to scuttle Labor’s NBN plan for fibre-optic cable to every premises, on the basis that “fibre-to-the-node” and using existing copper telephone wires to the premises would be much cheaper, this is what the chief spruiker of the Coalition’s NBN plan, Malcolm Turnbull, said about broadband needs in 2010:

There isn’t much or anything you can do with 100 Mbps that you can’t do with 12 Mbps for residential customers.

The breathtaking lack of insight and imagination in this comment is responsible in no small part for the Flintstonian broadband infrastructure Australia now has.

Prioritising speed of roll-out (which hasn’t even happened) over speed of internet (which sure has happened) was a massive mistake.

2: Positives justify subsidies

You having fast internet is good for me when we connect. When consumers can connect quickly to a business’s website that’s good for the business. It makes it more profitable for businesses to invest in their internet operations. This has benefits for other consumers and even other businesses.

A great illustration of this is in Dunedin, New Zealand, where there have been all sorts of business-to-business spillovers from the city having the fastest internet speeds in Australasia. The ABC’s Four Corners program has highlighted how this has revolutionised New Zealand’s video-game development industry, among other things.

Economists call spillover effects to third parties externalities. Pollution is a negative externality, while the benefit of fast internet is a positive externality.

Read more: Digital inclusion in Tasmania has improved in line with NBN rollout – will the other states follow?

A sound business model for the NBN ought to recognise the positive externalities and ensure they are incorporated into the price mechanism, by offering a partial subsidy to encourage people to sign up. Like the reverse of a carbon price.

One of the NBN’s key problems is the way successive governments structured national investment in it. Setting up NBN Co as a quasi-corporate entity needing to make a commercial rate of return on the roughly A$50 billion investment in the network was a huge mistake. It was the opposite of providing a subsidy.

The telecommunications companies who retail the NBN have complained that NBN Co’s wholesale price points mean it is hard for resellers to make a profit. It’s a kind of quality death spiral: an unattractive product means fewer people buy it, leading to the product getting worse, leading to even fewer people buying it.

3: Uniform pricing doesn’t work

Finally, it’s never a good idea to charge everyone the same price when there are different costs to serve different people.

The idea was that higher returns from easy-to-service city homes would subsidise the higher costs of service homes in regional and remote areas. But city homes, precisely because they are cheaper to service, have other options. If not enough city customers signed up to the NBN, prices would be driven up, making the network even less attractive to city customers. It’s textbook adverse selection, just like in health-insurance markets.

The government tried to get around this by banning competition. But that’s never really possible, especially from technologies not yet invented. Like 5G. The 2010 business case assumed no more than 16% of households would go wireless. Oops.

As economic journalist Peter Martin wrote in 2011:

NBN will never make a return on the cost of its capital or meet its customer targets if it faces competition. Its corporate plan says so, at point 1: “The plan assumes effective regulatory protection to prevent opportunistic cherry picking […] the viability of the project is dependent upon this protection.”

What to do from here

Multiple governments have bungled the NBN. But there is a way to salvage things – a bit.

Holding constant the technology (fibre-to-the-node), the best thing the government could do is write down its investment massively – ideally so low that it can flog NBN Co off to someone who can be subject to access regulation – ensuring, like other utilities, ownership of infrastructure doesn’t stymie competition – and make a modest rate of return.

Read more: What should be done with the NBN in the long run?

Our super funds are always sticking up their hands for infrastructure investment. This would be a good one.

Ideally, though, the technology should be fixed. Fibre-to-the-premises was always going to be expensive, but it was also going to be fast, and as future-proof as we could get.

Lack of imagination and inability to think past 12 Mbps less than ten years ago should not hold the nation back now.

– ref. Vital Signs: NBN’s new price plans are too little, too late – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-nbns-new-price-plans-are-too-little-too-late-123750

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative writing, University of Melbourne

Friendship is an incomparable, immeasurable boon to me, and a source of life — not metaphorically but literally.

-Simone Weil

About eight years ago, I went to dinner with a dear friend I had known for more than 40 years. It would be the last time we would see each other and by the end of that evening I was deeply shaken. But more lasting and more unsettling than this has been the feeling of loss without his friendship. It was a sudden ending but it was also an ending that lasted for me well beyond that evening. I have worried since then at what kind of friend I am to my friends, and why a friendship can suddenly self-destruct while others can so unexpectedly bloom.

My friend and I were used to going to dinner together, though it had become an increasingly tricky matter for us. We had been seeing each other more infrequently, and our conversations had been tending towards repetition. I still enjoyed his passion for talk, his willingness to be puzzled by life’s events, our comically growing list of minor ailments as we entered our sixties, and the old stories he fell back on — usually stories of his minor triumphs, such as the time his car burst into fire, was declared a write-off by insurance, and ended in an auction house where he bought it back with part of the insurance payout and only minor repairs to be made. There were stories of his time as a barman in one of Melbourne’s roughest pubs. I suppose in a lot of long-lasting friendships it is these repeated stories of the past that can fill the present so richly.

Nevertheless, both his opinions and mine seemed to have become too predictable. Even his desire to come up with the most unpredictable viewpoint on any problem was a routine I expected from him. Each of us knew the weaknesses in the other’s thinking, and we had learned not to go too far with some topics, which were of course the most interesting and important ones.

He knew how politically correct I could be, and shrewdly enough he had no time for my self-righteousness, the predictability of my views on gender, race and climate. I understood this. He knew too that his fiercely independent thinking was often just the usual rant against greenies or lefties. Something had begun to fail in our friendship, but I could not properly perceive this or speak of it.

We were a contrasting pair. He was a big man with an aggressive edge to his gregarious nature, while I was lean, short and physically slight next to him, a much more reserved person altogether. I liked his size because big men have been protective figures in my life. At times when I felt threatened I would ask him to come with me to a meeting or a transaction, and just stand next to me in his big way. During one long period of trouble with our neighbours he would visit when the tension was high to show his formidable presence and his solidarity with us.

I was always reading and knew how to talk books, while he was too restless to read much. He knew how to sing, bursting into song occasionally when we were together. He had been unable to work professionally since a breakdown that was both physical and mental. By contrast, I was working steadily, never quite as free with my time as he was.

Nearly two years before our last dinner together his wife had suddenly left him. As it turned out, she had been planning her departure for some time, but when she went he was taken by surprise. I saw a more confused and fragile side of him during those months when we would meet and talk through how he was dealing with their counselling sessions, and then how the negotiations were proceeding over belongings and finally the family house. He was learning to live alone for the first time since he had been a young man, and was exploring what it might be like to seek out new relationships.

Read more: Research Check: is it true only half your friends actually like you?

A safe haven

We had met when I was a first-year university student boarding at my grandmother’s home in an inner Melbourne suburb. I was studying for a Bachelor of Arts, staying up through the nights, discovering literature, music, history, cask wine, dope, girls and ideas.

He lived in a flat a few doors away in a street behind my grandmother’s place, and I remember it was the local parish youth group, or the remnants of one, that used to meet in his flat. In my friend’s flat we would lie around the floor, half a dozen of us, drinking, flirting, arguing about religion or politics until the night was strung out in our heads, tight and thin and vibrating with possibilities. I loved that sudden intimate and intellectually rich contact with people my own age.

My friend and I started up a coffee lounge in an old disused shopfront as a meeting place for youth who would otherwise be on the street. I was the one who became immersed in the chaotic life of the place as students, musicians, misfits, hopeful poets and petty criminals floated through the shop, while my friend kept his eye on the broader picture that involved real estate agents, local councils, supplies of coffee, income and expenditure.

Perhaps the experience helped delay my own adulthood, allowing me time to try out a bohemian, communal alternative lifestyle that was so important to some of us in the early 1970s. My friend, though, was soon married. It was as if he had been living a parallel life outside our friendship, outside the youth group, coffee shop, jug band, drugs and misadventures of our project.

This did not break us up, and in fact after his marriage he became another kind of friend. I was at times struggling to find some steady sense of myself. Sometimes in those years I would not be able to talk or even be near others, and I remember once when I felt like this I went to my newly married friend’s home, and asked if I could lie on the floor in the corner of their lounge room for a few days until I felt better.

They indulged me. I felt it was this haven that saved me then, giving me the time to recoup and giving me a sense that there was somewhere I could go where the world was safe and neutral.

In time, and more bumpily and uncertainly than my friend, I was with a partner raising a family. He was often involved in our children’s birthdays, other celebrations, our house-moving, and just dropping in on family meals. It worked for us. I remember him lifting our cast iron wood-burning stove into its place in our first renovated Brunswick cottage. He lived in a more sprawling home near bushland on the edge of Melbourne, so one of my pleasures became the long cycling trips out to see him.

My partner and I were embraced by a local community thanks to the childcare centre, kinders, schools and sport. Lasting friendships (for us and for our children) grew in the tentative, open-ended, slightly blindly feeling way of friendships. Through this decade and a half though, the particular friendship with my songful friend held, perhaps to the surprise of both of us.

‘Tolerating much, for the sake of best intentions’

In his thoroughly likeable 1993 book on friendship, the political scientist Graham Little wrote under the bright light of writings by Aristotle and Freud, that the purest kind of friendship “welcomes the different ways people are alive to life and tolerates much in a friend for the sake of best intentions”.

Here perhaps is the closest I have seen to a definition of friendship at its best: a stance imbued with sympathy, interest and excitement directed at another despite all that otherwise shows we are flawed and dangerous creatures.

On that evening, the evening of the last time we went out to dinner together, I did push my friend towards one of the topics we usually avoided. I had been wanting him to acknowledge and even apologise for his behaviour towards some young women he had spoken to, I thought, lewdly and insultingly nearly a year before in my home at a party. The women and those of us who had witnessed his behaviour felt continuing tension over his refusal to discuss the fact that he had wanted to speak so insultingly to them and then had done it in our home in front of us. For me, there was some element of betrayal, not only in the way he had behaved but in his continued refusal to discuss what had happened.

The women were drunk, he said, just as he had said the last time I tried to talk to him about this. They were wearing almost nothing, he said, and what he’d said to them was no more than they were expecting. My friend and I were sitting in a popular Thai restaurant on Sydney Road: metal chairs, plastic tables, concrete floor. It was noisy, packed with students, young couples and groups out for a cheap and tasty meal. A waitress had put menus, water and beer on our table while she waited for us to decide on our meals. Wanting to push finally past this impasse, I pointed out to him that the women had not insulted him, he had insulted them.

If that’s the way you want it, he replied, and placed his hands on each side of the table, hurling it into the air and walking out of the restaurant as table, bottles, glasses, water and beer came clattering and smashing down around me. The whole restaurant fell silent. I could not move for some time. The waitress began mopping up the floor around me. Someone called out, “Hey, are you all right?”

This was the last time I saw or heard from him. For many months, I thought of him every day, then slowly I thought of him less often, until now I can think of him more or less at will, and not find myself ashamed of the way I went for him in a conversation where I should have been perhaps more alive to whatever was troubling him.

Improvised, tentative

For some years after this, I felt I had to learn how to be myself without him. I have read articles and essays since then about how pitiful men can be at friendship. We are apparently too competitive, we base our friendships on common activities, which means we can avoid talking openly about our feelings and thoughts. I don’t know about this “male deficit model”, as some sociologists call it, but I do know that the loss of this friendship took with it a big part of my shared personal history at that time. It dented my confidence in ever having properly known this man or understood our friendship — or in knowing how secure any friendship might be.

I was drawn to read and re-read Michel de Montaigne’s gentle and strangely extreme essay on friendship where he was so certain that he knew with perfection what his friend would think and say and value. He wrote of his friend, Etienne de Boëtie, “Not only did I know his mind as well as I knew my own but I would have entrusted myself to him with greater assurance than to myself.”

Against this perfection of understanding between friends, there is George Eliot’s odd excursion into science fiction in her 1859 novel, The Lifted Veil. Her narrator, Latimer, finds he can perceive perfectly clearly the thoughts of all the people around him. He becomes disgusted and deeply disturbed by the petty self-interest he apparently discovers within everyone.

After 40 years of shared history, there was not the disgust Eliot writes of, nor Montaigne’s perfect union of mind and trust between me and my burly friend, but there was, I had thought, a foundation of knowledge whereby we took each other’s differences into ourselves, as well as our common histories of the cafe we had run, and as it happened our common serving of time in semi-monastic seminaries before we’d met — differences and similarities that had given us, I thought, ways of being in sympathy with each other while allowing for each other.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Michel de Montaigne’s Essays

Montaigne’s dearest friend, Etienne, had died, and his essay was as much about the meaning of this loss as about friendship. His big idea was loyalty, and I think I understand that, though not in the absolute way Montaigne wrote of it.

Loyalty is only real if it is constantly renewed. I worry that I have not worked enough at some friendships that have come into my life, but have let them happen more passively than the women I know who spend such time, and such complicated time, exploring and testing friendships. The sudden disappearance of my friend left me with an awareness of how patched-together, how improvised, clumsy and tentative even the most secure-seeming friendship can be.

When the philosopher and brilliant essayist, Simone Weil wrote shortly before she died in 1943,

I may lose, at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever that I possess, including things that are so intimately mine that I consider them as myself. There is nothing that I might not lose. It could happen at any moment ….

she seemed to be touching on the difficult truth that we run on luck and hope and chance much of the time. Why haven’t I worked harder at friendships, when I know that they provide the real meaning in my life?

Some years ago, when I was told by a medical specialist that I had a 30% chance of having cancer, as I waited for the results of a biopsy, I remember that in response to these dismal odds I had no desire to go back to work, no desire to even read — all I wanted to do was spend time with friends.

Inner worlds laid waste

To know what it is we care about, this is a gift. It should be straightforward to know this and keep it present in our lives, but it can prove to be difficult. Being the reader that I am, I have always turned to literature and fiction for answers or insights into those questions that seem to need answering.

I realised some time after the ending of my friendship that I had been reading novels dealing with friendship, and was not even sure how consciously I had chosen them.

For instance, I read The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber, a novel about a Christian preacher, Peter Leigh, sent to convert aliens in a galaxy ludicrously far from earth on a planet with an equally unlikely atmosphere benign to its human colonisers.

It is a novel about whether Leigh can be any kind of adequate friend to his wife left behind on Earth, and whether his new feelings for these aliens amounts to friendship. Though my suspension of disbelief was precarious, I found myself caring about these characters and their relationships, even the grotesquely shapeless aliens. Partly I cared about them because the book read like an essay testing ideas of friendship and loyalty that were important and urgent to the writer.

I also read at that time Haruki Murakami’s novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, a book that came with a little game of coloured cards and stickers, and I found that I cared about Tsukuru Tazaki too, for I felt all along that Murakami’s character was a thin and endearing disguise for himself (what a beautiful word that is, “en-dearing”).

The novel centred on lost friendships. I heard a tone in its voice that was the oddly flat, persistent, vulnerable and sincere searching of a man for connection with others. If Murakami’s novel has a proposition it wishes to test it would be that we only know ourselves in what images of ourselves we receive back from our friends. Without our friends we become invisible, lost.

In both those novels, the friendships are crashing to pieces in slow motion in front of the reader’s helpless eyes. I wanted to shake those characters, tell them to stop and think about what they were doing, but at the same time I saw in them mirrors of myself and my experiences.

I read John Berger too, on the way a human looks across an abyss of incomprehension when looking at another animal. Though language seems to connect us, it might be that language also distracts us from the actual abyss of ignorance and fear between all of us as we look, across, at each other. In his book on the savage mind, Lévi-Strauss quotes a study of Canadian Carrier Indians living on the Bulkley River who were able to cross that abyss between species, believing they knew what animals did and what their needs were because their men had been married to the salmon, the beaver and the bear.

I have read essays by Robin Dunbar on the evolutionary limits to our circles of intimacy, where he suggests that for most of us there needs to be three or maybe five truly close friends. These are the ones we lean towards with tenderness and open ourselves to with endless curiosity — those in whom we seek only the good.

My partner can name quickly four friends who qualify for her as part of this necessary circle. I find I can name two (and she is one of them), then a constellation of individual friends whose closeness to me I can’t easily measure. It is this constellation that sustains me.

Recently I was away from home for three months. After two weeks away I wrote a list in the back of my diary of the friends I was missing. A little more than a dozen of these were the friends, men and women, with whom I need contact, and with whom conversations are always open-ended, surprising, intellectually stimulating, sometimes intimate, and often fun. With each of them I explore a slightly different but always essential version of myself. Graham Little wrote that “ideal soulmates are friends who are fully aware that each has himself as his main life project”.

To live this takes some effort of imagination, and with my friend at dinner that night I might in myself have been refusing to make this effort.

There are also, it occurs to me, the friends who came as couples, with whom my partner and I share time as couples. This is itself another manifestation of friendship, one that crosses over into community, tribe and family — and no less precious than the individual intimacy of a personal friendship. For reasons I can’t properly fathom, the importance of this kind of time with coupled friends has deepened as I have grown through the decades of my fifties and sixties.

Perhaps it is that the dance of conversation and ideas is so much more complex and pleasurable when there are four or more contributing. It could be too that I am absolved from the responsibility of really working at these friendships in the way one must when there are two of us. Or it might be the pang and stimulus of the knowledge that opportunities to be together are brutally diminishing as we grow older.

But to lose an individual friend from one’s closest circle is to have large tracts of one’s inner world laid waste for a time. My feelings over the end of this particular friendship were a kind of grief mixed with bewilderment.

It was not that the friendship was necessary to my existence, but that perhaps through habit and sympathy it had become a fixed part of my identity. Robin Dunbar would say that by stepping away from this friendship I had made room for someone else to slip in to my circle of most intimate friends, but isn’t it the point of such close friends that they are in some important sense irreplaceable? This is the source of much of our distress when such friendships end.

Still learning

When I told people about what had happened in the restaurant that night, they would say, reasonably, “Why don’t you patch things up and resume your friendship?”

As I imagined how a conversation might go if I did meet my friend again, I came to understand that I had been a provocation to him. I had ceased to be the friend he needed, wanted or imagined.

What he did was dramatic. He might have called it merely dramatic. I felt it as threatening. Though I cannot help but think I provoked him. And if we had “patched” a friendship back together, on whose terms would this have been conducted? Would it always be that I would have to agree not to press him on questions that might lead him to throw over some table between us again?

Or worse, would I have to witness his apology, forgive him myself, and put him on his best behaviour for the rest of our friendship?

Neither of those outcomes would have patched much together. I had been hurting too over what I saw as his lack of willingness or interest to understand the situation from my point of view. And so it went inside me as the table and the water and the beer and the glasses came crashing down around me. I had been, in a way, married to my friend, even if he was a salmon or a bear — a creature across an abyss from me. Perhaps this was the only way out of that marriage. Perhaps he had been preparing for (moving towards?) this moment more consciously than I had been.

The ending of this friendship, it is clear, left me looking for its story. It was as if all along there must have been a narrative with a trajectory carrying us in this direction. A story is of course a way of testing whether an experience can take on a shape. Murakami’s and Faber’s novels are not themselves full-blown stories, for there is almost no plot, no shape, to their stumbling episodic structures, and oddly enough in both books the self-doubting lovers might or might not find that close communion with another somewhere well beyond the last page of each novel.

These novels cohere round a series of questions rather than events: what do we know and what can we know about others, what is the nature of the distance that separates one person from another, how provisional is it to know someone anyway, and what does it mean to care about someone, even someone who is a character in a novel?

When an Indian says he is married to a salmon, this can be no stranger than me saying I spent a couple of weeks on a humid planet in another galaxy with an astronaut who is a Christian preacher and an inept husband, or I spent last night in Tokyo with an engineer who builds railway stations and believes himself to be colourless, though at least two women have told him he is full of colour. But do I go to this story-making as a way of keeping my experiences less personal and more cerebral?

When I got home that night eight years ago, I sat at my kitchen table, shaking, hugging myself, talking to my grown-up children about what happened. It was the talking that helped — a narrative taking shape.

Dunbar, like me, like all of us, worries at the question of what makes life so richly present to us, and why friendships seem to be at the core of this meaningfulness. He has been surveying Americans with questions about friendship for several decades, and he concludes that for many of us the small circle of intimate friendships we experience is reducing.

We are apparently lucky now, on average, if there are two people in our lives we can approach with tenderness and curiosity, with that assumption that time will not matter as we talk in a low, murmuring, hive-warm way to a close friend.

My friend cannot be replaced, and it might be that we did not in the end imagine each other fully enough or accurately enough as we approached that last encounter. I don’t know precisely what our failure was. The shock of what happened and the shock of the friendship ending has over the time since that dinner become a part of my history in which I remember feeling grief but am no longer caught in confused anger or guilt over it. The story of it might not have ended but it has subsided.

Perhaps in all friendships we are not only, at our best, agreeing to encountering the unique and endlessly absorbing presence of another person, but unknown to us we’re learning something about how to approach the next friendship in our lives. There is something comically inept and endearing about the possibility that one might still be learning how to be a friend right up to the end of life.

– ref. Friday essay: on the ending of a friendship – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-on-the-ending-of-a-friendship-121627

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

John Howard is remembered by his Liberal tribe as a reformer, but his legacy is mixed. The GST has endured but he essentially doomed his government when he let his ideological obsession with industrial relations run away with him.

The Liberals lost the next election, and had to stand by as Labor dismantled WorkChoices.

Now a subsequent Liberal government is starting on workplace change, with industrial relations minister Christian Porter on Thursday releasing the first discussion papers.

It’s early days and in politics sheep can always put on wolves’ clothing. But on what we see, the measured approach of Scott Morrison and Porter is a far cry from that of Howard and likely to be more successful and lasting.

That’s not to ignore the government’s tough stand against militant unionism. The Ensuring Integrity bill from last term is back, and its prospects – provided there is some fine tuning – appear better this time, thanks in no small part to the antics of John Setka.

(On Thursday the Senate referred Setka to the privileges committee which will investigate the claim his comments at a private union meeting amounted to a threat against Centre Alliance senators in relation to their vote on the integrity bill. The CFMEU immediately declared it looked forward to appearing before the committee.)

More broadly, the government says industrial relations changes should meet three criteria: they need to create jobs and put upward pressure on wages, boost productivity, and promote economic growth.

Read more: How the major parties stack up on industrial relations policy

Porter, in his Thursday address to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), said the matters selected for scrutiny were based on what stakeholders had been telling the government.

The first two discussion papers cover proposed criminal penalties for wage theft, and extending the permitted length of greenfields enterprise agreements for major projects.

They have been chosen strategically. The second is relatively uncontroversial. The first is pitched towards workers.

These will be followed by papers on the building code that applies to Commonwealth-funded building work; casual employment; the small business fair dismissal code, and several aspects of enterprise bargaining. Some of these will be more controversial than the initial ones.

Porter sought to put the need for change in perspective: “the present system benefits from the great virtue that in most sectors most of the time it is a relatively orderly rules based system”.

Howard went for root-and-branch change; the Morrison government is looking for incremental reform.

Morrison is not an industrial relations crusader. Crucially, in all areas he is outcomes-oriented. He wants the changes he seeks to get through the Senate, where he would need crossbench support. Having unexpectedly won control of the Senate at the 2004 election, Howard had no check on his ambitions.

As Porter puts it, there are two crucial questions before a government wanting IR changes: what improvements are most important to strengthening the economy and “what possible changes can achieve a significant enough degree of consensus that they can be supported through parliament?”

Read more: Jacqui Lambie mixes battler politics with populism to make her swing vote count

Unsurprisingly, wrangling legislation through the upper house preoccupies the government. The Senate this term, with its smaller crossbench, is easier to deal with, though not necessarily easy. The half a dozen non-Green crossbenchers include Cory Bernardi (now in practice a government vote), two One Nation senators, two from Centre Alliance and Jacqui Lambie.

When Labor and the Greens vote against legislation the Coalition needs four of these crossbenchers to carry it. The government is shameless in throwing them bones of various shapes and sizes.

For Lambie’s support on the tax package, it forgave Tasmania’s $157.6 million housing debt.

This week Pauline Hanson was given a win, for past and future favours, when the government announced a joint parliamentary committee would examine the family law system.

Hanson, who thinks men get a bad deal in the system, has been constantly agitating for an inquiry, including putting some draft terms of reference to Porter. On Tuesday came the statement from Morrison and Porter.

The government is appointing as chairman Kevin Andrews, a Liberal conservative with a strong, long-term interest in and commitment to marriage counselling. It is backing Hanson as deputy chair (a position formally chosen by the committee). Of the ten-member committee five will be from the government; the ALP (which opposed the inquiry) will have three, and there will be one lower house crossbencher (Zali Steggall, who as a barrister specialised in family law).

This inquiry, though supported by the Law Council of Australia, seems unnecessary and is provocative.

Unnecessary, because the government already has a detailed report from the Australian Law Reform Commission, which it asked for, with a large number of recommendations on family law policy. That came earlier this year and the government has yet to address it. There was also a parliamentary inquiry last term that focused on protecting people affected by domestic violence in the family court system. There has been a plethora of other reviews over the past decade.

Provocative, because it is all about Hanson.

She caused immediate outrage after the announcement by her comment that “a lot of the women out there abuse the system by instigating false DVOs against their former partners or their husbands. They use that to further their needs”.

She also said: “In legislation there is 50/50 custody but it is at the discretion of the judges and I don’t think that is good enough.”

Read more: A new family ‘super court’ may not save time or result in better judgments

Anti-domestic violence campaigner Rosie Batty said in reply to Hanson’s DVO claim: “Obviously there are some women who do abuse the system, but overwhelmingly we know that one woman a week is being murdered at the hands of a violent man”.

Batty said Hanson’s comments showed she already had an agenda. “It cannot possibly be an unbiased inquiry with these two people heading it up,” she said.

The family law system is one of the most fraught and sensitive policy areas. It is more than unfortunate that it has become a pawn in the wider Senate play. This is all about politics. It’s far from a best practice path to reform of a system that affects so many people – critically, so many children.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Morrison government solid on industrial relations reform but bootlicks One Nation on family law – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-morrison-government-solid-on-industrial-relations-reform-but-bootlicks-one-nation-on-family-law-123880

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liz Hanna, Honorary Senior Fellow, Australian National University

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

Global warming is accelerating, driven by the continuing rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Australia’s climate has warmed by just over 1°C since 1910, with global temperatures on course for a 3-5°C rise this century.

Australia is ahead of the global temperature curve. Our average daily temperature is 21.8°C – that’s 13.7°C warmer than the global average of 8.1°C.

Heat extremes (days above 35°C and nights above 20°C) are now more frequent in Australia, occurring around 12% of the time compared to around 2% of the time between 1951 and 1980.

So what do high temperatures do to our bodies? And how much extra heat can people and our way of living tolerate?

More scorchers ahead

Australia’s summer of 2018-19 was 2.14°C warmer than the 1961–90 average, breaking the previous record set in 2012–13 by a large margin. It included an unprecedented sequence of five consecutive days with nationally averaged maximum temperatures above 40°C.

Read more: The reality of living with 50℃ temperatures in our major cities

The first half of 2019 ranks as the equal second hottest since records began for the world, and also Australia.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has warned this summer will be another scorcher. Hot dry northerly winds tracking across drought-affected New South Wales and Queensland have the capacity to deliver blistering heat and extreme fire risks to the southern states, and little relief is in sight for those in drought.

Some rural Australians have already been exposed to 50°C days, and the major southern metro cities are set to do the same within the next decade or so.

How our bodies regulate heat

Like most mammals and birds, humans are endotherms (warm-blooded), meaning our optimal internal operating temperature (approximately 36.8°C +/− 0.5) is minimally influenced by ambient temperatures.

Quietly sitting indoors with the air temperature about 22°C, we passively generate that additional 15°C to keep our core temperature at about 37°C.

Even when the air temperature is 37°C, our metabolism continues to generate additional heat. This excess internal heat is shed into the environment through the evaporation of sweat from our skin.

Temperature and humidity gradients between the skin surface and boundary layer of air determine the rate of heat exchange.

When the surrounding air is hot and humid, heat loss is slow, we store heat, and our temperatures rises.

That’s why hot, dry air is better tolerated than tropical, humid heat: dry air readily absorbs sweat.

A breeze appears refreshing by dislodging the boundary layer of saturated air in contact with the skin and allowing in drier air – thus speeding up evaporation and heat shedding.

What happens when we overheat?

Heat exposure becomes potentially lethal when the human body cannot lose sufficient heat to maintain a safe core temperature.

When our core temperature reaches 38.5°C, most would feel fatigued. And the cascade of symptoms escalate as the core temperature continues to rise beyond the safe functioning range for our critical organs: the heart, brain and kidneys.

Much like an egg in a microwave, protein within our body changes when exposed to heat.

Read more: How heat can make your body melt down from the inside out

While some heat-acclimatised elite athletes, such as Tour de France cyclists, may tolerate 40°C for limited periods, this temperature is potentially lethal for most people.

As a pump, the heart’s role is to maintain an effective blood pressure. It fills the hot and dilated blood vessels throughout the body to get blood to vital organs.

Exposure to extreme heat places significant additional workload on the heart. It must increase the force of each contraction and the rate of contractions per minute (your heart rate).

If muscles are also working, they also need an increased blood flow.

If all this occurs at a time when profuse sweating has led to dehydration, and therefore lower blood volume, the heart must massively increase its work.

The heart is also a muscle, so it too needs extra blood supply when working hard. But when pumping hard and fast and its own demand for blood flow is not matched by its supply, it can fail. Many heat deaths are recorded as heart attacks.

High aerobic fitness levels offer some heat protection, yet athletes and fit young adults pushing themselves too hard also die in the heat.

Who is more at risk?

Older Australians are more vulnerable to heat stress. Age is commonly associated with poorer aerobic fitness and impaired ability to detect thirst and overheating.

Read more: To keep heatwaves at bay, aged care residents deserve better quality homes

Obesity also increases this vulnerability. Fat acts as an insulating layer, as well as giving the heart a more extensive network of blood vessels to fill. The additional weight requires increased heat-generating muscular effort to move.

Certain medications can lower heat tolerance by interfering with our natural mechanisms necessary to cope with the heat. These include drugs that limit increases in heart rate, lower blood pressure by relaxing blood vessels, or interfere with sweating.

Core temperatures are increased by about half a degree during late stage pregnancy due to hormonal responses and increased metabolic rate. The growing foetus and placenta also demand additional blood flow. Exposure of the fetus to heat extremes can precipitate preterm birth and life-long health problems such as congential heart defects.

Won’t we just acclimatise?

Our bodies can acclimatise to hot temperatures, but this process has its limits. Some temperatures are simply too hot for the heart to cope with and for sweat rates to provide effective cooling, especially if we need to move or exercise.

We’re also limited by our kidneys’ capacity to conserve water and electrolytes, and the upper limit to the amount of water the human gut can absorb.

Profuse sweating leads to fluid and electrolyte deficits and the resulting electrolyte imbalance can interfere with the heart rhythm.

Mass death events are now occurring during heat waves in traditionally hot countries such as India and Pakistan. This is when heat extremes approaching 50°C exceed the human body’s capacity to maintain its safe core temperature range.

Read more: Could we acclimatise to the hotter summers to come?

Heatwaves are hotter, more frequent and lasting longer. We can’t live life entirely indoors with air conditioning as we need to venture outdoors to commute, work, shop, and care for the vulnerable. People, animals and our social systems depend on this.

Besides, on a 50°C day, air conditioning units will struggle to remove 25°C from the ambient air.

– ref. How rising temperatures affect our health – http://theconversation.com/how-rising-temperatures-affect-our-health-123016

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mary Anne Kenny, Associate Professor, School of Law, Murdoch University

Today, the Sri Lankan family who had resettled in the small town of Biloela in Queensland was given a last-minute reprieve in their fight to stay in Australia. A federal court judge ruled the family had established a prima facie case to remain in the country until a final hearing at a date yet to be determined.

The family of four are part of a group of asylum seekers and refugees who arrived in Australia by boat between August 2012 and January 2014. Their case highlights some of the problems with the “fast-track” refugee assessment system set up by the Coalition government in late 2014 to handle the flood of boat arrivals.

The system was intended to deny access to permanent residency for the refugees and create a faster system for processing their asylum claims.

In practice, however, it has been marked by prolonged delays and restrictions on the types of visas available to the refugees, contributing to their mental deterioration and despair.

The “fast-track assessment caseload” includes individuals, families and children who arrived by boat during that 18-month period from 2012-14. It also includes children born after their arrival, like the Biloela couple’s children, Kopica and Tharuunica.

It is estimated there are currently around 31,000 individuals in this group, some of whom still remain in limbo while their status is determined by the government.

The Australian Human Rights Commission raised deep concerns around the treatment and well-being of these refugees in a report in July.

We have also conducted research into the many barriers faced by the people in the caseload in terms of their access to legal representation and ability to understand the process. We have also examined the decline in their overall mental health and well-being.

According to the Monash University Australian Border Deaths Database and our own research, there have been at least 18 deaths by suspected or confirmed suicide in the caseload since June 2014.

Endless paperwork and delays

Policy and legislative changes in recent years have resulted in the group of refugees in the “fast-track” caseload being subjected to different treatment compared to other asylum seekers. The reason was to further discourage people from risking the journey by boat.

They were barred from applying for any visas until 2015 when the then-minister for immigration, Peter Dutton, started inviting them to apply for temporary protection visas under the new “fast track” process.

In 2014, the government abolished most of the funding dedicated to helping boat arrivals with advice and assistance on immigration. As a result, wait-lists for pro bono legal assistance at community legal centres blew out to over one year.

Read more: Sri Lankan asylum seekers are being deported from Australia despite fears of torture

Asylum seekers were then given a deadline of October 1, 2017 to lodge their protection claims, which placed huge strains on the pro bono legal community. The application process itself is incredibly complex, involving the completion of lengthy forms in English, taking at a minimum 10–15 hours to complete.

Since then, these asylum seekers have been subjected to extended delays. Department of Home Affairs statistics from July 2019 show that of the 31,000 in the initial “fast track” caseload, there are nearly 8,200 waiting for their cases to be dealt with.

This means that, in total, these asylum seekers have been waiting almost seven years for their visa applications to be processed.

Trapped in visa limbo

Despite these hurdles, approximately 70% of those in the “fast-track” caseload have been found to be owed protection and provided with temporary visas to remain in Australia.

They are not, however, eligible for permanent protection. They are only granted either a three-year Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) or a five-year Safe Haven Enterprise Visa (SHEV).

For most, the granting of one of these visas provides no relief. Their temporary status means they cannot seek reunification with family members overseas. And because all of their visas will have to reassessed when they expire, the uncertainty surrounding their lives never fully goes away.

Read more: We don’t know how many asylum seekers are turned away at Australian airports

Those who have their temporary visa applications refused by the Department of Home Affairs have access to a limited merits review by the independent Immigration Assessment Authority (IAA). The IAA only considers new information if there are exceptional circumstances. And in 87% of cases, it affirms the decision of the Department of Home Affairs.

Statistics show that in cases involving applicants claiming asylum from Sri Lanka, the IAA agrees with the initial visa refusal in 93% of cases.

The reduction in funding for legal assistance, combined with the lack of access to a robust system of review, has led the Australian Human Rights Commission to conclude that some individuals may have been refused visas despite having good claims for refugee status.

Others have pointed to serious issues in the application process for the Biloela family, in particular the mother, Priya.

Impact on mental health

For those unable to work while their immigration status is in limbo, the government provides extremely limited financial and case management support. According to a recent survey of asylum seekers, nearly four in five reported being at risk of homelessness or destitution if they lost this limited government support.

Those who remain on temporary visas for years while their fates are being determined feel deeply marginalised and disenfranchised.

They also face a minimum of ten years on a temporary visa without the prospect of reuniting permanently with separated family members, creating a subclass of people who likely will never feel that they “belong” in Australia or are fully settled.

Read more: How immigration policy harms asylum seekers’ mental health

Given such concerns, and in the absence of any shift in policy, we set up a crowdfunding campaign to provide suicide prevention training for non-government and government-sector workers supporting refugees and asylum seekers. The results so far are promising. More than 400 workers across Australia have taken part in the training.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has also put forth its serious concerns about the robustness of the fast-track process.

The commission has recommended that those refused visas should be able to have their cases re-examined in a full merits review by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. This would provide them with a new hearing and allow for the consideration of all their claims, including any new information.

Until this happens, the commission further recommends that the Australian government not remove any asylum seeker who has been refused under the fast-track process.

Reforms to the current system for the processing and granting of visas are urgently needed. It is also critical for the government to provide adequate legal and mental health support for those in the fast track caseload. Suicide-related despair for this group is excruciating and unendurable. Lives matter irrespective of the politics.

– ref. How the Biloela Tamil family deportation case highlights the failures of our refugee system – http://theconversation.com/how-the-biloela-tamil-family-deportation-case-highlights-the-failures-of-our-refugee-system-123685

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sebastien Darchen, Senior Lecturer in Planning, The University of Queensland

The crashing chords of punk echoed through the end of the 70s, heralding the arrival of a diverse bunch of subcultures. In Brisbane, none was more notable than the tribe known as Goth.

Just like the punks before them, they had a deep commitment to visual style – black clothes, big hair, whiteface with the streak of red, young eyes peering from lakes of kohl. No visible skin. They were as close to vampiric as we had yet seen – that they might dissolve with a whispered howl in our sub-tropical summer seemed quite likely.

Inspired by the Sex Pistols, British Goth pioneers Siouxsie Sioux and Steve Severin had started The Banshees in 1976, on the way borrowing from contemporaries like The Slits, and Magazine. By the time the 80s arrived, they had developed a unique musical persona.

The songs were dancy, literate, smart and funny, with psychedelic guitars and skittering tom-toms, influenced by The Velvet Underground and The Doors, Rimbaud and Shelley, Poe and Wilde – mood was everything. After touring with The Banshees in 1979, The Cure’s Robert Smith changed not only his band’s sound but his look. With UK DECAY, Joy Division and Bauhaus, a dark army was rising.

There were Australian bands dropping in to Brisbane in the 80s that can be included under the cowl of Australian Gothic, though they disavow any connection to the scene. The Birthday Party’s Nick Cave was inspired by quintessential goth poets like Baudelaire, while gloomy Melbourne also produced Dead Can Dance, whose drum-driven, howling sound and dark album art was described as “Goth as it gets”.

Read more: Australian Gothic: from Hanging Rock to Nick Cave and Kylie, this genre explores our dark side

As the subculture bloomed in Britain in the early 1980s, Brisbane was in sync, thanks to import record stores like Rocking Horse Records, and music/pop culture press like NME, Melody Maker and The Face. Brisbanites Karen Litzow and Stephen Crowther started fashion label Salon Dada to make clothes as darkly original as the music.

The imported vinyl was played on community radio station 4ZZZ by DJs who were also instrumental in the growing the city’s club scene, which formed the spine of Goth subculture in the 80s.

Swampies and Morticia’s

DJs Jane Grigg and Peter Mogg both spun 12″ tracks on 4ZZZ, treating disparate, desperate suburban youth to new releases from bands like The Fall, Sisters of Mercy and The Cult. They started Club Vortex d’Junk in 1985, screaming that punk was “DEAD and BURIED.” It was unique and vital, and short-lived.

Around the same time, Ian Whittred and Jonny Griffin were building their own audience. First with the club Hades, and then Morticia’s in 1987, they created a home for the Goths and “swampies” – a peculiarly Australian variant who dolled up the black with a touch of paisley and loved The Church, The Scientists, Wall of Voodoo and The Gun Club.

Morticia’s became the Goth mainstay in the Brisbane club scene, moving from venue to venue through the late 80s and 90s as landlord greed or room size forced their hand. From Warhols to the Canberra Hotel (a teetotalling Country Party throwback) to the Brisbane Music Hall, the crowd danced and smoked and loved one another.

Morticia’s gave way to new clubs and new venues, like Junkyard, Midian, and Industry, with a lineage that leads to the current day.

Read more: My favourite album: The Cure’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me

On Sunday nights today on 4ZZZ, DJ Doom presents Batcave, where she keeps the songs of Siouxsie and The Cure alive but also plays contemporary Goth bands such as Melbourne’s No Sister or Brisbane’s Pleasure Symbols. Global warming has not deterred these gentle folk; age has not wearied them.

Goth now

Although the airwaves carry the message, alternative Goth bands in Australia struggle to attract an audience. IKON from Melbourne has built a strong European following with frequent appearances at Wave Gothik Festival, but in Australia they are lucky to fill a room. The story of Vowws a Sydney Band that moved to LA, has played with Gary Numan and is now opening for The Cult shows that Australia might not be big enough for new Goth bands.

Australian born Zoe Zanias is a thriving Electronic Body Music artist but lives in Berlin where she co-founded the Fleisch collective and the record label of the same name.

Electronic Body Music springs from Industrial but it is more dance-oriented. Front 242 and Covenant are good examples of this genre.

The community continues to have a presence due to the passion of people like Rachael Blackemore, who moderates a Goth Facebook group. Originally from Adelaide, she ran the original 1334 Club dedicated to Deathrock and Trad Goth music in Melbourne from 2007.

Now based in Brisbane, the growth of the subculture online has allowed her to collaborate on interstate events like Bat Attack, where DJs from different states play similar genres like Death Rock and Trad Goth on the same night. It is evidence that the Australian Goth subculture has a strong national identity.

Although places to gather are still rare in Brisbane, Faithnightclub run by Richard Warman for nearly 20 years helps to feed the city’s Goth subculture. In the early 2000’s, Brisbane was the only city in the country with a weekly Goth club, a sanctuary, if you will, still running today.

Here’s a glimmer from the past: Brisbane in the 90s. Summer. The Goths drift through the heat haze; insults and disapproval hang in the air. But they only have eyes and ears for one another. The tribe is everything.

On the days when those tight black pants were unbearable, with the sun bleaching the sky and the humidity closing in, the boys would discuss it, and the shorts would make a rare appearance. Still black, of course. A colour you can wear for days without washing. Friendly, familiar, black.

– ref. It’s hot in here: the evolution of Goth subculture in sub-tropical Brisbane – http://theconversation.com/its-hot-in-here-the-evolution-of-goth-subculture-in-sub-tropical-brisbane-120890

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lucas Walsh, Professor, Education Policy and Practice, Youth Studies in the Faculty of Education. Latest books with Rosalyn Black include "Imagining Youth Futures: University Students in Post-Truth Times" and "Rethinking Youth Citizenship after the Age of Entitlement", Monash University

Senator Jacqui Lambie has proposed establishing a Senate inquiry to increase the number of volunteers to address challenges such as climate emergencies.

One way she suggests doing this is by conscripting young Australians to national emergency service. The Senator argues that

today’s generation don’t really want to volunteer themselves and commit to certain things. They want to show up to a rally once a year and apparently that’s giving back … It bothers me that kids today wouldn’t know a bloody sandbag, let alone a spade.

Her proposal comes on the back of criticism of youth climate protesters by several prominent politicians, such as Resources Minister Matt Canavan, who has said

the best thing you’ll learn about going to a protest is how to join the dole queue.

Young people are already volunteering

Collectively, these statements reflect a view of young people that is wildly inaccurate.

Firstly, Lambie echoes a familiar but negative view of young people as disengaged, indifferent and immature.

Volunteering rates are indeed declining. In 2014, volunteering declined for the first time since 1995, when the ABS started conducting national voluntary work surveys. The proportion of people aged 18 years and over who were volunteering fell from a peak of 36% in 2010 to 31% in 2014. (This is the most recent data available).

Read more: On an average day, only 1% of Australian news stories quoted a young person. No wonder so few trust the media

Historically, younger people are less likely to engage in civic activities than older Australians. But wider research during the last decade suggests something more nuanced.

A national youth survey in 2018 found volunteering to be one of the top three activities for young people – ahead of arts, culture and music activities. ABS figures from 2014 also showed that while overall rates of volunteering were on the decline, young people aged 15-17 had the highest rate in the nation at 42%.

The measures used to track volunteering also fail to capture the breadth and depth of volunteering that takes place among young people.

The ABS has defined volunteering as

the provision of unpaid help willingly undertaken in the form of time, service or skills, to an organisation or group, excluding work done overseas.

For young people, many types of volunteering take place invisibly through online activities like constructing news groups on Facebook that contribute to a wider cause. Such online activities may not be for a particular organisation or group and may be conducted internationally.

In addition, the boundaries between personal and civic contributions are sometimes blurred. For example, volunteering in some culturally and linguistically diverse communities is just part of life, and not considered to be volunteering.

Similarly, research has shown that some young people don’t necessarily think of activities such as umpiring a local sporting event as volunteering, because for them it is just an interesting pursuit.

As a result, these contributions by young people sometimes go unrecognised.

Acknowledging that its definition does not account for informal volunteering like this and other activities such as activism, the ABS is now seeking to capture

a broader range of volunteering activity and characteristics.

Protesting is an equally valid way of giving back

Young people are also increasingly motivated to take part in another form of civic participation: peaceful protest. For many, protesting for important causes is considered an equally valid way to give back to society.

The most prominent example of this are the student climate strikes around the world that have been galvanised by youth activist Greta Thunberg. Thousands of Australians students are expected to walk out of their classes again on Friday.

Read more: Why don’t more people volunteer? Misconceptions don’t help

Jonas Kampus, a 17-year-old protester from Switzerland, described the importance of these efforts to the Guardian:

For people under 18 in most countries, the only democratic right we have is to demonstrate. We don’t have representation.

Canavan has a different view, saying that young people “don’t learn anything” from leaving school to protest.

But experiential learning through activism can be powerful and connect people to finding common solutions. Education isn’t just about securing future jobs, as Canavan has suggested. It’s also about developing inquisitive, creative and critical thinkers who fully participate in society.

Young people throughout the world are demonstrating these attributes and participating in ways that do not register in conventional measures. Many are actively engaging the challenges facing our society and are acutely aware of the value of education.

There is another important connection between protesting and volunteerism. One international study has found that

people involved in voluntary associations are up to five times more likely to make political demands than those without such membership.

University of the South Pacific researcher Jacob Mwathi Mati and his colleagues argue that activist movements can serve as “schools of democracy that teach civic skills and foster civic attitudes.” Taking part in climate change protests, for example, can build capacity for citizen engagement in the same way as more traditional forms of volunteering.

The great majority of politicians are hardworking and dedicated to making a difference in society, and painting them with broad-brush criticisms that reinforce negative stereotypes does not do them justice.

It’s equally unfair to reduce young people to passive and clueless individuals in need of compulsory volunteer conscription.

– ref. Stop calling young people apathetic. For many, volunteering and activism go hand-in-hand – http://theconversation.com/stop-calling-young-people-apathetic-for-many-volunteering-and-activism-go-hand-in-hand-123754

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Dodd, Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne

Today on Media Files, a podcast on major themes and issues in the media, we meet Bastian Obermayer, the Pulitizer prize-winning journalist who led the Panama Papers investigation into global tax evasion and money laundering.

It was the biggest-ever collaboration for investigative journalism, involving 400 journalists in 80 countries who collectively produced 6,000 stories in 100 different media outlets.

Bastian Obermayer is the deputy editor for investigations at the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich, Germany. He was the person who received the original email from the anonymous source known as John Doe.

Bastian recently joined the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, courtesy of the Macgeorge fellowship. He recorded this discussion with Andrew Dodd for Media Files.

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Podcasts are often best enjoyed using a podcast app. All iPhones come with the Apple Podcasts app already installed, or you may want to listen and subscribe on another app such as Pocket Casts (click here to listen to Media Files on Pocket Casts).

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Additional credits

Producers: Andy Hazel and Henning Goll.

Theme music: Susie Wilkins.

Image

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– ref. Media Files: investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer, who led the Panama Papers tax exposé – http://theconversation.com/media-files-investigative-journalist-bastian-obermayer-who-led-the-panama-papers-tax-expose-122643

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

After nearly two decades of fighting, the death toll in the war in Afghanistan is staggering. Apart from more than 45,000 Afghani soldiers killed since 2014 and 3,576 western coalition soldiers since the beginning of the conflict in 2001, some 32,532 civilians were killed in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2018 – most of them by anti-government forces.

In a small subset in this human tragedy, New Zealand is critically examining one particular operation, during which six people were killed, including a three-year-old girl. This occurred when a Taliban group was targeted by a New Zealand lead force, allegedly in reply to an attack on a New Zealand team in early August 2010.

In their book, Hit and Run, journalists Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson called into question the official version of events of this action, known as Operation Burnham.

This questioning has resulted in an official inquiry, to see if there was wrongdoing on the part of New Zealand Defence Force personnel or whether New Zealand troops committed war crimes.

Read more: How to end Afghanistan war as longest conflict moves towards fragile peace

International humanitarian law

With such high stakes at play, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of the rules of international humanitarian law that govern such military operations. The core of this area (the Geneva Conventions) were concluded after the Second World War and then supplemented in 1977, with two protocols to deal with both international and non-international conflicts. New Zealand is a signatory to all of these rules.

Humanitarian law grants civilians much greater protection in times of international conflicts (Protocol I). But even with these higher standards, the rule is clear that the presence of civilians in a particular area does not render that place immune to military operations. This is especially so if the civilians are trying to shield legitimate military targets from attacks.

International humanitarian law grants civilians lesser protection in times of non-international (typically civil war) conflicts (Protocol II). This protocol mandates that civilians shall enjoy only a general protection against the dangers arising from military operations. While acts of violence with the primary purpose of spreading terror among the civilian population are prohibited, there is much more grey in what can be done in the war zone.

The law covering Afghanistan is Protocol II. New Zealand, along with our NATO allies, have been trying to help the Afghanistan government in their war against a number of insurgent groups, of which the Taliban are dominant.

Legitimate military targets

New Zealand military law tends to conflate the two protocols. But in terms of crimes of international significance, it is the wording of the protocols that matters at the global level, not the New Zealand practice.

The first thing to note is that all attacks against the opposing force must have a direct military advantage anticipated and focus on legitimate military objectives. Such objectives may be enemy combatants or places. This includes places occupied or defended by fighters of the opposing force or places they store their weapons.

On this point, video footage has shown some armed insurgents in close vicinity of one of the targets. In addition, two insurgent commanders hunted by the New Zealand SAS have subsequently admitted they were present in a village raided during Operation Burnham. In short, this appears to show that the planned operation was a legitimate goal.

Applicable restraints

Even if the goal is legitimate, there are still strong restraints around the methods by which an attack can take place. It is in this area, that the real work of the inquiry will be most difficult.

New Zealand standards prohibit direct attacks against civilians, especially if the attack would result in collateral civilian casualties clearly disproportionate to the expected military advantage. In plain language this means that just because a military target has civilians around it, their prima facie immunity does not stop the attack but there are limits to the type of attack that can occur.

Specifically, any attacks must be discriminate in focus and proportionate in impact, striking a balance between military necessity and humanity. For example, “free fire zones” (in which any person encountered is presumed to be enemy) or indirect fire missions (fired into an area at random without regard to who may be there) and single target areas (that combine both military and civilian considerations), are all prohibited.

Despite the importance of trying to create a clear line of distinction between civilians who should be immune, and enemy fighters who can be targets, the key is that anyone taking a direct part in hostilities does not have civilian immunity. In an ideal world, the enemy is easy to identify, distinguished by factors such as uniforms.

But war in Afghanistan is not an ideal world. As the enemy hides among civilians, the commander of conventional forces has to balance the risks of exposing their soldiers to heavy casualties to a disguised enemy, or innocent civilians paying a price, because the enemy draws fire upon them.

Sometimes, it is relatively easy to identify the non-uniformed enemy as a legitimate target as they are involved in actions of a fundamentally military nature intended to cause death or damage. Even if someone is not carrying a weapon, they may become a legitimate target if they have a “continuous function” that amounts to direct participation, such as membership of any enemy armed group.

Whether someone is taking a direct part can also depend on how they are behaving, the clothes they are wearing, their gender and age, the extent to which they are equipped for combat, and the way they react to the presence of the New Zealand force, and their history with the enemy armed group. Similarly, a civilian who acts as a voluntary human shield to block a legitimate military target, also loses their immunity.

Read more: Afghanistan: as Taliban and US near peace deal, it’s far too soon to commit to returning refugees

The principle of humanity

Where there is no doubt, and people must not be attacked, is when they are only indirectly participating in the conflict. Provision of general support and comfort to opposing forces, such as food and shelter or financial resources, does not amount to direct participation. Similarly, accompaniment with an armed enemy group does not mean a continuous combat function, nor does affiliation through family or community linkages. Refusing to help conventional forces, such as failing to provide information when asked, theft or even disobedience, do not justify lethal force to be used against these civilians as they, also, are not taking a direct part in the hostilities.

If there are reasonable questions as to whether a person is taking a direct part in hostilities, the person is to be given the benefit of doubt. They are presumed to have civilian immunity. In such situations, all feasible alternatives to lethal force should be explored. The principle of humanity demands this.

– ref. Operation Burnham: inquiry underway to determine any wrongdoing by New Zealand troops in Afghanistan – http://theconversation.com/operation-burnham-inquiry-underway-to-determine-any-wrongdoing-by-new-zealand-troops-in-afghanistan-123438

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Coates, Program Director, Household Finances, Grattan Institute

Compared to the rest of the world, income inequality is not particularly high in Australia, nor is it getting much worse.

The real problem is housing inequality.

Rising house prices have increased wealth inequality. Rising housing costs have dramatically widened the gap between high and low disposable incomes.

The gap between low-income and high-income households in Australia is close to the OECD average. Income inequality – measured by the gini coefficient – has fallen slightly over the past decade.

The Productivity Commission says inequality has increased only slightly in the past three decades. Economists at the Reserve Bank have come to similar conclusions.

But inequality is growing once housing costs are factored in, with the poor being hurt the most.

Incomes for the lowest 20% of households increased by about 27% between 2003-04 and 2015-16. But their incomes after housing costs increased by only about 16%. Low-income Australians are spending much more than they used to keep a roof over their heads.

In contrast, incomes for the highest 20% of households increased by 36%, and their after-housing incomes by 33%.

Leaving the young and poor behind

Home ownership is increasingly benefiting the already well-off. Since 2003-04, increasing property values have contributed to the wealth of high-income households increasing by more than 50%. Wealth for low-income households has grown by less than 10%

As we’ve noted previously rising housing costs have widened the gap between renters and home owners. As property prices have escalated, the higher deposit hurdle has seen rates of home ownership falling fast among the young and the poor.

In 1981 more than 60% of those aged 25-34 had a mortgage; by 2016 it was 45%. The trends are similar among older groups. In the same period, home ownership among the poorest 20% of households has fallen from 63% to 23%.

The big winners of the property boom have typically been older typically Australians lucky enough to buy a house before prices took off. Housing has thus compounded inequality between the young and old.

This could lead to higher inequality in the future, because the children with wealthier parents can rely on the “bank of mum and dad” to break into the housing market, and then inherit their parents’ home as an investment property.

Many low-income Australians won’t be so lucky, which is why the share of Australians who own their homes is expected to fall sharply in the decades ahead.

A clearer policy agenda

Despite the clear evidence housing is key to inequality in Australia, housing policy is thin on the ground.

In the dying days of the federal election campaign, the Coalition announced a plan to help those struggling to save the 20% deposit normally required to buy a home.

The federal government has also made it easier for people to access their super to pay the deposit.

These policies might be popular but do little to improve housing affordability for low-income earners; they might even do more harm than good.

Labor, meanwhile, ran with a proposal during the last election campaign to build 250,000 new affordable housing dwellings, using a mechanism similar to the earlier National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS). On our analysis, though, the original NRAS was poor value for money, and did not target those most in need.

Read more: Rudd’s rental affordability scheme was a $1 billion gift to developers. Abbott was right to axe it

Addressing inequality requires a clearer view on what to do about rising housing costs.

The priority should be to boost Rent Assistance by 40% – an extra A$1,410 a year for singles and A$1,330 for couples – and benchmark it to rents paid by low-income renters.

The federal government should also give more funding to the states for social housing carefully targeted to people at serious risk of homelessness.

Emulating the Rudd-era Social Housing Initiative, which resulted in 20,000 new social housing units being built and thousands more refurbished at a cost of A$5.6 billion, would provide a much-needed boost to housing construction when the pipeline is drying up.

Supply-side economics

But redistribution alone won’t be enough. Housing is a A$6.6 trillion market. Subsidies can only paper over market failures arising from overly strict zoning rules that prevent greater density in our major cities.

Housing inequality will really only fall if housing costs fall. That requires building more houses. We estimate building an extra 50,000 homes a year for the next decade would make house prices and rents 10% to 20% lower than they would be otherwise.

This is primarily a challenge for state governments. They govern the local councils that set most planning rules and assess most development applications. But the federal government can and should encourage the states to boost housing supply by reforming land-use planning and zoning laws.

If Scott Morrison really believes in “a fair go for Australians”, he needs to tackle the housing crisis.

– ref. Rising inequality in Australia isn’t about incomes: it’s almost all about housing – http://theconversation.com/rising-inequality-in-australia-isnt-about-incomes-its-almost-all-about-housing-119872

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Rich, Lecturer in International Relations and Security Studies, Curtin University

This week’s strikes on the Abqaiq and Khurais oil processing facilities in Saudi Arabia represent the latest in a pattern of actions by the Islamic Republic of Iran to escalate tensions in the Persian Gulf.

Unlike previous incidents, the impact of this attack has not just been felt locally. With half of Saudi oil output halted – around 6% of total world production – global fuel oil prices have spiked. The markets are spooked.

Direct culpability for the attack remains unclear. While Yemeni Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility, other sources and evidence have pointed to an Iraqi source, potentially the Hashd al-Shaabi militia.

Some sources inside the US government have also outright accused Iran itself. This seems unlikely, though, given Iran’s penchant for proxy activity and plausible deniability.

Read more: As pressure on Iran mounts, there is little room for quiet diplomacy to free detained Australians

Regardless of who physically pressed the launch button, however, it is almost certain that Tehran was the primary enabler of the strike. The state has a long history of supplying proxy non-state actors with the equipment, intelligence and training necessary to execute such attacks.

Indeed, in the context of the past few months, the attack appears to be the latest in a series of efforts by Iran to escalate tensions and insecurity in the Persian Gulf to push back on the US “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign.

A strategy of tension

Since early this year, Iran has committed itself to a strategy of destabilisation in and around the Arabian Peninsula.

The reasons have been myriad, but primarily revolve around the fallout from the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement. This has left Iran diplomatically isolated, economically strained and feeling betrayed by the wider international community.

Seeing few good options, the Iranian leadership has decided to promote chaos and instability to inflict what pain it can on global energy markets. The hope is this will add urgency to the negotiations with world powers and force them to seek a political solution to the economic and security standoff that provides an acceptable exit for Iran.

According to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Islamic Republic has been involved in nearly 100 incidents over the past few months targeting oil, transport and security infrastructure and equipment.

These have included attacks and seizures of several oil tankers in the gulf, as well as strikes on airports, military bases, diplomatic compounds and now oil facilities in Saudi Arabia.

While Iran has been directly implicated in a few of these cases, the majority appear to have been undertaken by allied non-state actors in Iraq and Yemen.

If one considers Iran’s historical patronage of such organisations, this should come as no surprise. Since the revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic has actively cultivated relationships with such groups as a key part of its foreign policy, most famously with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Such close alliances have permitted Tehran to project its influence into areas it otherwise would have little access to. They also grant a degree of plausible deniability when it comes to radical actions like those witnessed this week.

This can make it diplomatically more difficult for affected countries to assign blame and, more importantly, react to such provocations.

Read more: Infographic: what is the conflict between the US and Iran about and how is Australia now involved?

In the case of the attacks on the Saudi oil facilities, the Iranian leadership has staunchly rejected any responsibility, framing the attack as Houthi revenge against Saudi war crimes.

What was notable in these attacks was their relative bloodlessness and precision. They were primarily designed to threaten and inflict economic harm and uncertainty, rather than kill and maim.

This, combined with a general commitment to employing militant proxies, highlights the Iranian desire to create enough tension to achieve political outcomes, while avoiding crossing a threshold that would lead to dramatic military blowback from the US and its allies.

This is a fine line to walk at the best of times.

Gambling on inaction

Tehran’s brinkmanship rests on an assumption that calibrated provocations will not elicit serious reprisals.

Iran’s security elites have concluded that the Trump administration has little stomach for serious foreign military adventurism. A quick examination of the recent historical record shows that while the current American leadership has demonstrated an unprecedented amount of security policy bark – particularly on Twitter – this has not coincided with a similar level of bite.

Trump’s initial threats of “fire and fury” towards North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un in 2017 were quickly shown to be pure bluster.

Indeed, such bellicose posturing quickly gave way to unprecedented dialogue between the two countries. This culminated in an ongoing series of no-strings-attached summits in which the US president bizarrely prostrated himself before the Hermit Kingdom’s autocrat for little clear gain.

Read more: Iran’s leader is losing his grasp on power. Does this mean diplomacy is doomed?

More evidence of American reticence can be found in Syria. Trump loudly and continually warned against Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.

But, when push came to shove, punitive measures by the US proved little more than anaemic symbolism and posed no serious threat to the regime’s survival.

Just a few months ago, Trump also aborted several military strikes on Iranian military targets after the downing of a US drone. It was another indication Washington has little appetite for open conflict.

Internally, Trump has also clashed heavily with several of the hawks in his administration. In some cases, he has purged them when their views clashed too heavily with his own risk aversion.

The most notable recent example was the humiliating dismissal of his national security adviser, John Bolton, one of the 2003 Iraq war’s chief architects and a staunch advocate of regime change in Iran.

Rolling the dice

The Saudi incident this week represents an undeniable and significant escalation by Iran in its ongoing campaign of tension in the region. The attack has seriously raised the stakes and potential for a conflict between both regional and global players.

But looking at the Trump administration’s recent history, Iranian foreign policymakers are assuming their actions will not spark a dramatic escalation.

In theory, this is a reasonable conclusion, supported by evidence. But security dilemmas like this are characterised by an incredibly complex intersection of competing interests, understandings and short time frames. This often leads to tragic and unpredictable outcomes for those involved.

One has only to look at the ramifications of a previous US intervention against Iranian disruption in the gulf, Operation Praying Mantis in 1988, for evidence of the potential for a rapid escalation to large-scale military exchange.

– ref. How likely is conflict between the US and Iran? – http://theconversation.com/how-likely-is-conflict-between-the-us-and-iran-123714

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bill Bateman, Associate professor, Curtin University

Every spring in Australia is heralded by reports of magpies swooping at people. While it is of little comfort to those at the receiving end of a surprise attack, such events are actually quite rare when one considers the number of magpies across Australia, and the fact that they love to share our urban habitat with us.

According to one estimate, fewer than 10% of magpies swoop, and even fewer of these do so consistently. It is almost always males that swoop, and they only do so when they have chicks in the nest. Once the chicks are out the males seem to calm down; presumably they perceive nest-bound chicks as most vulnerable.

Swooping behaviour also seems to vary across Australia – at least according to Magpie Alert!, a website on which the public can report magpie attacks. Many more swoops have been reported in the eastern states than in Western Australia, and fewest of all in Tasmania.

Read more: Bird-brained and brilliant: Australia’s avians are smarter than you think

But regardless of their relative rarity, being the target of a swooping attack by a magpie can be frightening. It has resulted in injuries and, tragically this week, the death of a 76-year-old cyclist in Wollongong.

What can we do to avoid ending up on the receiving end? Is any of the advice meted out each year on avoiding attacks actually worthwhile, or backed by evidence? As with just about everything involving biology, the answer is “it depends”.

Some magpies never attack pedestrians but go for cyclists; others do the opposite. And some hold a deep animus against posties on bikes, and reserve their fury solely for them. Even more astonishingly, some magpies seem to really have it in for particular people, and will preferentially attack them.

Although Australian magpies are not related to true crows, they do share similar levels of intelligence. US researchers have shown that American crows recognise people who have trapped them to band them, give alarm calls when they next see them, and even pass on that information to untrapped birds who also sound the alarm when they see trappers.

It seems likely that Australian magpies do the same, effectively holding a grudge against particular people. Unfortunate posties, travelling the same route each day and meeting the same magpies, seem to end up on the naughty list through no fault of their own.

Cyclists do seem to invoke more extreme reactions than pedestrians, judging by the fact that magpies appear to pursue cyclists farther. It therefore stands to reason that the best response to a swooping attack while cycling would be to get off and push your bike.

You will of course be wearing a bike helmet, and as magpies swoop from behind, this will offer protection against its sharp beak.

Sadly it seems that the classic tactic of attaching cable ties to your helmet does little to deter a determined magpie, beyond the fact that some strategic placing can help keep them away from your ears. Ditto the idea of painting eyes on the back of your helmet or hat.

More reassuringly, however, magpies really only swoop in the vicinity of their nest, so once you have moved away you should be safe. If you become aware of swooping attacks in a certain area the best thing is to avoid it – even just crossing the road should be sufficient.

If you can’t do that, at least wear a hat and sunglasses; these will help reduce the chance of a determined magpie pecking a sensitive area. Turning to face magpies may also help – many birds do not appreciate being stared at, and as magpies prefer to swoop from behind, this may be a good tactic if you find yourself cornered in a park.

If you have magpies in your garden, perhaps the most appealing way of avoiding attacks is to become their best friend. Given that magpies have long memories, a few judicious offerings of mince or similar tidbits throughout the year can help you befriend them, making them much more amenable to your presence come spring.

But don’t overfeed them – it’s just a friendly bribe, not a full-blown dependency.

Read more: Magpies can form friendships with people – here’s how

If all else fails, simply console yourself with the fact that swooping season only lasts a few weeks. For the rest of the year magpies are peaceful urban nighbours who delight us with their distinctive song.

Bear that in mind, and we can hopefully reach a détente with our feathered (and occasionally flustered) friends. In the meantime, if you are unlucky enough to be swooped, remember to help others avoid the same fate by posting the details to Magpie Alert!.

– ref. Cable ties probably won’t stop magpie attacks – here are a few things to try instead – http://theconversation.com/cable-ties-probably-wont-stop-magpie-attacks-here-are-a-few-things-to-try-instead-123759

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Rich, Lecturer in International Relations and Security Studies, Curtin University

This week’s strikes on the Abqaiq and Khurais oil processing facilities in Saudi Arabia represent the latest in a pattern of actions by the Islamic Republic of Iran to escalate tensions in the Persian Gulf.

Unlike previous incidents, the impact of this attack has not just been felt locally. With half of Saudi oil output halted – around 6% of total world production – global fuel oil prices have spiked. The markets are spooked.

Direct culpability for the attack remains unclear. While Yemeni Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility, other sources and evidence have pointed to an Iraqi source, potentially the Hashd al-Shaabi militia.

Some sources inside the US government have also outright accused Iran itself. This seems unlikely, though, given Iran’s penchant for proxy activity and plausible deniability.

Read more: As pressure on Iran mounts, there is little room for quiet diplomacy to free detained Australians

Regardless of who physically pressed the launch button, however, it is almost certain that Tehran was the primary enabler of the strike. The state has a long history of supplying proxy non-state actors with the equipment, intelligence and training necessary to execute such attacks.

Indeed, in the context of the past few months, the attack appears to be the latest in a series of efforts by Iran to escalate tensions and insecurity in the Persian Gulf to push back on the US “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign.

A strategy of tension

Since early this year, Iran has committed itself to a strategy of destabilisation in and around the Arabian Peninsula.

The reasons have been myriad, but primarily revolve around the fallout from the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement. This has left Iran diplomatically isolated, economically strained and feeling betrayed by the wider international community.

Seeing few good options, the Iranian leadership has decided to promote chaos and instability to inflict what pain it can on global energy markets. The hope is this will add urgency to the negotiations with world powers and force them to seek a political solution to the economic and security standoff that provides an acceptable exit for Iran.

According to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Islamic Republic has been involved in nearly 100 incidents over the past few months targeting oil, transport and security infrastructure and equipment.

These have included attacks and seizures of several oil tankers in the gulf, as well as strikes on airports, military bases, diplomatic compounds and now oil facilities in Saudi Arabia.

While Iran has been directly implicated in a few of these cases, the majority appear to have been undertaken by allied non-state actors in Iraq and Yemen.

If one considers Iran’s historical patronage of such organisations, this should come as no surprise. Since the revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic has actively cultivated relationships with such groups as a key part of its foreign policy, most famously with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Such close alliances have permitted Tehran to project its influence into areas it otherwise would have little access to. They also grant a degree of plausible deniability when it comes to radical actions like those witnessed this week.

This can make it diplomatically more difficult for affected countries to assign blame and, more importantly, react to such provocations.

Read more: Infographic: what is the conflict between the US and Iran about and how is Australia now involved?

In the case of the attacks on the Saudi oil facilities, the Iranian leadership has staunchly rejected any responsibility, framing the attack as Houthi revenge against Saudi war crimes.

What was notable in these attacks was their relative bloodlessness and precision. They were primarily designed to threaten and inflict economic harm and uncertainty, rather than kill and maim.

This, combined with a general commitment to employing militant proxies, highlights the Iranian desire to create enough tension to achieve political outcomes, while avoiding crossing a threshold that would lead to dramatic military blowback from the US and its allies.

This is a fine line to walk at the best of times.

Gambling on inaction

Tehran’s brinkmanship rests on an assumption that calibrated provocations will not elicit serious reprisals.

Iran’s security elites have concluded that the Trump administration has little stomach for serious foreign military adventurism. A quick examination of the recent historical record shows that while the current American leadership has demonstrated an unprecedented amount of security policy bark – particularly on Twitter – this has not coincided with a similar level of bite.

Trump’s initial threats of “fire and fury” towards North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un in 2017 were quickly shown to be pure bluster.

Indeed, such bellicose posturing quickly gave way to unprecedented dialogue between the two countries. This culminated in an ongoing series of no-strings-attached summits in which the US president bizarrely prostrated himself before the Hermit Kingdom’s autocrat for little clear gain.

Read more: Iran’s leader is losing his grasp on power. Does this mean diplomacy is doomed?

More evidence of American reticence can be found in Syria. Trump loudly and continually warned against Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.

But, when push came to shove, punitive measures by the US proved little more than anaemic symbolism and posed no serious threat to the regime’s survival.

Just a few months ago, Trump also aborted several military strikes on Iranian military targets after the downing of a US drone. It was another indication Washington has little appetite for open conflict.

Internally, Trump has also clashed heavily with several of the hawks in his administration. In some cases, he has purged them when their views clashed too heavily with his own risk aversion.

The most notable recent example was the humiliating dismissal of his national security adviser, John Bolton, one of the 2003 Iraq war’s chief architects and a staunch advocate of regime change in Iran.

Rolling the dice

The Saudi incident this week represents an undeniable and significant escalation by Iran in its ongoing campaign of tension in the region. The attack has seriously raised the stakes and potential for a conflict between both regional and global players.

But looking at the Trump administration’s recent history, Iranian foreign policymakers are assuming their actions will not spark a dramatic escalation.

In theory, this is a reasonable conclusion, supported by evidence. But security dilemmas like this are characterised by an incredibly complex intersection of competing interests, understandings and short time frames. This often leads to tragic and unpredictable outcomes for those involved.

One has only to look at the ramifications of a previous US intervention against Iranian disruption in the gulf, Operation Praying Mantis in 1988, for evidence of the potential for a rapid escalation to large-scale military exchange.

– ref. Iran wants to create chaos in the Middle East. But conflict with the US remains a limited, if worrying, possibility – http://theconversation.com/iran-wants-to-create-chaos-in-the-middle-east-but-conflict-with-the-us-remains-a-limited-if-worrying-possibility-123714

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics, Monash University

There’s no shortage of special days throughout the year. Some — like International Literacy Day — speak to important issues in society. Others speak to our inner dag.

Today marks one of the daggier days, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It marks the occasion when Americans John Baur (aka Ol’ Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (aka Cap’n Slappy) first proclaimed in 1995 that everyone in the world should talk like a pirate.

Read more: The prosecution of pirates was a model for today’s system of international justice

And so we thought we’d take the chance to answer a few pirate questions. Why do pirates say “arr”? What are timbers — and what happens when they get shivered?

Let’s get underway me language-loving ‘earties.

Who put the ‘arrr’ in pirate?

The modern-day fiction of pirate-speak emerged from pirate-themed amusement rides, books and films, especially the Disney classics like Treasure Island, the Pirates of the Caribbean series — and of course Australia’s own Captain Feathersword of the Wiggles fame.

The signature pirate voice is West Country (or some version of it). But why West Country?

True, south-western England produced well-known pirates like “Black Sam” Bellamy and “Long Ben” Every, but famous pirates came from all over. Captain Kidd hailed from Scotland, Black Bart from Wales, William Burke from Ireland and Edward “Ned” Low from London.

Read more: Captain Kidd’s ‘treasure’ found in Indian Ocean – but this is no haul in pirating terms

But it was Dorset-born Robert Newton – acclaimed actor and patron saint of Talk Like A Pirate Day – who set the fashion for pirate-speak. His portrayal of Long John Silver and Blackbeard in 1950s films set the gold standard for pirate voices on the screen – including the “arr”.

Together with the skull-and-crossbones logo, this accent built the pirate brand.

How pirate-speak preserves language

The books and movies that launched the pirate brand all those years ago have acted like artificial life support systems for expressions that otherwise would have long bitten dust.

Making many regular appearances on September 19 are expletives like “timbers”, “shiver me timbers” and “sash me timbers” – all nautical exclamations from the late 18th century.

Read more: Oi! We’re not lazy yarners, so let’s kill the cringe and love our Aussie accent(s)

Timber was a slang term for “wooden leg” (“timber toe” meant “man with a wooden leg”). It was also a nautical expression for the pieces of wood making up the ribs or frames of a ship’s hull. The term “shiver” meant “to splinter” (by happy coincidence, English has another verb “shiver” with equally appropriate “quiver, tremble” senses).

There was undoubtedly a bit of word play going on with these mock oaths — the idea being something like “may my wooden leg (or ship) fly into small pieces!”. They are modelled along the lines of frightful curses like “Gorblimey” (a truncated version of “May God blind me”) and “Drat” or “Rats” (innocent sounding expressions until you realise they’re disguised forms of “God rot them”).

Like “(God) strike me dead” and “blow me down”, shiver me timbers was rare by the mid 1800s and is never encountered these days – except on September 19.

We see a similar pirate-specific support of nautical terms like “hearty” and “lubber”. When pirates say “me hearties”, they’re giving due respect to a person for bravery or other admirable qualities. “Hearty” was even another word for “sailor” from the 18th to the early 20th century.

Read more: 13 ‘ye olde’ phrases that would be far better in the workplace

“Lubber” has been around since the 14th century and referred to a clumsy and idle person. In fact, before becoming part of sailor parlance, people spoke scathingly of the “abbey-lubber” (monks living in idleness or self-indulgence).

And from the 16th to the 19th centuries, we see the “lifting” hearties speaking of the “leaning” lubbers, especially those land-lubbers.

Tracing sea lingo from travel logs to sluiced gobs

Our knowledge of sea-faring lingo comes from early manuals like seamanship writer Samuel Sturmy’s Compleat Mariner (1669). Some of this nautical jargon made it into ordinary language and survived — “by and large”, “taken aback”, “underway” and “go by the board”.

The so-called golden age of piracy (late 17th and early 18th centuries) happened to coincide with the golden age of travel literature, and it became the fashion of the time for writers to pepper their memoirs and travelogues with nautical words. This was so much the case that philosopher George Campbell described the practice as a “source of darkness in composing”.

Early slang dictionaries are another source of “tar phrases”, tar being an early appellation for a sailor. Early lexicographer Captain Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue groans with 18th century nautical gems like “shipshape” (orderly), “junk” (pieces of old rope and, later, “pieces of salted pork”), and lashings of terms for food and drink — “belly timber”, “slush and tack” (food), “grub-spoiler” (cook), “flash the hash” (to vomit), “grog” (rum and water), “sluice the gob” (to drink) are some of the success stories.

Those who see scruffy slang as a shortcoming of modern times might be surprised to encounter in Grose’s dictionary entries like “Vice Admiral of the Narrow Seas”, which he defines as “a drunken man that pisses under the table into his companions’ shoes”.

Read more: Dinky-di Aussies: how slanguage helped form a new national identity

In fact, many current terms around drunkenness hail from this time: “slewed”, “(well) spliced”, “listing to starboard”, “three sheets to the wind”, “legless”, “keel over” and “guzzle-guts” (“one greedy of liquor”). Even the phrase “name your poison” as an invitation to drink was early sailing slang. It seems the expression “drunk as a sailor” is well founded.

So go ahead and enjoy International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It’s the one day when all around the English-speaking world, you can hear “shiver me timbers” and a flourishing of picaroon “arrrs”!

And if our short introduction has whet your appetite, check out the talk like a pirate website or use a pirate translator. These ‘ere translatin’ contrivances be fer turnin’ decent English into the lingo of sea-dogs. At this point we’ll sling our hook…

– ref. Why would anyone shiver their timbers? Here’s how pirate words arrr preserving old language – http://theconversation.com/why-would-anyone-shiver-their-timbers-heres-how-pirate-words-arrr-preserving-old-language-121493

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Pickles, Professor of History at the University of Canterbury and current Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi James Cook Research Fellow, University of Canterbury

Today marks the passing of the much celebrated 1893 Electoral Act, 126 years ago, which made New Zealand the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote.

But it would take 26 years before the often twinned step of allowing women to stand for parliament happened. On October 29, it will be a century since the passing of the 1919 Women’s Parliamentary Rights Act, which opened the way for women to enter politics.

Women’s suffrage and women’s right to stand for parliament are natural companions, two sides of the same coin. It would be fair to assume both happened at the same time.

Early women’s suffrage bills included women standing for parliament. But, in the hope of success, the right was omitted from the third and successful 1893 bill. Suffragists didn’t want to risk women standing for parliament sinking the bill.

The leader of the suffrage movement, Kate Sheppard, reluctantly accepted the omission and expected that the right would follow soon afterwards. But that didn’t happen.

Read more: Why New Zealand was the first country where women won the right to vote

Post-vote agitation

After women won suffrage, agitation for several egalitarian causes, including women in parliament, continued. The Women’s Christian Temperance Movement (WCTU) and, from 1896, the National Council of Women (NCW) both called for the bar to be removed.

Women including Kate Sheppard, Margaret Sievwright, Stella Henderson and Sarah Saunders Page kept up the battle. But the unity found in rallying around the major women’s suffrage cause was lacking and the heady and energetic climate of 1893 had receded.

From 1894 to 1900, sympathetic male politicians from across the political spectrum presented eight separate bills. Supportive conservatives emphasised the “unique maternal influence” that women would bring to parliament. Conservative MP Alfred Newman argued that New Zealand must retain its world-leading reputation for social legislation, but he downplayed the significance. He predicted that even if women were allowed to stand for parliament, few would be interested and even fewer would be elected.

Left-leaning supportive MPs George Russell and Tommy Taylor saw the matter as one of extending women’s rights and the next logical step towards societal equality. But contemplating women in the House was a step too far and all attempts failed.

Enduring prejudice

The failure in the pre-war years was largely because any support for women in parliament was outweighed by enduring prejudice against their direct participation in politics.

At the beginning of the new century, Prime Minister Richard Seddon was well aware of public opinion being either indifferent to or against women in parliament. A new generation of women with professional careers who might stand for parliament, if allowed, comprised a small minority.

Much to the chagrin of supporters, New Zealand began to lag behind other countries. Australia simultaneously granted women the right to vote and stand for parliament in 1902 at the federal level, with the exception of Aboriginal women in some states.

Women in Finland were able to both vote and stand for election from 1906, as part of reforms following unrest. In 1907, 19 women were elected to the new Finnish parliament.

The game changer: the first world war

Importantly, during the first world war, women’s status improved rapidly and this overrode previous prejudices. Women became essential and valued citizens in the war effort. Most contributed from their homes, volunteering their domestic skills, while increasing numbers entered the public sphere as nurses, factory and public sector workers.

Ellen Melville became an Auckland city councillor in 1913. Ada Wells was elected to the Christchurch City Council in 1917. Women proved their worth in keeping the home fires burning while men were away fighting.

In 1918, British women, with some conditions, were enfranchised and allowed to stand for parliament. Canada’s federal government also gave most of its women both the right to vote and stand for parliament.

Read more: 100 years since women won the right to be MPs – what it was like for the pioneers

Late in 1918, MP James McCombs, the New Zealand Labour Party’s first president and long-time supporter of women’s rights, opportunistically included women standing for parliament in a legislative council amendment bill. It was unsuccessful, mostly due to technicalities, and Prime Minister Bill Massey promised to pursue the matter.

Disappointed feminist advocate Jessie Mackay pointed to women’s service during the war and the recent influenza epidemic and shamed New Zealand for failing to keep up with international developments.

Women’s wartime work, renewed feminist activism and male parliamentary support combined to make the 1919 act a foregone conclusion. Introducing the bill, Massey said he did not doubt it would pass because it was important to keep up with Britain. The opposition leader, Joseph Ward, thought war had changed what was due to women, and Labour Party leader Harry Holland pushed women’s role as moral citizens.

The Legislative Council (upper house) held out and women had to wait until 1941 for the right to be appointed there. It took until 1933 for the first woman, Elizabeth McCombs, to be elected to parliament. The belief that a woman’s place was in the home and not parliament, the bastion of masculine power, endured.

Between 1935 and 1975, only 14 women were elected to parliament, compared to 298 men. It was not until the advent of a second wave of feminism and the introduction of proportional representation in 1996 that numbers of women in the house began to increase.

– ref. NZ was first to grant women the vote in 1893, but then took 26 years to let them stand for parliament – http://theconversation.com/nz-was-first-to-grant-women-the-vote-in-1893-but-then-took-26-years-to-let-them-stand-for-parliament-123467