Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate C. Prickett, Director of the Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families and Children, Victoria University of Wellington

The terrorist attacks on the Christchurch Muslim community on 15 March this year resulted in a political response that was decidedly different from what usually follows mass shootings in the United States.

The speed of legislative action, banning military-style semi-automatic weapons (MSSAs) within days of the attack, was remarked on both at home and around the world. Some gun owners began handing over their MSSAs to police voluntarily after the attacks, and hundreds of guns have been handed in during government buyback events throughout the country.

Read more: Why NZ needs to follow weapons ban with broad review of security laws

But there was another group who considered the government response an over-reaction and an infringement of gun owners’ rights.

Given these diverging views, which story truly reflects gun owners? Do gun owners trust the government to do what’s right? And do they trust other gun owners or the pro-gun lobby that purports to represent them?

These are questions we can now answer from our recent survey.

Gun owners are middle-class European Kiwis

Our team runs an annual survey asking a nationally representative sample of New Zealanders about their trust in people and institutions. The 2019 survey was carried out just prior to the attacks, but we decided to run it again in April, primarily to see whether this tragedy had an impact on trust. We also asked respondents whether they were a gun owner or living in a household with someone who owned a gun – and we asked about trust in gun owners and the pro-gun lobby.

Overall, 15% of respondents reported owning a gun (7.7%) or living in a household with someone who owned a gun (7.5%). Among those who said they owned a gun, 88% were men, but among those who said they didn’t personally own a gun but there was one in the home, 81% were women. In short, men own guns.

People in gun-owning households were somewhat more likely to be New Zealand European (84% vs 74% in the general population) and were more likely to be between 45 and 60 years old, compared to those who did not own guns (34% vs 25%).

Household gun owners reported moderately lower levels of education, with 32% having a university degree compared with 37% of non-gun owners. They were more likely to report middle-class household incomes between NZ$50,000 and NZ$150,000 (60% vs 52%) and less likely to live in big cities (21% vs 47%).

These statistics paint the profile of gun-owning households as fairly average, middle-class, New Zealand European Kiwis, with men primarily the owners.

Gun owners trust themselves

Perhaps surprisingly, gun owners are only a little different from others in thinking the government is generally doing the right thing. Controlling for the things that differentiate gun owners from those who don’t own guns, we found a statistically significant, but not very meaningful difference. Survey respondents were asked:

How much trust do you have in the government to do what is right for New Zealand?

On a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 is “very little/none” and 4 is “a great deal”, gun owners reported an average of 2.6 vs 2.7 among those who did not own guns.

If gun owners seem like the group who stood to lose through this legislation, why aren’t there bigger differences between those who do and do not own guns in their trust in government? One explanation could be that gun owners are actually more similar than different from the rest of New Zealand when it comes to their views on guns.

In addition to asking about trust in groups such as police, medical practitioners and corporations, we asked people how much trust they had in gun owners and the pro-gun lobby to do the right thing. This scale ranged from 1 (no trust at all) to 5 (complete trust). Unsurprisingly, gun owners reported a higher average trust level in other gun owners: 3.4 compared with 2.7 among those who did not guns – a moderate to large effect size.

When looking at trust in the pro-gun lobby, gun owners still reported higher levels of trust than non-gun owners – 2.7 vs 2.2. But the overall levels of trust were much lower than in gun owners generally. Gun owners tended to rate the gun lobby similar in trust as corporations and politicians. Those who don’t own guns rated the gun lobby as only more trustworthy than bloggers or online commentators.

Gun owners’ distrust in pro-gun lobby

It suggests that gun owners have trust in themselves to do the right thing, but far less trust in the pro-gun lobby to represent their best interests. But is it just that gun owners are apathetic to the gun lobby – they neither trust nor distrust it – or is it actual distrust in the lobbyists?

The data suggests it may be a bit of both. Over a third of gun owners distrust the gun lobby compared with only 9% of gun owners who don’t trust other gun owners. On the flipside, close to half of gun owners either have lots or complete trust in gun owners but only 23% can say the same about the gun lobby.

When this survey was conducted, the main legislative change announced was a ban and government buy-back of MSSAs. For the average gun owner, this might have been seen as sensible. But as more changes were announced and the gun lobby began to mobilise, it is important to understand whether their views are widely shared by gun owners.

Read more: New Zealand gun owners invoke NRA-style tropes in response to fast-tracked law change

Although gun owners report higher trust in gun owners and the pro-gun lobby, breaking this down by political ideology shows that most of the higher levels of lobbyist trust are concentrated among those gun owners to the political right. For example, among those on the political left, there is no statistical difference in trust in gun owners and the pro-gun lobby by whether you own a gun or not. The difference in gun trust among gun owners and those who don’t own guns is widest on the centre, centre right and right.

As New Zealand goes through the process of reforming gun laws to make our country safer and reinforce gun ownership as a privilege rather than a right, one thing is important: the views of the average gun owner are not co-opted by a fringe view of gun ownership.

– ref. Survey reveals a third of NZ gun owners distrust gun lobby – http://theconversation.com/survey-reveals-a-third-of-nz-gun-owners-distrust-gun-lobby-121736

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Graves, Distinguished Professor of Genetics, La Trobe University

Parkinson’s disease, a debilitating neurodegenerative disease common in elderly people, is twice as prevalent in men than women.

A new study published this month suggests the sex gene (SRY on the male-specific Y chromosome) plays a role in the loss of dopamine-making neurons that underlies this disease.

As well as providing a spectacular example of how genes act differently in male and female brains, this discovery may lead to a new treatment option for men suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

Read more: Not just about sex: throughout our bodies, thousands of genes act differently in men and women

Sex and disease

Many diseases are more common in one sex than the other. For example, multiple sclerosis and other immune disorders are more common in women than men. Parkinson’s disease, and several mental health conditions such as schizophrenia and autism, are more common in men than women.

Treatments, too, may be differently effective in men and women because of differences in expression of genes important for drug metabolism.

The bases of these sex differences are often unclear. Is it a hormonal difference that makes men and women differently susceptible to diseases, and differently amenable to treatment? For instance, the sex difference in Parkinson’s disease was previously attributed solely to the protective effect of the hormone oestrogen in female brains.

But as well as hormonal differences, we now have reason to believe genes on sex chromosomes may directly affect the brain.

Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease is a growing problem, particularly with an ageing population. Nearly one in 300 Australians live with Parkinson’s disease. It usually appears in later life as problems in starting and maintaining voluntary movements, and may be accompanied by severe tremor.

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

Parkinson’s disease is caused by a loss of neurons responsible for making dopamine, a hormone and neurotransmitter that sends messages to other nerve cells. Symptoms appear when 70% of these dopamine-synthesising cells have been depleted. We don’t understand how these neurons are lost, but expect the effect of loss on motor function is due to the curtailed dopamine production.

Parkinson’s disease is progressive and incurable, but the symptoms may be ameliorated and delayed by medications that boost dopamine or substitute for it.

SRY and Parkinson’s disease

In humans and other mammals, females have two X chromosomes (XX), and males a single X and a male-specific Y chromosome (XY). SRY is the master gene on the Y chromosome that determines the male sex of a baby in the embryo.

But research has found SRY seems to be active in other parts of the body, too. In mice and rats, SRY is active in the brain, and in humans it’s expressed in several tissues and organs, including the brain.

Read more: What makes you a man or a woman? Geneticist Jenny Graves explains

SRY has been found to be expressed at abnormally high levels in the brains of mice and rats mutated to have symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and in animals where the disease was induced by chemical treatment.

Previous work showed overactivity of the SRY gene destroys neurons that synthesise dopamine. We’re not entirely sure how this happens, but given the link between dopamine production and Parkinson’s disease, it might partly explain why Parkinson’s disease affects males more commonly than females.

This new study now shows that interfering with SRY expression in the brains of rodents with Parkinson’s disease ameliorates the severity of symptoms. Vince Harley and Joohyung Lee from the Hudson Institute in Melbourne found that quashing SRY action prevented or mitigated the reduced mobility of male animals with Parkinson’s disease.

So, suppressing the activity of SRY in neurons of Parkinson’s disease patients could ameliorate their symptoms.

This sort of a cure may be many years away, but it would have a huge impact on the quality of life of thousands of men in Australia living with Parkinson’s disease.

Sex and the brain

Male and female brains really are different at every level; molecular, cellular, and behavioural. For 60 years this has been attributed to sex hormones. But we’re beginning to find that genes may also have direct effects.

A recent analysis of the activity of most of the 20,000-odd genes in the bodies of hundreds of men and women showed that more than one-third were expressed much more highly in one sex than the other. This sex bias was not limited to sex organs, but was obvious at many other sites, including the brain.

The effect of SRY in the brain is a strong demonstration that male and female brains are genetically different in health and disease, and a reminder we must take account of sex differences in diagnosing and treating disease in men and women.

Read more: Differences between men and women are more than the sum of their genes

– ref. The sex gene SRY and Parkinson’s disease: how genes act differently in male and female brains – http://theconversation.com/the-sex-gene-sry-and-parkinsons-disease-how-genes-act-differently-in-male-and-female-brains-121764

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sebastian Leuzinger, Associate Professor, Auckland University of Technology

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

Carbon dioxide is a fertiliser for plants, so if its concentration increases in the atmosphere then plants will grow better. So what is the problem? – a question from Doug in Lower Hutt

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) is warming our climate, but it also affects plants directly.

A tree planted in the 1850s will have seen its diet (in terms of atmospheric carbon dioxide) double from its early days to the middle of our century. More CO₂ generally leads to higher rates of photosynthesis and less water consumption in plants. So, at first sight, it seems that CO₂ can only be beneficial for our plants.

But things are a lot more complex than that. Higher levels of photosynthesis don’t necessarily lead to more biomass production, let alone to more carbon dioxide sequestration. At night, plants release CO₂ just like animals or humans, and if those respiration rates increase simultaneously, the turnover of carbon increases, but the carbon stock doesn’t. You can think of this like a bank account – if you earn more but also spend more, you’re not becoming any richer.

Even if plants grow more and faster, some studies show there is a risk for them to have shorter lifespans. This again can have negative effects on the carbon locked away in biomass and soils. In fact, fast-growing trees (e.g. plantation forests) store a lot less carbon per surface area than old, undisturbed forests that show very little growth. Another example shows that plants in the deep shade may profit from higher levels of CO₂, leading to more vigorous growth of vines, faster turnover, and, again, less carbon stored per surface area.

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

Water savings

The effect of CO₂ on the amount of water plants use may be more important than the primary effect on photosynthesis. Plants tend to close their leaf pores slightly under elevated levels of CO₂, leading to water savings. In certain (dry) areas, this may indeed lead to more plant growth.

But again, things are much more complex and we don’t always see positive responses. Research we published in Nature Plants this year on grasslands around the globe showed that while dry sites can profit from more CO₂, there are complex interactions with rainfall. Depending on when the rain falls, some sites show zero or even negative effects in terms of biomass production.

Currently, a net amount of three gigatons of carbon are thought to be removed from the atmosphere by plants every year. This stands against over 11 gigatons of human-induced release of CO₂. It is also unclear what fraction of the three gigatons plants are taking up due to rising levels of CO₂.

In summary, rising CO₂ is certainly not bad for plants, and if we restored forested land at a global scale, we could help capture additional atmospheric carbon dioxide. But such simulations are optimistic and rely on conversion of much needed agricultural land to forests. Reductions in our emissions are unavoidable, and we have very strong evidence that plants alone will not be able to solve our CO₂ problem.

Read more: Exaggerating how much CO₂ can be absorbed by tree planting risks deterring crucial climate action

– ref. Climate explained: why plants don’t simply grow faster with more carbon dioxide in air – http://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-plants-dont-simply-grow-faster-with-more-carbon-dioxide-in-air-115907

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Garrick, University Fellow in Law, Charles Darwin University

What’s happening in Hong Kong right now has direct bearings on Australia. It goes to an issue crucial to our position in a world economic order that is likely to be shaped less by the United States, still our most important ally, and more by China, our ever more valuable trading partner.

At the heart of the Hong Kong protests is the same issue that causes concern about China’s ambitions from the South China Sea to the South Pacific. It’s about the Chinese government’s commitment to an idiosyncratic idea of the rule of law.

Hong Kong has something like a constitution or bill of rights, called the Hong Kong Basic Law. It’s a legacy of British colonial rule, which the Chinese government agreed to preserve because there was value in keeping Hong Kong the prosperous city it had become.

China has a very different approach to law. Its constitution can and has been changed at the whim of the ruling party. There is no separation of powers, and no such thing as an independent judiciary.

Removing the judicial firewall

The trigger for the Hong Kong protests was a proposed law enabling China to extradite Hong Kong residents and visitors. Protesters foresaw democrats and dissidents disappearing into China’s prison system. The judicial “firewall” giving meaning to the notion of “one country, two systems” would be fatally undermined. Hong Kong’s distinctive culture and economy would be destroyed with it.

Read more: The Hong Kong protesters have turned militant and more strategic – and this unnerves Beijing

The idea of law as an instrument of the Chinese Communist Party shapes the Chinese government’s domestic policies, and also its approach to international law. It respects international conventions when it has to, and when it is in the national interest. But there’s a point where it is quite willing to thumb its nose at the whole idea.

This willingness has stiffened under the leadership of Xi Jinping, who has reaffirmed in word and deed that the Chinese Communist Party “is the highest force for political leadership”.

Law of the sea

An example is China’s view of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in its dispute with the Philippines over island territory in the South China Sea.

In 2016 a UN tribunal unanimously found in favour of the Philippines. China refused to accept the verdict. It declared it “would continue to abide by international law and basic norms governing international relations”, but also added:

The Chinese government reiterates that, regarding territorial issues and maritime delimitation disputes, China does not accept any means of third party dispute settlement or any solution imposed on China.

It therefore continues to claim the South China Sea as an “inalienable” part of its territory. In direct defiance of the ruling, it has also built artificial islands within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, and built military bases on those islands.

Wider implications

China’s official narrative is that it doesn’t reject international law per se, but simply wants law that accommodates “Chinese characteristics”, including China’s preference for resolving disputes one on one.

Read more: Australians’ feelings sour towards China: Lowy poll

Given that the point of establishing the United Nations and other multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organisation was to replace “might makes right” with something like an international rule of law, this is likely to prove cold comfort for smaller nations.

As Xi told the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017:

• the overall goal of “comprehensively advancing law-based governance” is to “establish a system of socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics and build a country of socialist rule of law”

• “major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics aims to foster a new type of international relations and build a community with a shared future for mankind”

• the defining feature of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is “the leadership of the Communist Party of China”.

Read more: Australia has too few home-grown experts on the Chinese Communist Party. That’s a problem

Beijing’s view of the rule of law is thus very different to what most of the rest of the world understands. The potential consequences are not lost on the citizens of Hong Kong, and they should not be lost on China’s neighbours and trading partners.

– ref. Hong Kong fears losing its rule of law; the rest of the world should worry too – http://theconversation.com/hong-kong-fears-losing-its-rule-of-law-the-rest-of-the-world-should-worry-too-121807

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanya Latty, Senior Lecturer, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

In this series, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.

Insects have always been intimately connected with agriculture. Pest insects can cause tremendous damage, while helpful insects like pollinators and predators provide free services. The relatively young field of agricultural entomology uses knowledge of insect ecology and behaviour to help farmers protect their crops.

One of the most influential agricultural entomologists in history was an insatiably curious and fiercely independent woman named Eleanor Anne Ormerod. Although she lacked formal scientific training, Ormerod would eventually be hailed as the “Protectress of British Agriculture”.

Eleanor was born in 1828 to a wealthy British family. She did not attend school and was instead tutored by her mother on subjects thought to increase her marriageability: languages, drawing and music.

Like most modern entomologists, Eleanor’s interest in insects started when she was a child. In her autobiography, she tells of how she once spent hours observing water bugs swimming in a small glass. When one of the insects was injured, it was immediately consumed by the others.

Shocked, Eleanor hurried to tell her father about what she had seen but he dismissed her observations. Eleanor writes that while her family tolerated her interest in science, they were not particularly supportive of it.

Securing an advantageous marriage was supposed to be the primary goal of wealthy young women in Eleanor’s day. But her father was reclusive and disliked socialising; as a result, the family didn’t have the social connections needed to secure marriages for the children. Of Ormerod’s three sisters, none would marry.

The Ormerod daughters were relatively fortunate; their father gave them enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. Their status as wealthy unmarried women gave them the freedom to pursue their interests free from domestic responsibilities and the demands of husbands or fathers. For Eleanor, this meant time to indulge her scientific curiosity.

Foaming at the mouth

Ormerod’s first scientific publication was about the poisonous secretions of the Triton newt. After testing the poison’s effects on an unfortunate cat, she decided to test it on herself by putting the tail of a live newt into her mouth. The unpleasant effects – which included foaming at the mouth, oral convulsions and a headache – were all carefully described in her paper.

Omerod’s first foray into agricultural entomology came in 1868, when the Royal Horticultural Society asked for help creating a collection of insects both helpful and harmful to British agriculture. She enthusiastically answered the call and spent the next decade collecting and identifying insects on the society’s behalf.

In the process, she developed specialist skills in insect identification, behaviour and ecology.

Read more: Hidden women of history: Flos Greig, Australia’s first female lawyer and early innovator

During her insect-collecting trips, Ormerod spoke with farmers who told her of their many and varied pest problems. She realised that farmers were in need of science-based advice for protecting their crops from insect pests.

Yet most professional entomologists of the time were focused on the collection and classification of insects; they had little interest in applying their knowledge to agriculture. Ormerod decided to fill the vacant role of “agricultural entomologist” herself.

In 1877, Ormerod self-published the first of what was to become a series of 22 annual reports that provided guidelines for the control of insect pests in a variety of crops. Each pest was described in detail including particulars of its appearance, behaviour and ecology. The reports were aimed at farmers and were written in an easy-to-read style.

An early form of crowdsourcing

Ormerod wanted to create a resource that would help farmers all over Britain. She quickly realised this task would require more information than she could possibly collect on her own. So Ormerod turned to an early version of crowdsourcing to obtain data.

She circulated questionnaires throughout the countryside asking farmers about the pests they observed, and the pest control remedies they had tried.

Whenever possible, she conducted experiments or made observations to confirm information she received from her network of farmers. Each of her reports combined her own work with that of the farmers and labourers she corresponded with. The resulting reports cemented Ormerod’s reputation.

Ormerod was invited to give lectures at colleges and institutes throughout Britain. She lent her expertise to pest problems in places as far afield as New Zealand, the West Indies and South Africa.

In recognition of her service, she was awarded an honorary law degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1900 – the first women in the university’s history to receive the honour. Such was her fame that acclaimed author Virginia Woolf later wrote a fictionalised account of Ormerod’s life called Miss Ormerod.

While she undoubtedly contributed to the rise of agricultural entomology as a scientific field, Ormerod’s legacy is complicated by her vocal support of a dangerous insecticide known as Paris Green. Paris Green was an arsenic-derived compound initially used as a paint (hence the name).

Although Paris Green was used extensively in North America, it was relatively unheard of in Britain. Ormerod made it her mission to introduce this new advance to British farmers. So strongly did she believe in its crop-saving power, she joked about wanting the words, “She brought Paris Green to Britain,” engraved on her tombstone.

Unfortunately, Paris Green is a “broad spectrum” insecticide that kills most insects, including pollinators and predators. The loss of predators in the crop ecosystem gives free rein to pests, creating a vicious cycle of dependence on chemical insecticides.

Paris Green also has serious human health impacts, some of which were recognised even in Ormerod’s day. The fact that arsenic was a common ingredient in all manner of products – including medicines – may partly explain why Ormerod seems to have underestimated the danger of Paris Green to human and environmental health.

Ormerod’s steadfast promotion of Paris Green seems naïve in retrospect. But the late 1800’s was a time of tremendous optimism about the power of science to solve the world’s problems.

Paris Green and other insecticides allowed farmers to cheaply and effectively protect their crops – and thus their livelihoods. In fact, less than 50 years after Ormerod’s death, chemist Paul Muller won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the infamous (and environmentally catastrophic) insecticide DDT. When viewed in light of the “pesticide optimism” of her time, Ormerod’s enthusiasm about Paris Green is easier to understand.

Interestingly, Ormerod wasn’t just an insecticide evangelist. Her reports gave recommendations for a variety of pest control methods such as the use of exclusion nets and the manual removal of pests. These and other environmentally friendly techniques now form the core of modern “integrated pest management”, the gold standard for effective and sustainable pest control.

Eleanor Ormerod was devoted to the cause of protecting agriculture at a time when few “serious” entomologists were interested in applying their knowledge to agriculture. She recognised that progress in agricultural entomology could only happen when entomologists worked in close partnership with farmers.

She continued working and lecturing to within weeks of her death in 1901; in all of her years of service, she was never paid.

– ref. Hidden women of history: Eleanor Anne Ormerod, the self taught agricultural entomologist who tasted a live newt – http://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-eleanor-anne-ormerod-the-self-taught-agricultural-entomologist-who-tasted-a-live-newt-120158

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zac Rogers, Research Lead, Jeff Bleich Centre for the US Alliance in Digital Technology, Security, and Governance, Flinders University

Back in the 1990s – a lifetime ago in internet terms – the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells published several books charting the rise of information networks. He predicted that in the networked age, more value would accrue in controlling flows of information than in controlling the content itself.

In other words, those who positioned themselves as network hubs – the routers and switchers of information – would become the gatekeepers of power in the digital age.

With the rise of internet juggernauts Google, Facebook, Amazon and others, this insight seems obvious now. But over the past two decades, a fundamentally new business model emerged which even Castells had not foreseen – one in which attracting users onto digital platforms takes precedence over everything else, including what the user might say, do, or buy on that platform.

Gathering information became the dominant imperative for tech giants – aided willingly by users charmed first by novelty, then by the convenience and self-expression afforded by being online. The result was an explosion of information, which online behemoths can collate and use for profit.

Read more: Here’s how tech giants profit from invading our privacy, and how we can start taking it back

The sheer scale of this enterprise means that much of it is invisible to the everyday user. The big platforms are now so complex that their inner workings have become opaque even to their engineers and administrators. If the system is now so huge that not even those working within it can see the entire picture, then what hope do regulators or the public have?

Of course, governments are trying to fight back. The GDPR laws in Europe, the ACCC Digital Platforms report in Australia, and the DETOUR Act introduced to the US Congress in April – all are significant attempts to claw back some agency. At the same time, it is dawning on societies everywhere that these efforts, while crucial, are not enough.

Read more: Consumer watchdog calls for new measures to combat Facebook and Google’s digital dominance

Gatekeepers reign supreme

If you think of the internet as a gigantic machine for sharing and copying information, then it becomes clear that the systems for sorting that information are vitally important. Think not just of Google’s search tool, but also of the way Google and Amazon dominate cloud computing – the largely invisible systems that make the internet usable.

Over time, these platforms have achieved greater and greater control over how information flows through them. But it is an unfamiliar type of control, increasingly involving autonomous, self-teaching systems that are increasingly inscrutable to humans.

Information gatekeeping is paramount, which is why platforms such as Google, Amazon and Facebook have risen to supremacy. But that doesn’t mean these platforms necessarily need to compete or collude with one another. The internet is truly enormous, a fact that has allowed each platform to become emperor of a growing niche: Google for search, Facebook for social, Amazon for retail, and so on. In each domain, they played the role of incumbent, disruptor, and innovator, all at the same time.

Now nobody competes with them. Whether you’re an individual, business, or government, if you need the internet, you need their services. The juggernauts of the networked age are structural.

Algorithms are running the show

For these platforms to stay on top, innovation is a constant requirement. As the job of sorting grows ever larger and more complex, we’re seeing the development of algorithms so advanced that their human creators have lost the capacity to understand their inner workings. And if the output satisfies the task at hand, the inner workings of the system are considered of minor importance.

Meanwhile, the litany of adverse effects are undeniable. This brave new machine-led world is eroding our capacity to identify, locate, and trust authoritative information, in favour of speed.

It’s true that the patient was already unwell; societies have been hollowed out by three decades of market fundamentalism. But as American tech historian George Dyson recently warned, self-replicating code is now out there in the cyber ecosystem. What began as a way for humans to coax others into desired behaviours now threatens to morph into nothing less than the manipulation of humans by machines.

The digital age has spurred enormous growth in research disciplines such as social psychology, behavioural economics, and neuroscience. They have yielded staggering insights into human cognition and behaviour, with potential uses that are far from benign.

Even if this effort had been founded with the best of intentions, accidents abound when fallible humans intervene in complex systems with fledgling ethical and legal underpinnings. Throw malign intentions into the mix – election interference, information warfare, online extremism – and the challenges only mount.

If you’re still thinking about digital technologies as tools – implying that you, the user, are in full control – you need to think again. The truth is that no one truly knows where self-replicating digital code will take us. You are the feedback, not the instruction.

Regulators don’t know where to start

A consensus is growing that regulatory intervention is urgently required to stave off further social disruption, and to bring democratic and legal oversight into the practices of the world’s largest monopolies. But, if Dyson is correct, the genie is already out of the bottle.

Entranced by the novelty and convenience of life online, we have unwittingly allowed silicon valley to pull off a “coup from above”. It is long past time that the ideology that informed this coup, and is now governing so much everyday human activity, is exposed to scrutiny.

Read more: Explainer: what is surveillance capitalism and how does it shape our economy?

The challenges of the digital information age extend beyond monopolies and privacy. This regime of technologies was built by design without concerns about exploitation. Those vulnerabilities are extensive and will continue to be abused, and now that this tech is so intimately a part of daily life, its remediation should be pursued without fear or favour.

Yet legislative and regulatory intervention can only be effective if industry, governments and civil society combine to build, by design, a digital information age worthy of the name, which doesn’t leave us all open to exploitation.

– ref. Regulating Facebook, Google and Amazon is hard given their bewildering complexity – http://theconversation.com/regulating-facebook-google-and-amazon-is-hard-given-their-bewildering-complexity-111821

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marnee Shay, Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow, School of Education and Centre for Policy Futures, The University of Queensland

When you think of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander kid, or in fact any kid, imagine what’s possible. Don’t define us through the lens of disadvantage […] Expect the best of us. – Excerpt from the Imagination Declaration, August 2019.

A group of school students from across Australia have just shown what real leadership on Indigenous issues looks like.

At last week’s national Garma Festival, 65 Indigenous and non-Indigenous students from years six to 12 came together for a Youth Forum and wrote their own follow up to 2017’s Uluru Statement from the Heart. They called it the Imagination Declaration. It’s a challenge to the prime minister and education ministers to involve young people – and Indigenous Australians in particular – in making policy about their future.

With 60,000 years of genius and imagination in our hearts and minds, we can be one of the groups of people that transform the future of life on Earth, for the good of us all.

We can design the solutions that lift islands up in the face of rising seas, we can work on creative agricultural solutions that are in sync with our natural habitat, we can re-engineer schooling, we can invent new jobs and technologies, and we can unite around kindness.

We are not the problem, we are the solution.

Young people under 25 years make up more than half of the Indigenous population, even more than the one-third proportion of non-Indigenous Australians the same age. Yet we rarely hear the perspectives of the future leaders and custodians of the oldest living culture in the world.

That was true even of last week’s Imagination Declaration, which was briefly reported by just one media outlet, NITV.

But there’s a good chance you’ll hear more about “the Imagination agenda for our classrooms” at your local school, childcare centre or university in coming months, as Indigenous mentoring organisation AIME plans to share the declaration nationally for other Australians to sign if they support the students’ goals.

Read more: How a robot called Pink helped teach school children an Aboriginal language

The students invite the prime minister and education ministers to meet them and listen to their ideas. Cynics might dismiss that as too idealistic – but as education researchers, we’ve seen the genuine difference listening to and “expecting the best” of young people can make.

Lessons from Queensland and WA high schools

We’ve spent the past three years in six urban, regional and remote communities across Queensland and Western Australia, working with more than 100 young people in a diverse range of high schools.

One of the reasons for doing the “Our Stories, Our Way” project was that while you can find hundreds of studies about Indigenous young people – usually with a negative, “closing the gap” focus – when we searched for health or education research on identity from recent decades, we found just 14 studies that specifically included the voices of Indigenous Australians under 25.

We helped create spaces where Indigenous young people had a rare chance to share their hopes with their communities, schools and each other, ranging from “I want to go to uni and study physiotherapy” to:

No matter what happens we should all be proud of whatever culture we are, no matter what culture/colour. We are all people, our skin colour shouldn’t matter

Our project focused on identity, health and well-being. Young people were given resources to make a creative piece that reflects their identities, in their words.

Some chose to create clothes and posters with art representing their stories, with messages such as “our pride, our culture” and “strive with pride”. In two urban Brisbane schools, young people wrote and recorded their own rap songs, filled with powerful lyrics such as:

Listen to the medley, black and deadly
Searching for acceptance, we must be respected
You can say what you want friend or foe
I feel good in my skin wherever I go

In contrast with negative representations of Indigenous young people, the young people in our project spoke about their values, such as pride, respect for Elders, succeeding, family and being a collective when they explained how they express their identities.

But they also talked about the high levels of racism they experience.

Navigating everyday things, like going to a shop, was a cause of real stress and anxiety for some Indigenous young people. Being followed around, often with the assumption Indigenous young people don’t have money or are going to steal something, is an issue that was reported to us by young people consistently across the project.

Some young people even said they weren’t able to continue attending school due to racism. Asked to explain this, the young people we worked with were frank:

When young black kids, like ourselves, when we feel like we have nothing to do, that’s when we go out and break the law. Then when you’ve got the other good black kids staying in school and going to real good schools … coppers will look at them funny too just because their skin is black. It’s like, you know, not every blackfella is the same.

Lessons for educators from our project

What struck us most was that, in spite of the impacts of negative stereotyping and racism, the young people we worked with showed enormous resilience and ability to understand and navigate complex issues.

Nine local Indigenous researchers worked with our project team. They provided reflections on the impacts they had seen, observing a transformation in young people’s confidence, with a greater “sense of self worth among students … (and) sense of pride and belonging”.

The local researchers also reported that there was more talk within the high schools than before the project about the value of “embedding Indigenous culture in the curriculum” and that “community members were talking about the creative projects by young people and were proud of their achievements”.

One non-Indigenous school leader expressed surprise that even at a high school that had made an effort to embed Indigenous culture into the curriculum, “it was a bit of an eye opener that there is still really a place for the kids for an Indigenous space”.

Read more: Indigenous art centres that sustain remote communities are at risk. The VET sector can help

An Imagination agenda, from childcare to Canberra

The students behind the Imagination Declaration have called on politicians “to establish an imagination agenda for our Indigenous kids and, in fact, for all Australian children”, which stops “looking at us as a problem to fix”.

That hope of being included in making solutions – rather than having curricula or policy written without them – was echoed by one of our project’s students:

Well if people just listen to us for once … we can make our own job. We can make our own shop, with all the art stuff or Aboriginal kids have grown up in dance and stuff. But the government just (needs to) listen to us. We reckon we’ll make a future. We’ll go all the way.

– ref. The Imagination Declaration: young Indigenous Australians want to be heard – but will we listen? – http://theconversation.com/the-imagination-declaration-young-indigenous-australians-want-to-be-heard-but-will-we-listen-121569

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

Scott Morrison has voiced his intention to shake up the federal public service – seeking to make it more efficient in implementing the government’s agenda. A review of the public service led by David Thodey is now finished.

Meanwhile, Professor Beth Noveck and Professor Rod Glover have released a timely study of the public service, titled Today’s problems, Yesterday’s toolkit. Commissioned by the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, it builds on interviews with almost 400 public servants – most of them Australians.

In this podcast episode, Noveck and Glover discuss the “creeping crisis” of effectiveness and legitimacy the Australian public service is facing.

Blunt public sector management tools, including hiring freezes, efficiency dividends, and funding cuts that hobble innovative or experimental initiatives, are creating what interviewees for this study describe as a creeping crisis for the public sector.

To reverse this trend, they say the government must ensure public servants have a “ 21st century toolkit” to solve public problems. They point to the private sector’s “use of creative problem-solving methods, enabled by new technologies” as an example to follow.

They argue that “improving individual skills provides the linchpin for tackling public problems and restoring trust in government”.

The report is .

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Additional audio

A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

Image:

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– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: on the ‘creeping crisis’ in the public service – http://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-on-the-creeping-crisis-in-the-public-service-121818

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacqueline Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Neuropsychology, University of Melbourne

From young adults to people in their 60s, everyday functioning in today’s world can place high demands on our attention and memory skills.

Memory lapses such as forgetting an appointment, losing our keys, forgetting a distant relative’s name or not remembering why you opened the fridge can leave us believing our thinking skills are impaired.

But you might be too hard on yourself. Tiredness, stress and worry, and feeling down or depressed are all common reasons adults experience attention and memory difficulties.

Read more: What is ‘cognitive reserve’? How we can protect our brains from memory loss and dementia

Attention and memory systems

Attention and memory skills are closely connected. Whether we can learn and remember something partly depends on our ability to concentrate on the information at the time.

It also depends on our ability to focus our attention on retrieving that information when it’s being recalled at a later time.

This attention system, which is so important for successful memory function, has a limited capacity – we can only make sense of, and learn, a limited amount of information in any given moment.

Being able to learn, and later successfully remember something, also depends on our memory system, which stores the information.

Changes in attention and memory skills

In people who are ageing normally, both attention and memory systems gradually decline. This decline starts in our early 20s and continues slowly until our 60s, when it tends to speed up.

During normal ageing, the number of connections between brain cells slowly reduce and some areas of the brain progressively work less efficiently. These changes particularly occur in the areas of the brain that are important for memory and attention systems.

This normal ageing decline is different from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, which cause progressive changes in thinking skills, emotions and behaviour that are not typical of the normal ageing process. Dementia comes from a group of diseases that affect brain tissue and cause abnormal changes in the way the brain works.

Read more: Why people with dementia don’t all behave the same

If you’re concerned your memory difficulties may be a symptom of dementia, talk to your GP, who can refer you to a specialist, if needed, to determine whether these changes are due to normal ageing, dementia or some other cause.

If you experience persistent changes in your thinking skills, which are clearly greater than your friends and acquaintances who are of a similar age and in similar life circumstances, see your GP.

Normal attention and memory difficulties

Broadly, there are two main reasons healthy adults experience difficulties with their memory and/or attention: highly demanding lives and normal age-related changes.

A person can be consistently using their attention and memory skills at high levels without sufficient mental relaxation time and/or sleep to keep their brain working at its best.

Young adults who are working, studying and then consistently using attention-demanding devices as “relaxation” techniques, such as computer games and social media interaction, fall into this group.

Adults juggling the demands of work or study, family and social requirements also fall into this group.

Most adults need around seven to nine hours of sleep per night for their brain to work at its best, with older adults needing seven to eight hours.

The second common reason is a combination of ageing-related brain changes and highly demanding work requirements.

For people in jobs that place a high load on thinking skills, the thinking changes that occur with normal ageing can become noticeable at some point around 55 to 70 years of age. It’s around this time age-related changes in the ability to carry out complex thinking tasks become large enough to be noticeable. People who are retired or don’t have the same mentally demanding jobs generally experience the same changes, but may not notice them as much.

This is also the age many people become more aware of the potential risk of dementia. Consequently, these normal changes can result in high levels of stress and concern, which can result in a person experiencing even greater difficulties day to day.

Emotional distress can take its toll

Feeling down and sad can affect memory and concentration. When a person is feeling worried and/or down regularly, they may become consumed by their thoughts.

It’s important to recognise how you’re feeling, to make changes or seek help if needed. But thinking a lot about how you’re feeling can also take a person’s attention away from the task at hand and make it difficult for them to concentrate on what is happening, or remember it clearly in the future.

So feeling worried or down can make it seem there is something wrong with their memory and concentration.

Boosting your attention and memory skills

There are a number of things that can be done to help your day-to-day memory and attention skills.

First, it’s important to properly rest your mind on a regular basis. This involves routinely doing something you enjoy that doesn’t demand high levels of attention or memory, such as exercising, reading for pleasure, walking the dog, listening to music, relaxed socialising with friends, and so on.

Playing computer games, or having a lengthy and focused session on social media, requires high levels of attention and other thinking skills, so these are not good mental relaxation techniques when you are already mentally tired.

Read more: Why two people see the same thing but have different memories

It’s also important to get enough sleep, so you are not consistently tired – undertaking exercise on a regular basis often helps with getting good quality sleep, as does keeping alcohol consumption within recommended limits.

Looking after your mental health is also important. Noticing how you are feeling and getting support (social and/or professional) during longer periods of high stress or lowered mood will help ensure these things are not affecting your memory or concentration.

Finally, be fair to yourself if you notice difficulties with your thinking. Are the changes you notice any different to those of other people your own age and in similar circumstances, or are you comparing yourself to someone younger or with less demands in their life?

If you have ongoing concerns about your attention and memory, speak with your GP, who can refer you to a specialist, such as a clinical neuropsychologist, if needed.

Read more: Curious Kids: why do I sometimes forget what I was just going to say?

– ref. Memory and attention difficulties are often part of a normal life – http://theconversation.com/memory-and-attention-difficulties-are-often-part-of-a-normal-life-119539

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gillian Triggs, Emeritus Professor, University of Melbourne

If anyone doubts the need for a charter of rights in Australia, the Banerji decision of the High Court handed down last week demonstrates why legislative protection for our common law freedoms has become a matter of national urgency.

We have it from the most authoritative source. The High Court has confirmed unanimously that Australians do not have a personal right to freedom of speech.

Most Australians might be surprised to learn this, but this is one of the consequences of Australia being the only Western democracy without some form of charter of rights legislated by parliament or entrenched in the constitution.

A ‘freezing’ effect on free speech

The High Court is technically right. The constitution does not explicitly protect the right to freedom of speech. In its ruling, the court upheld the government’s right to sack Michaela Banerji, a public servant, for her critical tweets about the indefinite detention of refugees offshore, among other concerns.

It was a highly technical and narrow interpretation of the law. It failed to acknowledge the common law right to freedom of expression, which is as ancient as the English Bill of Rights 1689. It also failed to recognise Australia’s international treaty obligations.

Read more: Will the High Court ruling on public servant’s tweets have a ‘powerful chill’ on free speech?

The High Court acknowledged that, had this case arisen in Canada, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms might have provided some protection.

With respect to free speech, the Canadian Supreme Court has adopted the test of “minimum impairment” guaranteed by its charter. The court has said that a blanket ban on critical comments by public servants is not “justified in a free and democratic society”. Any restriction on the freedom of expression of a public servant must not go

beyond what [was] necessary to achieve the objective of an impartial and loyal civil service.

A similar charter protection in Australian law may not have saved Banerji on the facts of her case, as it is arguably necessary to protect the integrity of the public service. But the impact of the High Court’s decision is likely to have a chilling, if not freezing, effect on the liberty of public servants to speak up fearlessly when governments abuse their powers or trample on fundamental freedoms.

This is especially worrying as public officials are often in the best position to know.

Further restrictions on common law freedoms

Timing, of course, is everything. The Banerji decision comes in the middle of a national debate about the need for religious freedom protections in the Israel Folau case, and the threats to press freedom posed by recent federal police raids on a News Corp journalist and the ABC.

It is more than ironic the government should also be prosecuting Bernard Collaery, a former attorney-general for the ACT, for espionage. His alleged offence was to provide legal advice to Witness K, a whistleblower who recently agreed to plead guilty to releasing information about Australia’s spying activities in Timor-Leste.

Less sensational, but a serious restriction on our common law freedoms, are the laws introduced since 2001 to counter the threat of terrorism. These laws have been coined “hyper-legislation”, as they are more extensive and intrusive than those adopted by other nations.

Read more: How a charter of rights could protect Australians’ fundamental freedoms

The UK’s Human Rights Act has provided guidance to courts when rejecting laws passed in the name of national security that breach fundamental freedoms.

In the Belmarsh case in 2004, for example, the House of Lords condemned the detention of suspected terrorists who had not had the benefit of a criminal trial. The court found their detention was not rationally related to the perceived threat to national security and was illegal.

Since 2001, respective Australian governments, supported by opposition parties, have granted unprecedented powers to security and intelligence agencies and discretionary powers to ministers. There have not been compelling national security reasons for granting these powers, nor are these powers reviewable, for practical purposes, by our courts.

Among the many examples of legislative overreach in Australia since then are the Data Retention Act, Foreign Fighters Act, Espionage and Foreign Interference Act, de-encryption provisions, laws expanding detention for questioning, and secrecy laws applicable to offshore detention and security operations.

There are also countless apparently minor intrusions on our rights. In 2014, the Australian Law Reform Commission found at least 121 laws infringe our democratic freedoms, from mandatory sentencing laws to restrictions on environmental protests.

Sadly, traditional common law rights that might protect us from such legislative excesses are all too readily ignored by the courts.

Would a charter lead to greater judicial power?

How would a charter of rights ensure that government intrusions on our liberties are reasonable and proportionate to achieve a legitimate end – the test adopted by the High Court to assess the validity of federal laws?

A charter is not a sole solution. Many nations that abuse human rights have one. But under Australian law, a charter would give greater power to the courts to ensure that common law freedoms were respected.

Read more: Gillian Triggs: How the ‘fair go’ became the last bulwark for Australia’s freedoms

A judge could, for example, apply charter law to prohibit indefinite detention without trial of stateless persons, the mentally ill and asylum seekers and refugees; ensure that juveniles are not held in adult facilities; require governments to provide adequate housing for all; ensure access to medical care and social justice; protect against disproportionate counter-terrorism and surveillance laws; and protect the culture and rights of Indigenous peoples.

Would this mean the expansion of judicial power at the cost of parliamentary sovereignty? Would it be a carbon copy of the US Bill of Rights?

Not if we adopt the so-called “dialogue model” of the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities. Under this model, a Victorian court cannot invalidate a law; it can only declare that a law does not comply with charter rights. It is then up to parliament to amend the offending law as it sees fit.

It would be a misunderstanding of the role of a rights charter to think only of judicial power. The real significance of a charter lies in the benchmarks it creates to influence the decisions of public officials and the standards demanded by the community. A charter is a check on government power that is vital to contemporary democracy.

We now have a serious deficit in legal protection for human rights in Australia, rights that have been in regression for 20 years. We now need to consider a legislated charter setting out the rights we care about.

Gillian Triggs will take part in a debate sponsored by La Trobe University on whether Australia needs a charter of human rights on Tuesday, Aug. 13, at the National Gallery of Victoria.

– ref. Why an Australian charter of rights is a matter of national urgency – http://theconversation.com/why-an-australian-charter-of-rights-is-a-matter-of-national-urgency-121411

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Banks, Professor of Conservation Biology, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au.

Where did rats first come from? – Lewis, age 7, Brisbane.

Rats are everywhere – at least everywhere that humans are. In almost every big city in the world, rats are eating our rubbish, breeding in our buildings, and running through our streets.

But there are lots of different types of rat. And where they originally came from depends on which rat species you are talking about (species means they’re of the same animal type).

Read more: Curious Kids: Where did the first person come from?

Black rats and brown rats

There are two rat species that usually live in cities.

One is the black rat (what scientists would call Rattus rattus). They’re sometimes called the “ship rat” because they’ve been spread around the world on ships. They’re also known as the “roof rat” because they like to live in roofs. Rattus rattus is originally from India and began to live with humans more than 4,000 years ago, and slowly spread west into Europe about 3,000 years ago.

Then there’s the brown rat (which scientists would call Rattus norvegicus). They are twice as big as black rats. They’re the main city rat in Europe and America, but they live in Australia too. They’re also known as the sewer rat (because they like to live in drains) or the Norway rat (because people mistakenly thought they came from Norway.)

Most pet rats and lab rats are brown rats. They originally came from China and spread around the world later than black rats. They probably arrived in Europe around the 1300s and spread worldwide in the late 1700s.

Black rats are the most common species in Australian cities but brown rats can be more common in older inner-city areas. There are a lot of brown rats in Brisbane, so chances are you have seen one.

Both black and brown rats came to Australia with Europeans on ships, which is how they spread to many other places in the world too.

Skeletons of black rats were found in the gun barrels of Dutch ships that sank off the west coast of Australia in 1616, but black rats probably entered Australia with the First Fleet in 1788.

Some Europeans thought at first these rats were a native Australian species, as they look quite similar to local rats and liked living in our native trees. But now we know they arrived with the Europeans.

Brown rats also probably arrived with the British but we don’t know exactly when.

Cities are perfect for rats

City rats have three main secrets to their success.

First, they eat pretty much anything.

Second, they produce lots of babies, and fast. A female can have up to 12 pups in a litter, every month, and those babies can breed in just a few months.

And third, they’re bold but smart and have worked out what’s safe and what’s dangerous in the city.

It’s no wonder rats survive and thrive in the city.

Australian native rodents

Rats are a type of animal called a rodent. There are about 2,200 different species of rodents, including mice, squirrels, guinea pigs, beavers, and many more. Rodent-like mammals have been around for 66 million years, appearing soon after dinosaurs went extinct. They are now spread across the globe.

Australia has more than 60 species of native rodents that evolved here, and rodents make up a quarter of all our native mammal species.

Our largest is the water rat (Hydromys chrysogaster), which can weigh more than 1kg. That’s more than four times the size of black rats! You still sometimes see them in cities like Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth.

The smallest is the delicate mouse (Pseudomys delicatulus), which weighs less than 10g and lives in Australia’s central deserts.

Unfortunately, many of Australia’s native rodents are threatened with extinction, mostly due to introduced predators like foxes and feral cats.

Read more: Curious Kids: how can penguins stay warm in the freezing cold waters of Antarctica?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au

– ref. Curious Kids: where did rats first come from? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-where-did-rats-first-come-from-121307

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew King, ARC DECRA fellow, University of Melbourne

Many Australians have just shivered through a cold weekend of wintry weather, with widespread snowfall across Victoria and parts of New South Wales.

The snow was welcomed by skiers and snowboarders alike, with over a metre of snow at the major resorts, but was less fun for people travelling on icy roads across the southeast.

Snow also fell on an AFL match for the first time. So how unusual was last weekend’s dose of winter weather and does a changing climate mean we’ll see more or less snow in winters to come?

Firstly, let’s look at what happened.

A succession of cold fronts brought wind, rain and snow to the southeast of Australia and strong southerly winds kept days and nights much cooler than average. This kind of weather setup where we get sustained southerlies and cold fronts over several days is unusual but by no means unprecedented.

Often, strong cold outbreaks will pass within a day or so, but this event was more prolonged than most because we had multiple blasts of cold air.

Snow fell on and off for two days in places like the Dandenong Ranges and around Orange, and many areas above 1,000 metres in the NSW Central Tablelands were still snow-covered on Monday. Among the lowest places where snow settled were Tumut (New South Wales) and Maldon (Victoria), both at about 300 metres elevation.

Read more: Why snowfall is one of the hardest predictions for a meteorologist

Snow also fell during the AFL match between the GWS Giants and Hawthorn at Canberra on Friday night. While this is the first time snow is known to have fallen during an AFL/VFL match, on average over the last few decades snow falls without settling in Canberra once every year or two. It is only recently matches have started being played in Canberra; until the 1980s, almost all matches were in Melbourne, which has only seen falling snow a handful of times since European settlement.

How unusual was it?

When we delve into the past, we can find lots of incidences of widespread snowfalls and freezing conditions in areas of Victoria and New South Wales going back to early British colonisation.

Some of the most memorable widespread events of the past include those of 1900, when 60 centimetres fell in Bathurst; 1965, when snow fell as far north as the ranges west of Mackay; and 1984, when most of the Great Dividing Range was covered as far north as southern Queensland.

The most widespread snowfall of the last 20 years was probably that of May 2000, when snow fell as low as 250 metres in northeast Victoria. 2000 was also the last time substantial snow settled in central Canberra.

Last weekend’s event was probably the most significant snowfall since 2000 in parts of Victoria north of the ranges, and in southern inland New South Wales. In central and northern New South Wales, the last snowfall on this scale was in 2015, while in the hills around Melbourne it was on a par with 2008.

Will snowy winters be a thing of the past?

As the climate warms up, we generally expect to see more of what falls out of the sky to be rain than snow. Winter temperatures across the south of Australia are warming and that’s why it’s become so hard to break existing cold records and much easier to break warm records.

In addition, our rain- and snow-bearing winter storms are tending to move slightly southwards, meaning they miss the south of Australia and head into the Southern Ocean. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect events like this in the future. They may become less frequent and slightly less cold when they do occur, but we still expect winter cold snaps like this one to remain a feature of a warmer climate.

As many a keen observer of Australia’s ski season will know, a good season can really depend on the timing of a massive cold outbreak like the one we have just experienced. This can make it hard, anecdotally, to see the changes to our ski seasons in real time.

Analysis of daily snowfall data from the major Victorian ski resorts suggests that while the average number of days in which snow accumulates has declined since the 1990s, the number of heavy snowfall events has remained unchanged.

However, at lower elevations, such as at Bukalong, NSW (790m above sea level), the reduced number of snowfall days and depth is very clear. Over a 50 year time period, there has been a 38% decline per decade in the June maximum snow depth (as a percentage of the June average).

Projections of future snowfall conditions across southeast Australia indicate that while extreme cold events such as last weekend may still occur, it may be harder for snow to stick around once on the ground, with near-surface temperatures expected to increase significantly.

Read more: Why does a bit of snow plunge Britain into transport chaos?

Combining this with a continued decrease in non-extreme snowfall events, largely due to changing air temperatures, has lead climate scientists to predict Australia’s snow-cover will be reduced by about 60% by 2070. This is bad news for endemic alpine species such as the endangered pygmy possum, for our water resources, and also for the snow-obsessed among us who enjoyed our recent winter wonderland.

– ref. Snow at the footy? Just how unusual was last weekend’s weather? – http://theconversation.com/snow-at-the-footy-just-how-unusual-was-last-weekends-weather-121802

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Balkin, Lecturer, English and Theatre Studies, University of Melbourne

Review: My Dearworthy Darling, Malthouse

My Dearworthy Darling is a collaboration between playwright, fantasy novelist, poet, and theatre critic Alison Croggon and feminist theatre company The Rabble (Kate Davis and Emma Valente).

In her criticism, Croggon champions good writing for the stage, rejecting the idea that the literary and the theatrical are opposing concepts. In their dramaturgy, The Rabble reject the male-dominated tradition of play scripts, instead pursuing experimental, design-led re-imaginings of iconic stories from the Western canon.

Their philosophies met and sometimes clashed in My Dearworthy Darling, which was inspired by the autobiography of an illiterate woman, the medieval mystic Margery Kempe. It attempted to help us hear women’s voices by making them strange, asking us to listen across time and idiom.

The story happens across two times and places, contemporary Australia and medieval England. In Australia there are three nameless characters, a woman (Jennifer Vuletic), her insurance agent husband (Ben Grant), and her sister (Natalie Gamsu). The woman is possibly having a breakdown but definitely being gaslit by her husband and sister, who tell her at every opportunity that there is something wrong with her mind, memory, or behaviour.

Read more: Explainer: what does ‘gaslighting’ mean?

The woman has visions that connect her to a medieval mystic, also played by Vuletic, whose physicality and resonant voice are compelling. A chorus in monastic robes (played by Monash University performance students) supports and listens to her.

Croggan’s script and Valente’s sound design encourage us to listen, too. The three main actors were miked in a way that drew attention to the amplification of their voices, rendering them slightly alien in their audibility.

The sounds of contemporary Australia were the drone of a vacuum cleaner, the hum of an electric toothbrush, the crunch of ice cubes in a plastic cup, and the ringing of mobile phones. The sounds of medieval England were more human and less prosaic —speaking, chanting, and singing.

But one time also seemed to bleed through to the other: a vacuum switches itself on with mundane supernaturalism; a mobile phone rings in medieval England. At one point the woman places a drinking glass on the ground and then her ear to the glass, as though trying to hear the other time.

Croggan’s program note suggests the three Australian characters are “pressured and broken by the dehumanisations of modern capitalism” and “don’t know how to communicate and so hurt each other.”

These themes were perceptible in the play, but I found the husband and sister so unpleasant there seemed no reason for the woman to attempt communication with these characters, or to remain in their prosaic world. They repeatedly tried to convince the woman that she was crazy by lying to and about her, including a scene in which the husband unconvincingly tells an emergency operator that his unconscious wife has a knife and is trying to kill him. I preferred the appliances to these characters, though Grant and Gamsu are skilled actors.

In Australia, the woman repeatedly says that she doesn’t have the words to express what she is experiencing. Nor are the husband and sister inclined to listen. In medieval England, on the other hand, the woman joins the chorus in speaking words from The Book of Margery Kempe. In this way she finds a voice and the chorus become her onstage auditors and supporting singers.

The Book of Margery Kempe is often called the earliest autobiography in English. Kempe could not write and so dictated her visions and feelings to male scribes who wrote them down in the third person. Although Kempe was more than once accused of being a heretic during her lifetime, she is now celebrated as a woman who claimed a public voice to express her emotional, sexual, and religious experience.

Text from Kempe’s book appears throughout My Dearworthy Darling as electronic surtitles and spoken or sung dialogue. The actors’ facility with the Middle English was impressive and beautiful.

Because the Middle English overlaps with but is different from our own idiom, the audience must listen carefully, or relinquish conventional ideas about meaning and communication in favour of the sounds and aesthetics of Kempe’s words.

That these words are a third-person, dictated, 14th-century memoir should caution us against simplistic morals about restoring and listening to women’s voices — a problem The Rabble also grappled with in their 2017 show about another illiterate medieval heroine, Joan.

My Dearworthy Darling’s use of electronic surtitles, time travel, and Middle English show how the mediations that stand between us and Kempe’s voice are also what allow us to hear it. Going back in time, shifting place and idiom, the woman finds she has both words and listeners.

Are the words her own? Croggan’s citations of Kempe and the play’s shift to chanting and choral song suggest this is the wrong question. If we want to give women words and hear their voices, the play implies, we must also disrupt and complicate the conventions of authorship and public speech that write them out of history.

We must see how mediation, estrangement, and ventriloquism facilitate as well as thwart expression.

My Dearworthy Darling is at The Malthouse until August 18.

– ref. Contemporary and medieval women’s voices collide in My Dearworthy Darling – http://theconversation.com/contemporary-and-medieval-womens-voices-collide-in-my-dearworthy-darling-120590

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Agostini, Post doctoral research fellow, University of South Australia

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au.

How do people know not to fall out of their beds when they are sleeping? – Louisa, age five.

You might think that when we sleep we are completely unconscious and we have no idea what is happening around us. But that isn’t quite true.

When we’re sleeping, our bodies and brains are still working to keep us healthy and happy. We also still have some idea of where we are.

Read more: Curious Kids: What happens in our bodies when we sleep?

Our body knows how it is moving and where it is because of a sense called “proprioception”. It’s like a “sixth sense” that helps your body know where it is in the world and where all the parts of your body are in relation to each other.

When we are awake, this sixth sense stops us from walking into things or falling over.

You might think that it would switch off when we’re sleeping. But because our bodies still work while we’re sleeping, our sixth sense is still working too.

Even though we are asleep, we can still feel if we are comfortable and our sixth sense is working to let us know where we are in our beds. This helps us know not to fall out.

But the system doesn’t always work very well when we are young. This is why kids fall out of bed sometimes.

We get better at this as we get older, so older children and adults are less likely to fall out of bed.

The different stages of sleep

Our sleep isn’t the same the whole night through. It goes through different stages, from light sleep to deep sleep and back again.

One special stage of sleep, where we have our most exciting dreams, is called REM sleep. REM stands for rapid eye movement. That’s when our eyes are moving around to try to see everything that is happening while we are dreaming.

During this stage, our brain sends a message to our body to stop moving to make it less likely we will get up or fall out of bed.

If our body didn’t send this message to our brain, we would act out our dreams!

Message not recieved

Some people’s brains don’t send this message and these people do act out their dreams. This is called “rapid eye movement behaviour disorder”. It is very rare.

There are stories of people with this disorder doing things like patting imaginary cats or hurting themselves by trying to jump out of bed while they’re still asleep. Most of them wake up not knowing they did anything unusual until someone tells them.

Sleep is very important to help us grow big and strong. Our bodies and brains are still working while we are asleep to heal any injuries and help keep us happy and healthy.

Read more: Curious Kids: Where do dreams come from?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au

– ref. Curious Kids: why don’t people fall out of bed when they are sleeping? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-why-dont-people-fall-out-of-bed-when-they-are-sleeping-120282

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason Ferris, Associate Professor, Program Leader for Research and Statistical Support Service and Program Leader for Substance Use and Mental Health, Centre for Health Services Research, The University of Queensland

This is the second in a series of articles discussing a recently released comprehensive evaluation of the Queensland government’s 2016 policy reforms to tackle alcohol-fuelled violence and the implications for liquor regulation and the night-time economy in Queensland and Australia. A summary report is also available.

Our evaluation of the Queensland government’s 2016 “Tackling Alcohol-Fuelled Violence” (TAFV) policy has found Queenslanders are still drinking more heavily than people in other states when going out at night.

Despite significant reductions in serious assaults and other health-related outcomes, reported levels of aggression are also high.

Read more: Lessons from Queensland on alcohol, violence and the night-time economy

Queenslanders report much higher levels of aggression than reported in our previous studies, which asked the same question in Canberra, Hobart, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Wollongong, Geelong and Newcastle.

Female patrons reported experiencing more of all types of aggression than men across all precincts. The next article in this series highlights the worrying number of women who experience unwanted sexual attention while out.

To measure the impact of the 2016 policy changes on alcohol consumption, illicit drug use and aggression, our research teams conducted street intercept surveys on Saturday nights in Fortitude Valley (Brisbane), Surfers Paradise and Cairns between 2016 and 2018. All participants were breathalysed. Every fifth person was invited to participate in a saliva drug swab.

Across the precincts, 4,401 people – 57% of them male – completed surveys.

Blood alcohol concentration (BAC)

Half of patrons’ blood alcohol concentration (BAC in g/dL) readings were over 0.077 (the median value, with a range of 0.000-0.300) in Fortitude Valley, 0.086 (range 0.000-0.290) in Surfers Paradise and 0.087 (range 0.000-0.289) in Cairns. The highest reading, 0.300, is six times the legal driving limit.

These median BAC levels are much higher than other, previously studied cities. The results highlight the challenges of achieving change in Queensland’s drinking culture.

Interestingly, most patrons are more drunk than they think they are. Before undertaking a breath test patrons were asked to guess their level of intoxication. For example, in Cairns, patrons’ median guess of their BAC reading was 0.070, compared to the measured median of 0.087.

Pre-drinking

High alcohol consumption when going out to night-time entertainment precincts includes pre-drinking (drinking at home before going out; also known as pre-gaming, pre-partying or pre-loading in other countries). As our research teams have documented since 2012, pre-drinking has continued to increase.

With 84% of all patrons reporting pre-drinking before going out, Queensland shows higher levels than in most other previously studied cities.

Overall, male patrons drank significantly more than female patrons when pre-drinking. In Fortitude Valley, though, female patrons were significantly more likely to pre-drink than males.

Read more: Women’s alcohol consumption catching up to men: why this matters

It’s a common belief that patrons choose to pre-drink to avoid buying more expensive drinks while they’re out in bars or clubs. But we found patrons who reported pre-drinking were more likely to drink more heavily across the night. They also reported drinking for longer than those who did not pre-drink.

Our report also shows the rate of pre-drinking across the precincts remained mostly stable in the two years after the TAFV policy was introduced in 2016. This suggests it did not affect rates of pre-drinking.

Illicit drug use

Rates of self-reported illicit drug use varied between precincts, from 13% of patrons in Fortitude Valley to 25% of all patrons in Surfers Paradise.

Ecstasy was the most commonly used illicit substance reported by patrons (5.5%), followed by cannabis (4%).

Among those who completed saliva drug swabs, the most commonly detected substances were amphetamines in Fortitude Valley and Cairns. In Surfers Paradise, however, it was methamphetamine; with 23.5% of patrons interviewed in Surfers Paradise testing positive for the substance.

Although rates of illicit drug use fluctuated in the two years after the TAFV policy was introduced, overall rates remained largely stable. This indicates the policy did not result in a clear increase or decrease in illicit drug use.

Read more: Fact check: only drugs and alcohol together cause violence

So what does it all mean?

Historically, Queensland has high levels of harmful consumption of alcohol, especially in high-risk groups. Around 46% of Queenslanders have exceeded single-occasion risk guidelines in the past year, higher than in New South Wales and Victoria.

There has been significant investment in education campaigns across social media and in schools. Despite this, Queenslanders continue to show hazardous levels of alcohol consumption, illicit drug use and experiences of aggression.

Changing cultural patterns relating to pre-drinking and alcohol-related harms will not be easy. Previous research suggests further tightening of licensed venues’ trading hours will help. Our report recommendations include introducing a minimum unit price on alcohol and promoting low-risk drinking guidelines at all points of sale across Queensland.

Our report also recommends trialling live music early in the night to try to bring people into entertainment districts earlier.

Despite the promising results of government policy efforts to date, our evaluation suggests the work to reduce alcohol-related harm across Queensland is not finished.

Read more: FactCheck: can you change a violent drinking culture by changing how people drink?

– ref. Queenslanders are among our heaviest drinkers on nights out, and changing that culture is a challenge – http://theconversation.com/queenslanders-are-among-our-heaviest-drinkers-on-nights-out-and-changing-that-culture-is-a-challenge-121115

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

The announcement by Suncorp that it will no longer insure new thermal coal projects, along with a similar announcement by QBE Insurance a few months earlier, brings Australia into line with Europe where most major insurers have broken with coal.

US firms have been a little slower to move, but Chubb announced a divestment policy in July, and Liberty has confirmed it will not insure Australia’s Adani project.

Other big firms such as America’s AIG are coming under increasing pressure.

Even more than divestment of coal shares by banks and managed funds, the withdrawal of insurance has the potential to make coal mining and coal-fired power generation businesses unsustainable.

As the chairman and founder of Adani Group, Gautam Adani, has shown in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, a sufficiently developer can use its own resources to finance a coal mine that banks won’t touch.

Read more: Echoes of 2008: Could climate change spark a global financial crisis?

But without insurance, mines can’t operate.

(Adani claims to have insurers for the Carmichael project, but has declined to reveal their names.)

Why are insurers abandoning coal?

By the nature of their business, insurers cannot afford to indulge the denialist fantasies still popular in some sectors of industry. Damage caused by climate disasters is one of their biggest expenses, and insurers are fully aware that that damage is set to rise over time.

Even so, a sufficiently hard-headed company might choose to work both sides of the street – continuing to do business with fossil fuel companies, while also writing more expensive insurance against climate damage.

The bigger problem insurers face is the risk of litigation holding fossil fuel companies responsible for climate-related damage. For the moment, this is a potential rather than an immediate risk.

As US insurer AIG, yet to announce a divestment policy, has observed:

Based on our monitoring, while the overall volume of litigation activity has increased, past litigation seems to have largely been unsuccessful on numerous grounds including difficulties in determining and attributing fault and liability to a particular company, and the judiciary’s deference to the political branches of government on questions relating to climate change.

Recent development suggest these difficulties will be overcome.

It’s becoming easier to finger climate culprits…

Until recently, the most immediate problem facing potential litigants has been demonstrating that an event was the result of climate change as opposed to something else, such as random fluctuations in climatic conditions.

Scientific progress on this “extreme event attribution problem” has been rapid.

It is now possible to say with confidence that climate change is causing an increase in both the frequency and intensity of extreme weather and weather-related events such as extreme heatwaves, drought, heavy rains, tropical storms and bushfires.

The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has highlighted three extremes in 2016 that would not have occurred if not for the added influence of climate change:

• a persistent area of unusually warm water that lingered off the Alaskan coast, causing reduced marine productivity and other ecological disruptions

• the extreme heatwave that happened in Asia, killing hundreds and destroying crops

• the overall global atmospheric heat record set that year.

…and to allocate liability

The second line of defence against climate litigation that has held so far is the difficulty of imputing damage to the companies that burn fossil fuels.

While it is true that all weather events have multiple causes, in many circumstances climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels has been a necessary condition for those events to take place.

Courts routinely use arguments about necessary conditions to determine liability.

For example, a spark from a power line might cause a bushfire on a hot, dry, windy day, but would be harmless on a wet cold day. That can be enough to establish liability on the part of the company that operates the power line.

These issues are playing out in California, where devastating fires in 2017 caused damage estimated at US$30 billion and drove the biggest of the power companies, PG&E, into bankruptcy.

As a result there has been pressure to loosen liability laws, leaving the cost of future disasters to be borne by Californians in general, and their insurers.

Lawyers will be looking for someone to sue.

Adani is a convenient target

The question facing potential litigants is whether any single company contributes enough to climate change to make it meaningfully liable for particular disaster.

Adani’s Carmichael mine provides a convenient example.

Adani says the 10 million tonnes of coal it plans to mine will produce only 240,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, but this is semantic trickery. The firm is referring only to so-called “scope 2” emissions associated with the mining process itself.

When the coal is burned it might produce an extra 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, amounting to about 0.05% of global emissions.

A 0.1% share of the damage associated with the California fires is US$15 million, enough to be worth suing for. Other similarly sized mines will face similar potential liabilities.

Once a precedent is established, any company in the business of producing or burning fossil fuels on a large scale can expect to be named in a regular stream of suits seeking substantial damages.

When governments are successfully sued…

The remaining line of defence for companies responsible for emissions is the history of courts in attributing climate change to decisions by governments rather than corporations.

In the Netherlands, a citizen action group called Urgenda has won a case against the Dutch government arguing it has breached its legal duty of care by not taking appropriate steps to significantly restrain greenhouse gas emissions and prevent damage from climate change.

The government is appealing, but it has lost every legal round so far. Sooner or later, this kind of litigation will be successful. Then, governments will look for another party that can be sued instead of them.

…they’ll look for someone else to blame

Insurance companies are an easy target with deep pockets. Despite its hopeful talk quoted above, AIG would find it very difficult to avoid paying up if Californian courts found the firms it insured liable for their contributions to a climate-related wildfires or floods.

This is not a message coal-friendly governments in the US or Australia want to hear.

But the decision of Suncorp to dump coal, just a couple of months after the re-election of the Morrison government, makes it clear that businesses with a time horizon measured in decades cannot afford wishful thinking. They need to protect themselves against what they can see coming.

Read more: Explaining Adani: why would a billionaire persist with a mine that will probably lose money?

– ref. Adani beware: coal is on the road to becoming completely uninsurable – http://theconversation.com/adani-beware-coal-is-on-the-road-to-becoming-completely-uninsurable-121552

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Crosby, Senior Lecturer, Design, University of Technology Sydney

Indigenous Australians have influenced modern Australian dress since first contact. From possum skin cloaks and booka kangaroo capes to shell necklaces in Tasmania, Europeans have been fascinated with Indigenous materials, skills and aesthetics. They have stolen, purchased, borrowed and worn them for more than 200 years.

In turn, Indigenous Australians have at times enjoyed wearing soldiers’ red jackets as battle spoils and possibly mocked the Europeans by wearing their top hats cockily in the early streets of Sydney.

Later, as First Australians were dispossessed from their lands and herded into reserves and missions, clothing was imposed on them, ranging from shapeless “mother hubbard” dresses for women to shabby but respectable woollen two-piece suits for men.

Traditional dress practices, along with ceremony, language and music-making, were often banned by the colonisers. Missionaries often taught western-style leatherwork to men and needlecraft to women – yet powerful hybrids of self-determined dress also emerged, expressing subversive gestures and quiet resistance.

In the mid 20th century, missionary nuns in Far North Australia began to allow Indigenous women to craft their own textiles. Brightly coloured fabrics were the result, with unusual combinations of motifs. As Indigenous Art Centres were developed across Australia from the 1970s, mostly in remote communities, the fertile hybrid of painting and textile design generated wholly new looks – leading to the Indigenous textile revolution.

For some time, Indigenous Australian art was often seen as the future of a distinctively Australian design, as evident in the 1970s energy of Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson, but on the whole, Indigenous design was not recognised in its own right. This is now changing – Indigenous fashion design today is being shaped by First Nations people at every level.

Last weekend, the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair was held on Larrakia Country. For the second year in a row, a major fashion parade more akin to a performance filled Darwin’s large Convention Centre. The fashion event From Country to Couture, held on 7 August, showcased fashion and textile design. But there was a very big difference from the way such a parade would have appeared in the 1980s or even the 1990s.

Indigenous Fashion is about a new framing of self-determination. From Country to Couture was designed, coordinated, produced, curated and mobilised from wholly Indigenous standpoints. This was apparent in many striking ways – from the inclusion of Indigenous models, to the deep strains of a “black power” music track.

This year’s creative director of the event was Grace Lillian Lee, whose own designs are in major collections including the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (Sydney). Grace also leads a project called First Nation Fashion + Design which nurtures relationships between Indigenous artists and the fashion industry. Lee notes that she is “empowering black women and men to have their voices in the fashion space, which doesn’t always have to be overtly political, and can just be beautiful, and a lot of fun”.

Lee worked with dozens of artists, mainly from remote Indigenous Art Centres. Textile approaches ranged from silkscreen, batik, weaving, natural dying, digital printing, and embroidery. Some of these collaborations had the energy of new experiments, and others are ongoing.

The anniversary collection of Tiwi clothing label Bima Wear, in collaboration with Clair Helen celebrated 50 years of the women’s creative enterprise. The designs worked with the quintessential geometric patterns of Bima in bold combinations. The message was as much about ethical, community-led industry as it was about beautiful textiles and clothes.

Fashion has always been collaborative. It relies on the varied skills of textile designers, manufacturers, hidden hands or makers (petits mains in French), stylists, marketers, photographers, distributors, as well as designers. Yet since the late 18th century, the idea of fashion has been generated around one powerful individual – the high fashion designer.

Indigenous fashion challenges this focus on hero designers – many of whom are men in western society. Based on deep community engagement, it challenges the conventional understanding of the fashion designer as sole, individual author and draws on the talents of large numbers of women.

As much a cultural performance as a fashion parade, Lee’s Darwin event featured a set and a narrative of smoking, burning, and regeneration to thread the six collections together, interspersed with dance performances by Luke Currie-Richardson and Yolanda Lowatta.

From Country to Couture highlighted how the success of the textile design movement in remote Indigenous communities has shaped high-end fashion in Australia. But it also signalled a new way forward, grounded in community relationships, for Indigenous fashion design.

– ref. How Indigenous fashion designers are taking control and challenging the notion of the heroic, lone genius – http://theconversation.com/how-indigenous-fashion-designers-are-taking-control-and-challenging-the-notion-of-the-heroic-lone-genius-121041

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rod Glover, Professor and Director, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University

Around the world, the most informed and effective public servants are changing the way they develop policy and services. Australian public servants are eager to do the same, but their leaders are not supporting them to do so.

This is the key message from our new research on innovation in the public service, conducted for the Australian and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG).

With the final report of the independent review of the Australian Public Service by former Telstra CEO David Thodey expected to be published any day, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has signalled the need for a fundamental shake-up of the public service to improve the implementation of policies and strengthen accountability.

The prime minister is right to stress the performance of the public service. Concerns that it has lost capability and confidence in recent years are widespread, and important public outcomes are not being met.

Read more: Australia’s public servants: dedicated, highly trained … and elitist

This struggle to deliver solutions to crucial public challenges, such as tackling greenhouse gas emissions or reducing Indigenous incarceration rates (the highest for any people in the world), helps explain why trust in Australian government is at an all-time low. Fewer than 41% of citizens are satisfied with the way democracy works, a decline from 86% in 2007.

To avoid making this worse, our leaders need to make sure they do not strip the public service of its ability to advise governments wisely and truthfully, and resist relying excessively on private sector consultants for solutions to public problems.

If Morrison wants a more effective public service, he instead needs to focus on investing in talent and letting the creative thinkers in the service advance innovative ideas that improve people’s lives.

Our governments also need to better understand public problems and how communities experience them – a challenge we can meet with better use of data-driven and participatory practices.

The findings of our research

Our report’s world-first survey of nearly 400 public servants shows that public servants are eager to become innovative public problem solvers, or what we call “public entrepreneurs”. Of the respondents who were not aware of specific innovation skills, for example, two out of three wanted to learn more about them.

The skills such public servants possess are specific and concrete. They know how to define actionable and specific problems. They consult data, and design effective solutions in partnership with the public. Above all, they recognise that we cannot be as smart alone as we are together, so they collaborate.

Our survey sets out nine specific skills – such as data anaytics, behaviour change and systems thinking – that make up a 21st century toolkit for public problem solving. We believe this toolkit is the strongest response yet to concerns about silo mentalities and risk aversion in the public service.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Morrison can learn a lot from the public servants, but will he listen?

Such tools are powerful. For instance, the city of New Orleans used data analytics to reduce its murder rate by 20% in one year. However, we argue against over-hyping any one method, as they are most powerful when used in combination.

Along with this new mindset comes a need to rethink how these skills are taught. Our analysis of the best public sector training programs from around the world suggests a need for more online learning, flexible and self-paced formats, and hands-on coaching in problem-solving.

Another important change to implement here in Australia: learning how to work smaller and think bigger.

For instance, instead of researching and planning a project, policy or service from start to finish, some practitioners are breaking down big projects into smaller chunks. They develop projects incrementally and assess progress frequently, assessing the success of a small product before it is rolled out on a larger scale.

Public servants also need to make better use of digital technologies to amplify the impact of these new approaches. This enables conversations with the community about both problems and solutions, which leads to better-informed and more effective policy-making.

Innovations that are making a difference

To date, the adoption of these innovative ways of working in the public sector is not widespread in Australia.

The structures, incentives and cultures within the public sector are not set up to encourage innovation. In our interviews, middle management was pinpointed as a key blocker to innovation, while only 40% of respondents said that senior management was willing to take risks to support new ideas. The problem is pervasive.

But there are signs of hope, such as Australia’s early experiments with policy labs and mission-driven ways of working to tackle important problems.

For example, Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission and its many partners have employed a host of innovations to prevent injuries, save lives and optimise recovery for accident victims. These have included seat belt legislation, new road design, vehicle safety standards, case-managed rehabilitation, speed cameras and sophisticated advertising campaigns. Such initiatives have together reduced the road fatality rate in the state by 85% over the past 50 years.

Read more: Dealing with ministerial advisers: a practical guide for public servants

The scale of the changes needed is not small. Indeed, Australia may even require an innovation reset, through the creation of a new institution (like Nesta in the UK or Sitra in Finland) dedicated to advancing public problem-solving.

The consequences of inaction cannot be more serious. Although Australia’s public sector is generally well-functioning, there is a creeping crisis of effectiveness in the sector that must be addressed.

This radical re-imagining of the role of government and the public servant will be a defining challenge for the Thodey review and all Australian governments.

– ref. To restore trust in government, we need to reinvent how the public service works – http://theconversation.com/to-restore-trust-in-government-we-need-to-reinvent-how-the-public-service-works-121634

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joachim Sturmberg, Conjoint Associate Professor of General Practice, University of Newcastle

Last week’s hearings at the aged care royal commission in Brisbane looked at regulation in aged care. While rules and regulations are designed to safeguard residents, bureaucratic “red tape” also contributes to the failings in aged care.

The fear among nursing home staff of failing a review visit by an Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission surveyor has been known to shift the focus from care for residents to meeting paper trail requirements.

The best outcome for aged care residents and their families would be new reporting requirements centred on outcomes rather than processes. Their primary focus should be on the mediation of critical incidents – that is, looking at what caused them and how they could be prevented in future – and the maintenance of health.

Read more: Our ailing aged care system shows you can’t skimp on nursing care

How did we get here?

The crisis in the aged care sector has emerged over time. At least in part, systemic problems in organisations arise from interactions among its key players. These interactions must be aligned to achieve its common goals.

But the key players in the aged care system pursue divergent agendas. Regulators focus on process adherence, while staff struggle with their limited capacity to manage the complex needs of residents. Meanwhile, proprietors focus on economic viability.

The prevailing approach of dealing with the problem of a particular key player in isolation will not solve the problems of aged care as a whole.

Governance and accountability

Our research suggests the need for a major culture shift in the aged care system.

Around the world, governments are being urged to put less emphasis on process measurement and more on outcome transparency.

Read more: We’ve had 20 aged care reviews in 20 years – will the royal commission be any different?

Peter Drucker, a well-known management consultant, educator and author, once said “management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things”.

Ticking the boxes of a protocol to demonstrate “regulatory compliance” – that is, doing things right – is no longer an option on its own. Residents and their families expect staff to be attentive to residents’ changing physical, emotional, social and cognitive needs; that is, doing the right things.

These insights tell us the aged care system needs to be redesigned.

Read more: Nearly 2 out of 3 nursing homes are understaffed. These 10 charts explain why aged care is in crisis

What would this look like in practice?

Let’s consider two common aged care problems – falls and diabetes – whose management is significantly influenced by the chosen accountability framework. The differences between an outcomes-based approach (that is, adapting care to problems in their context) and a process-based approach (adhering to a protocol) are stark.

The first example: a resident has a fall. Rather than only assessing her for injuries and vital signs (as per protocol), staff would also assess potential reasons for the fall – for example, lack of mobility, pain, low blood pressure, or polypharmacy (taking multiple prescription medications at once) – and involve allied health professionals in preventive and rehabilitative care. This could include muscle strengthening exercises, gait and balance retraining, pain management and medication review. These are measures that could reduce the likelihood of the patient falling again, thereby improving her outcomes.

And let’s take a resident with normally stable diabetes, who one day records an elevated blood sugar reading. Rather than just giving him more insulin, staff would also assess potential underlying reasons for the elevated reading. These could include loss of appetite, an infection, or an episode of delirium.

The royal commission should do many things, but adding red tape isn’t one of them

Increasing frailty and/or significant memory decline are the main reasons for admission to an aged care facility. These people are particularly vulnerable as their health changes frequently and rapidly.

Being bogged down by regulatory ritualism reduces the time staff have available to spend on residents’ physical, social, emotional and cognitive needs.

Read more: Don’t wait for a crisis – start planning your aged care now

True accountability in aged care is achieved by demonstrating how the provided care has impacted a resident’s well-being. In that regard, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission should provide leadership and primarily act as an educator, helping facilities to become learning organisations. If an aged care facility fails to “learn and improve”, then sanctions and penalties become necessary.

More bureaucracy would only serve to perpetuate the current crisis, and would fail those residents and families who have suffered from the current failings in the sector.

Len Gainsford, a former adjunct research fellow in accounting & governance at Swinburne University of Technology, contributed to this article.

– ref. Red tape in aged care shouldn’t force staff to prioritise ticking boxes over residents’ outcomes – http://theconversation.com/red-tape-in-aged-care-shouldnt-force-staff-to-prioritise-ticking-boxes-over-residents-outcomes-121561

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jaime Gongora, Associate Professor, Animal and Wildlife Genetics and Genomics, University of Sydney

Colombia is the second most biodiverse country in the world with more than 56,000 recorded species, some 9,000 of which are unique. However protecting and researching this natural treasure has been extraordinarily difficult during Colombia’s nearly 55 years of internal conflict.

Since the 2016 peace agreement 21 scientific bio-expeditions have been carried out, most in areas that were previously conflict zones. This has led to the discovery of more than 150 new animal and plant species.

Read more: Ecotourism could be making animals less scared, and easier to eat

This flowering of research offers a new opportunity to the thousands of ex-combatants now looking for productive and peaceful work. We worked with former guerrillas in our project GROW-Colombia to train them to protect Colombia’s biodiversity.

Who are the ex-combatants?

A huge effort to reincorporate these combatants back into civilian life is under way. Paramount is finding suitable jobs, to rebuild the country and offer stable wages.

A recent census found the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC-EP) consists of some 10,000 people. Ranging between their 20s and 40s, around three-quarters are men.

Around 40% of these ex-guerrillas have experience in environmental conservation, and 70% have agricultural skills. Some 10% would like to work in veterinary, aquaculture and animal production fields, 60% in agriculture, and 84% in terrestrial and river environmental restoration.

There is also increasing interest in ecotourism in the 26 Territorial Training and Reincorporation Spaces (ETCRs) where the ex-combatants are currently based.

Their interests, the new political environment, and nearly 20 tourism initiatives in the ETCRs provide a unique opportunity to promote biodiversity as part of the peace process.

Training ex-combatants to protect biodiversity

We wanted to teach ex-FARC-EP combatants some basic conservation skills and identify the potential of nature to create sustainable business opportunities.

We started with a national workshop with the representatives of 16 ETCRs from across the country. These members reflected on their personal and scientific perceptions of the natural world, mapped ecosystems in their local areas and canvassed ecotourism projects. We then discussed the contributions they made to protecting biodiversity before the peace agreement.

One participant, Curruco* had his own farm before being displaced by the armed conflict. He told us,

our participation in the workshops is evidence of our commitment to peace. We protected the fauna and flora during the conflict.

We then used case studies to teach our workshop members how to take inventory of the species in a given area, explored tourism of nature and conservation in Colombia and discussed business models for the use of biodiversity in ecotourism enterprises.

One of the most interesting parts for the ex-combatants was learning techniques for making inventories. We used teaching stations where they learnt about indirect surveys, for example using footprints and faeces, and direct observation and capture. We covered the use of binoculars, trapping cameras, tablets and mobiles, access to taxonomic identification resources and some basic non-invasive sampling methods.

One of the participants, Solangie, had a remarkable knowledge of the Amazon forest. She said:

I enjoyed all the content of the training but I like the bird sightings and plant cataloguing the most because during my time as a combatant we were living among the fauna, including tapirs, reptiles, frogs and butterflies.

I was impressed with the training about plants because in our time in the jungle we used plants as medicine and health treatments.

We then used these skills in practical field work to collect and inventory plants, sight birds and explore caves. The resulting notes and photographs were documented with iNaturalist, an online repository considered a major drawcard in engaging the public in science around the world.

Turning knowledge into business

We also wanted to give our participants a clear idea of how this knowledge could become profitable work. We hosted a business network forum, and 60 meetings were organised so FARC-EP ex-combatants could meet representatives of the major Colombian research institutions and agencies and gain support for their ecotourism and biodiversity initiatives.

Yesenia*, a mother of two, joined FARC at a young age after the paramilitary killed her parents. During the research, she said:

If we want this peace process to succeed it will require the continued involvement of the various components of society, including scientific institutions and universities.

Our work established two levels of organisation: a national biodiversity committee of ETCR representatives from across the country, and a committee of government and non-government institutions and agencies to coordinate and support their biodiversity and ecotourism initiatives.

All of this may sound relatively simple, but this is new and life-changing knowledge for people who were part of an armed conflict, fighting in the jungle against the government.

Read more: Violence and killings haven’t stopped in Colombia despite landmark peace deal

One of us, Jaime, lived part of his life under this conflict, and found it very moving to see how the climate of trust has been changing. While there are, of course, considerable challenges, this was unimaginable before the peace agreements.

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Amazonia, Research Institute of Biological Resources Alexander Von Humboldt, Sinchi Amazonic Institute of Scientific Research, COLCIENCIAS-Colombia BIO, United Nations Development Programme, National Natural Parks Colombia, Vice-Ministry of Tourism, Social Economies of the Common, Agency for Reincorporation and Normalisation, Verification Mission of the United Nations, British Embassy in Colombia, ETCR participants, the GROW Colombia team at Earlham Institute, The University of East Anglia and The University of Sydney.

– ref. Peace with nature: helping former Colombian guerrilla fighters to become citizen scientists – http://theconversation.com/peace-with-nature-helping-former-colombian-guerrilla-fighters-to-become-citizen-scientists-121695

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Graham, Executive Director, La Trobe Asia, La Trobe University

Concerns are growing about Chinese influence on Australian universities. Some universities are reviewing research partnerships with Chinese state-owned companies after the ABC’s Four Corners revealed links to technology being used by the Chinese Government to carry out mass human rights abuses against the Uygur ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

There are also reports the attorney-general’s department is looking into whether activities conducted by Confucius Institutes at Australian universities potentially fall foul of Australian’s foreign interference laws.

And the protests in Hong Kong against China’s controversial extradition laws have spilt over onto Australian university campuses, leading to scuffles between pro-Hong Kong and pro-China activists.

It’s a tough balancing act for Australia: being alert to the Chinese Communist Party’s potential for domestic influence and interference, while maintaining a relationship critical to our economic and strategic interests.

In March, foreign minister Marise Payne announced a A$44 million National Foundation for Australia-China Relations to “turbo-charge our national effort in engaging China”.

If Australia wants to understand China as a foreign policy partner and strategic actor, some of that effort should be directed at improving our collective understanding of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP): its structures, its leaders and its military wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Such expertise is spread dangerously thin across Australia’s universities and, to a lesser extent, think tanks.

The CCP calls the shots in China, internally and externally. Unless we understand the Party’s objectives, how its leaders think and make decisions, our policies are likely to come up short. Australia must develop the intellectual acumen to see the world through China’s leaders’ eyes to manage the relationship on its own terms.

The knowledge gap

During the Cold War, Western governments recognised a strategic requirement to better understand the Soviet Union. They encouraged universities to develop specialist language skills and expertise on the Communist world.

Australia’s location, its alliance with the United States and its reliance on China for trade, mean knowledge of the party leadership’s machinations matters more to Australia than Cold War Kremlinology ever did.

Chinese language is widely taught in Australia, including through Confucius Institutes. But China Studies, as a discipline, is not currently structured or incentivised to develop expertise on China’s ruling CCP or the PLA.

Read more: Explainer: what are Confucius Institutes and do they teach Chinese propaganda?

Since the mid-1990s, Australia’s empirical research expertise on China (and Asia more broadly) has declined.

Few Australian universities offer courses on Chinese politics, while those that do tend to be historically focused. The study of Chinese culture, literature and philosophy and other subjects commonly featured in the curriculum of China Studies, is perfectly legitimate.

But China-literate expertise in the contemporary political and security fields has atrophied to such a point that it needs to be addressed head-on, through active partnership between universities and government.

The knowledge gap is not only impoverishing the public debate. Universities are also incubators for Australia’s next generation of China experts who will populate government, business and academia itself.

This is a sensitive point, but universities should resist the temptation to hire China-trained academics as a quick fix to plug the expertise gap. Chinese-born Australians should of course be welcomed if they have received a liberal education outside of China. The language skills and knowledge they bring are invaluable.

But Australia needs a cohort of homegrown analysts, with the ability to read source material in Mandarin, who are motivated to pursue a career here, whether in academia or in government.

A healthy public discourse requires strategists, linguists, economists, historians and political scientists to contribute, as each sees the “problem” from a different angle. Moreover, the China debate is too important to leave exclusively to country experts, some of whom have a vested interest in preserving their access and networks in the PRC.

Academia is not playing the role it could and should to raise Canberra’s policy game and elevate the public debate on China. The government should explicitly identify this as a knowledge gap for Australian universities to fill.

How should the government do this?

The focus of these efforts should be on investing in individuals rather than on setting up new centres. An external review completed last year judged that the Australian Centre on China in the World, set up in 2010 at the Australian National University and the recipient of A$53 million in federal funding, was “faltering and cannot be said to be meeting expectations”.

This is a salutary reminder of the potential wastage of a centre-led approach.

Instead, resources should be invested in funded positions, scholarships and tied research programs to support and incentivise a new generation of China scholars specialising in CCP elite politics, the Party’s influence over foreign policy, the PLA and other designated strategic subjects, such as cross-Strait relations.

More doctoral research should be encouraged, provided there are enough qualified supervisors in academia. The government should be explicit in its riding instructions, but the conduct of research and academic appointments must be left to universities.

Resources should also be spread to ensure a pool of expertise across universities and think tanks, to avoid over-dependence on any one institution. Given Australian universities’ financial reliance on Chinese international students, a diversified approach makes sense.

This could be achieved by creating research networks that pool expertise across institutional boundaries, linking universities and think tanks, and by selecting institutions that are less susceptible to self-censorship or pressure from pro-Beijing organisations, on or off campus. Universities that rely heavily on China for student recruitment or co-funded research are most vulnerable in this regard.

Read more: Australian universities must wake up to the risks of researchers linked to China’s military

Senior officials and diplomats could do more to engage leading scholars on China, including offering regular briefings and providing guidance from the intelligence community on partnership and interference risks. China experts schooled on elite politics and the PLA can contribute directly to government intelligence assessments by challenging or refining key judgements.

Unfortunately, academic freedom cannot be taken for granted on topics deemed sensitive by the CCP such as Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang or even Hong Kong.

Building a cadre of China experts with the necessary language skills and knowledge to help Australia meet the complex policy challenges ahead won’t have an instant payoff. This is a long game – but a crucial one.

This is a modified extract of an article that first appeared in Australian Foreign Affairs.

– ref. Australia has too few home-grown experts on the Chinese Communist Party. That’s a problem – http://theconversation.com/australia-has-too-few-home-grown-experts-on-the-chinese-communist-party-thats-a-problem-121174

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

Family planning organisation and abortion provider Marie Stopes today warned that Australian women face a confusing patchwork of state-based laws and service shortages that restrict access to abortions, based on where they live.

At the centre of these inconsistent laws is the gestational cut off – the point where the pregnant person is no longer the primary decision-maker and, instead, specific criteria must be met (generally, two doctors must agree that the abortion is necessary on medical and/or social grounds).

Gestational cut-off points vary from state to state. The Australian Capital Territory has no cut off. Others are set at 14 weeks (the Northern Territory), 16 weeks (Tasmania), 22 weeks (Queensland and the bill currently under debate in New South Wales), and 24 weeks (Victoria).

Read more: After 119 years, NSW is set to decriminalise abortion. Why has reform taken so long?

Around the world, Canada has no cut off, while Ireland’s is set at 12 weeks. The bill set to be debated in New Zealand has a gestational limit of 20 weeks.

Around 1–3% of abortions in Australia occur after 20 weeks. About half are performed because of foetal abnormality. The other half are for a number of reasons: women who don’t menstruate regularly (because they are young, perimenopausal or on contraceptives, for example) miss early symptoms of pregnancy; abusive partners prevent women from accessing abortion services at an earlier date; relationships break down; socioeconomic circumstances change.

There’s no evidence gestational limits result in fewer second and third trimester abortions. But there is evidence that such cut-offs harm women, especially those who are already disadvantaged. They also prevent medical professionals from providing pregnant people with the best possible care.

Cut-offs are often based on foetal viability

The 24-week limit in Victoria was adopted from law in the United Kingdom. It’s based on foetal viability: the age at which an extremely premature baby can survive outside the uterus. 22-weeks is commonly considered the “threshold of viability”.

But viability is subject to medical technologies that are constantly evolving. 22-26 weeks’ gestation is considered a “grey zone”, where some foetuses have survived with major medical intervention, mostly with ongoing disabilities.

Attempts to legally differentiate “early” from “later” abortions are arbitrary, and based on the technology of the day. When applied in law, these cut-offs are likely to be subject to judicial review in the future as technology advances.

Life-saving treatment is not generally provided for babies born before 22 weeks’ gestation. Parents of babies born before 26 weeks can decide whether or not their babies receive treatment, even when there is a chance of survival.

As bioethicists Lachlan de Crespigny and Julian Savulescu argue, the discrepancy between this practice and gestational limits on abortion grants “the foetus inside a woman’s body […] a higher moral status than a newborn infant of the same gestation outside the woman’s body”.

Most Australians support women’s right to choose

Although the inclusion of gestational limits for abortion is commonly viewed as a “middle ground” between pro- and anti-choice positions on abortion, they represent a significant move towards the position of a vocal minority.

The most recent study of public opinion towards abortion in Australia found 73% of respondents believed abortion should be fully decriminalised and 57.9% agreed that “women should be able to obtain an abortion readily when they want one”.

Only 5.6% were unequivocally opposed to abortion.

Read more: One in six Australian women in their 30s have had an abortion – and we’re starting to understand why

A study from 2008 similarly concluded “a majority of Australians support laws which enable women to access abortion services after 24 weeks’ gestation”.

Leading professional health bodies also oppose gestational limits, including the Royal Australian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, the Australian Psychological Society, and the Public Health Association of Australia.

Cut-offs don’t reduce late-term abortions

There is a fiction circulating that an absence of legal restrictions on abortion would compel doctors to perform abortions “until birth”. The claims that, without legal oversight, women would terminate pregnancies they have carried to near term and highly trained doctors would perform such procedures are clearly untrue.

There is no evidence that legal restrictions on second and third trimester abortions reduce the number of abortions that occur later in pregnancy. In fact, based on the most recent statistics, the proportion of abortions performed after 20 weeks in Canada, which has no gestational cut off, is half that in Queensland, which has a 22 week cut off (0.66% compared with 1.34%).

The Royal Australian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists states that in some circumstances, it’s unreasonable for women to make a decision about termination at an earlier gestation. Second trimester ultrasounds, for example, are generally performed between 19-20 weeks’ gestation. Further testing is required when anomalies are detected, and some abnormalities are not diagnosable until much later.

When faced with a diagnosis of major foetal abnormality, even people who consider themselves anti-choice often re-evaluate their opposition to terminating a pregnancy.

Gestational cut-offs compel pregnant people (and often their partners) to make decisions without the necessary time or information that is required to comprehend complex medical conditions. This means women terminate pregnancies they would otherwise keep; they keep pregnancies they would have otherwise terminated; and they terminate pregnancies before they are emotionally and psychologically prepared to end a pregnancy that was, until that time, wanted.

Read more: It’s time to lift the restrictions on medical abortion in Australia

Cut-offs disadvantage the vulnerable

Restrictions on abortion past 20 weeks’ gestation disproportionately impact on women who are disadvantaged socially and/or geographically and those experiencing reproductive coercion and other forms of domestic violence.

Women living in rural and regional areas, for example, can experience delays in accessing the medical testing required to diagnose foetal abnormality and then further delays when accessing abortions. At later gestations, this generally involves travel to urban centres. Such delays are more onerous for women who do not have ready access to the financial resources to pay for the abortion, and associated costs such as travel, accomodation and childcare.

Only a handful of providers perform abortion post 16 weeks in Australia. This is due to a combination of factors, including laws that differentiate “early” from “late” abortions, a shortage of doctors trained to provide later gestation abortions, and the privatisation of abortion services (and withdrawal of state responsibility for providing access to abortion).

Restrictions on access to second/third trimester abortions produce a two-tiered system, where women with financial resources have access to abortion services interstate and overseas.

Aware that re-criminalising abortion in all circumstances is politically untenable, anti-abortion campaigners have increasingly focused attention on challenging the upper limit of abortion.

This focus misrepresents the practice of abortion and ignores the fact all foetuses exist within the bodies of pregnant people, and pregnant people always exist within a social space that is particular to them.

– ref. Here’s why there should be no gestational limits for abortion – http://theconversation.com/heres-why-there-should-be-no-gestational-limits-for-abortion-121500

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian R. Camilleri, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Technology Sydney

Ever relied on an online review to make a purchasing decision? How do you know it was actually genuine?

Consumer reviews can be hugely influential, so it’s hardly surprising there’s a thriving trade in fake ones. Estimates of their prevalence vary – from 16% of all reviews on Yelp, to 33% of all TripAdvisor reviews, to more than half in certain categories on Amazon.

So how good are you at spotting fake consumer reviews?

I surveyed 1,400 Australians about their trust in online reviews and their confidence in telling genuine from fake. The results suggest many of us may be fooling ourselves about not being fooled by others.

In strangers we trust

Online consumer reviews were the equal-second most important source for information about products and services, after store browsing. Most of us rate consumer reviews – the views of perfect strangers – just as highly as the opinion of friends and family.

Trust is central to the importance of reviews in our decision-making. The following chart shows the trust results broken down by age: in general, people most trust product information from government sources and experts, followed by consumer reviews.

The chart below displays trust ratings according to website, with the most trusted sources for reviews being TripAdvisor.com.au, Google Reviews and ProductReview.com.au.

Those aged 23-38 tended to trust sites the most, and those above 55 tended to trust sites the least.

While 73% of participants said they trusted online reviews at least a moderate amount, 65% also said it was likely they had read a fake review in the past year.

The paradox of these percentages suggests confidence in spotting fake reviews. Indeed, 48% of respondents believed they were at least moderately good at spotting fake reviews. Confidence tended to correlate with age: those who were younger tended to rate themselves as better at detecting fake reviews.

In my opinion, respondents’ confidence is a classic example of overconfidence. It’s a well-documented paradox of human self-perception, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. The worse you are at something, the less likely you have the competence to know how bad you are.

The fact is most humans are not particularly good at distinguishing between truth and lies.

A 2006 study involving almost 25,000 participants found that lie-truth judgments averaged just 54% accuracy – barely better than flipping a coin. In a study looking more specifically at online reviews (but with only a small number of judges), Cornell University researchers found an accuracy rate of about 57%. A similiar study based at the University of Copenhagen found an accuracy rate of about 65%, with information about reviewers improving scores slightly.

What we look for

So what tends to sway people’s judgement about whether a review is fake or not? My research suggests the most important attribute people look out for is “extremity” – going over the top in one-sided praise or criticism.

This sentiment is a relatively sound rule of thumb, supported by analysis. Studies suggest fake reviews also tend to:

• focus on describing product attributes and features
• have much fewer subjective and anecdotal details
• be shorter than others
• be relatively more difficult to read (probably due to fake reviewers being hired from foreign countries).

Fake reviews might also be identified by characteristics of the reviewer. Their profiles tend to be new and unverified accounts with few details and little or no history of other reviews. They will have gained very few “helpful” votes from others.

Test yourself

With all this in mind, it’s now’s time to see how good you are at spotting fake reviews with this quiz.

Chances are you didn’t do as well as you thought you would. That’s because clever fraudsters work to hide all the attributes of fake reviews outlined above.

So two final pieces of advice.

Use some technology to help. Two websites I recommend are Fakespot.com and ReviewMeta.com. In my experience, both do a good job weeding out suspicious reviews (tip: be sure to delete domain suffixes such as “.au” from the URLs you check).

Also check out multiple review sites to get second, third and fourth opinions. It is less likely a fraudster will be paying for fake reviews on every platform.

– ref. How to spot a fake review: you’re probably worse at it than you realise – http://theconversation.com/how-to-spot-a-fake-review-youre-probably-worse-at-it-than-you-realise-121043

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacqueline Williams, Senior Research Fellow & Lecturer, School of Environmental and Rural Science, University of New England

Australia has made a global commitment to “sustainable agriculture”, an endeavour seen as increasingly crucial to ending world poverty, halting biodiversity loss, and combating climate change. A recent report from the UN found land use – including food production – is responsible for around one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Unfortunately, Australia has something of a sustainable agriculture policy vacuum, after years of a fragmented, stop-start approach.

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

To honour our international obligations and respond to growing sustainability markets, Australia urgently needs a contemporary definition of sustainable agriculture, including agreed on-farm metrics.

Good policy abandoned

Australia spent more than a decade developing promising policies that defined sustainable agriculture with broad indicators for measuring progress.

In 1997 Australia passed federal legislation defining “sustainable agriculture” as:

agricultural practices and systems that maintain or improve […] the economic viability of agricultural production; the social viability and well-being of rural communities; […] biodiversity; the natural resource base [and] ecosystems that are influenced by agricultural activities.

The following year, the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Resource Management published a broad set indicators.

During the early 2000s a national framework of Environmental Management Systems was developed, and national pilots were conducted across Australia up until 2006.

Between 2004 and 2006 the Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded farmers’ investment in natural resource management. However these surveys have not been replicated in more than a decade.

In 2005, the states and territories formed a joint working group to create a national approach to property management systems. This group met with industry representatives and regional land managers throughout 2006, and in 2007 the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry planned a pathway for a national policy. There was much hope and enthusiasm it would soon become a reality.

However, since 2008 there has been no progress and little, if any, explanation for why this important sustainable agriculture policy initiative was shelved.

Current policy vacuum

It is concerning that Australia’s first progress report on implementing the sustainable development goals contains the words “sustainable agriculture” only once in 130 pages, as part of the heading for the goal of ending hunger.

The definition arrived at in 1997 is far too broad and simplistic, and can’t be used at the farm level.

When contacted for comment, a spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture reiterated their commitment to improving sustainable food production, and said:

Australia is involved in global discussions about how best to measure sustainable agriculture performance […] However a globally agreed methodology has not been set for [agricultural sustainability].

Australia’s only substantial sustainable agriculture policy mechanism at the moment appears to be grants available through the National Landcare Program. This is reiterated by searching through key Coalition policy documents and the recent budget.

The budget allocation to the overall National Landcare Program is around A$1 billion from 2017 to 2023. New programs announced in the 2019 budget that build on this commitment include:

• A$100 million over four years for the environment restoration fund,
• A$34 million over four years for a new biodiversity stewardship program,
• A$28.3 million for a new communities environment program for 2019-20, and
• A$2 billion over 15 years for the climate solutions fund.

These programs combined equate to some A$354 million per year. But a coherent sustainable agriculture policy cannot be delivered through grants alone.

And even though these grants are substantial, past ABS surveys found that farmers invest at least A$3 billion a year in natural resource management. The Indigenous on-country contribution is currently unknown, but likely to be substantial.

Caring for country fund

Around 10% of Australia’s population lives in rural or remote areas. These comparatively small communities – largely farmers and Indigenous land managers – currently steward most of the country.

A review released in late July on how conservation laws affect the agriculture sector has recommended the federal government create a A$1 billion fund for farmers who deliver environment benefits from their land.

This mirrors calls from farmers for an ecosystem services fund.

If our 13.9 million taxpayers contributed some A$60 each per year in a “caring for country” levy, urban and rural Australians could more fairly share the costs – as well as the advantages – of sustainable land management.

We could start with revisiting the good work undertaken more than a decade ago in developing a national framework for property management systems.

Underpinning such a system, we need an independent and trusted source of metrics for farmers, land managers and agricultural industries. To this end, the University of New England is establishing a research hub to help develop just such a harmonised approach.

Read more: Vegan food’s sustainability claims need to give the full picture

There are many good news stories of sustainable agriculture around Australia, however our ongoing biodiversity crisis requires transformative policy change and federal leadership.

One bold first step would be addressing the current paradox of sustainable agriculture in Australia.

– ref. Australia urgently needs real sustainable agriculture policy – http://theconversation.com/australia-urgently-needs-real-sustainable-agriculture-policy-120597

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katharine Kemp, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, UNSW, and Co-Leader, ‘Data as a Source of Market Power’ Research Stream of The Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation, UNSW

Australia’s consumer watchdog has recommended major changes to our consumer protection and privacy laws. If these reforms are adopted, consumers will have much more say about how we deal with Google, Facebook, and other businesses.

The proposals include a right to request erasure of our information; choices about whether we are tracked online and offline; potential penalties of A$10 million or more for companies that misuse our information or impose unfair privacy terms; and default settings that favour privacy.

Read more: Consumer watchdog calls for new measures to combat Facebook and Google’s digital dominance

The report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) says consumers have growing concerns about the often invisible ways companies track us and disclose our information to third parties. At the same time, many consumers find privacy policies almost impossible to understand and feel they have no choice but to accept.

My latest research paper details how companies that trade in our personal data have incentives to conceal their true practices, so they can use vast quantities of data about us for profit without pushback from consumers. This can preserve companies’ market power, cause harm to consumers, and make it harder for other companies to compete on improved privacy.

Privacy policies are broken

The ACCC report points out that privacy policies tend to be long, complex, hard to navigate, and often create obstacles to opting out of intrusive practices. Many of them are not informing consumers about what actually happens to their information or providing real choices.

Many consumers are unaware, for example, that Facebook can track their activity online when they are logged out, or even if they are not a Facebook user.

Read more: Shadow profiles – Facebook knows about you, even if you’re not on Facebook

Some privacy policies are outright misleading. Last month, the US Federal Trade Commission settled with Facebook on a US$5 billion fine as a penalty for repeatedly misleading users about the fact that personal information could be accessed by third-party apps without the user’s consent, if a user’s Facebook “friend” gave consent.

If this fine sounds large, bear in mind that Facebook’s share price went up after the FTC approved the settlement.

The ACCC is now investigating privacy representations by Google and Facebook under the Australian Consumer Law, and has taken action against the medical appointment booking app Health Engine for allegedly misleading patients while it was selling their information to insurance brokers.

Nothing to hide…?

Consumers generally have very little idea about what information about them is actually collected online or disclosed to other companies, and how that can work to their disadvantage.

A recent report by the Consumer Policy Research Centre explained how companies most of us have never heard of – data aggregators, data brokers, data analysts, and so on – are trading in our personal information. These companies often collect thousands of data points on individuals from various companies we deal with, and use them to provide information about us to companies and political parties.

Data companies have sorted consumers into lists on the basis of sensitive details about their lifestyles, personal politics and even medical conditions, as revealed by reports by the ACCC and the US Federal Trade Commission. Say you’re a keen jogger, worried about your cholesterol, with broadly progressive political views and a particular interest in climate change – data companies know all this about you and much more besides.

So what, you might ask. If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to lose, right? Not so. The more our personal information is collected, stored and disclosed to new parties, the more our risk of harm increases.

Potential harms include fraud and identity theft (suffered by 1 in 10 Australians); being charged higher retail prices, insurance premiums or interest rates on the basis of our online behaviour; and having our information combined with information from other sources to reveal intimate details about our health, financial status, relationships, political views, and even sexual activity.

Read more: Why you might be paying more for your airfare than the person seated next to you

In written testimony to the US House of Representatives, legal scholar Frank Pasquale explained that data brokers have created lists of sexual assault victims, people with sexually transmitted diseases, Alzheimer’s, dementia, AIDS, sexual impotence or depression. There are also lists of “impulse buyers”, and lists of people who are known to be susceptible to particular types of advertising.

Major upgrades to Australian privacy laws

According to the ACCC, Australia’s privacy law is not protecting us from these harms, and falls well behind privacy protections consumers enjoy in comparable countries in the European Union, for example. This is bad for business too, because weak privacy protection undermines consumer trust.

Importantly, the ACCC’s proposed changes wouldn’t just apply to Google and Facebook, but to all companies governed by the Privacy Act, including retail and airline loyalty rewards schemes, media companies, and online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay.

Australia’s privacy legislation (and most privacy policies) only protect our “personal information”. The ACCC says the definition of “personal information” needs to be clarified to include technical data like our IP addresses and device identifiers, which can be far more accurate in identifying us than our names or contact details.

Read more: Explainer: what is surveillance capitalism and how does it shape our economy?

Whereas some companies currently keep our information for long periods, the ACCC says we should have a right to request erasure to limit the risks of harm, including from major data breaches and reidentification of anonymised data.

Companies should stop pre-ticking boxes in favour of intrusive practices such as location tracking and profiling. Default settings should favour privacy.

Currently, there is no law against “serious invasions of privacy” in Australia, and the Privacy Act gives individuals no direct right of action. According to the ACCC, this should change. It also supports plans to increase maximum corporate penalties under the Privacy Act from A$2.1 million to A$10 million (or 10% of turnover or three times the benefit, whichever is larger).

Increased deterrence from consumer protection laws

Our unfair contract terms law could be used to attack unfair terms imposed by privacy policies. The problem is, currently, this only means we can draw a line through unfair terms. The law should be amended to make unfair terms illegal and impose potential fines of A$10 million or more.

The ACCC also recommends Australia adopt a new law against “unfair trading practices”, similar to those used in other countries to tackle corporate wrongdoing including inadequate data security and exploitative terms of use.

So far, the government has acknowledged that reforms are needed but has not committed to making the recommended changes. The government’s 12-week consultation period on the recommendations ends on October 24, with submissions due by September 12.

– ref. Here’s how tech giants profit from invading our privacy, and how we can start taking it back – http://theconversation.com/heres-how-tech-giants-profit-from-invading-our-privacy-and-how-we-can-start-taking-it-back-120078

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne

In light of the ministerial direction issued to the Australian Federal Police by the Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton on August 9, it would be a spectacular contradiction in policy if the Australian Federal Police’s current pursuit of journalists were to end in prosecutions.

Read more: Explainer: what are the media companies’ challenges to the AFP raids about?

The direction stated in part:

I expect the AFP to take into account the importance of a free and open press in Australia’s democratic society and to consider broader public interest implications before undertaking investigative action involving a professional journalist or news media organisation in relation to unauthorised disclosure of material made or obtained by a current or former Commonwealth officer.

So much for the uncompromising stance of Dutton and the then acting commissioner of the AFP, Neil Gaughan, that the law was the law, and if journalists broke it they could expect to be prosecuted like anyone else.

The political sensitivity of this climb-down may be gauged from the fact the direction was issued at 4pm on a Friday.

A combination of early deadlines for the Saturday papers, the incapacity of television to pull together a comprehensive story in time for the evening bulletins, and the dead air of the weekend make late Friday the preferred time of the week to drop bad or embarrassing news.

Dutton’s announcement was bereft of explanation. However, events since the AFP raids on the home of a News Corp journalist, Annika Smethurst, and on the ABC headquarters on June 5 and 6 respectively give a hint of the likely reason.

First, there was the international condemnation across the Western world of the repressive nature of the police raids, expressed in a tone of disbelief that this could be happening in a mature democracy.

Then there was the unified response from the heads of Australia’s three main news organisations, the ABC, News Corporation and Nine. Their message, delivered in a nationally televised broadcast from the National Press Club on June 26, was that a government obsessed with secrecy had now gone so far as to criminalise journalism.

There was also the statement by the Federal Attorney-General, Christian Porter, that he was “seriously disinclined” to prosecute journalists for doing journalism. His consent is needed for any such prosecution.

Faced with international condemnation, pressure from the media and the potential for a major row in Cabinet between Dutton and Porter, the government then tried to take the sting out of the situation by setting up an inquiry into press freedom.

Bizarrely, this is being conducted by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS), the very body that has waved through most of these repressive laws in the first place.

The inquiry has generated a body of strongly worded submissions arguing for the balance between press freedom and government secrecy to be struck in a way that is more consistent with democratic principles.

It begins its public hearings this week.

So Dutton’s ministerial direction may be seen as having two objectives: heading off a potentially damaging split in cabinet, and accomplishing a preemptive buckle before the parliamentary inquiry calls him and outgoing AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin, to give an account of themselves.

Of course, as far as anyone knows, the AFP investigations are still on foot. Already officers have removed thousands of records from the ABC, accumulated travel data concerning two ABC journalists and requested their fingerprints, as well as turning Annika Smethurst’s home upside-down.

So the government’s intimidatory tactics have had a good run already, even if prosecutions do not follow.

There is nothing to stop the police from completing these investigations and providing a brief of evidence for Porter. However, given his stated position, allied with the new political dynamics created by the reaction to the raids and Dutton’s directive, it seems unlikely prosecutions will follow.

While the ministerial direction represents a genuflection in the direction of press freedom, it provides nothing by way of protection for whistleblowers.

The direction says it

does not constrain investigation by the AFP of unauthorised disclosure of material made or obtained by a current or former Commonwealth officer.

So it seems the pursuit of whistleblowers – the people who provide journalists with leaked information – can continue unabated. They still have only a demonstrably useless law – the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013 – offering a fig leaf of protection.

The present prosecutions of Richard Boyle (Tax Office) and David McBride (Defence) attest to this.

The last paragraph of Dutton’s directive deals with the process by which government departments or agencies refer leaks to the AFP, and the AFP then assesses for investigative possibilities.

Read more: Media raids raise questions about AFP’s power and weak protection for journalists and whistleblowers

This entire reference and assessment process has been shot through with politics, either at the departmental end or the police end, or both.

That is why the ABC and Smethurst leaks – neither of which had much to do with national security but were acutely embarrassing to the government – were subject to police action.

By contrast, a leak to The Australian about the alleged security effects of the medevac legislation, which the head of ASIO Duncan Lewis publicly complained was a real threat to national security, was not subject to police action because it played into the hands of the government’s scare campaign about people-smuggling.

Dutton’s direction says:

I expect the AFP to strengthen its guidance and processes about the types and level of information required from a Government department or agency when they are referring to an unauthorised disclosure. Referring departments or agencies will need to provide a harm statement indicating the extent to which the disclosure is expected to significantly compromise Australia’s national security.

If the direction is to be taken as meaning only leaks significantly compromising national security are to be referred to the police, then there may be a larger safe space within which journalists can operate.

But the hunt for whistleblowers will go on.

– ref. Dutton directive gives journalists more breathing space, but not whistleblowers – http://theconversation.com/dutton-directive-gives-journalists-more-breathing-space-but-not-whistleblowers-121730

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wanning Sun, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Technology Sydney

Earlier this year, a new app was launched in China to put the patriotism of Chinese citizens to the test.

Named “Study Xi to Strengthen the Nation”, the app quizzes users on all things related to President Xi Jinping – his policies, activities, achievements, theories and thoughts. Users can earn points and win prizes for correct answers and compete with colleagues and friends to see who knows the most about China’s leader.

The app is the latest example of a rethink by the Communist Party when it comes to its propaganda efforts and how best to justify the legitimacy of its one-party rule, extol the virtues of the party, and promote patriotism to an audience of young, tech-savvy Chinese.

For those institutions responsible for the production of effective propaganda, this is a real challenge. After all, propaganda in the 21st century has to go beyond forcing people to sit in study sessions on Friday afternoons, read the People’s Daily newspaper, or watch China Central Television (CCTV) in group meetings.

Read more: Extremist mobs? How China’s propaganda machine tried to control the message in the Hong Kong protests

From sermons to ‘indoctritainment’

Thanks to a number of developments, the old propaganda messages of previous generations can easily be repackaged for millennials. Like the rest of the world, Chinese millennials are keen adopters of the latest mobile technologies and suffer from short attention spans. They are also just as enthusiastic as their Western counterparts about posting jokes, music videos and short, sharp, attention-grabbing memes on social media.

The Chinese government, meanwhile, is putting more of an emphasis on humanising its approach to leadership. Politicians are keen to be seen as relatable rather than authoritative figures.

So, to get its messaging across in a new way, party propaganda has morphed from dry sermons to what I like to call indoctritainment. And these campaigns are often high-end productions.

Increasingly, ideological messages are more effective if they are delivered using a platform that’s already been trialled and proven in marketing. In 2016, for instance, CCTV launched a promotion of the Communist Party in the form of a public awareness advertisement to mark the 95th anniversary of the founding of the party.

The one-minute video, titled “I am a Chinese Communist Party member,” features heartwarming vignettes of individuals from different walks of life – teacher, cleaner, surgeon, policeman, local public servant, fisherman – who are all good Samaritans doing their bit to help others.

The message is clear: the party is being re-branded as an organisation made up of unsung heroes. As the voice-over explains:

I am the first one to arrive, I am the last one to leave, I’m the one who thinks of myself the least, and cares about others the most … I am the Chinese Communist Party, and I am always there with you.

Another video promoting the Chinese military, “I am a Chinese soldier”, demonstrates the point. Even without the English subtitles, it’s not hard to see what the producers were going for: a patriotic Hollywood movie or romantic tear-jerker.

The pop culture treatment, with American accents

Another tactic is the use of popular culture as a way of conveying sometimes dense or dull Chinese government policies, especially if the intended audience is global.

In 2015, a video called “The 13 what” used catchy pop music, colourful animation, and American-accented English to explain China’s 13th five-year national plan.

Channelling David Bowie, Monty Python and the psychedelia of the 1960s, the three-minute video was produced by a digital media production team operating under the auspices of the government’s main propaganda offices in Beijing.

Two years earlier, the same studio also produced the widely circulated five-minute video clip, “How leaders are made”. Xi Jinping appears in the clip as a cartoon character, as do US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Light-hearted, zany, and (again) featuring American English, the video informs viewers that Xi has worked long and hard to move up China’s political ladder. The implication is that Xi’s power is just as legitimate as that of his Western counterparts.

Within a short period after its release, the video had been viewed more than a million times on Youku, China’s version of YouTube.

Propaganda by way of screen bullets

Increasingly, the Communist Party’s propaganda material goes viral only after it appears on popular video-sharing websites with “bullet screens”. This is an interactive feature that enables viewers to “shoot” text comments across the screen as the video is being streamed. It’s very popular with younger audiences.

One of China’s biggest bullet screen platforms is Bilibili, often referred to as “the B site”.

The site used to be occasionally shut down for streaming what the government considers “morally unsound” material.

To stay on the party’s good side, Bilibili now plays host to a wide suite of propaganda produced by CCTV or the Chinese Department of Propaganda. In 2015, the Communist Youth League of China also began to hold regular courses on the site aimed at promoting patriotism among young people.

But how effective is it?

Just how successful these strategies have been is still not entirely clear. While the “Xi Jinping thought” app has captured the imagination of many outside China, party members who have been encouraged – in some cases requested – to download the app seem less than enthusiastic.

And some of these new propaganda efforts have backfired and attracted cynical responses online, even ridicule.

Read more: Xi Jinping’s grip on power is absolute, but there are new threats to his ‘Chinese dream’

But judging by the many comments viewers have left on the B site, it seems fair to conclude that some of the tactics have had the intended effect of endearing the party and its leaders to the young and impressionable.

This is a reminder of how naïve it is to assume that technologies are inherently democratising, and that digital disruption is likely to spell the end of communism in China. Such assumptions still permeate most Western media stories about the Communist Party’s new propaganda strategies, but this is clearly not the case.

As the party’s propaganda strategies become more nuanced and sophisticated, so should our frameworks for understanding them.

– ref. Chinese propaganda goes tech-savvy to reach a new generation – http://theconversation.com/chinese-propaganda-goes-tech-savvy-to-reach-a-new-generation-119642

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Norton, Higher Education Program Director, Grattan Institute

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in recent days that “TAFE is as good as university”, and in many cases leads to better pay.

TAFE plays a vital role, but for most university students, a TAFE course is not going to increase their income. University graduates usually have higher rates of pay and employment than non-graduates.

But a new report from the Grattan Institute – Risks and rewards: when is vocational education a good alternative to higher education? – looked at the employment outcomes for students leaving school with a lower Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) (their main entry criteria into most undergraduate university programs).

It found men with a lower ATAR have options among vocational educational and training (VET) courses that can get them a job faster, and often higher earnings, than if they do a university degree. But these VET options are less attractive for women. And women who choose them often have poor outcomes, such as being denied a job in a male dominated industry like engineering.

ATAR is not everything. It does not perfectly predict university results or outcomes after university. But compared to graduates with a high ATAR, graduates with a lower ATAR have, on average, worse academic results, lower rates of high-skill employment and less earnings.

The Grattan Institute report looked at VET courses offered as a potential alternative to university. Especially once the income effects of lower ATAR are taken into account, the report found some bachelor degrees led to lower earnings than some VET diplomas and Certificate III/IV courses.

How ATAR can affect employment outcomes

Over the last decade, more school leavers have been starting university with an ATAR below 70. Before an enrolment boom that began in 2009, about 20,000 school leavers with ATARs between 30 and 70 started university each year. In more recent years, the reported number is around 34,000.

But the true figure is higher, as universities don’t always record an ATAR when it is not used to admit the student.

Read more: More students are going to university than before, but those at risk of dropping out need more help

Employment outcomes usually improve over time, but slow career starts can have long-term consequences. The Grattan Institute report used data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY), which tracks young graduates up to age 25.

Graduates with a lower ATAR are more likely than those with a higher ATAR to fail subjects during their degree. But fail rates differ between courses. In education and nursing, for instance, graduates with ATARs below 60 failed 5% of all the subjects they took. This was half the fail rate of disciplines such as science, engineering, IT and commerce.

With fails on their academic transcripts, graduates with a lower ATAR have more trouble finding full-time work within four months of finishing their studies, and the jobs they find are less likely to use their skills.

But when it comes to employment options, the course matters more than the ATAR. In the months after graduation, humanities, science and commerce graduates with higher ATARs struggle more than nursing or education graduates with lower ATARs to find a job.

ATAR and annual income are connected within each university course. For example, male science graduates with ATARs of 90 earn about 13% more than graduates with ATARs of 60.

Men’s VET options could make them better off

To be considered a potential better choice, a course must plausibly interest the student and have better employment outcomes. There is no point telling a potential performing arts student an accounting diploma would improve their job prospects.

Few people are interested in both these courses. University applications, which often include preferences for multiple courses, reveal what other fields students are interested in.

One in five of all men whose first preference university course was science had a lower preference for engineering. Science is a high-risk university course, as rapid enrolment growth has led to graduates significantly outnumbering jobs.

Young people with lower ATARs considering science would receive a university offer, but could potentially earn more enrolling in a VET diploma (as shown in the chart below).

Similarly, about one in five men whose first preference is arts (another high-risk field) have a lower preference for commerce.

For men, with a lower ATAR, a commerce-related VET diploma would give them better employment prospects than an arts degree. These and other possible alternatives can be seen in the chart. Often a diploma is acquired after first completing a Certificate III/IV course.

Read more: We need to change negative views of the jobs VET serves to make it a good post-school option

Women should stick with uni

Women make up the majority of students who enrol into university with a lower ATAR. For them, a commerce diploma can sometimes be a good alternative to university, too. But otherwise women’s realistic choices differ from men’s – for both positive and negative reasons – in ways that make VET less attractive.

A positive reason is that two popular courses for women with lower ATARs – education and nursing – have good outcomes. Rates of professional employment for graduates of both courses are high across the ATAR range.

Nurses and teachers with higher ATARs who went to university tend to earn more than those with lower ATARs but the differences aren’t large enough to not recommend a bachelor degree over a VET course (as the chart shows).

A negative reason why vocational education is less attractive for women is that they show little interest in engineering-related fields that are popular for men. Once qualified, these men often work in construction, manufacturing, electrical and maintenance related fields.

But even when women have the relevant qualifications they often work in other occupations that pay less but offer more flexible working conditions.

VET fields popular with women, such as child care, nursing, aged care and hospitality have a large number of job vacancies, but don’t pay as well as most graduate occupations.

Vocational education does get overlooked in careers advice. But VET is less attractive for women than for men, if pay is a significant factor in course choice. Women have been a majority of university students since 1987. Given the nature of the labour market, it is not hard to see why.

– ref. If you have a low ATAR, you could earn more doing a VET course than a uni degree – if you’re a man – http://theconversation.com/if-you-have-a-low-atar-you-could-earn-more-doing-a-vet-course-than-a-uni-degree-if-youre-a-man-121624

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katrina Hutchison, Postdoctoral research fellow, Macquarie University

The past year has seen wide concern about the safety of medical implants. Some of the worst scandals have involved devices for women, such as textured breast implants with links to cancer, and transvaginal mesh implants, which were the subject of a senate inquiry.

But women are harmed not only by “women’s devices” such as breast implants and vaginal mesh. Women are also more likely to be harmed by apparently gender-neutral devices, like joint replacements and heart implants.

Read more: We can cut private health insurance costs by fixing how we pay for hip replacements and other implants

In recently published research, I explored the reasons for this. I found gender biases at all stages of design and use of medical implants.

Proposed changes to how devices are regulated, such as introducing a national register of all implants, will make it quicker to identify dodgy devices. But this will not address gender bias in how devices are designed and used.

Bias starts with design, then lab testing

Biological and social factors can affect how women present when injured or ill, and how well treatments work. Often, device designers do not take these differences into account.

The lab tests used to make sure implants are safe often ignore the possibility women could have different reactions to materials, or their activities could place different loads on implants.

Read more: Medicine’s gender revolution: how women stopped being treated as ‘small men’

Bias continues with clinical trials

Some medical device companies have exploited regulatory loopholes to get devices to market in the UK without clinical trials. Even when trials take place, women are not always included. Or researchers do not analyse the data for gender differences.

Regulators such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States and Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) often approve devices without data split by gender on how well devices perform or how safe they are.

Then there’s the doctor-patient relationship

The gender of the doctor and patient can make a difference to what women learn about their implant. The very low numbers of women in surgery mean female patients often see male surgeons. And there is some evidence male doctors tend to treat female patients in a more paternalistic and less patient-centred way.

Then there’s the issue of whether surgeons raise important safety issues with their female patients. For example, some surgeons feel uncomfortable discussing whether it’s safe to have sex after a hip implant, especially with female patients. This is important as some sexual positions are safer than others.

Read more: Women have heart attacks too, but their symptoms are often dismissed as something else

Let’s look at one example, a hip implant

The DePuy ASR (articular surface replacement) hip implant caused serious complications for patients around the world, including Australia, such as inflammation, painful growths, dislocations and metal toxicity.

Despite media coverage, few were aware this hip implant was more than twice as likely to fail in women.

In the case of hip implants, the same models are available for women and men, implying these devices are gender neutral. Most models come in a range of sizes, with some having better outcomes for women. But women are not small men, and there are gender differences in basic activities involving the hip, such as walking.

When women stand up from sitting or have sex, the fragile edges of their hip sockets tend to bear greater loads than men’s. This “edge loading” increases the risk hip implants will wear down and release dangerous metal particles.

These differences would not matter if lab tests showed equal safety of hip implants for men and women. However, evidence is not collected on this. In fact, international standards for lab tests that measure rates of wear in hip implants ignore gender differences, and only test normal walking rather than more stressful activities, such as running or having sex.

The FDA, TGA and other regulators often approve new hip implants based on their similarity to already approved models. This happened with the ASR hip implant. Regulators did not need new data, let alone evidence the hip was equally safe for women and men.

It’s a concern internationally

Internationally, there is increasing concern about the regulation and safety of medical implants. An international group of journalists released a damning report late last year. The FDA’s 510(k) process, which approves new devices based on their similarity to existing ones, allows approval of some high-risk implants without additional evidence.

The situation is no better in Europe, where commercial agencies do the approvals. This system has been criticised for approving devices without good data and for lacking transparency when it comes to implant recalls.

Read more: What is the Medical Technology Association and how does it wield its power?

The FDA has taken some steps to address gender bias, issuing guidance for companies to provide data on their devices in women and men. However, this is not binding. A study of devices approved after its introduction found only 17% included data analysis by sex.

How could we improve things?

In Australia, scandals with implants have led to calls for bans and registries. These are good ideas, but will not prompt new devices to be designed with women in mind, nor improve patient communication.

Read more: The TGA’s proposed breast implant ban exposes a litany of failures, and fails to protect women

Surgeons need to raise topics important for their patients to know about surgery, however uncomfortable it makes them feel. Current efforts to improve the culture of surgery, and to attract trainees who better reflect the communities they serve may help. But there is a long way to go.

Regulators like the TGA and FDA can influence device design by requiring data on the safety and performance of all new (and modified) devices in both women and men. The FDA experience shows these requirements must be binding if they are to work.

– ref. Why women are more likely to have dodgy hip implants or other medical devices – http://theconversation.com/why-women-are-more-likely-to-have-dodgy-hip-implants-or-other-medical-devices-121363

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shireen Daft, Lecturer, Macquarie Law School, Macquarie University

An open letter from 24 scientists published in Nature last month calls on governments to draft a new Geneva Convention dedicated to protecting the environment during armed conflict.

This inspired a number of headlines that misleadingly said the scientists want environmental destruction to be made a war crime.

But environmental destruction is already recognised as a war crime by the International Criminal Court. The existing legal framework governing armed conflict also provides some protections for the environment.

Read more: More than 1,700 activists have been killed this century defending the environment

The problem is these protections are inadequate, inconsistent, unclear, and most military behaviour won’t fall foul of these laws.

The legal protections already in place

There are currently four Geneva Conventions and three Additional Protocols that are supposed to regulate conduct during armed conflict, sometimes known as the rules of war.

The original four Geneva Conventions, which celebrate their 70th anniversary this year, contain no explicit mention of the natural environment.

The use of Agent Orange (and Agents White and Blue) to defoliate huge spans of land during the Vietnam War led to the introduction of the first specific protections for the environment during armed conflict.

Following the Vietnam War, two major developments in the law occurred.

The first was the adoption of the United Nation’s Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques Convention (ENMOD) that prohibits the hostile use of environment-altering techniques that have “widespread, long-lasting, or severe effects”.

The second was the inclusion of provisions in Additional Protocol I (API) that prohibits methods or means intended or expected to cause “widespread, long term, and severe damage to the natural environment” during warfare.

Near impossibly high standards

Both treaties set a very high threshold for falling foul of the prohibitions. API requires that all three elements of damage — widespread, long term, and severe — must be met for military action to be in violation of this provision.

The consequence is that most military behaviour, even when damaging the environment, won’t be in violation of these laws.

Making it even more difficult, the meaning of the three terms differs between the two, and there is ongoing disagreement as to their definition.

The only environmental destruction in recent times that has been considered to meet such a high threshold was the setting alight of Kuwaiti oil fields by Iraqi forces as they withdrew during the 1991 Gulf War.

The United Nations Compensation Commission held Iraq liable for the environmental damage caused in Kuwait. But because Iraq was not a party to either ENMOD or API, the Commission applied a unique legal standard derived from Security Council Resolution 687 and Iraq is still paying compensation to Kuwait to this day.

Neither ENMOD nor API specifies that a breach of these provisions constitutes a war crime. This came in 2002 when the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court came into force.

The Rome Statute says it is a war crime to intentionally cause “widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive” to the military advantage to be obtained.

The terms are not defined in the Rome Statute, and what is meant by “clearly excessive” is subjective, and introduces a test of proportionality.

Another Geneva Convention?

A new international agreement that balances the interests of environmental protection and respects the laws on armed conflict could be of enormous benefit.

The existing legal framework is only equipped to deal with direct attacks on the natural environment.

But this ignores the many other ways the environment is affected by conflict. Resources such as diamonds, coltan, timber and ivory are all used to help fund conflicts, and this can place enormous stress on the environment.

A particular gap is that no consideration is given in the existing framework to non-human species – to wildlife affected by war or to animals used for military purposes. Yet conflict has proved the biggest predictor of population declines in wild species.

But a new treaty that creates strong, effective, and enforceable protections requires significant political will.

An attempt was made two decades ago, headed by Greenpeace, but no agreement could be reached. That attempt was made during a time when international cooperation and treaty development was at its highest, following the end of the Cold War.

In the current political and social environment it seems unlikely any attempt for such an agreement would be successful. At best, we would see watered-down protections, no stronger than what is already in place. Thus drafting such a Convention now could do more harm than good, in the long run.

If not a new treaty, then what?

The International Law Commission (ILC) is about to release its final report dealing with the issue of protecting the environment during armed conflict. This was what inspired the Open Letter from the scientists in the first place.

The Draft Principles it is producing are not new principles of law, but those already found in the existing legal framework. Unfortunately the work produced so far continues to use “widespread, long term, and severe” with no clarity as to what they mean.

But they do confirm that all the fundamental principles of the rules of war apply to the environment, and should be interpreted “with a view to its protection”. The environment should not be a target, and the impact on the environment must be taken into consideration in military operations.

The work of the ILC should inform governments of the interpretation of existing law. Governments should then give more attention to the environment in the operational guidelines used by their militaries.

Read more: Some good conservation news: India’s tiger numbers are going up

The Australian Law of Armed Conflict manual, used by our defence forces, already acknowledges they have a duty to protect the natural environment. The next step is to move beyond this general principle to the specific, and have clear guidelines about what protecting the environment during armed conflict means, in practice.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is also currently updating its guidelines for all military manuals to ensure the environment is a consideration to be evaluated during all military operations.

While the world might not yet be ready to consider a new Geneva Convention relating to the environment, the survival of our natural environment does depend on changes being made to the way the war is conducted.

– ref. Environmental destruction is a war crime, but it’s almost impossible to fall foul of the laws – http://theconversation.com/environmental-destruction-is-a-war-crime-but-its-almost-impossible-to-fall-foul-of-the-laws-121180

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Miller, Professor of Violence Prevention and Addiction Studies, Deakin University

This is the first in a series of articles on a recently released comprehensive evaluation of the Queensland government’s 2016 policy reforms to tackle alcohol-fuelled violence and the implications for alcohol regulation and the night-time economy in Queensland and Australia. A summary report is also available.

Under the “Tackling Alcohol-Fuelled Violence” policy, which among other things introduced statewide restrictions on trading hours, Queensland has recorded reductions in assaults, ambulance attendances and hospital admissions. These reductions represent a substantial cost saving to the Queensland community. At the same time, tourism and the number of liquor licences have continued to grow in many areas.

Despite this, levels of alcohol-related harm still remain too high, which calls for further effort.

Read more: All in it together: why stopping alcohol’s harms needs everyone

In this article we describe the report findings from “archival” data – data collected by government services. The next three articles will:

• describe the data from patron interviews, highlighting levels of intoxication and harm
• highlight the unwanted sexual attention reported by patrons
• explore the impact on live music.

The Queensland government has provided an interim response to the report’s 38 recommendations. Community consultation will continue to the end of 2019.

What were the 2016 policy changes?

In 2016, the government responded to community concerns about alcohol-related harm by implementing a multifaceted policy with three broad aims:

1. a safer night-time environment, in particular in entertainment precincts
2. cultural change, including more responsible drinking practices within designated safe night precincts (SNPs)
3. a regulatory framework that balances the interests of the liquor industry with a reduction in alcohol-fuelled violence.

The policy measures were partly based on the successful “Newcastle intervention” in New South Wales. From 2008, Newcastle CBD venues closed at 3.30am and had a 1.30am one-way door (or “lockout”). These changes resulted in steady reductions in harms over time.

Read more: ‘Last drink’ laws, not lockouts, reduce alcohol-fuelled violence

The measures introduced in Queensland differed from those in Newcastle in four key ways:

1. licensed venues were permitted to remain open after 3am, but not to serve alcohol
2. the 1.30am one-way door, although originally proposed, was later repealed in light of an interim report
3. the government introduced mandatory networked ID scanners
4. venues were able to apply for up to six extended trading permits allowing trade until 5am (reduced from 12 in February 2017).

The measures were implemented in a series of steps, shown in the timeline below.

How did we measure impact?

We were able to collect and report on more than 40 datasets. The full report provides detailed methods. The main elements include:

1. administrative service and business data (police, ambulance, hospital, liquor licensing, alcohol sales, transport)

2. interviews with patrons in the street (including follow-up surveys)

3. interviews with key informants (licensees, police, support service workers, doctors, licensing officials etc)

4. structured venue observations

5. precinct streetscape and business mapping

6. foot traffic counting

7. ID scanner data

8. live music performances (based on events recorded by music rights licensing organisation APRA-AMCOS and Facebook)

9. population surveys

10. education campaign assessments

11. tourism data and survey

12. economic evaluation.

What did we find?

SAFETY

After 2016, there were no deaths around licensed venues in a safe night precinct.

Statewide, the rate of serious assaults from 3am-6am fell by 29% per month on average. But serious assaults increased by 19% earlier in the night (8pm to midnight).

A 40% reduction in serious assaults was recorded in Fortitude Valley between 3am and 6am and 35% in Toowoomba (3-6am). Trends were stable elsewhere.

Alcohol-related ambulance call-outs were reduced significantly statewide: 11% on average per month 3-6am, and in all safe night precincts (29% 3-6am).

Hospital admissions for ocular bone fractures also fell significantly statewide, as did intracranial injuries in Greater Brisbane. These are some of the most common fractures related to alcohol.

Hospital admissions for alcohol intoxication and a range of injuries, which had been increasing, also levelled out statewide and in Brisbane.

Read more: Fewer alcohol-related visits to inner Sydney emergency room since ‘lockout laws’ introduced

Other key findings included:

• no displacement of issues to outside safe night precincts for most of the state

• at least one serious crime solved (such as rape and grievous bodily harm) per week using ID scanner data.

DRINKING CULTURE

Key findings included:

• the proportion of patrons in safe night precincts reporting pre-drinking remains high and has not changed

• education/awareness campaigns were ineffective at reducing intoxication and violence.

BUSINESS IMPACTS

The economic evaluation identified a A$16 million overall benefit from the changes to the Queensland community. The returns on every dollar spent by govt on implementation have been A$1.96-6.80.

Other findings included:

• increased number of liquor licences across Queensland

• increased number of people using transport (public transport, taxis and Uber) on weekend nights in Fortitude Valley over time

• tourism continues to grow strongly statewide

• all live music performances have continued to increase. However, the number of original live music performances may have continued declining since 2012.

Building on the gains

The findings are terrific news in terms of reductions in ambulance callouts, serious assaults and hospital admissions, although alcohol-related harm across much of Queensland has remained stable. Further, the policy has not significantly harmed business and has delivered an overall economic benefit to the community.

The report made recommendations to further reduce alcohol-related harm. These include increasing banning periods for unruly patrons, shutting venues at 3.30am and introducing point-of-sale health promotion.

But, overall, the evaluation is a good news story for the people of Queensland. These findings hold important lessons for other states grappling with how to reduce alcohol-related violence.

Read more: Designer nights out: good urban planning can reduce drunken violence

– ref. Lessons from Queensland on alcohol, violence and the night-time economy – http://theconversation.com/lessons-from-queensland-on-alcohol-violence-and-the-night-time-economy-121114

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

Trade minister Simon Birmingham on Sunday weighed into the debate over Andrew Hastie’s warning about China rise. Birmingham said colleagues in future should ask themselves two questions before speaking out on “sensitive foreign policy matters”.

These were: “Is the making of those comments in a public way necessary? And is it helpful to Australia’s national interest?”

On a narrow view, the warning by Hastie – the chairman of the powerful parliamentary committee on intelligence and security – about Australia not being alive enough to the dangers of an ever more powerful China was not “necessary”; nor was it particularly helpful to a government trying to manage a relationship that gets more complicated all the time.

But the idea that backbenchers should not voice considered views on such a major long term issue for this country shows a certain contempt for parliamentary democracy.

Birmingham, speaking on the ABC, said: “There are a range of ways in which any of us can contribute and we can do that with direct discussion with ministers and with leadership in backbench committees and other ways”.

Decoded, the message to the backbench was: boys and girls, when in public just follow the talking points we give you.

Amid the noisy chatter and clatter of our current politics, serious foreign policy discussions among politicians are relatively rare. But the broad community debate grows ever stronger about China and its implications for Australia – including the now-great power’s trajectory, our dependence on it economically, its reach into this country (including through investment and our educational institutions), and how we juggle our respective relationships with it and the United States.

New Liberal backbencher Dave Sharma entered the China debate at the weekend, with a robust thread of nearly a dozen tweets, in support of Hastie.

A former senior diplomat, Sharma is more steeped in foreign policy than most on the frontbench.

“Hastie is right to ring the bell on this issue, and to warn that our greatest vulnerability lies in our thinking, which is Panglossian at times,” he wrote.

Significantly, Sharma also supported Hastie’s comparison with France’s failure to comprehend properly the rise of Germany before World War 2.

“In WW2, we failed to realise early enough that German ambitions could not be accommodated. National Socialist Germany was not a status quo power, but we mistook it as such, or deceived ourselves that it was,” Sharma wrote.

Hastie’s reference to Germany had been sharply condemned on Friday by Senate leader Mathias Cormann, who said it was a “a clumsy and inappropriate analogy.”

But Hastie was verballed over his invoking of Germany. He wasn’t saying the Chinese and Nazi regimes were the same – he was talking about the underestimation of the threats they posed to other countries.

Hastie could have drawn another parallel – with the failure of countries in the 1930s to fully appreciate the looming threat from Japan.

Sharma noted that rising powers inevitably cause convulsions – “the challenge is to accommodate a rising power IF it is sufficiently status quo in nature that it can be accommodated. This was the thesis with China for much of the early 2000s,” Sharma wrote.

“But if the rising power is revisionist in nature, and cannot be accommodated within the existing order – because it fundamentally does not accept the legitimacy of that order – then the future becomes much tougher”.

Given it was clear China’s ideological direction and ambition had become “far more pronounced” under its current leadership, “our strategy and thinking needs to reflect this shift, which is basically Hastie’s point – that we need to remove the blinkers from our eyes, recognise reality for what it is, and act accordingly,” Sharma said.

“This does not mean we should not be pursuing a constructive and positive relationship with China – we should be. Nor does it compel us to make a ‘choice’. But we need to be honest with ourselves about the challenges of managing this relationship and what might lie ahead.”

Of course Australian government policy in the last few years has been reacting to what has been seen as a heightening Chinese threat – even while the government has often been unwilling to admit as much.

The Pacific “step up” is all about China. So was the legislation, enacted by the Turnbull government, against foreign interference. The exclusion of Huawei from the 5G network was an unequivocal message. Australia’s intensified efforts to counter the cyber security threat have China front of mind.

The Chinese predictably reacted with annoyance to Hastie’s comments. But they are much more attuned to the actions Australia has taken and continues to take – measures which have been and are in the national interest. That’s the basic reason why Australia-China relations are strained.

The government’s trying to shut down backbench contributions to this debate is less a matter of the “national interest” than an exercise of attempted control of its MPs in its own interest. In fact it might be counter-productive for the national interest, which may require the Australian public to acquire a much better understanding than they have now of what could be increasingly difficult times and decisions in the years to come.

– ref. View from The Hill: It’s not in the ‘national interest’ for the backbench to shut up about China – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-its-not-in-the-national-interest-for-the-backbench-to-shut-up-about-china-121732

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

Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe has said two things about unemployment in the past few weeks. Together, they lead to an inescapable conclusion.

The first was in a speech in May, expanded on in a speech in June. At both times the published unemployment rate was 5.2%.

Lowe said in May that while the Reserve Bank had long thought an unemployment rate of 5% was the best that could be achieved without generating worrying inflation, that view has now changed:

From today’s perspective, I think we can do better than this. My judgement of the accumulating evidence is that the Australian economy can support an unemployment rate of below 5% without raising inflation concerns.

It was good news. And then it got better.

In June he put a number on how low the unemployment rate could go before inflation became a concern:

While it is not possible to pin the number down exactly, the evidence is consistent with an estimate below 5%, perhaps around 4.5%. Given that the current unemployment rate is 5.2%, this suggests that there is still spare capacity in our labour market.

The Reserve Bank should be able to cut interest rates until unemployment fell below 5% and approached 4.5% without worrying about inflation, Lowe argued.

And in May, in a report back from a board meeting, he made it clear that’s what he would do:

At that meeting, we discussed a scenario in which there was no further improvement in the labour market and the unemployment rate remained around the 5% mark. In this scenario, we judged that inflation was likely to remain low relative to the target and that a decrease in the cash rate would likely be appropriate.

It would likely be appropriate to cut interest rates and keep cutting until the unemployment rate was driven below 5%, continuing to cut until it approached 4.5%.

Today, appearing before the House of Representatives economics committee in Canberra with the unemployment rate still stuck at 5.2% despite two consecutive rate cuts, he delivered what on the face of it was bad news.

He said the bank’s central forecast was that the unemployment rate would stay above 5% again until 2021. That’s right, 2021.

But taking the two statements together, it is reasonable to conclude that the Reserve Bank will keep cutting rates until unemployment does fall below 5%. In other words, it will keep cutting rates until 2021.

Lowe ain’t done cutting…

Indeed, the Reserve Bank’s quarterly forecasts update, released as Lowe spoke, countenances that happening. As foreshadowed by the governor, it forecasts that the unemployment rate won’t fall back to 5% until June 2021.

And it contains several other unwelcome forecasts: economic growth of just 2.5% this year, down from a previously forecast 2.75%, and very weak inflation this year of just 1.75%, down from a previously forecast 2%.

But here’s the thing. All of those forecasts were compiled, as is the Reserve Bank’s custom, by taking into account not only the two interest rate cuts that have already happened (and have taken the bank’s cash rate down to an all-time low of 1%), but also two more yet to be delivered.

It is explained in the footnote:

Technical assumptions set on 7 August include the cash rate moving in line with market pricing.

The “market pricing” is the consensus of the bets placed on the futures market for what the Reserve Bank is going to do to its cash rate.

The consensus is for another cut of 0.25% in October and then another cut of 0.25% in February, taking the cash rate down to yet another all-time low of just 0.5%.

The Reserve Bank is normally at pains to point out that this is a mere technical assumption, not a guarantee of how it will move rates. But the awful truth is that its forecasts imply that unless it cut rates two more times in coming months, unemployment won’t fall to 5% by 2021, and inflation will be even weaker than the incredibly weak 1.75% it is forecasting.

…and he might not stop at zero

Two more cuts in its cash rate will take it to 0.5%, close to zero.

Lowe revealed that the Reserve Bank is investigating so-called “unconventional” monetary policy or quantitative easing that would have the same effect as taking the cash rate below zero.

“It is prudent for us to have done the work in advance to see what we would do – it’s really contingency planning,” he said.

Rates might go to zero, or below, worldwide because right now there is a worldwide glut of savings, and not enough investment.

The reality we face is that, if a lot of people want to save and not many people want to use those savings to build new capital, savers are going to get low returns. We can move our interest rates around this new structurally lower level,but we can’t escape the fact that global interest rates are low.

The Reserve Bank’s best case is that its Australian forecasts are wrong – that unemployment actually falls and that inflation, wage growth and economic growth climb.

There’s a respectable view within the bank that this might happen. Its forecasts take into account a range of positive influences, including lower interest rates, the recent tax cuts, the depreciation of the Australian dollar, a brighter outlook for investment in the resources sector, some stabilisation in the housing market, and ongoing high levels of investment in infrastructure.

Read more: Below zero is ‘reverse’. How the Reserve Bank would make quantitative easing work

But they are the result of a mechanical model that takes them into account individually. The governor’s hope is that, taken together, they will achieve more than is forecast.

He would like governments themselves to push things along, starting with the wages they pay their own employees, and he is becoming ever more bold about saying so:

Most public sectors have wage caps of 2.5%, some have 1.5%, I think in Western Australia it’s probably even lower. I can understand why governments are doing that. On the other hand, the wage caps in the public sector are cementing low wage norms across the country. Over time, I hope the whole system, including the public sector, could see wages rising at three point something.

He is as good as powerless to stop what he regards as a worldwide investment strike caused by the trade and technology disputes between the United States and China.

These disputes pose a significant risk to the global economy. Not only are they disrupting trade flows, but they are also generating considerable uncertainty for many businesses around the world. Worryingly, this uncertainty is leading to investment plans being postponed or reconsidered.

Lowe doesn’t believe further interest rate cuts would to do much to encourage businesses to invest, or to encourage home buyers to borrow.

But he is certain they will help in other ways.

They will lower the exchange rate, making Australian goods and services more competitive, and that they will free up the cash of Australians who already have home loans, what he calls the “cash flow” channel:

There is no evidence that has become less effective. It is certainly true that in the current environment, at least in my view, monetary policy is less effective than it used to be. In today’s environment people don’t run off to the bank to borrow more when interest rates fall; they are more likely to pay back their mortgage more quickly. So that dynamic is different than it used to be.

When he last appeared before the parliamentary committee in February he said the probabilities of rates going up and rates going down were evenly balanced. He didn’t say that today.

Read more: Buckle up. 2019-20 survey finds the economy weak and heading down, and that’s ahead of surprises

– ref. RBA update: Governor Lowe points to even lower rates – http://theconversation.com/rba-update-governor-lowe-points-to-even-lower-rates-121690