If you listen to any number of love songs, dating “experts”, or plunge head first into a romance novel, you’re likely to think it’s in our destiny to find that special someone – your soul-mate.
But how do you know if you’ve found “the one”? Will the birds sing? Will you see fireworks or a shooting star?
And for those who are yet to find “the one”, should you keep searching, or is it a misguided quest?
Research into the science of relationships spanning the last two decades shows maintaining a “destiny” mindset – that we are all meant to find that ideal person who completes us in every way – can be problematic for our love lives.
For some, this mindset can even include a mental picture as to what that person should look like.
What are the costs of a mindset?
A destiny mindset may make a person less open to developing a relationship with someone who possesses many excellent qualities, but does not match an individual’s mental picture of “the one”.
A person who holds a destiny mindset may be more likely to focus on the potential faults or inadequacies of another, for example, rather than centre on their good qualities.
Potential love interests may not measure up.Stanley Dai
On the other hand, a person may not pursue a potential love interest in the hope that something better comes along that matches their vision of destiny. By maintaining a destiny mindset, they may reject real opportunities at finding love.
For those in an existing relationship, maintaining a destiny mindset can be associated with relationship satisfaction, if the current relationship closely (if not perfectly) matches one’s idea.
But if the relationship is not in line with one’s vision of destiny, or if the relationship is evaluated as no longer matching one’s destiny, dissatisfaction can ensue.
Research suggests people who hold a destiny mindset don’t work as hard at their relationships because they have a very fixed view of their partner and relationship. They tend to accept things the way they are – either a relationship is meant to be or it is not – rather than putting in time and effort to make relationships things work and deal with relationship problems.
Is there a better alternative?
In contrast to a destiny mindset, some people hold a “growth relationship” mindset. This includes beliefs and expectations that a partner and relationship has the capacity to develop and change over time, and that problems or challenges can be overcome.
Relationships have their highs and lows and take work to maintain.Toa Heftiba
People with a growth mindset experience various positives such as greater relationship and sexual satisfaction and have a better, more constructive way of handling conflict. A growth mindset has also been found to reduce the risk of a relationship ending.
Can you have both?
Some people recount meeting their partner and knowing they were “the one”. But when describing how their relationship has progressed over time, it’s clear they put time and effort into it and work on problems when they arise.
These people may hold beliefs about destiny, but overall, hold more of a growth mindset about their relationship.
These couples often acknowledge their partner and relationship has changed, for example, and often note that they’ve helped each other develop and grow over time.
So if you work hard at your relationship, and you and your partner help one another develop and grow, you may get to know each other so well that you feel as if you share one soul. Maybe that’s what is meant by a true soul-mate.
Last week, Victoria Police arrested seven people who were alleged members of a professional begging “syndicate”. They were flown in from China on tourist visas.
In reporting this story, Australian media generated a considerable amount of public outrage. The idea that people who beg are somehow “faking” homelessness or poverty is one often used in tabloid media. Add an element of foreignness, and this story appears especially scandalous.
Most of the time, accusations of so-called “professional” begging are misleading, intended to demonise those who beg as deceitful and to legitimise the vilification of people who beg and/or are homeless.
But in this case, it appears the label is accurate, or, more accurate than usual anyway. And given the commonalities shared by those arrested, such as age, nationality, and that they were reportedly living together in Melbourne’s CBD, there does appear to be a level of coordination involved.
Still, this doesn’t make their poverty and desperation any less legitimate, nor their exploitation more acceptable, and the use of criminal charges does not seem appropriate.
Acting Inspector John Travaglini said the seven people arrested were identified as being ‘professional beggars’.Erik Anderson/AAP Image
And given homelessness and begging are emotive issues prone to hyperbole and misinformation, this story highlights a few misconceptions worth addressing.
There’s no such thing as ‘professional begging’ in the law
In state law, there is no such thing as “professional begging”. Begging is a crime under Victoria’s Summary Offences Act, which makes no mention of “professionalism” or coordination other than to prohibit the procuring of a child to beg.
The people in this case have also been charged with possessing proceeds of crime. But this is only possible because begging, controversially, remains a criminal offence in Victoria, whereas other states have decriminalised the activity.
What’s more, it has been alleged in the past, but denied by the police, that Victoria Police has confiscated money from people begging in Melbourne.
Being homeless has a broad definition
Acting Inspector John Travaglini from Victoria Police stated that because those arrested were residing together, their claims of homelessness were “false” and “deceitful”.
As well as rough sleeping, homelessness in Australia involves being in situations that fall below the minimum standard of housing, such as couchsurfing, staying in bedsits, hostels or boarding houses, or in living arrangements that are unsafe or overcrowded.
Given those arrested were reportedly sharing the same accommodation, they may very well meet definitional criteria for homelessness.
Begging and rough sleeping are not the same thing. Some homeless people beg, others don’t. Some people who have somewhere to sleep engage in begging, because they are very poor or otherwise marginalised.
Those arrested had somewhere to sleep, but it doesn’t mean they are not extremely poor.
Travaglini also claimed these people were not vulnerable, unlike others who beg. But the arrested individuals were aged in their late 60s and 70s, and allegedly flew to another country for the purpose of begging on the streets: they look pretty vulnerable to us.
So if the allegations are true, these people seem especially vulnerable. Think of the older Australians you know: how many would agree to be flown to China to beg on the streets there?
Were criminal charges appropriate?
Ten years ago, the idea of people flying to Australia to beg as a scheme to make money might have seemed unlikely. But in an increasingly globalised and connected world, poverty and vulnerability have fewer geographic limitations.
It’s likely that Australia, given its enviable standard of living and economic standing, will see more examples of these kinds of activities, not fewer. And how we respond to these kinds of events will have increasing importance in the years to come.
In this case, we certainly support an intervention into this seemingly exploitative situation. But we question the appropriateness of criminal charges for those deployed on the streets to beg.
Charges may be appropriate for those coordinating this apparent scheme. But, like society’s responses to illegal drug use, levelling criminal charges at those on the bottom rungs of the hierarchy is unlikely to address anything in a meaningful way.
There is often debate about whether you should give to people who beg, and people will likely come to their own conclusions on this.
What worries us is that stories such as these further entrench public perceptions of the homeless as criminal, and of the vulnerable as exploitative and, worse, potentially dangerous.
We urge that people, should they wish, continue to give donations to those who seek them, and, more crucially, to demand action on homelessness and poverty from their politicians. Because continued inaction on these issues, whatever form they take, is the true crime.
The islands of New Zealand are only the visible part of a much larger submerged continent, known as Te Riu a Māui or Zealandia. Most of New Zealand’s sovereign territory, around 96%, is under water – and this means that the health of the ocean is of paramount importance.
Most of the Zealandia continent is under water.CC BY-SA
New Zealand’s marine and coastal environments have significant ecological, economic, cultural and social value, but they face many threats. Disjointed legislation and considerable knowledge gaps limit our ability to effectively manage marine resources.
Ten important science questions were identified within nine research areas. The full list of 90 questions can be found in the paper and policy brief, but these are the nine priority areas:
Fisheries and aquaculture are vital sources of food, income and livelihoods, and it is crucial that we ensure these industries are sustainable. Our study has identified the need for new methods to minimise bycatch, mitigate environmental impacts and better understand the influence of commercial interests in fishers’ ability to adequately conserve and manage marine environments.
2. Biosecurity
The number of marine pests has increased by 10% since 2009, and questions remain around how we can best protect our natural and cultural marine heritage. Future directions include the development of new techniques to improve the early detection of invasive species, and new tools to identify where they came from, and when they arrived in New Zealand waters.
3. Climate change
Climate change already has wide ranging impacts on our coasts and oceans. We need research to better understand how climate change will affect different marine species, how food webs might respond to future change, and how ocean currents around New Zealand might be affected.
Climate change already affects marine species and food webs.CC BY-ND
4. Marine reserves and protected areas
Marine protected areas are widely recognised as important tools for marine conservation and fisheries management. But less than 1% of New Zealand’s waters is protected to date. Future directions include research to identify where and how we should be implementing more protected areas, whether different models (including protection of customary fisheries and temporary fishing closures) could be as effective, and how we might integrate New Zealand’s marine protection into a wider Pacific network.
While we know about 15,000 marine species, there may be as many as 65,000 in New Zealand. On average, seven new species are identified every two weeks, and there is much we do not know about our oceans. We need research to understand how we can best identify the current baseline of biodiversity across New Zealand’s different marine habitats, predict marine tipping points and restore degraded ocean floor habitats.
6. Policy and decision making
New Zealand’s policy landscape is complicated, at times contradictory, and we need an approach to marine management that better connects science, decision making and action. We also need to understand how to navigate power in decision making across diverse interests to advance an integrated ocean policy.
7. Marine guardianship
Marine guardianship, or kaitiakitanga, means individual and collective stewardship to protect the environment, while safeguarding marine resources for future generations. Our research found that citizen science can help maximise observations of change and connect New Zealanders with their marine heritage. It can also improve our understanding of how we can achieve a partnership between Western and indigenous science, mātauranga Māori.
8. Coastal and ocean processes
New Zealand’s coasts span a distance greater than from the south pole to the north pole. Erosion and deposition of land-based sediments into our seas has many impacts and affects ocean productivity, habitat structure, nutrient cycling and the composition of the seabed.
Future research should focus on how increased sedimentation affects the behaviour and survival of species at offshore sites and on better methods to measure physical, chemical and biological processes with higher accuracy to understand how long-term changes in the ocean might influence New Zealand’s marine ecosystems.
9. Other anthropogenic factors
Our study identified a range of other human threats that need more focused investigation, including agriculture, forestry mining and urban development. We need more research into the relative effects of different land-use types on coastal water quality to establishing the combined effects of multiple contaminants (pesticides, pharmaceuticals, etc) on marine organisms and ecosystems. Pollution with microplastics and other marine debris is another major issue.
We hope this horizon scan will drive the development of new research areas, complement ongoing science initiatives, encourage collaboration and guide interdisciplinary teams. The questions the New Zealand marine science community identified as most important will help us fill existing knowledge gaps and make greater contributions to marine science, conservation, sustainable use, policy and management.
To design a new house in Australia, the building needs to meet the national construction code. One way to do this is by using software to simulate the building’s thermal efficiency, to see if it meets the minimum requirements of the national house energy scheme. The scheme divides Australia geographically into 69 different climate zones and requires new houses to be thermally appropriate for their environment.
Unfortunately, this software does not properly take into account our warming weather. Our recent report found the climate assumptions used by the government drastically underestimate the length and heat of summers in the near future.
In fact, buildings that perform best for heat waves predicted by 2030 are actually banned by the government’s building code. We urgently need to update our building codes to cope with our changing climate.
Understand the future local climate
We took Richmond in New South Wales as an example to understand the effect a changing climate might have on building performance. By taking predictions from CSIRO’s medium greenhouse gas emissions scenario, we analysed Richmond’s likely weather for every week of 2030.
The future outlook, shown below, is strikingly different from the weather files used to determine whether houses meet the minimum thermal performance requirement of the National Construction Code. In 2030, Richmond will experience a warm period almost four times longer than predicted by the official weather file.
Author provided
Design for the future
Based on the future climate scenario, the design strategy for buildings in Richmond should focus on well shaded and insulated buildings to avoid any heat gain in the warm period, but should also harness sunlight to warm up the indoors in the cool period.
The warm period will last from December to March, when keeping the house cool is the priority. Passive solar heating, such as northern windows and well-insulated walls, floor and ceilings, are important during the May to September cool months, while direct ventilation is largely all that’s needed during the mostly comfortable April and October to November.
To test how houses will perform in a hotter future, we modelled a house in Richmond using AccuRate software. We found a design and construction solution that performed well (achieving 7.6 stars out of 10) for the 2030 scenario failed to meet a heating threshold that is legally required in NSW. In effect, the house that makes the most sense for the immediate future, could not be built.
These thresholds for heating and cooling are based on assumptions that are out of step with current conditions, let alone the future. Between 2016 and 2018 Richmond’s annual average temperature was 17.8℃, whereas the NatHERS weather file assumes it to be 16.7℃. This difference is set to increase.
In a 2019 amendment, the National Construction Code adopted NSW’s approach to heating and cooling thresholds to other climate zones in other states. The heating threshold puts a restraint on designing buildings that are optimised to mitigate extreme heat events.
This highlights the limitation of out-of-date climate files, and the current regulation that acts as a barrier to developing energy efficient designs for a future warmer climate.
Build to perform
A 2013 CSIRO study found that houses with higher star ratings using more energy in summer.
One of the reasons is the trade-offs on the thermal performance of one building component against another in the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) software. For example, a window without shading on the western façade is acceptable in a NatHERS simulation, whereas the same window would not be allowed if a glazing calculator developed by the National Construction Code were used to demonstrate the thermal performance of a house.
Other issues are trade workmanship, such whether a building is airtight. Airtightness in residential buildings is ignored in the national construction code. However, considerable energy savings can be achieved if a house can be made airtight.
Author provided
Similarly, missing or displaced insulation in the ceiling, as shown above, can cause significant discomfort and additional heating and cooling costs. We all, from builders to homeowners, need to understand insulation must be carefully installed and cannot be moved later, or even well designed buildings will become inefficient.
Windows are the main option for ventilating most houses. However, if you live in a high-pollution or noisy area, or in a place with very little wind, open windows might not be desirable or practical. Consequently, households may not be getting enough fresh air to maintain a healthy indoor environment. A mechanical ventilation system, which uses little energy, is an ideal alternative.
The current weather files and heating thresholds used to develop minimum building standards are inadequate for our warming climate. Our report presents a framework for designing and building houses that consider climate change. We hope to see further research on other Australian population centres, so we can develop a comprehensive overview to help us build energy efficient and healthy houses for the future.
Australia prides itself on being a safe travel destination. And feeling safe is one of the leading considerations for international students when choosing to study here.
So, a spate of robberies and physical attacks targeting international students in Melbourne in recent weeks is particularly concerning. This is especially so on the tail of media accusations that Australian universities are treating international students as “cash cows” .
Admittedly, international education is huge business. In the 2017-18 financial year, more than 500,000 international students injected nearly A$32 billion into Australia’s economy. The majority of these were university students.
International education is also Australia’s third-largest export earner. As Universities Australia’s Deputy Chief Executive Anne-Marie Lansdown said last year
Australians should be fiercely proud of this incredibly important industry. They should also be fiercely protective of it.
And this means being protective of its customers.
Federal education minister Dan Tehan responded quickly to the Melbourne attacks. He said the government was working with education providers to “ensure Australia is a safe and welcoming country for international students”.
It also states universities should have staff and support mechanisms in place to assist students. Mechanisms include health and counselling services, and immediate response to critical incidents such as severe verbal or psychological aggression, violence and physical or sexual abuse.
But it’s a huge challenge to protect international students travelling to and from the university, and in day-to-day living in local communities.
Safety outside university
University students are often victimised on public transport. In one Melbourne study of all students (local and international) nearly 80% of female students surveyed and an equivalent proportion of LGBTI+ students, said they had been the victims of unwanted sexual gestures, comments, advances, exposed genitals, groping, or being followed on public transport in the previous three years. More than half of men reported having been victimised.
Women said they adopted a range of behaviours, from avoiding certain lines and stops to ensuring they are met at a stop. They said they were on constant alert to mitigate their risk of victimisation. A concerning finding was that only 5.7% of those who had been victimised reported this to anyone in authority.
Australian universities have CCTV cameras on campus.from shutterstock.com
The recent rape and murder of 21-year-old international student Aiia Maasarwe in Melbourne highlights the danger of travelling alone at night and use of public transport. Ms Maasarwe was walking home at night after getting off a tram near La Trobe University in Bundoora.
Another study on the community safety of international students in Melbourne found international students were more likely than domestic students to report that, when their safety was threatened, there was a racial, religious or cultural element to the threat.
Violence can also be opportunistic, with environmental factors such as travelling at night and the use of public transport heightening the risk.
What universities can do
Orientation programs are a good start and an opportunity to offer safety information to international students. This can be done through videos and presentations by police and other service providers, along with online resources that can be accessed 24/7.
Personal safety tips include leaving valuables at home when going out and not carrying large amounts of money, knowing the 000 (triple zero) national emergency number and how to interact with the operator. Many universities now have mobile apps that provide access to emergency and security resources.
But orientation programs, two or three times a year, are intense periods of information overload where personal safety is one of many topics to be covered in a limited amount of time. They are not enough by themselves.
Universities can address some public safety issues through measures such as thoughtful timetabling that reduces night travel to and from campus, working directly with transport authorities to enhance safety on buses and trains and establishing a close working relationship with local police.
These strategies are part of a growing international approach called Healthy Universities that promotes health, safety and well-being for staff and students.
As part of its Safe Campuses It’s On All of Us program, Griffith University offers self-defence classes to staff and students. The focus is not just on protecting oneself but also understanding when and where you might be vulnerable and how to develop strategies to avoid personal injury.
Most universities have a MATES (Mentoring and Transition Equals Success) or equivalent mentoring program for new students to help connect with other students and learn about university life. This existing network could be mobilised to promote international student safety if the mentors were appropriately trained, resourced and supported by their universities.
Australian universities have proactively addressed sexual assault and sexual harassment through the Respect. Now. Always. initiative. This means a broad framework for international student safety is already in place to run the necessary face-to-face workshops and training programs, liaise with police and encourage reporting of incidents.
Of course this will require more dedicated staff and resources in the international offices so programs are sustainable.
There is already enough policy and general advice in place about the safety of international students. What we need is more operational programs with the police and other key stakeholders, leading to evidence-based practice.
In particular, evaluation of real world initiatives is needed to know what works and what does not. This way we can confidently reassure international students and their families that personal safety is a priority.
Mid-year orientation is occurring right now. This provides a timely opportunity to focus on international student safety.
Compulsory superannuation was sold to Australians on the basis that it would make us better off.
But as the government prepares for an independent inquiry into retirement incomes, new Grattan Institute research finds that increasing compulsory contributions from 9.5% of wages to 12%, as has been legislated, would leave many Australian workers poorer over their entire lifetimes.
They would sacrifice a significantly increased share of their lifetime wage in exchange for little or no increase in their retirement income.
The typical worker would lose about A$30,000 over her or his lifetime.
More compulsory super means lower wages
Superannuation delivers higher incomes in retirement at the expense of lower incomes while working.
Yet the superannuation lobby usually presents only one side of the pact, urging an increase in compulsory super to get the higher retirement incomes while ignoring the income that workers have to forgo to get them.
Compulsory super contributions are paid by employers. But they appear to come out of funds the employers would otherwise have spent on wages.
This means increases in compulsory super come at the expense of wage increases – something that was acknowledged when compulsory super was set up (indeed, it was part of the reason it was set up) and has been acknowledged by advocates of higher contributions, including the former opposition leader Bill Shorten).
Grattan Institute calculations suggest that lifting compulsory super to 12% by 2025 will take up to A$20 billion a year from workers’ pockets. For most, the trade-off isn’t worth it.
The reality is that most Australians can already look forward to a better living standard in retirement than they had while working – even if they interrupt their careers to care for children. Workers with interrupted employment histories lose super in retirement, but get larger part-pensions.
The poorest Australians get a clear pay rise when they retire: the age pension is worth more than their after-tax income while working.
Other Grattan Institute research finds retirees are more comfortable financially than any other group of Australians and are much less likely to suffer financial stress than working-age Australians.
It needn’t lead to better retirement
So what about Middle Australia?
Despite the “magic” of compound returns, just about all of the extra income from a higher super balance at retirement would be offset by lower pension payments, due to the pension assets test.
It is always possible the pension rules will change, but it isn’t usually regarded as wise to assess proposals on the basis of changes that haven’t happened and aren’t being suggested.
Pension payments themselves would also be lower under a 12% superannuation regime. They are benchmarked to wages, which would be lower if employers have to put more into super.
The graph below shows that the big winners from higher compulsory super would be the wealthiest 20% of Australian earners, who would benefit from extra super tax breaks and would be unlikely to receive the age pension anyway.
Higher compulsory super redistributes income from the middle to the top. Middle earners would be no better off.
Over a lifetime, it could be a net loss
As higher compulsory super would leave Middle Australians no better off in retirement, but poorer while working, it follows that it would make them poorer over their entire lives.
How much poorer? We calculate that, after adjusting for inflation, the typical (median) 30-year-old Australian worker earning A$58,000 today would lose about 2.5% of wages each year and get less than a 1% boost to retirement income.
As a result, that person’s lifetime income would be almost 1% lower – about A$30,000 lower.
A post published on the Grattan Blog today gives more detail on the method we used to calculate the impact of higher compulsory super on lifetime incomes.
And it would cost the budget
Higher compulsory super might be justified if it saved the budget money on the pension – because those savings could be used to compensate middle-income earners via lower taxes or more services.
But in fact, higher super would cost the budget.
Our modelling shows that lifting compulsory super to 12% of wages would cost taxpayers an extra A$2 billion to A$2.5 billion per year in super tax breaks, overwhelmingly directed at high-income earners.
Those extra super tax breaks would dwarf any budget savings on the age pension until about 2060 – by which time there would be 80 years of budget costs from compulsory super to pay back before the whole exercise saved the government money.
Here’s the bottom line, worth keeping in mind in the lead-up to the independent inquiry: it’s hard to think of a policy less in the interests of working Australians than more compulsory super.
In the first act of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical A Little Night Music, the long-suffering Countess Charlotte Malcolm mentions her younger sister, noting, “Dear Marta has renounced men and is teaching gymnastics in a school for retarded girls in Bettleheim”.
When first written for the show’s Broadway premiere in 1973, this was intended as a laugh line that transitions into the famous duet, Every Day a Little Death. But nearly 50 years later, it stands out for all the wrong reasons.
During Victorian Opera’s recent production of the musical in Melbourne, the use of the pejorative term “retarded” prompted an audible intake of breath from the audience, with many visibly shifting in their seats.
When the performers began the duet, the audience’s discomfort was largely forgotten. Yet the moment highlights one of the most significant challenges facing opera companies in the 21st century: an ever-widening gap between a repertoire that is frozen in time and an audience that is continuing to evolve.
This issue is increasingly coming to the fore in opera circles, as the stories presented on stage seem more and more removed from the modern realities of #MeToo and efforts to achieve racial and gender equality. In Australia recently, more than 190 composers, directors, and musicians signed a call to action to remove sexism and gendered violence from operatic works.
But the problem is deep-rooted and stems from opera’s nature as a historical art form.
The problem of the canon
The music and text of an opera are largely fixed, but stage interpretations can vary wildly depending on the performers, stage direction, design, venue, and budget.
This tension between score and stage has existed since opera’s emergence in 17th century Venice. With the turn of the 20th century, however, the operatic canon became codified as a collection of Greatest Hits, in which long dead composers like Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, and Rossini still reign supreme.
Opera companies are diversifying their programming with musical theatre, 20th century offerings (for example, works by British composer Benjamin Britten), and newly-commissioned works. Still, consider the five most performed operas in the world in 2018-2019: La Traviata, The Magic Flute, La bohème, Carmen, and The Barber of Seville. The most recent of these? La bohème, which premiered in 1896.
It’s not surprising that some of opera’s most canonical works struggle to find relevance with a modern-day audience. But this tension reaches a boiling point when it comes to operas that contain racist and misogynistic elements.
See, for example, the ethnic exoticism deployed in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Delibes’ Lakmé; the Chinese stereotypes in Puccini’s Turandot, the lightly-veiled anti-Semitism in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the Muslim caricatures in Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, and the gendered violence in Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s Tosca, to name just a few.
Many of these works have become even more problematic because of longstanding production conventions. Up until 2015, white tenors were still wearing “blackface” makeup when performing the titular role in Otello at The Metropolitan Opera. Productions of Madama Butterfly, Turandot, and The Mikado regularly put non-Asian performers in “yellowface” makeup.
Russian soprano Anna Netrebko recently caused a firestorm on social media after posting a selfie of herself wearing “brownface” makeup for a production of Aida.
Opera Australia prompted a similar backlash after casting a non-Hispanic performer as Maria for its 2019 production of West Side Story, a work with its own lengthy tradition of white performers playing Puerto Rican characters.
Opera traditionalists have long clung to the view that opera productions should function as historical artefacts, adhering to the intentions of the original composer and librettist as well as the way a work has “always” been done. The Facebook page Against Modern Opera Productions, which boasts more than 59,000 followers, is an online bastion of this viewpoint.
But when a work’s score and staging traditions are at odds with modern-day cultural norms, traditionalists may find themselves defending aspects of works that, in any other context, would be classified as racist and/or sexist.
Strategies for change
As opera audiences continue to dwindle, companies need to find a way forward that doesn’t alienate either traditionalists or the younger, more socially-minded generation.
One strategy used by the Canadian Opera Company was to rewrite the dialogue for Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio in order to remove racist language. Companies such as Seattle Opera have endeavoured to foster dialogue around troubling works like Madama Butterfly by scheduling accompanying events on diversity and representation.
Another common strategy is to commission new translations or use modernised supertitles (the opera equivalent of subtitles) that revise outdated language. In the case of Victorian Opera’s A Little Night Music, a minor edit to replace “retarded” with an alternate term might have been appropriate.
More generally, arts organisations are facing broader calls to diversify their casts and creative teams. The US-based organisation Final Bow for Yellow Face actively lobbies companies to “replace caricature with character” in productions across ballet, opera, and theatre.
These goals are difficult to achieve, particularly when traditional productions of works like Madama Butterfly and Turandot regularly pack in audiences worldwide. As audiences continue to evolve, however, the opera industry will soon need to grapple with larger questions about which works still belong in the “canon”.
In the meantime, perhaps the best option is to imagine what the original composer and librettist would really want. Would they rather have an audience that is wholly engrossed in the narrative unfolding on stage … or one that is uncomfortably shifting in their seats?
International human rights lawyers Amal Clooney and Caoilfhionn Gallagher QC will lead a legal team representing Maria Ressa, the award-winning Philippines journalist, editor and publisher who has been repeatedly arrested this year on charges that critics say are designed to silence her, reports CNN.
“It is clear that the government is manipulating the law to muzzle and intimidate one of its most credible media critics,” said the Committee to Protect Journalists after her arrest in March.
“Maria Ressa is a courageous journalist who is being persecuted for reporting the news and standing up to human rights abuses. We will pursue all available legal remedies to vindicate her rights and defend press freedom and the rule of law in the Philippines,” Clooney said in a press statement released by London-based law firm Doughty Street Chambers announcing the relationship.
Ressa is the cofounder and editor of online news site Rappler, which has gained prominence for its unflinching coverage of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and his brutal war on drugs.
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She has been indicted multiple times on libel and tax evasion charges that critics have described as designed to silence independent media in the southeast Asian country. She worked for CNN as an investigative journalist before starting Rappler.
In an op-ed published this year by Columbia Journalism Review, Ressa accused Duterte of leading a systematic campaign against news organisations in the Philippines, and against herself personally.
“Legal hassles can take up 90 percent of my time; a day after our May midterm elections, I was arraigned for cyber libel in the morning and appeared for a case of securities fraud in the afternoon,” she wrote.
Cyber libel charges After being arrested on cyber libel charges in February, she told CNN it was an example of how the law was being “weaponised” against critics of the country’s president.
Speaking to CNN’s Kristie Lu Stout, Ressa said the law was “draining … democracy dry”.
Ressa had been charged with a lawsuit relating to a story written in 2012, which alleged that businessman Wilfredo Keng had links to illegal drugs and human trafficking.
However, the article was published by Rappler two years before the new cyber libel laws came into effect in the Philippines.
In March, she was detained at Manila airport and later charged with violating the anti-dummy law, legislation related to securities fraud.
Clooney has previously represented Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were jailed in Myanmar under the country’s Official Secrets Act for reporting on a massacre of Rohingya civilians. The Pulitzer Prize-winning pair were released in May.
Rappler cofounder and editor Maria Ressa … “the law is draining … democracy dry.” Image: RSF
An Auckland University of Technology graduate is practicing true community journalism by sharing the stories of Auckland’s most marginalised and vulnerable people.
Former AUT journalism student Six is the editor of the K’Road Chronicle, a community newspaper capturing the essence and eccentricities of Auckland’s infamous Karangahape Road which serves as home to so many homeless.
A self-described over-qualified, under-employed journalist, Six knows the road as if it were her home. It was for a time; she spent several years living on the streets.
She told Pacific Media Watch this experience gave her a unique perspective to write stories about other rough sleepers for the K’Road Chronicle – some of which have been made into a popular video series through a partnership with Stuff.
“It’s about building trust when I speak with them,” she says.
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“I sit alongside them. Their story is my story.”
Supportive AUT Staff While no longer homeless, Six was living on the streets during her time studying at AUT, a difficult period that she says was made easier with the support of the staff on her course.
“There was Greg Treadwell, Helen Sissons. Big respect for David Robie and his wife Del too, if it wasn’t for their support I’m not sure if I would have gotten through,” she says.
K’Road Chronicle…capturing the essence and eccentricities of Auckland’s infamous Karangahape Road. Image: Facebook/K’Road Chronicle
“Even the security guards, after I lost my key card and couldn’t afford to pay the $15 or whatever it was for the new one, they knew me and would let me in the building after hours.”
“And they even turned a blind eye when I’d occasionally spend the night on one of the couches.”
Head of AUT’s journalism department and Six’s former lecturer Dr Greg Treadwell says that her homelessness would have made her studies particularly challenging.
“There were rumours that she was sleeping down on the tenth floor, but I never went down to check.”
“So, if that was the level of support through inaction then I’m very happy to have provided that support.”
Social justice journalism He says that such an experience would have bolstered her journalism with a strong sense of social justice.
“Her heart was always in the homeless community in many ways. And if there’s an advocacy journalism that’s appropriate, then the journalism that advocates for the homeless is fundamentally good journalism.
“If journalism speaks for the voiceless then the homeless have got to be the most voiceless in society.”
After graduating, Six had trouble finding work in the mainstream media, a problem that many journalism graduates are facing.
Her employment troubles forced her down other avenues, and while sitting on K’Road one day realised the wealth of stories that she could find through street locals. After pitching the idea and securing some initial funding from the K Road Business Association, the Chronicle was spawned.
Cult following Now in its second year, the newspaper has attracted a cult following within the community and beyond.
“I can’t keep up with demand,” Six says. “I’m even getting asked for copies from AUT and the library.”
Other than sharing important stories, the paper is also providing employment for some K’Road locals who get given copies to sell themselves and keep the earnings, something that Dr Treadwell says is another reason why the Chronicle is a valuable asset for the homeless community.
Streetie Rob selling Issue One of K’ Road Chronicle. Image: Facebook/K’Road Chronicle
He also says Six’s inability to find work in the mainstream media ultimately proved to be a service to journalism.
“I think it pushed Sister Six in the right direction,” he says.
“I personally think that the orthodoxy of mainstream newsrooms was never going to make her happy, she’s much more of an advocate than that.”
“So what she’s doing now is hugely valuable and helpful for society but also probably at this stage really good for her because she’s experienced the lacking of things in life, of comfort and so on.
“She knows what it’s like.”
Gonzo Journalism A fan of American journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Six likens the type of work she does to Thompson’s Gonzo journalism, a style in which the writer becomes so involved with the subject and the subject’s world that he or she actually becomes part of the story.
Treadwell agrees.
“She’s the classic gonzo journalist in a lot of ways.
“She’s much more concerned with outcomes than process, much more interested in shining lights on injustice than necessarily following all the petty rules of the bureaucracy.
“Every city needs a sister six.”
The need for Six’s work is perhaps greater than ever. According to the Auckland Council the number of people classified as “homeless” in Auckland is 20,296. The number of people literally living without shelter day to day is 771.
Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie agrees, saying that the K’Road Chronicle came at a critical time.
Paper for the voiceless “It was an excellent and exciting initiative to start the K’Road Chronicle – not only is homelessness a growing problem in Auckland, but until this publication started the homeless were voiceless as well.”
During her time at AUT, Six filed stories on diversity for the Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Scoop project.
Dr Robie says the type of diversity reporting that Six is doing is an example for all journalists.
“Journalists should be supporting the voiceless, marginalised and stigmatised far more than they do. The mainstream media are far too close to power and should be far more challenging.”
“Six and her community should be congratulated for taking up the challenge – journalism that cares.”
Caring is certainly a value, among others that Six employs in her work.
Journalism values She says that any journalist can write advertorials or sensationalist articles but it takes a special set of values to write stories about those living on the fringes of society.
Resilience, persistence, resourcefulness, pragmatism and positivity are what enables her to get through life and do the work she does.
“A journalist is nothing without values,” she says.
Iranian officials this week revealed that the country’s nuclear program will break the limit for uranium enrichment, set under the terms of the deal struck in 2015 between Iran and world powers including the United States under former president Barack Obama.
The nucleus of a uranium atom is a very rich source of energy. The splitting of a uranium atomic nucleus – a process called nuclear fission – produces more than 20 million times more energy than a strong chemical reaction such as burning a molecule of natural gas.
Atomic nuclei are made of two types of subatomic particles: protons and neutrons. All uranium atoms contain 92 protons, but can contain varying numbers of neutrons. Each specific combination of neutrons and protons is called an isotope. Isotopes are named according to the total number of protons and neutrons – hence, uranium-238 (U-238) contains 92 protons and 146 neutrons, whereas U-235 contains three fewer neutrons.
U-235 undergoes nuclear fission more readily than U-238, making it more valuable as a source of nuclear energy. What’s more, only U-235 can sustain a “nuclear chain reaction”, in which enough neutrons are released during nuclear fission to trigger fission in neighbouring atomic nuclei. This process is necessary to efficiently release large amounts of energy – either in a controlled way, such as in a nuclear power station, or in an uncontrolled explosion such as in a nuclear bomb.
Natural uranium, however, contains just 0.7% U-235, and 99.3% U-238. Commercial nuclear reactors designs generally require uranium fuel with U-235 concentrations of between 3.5% and 5%.
Uranium enrichment is the process of artificially increasing the proportion of U-235 in a sample of uranium to meet this requirement.
What does the process involve?
The technical details of uranium enrichment technology are highly classified, but we know the most efficient technique uses a process called centrifuge enrichment.
This involves reacting the uranium with fluorine to form a gas called uranium hexafluoride (UF₆). This is then spun at very high speeds in a series of centrifuges.
UF₆ molecules containing the heavier U-238 isotope are forced to the outside of the centrifuge, where they are removed. The remaining gas is thus richer in U-235, hence the term “enrichment”.
By feeding the mixture through a succession of centrifuges, the uranium becomes successively more enriched. Higher levels of uranium enrichment are therefore more expensive and time-consuming.
A typical 1-gigawatt commercial nuclear reactor contains one reactor and uses around 27 tonnes of enriched uranium fuel per year, although this depends on the quality of the nuclear fuel used. In a commercial market this costs around US$40 million, which is a small fraction of the US$450 million revenue that would be generated if we assume an electricity price of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Does it inevitably lead to weapons?
The technical details of nuclear weapons development are more closely guarded still. But we know that a uranium fission weapon requires tens of kilograms of highly enriched uranium, with U-235 concentrations of around 90%.
While the level of enrichment is much higher, there is no difference in the equipment used to make weapons-grade uranium, as opposed to nuclear fuel.
The same facilities used to produce 27 tonnes of 3.6% U-235 fuel for a commercial reactor could conceivably also be used to make one tonne of U-235 enriched to 90% – roughly enough for 20 nuclear weapons.
However, the post-processing of the UF₆ to make nuclear fuel is considerably different to that required for a weapon. In the case of nuclear fuel, it is formed into uranium oxide pellets and encased in zirconium alloy tubes. Weapons require pure uranium metal.
What limit has Iran breached, and what does it stand to gain?
Under the treaty, Iran agreed to enrich uranium to no more than 3.6%, and to only stockpile enough fuel to run its single commercial nuclear reactor for one year.
It has already breached the stockpiling limit, and has now broken the enrichment limit.
In theory, these breaches could allow Iran’s nuclear reactor to run more economically and for a longer time before the fuel needs to be replaced. However, these higher-enrichment fuels require very specialised processing, and only a handful of companies worldwide have the technology to do this. The waste handling required for the spent fuel is also more sophisticated.
Whatever Iran’s ultimate aim, and despite the diplomatic tensions, its uranium enrichment levels are not yet near those required for nuclear weapons.
There’s increasing doubt about how transformational the Labour-led Government is turning out to be. In all sorts of public policy areas the new administration is struggling to make the changes and produce the outcomes it promised. Perhaps expectations are too high? Maybe voters and commentators are too impatient? Or, could it be that the political system simply isn’t well equipped to allow transformational change.
For those interested in politics being more transformational and meaningful, an important report was published recently which relates to some of these issues. Produced by researchers at Victoria University of Wellington in conjunction with Parliament’s Office of the Clerk, the report contains some important – and contentious – recommendations for reform of New Zealand’s democracy – see the report here: Foresight, insight and oversight: Enhancing long-term governance through better parliamentary scrutiny.
Veteran political journalist John Armstrong said the report “arguably is the most meaty menu in terms of options for change in a fundamental component of the political system since the Royal Commission on the Electoral System of the mid-1980s” recommended the shift to MMP – see his must-read column: Report critiquing Government swept under the rug along with thoughts of the future.
Armstrong laments that the report hasn’t had much attention, suggesting it should be “compulsory reading” for MPs. But he’s not holding his breath: “How regrettable, wasteful and unforgivable it will be if MPs shun what is nothing less than blueprint for a much-needed overhaul of New Zealand’s increasingly sorry excuse for a Parliament.”
So, why aren’t our politicians interested in this report? Armstrong suggests that it challenges the very nature of modern politics, saying the report is “a very welcome antithesis to the self-serving unwillingness of politicians to address the future for fear of losing votes. It rejects the attempt to divorce the present from the future. It suggests numerous mechanisms to acknowledge the long-term rather than being fixated with the short-term.”
The report is all about finding ways to reconfigure parliamentary politics to be more future-focused, and able to deal with long-term and often intractable issues such as environmental collapse, and demographic population changes causing problems for resource use. It makes the argument that politicians don’t deal with such problems because they’re more focused on short-term and day-to-day problems in society.
This is all best explained by one of the co-authors of the report, Jonathan Boston, who argues that because of the way New Zealand’s system of political accountability is currently set up, “poor decision-making may go undetected while non-urgent, but potentially serious, long-term problems receive inadequate political attention. Future citizens are then left to pay the price” – see: Taking the fight to short-termism in government.
Boston has a number of questions about whether our system of parliamentary scrutiny is producing a forward-looking system of government: “Are they successfully identifying, mitigating and managing significant national risks? Are they sufficiently alert to slow-burning or creeping problems, not least those with irreversible consequences? Do they have effective strategies to address major long-term policy challenges such as biodiversity loss and climate change, the fiscal impacts of demographic changes or the social consequences of disruptive technologies? In short, are they exercising sound anticipatory governance?”
Although all politicians are likely to be more focused on the “present” than the “future”, Boston believes our democratic configuration “compounds the presentist bias in decision-making”.
A package of potential reforms is raised for debate in the report. These range from a number of changes that could be made in the way Parliament operates, through to the number of MPs (proposing an increase to 150), to the length of the parliamentary term (proposing it be extended from three to four years).
It’s this latter recommendation that has received the most media coverage. Jonathan Boston went on TVNZ’s Breakfast to advocate for the reduction in elections, saying that the main advantage to having less frequent elections is that politicians would then have “more time and opportunity to address big, long-term issues, whether they are environmental, economic and housing and so on” – see: Extending MP terms to four years would allow more ‘thoughtful analysis’, expert argues.
Speaking on RNZ’s Morning Report, Boston elaborated on the problems of the current three-year election cycle: “As it currently stands a new government can be formed and then in effect got to spend maybe the first year trying to work out what it’s going to do, the second year trying to do it and then the third year preparing for the next election. In dealing with very complex, difficult issues, that’s a very, very tight timeframe” – see: New report calls for four-year term, more MPs in Parliament.
In addition, RNZ reports Boston’s view that “short electoral cycles are compounded by the rapid nature of social media and the news media. Professor Boston said relentless reporting puts governments under pressure to deliver quickly, which encourages a short-term approach.” Boston is quoted saying: “I think we have plenty of evidence in New Zealand of governments of all persuasions really struggling to address big issues like climate change, fresh water, housing in very short parliamentary terms.”
The same article quotes former Labour Party president Mike Williams agreeing on the need for change, but suggesting that it would be unlikely: “My gut feeling is both would be rejected. My personal opinion is that the term is too short and four years would be much better. I just don’t think that would be acceptable to the public. They like the option of being able to chuck a government out after three years.”
This ability to throw governments out is also emphasised in the same article by Otago University professor of law Andrew Geddis, as an important part of holding politicians to account in a system with very few checks on power: “We don’t have a written constitution, we don’t have courts that can strike down legislation, we don’t have an upper house of parliament or anything like that… So if we get rid of three-yearly elections and move to four yearly we’d have to ask what other arrangements we put in place to increase the accountability of members of parliament.”
However, it’s worth noting that “National’s electoral law spokesman, Nick Smith, said the party was considering a policy backing a referendum on longer terms.” And when he retired from Parliament late last year, former Attorney General Chris Finlayson also made a plea to shift to a four-year parliamentary term.
This was taken up at the time by a New Zealand Herald editorial, which argued, “Anything that encourages decision makers in any field to lengthen their horizons is a good thing. Just as business needs chief executives who can look beyond their annual reporting cycle, and beyond their likely tenure at the top, democracies need governments that can look well beyond the next election. Even one extra year in the electoral cycle might make quite a difference” – see: Four year terms could make governments more far-sighted – New Zealand Herald.
In contrast, for some opposing arguments, it’s worth reading an older opinion piece by lawyer Graeme Edgeler: Four-year term better in theory than practice. He puts forward the case that “There’s no evidence that a four-year Parliamentary term would lead to better legislation. And nor is there evidence that the current three-year term prevents Parliament from completing major law reform projects.”
The proposal to increase the size of Parliament from 120 to 150 MPs is also highly unlikely to be accepted by the public. After all, New Zealand has previously had referendums which give an idea of the likely public orientations to the idea.
Brittney Deguara reports: “In 1967 and 1990, two referendums were held regarding a potential term expansion. Both produced results against a term increase, with only around a third of voters supporting the change. Similarly, a 1999 referendum resulted in the majority of citizens – 81 per cent – voting in favour of reducing the number of MPs from 120 to 100” – see: Proposal to extend parliamentary term to four years, increase MPs to 150.
As blogger David Farrar says the notion is “likely to be about as popular as a Big Mac at a Green Party conference”, but he supports it – see: Good parliamentary reform proposals.
Farrar makes some comparisons between the New Zealand Parliament and those of some other comparable countries: “A rough rule of thumb for the size of national legislatures is the cube root of the population. That would mean we should have 169 MPs. We have one of the smallest legislatures in the world because we have only one chamber. Also we have no state legislatures. Let’s look at the size of legislatures in a few countries. Croatia and Ireland have smaller populations than NZ and have 151 and 218 MPs respectively. Norway, Finland and Denmark have under six million population and have 169, 200 and 179 MPs respectively. Sweden has 349 MPs for 10 million people.”
Therefore, it seems as if the package of suggested reforms is not getting much traction. But there really are many other options worth debating in the report. As John Armstrong says, even if some of the higher profiles proposals are rejected, this “still leaves a truckload of other recommendations which are not contentious. MPs could pick and choose the ones they favour. In a sense, the gauntlet has been thrown down for the Speaker to pick up. It is an opportunity for Trevor Mallard to show leadership in that role.”
And without some of this type of change, there’s the risk that New Zealand democracy will continue to be mired in what Rod Oram calls the “soundbites, dog whistles, one-liners and other cynical devices” instead of the “fundamental, comprehensive and long-term change” that is necessary – see his column from late last year: Ditch the dog-whistle, save democracy.
Finally, members of the public will soon get the chance to have their say on some of the types of recommendations in the report that pertain to how Parliament operates. That’s because every three years the Standing Orders Committee of MPs call for recommendations for the rules of Parliament, and RNZ’s Phil Smith explains how this works – see: Adding foresight to oversight.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robin Daly, Professor of Exercise and Ageing, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Deakin University, Deakin University
As we grow older, the size and strength of our muscles progressively deteriorates. This can affect our capacity to perform everyday activities like standing up from a chair, climbing stairs or carrying groceries.
For some people, muscle wasting becomes more severe, leading to falls, frailty, immobility and a loss of autonomy.
People who experience a marked loss in their muscle mass, strength and function may be suffering from a major but poorly recognised muscle-wasting condition called sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is to our muscles what osteoporosis is to our bones.
Sarcopenia is now recognised as a disease after being added to Australia’s formal list of diseases, called the (ICD-10-AM).
Given the condition may affect almost one-third of older adults in the community, it’s high time its impact is recognised and talked about.
The good news is that people with sarcopenia can rebuild their muscle mass and strength via strength or resistance training and some diet modifications. In fact, these are things we can all do to protect ourselves.
What causes sarcopenia?
Ageing disrupts the body’s ability to produce the proteins needed to grow or maintain muscles. As we age, fewer signals are also sent from the brain to the muscles, leading to a loss in the mass and size of our muscles.
Sarcopenia is most common in older people, but can also occur earlier in life. In our 40s, muscle mass and strength begin to decline, and without intervention such as regular exercise, this loss accelerates with age. By the age of 70, up to half of muscle mass is lost and this is often replaced with fat and fibrous tissue, particularly in people who are inactive.
On the left, a young, healthy thigh muscle. On the right, a thigh muscle affected by sarcopenia.Author provided, Author provided
Sarcopenia is common in people with other diseases such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Many of the drugs used to treat these conditions can contribute to sarcopenia, as they can cause an imbalance in muscle metabolism and disrupt the pathways that control muscle mass.
Yet because many health professionals have little knowledge of sarcopenia and its consequences, they don’t necessarily consider or treat age-, diet– or drug-related muscle wasting.
Consequences of sarcopenia
Skeletal muscle is the largest organ in the body, making up around 40% of body weight. It’s essential for both movement and metabolic functions such as regulating blood glucose levels. So it’s not surprising that sarcopenia is linked to many adverse health outcomes.
Sarcopenia has been associated with impaired mobility, osteoporosis, falls, fractures, frailty, poor outcomes after surgery, institutionalisation, hospital admissions, impaired quality of life and premature death.
Treating sarcopenia
There are currently no approved medications to treat sarcopenia, and research to identify new drugs has been inconclusive. The most effective approach we have is resistance or strength training, which should be done at least twice a week in combination with a nutritional (protein-enriched) intervention.
Skeletal muscle has a remarkable ability to adapt and regenerate in response to loading. Gains in muscle mass of 5-10% and improvements in muscle strength or power of 30-150% have been observed after 12 weeks of resistance training, even in older nursing home and hospitalised patients and the very old. This is equivalent to regaining the muscle mass lost over a decade.
Accredited exercise physiologists are best positioned to prescribe and deliver evidence-based exercise programs for older people and those with chronic diseases including sarcopenia.
Nutritional factors, such as protein, are also important for maintaining muscle, particularly in older patients who may be malnourished. To ensure an adequate intake of protein each day, most people should aim for one to three serves of lean meat, poultry, fish/seafood, eggs, nuts/seeds, or legumes.
Low vitamin D has also been linked to muscle weakness and falls. Sunlight exposure is the main way to get vitamin D, but where appropriate, a doctor may recommend a vitamin D supplement.
Moving forward
Recognition of sarcopenia as a distinct disease in Australia is critical to raise awareness of the condition among health professionals and the wider community.
Improved awareness will lead to better routine treatment for people with sarcopenia. For example, a GP who identifies a patient with sarcopenia can refer them to an exercise physiologist under a chronic disease management plan, which includes up to five Medicare-rebated sessions with an allied health professional over a calendar year.
More broadly, recognition is an essential step if we’re going to see any changes to public health policy. It will enable the collection of more rigorous data on the prevalence of sarcopenia, and pave the way for additional resources to be targeted towards prevention.
Right now, the biggest challenge in the field is accurately and consistently diagnosing the condition. The type of assessments for muscle mass, strength and function used to diagnose sarcopenia continue to be debated. We need to progress towards a single international definition that includes region- and ethnic- specific criteria.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Harris Rimmer, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Griffith Law School, Griffith University
The Lowy Institute has launched a three-year study on gender representation in Australia’s diplomatic, defence and intelligence services, and the findings are critical: gender diversity lags significantly behind Australia’s public service and corporate sector, as well as other countries’ foreign services.
In a field which has long ignored research on gender or feminist approaches to understanding international relations, this report is welcome and sets forth an important research agenda within Australia.
Gender diversity is an important issue for all who value the pursuit of Australia’s national interests overseas. Attracting and retaining the best talent is more important now than ever before.
As then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in June 2017:
The economic, political and strategic currents that have carried us for generations are increasingly difficult to navigate.
The report’s most significant findings
The Lowy Institute found that of all the fields in international relations, women are least represented in Australia’s intelligence communities.
As the funding and resources of the intelligence sector continue to grow, this is a serious problem with little transparency. The sector appears to be struggling with a “pipeline” and “ladder” problem: women are both joining at lower rates and progressing at far slower rates than their male counterparts.
Another important finding is that the presence of female trailblazers in these fields, such as foreign ministers Julie Bishop and Marise Payne and Labor’s shadow foreign minister, Penny Wong, may be masking more systemic issues. This may be leading some agencies to becoming complacent, rather than proactive, on gender diversity.
Women’s pathways to leadership continue to be impeded by institutional obstacles, such as unconscious bias and discrimination built into the cultures of these sectors, as well as difficulties in supporting staff on overseas postings. For instance, the report notes that in 2017 the government cut assistance packages for overseas officers, including government childcare subsidies. This has gendered ramifications given that women continue to do the bulk of domestic labour.
As such, the most important and high-prestige international postings are still largely dominated by men. DFAT’s Women in Leadership Strategy has proved successful in meeting initial targets for improving women’s representation, however the industry as a whole has not yet followed suit.
Further, it is not enough to just consider how many women there are, but what roles they occupy, given that women have often been siloed into “soft policy” or corporate areas and out of key operational roles needed for career progression.
The report also draws attention to the marginalisation of women from key policy-shaping activities.
From the study’s research on declared authorship, a woman is yet to be selected to lead on any major foreign policy, defence, intelligence, or trade white paper, inquiry or independent review.
We would mention a few exceptions of women in other high-profile foreign policy roles – Heather Smith’s stewardship of the G20 during Australia’s presidency and Harinder Sidhu’s leadership in the crucial India High Commission. We would also note the contribution of Jane Duke to the ASEAN Summit in Sydney.
Rebecca Skinner has served as associate defence secretary since 2017 and Justine Grieg was appointed deputy secretary defence people in 2018. Major General Cheryl Pearce was also appointed commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus – the first Australian woman to command a UN peacekeeping mission.
Cheryl Pearce was commander of the Australian joint task force group in Afghanistan before taking up her current role.Paul Miller/AAP
While the under-representation of women in international affairs remains a core concern, we would argue the report could have taken a broader look at gender representation in foreign affairs-focused academic communities, think tanks and publishing industries, as well.
Many of these organisations have similarly woeful records when it comes to gender diversity. For instance, Australian Foreign Affairs magazine has been criticised for the lack of women authors it publishes. We know that it is not for lack of credible voices, but rather seems indicative of a systematic form of marginalisation of women within the wider foreign affairs community.
Bright spots for gender diversity
However, there is some cause for optimism. For instance, our current PhD project is documenting the gender make-up of leaders and internationally deployed representatives in the departments of foreign affairs and trade, defence and home affairs, as well as the Australian Federal Police. As of this January, women represented 39.5% of those in the senior executive service in DFAT, and 41.4% of those employed as heads of Australian embassies and high commissions globally.
Further, we’ve found an increase recently in the number of women who work in diplomatic defence roles. While the Lowy report notes that women held just 11% of international roles in defence in 2016 (it is unclear exactly what international roles they are talking about), we found a slightly higher percentage of women (19%) currently employed in defence attaché roles.
The achievements made in this sphere are not just limited to gender either, with women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds forming an important and growing part of representation.
In fact, a more in-depth analysis of the Lowy report’s data would have produced some very interesting, and more nuanced, findings. For instance, foreign affairs has long been the preserve of men, however it has also been the preserve of certain types of men. Diplomacy remains a bastion of prestige, social class, heteronormativity, and in Australia, Anglo-Saxon privilege. It was only last year, for example, that Australia’s first Indigenous woman, Julie-Ann Guivarra, was appointed ambassador (to Spain).
Overall, as the report outlines, gender equality is not just nice to have, nor is it a marginal issue in foreign policy. Rather, the findings are clear: addressing the continued gender gaps are imperative to Australian foreign policy, national security and stability.
We can, and must, do better. Australian foreign policy needs good ideas, and it needs a lot of them. We cannot assume they will all come from the same place.
The ocean that surrounds Antarctica plays a crucial role in regulating the mass balance of the continent’s ice cover. We now know that the thinning of ice that affects nearly a quarter of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is clearly linked to the ocean.
The connection between the Southern Ocean and Antarctica’s ice sheet lies in ice shelves – massive slabs of glacial ice, many hundreds of metres thick, that float on the ocean. Ice shelves grind against coastlines and islands and buttress the outflow of grounded ice. When the ocean erodes ice shelves from below, this buttressing action is reduced.
While some ice shelves are thinning rapidly, others remain stable, and the key to understanding these differences lies within the hidden oceans beneath ice shelves. Our recently published research explores the ocean processes that drive melting of the world’s largest ice shelf. It shows that a frequently overlooked process is driving rapid melting of a key part of the shelf.
Rapid ice loss from Antarctica is frequently linked to Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW). This relatively warm (+1C) and salty water mass, which is found at depths below 300 metres around Antarctica, can drive rapid melting. For example, in the south-east Pacific, along West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea coast, CDW crosses the continental shelf in deep channels and enters ice shelf cavities, driving rapid melting and thinning.
Interestingly, not all ice shelves are melting quickly. The largest ice shelves, including the vast Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves, appear close to equilibrium. They are largely isolated from CDW by the cold waters that surround them.
The satellite image shows that strong offshore winds drive sea ice away from the north-western Ross Ice Shelf, exposing the dark ocean surface. Solar heating warms the water enough to drive melting. Figure modified from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0356-0.Supplied, CC BY-ND
The contrasting effects of CDW and cold shelf waters, combined with their distribution, explain much of the variability in the melting we observe around Antarctica today. But despite ongoing efforts to probe the ice shelf cavities, these hidden seas remain among the least explored parts of Earth’s oceans.
It is within this context that our research explores a new and hard-won dataset of oceanographic observations and melt rates from the world’s largest ice shelf.
Beneath the Ross Ice Shelf
In 2011, we used a 260 metre deep borehole that had been melted through the north-western corner of the Ross Ice Shelf, seven kilometres from the open ocean, to deploy instruments that monitor ocean conditions and melt rates beneath the ice. The instruments remained in place for four years.
The observations showed that far from being a quiet back water, conditions beneath the ice shelf are constantly changing. Water temperature, salinity and currents follow a strong seasonal cycle, which suggests that warm surface water from north of the ice front is drawn southward into the cavity during summer.
Melt rates at the mooring site average 1.8 metres per year. While this rate is much lower than ice shelves impacted by warm CDW, it is ten times higher than the average rate for the Ross Ice Shelf. Strong seasonal variability in the melt rate suggests that this melting hotspot is linked to the summer inflow.
Summer sea surface temperature surrounding Antarctica (a) and in the Ross Sea (b) showing the strong seasonal warming within the Ross Sea polynya. Figure modified from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0356-0.Supplied, CC BY-ND
To assess the scale of this effect, we used a high-precision radar to map basal melt rates across a region of about 8,000 square kilometres around the mooring site. Careful observations at around 80 sites allowed us to measure the vertical movement of the ice base and internal layers within the ice shelf over a one-year interval. We could then determine how much of the thinning was caused by basal melting.
Melting was fastest near the ice front where we observed short-term melt rates of up to 15 centimetres per day – several orders of magnitude higher than the ice shelf average rate. Melt rates reduced with distance from the ice front, but rapid melting extended far beyond the mooring site. Melting from the survey region accounted for some 20% of the total from the entire ice shelf.
The bigger picture
Why is this region of the shelf melting so much more quickly than elsewhere? As is so often the case in the ocean, it appears that winds play a key role.
During winter and spring, strong katabatic winds sweep across the western Ross Ice Shelf and drive sea ice from the coast. This leads to the formation of an area that is free of sea ice, a polynya, where the ocean is exposed to the atmosphere. During winter, this area of open ocean cools rapidly and sea ice grows. But during spring and summer, the dark ocean surface absorbs heat from the sun and warms, forming a warm surface pool with enough heat to drive the observed melting.
Although the melt rates we observe are far lower than those seen on ice shelves influenced by CDW, the observations suggest that for the Ross Ice Shelf, surface heat is important.
Given this heat is closely linked to surface climate, it is likely that the predicted reductions in sea ice within the coming century will increase basal melt rates. While the rapid melting we observed is currently balanced by ice inflow, glacier models show that this is a structurally critical region where the ice shelf is pinned against Ross Island. Any increase in melt rates could reduce buttressing from Ross Island, increasing the discharge of land-based ice, and ultimately add to sea levels.
While there is still much to learn about these processes, and further surprises are certain, one thing is clear. The ocean plays a key role in the dynamics of Antarctica’s ice sheet and to understand the stability of the ice sheet we must look to the ocean.
Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.
How does electricity work? – Edie, age 5.
Electricity is all around us. Maybe some of the toys you play with run on batteries, which have electricity stored in them. You or your parents are reading this article on a computer, phone or tablet, all of which use electricity. The light bulbs, the television, the traffic lights, cars, aeroplanes – they all run on electricity. Electricity is exciting and important, so I am glad you asked this excellent question.
Everything is made from atoms
Everything is made from little tiny things called atoms. They are so small we cannot see them. They are much smaller than chickpeas, rice, ants, and ant eggs.
Because atoms are so small, we need a lot of them to make things. For example, a grain of rice has billions and billions and billions of atoms. Those atoms make up the rice, in the way LEGO pieces make up a LEGO car or house. They atoms click together and hold onto each other.
Even though an atom is extremely small, it is also made from even smaller things.
One of the things that make up the atom is called an “electron”. Electrons have many jobs. Some electrons help the atoms hold onto each other. Scientists call these electrons the “bonding electrons”. Bond means to stick together.
Other electrons just keep running around in the atoms. They are free electrons and they’re always on the move. Sometimes, they can move from one atom to another.
Electricity happens when electrons move from one atom to another.
Electricity in the power cable
So, the story so far: we know there are billions and billions and billions of atoms. There are also billions and billions and billions of electrons in everything around you. A leaf, a plastic cup, your pet – they all have electrons. Some things, like metals, have more free electrons than other things. A plastic cup, for example, doesn’t have as many free electrons.
You probably have a lot of power cables at home. They might be plugged into the TV or computer or a phone charger. Power cables have a huge number of free electrons.
When the free electrons in a power cable move from one atom to another, almost all in the same direction, you get something called an “electric current” running through the power cable.
How do we push the electrons through the cable? Adults do that by plugging the cable into a wall socket.
Remember, electricity can be very dangerous and can even kill people, so it’s important that kids just let adults handle the cables and wall sockets.
The socket makes a thing called “voltage”, which is like an invisible force that pushes all the electrons in the same direction down the cable.
Once the cable is plugged into the socket, the socket pushes the electrons inside the cable, like cars moving down lots of lanes in a highway. The electrons inside the cable then keep pushing each other forward (and sometimes back and forth depending on the type of electricity). This creates an electric current inside the cable.
The cables have a kind of jacket (which we call “insulation”) on the outside to keep the electrons moving along the metal safely. These jackets make it safe for us to use electricity by keeping them in the metal.
But where does electricity come from?
Electricity comes from power stations – great, big places that can make electricity in different ways.
One way is by burning coal. But this way is bad for our environment. Some power stations use the light from the Sun to make electricity, using large solar panels. Or they might use wind, or water to make electricity. These methods are not as bad for our environment.
If you’re interested in learning more about how electricity is made, check out this Curious Kids article over here.
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.auPlease tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.
Kramer said they included a complaint filed by a journalist who he claimed to have exposed accepting payments from an MP.
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The police minister said he would not be going into hiding and would make himself available for police interviews.
“Since taking office, I have declined police close protection, police escort or even a designated driver,” he said.
“I regularly get asked about the risks that come with what I do. My response has always been and will continue to be I have no question of doubt I will eventually get killed for what I do.
“It goes without saying when you get in the way of those stealing billions in public funds, they will do whatever it takes to get rid of you.”
Kramer last week replaced police commissioner Gary Baki and his two deputies, prompting Baki to apply through the courts for a restraining order against the move.
This article is published under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.
Review: Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia, National Gallery of Australia
They talk of a family of nations, or families of nations. In Australia, the UK can still be referred to as the mother country, while the English talk of their American cousins. Geographic neighbours usually have these relationships down pat, though with a frisson of sibling rivalry or pecking orders of favouritism.
However, one of the truths about Australia and Indonesia, so physically close, is that there is pretty well no familial relationship at all. It’s like we are different species.
I think this is central to the on-again, off-again, try-hard, well-meant, scratchy relationship that struggles to get to first base, always slipping back into the no-man’s-land of “it-is-all-too-hard” and “who-cares-anyway-ville”.
I recently listened to an ABC RN arts program on the Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia exhibition, now at the National Gallery of Australia, where the announcer spoke of Australian artists travelling to “New York or Berlin or London” with no instinctive, familial thought that, just maybe, travelling to “Jakarta, Singapore or Tokyo” might also be part of the mix.
Zico Albaiquni, For evidently, the fine arts do not thrive in the Indies, 2018, oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas.Courtesy of the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore
Indeed Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia could be from outer space. Despite 30 years of close contact with Indonesia by Australian curators and artists; despite goodwill and a lot of government rhetoric about the “importance of the relationship”; despite so many exchanges and residences and lectures, the nuance is still irredeemably “other”.
I’ve been involved in arts management training programs in Indonesia, curated exhibitions (from 1990, when I organised Eight Views at the National Gallery in Jakarta), been behind the Asialink Artist-in Residency program in Indonesia, served on the Australia-Indonesia Institute (pushing always for strong, intelligent, meaningful arts programs to be supported) and I still see Australians not able to catch Indonesian names, or artists, and hold them as important. Teaching of Indonesian language is struggling; academic inclusion of Indonesian cultural material remains minimal.
Yet Indonesian art was and is great. This exhibition shows many of the reasons why: it is fresh, energetic, human, performative, warm, serious, funny, clever, sensitive, political and not political.
Tita Salina, 1001st Island – the most sustainable island in Archipelago 2015, plastic waste, fishing net, rope, floats, bamboo, LED lights and oil barrels, single-channel video: 14:11 minutes, colour, sound.Courtesy of the artist
There are many wonderful works: Tita Salina has built a raft of rubbish that she rides into Jakarta Bay (shown here as a video), a totally pertinent comment on pollution, but also beautiful and elegaic.
Yudha “Fehung” Kusuma Putera dresses and photographs motley groups of people and animals in cloths that distort their forms – out of it comes humorous but pointed comment on what we are.
Eko Nugroho, We keep it as hope, no more no less 2018, manual embroidery on fabric with rayon thread.National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 2018
Eko Nugroho’s graphic work based on popular culture is relatively well known in Australia, but here he blows three-dimensional air into his usually flat cartoon forms, which then seem about to waddle off down the street.
Mella Jaasma’s work is classy as usual: a video of a Sufi dancer outlined against the sky, twirling his skirt made of mock Mooi-Indie (“beautiful Indies”) sentimental colonial landscapes. His trance-dance is a comment on humanity’s capacity to seek and find inner strength despite fake news – current and past.
And then there’s Entang Wiharso’s just wonderful magic house made of cut metal (but it could be of lace cobwebs), lit by a chandelier. It throws shadows to the walls like any self respecting environment for the flat, back-lit forms of wayang puppetry, though on closer inspection the cut forms are illustrations of the artist’s life and world, totally of this day.
This is some of the art of the archipelago. It is an art scene as lively as anywhere and both this and the art is increasingly recognised around the world as being a hot spot of creative energy and interest. Why do Australians not know this?
We have had heaps of opportunities, yet this exhibition in Canberra is the first ever of “contemporary” Indonesian art for our premier national visual arts gallery. The NGA has previously held exhibitions of Islamic Indonesian imagery, with calligraphy to the fore, and textiles – both of great quality – but they are not what would be called contemporary art.
Jaklyn Babington, one of the two in-house curators of this new exhibition, was candid about the paucity of Indonesian art in the NGA collection during her talk at the associated conference. This is despite leading curators being nearby at ANU, Caroline Turner in the main, the leader with David Williams and Jim Supangkat in the selection of Indonesian work for the First Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, nearly 30 years ago (with a selection trip in November 1991 in which I also took part). That selection and subsequent ones have seen a significant collection of Indonesian work held in Brisbane … But not Canberra.
The exhibition now in Canberra was obviously put together quickly – too quickly, as Babington noted them not having “long enough” (no criticism here of the curators, caught between changing administrations of the gallery).
Yudha ‘Fehung’ Kusuma Putera , Past, present and future come together 2017, series of 9 inkjet prints with accompanying instructions for participatory elements of the work.National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 2018
Compare the time now put into collecting at the National Gallery Singapore, which recently acquired one of the icons of Indonesian 20th century art, Semsar Siahaan’s Olympia. This is the gallery that had the chutzpah to research and bring together the seminal show of Raden Saleh’s 19th century Indonesian paintings a year ago, and put on their current Awakenings, a serious investigation of 1960-90s art of the region including Indonesia – a show that really offers new research work into this area.
The great themes of Indonesian art need space to emerge: to find the sense of theatre, of the magic lurking in shadows, of the mischief and moral purity of the gods, of the elegance of line and style of a culture trained to see the angle of an arm or the bend of the knee as highly pondered action. The art is also permeated by an easy communal sense of coming together to make cultural objects and performance, including friends and members of villages, both urban and rural, in their creation.
Sunshower, the 2017 exhibition of Southeast Asian Art by major institutions in Tokyo, was given due space and time to work itself into its proper shape. The miraculous program the Japan Foundation instigated in Indonesia ten years ago, Kita! Japanese Artists Meet Indonesia, sent curators and artists to work with Indonesians, in a project that sang with energy and creative interest.
In 2014, there was an inspiring show of Indonesian art at the National Gallery of Victoria in a much smaller space than the NGA has provided, but the two curators Joel Stern and Kristi Monfries, uniting sound with visual art, used their expertise to create something new.
A way forward
Australia used to be considered a player in Indonesian art scenes. We were proactive; we created collaborative projects; we worked throughout the archipelago – from Timor Barat to Sumatra. In the early 2000s we fell back, just as Indonesians were starting to hit their international stride. Jim Supangkat, doyen curator, said to me around 2005: “where have you Australians gone?”
We went. Partly deterred by events, that is sure, like the Bali bombing, but also by an Australian arts fraternity probably relieved not to have to face Indonesia any more. The Australia Council’s funding of Indonesian projects sank like a stone in these years; only the Australia-Indonesia Institute keeping a frail flame alight.
Eko Nugroho , Carnival trap 2 2018, resin, wire, upcycled plastic, iron and syntehtic polymer paint.National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 2018
This review started by talking about families, an implication of blood families. If that doesn’t work with Indonesia, what about marriages? Or even engagements? Even dating needs a commitment and, it would be hoped, some sense of a future, some idea that actions now can lead to positive outcomes later.
What about a commitment to trying something for a length of time, say a five-year plan mentality? The big institutions, and the Australia Council, could build programs of yearly collaborations; significant regular talk series; regular curatorial and “interested-others” tours of Java in particular, seeing the arts sights, visiting studios, attending the many performances that abound.
Or what about a commitment to a new Australian Cultural Centre in Yogyakarta? That was mooted some 15 years ago, and a budget put forward, but it languished with the bombing threats. Almost every other country that deals with Indonesia culturally has one of these, except us. It was to be a site for engagement, a site for linkages, for some discussions and exhibitions; not expensive; not staffed by public servants; a bit free and loose like so much in Java that makes the art scene there so beguiling.
This is about a commitment over tokenism; about the long-term; about building knowledge and about keeping delivering. If we aspire in this way, then maybe those personal links will lead to outcomes we all acknowledge as part of our inheritance.
Vanuatu’s first President and one of the founding fathers of political Independence, Ati George Sokomanu, is calling on the Vanuatu government to stop the sale of Vanuatu passports under its citizenship programme.
“It is lowering our dignity as Ni-Vanuatu and Melanesian people,” Sokomanu told the Vanuatu Daily Post.
“It is degrading, it is totally unacceptable and non-negotiable in any way you can think. We the people of Vanuatu cannot accept this.”
Sokomanu became the first President of the Republic of Vanuatu on July 30, 1980. He stressed the country won its political independence from Britain and France through political struggle and sheer determination.
“The sale of Vanuatu green passports is removing the value of our identity and who we are the Ni-Vans in our own land,” he said.
He added that he was speaking for and on behalf of the founding fathers of Vanuatu’s political independence who had died and those who were still living today.
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‘Never meant for sale’ “None of us who fought for our political independence ever dreamed that one day we will be sitting back and watching our national identity – our green passports – go on sale on foreign soil,” Sokomanu said.
“It was not our dream, it was not our hope for making money, it was never meant to be for sale. It must be stopped. Not in the name of budget constraints and if you want to raise more revenue for the country, look elsewhere but do not sell our national identity.
“This is our God-given identity should not be exploited and sold for money. No money in the world can buy our national identity, so stop the sale of Vanuatu passports.”
Asia Pacific Report republishes Vanuatu Daily Post articles with permission.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Onno van der Groen, Research Fellow in the school of medical and health sciences, Edith Cowan University
Like to work in a noisy environment while your colleague prefers silence? It could be your brain is simply less “noisy” so this extra, external noise improves your cognitive functioning.
Every day of our lives we effortlessly use our senses to perceive the world around us. We take in information so we can learn new things, taste our food, watch our favourite Netflix show. What we often don’t consider is that our senses are being bombarded with “noise”, and by that I mean random interference.
This interference can be noise that you hear – for example the humming of an air-conditioner in your office or listening to background music played through your headphones – or noise that you see (for example when your TV is not tuned in properly and you see some “snow” on your screen).
Such noise would usually be considered a nuisance, but evidence shows that small amounts of noise can actually be beneficial for our senses. The phenomenon is known as “stochastic resonance”.
Stochastic-resonance was originally investigated in animals. For example, crayfish were shown to be better at avoiding predators when a small amount of random electrical currents were added to their tail fins. Paddlefish caught more plankton when small currents were added to the water.
Paddlefish are a smooth-skinned freshwater fish.Shutterstock
These experiments demonstrate that sensory signals can be enhanced by noise and improve behaviour in various animals. Research in humans has manipulated noise levels by making people listen to noisy sounds, look at static on a screen or by adding random vibration to the skin.
It’s been shown that as the intensity of noise is increased, a certain optimal noise level allows people to see, hear and feel better. Too much noise degrades our performance.
Stochastic resonance occurs when an optimal level of noise is added to a weak signal. In this example the signal alone (red line) remains below the threshold for detecting the signal (dotted line). Adding an optimal amount of noise raises the stimulus periodically above the system threshold. If the added noise is too weak, the threshold is not crossed. Conversely, if the noise is too strong, the signal remains buried and cannot be discriminated from the noise.Author provided
This inverted-U relationship between performance and noise levels is a characteristic of stochastic-resonance. The phenomenon has real life applications. For example, adding noise to the feet of people with vibrating insoles can improve balance performance in elderly adults. It also has applications for patients with diabetes, those recovering from stroke and it may be used to augment muscle function.
Human behaviour and perception occurs due to the firing of brain cells. Sometimes your brain cells fire randomly. There is more and more evidence that this random activity of your brain cells can be beneficial for your perception and cognitive performance.
My research team is interested in finding out what happens when we change noise levels in the brain directly with non-invasive brain-stimulation.
Your brain cells use electricity for their communication. In experiments conducted with my colleague Nicole Wenderoth at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, we applied currents to the brain to activate brain cells in a random fashion with transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS). We found that when participants received stimulation, it improved how well they could see a low-quality image. This suggests that brain noise can help us see better.
In two additional experiments, conducted with Jason Mattingley and Matthew Tang at the Queensland Brain Institute, we used tRNS to provide further insight into how noise affects the brain. In one study we found that decision making can actually be improved. That is, decisions were more accurate and faster when brain cell noise levels are tuned up. Improved decision making only occurred for difficult decisions, such as when the information was ambiguous.
In a third study we found that tRNS can influence what you see during a visual illusion. This suggests that noise is important in making sure that your brain doesn’t get stuck on one way of looking at things.
In summary, our data showed that brain noise is a crucial part of human perception, decision making and being able to see from different perspectives.
The optimal level of noise that can enhance cognitive functions could be different for everyone. That might explain why some people perform best in noisy environments, while others prefer silence.
There might also be a role played by brain noise in various neurological conditions. For example, it seems that individuals with autism, dyslexia, ADHD and schizophrenia have excessive brain variability compared to others.
Elderly individuals might also have more brain noise, which might be associated with a decline in cognitive performance. Small amounts of noise can improve performance, but excessive amounts degrade performance. This could explain some of the disease characteristics and cognitive and perceptual problems occurring with increasing age.
The level of brain noise can be altered with tRNS, which opens up new avenues of studying the role of brain noise on human performance. Our understanding of the role of noise in the human nervous system is expanding. This allows us to develop interventions or devices to manipulate noise levels, which could improve cognitive functioning in health and disease.
For now, if you do prefer to work in a noisy environment, you can safely make the argument that it’s likely boosting your performance.
In the not too distant past, players who suffered head injuries in professional contact sports quickly returned to the field of play, sometimes in the same game, seemingly able to shake off any concussion concerns.
Last month, however, a report was released by researchers from the University of Sydney and the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital finding scientific evidence of CTE in the brains of two middle-aged, former National Rugby League (NRL) players who had each played more than 150 games over many years.
The report, published as a “letter to the editor” in a medical journal, is the first time CTE has been identified in rugby league players anywhere in the world.
a degenerative brain disease found in athletes, military veterans, and others with a history of repetitive brain trauma.
The Sydney researchers acknowledge that their report is limited by a lack of clinical information collected during the lifetimes of the two NRL players and note that
it is difficult to assess whether these two CTE cases are serendipitous findings, or emblematic of a more common issue with Rugby League and other Australian football codes.
Nonetheless, in the face of this discovery, a legal question has arisen in the rugby league world: who should be responsible for brain injuries suffered by former players? The answer is likely to be determined in Australian courts if a threatened class action lawsuit is brought by former NRL players against the league and its clubs.
According to media reports, several former, but as yet unnamed, NRL players have expressed interest in joining a proposed class action suit, claiming the league and its clubs failed to provide a safe workplace.
Without full details of the complaints, media reports have suggested the case will revolve around whether the league and clubs did enough to protect players from the long-term effects of repetitive concussive and subconcussive injuries and whether they knew or ought to have known about the risks associated with mismanaging such injuries.
Central to the case will be whether the players can demonstrate they were owed a duty of care by the league and whether that duty was breached. Another critical question will be whether players can prove that any breach of duty caused or contributed to the players’ long-term injuries.
A key challenge in any class action suit is to first establish that the claims of several parties are against the same person or organisation, and arise from the “same, similar or related circumstances” involving a substantial common issue of law or fact.
Like most professional sports leagues, the NRL has adopted its own concussion protocols over the years to properly manage how and when players can return to the sport following a head injury. As NRL chief executive Todd Greenberg says:
We have made huge changes going back to 2014 and I’m very confident those rules are in place for the primary reason for the care of our players.
A key question in the proposed class action, therefore, is how this was handled in the past, before the current protocols were put in place. Were players returning to competition too soon after a head injury? And were the concussion protocols properly implemented and enforced?
These questions rely on first establishing whether the NRL, as the sport’s governing body, owed a legal duty to provide and invest in a safe workplace to prevent or reduce the risk of mismanaging head injuries.
Another important question is the level of scientific understanding of the risks associated with mismanaging concussions at the time the players were injured. Was the sport following best practices based on the scientific understanding at the time?
Who is legally responsible for players’ safety?
A professional sportsperson can legally be classified as an employee, with the right to expect a safe working environment. In professional team sport, this includes an obligation to remove a player from a game or training when they are believed to have suffered a concussion.
In 2000, the High Court in Agar v Hyde established that the governing body of a sport does not owe a duty to voluntary, amateur participants to amend the rules of the game to make it safer. One of the reasons for this decision was a finding that a sport governing body lacked any real or effective control over recreational or amateur participants.
However, the court left open the possibility of re-examining whether professional athletes who are classified as employees and injured at work fall within a different category.
Since the Agar v Hyde case, this question has not been determined in any Australian case, so it is likely to arise in a rugby league class action suit, should it proceed to trial.
How cases have been handled elsewhere
The heightened awareness around CTE in Australia follows the 2011 class action lawsuit filed in the United States by former football players against the National Football League. The case involved allegations the league knew about the dangers associated with repetitive concussive and subconcussive injuries but, among other things, fraudulently concealed this information and failed in its duty of care to ensure the safety of players.
The NFL case settled for US$1 billion before going to trial, so these allegations were not tested in court. The NFL case did, however, bring into sharp focus the role of a sport’s governing body and who is ultimately responsible for the long-term health of players.
In a culture known for its litigation appetite, hundreds of legal cases have since been filed in US courts – against clubs, schools, colleges, doctors, coaches, hospitals and insurers, to name a few. The National Hockey League has also been sued by former players, but the case was settled last year.
But the US and Australian sports and court systems are different, and any Australian case will need to be based on Australian law in accordance with the federal or state-based civil procedures.
The long-term impact of such lawsuits also remains to be seen. In the US, there are fewer high school students playing football due to concerns over the long-term effects of brain injuries. Whether the links between CTE and rugby league players will have the same effect on participation rates in Australia is another issue worth further study.
Inactivity in school children has been in the news again with the release of a study into the health of Australian 11-12 year olds from around the country.
The 1,800 person study found most children were healthy. But there was room for improvement in areas including physical activity and weight.
It’s a different story for Finnish children and their other Nordic counterparts. They outperform most other highly developed nations when it comes to childrens’ physical activity levels and obesity rates.
So what can Australia’s school system learn from the Nordic approach to physical education?
Throughout the world, physical education is recognised for its contribution to education itself (teaching movement skills), development of personal and social skills (including learning rules, strategy and cooperation with others) and of course children’s physical health.
More research is also suggesting physical activity (which in school, is achieved through physical education and active play during break periods) is positively associated with educational attainment, particularly in maths. In other words, active kids tend to do better at school.
The health component sets out to teach children about many aspects of health, including alcohol, nutrition, relationships and sexuality. The physical education component offers children the chance to take part in games, adventure activities, fundamental movement skills, sports and rhythmic movement activities such as dance.
The Australian national curriculum is on the right track in many ways. Gone are the harrowing days of waiting to be picked for a team, being made to run for punishment, and measuring children’s weight or skinfolds in front of the class.
The national curriculum emphasises enjoyment and participation in movement-based activities, positive challenges, leading to personal and social outcomes, intended to set children up for lifelong activity.
However, by failing to mandate physical education time each week, we risk physical education being “pushed to the periphery” and losing out to other priorities.
Australia could learn from the Nords by:
introducing nationwide mandatory physical education policy that ensures every school in Australia schedules weekly classes as part of the core curriculum;
mandating every school in Australia delivers high-quality physical education through tertiary-trained physical education teachers for all students.
Without these mandates, great things are happening in some schools. However, other schools are slipping through the cracks. It’s time to learn from the Nordic countries to ensure high-quality physical education for all. Because the right physical education can lay the foundations for an active lifestyle, for life.
Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.
I would like to find out something about swallows: we have noticed that they return to the same nests each year, but there must be younger birds that have no nest. Where do they sleep until they have built their new nest? – Nefeli, age 13, Corfu, Greece.
Thank you for your question, Nefeli.
It’s true that some swallows return to the same nests each year. But what do they do there?
We need to understand what nests are really for – and they are not for sleeping. They are for putting eggs into. The eggs need protection from the weather (hot and cold, wind and rain) and from other animals that would eat them. For predators, eggs taste great!
Adult swallows must build their nests away from predators and unsafe weather conditions, such as the wind, heat and cold.merec0/flickr, CC BY-NC
Eventually the eggs hatch, then a blind and featherless baby swallow emerges. The babies are called nestlings or sometimes chicks. So nests are not for sleeping, they are for raising a family.
The babies that hatch from the swallow’s eggs are called nestlings or chicks.Rafael V/flickr, CC BY-NC
It is true that when an adult is sitting on eggs and nestlings, it may sleep, especially at night.
But the young swallows who don’t have a nest to return to must build their own nest (to protect and feed their babies) or sleep on a tree branch, a rock ledge of a cliff face, or inside the hollow of a tree.
When swallows sleep away from the nest they sleep in places called roosts.
So remember: nests are mostly for babies; roosts are for sleep.
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.auPlease tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.
Greening our cities has become one of the great global imperatives of the 21st century including to tackle climate change. And Australia’s sprawling car-based cities are gradually changing to embrace green or living infrastructure.
Green cities bring together elements of architectural design and urban planning, often combining plants and built infrastructure to meet the needs of humans, such as our love of nature.
Trees, plants, waterways and wetlands can deliver climate conditioning, cooling cities by reducing the urban heat island effect. They also absorb carbon dioxide, filter wastewater and create habitats.
Living elements can be incorporated with built infrastructure at a range of scales, from individual buildings with green walls and roofs, through to citywide strategies. And there are a suite of strategies to guide more widespread integration of biological elements and ecological processes in cities.
In recent months, we profiled Australian examples of living infrastructure that show some of Australia’s approaches to developing green infrastructure, from greening Melbourne’s laneways to Canberra’s urban forest. These cities are already redesigning their water systems and implementing urban forest strategies to create green belts and protect and restore waterways.
Melbourne and Canberra provide some useful examples of the green cities movement, but to make it mainstream, these techniques need to be adopted widely through policies supporting more holistic and better integrated urban planning.
Why we need urban forests
Percival Alfred Yeoman was one of the first Australian pioneers of urban forestry. In 1971, he articulated a clear vision for enhancing cities with trees.
Local governments in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, are implementing his ideas, committing to ambitious increases in urban canopy cover. Their targets range from 25% to 40%.
This revived interest in urban forestry comes from its well documented potential for accelerating the transition to more climate adaptive cities.
The social, environmental and economic benefits of urban trees, or “ecosystem services”, are becoming better recognised, including for their recreational and cultural values.
Melbourne and Canberra are leading Australia’s green cities movement
Melbourne
Melbourne has a rich legacy of urban parks and green belts thanks to planning decisions made in the city’s early years.
These parks underpin a new wave of urban greening, with projects that aim to deliver action on climate change, biodiversity and the health and well-being of communities.
a “growing green guide” that provides practical advice to community and business groups on planning, design and maintenance of green infrastructure
the greening laneways strategy, which builds on the commercial revitalisation of Melbourne’s laneways over three decades. Laneways with greening potential were mapped and demonstration project developed to display techniques for making them more vibrant green spaces for business, tourists and locals to enjoy
an urban forest strategy, with an overall target of 40% canopy cover by 2040. And 5 to 8 million trees will be planted over coming decades for the greater Melbourne metropolis.
Canberra
Canberra is often described as “a city within a landscape” and the “bush capital”. But its higher altitude, hot dry summers and cold winters bring a set of challenges for green infrastructure.
With more than 800,000 planted trees, Canberra is an urban forest. But these trees require special care and attention given they are ageing and suffering from a hotter, drier climate.
Wildfire also represents a significant risk where urban and rural areas connect. This means Canberra needs urban forests that will cool the city in warmer months without also escalating wildfire risks.
The ACT Government has committed to action on climate change, legislating targets for 100% renewable electricity by 2020 and carbon neutrality (no net carbon emissions) by 2045.
With more than 800,000 trees, Canberra is an urban forest.Shutterstock
Integrated approach needed to expand green cities
Greening cities requires a holistic approach – for instance, not leaving the health of waterways entirely to water engineers.
Greening cities is more than just a technical challenge. Transforming the form and functions of urban systems, through urban forests and other living infrastructure, requires greater leadership and political commitment, integrated planning and community participation, and long-term thinking.
An integrated approach to greening cities involves mapping diverse opportunities and mobilising support for change in the community. As an example, urban storm water can be a productive resource when used in constructed wetlands or to irrigate urban forests.
The vertical gardens in One Central Park in Sydney are globally renowned for their green infrastructure.Shutterstock
And often urban drainage lines and wastelands can be transformed into green spaces, but it’s worth recognising there is intense competition for space for housing.
But for more widespread adoption of integration, institutional support within local governments and metropolitan water and planning agencies is needed.
So to scale up living infrastructure in our urban landscapes, we must learn from local success stories, conduct more research, and better understand how to deal with climate adaptation and mitigation challenges.
Nations behave wisely, Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban observed five decades ago, “once they have exhausted all other alternatives”.
One can only hope that proves the case with water policy in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, the nation’s largest river system and agricultural heartland.
The ABC’s Four Corners program Cash Splash, aired last night, illustrates how thoroughly we are exhausting the options that don’t work to keep rivers being sucked dry by irrigators. Billions of dollars have been spent on infrastructure schemes that have failed to deliver any measurable improvement in water flows or the state of the environment.
The Murray–Darling Basin is Australia’s largest and most complex river system. With 77,000 km of rivers, it is the food bowl of the nation.Murray–Darling Basin Authority
This failure is no surprise to economists who have studied the problems of the Murray-Darling Basin for decades.
The central problem is well understood, as are the workable (and unworkable) possible responses.
The basin covers four states: Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. All state governments have allocated permits to extract water for human uses (irrigated agriculture and urban water). The allocations grew rapidly in the second half of the 20th century, exceeding the sustainable capacity of the natural environment.
One sign of the failure became dramatically obvious in 1991, with an outbreak of toxic blue-green algae over 1,200 km of the Darling River. Algal blooms are fed by nitrogen and other nutrients in fertiliser runoff and sewerage. They continue to occur.
A 2009 algae bloom in the Murray-Darling Basin.Office of the NSW Minister for Water/AAP
This event underlined the need to leave enough water in rivers for “environmental flows” to keep the system healthy.
Acting with what now seems like impressive promptness, the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council (made up of the water resources ministers from the basin states, the Australian Capital Territory and the federal government) imposed a cap on water extractions in 1995. It limited extractions to the volume of water capable of being taken out by the infrastructure (pumps, dams, channels, management rules) that existed in 1993-94.
The cap was supposed to be a temporary measure. It wasn’t intended to solve the problem, just stop it getting any worse in the short run.
The long-term solution was to be a system of trade in water rights, introduced by the Council of Australian Governments in 1994. Combined with the right price signals from environmental purchases, this system was meant to allocate water to its most productive uses while reducing extractions to sustainable levels.
A quarter-century on, the cap is only now being phased out, and a vast array of measures have come and gone, including the National Water Initiative, the Water Act of 2007, Water for the Future and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
Buying block
The failure of these initiatives rests on one simple fact: the refusal of irrigation lobby groups to countenance the government buying water rights on the open market to increase environmental flows. Their opposition has been immovable, despite many individual irrigators being keen to sell their water rights and use the money to invest in alternative cropping activities or retire.
On the other hand, there are a lucky (often politically well-connected) few who have done very well from “strategic” purchases of water. Investigative journalist Michael West has noted the National Party’s Party Barnaby Joyce has been publicly hostile towards buybacks of water entitlements but authorised, as federal water resources minister, three major “strategic purchases”.
Instead of water purchases, politicians like Joyce have put their faith in subsidies to infrastructure, to improve the efficiency of water use.
The idea has a lot of intuitive appeal. If less water can be used, it should be possible to increase flows in the river system without reducing agricultural output. With rare exceptions, this appealing vision has dominated the thinking of politicians and much of the public.
The reality is sadly different. The failure of infrastructure-based water recovery was both predictable and predicted.
I pointed out the main difficulties in a piece for ABC Online in 2012. The article didn’t contain any remarkable insights. It simply stated views shared by every independent economist who has worked on the issue.
The illusion of efficiency
Among the many problems with infrastructure schemes, two have stood out.
First, the measured cost of saving water through infrastructure schemes is two to three times as much as that of buying water on the open market.
Second, and more importantly, much of the supposed water savings are illusory. Much of the water “wasted” in irrigation systems is not lost to the environment. Most of the water leakage and seepage from irrigation channels eventually returns to rivers through groundwater systems. So “saving” this water through infrastructure efficiency doesn’t actually add anything more to environmental flows.
My 2012 analysis assumed a scientifically based effort to secure water savings at the lowest possible cost to the public. As the Four Corners report has shown, that assumption was massively over-optimistic. In reality, the scheme has been characterised by lax monitoring, cronyism and rorting.
After the expenditure of billions in public money, the system may be worse off than before. As a result, environmental disasters keep on happening.
Along with recurring algal outbreaks, we are witnessing disasters such as the massive fish kills like that in western New South Wales in January. The massive fish kills have been attributed to little or no flow in the Darling River combined with plunges from high temperatures, starving the water of oxygen.
Hundreds of thousands of dead fish in waterways around Menindee, far-west New South Wales, in January 2019.Graeme McCrabb/AAP
As the riverine environment keeps deteriorating, there’s no sign of any positive change in policy.
Eventually, though, we must hope Abba Eban will be proved right. Having exhausted all the options that don’t work, we will have to turn to those that do.
Earlier this year, researchers suggested the amount of water returned to the Murray Darling Basin under a federal program has been “grossly exaggerated”, to the tune of hundreds of billions of litres.
The report argued that government investment in irrigation improvements might even result in a net loss of water for the environment.
To investigate these claims, the Murray Darling Basin Authority commissioned us to undertake an independent review to examine the best available data for every irrigation efficiency project funded across the basin.
We found the government investment into irrigation efficiency projects has achieved 85% of the 750 gigalitres per year target. The remaining 15% of the target may be affected by unintended side-effects.
This result highlights the need for continued review of risks to the basin plan, as Australia grapples with the management of an extraordinary complex natural system.
How is water for the environment recovered?
The Water Act 2007 introduced significant reforms aimed at setting aside more water for the environment. At the time, record high levels of surface water were being consumed. Aiming to save 2,750 gigalitres of surface water (water flowing in the open air, rather than underground) the federal government began buying back water rights and investing in more efficient infrastructure.
The Commonwealth is providing A$3.1 billion to buy these water rights, of which A$2.5 billion has been spent. It is also providing more than A$8 billion for modernising infrastructure and water efficiency improvements, of which more than A$4 billion has so far been spent.
These projects aim to improve water delivery – reducing leaks and evaporation – and make irrigation more efficient. The water saving generated from these projects is shared between the governments for environmental use, and irrigators.
Mass fish deaths earlier in the year raised serious concerns about the health of the Murray-Darling system.DEAN LEWINS/AAP
What are “return flows”?
To understand why the government investment in irrigation efficiency projects have not achieved 100% of the original target, we need to talk about return flows.
When water is diverted from the river for irrigation, not all of it gets consumed by the plants. Some water will make its way back to the river. This is called return flow. A large part of the return flow is through groundwater to the rivers, and this part is extremely difficult to measure. More efficient infrastructure and irrigation generally means less return flow to the river.
If these reductions are not considered when calculating the water savings, it is possible there will be implications for irrigators, the environment and other water users downstream, that previously benefited from return flows.
What we tried to determine is how much the efficiency projects reduced return flow.
For the first time, we attempted to bring together data on individual projects in order to assess return flows across the basin. We developed a framework for calculating return flows, which took into account water in the rivers, groundwater, and efficiency projects.
This is the first attempt to bring together the existing data on individual projects to assess return flows in the basin at a detailed level. A large portion of the data used in this study was collated for the first time and not previously available in a readily accessible format.
We found a reduction in return flow of 121 gigalitres per year as a result of the government funded projects. This is comparable to 16% of the recovery transferred to environmental entitlements.
What does this mean for the Basin Plan?
There are several important details that must be considered to assess the importance of the return flow volume for the environment and Basin Plan objectives. We do not attempt here to quantify the outcomes, but instead to raise a number of important considerations beyond simply “volume”.
1. Recovered water should be legally protected
Return flows are good for the environment, but are essentially accidental. As irrigation becomes more efficient, inevitably they will diminish.
On the other hand, formally allocated environmental water entitlements are legally protected. It is more secure for the environment – and far easier to keep track of.
2. It’s not ‘efficiency vs the environment’
Part of this debate centres around the idea that reducing return flows means less water for the environment. But in Victoria and New South Wales, before water is allocated to anyone (irrigators or the environment), a base level is set aside. This is the minimum required to keep the rivers physically flowing and to meet critical human needs.
Efficiency projects mainly affect this base-level flow of the river. This means the water reduction is shared across everyone who holds a water licence – the majority of which are irrigators.
This policy means it does not make sense to compare the effect of efficiency projects directly with the recovery of environmental water.
3. Volume is a crude measure of environmental benefit
The focus of the debate around return flows has been based on the annual volume of returned environmental water in comparison to the stated Basin Plan target.
However, the real objective of the water recovery is to achieve environmental objectives in the Basin. This is not just about annual volumes, but the quantity, timing, and quality of fresh water.
How should we move forward?
Our review has particularly highlighted the need for better ongoing data collection and regular evaluations.
Both taxpayer investments and the water market are changing irrigation to become more efficient and reducing the river’s base flow. With this in mind, we need to regularly reexamine how we share water between everyone (and everything) that needs it, particularly in extended dry periods.
The Murray-Darling Basin is a constantly changing system, both in terms of climate and irrigation. Return flows are one of a number of potential threats to the Basin Plan. As the system is continually changing, these threats will need to be reassessed with each Basin Plan review.
A Four Corners program on the $13 billion Murray-Darling Basin Plan will air on ABC at 8.30pm on July 8.
This article was co-written by Glen Walker, a former CSIRO employee and now private consultant, who worked with the University of Melbourne on the independent review.
Want to boost your immune system, reduce your physical signs of ageing, or cleanse your blood to get rid of toxins? Intravenous (IV) vitamin therapy, or vitamin drips, promise to help. Some claim they can even benefit serious conditions like cancer, Parkinson’s disease, the eye condition macular degeneration, the pain of fibromyalgia and depression.
Celebrities have promoted them on social media. The demand has led to alternative therapy lounges popping up around the world, including in Australia. Patients can kick back in comfy leather chairs while they’re hooked up to IVs in the infusion lounge, watch Netflix and have some tea.
But do they work? Or are you just paying for really expensive urine? Let’s look at what the science says.
What is IV vitamin therapy?
IV vitamin therapy administers vitamins and minerals directly into the bloodstream via a needle that goes directly into your vein. Fans of the therapy believe this enables you to obtain more nutrients as you avoid the digestion process.
Providers of these injections say they customise the formula of vitamins and minerals depending on the perceived needs of the patient.
Right now for example, many Australian lounges are offering drip “cocktails” containing immune boosting vitamins like vitamin C and zinc to help protect against the flu. Other popular therapy sessions come under names like “Energy Cocktail” and “Glow”. One vitamin IV therapy session can take 30-90 minutes and will cost between A$80 to $1,000.
IV therapy itself is not new and has been used in the medical profession for decades. In hospitals, it is commonly used to hydrate patients and administer essential nutrients if there is an issue with gut absorption, or long-term difficulty eating or drinking due to surgery. Single nutrient deficiencies like vitamin B12 or iron are also often treated in hospital with infusions under medical supervision.
But the “cocktails” IV vitamin therapy clinics create and administer are not supported by scientific evidence. There have been no clinical studies to show vitamin injections of this type offer any health benefit or are necessary for good health. In fact, there are very few studies that have looked at their effectiveness at all.
There is one review on the use of the “Myers’ cocktail” (a solution of magnesium, calcium, vitamin C and a number of B vitamins). But it just contains a collection of anecdotal evidence from singular case studies.
Another trial looked into the effectiveness of IV vitamin therapy in reducing symptoms of 34 people with the the chronic pain condition fibromyalgia. It found no significant differences between those who received the “Myers’ cocktail” once a week for eight weeks and those who did not. In fact, the authors noted a strong placebo effect. In other words, many people said their symptoms improved when they were only injected with a “dummy” cocktail.
Another study that examined IV vitamin use in fibromyalgia patients was missing a placebo group, involved just seven patients and showed only short-term improvement in symptoms. The only other published study examined IV vitamin therapy use for asthma. But that study was of even poorer quality.
What are the risks of IV vitamin therapy?
Even when it comes to vitamins and minerals, you can have too much of a good thing. For example, if you take in more of the fat soluble vitamin A than you need, your body stores it, risking damage to major organs, like the liver.
IV vitamin therapy “cocktails” also often contain significant levels of the water soluble vitamins C and B. These are processed by the kidneys and excreted into urine when the body cannot store any more. This makes for some very expensive urine.
There is also the risk of infection with IV vitamin therapy. Any time you have an IV line inserted, it creates a direct path into your bloodstream and bypasses your skin’s defence mechanism against bacteria.
People with certain conditions like kidney disease or renal failure shouldn’t have IV vitamin therapy because they cannot quickly remove certain minerals from the body. For these people, adding too much potassium could lead to a heart attack.
People with heart, kidney or blood pressure conditions should also avoid IV vitamin therapy as there is risk of fluid overload without consistent monitoring. The consequences of fluid overload in these patients can include heart failure, delayed wound healing, and impaired bowel function.
What’s the bottom line?
For most of us, the quantities of vitamins and minerals needed for good health can be obtained by eating a healthy diet with a wide range of foods and food groups. Obtaining vitamins and minerals from your diet is much easier, cheaper, and safer.
Unless you have a medically diagnosed reason for getting a vitamin infusion and it was prescribed by your doctor, you are always better off obtaining vitamins and minerals through food.
Amid the hype around Facebook’s plan to launch its own cryptocurrency, Libra, there’s one big question. How is the company going to profit from it?
The project relies on developing blockchain technology. But blockchain’s whole raison d’être is to challenge the way corporate capitalism and businesses like Facebook make money.
Facebook has also established, with several dozen equally capitalistic partners, the Libra Association, a nonprofit organisation based in Switzerland, to spearhead the venture.
After years of copping criticism for questionable business practices, has Facebook decided to take an altruistic turn?
Probably not. It’s more likely that blockchain, and even Libra, is a means to a end; it’s about Facebook wanting to be not only the world’s biggest social media platform but also the globe’s go-to marketplace, putting Amazon, eBay, Apple and Google in the shade.
To appreciate why this suggestion isn’t also hyperbole, we need to talk not so much about Libra but its companion technology, the “custodial wallet” called Calibra.
Blockchain, but not blockchain
First, let’s do a quick recap of some fundamentals.
In 2008, a person or group calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a method for transacting over the internet without a trusted third party such as a bank. It uses a distributed ledger known as a blockchain and cryptography to maintain a tamper-proof record of ownership of electronic cash – hence the term cryptocurrency.
Blockchain’s core innovation is to do away with the need for trusted entities like banks. So how do people safely send or receive cryptocurrency? Well, they can use a “cryptocurrency wallet”. A cryptocurrency balance is recorded against a blockchain address. Proving ownership depends on a secret code (or “private key”) known only to the owner. The “wallet” is essentially software that allows people to manage their private keys and authorise transactions.
Facebook has other ideas for its cryptocurrency. The Libra Association says it wants to “make sending money as easy and cheap as sending a text message”. Tapping addresses and secret codes into a wallet interface every time wouldn’t be that easy. These codes can be long – up to 64 characters, compared to 16 for a credit card.
So Facebook will instead provide a “custodial wallet” – Calibra. It will be the custodian of your cryptocurrency, much like a bank is custodian of your money, and thus manage your wallet for you.
Facebook can certainly argue that this makes it much easier to use Libra – and it wants to make Libra easy to use so you can buy items through Facebook and its other platforms, such as Whatsapp and Instagram.
But this aspect has little to do with the original ideals behind blockchain. It makes Calibra more like a bank, with a record of your electronic payments. It will know everything you buy or sell through its wallet; and it will share “Calibra customer data with managed vendors and service providers — including Facebook”.
How Facebook monetises data
Why is this important? Because Facebook is in the business of gathering your personal data.
It now uses this information to make about 99% of its income from selling advertising – US$14.9 billion in the first quarter of 2019 alone.
Facebook revenue, in millions.Facebook
Its value as an advertising delivery mechanism comes not just from its sheer number of users (1.56 billion daily users, and 2.37 billion monthly users) but from what it knows about them.
Facebook daily active users, in millions.Facebook
This goes way beyond basic personal details like your birthdate. Almost everything about Facebook is designed to get you to reveal personal information. You do this through what you post and the posts you like or respond to. You do this even when not directly using Facebook. Lots of online stores report back to Facebook when you visit them, for example.
Identifying key personality traits can be used to predict purchasing behaviour – or political preference, as demonstrated in the Cambridge Analytica controversy. The British-based political consultancy bragged it effectively swung the US 2016 election to Donald Trump by using Facebook to harvest user data and then directing customised political messages to users’ newsfeeds.
While there is some scepticism about Cambridge Analytica’s electoral impact, it is generally agreed the process of “micro-targeting” can be very effective for marketers.
So the more information Facebook has about you, the more money it can potentially make by influencing you.
Becoming bigger than Amazon
There’s more.
Facebook’s value as an advertising powerhouse has made its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, extremely wealthy – worth an estimated US$73 billion. But that’s less than half of Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, who’s worth US$158 billion.
Both companies are in the business of helping merchants sell products. But Amazon’s position as an online marketplace is more lucrative than Facebook’s role as a shop window. Amazon can take a cut from every sale. Its retail business makes up about 80% of its US$950 billion value, which is greater than Facebook’s total value of US$550 billion.
What if Facebook could be both the shop window and the cash register? What if it no longer just introduced users to merchants but also became the digital marketplace supporting those merchants? What if it could collect not just social data but also buyer history data?
This is what Libra, and more critically, Calibra, could mean for Facebook.
Libra’s an important part of this picture. But it’s Calibra that could deliver the data Facebook needs to become possibly the most valuable, and powerful, online company in the world.
Fifty years after her death, Australian writer Charmian Clift is experiencing a renaissance. Born in 1923, Clift co-authored three novels with her husband George Johnston, wrote two under her own name, produced two travel memoirs, and had weekly column widely syndicated to major Australia papers during the the 1960s.
Clift has long been overshadowed by the legacy of Johnston, whose novel My Brother Jack is considered an Australian classic. Her novels and memoirs are sadly out of print, yet she is increasingly recognised for her important place in Australian culture.
Charmian Clift, pictured on the front cover of her memoir, Peel Me a Lotus.Hutchinson, 1959
In 2018 she, along with Johnston, was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame in recognition of her work as a columnist. She is also being reimagined in fiction, as the subject of A Theatre of Dreamers (2020), a forthcoming novel by English author, Polly Samson, and in Tamar Hodes’ The Water and the Wine (2018).
The revival of interest in Clift is more than a collective nostalgia or feminist correction of the historical record, although both are relevant. Many of her readers from the 60s still remember her newspaper column, and the impact that it had on their view of Australia’s place in the world, with great affection.
Younger generations, particularly women, have also been exposed to Clift’s clear and passionate voice after the columns were published in several volumes in the years following her death. That Clift and her writing continue to resonate with contemporary Australia tells us something about both her and the nation.
The Hydra years
Much of the renewed interest in Clift is focused not only on her writing, but also on the near decade that she and Johnston lived on the Greek Island of Hydra. In late 2015, artist Mark Schaller’s Melbourne exhibition, Homage to Hydra, featured paintings depicting Clift and Johnston’s island lives, with several featuring other residents from Hydra’s international population of writers and artists, including Canadian poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen.
The same year, Melbourne musicians Chris Fatouros and Spiros Falieros debuted Hydra: Songs and Tales of Bohemia, marrying Cohen’s songs to a narrative about Clift and Johnston’s time on Hydra.
To date in 2019, Sue Smith’s play, Hydra, has been staged in Brisbane and Adelaide, casting Clift in ways that resonate sympathetically with the concerns of contemporary audiences. As Smith writes in her script’s introduction:
Charmian was a woman ahead of her time. We see this in the choices she made both in her personal life, whether it be scandalising the Greek locals by wearing trousers and drinking in bars, to insisting upon her personal and sexual freedom and, of course, through her work.
Modern readers might respond to Clift the writer, but the focus on her years on Hydra suggests there is also great interest in her charismatic personality and tempestuous life with Johnson, as their dream of a cheap and sun-soaked creative island life slowly soured.
While researching the couple’s lives on Hydra, we came across a suggestive, eye-witness diary entry by a fellow writer, New Zealander Redmond Wallis, written in 1960.
Charm is her greatest creation, Charmian Clift, the great Australian woman novelist. Charmian is very curious. She is, potentially at least, a better writer than George but she has and is deliberately creating a picture of herself … which one feels she hopes will appear in her biography some day.
The head of a literary coterie, beautiful, brilliant, compassionate but still the mother of 3 children, running a house. Sweating blood against almost impossible difficulties – a husband inclined to unfounded jealousy, the heat, creative problems, the children, the problems foisted on her by other people … and yet producing great art.
Wallis’s observations are accurate, and prophetic, in noting Clift’s capacity for self-mythologising and her belief that both she and her Hydra idyll would be remembered. Nearly four decades after Clift returned from Greece to Australia amid the acclaim for My Brother Jack, she did become the subject of an excellent biography, Nadia Wheatley’s The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (2001).
Nadia Wheatley’s biography of Clift.Goodreads
But there were also failures amongst the success. The vision she and Johnston shared for a writing life on Hydra floundered amid poverty, alcoholism and illness. Their return to Australia in 1964 was an unlikely triumph for Johnston following the success of My Brother Jack, but Clift did not return with the same profile.
Wheatley also traced another of Clift’s great disappointments – her failure to complete her long-dreamt of autobiographical novel The End of the Morning, a struggle that was the subject of Susan Johnson’s 2004 novel, The Broken Book.
Clift did, however, leave an autobiography of sorts, in her newspaper articles. These often focused on domestic circumstances and everyday thoughts – ranging from conscription, to the rise of the Greek military junta after she left Hydra, to the changing social circumstances in Australia, and her daughter’s engagement.
These articles might not have always reflected the experiences of her readers – not everyone invited Sidney Nolan over for drinks – but Clift’s first-person narratives of a life lived with great passion and a sceptical eye to the consequences, garnered a large readership.
These readers responded to an incisive intellect with a vision of a culturally enriched Australia. She understood well the need for the country to outgrow its entrenched conservatism in order to realise its potential; and she emerged as a generous spirit who realised that the dreams and passions that drove her life were found everywhere in Australian suburbs.
Clift’s death reported by The Canberra Times in July, 1969.
Wallis’s detection of Clift’s hubris and narcissism paints her as a potentially tragic figure. It was a fate she perhaps fulfilled, when Johnston eventually wrote of Clift’s infidelities on Hydra. Clift took her own life on July 8 1969, an event that curtailed her voice while leaving behind a legacy of loyal and grieving readers.
A natural cosmopolitan
Clift’s is one of the voices – and one of the most important female voices – that rose above the crowd during the post-war period, as the western world unknowingly girded itself for the social revolution that was to come.
Through her columns she advocated for a bolder, more outward looking future, and as someone who was naturally cosmopolitan she was avidly interested in seeing Australia become more open to the world and better integrated into the Asia-Pacific.
She didn’t always get it right (an essay decrying the rise of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones stands out!), but she helped navigate the path to a more broad-minded and inclusive vision of Australia.
Over the years Clift has emerged as someone who was not only modern, but also engaged in that most post-modern of activities, self-creation. For while Wallis scorned Clift’s self-mythologising at the time, it might now be recognised as the finest gift of the creative artist – to re-make oneself in the image of a world yet to be made. It was her gift to her readers and Australia.
TVNZ’s Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver reports on organisers trying to shut down the outgoing Miss Heilala Queen during her final address. Video: TVNZ
By Kalafi Moala in Nuku’alofa
Angry criticism has flooded social media over a reported intervention by Tonga’s Deputy Prime Minister – including calls for his resignation – at the Miss Heilala beauty pageant in Nuku’alofa on Friday.
Semisi Sika is reported to have instructed the DJ to play loud music to drown out the controversial speech of Kalo Funganitao, the outgoing Miss Heilala.
Funganitao condemned pageant officials for tormenting and bullying her during her reign and claimed she had been cheated, lied to, backstabbed and messed around.
The law student from Auckland University is considered to have dealt the pageant the strongest condemnation ever in its 40-year history.
-Partners-
“Enough is enough,” Kalo, as she is commonly known, yelled over the music.
Her mother, brother and other contestants joined her on stage for the speech for which her microphone was eventually cut, allegedly at the instruction of Sika, who was the honoured official at the pageant.
But Kalo continued to give her speech, a protocol given to every reigning Miss Heilala as they are about to depart and hand over the crown to the next winner.
“My mother and I were cheated, lied to, backstabbed and generally messed around,” Kalo claimed.
The support she was promised as a Miss Heilala winner never came, she said. Instead, she claims to have been bullied and rudely treated.
“Up until today I have experienced just how hard it can be to be a young Tongan woman. I have dealt with people in official roles and in other places in the workforce that have been unprofessional and rude,” Kalo said.
Resignation calls Social media users criticised the way Kalo’s speech appeared to have been shut down with a few calling for Sika’s resignation.
She described her experience during her reign as Miss Heilala as a direct result of the way she was treated by pageant officials and some of the public.
She also spoke about vicious attacks she had endured on social media, as people in the crowd started booing her and shouted obscenities.
The attempt to silence Kalo was recorded on video and posted on social media. She was ushered off the stage and was unable to crown the new Miss Heilala.
Sika is also accused of failing to intervene when someone from the VIP table reportedly screamed racist abuse at Leoshina Kariha, Miss Pacific Islands from Papua New Guinea.
A senior journalist in Tonga, Taina Kami, has expressed embarrassment at the abuse.
“Miss Pacific Islands Leoshina Kariha. I hang my head in shame and apologise for such unpleasant and uncalled for behaviour,” she wrote.
Kami has called for an apology from the pageant organisers.
No apologies have been issued by the tourism committee that organises the pageant or the Tourism Ministry for which Sika is the minister.
This article is published under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.
2018 Miss Heilala Kalo Funganitao … condemned pageant officials for being “tormented and bullied” during her reign. Image: Kalo Funganitao/RNZ Pacific
From the Fitbit to Apple’s smartwatch, wearable tech is becoming increasingly popular across the globe. Compared to other nations like US, which has seen higher adoption of fitness trackers, uptake in Australia is still less than 10% in 2019. But news reports indicate that Australians are taking to fitness monitoring more than ever before.
And wearable devices are not only being embraced by consumers, but also across insurance industries. Health and life insurance companies collect data from fitness trackers with the goal of improving business decisions.
Hollywood actor Christopher Walken was the spokesperson for Qantas’s 2016 Assure campaign.
Currently, these business models work as a “carrot” incentive. That means consumers can benefit from discounts and cheaper premiums if they are willing to share their Fitbit data.
But we could see voluntary participation become mandatory, shifting the incentive from carrot to stick. John Hancock, one of the largest life insurance companies in the United States, has added fitness tracking with wearable devices to all of its policies. Though customers can opt out of the program, some industry experts argue that this “raises ethical questions around privacy and equality in leaving the traditional life insurance model behind”.
Is this the beginning of a major trend? And, more importantly, how do consumers feel about being “persuaded” into fitness tracker-based insurance policies?
In a study conducted with my colleague Professor Stefanie Paluch at RWTH University in Germany, we investigated people’s perceptions of fitness tracker-based insurance policies.
What are the concerns?
Unfair price discrimination
People are concerned that the data monitoring will lead to personal disadvantages. They don’t want to be penalised with higher insurance rates if they stop using the fitness tracker. One Fitbit user said:
The problem lies in the disadvantage if I don’t wear it.
Data protection
Consumers are concerned about how insurance firms will access, use, and store their fitness data. One person said:
I find it very important to have strict regulations, especially in these times, when personal data is collected and stored everywhere, but can also be shared, exchanged, sold and passed on to third parties, to those I don’t want […] to have my data.
Privacy
People have a wide range of privacy concerns. In general, they fear becoming “observable”, “transparent”, “predictable”, “easy to manipulate” and “rated” by the insurance provider. One user said:
The risk is that you will become so transparent and […] institutions will know about you, that is actually not their right at all, only on the basis that they somehow want to make a profit […] it’s none of their business.
How to reduce the risks?
Our study shows that the strongest opposition is based on people’s fear of unfair and exploitative behaviour of commercial data users, in particular switching from voluntary to mandatory enrolment. To avoid backlash, insurance firms should follow the following four recommendations.
1. Understand your customer
Insurance firms need to first segment their customer base to better understand consumer lifestyles and motivations to use a fitness tracker. While some consumers have a personal affinity towards self-tracking, other individuals will not change their habits. One user said:
I am not sure how this helps? If you lie on the sofa for 12 hours a day with a fitness tracker. Do you see a result? No! The insurance cannot force you to move your ass. Normally only people who are active already and do sports regularly, they wear such trackers.
2. Provide value
People wish to receive a benefit for their participation. This ranges from financial value (discounts, lower premium) to functional value, such as the quality of the device (design features, ease of use), as well as its reliability and accuracy in tracking data.
I like sports, and fitness trackers are important to me. As I said, to follow my progress, and if I can get them cheap, then I find that very positive.
The tracker itself must be good. […] I have to have a feeling that I really benefit from it.
3. Be transparent
In order to reduce privacy concerns, insurance firms need to offer transparent and fully informative privacy policies and should more clearly educate and inform users about the terms and conditions. One Fitbit user said:
…if a little more is published [about] what happens with our data, […] one can inform oneself about it […] Perhaps general education in schools or so would be desirable, too.
For me, the personal contact is important, because if someone explains that to me, then I will trust this person, and then I do not think that he/she will try to conceal any things […]. Once this has been explained to me, then I’m ok with it.
4. Give customers control
People are more willing to participate in fitness tracker-based insurance policies when they are in control of their participation. Greater empowerment increases their perceived self-determination and acceptance. Thus, participation should remain voluntary and be flexible regarding the timeframe. Two respondents said:
Well, if they [fitness trackers] are on a voluntary basis […] then I would use them.
That I can choose this bonus program myself, that I can choose the different functions from it and that I can resign at any time without any financial, health or insurance disadvantages.
As the sharing of personal biometric data increases further, we hope that our findings will contribute to an emerging public policy and legal debate about the practice.
The rapid spread of fake news can influence millions of people, impacting elections and financial markets. A study on the impact of fake news on the 2016 US presidential election, for instance, has found that fake news stories about Hillary Clinton was “very strongly linked” to the defection of voters who supported Barack Obama in the previous election.
To stem the rising influence of fake news, some countries have made the creation and distribution of deliberately false information a crime.
Singapore is the latest country to have passed a law against fake news, joining others like Germany, Malaysia, France and Russia.
But using the law to fight the wave of fake news may not be the best approach. Human rights activists, legal experts and others fear these laws have the potential to be misused to stifle free speech, or unintentionally block legitimate online posts and websites.
Legislating free speech
Singapore’s new law gives government ministers significant powers to determine what is fake news, and the authority to order online platforms to remove content if it’s deemed to be against the public interest.
What is considered to be of public interest is quite broad, but includes threats to security, the integrity of elections, and the public perception of the government. This could be open to abuse. It means any content that could be interpreted as embarrassing or damaging to the government is now open to being labelled fake news.
Similar problems have arisen in Malaysia and Russia. Both nations have been accused of using their respective laws against fake news to further censor free speech, especially criticism of the government.
Malaysia’s previous government outlawed fake news last year, making it a crime punishable by a fine up to 500,000 Malaysian (A$171,000) ringgit or six years’ imprisonment, or both. The new government has vowed to repeal the law, but so far has yet to do so.
Russia banned fake news – which it labels as any information that shows “blatant disrespect” for the state – in April. Noncompliance can carry a jail sentence of 15 days.
Discriminating between legitimate and illegitimate content
Even countries like Germany are facing difficulties enforcing their laws in a way that doesn’t unintentionally also target legitimate content.
Germany’s law came into effect on January 1, 2018. It targets social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and requires them to remove posts featuring hate speech or fake information within 24 hours. A platform that fails to adhere to this law may face fines up to 50 million euros.
The Association of German Journalists has complained that social media companies are being too cautious and refusing to publish anything that could be wrongly interpreted under the law. This could lead to increasing self-censorship, possibly of information in the public interest.
But there has been no serious talk of passing a law banning fake news here. Instead, Australian politicians from all sides have been pressuring the biggest social media platforms to be more vigilant and remove fake news before it becomes a problem.
Are there any alternatives to government regulation?
Unlike attempts to limit or ban content in pre-internet days, simply passing a law against fake news may not be the best way to deal with the problem.
But there are already concerns the code was “softened” to minimise the amount of content that would need to be removed or edited.
Whenever governments get involved in policing the media – even for the best-intended reasons – there is always the possibility of corruption and a reduction in genuine free speech.
Industry self-regulation is also problematic, as social media companies often struggle to objectively police themselves. Compelling these companies to take responsibility for the content on their sites through fines and other punitive measures, however, could be effective.
Another alternative is for media industry groups to get involved.
Media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders, for instance, has launched the Journalism Trust Initiative, which could lead to a future certification system that would act as a “guarantee” of quality and accuracy for readers. The agreed standards are still being discussed, but will include issues such as company ownership, sources of revenue, independence and ethical compliance.
Most illicit drugs used at festivals, including ecstasy (methylenedioxymethamphetamine or MDMA), started out as relatively benign pharmaceuticals.
MDMA is most commonly implicated in drug-related harm at festivals. Fatal and non-fatal MDMA overdoses are usually a result of high-purity MDMA, dangerous contaminants, or environmental factors such as overheating or drinking too much or too little water. So to reduce harms we need to address all these problems.
Police presence, random drug searches and drug detection dogs don’t deter drug use and may increase harms. Yet they are common at festivals and come at a substantial financial cost to festival goers, which has to be covered in the price of the ticket.
Publicly, the police focus is on drug dealing, but the reality is that most people who are arrested at festivals are people who use, rather than sell, drugs. NSW police reported that, at Sydney’s 2019 Field Day Festival, of the 28,000 people who attended, there were 155 drug-related arrests: 149 for possession and 6 for supply.
When police dogs are present, people are more likely to buy drugs inside the festival rather than risk detection by carrying drugs in. This means they are more likely to buy from unknown sources, which increases their risk of harm compared with buying from a trusted source.
Decriminalising illicit drugs would significantly reduce harms and allow festival police to focus on public safety issues, such as antisocial behaviour and public drunkenness.
presence of peer-led organisations, like Dancewize, which provide harm reduction information and support
emergency services and first aid
chill out spaces
availability of cool clean water
good ventilation in indoor spaces, and
staff and volunteer training in responding to drug affected people.
Pill testing direct to consumer
On-site pill testing, which identifies the content and purity of drugs brought in by festival goers, also includes contact with a health professional to provide a brief intervention, that can include advice about risks of taking drugs and harm reduction information. Festival goers are always told that it is safest not to take drugs at all.
Brief interventions from a health professional can reduce risky drug use among young people. But without a way to offer an intervention, most young people who go to festivals will not come into contact with a health worker to receive that information.
Some Australian police, politicians and policymakers are reluctant to consider pill testing at festivals. That may be because, so far, only on-site, direct-from-consumer testing has been offered as a viable way of reducing harm.
Some people have concerns about the idea of accepting and testing illicit drugs direct from the people using them, given that they are still illegal.
But there are many other ways of pill testing that can also reduce harm.
Testing of police-acquired drugs
We could also test drugs on-site that have been seized by police, acquired from emergency services after an incident or surrendered in amnesty bins.
This approach has been used at a number of festivals in the UK since 2013. When a potentially problematic drug is identified during the festival, an alert is issued on-site through social media usually within hours, to alert others who may have bought drugs from similar batches.
As well as potentially reducing harm for people who use drugs, these alerts mean police are better able to monitor the local drug market; on-site paramedics, first aid and outreach workers are better informed about drugs in circulation, helping to improve responses; and according to the UK testing facility, medical services report having more confidence in dealing with presentations because of the alerts.
Medical services can also benefit from alerts letting people know which problem drugs might still be in circulation.from www.shutterstock.com
This approach is not as effective in reducing harms as direct-from-consumer testing. That’s because it doesn’t include contact with a health professional who can offer a brief intervention, and the information about pill contents doesn’t go direct to the people intending to use them.
But if testing of police acquired drugs is combined with real-time alerts about potential problem drugs to festival goers, it can still reduce harms.
Off-site testing
Testing of pills brought in by festival goers can also occur off site before the festival. It works the same way as onsite testing, and includes brief intervention, but operates away from the festival site.
Off-site testing removes the need to change the way the drugs are policed at festivals, so may be more acceptable to some. If both off-site and on-site testing are implemented, testing services will have greater reach and be more effective in reducing harm.
Testing drug purity
The only official pill testing that has been undertaken in Australia has been at Canberra’s Groovin’ the Moo in 2018 and 2019. The on-site facility tested samples provided directly by consumers and identified the drugs present. But they could only estimate the purity of drug powders and did not measure the dose of MDMA in the pills.
High-dose MDMA has been implicated in a number of the recent festivals deaths. Knowing the dose may help reduce overdoses from MDMA pills because people can choose to take a smaller amount of the drug if they know the strength is high.
The Loop UK has developed a method of more accurately measuring the dose in MDMA pills, which could help reduce the harms associated with high purity. The process does not require any specialised equipment and is performed on-site by trained chemists. At this year’s Parklife Festival the organisation identified high-strength pills and send out warnings.
Example of alerts from The Loop UK at this year’s Parklife Festival.
Understanding drug use at festivals
We also don’t really know how many young people use drugs at Australian festivals and how much they use. Most of what we know is from anecdotal reports. There’s probably differences between festivals.
We know both festival attendance and illicit drug use hit a peak among people in their 20s. So more research on how common drug use is at festivals and the kinds of drugs people use would help inform better and more targeted harm reduction policies.
We will never completely eliminate drug use at festivals but we can make them safer by implementing what we know works and stopping what we know doesn’t. It’s normal for young people to take risks. Whether you agree with drug taking or not, our young people don’t deserve to die just because they have taken drugs.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Warren Midgley, Honorary Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of Southern Queensland
Just before the May federal election, then shadow treasurer Chris Bowen gave a speech in which he lamented the low levels of Year 12 students studying Mandarin in Australia. The speech was at a launch for Labor’s plan to deepen Australia’s engagement with Asia.
According to the launch’s media release, Labor’s strategy would include “improving Asian literacy and cultural understanding through school curriculums”.
Bowen mentioned that only about 130 Australians of non-Chinese heritage can speak Chinese to a level good enough to do business with China. In recent weeks, experts confirmed this number may be correct, although an educated guess.
But whatever the exact number, 100 or 130 or 200, an expert told the ABC “it’s still absolutely peanuts”.
For decades, Australian schools have focused on teaching Asian languages to strengthen our opportunities in Asia. One of the four target languages has been Standard Chinese, or Mandarin, the official language of mainland China.
If only 130 people of non-Chinese heritage can speak it after all these years, has something gone catastrophically wrong?
The bigger picture
There are many more than 130 people in Australia who can speak Mandarin fluently. According to the latest census data, almost 600,000 people in Australia speak Mandarin at home, which indicates a very high level of fluency.
Given more than 500,000 Australians were born in China, there is a good chance most Mandarin-speaking Australians would be, to use Bowen’s term, of “Chinese heritage”. But it’s unclear why this is concerning.
From a purely academic perspective, these data suggest Australia is well placed to recruit Mandarin-speaking leaders in business, international relations, diplomacy and so forth, to strengthen our engagement with Asia.
Clearly, there is no critical shortage of fluent Mandarin speakers in Australia. There may be a shortage of Mandarin-speaking Australians entering into leadership positions, but that is an entirely different discussion.
Mandarin learning in schools
There is no definitive source of data for the number of children learning languages in Australian schools. One source indicates that in 2015, more than 170,000 students were learning Mandarin in Australian schools – almost twice as many as were learning it in 2008.
However, only about 4,000 of those students were in Year 12, and of those only an estimated 400 were of non-Chinese heritage. So while the total number of students has risen, the number of non-Chinese heritage students continuing to study Mandarin through to Year 12 has remained low.
These figures are similar to those for Japanese, which is the most popular language taught in Australian schools. In 2015 there were estimated to be just over 210,000 students studying Japanese at school in Australia. Following a similar pattern to Mandarin, only 572 of those students were in the upper years of secondary school.
What does success mean?
Not all language students start at the same proficiency level. The Australian Curriculum has five different streams for students of Mandarin to accommodate a range of different starting levels of proficiency.
In theory, this means Chinese heritage students who already speak Mandarin very well can study a much higher level of Mandarin than non-Chinese heritage students. However, many students with very good starting proficiency in Mandarin end up in classes designed for students with lower starting levels of proficiency.
These differences in starting levels of proficiency mean it is difficult to determine whether Mandarin language programs have been successful. An excellent written paper by a non-native speaker of Mandarin may be a very poor result for a student who is a native speaker of Mandarin.
In one study, Year 12 students who spoke Mandarin at home achieved an average score of 77 on a proficiency test that had a maximum possible score of 120. The average for students who did not speak Mandarin at home was 16.
We need to think carefully about what we mean by success in language learning. If speaking as a native speaker would, which is what might be required for someone to be able to conduct business in China, is the measure of success, all language classes will perform poorly. A school student in China will learn about 6,000 written characters by the time they graduate. By comparison, a Year 12 student in Australia will graduate with a knowledge of only about 500 characters.
By the time a school student in China graduates, they will have learnt about 6,000 written characters.from shutterstock.com
Even languages that don’t have large numbers of characters are almost impossible to master in the small amount of time allocated to language classes in Australian schools.
In the same way, if winning an Olympic gold medal were the measure of success of sports classes, then they also have been a monumental failure. There have only been 267 Australian gold medallists in all Summer and Winter Games since 1896.
The same could be said for any other subject in which achieving such rare levels of excellence is considered to be the only measure of success.
None of these benefits requires the learner to be able to speak, read or write that second language as well as a native speaker.
Some of the questions we should be asking are:
are our children making progress in learning the language?
are they engaged with the lessons and the materials?
are they demonstrating interest in other cultures and ideas?
are they exploring new ways of seeing the world and solving problems?
are they reaching out to others in the community who have different language and cultural backgrounds?
The first two of these are regularly measured, or at least noted, by classroom teachers. But the others are often overlooked. It is difficult to know how successful our programs have been without measuring these things too.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hal Pawson, Associate Director – City Futures – Urban Policy and Strategy, City Futures Research Centre, Housing Policy and Practice, UNSW
In the wake of slumping demand for apartment building, it’s little wonder the multi-unit housing industry has been eagerly eyeing a possible new residential product: “build-to-rent”.
In fact, the latest figures show that apartment-building construction starts were down 36% in 2018 from 2016. But how much will this little-known type of housing solve our housing problems?
Build-to-rent won’t be a silver bullet solution for Australia’s housing affordability stress, but it does have potential to tick the box on several important public policy objectives. These include widened housing diversity, enhanced build standards, and a better-managed, more secure form of private rental housing.
But for this to happen, Australia’s tax settings need adjustment.
Project design of build to rent properties in Mirvac Olympic Park, Sydney. Build to rent has already started in Australia, but can only be fully embraced with government support.Author provided (No reuse)
What is ‘build-to-rent’?
This refers to apartment blocks built specifically to be rented, usually at market rates, and held in single ownership as long-term income-generating assets.
The enduring owner might be, for instance, an insurance company, an Australian super fund, a foreign sovereign wealth fund, a private equity firm, or the building’s developer.
A scattering of build-to-rent schemes are already underway or completed, mainly in inner Sydney and Melbourne. And they may prove to be the forerunners of a new Australian residential property sector – but that is far from guaranteed.
In Australia, our private rental market is almost entirely owned by small-scale mum-and-dad investors, so this kind of housing would be a largely new departure from typical Australian real estate.
Potential benefits
The build-to-rent development model, involving a long-term owner commissioning an entire building, creates an incentive for higher, more enduring quality than the standard “build-to-sell” apartment development approach.
Importantly, build-to-rent is a long-run investment that caters for rental demand, which tends to grow steadily.
This means the model is largely immune to the fickle changes in housing demand resulting from typically short time horizons and primarily speculative instincts of individual buyers traditionally dominant in our market.
So at its full potential, this new housing product could introduce a valuable counter-cyclical component into the notoriously volatile residential construction industry, helping to offset damaging booms and busts. In other words, build-to-rent can create stability in the Australian property market.
How build-to-rent can incorporate affordable housing
Optimistically, some have claimed build-to-rent could also provide an “affordable housing” fix for many earners who are doing it tough in our existing private rental market.
But this could be possible only with the aid of major government funding or planning concessions.
A design for build to rent property in Latrobe Street, Melbourne.Author provided (No reuse)
Ideally, housing at rents affordable to low or moderate income earners would be included in predominantly market-rate build-to-rent schemes. Indeed, one major construction industry player recently advocated this as a standard expectation.
So how should affordable housing be provided in this case?
To find out, our analysis compares the cost of developing affordable housing by a for-profit company with development under a not-for-profit community housing provider.
Thanks to that non-profit format, and the tax advantages that go along with it, community housing providers can, in fact, construct affordable rental housing at significantly lower cost than their for-profit counterparts. Less subsidy is therefore needed.
Nonetheless, government help in some form will be essential to enable an affordable housing element. The most painless way for this to happen, from the government perspective, is through allocating sections of federal or state-owned redevelopment sites to community housing providers at discounted rates.
Encouragingly, this strategy was recently advocated by newly designated federal housing minister Michael Sukkar.
Such designation of government-owned sites could, for instance, be factored into large-scale urban renewal projects like Sydney’s Central-to-Eveleigh and Rozelle Bays. When complete, it could fulfil the widely voiced demand that 30% of these developments should be affordable housing.
Levelling the playing field
Our modelling shows that under current conditions, even market-rate build-to-rent projects are barely viable – at least in Sydney.
The inflated price of developable land in Australia’s urban housing markets is an important contributing constraint. But our research also identifies a range of government tax settings that disadvantage build-to-rent, compared with both mum-and-dad-investors and traditional build to sell developers.
Removing less favourable land tax and GST treatment could markedly improve build-to-rent feasibility.
From a housing policy perspective, there’s also a case for the federal government to reconsider its recent “withholding tax” decision that treats overseas-based institutional investment in rental property less favourably than investment in commercial property.
Since such global funds would likely lead the establishment of a new Australian build-to-rent asset class, revisiting the withholding tax changes could be a significant step in making build-to-rent a reality in Australia.
In any case, build-to-rent is no simple solution for Australia’s affordable housing shortage.
But even as a market-rate product, it could fulfil several important public policy objectives. How far it might do so in practice is something that governments rightly need to weigh up when considering industry-proposed tax and regulatory reforms.
Australia took its eyes off long-term unemployment, for what it thought were good reasons.
Long-term unemployment is defined as unemployment for more than 12 months in a row.
In the early 1990s, after the “recession we had to have”, long-term unemployment grew to a postwar high of 4% and became a major concern for the government amid fears that once Australians had became long-term unemployed, they would never easily get back to work.
Over time, that concern lessened.
Strong economic growth delivered a steady decline in the overall rate of unemployment and, as a consequence, long-term unemployment.
With the long-term rate low, we looked away…
By the time the financial crisis hit in 2008, Australia’s long-term unemployment rate was down to just 0.6%. After the crisis, our lack of attention continued.
The crisis had caused only a relatively small increase in unemployment, and it seemed reasonable to assume that it hadn’t caused much of an uptick in long-term unemployment.
In absolute terms, it hadn’t. Today, long-term unemployment is 1.25%, still way below its peak in the early 1990s.
But that figure of 1.25% demands closer attention.
It is about 0.3 percentage points higher than would have been the case for the same unemployment rate a few years earlier.
…and kept looking away…
Those few fractions of a percentage point mightn’t seem like much, but they add up to 41,000 more long-term unemployed Australians than would be expected.
The surprising growth in long-term unemployment relative to unemployment can be seen in the figure below, which shows rates of unemployment and long-term unemployment from 2003 onwards.
Unemployment rates and long-term unemployment rates, 2003-19
It is clear that something changed after mid-2016.
Before then, an unemployment rate of 5% meant a rate of long-term unemployment of about 1%. After then it has meant a long-term unemployment rate of about 1.3%.
While the change has become most apparent since 2016, I argue in my recent briefing on this topic that it began earlier, in the years between 2009 and 2016.
During those seven years, the overall rate of unemployment changed little.
…while something changed
Standard theories predict that if the overall rate of unemployment remains stable, the rate of long-term unemployment should also remain stable.
But the rate of long-term unemployment virtually doubled from 0.7% to 1.35% during those seven years, meaning the proportion of the unemployed who were long-term unemployed climbed from 13% to 23%.
The growth in long-term unemployment has been pervasive – affecting male and female jobseekers equally, and all age categories – although young jobseekers seem to have been the most affected.
At this stage, the reasons for the increase remain unclear.
Low wage growth deepens the mystery
Paradoxically, it makes Australia’s current low rate of wage growth even harder to understand.
Standard theories characterise the long-term unemployed as being less immediately employable than the short-term unemployed, meaning that as long-term unemployment grows as a proportion of total unemployment, employers will try to fill vacancies from a smaller and smaller pool of short-term unemployed, making it easier for existing workers to extract higher wages.
If this is happening, it is being more than offset by something else.
What this development certainly does mean is that we ought to be concentrating more on getting the long-term unemployed back into work. Fortuitously, this is already happening.
In 2018 an expert panel commissioned by the then Commonwealth Department of Jobs and Small Business recommended rebalancing of employment services towards jobseekers facing the highest barriers to employment.
The increasingly chunk of the unemployed who are long-term unemployed makes the need for such a shift more critical.
Michael Andrew’s Pacific Media Watch interview with Rosa Moiwend of West Papua. Video: Pacific Media Centre
By Michael Andrew
West Papuan human rights defender Rosa Moiwend was in New Zealand this week, speaking about the need for more countries to challenge Indonesia on its human rights abuses in her homeland.
Her New Zealand tour featured talks in Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland where she discussed West Papuan resistance to expanding Indonesian military and business interests.
She told Pacific Media Watch contributing editor Michael Andrew about Indonesia’s confiscation of indigenous land for oil palm developments and its attempt to isolate West Papua from the rest of the Pacific.
West Papuan human rights defender Rosa Moiwend talks to Pacific Media Watch contributing editor Michael Andrew at the Pacific Media Centre this week. Image: Del Abcede/PMC
“Land has been taken away from the indigenous people,” she says in this video report.
“And this massive food project is a kind of third wave of taking people’s land without permission.”
-Partners-
Moiwend also says there needs to be stronger media coverage.
“To get the information, maybe they are not well informed, that’s my assumption,” she says.
“Or, the second thing is, maybe they don’t have access to get into West Papua. Again, it is really important that the New Zealand government talks to the Indonesian government and asks them that they should open up to the media.”
West Papuan human rights defender Rosa Moiwend at the Pacific Media Centre this week with publications from the centre. Image: Del Abcede/PMC
The Chinese Embassy has for a second time failed to respond to a request for comment concerning its role in the arrest, detention and planned deportation of six Chinese nationals on Vanuatu soil.
The Vanuatu Daily Post originally contacted the embassy by telephone last week, but were instructed to send a written request for comment instead. The newspaper complied.
Another request was sent yesterday shortly before lunch. No reply had been received by the time the article went to press.
Vanuatu’s investment “fast citizenship” Vanuatu Development Programme (VDP) is gaining momentum. Image: Vanuatu Daily Post
The presence of Chinese law enforcement officials on Vanuatu soil, their official status, and their role in the arrest and detention of the six arrested people has raised numerous questions about due process and the rule of law.
The Office of the Prime Minister, which oversees the Citizenship Office, shared further information yesterday concerning the six Chinese nationals currently in detention, pending their expected deportation.
-Partners-
Four of the six individuals had applied for Vanuatu citizenship under the Development Support Programme (DSP). They had their citizenship granted in mid-May this year. Two others were not citizens.
The four citizenship applications approvals were made on the same day in mid-May, a PMO spokesman said.
Standard security check At that time, they had been subjected to the standard security and background check, which included a query against the Interpol database. Vanuatu joined Interpol in November last year.
In late June this year, Chinese authorities informed the government of Vanuatu that six individuals were involved in what they characterised as a “pyramid” scheme, aimed at victims in China.
These activities were allegedly based in a commercial property in the Seaside neighbourhood.
The Daily Post was shown a letter, evidently from Chinese police, stamped and dated from June 2019, which alleged that a Chen Bo had forged his criminal record check form. Commonly called a police clearance, it is a required document for any residence or citizenship application.
The letter described Chen as a fugitive from the law.
The Daily Post asked if all of the six were the subject of similar correspondence. The PMO spokesman said yes, they were.
The identities of the other five detainees are not known.
Woman in hiding A woman named Liana Chen is also reportedly wanted by Chinese authorities. The Daily Post has been told that she was currently in hiding in Vanuatu.
Sources informed the Daily Post that six Chinese law enforcement officials were later joined by five more. These individuals have been occupying the same property as the detainees, but it is not clear what their role in regarding the six people.
It is known that Vanuatu Police are providing a security detail to ensure the six remain on the premises.
Sources with direct knowledge of their circumstances told the Daily Post that the six were or are being held on a property owned by the China Civil Engineering and Construction Company (CCECC), in the Prima neighbourhood.
The Daily Post contacted CCECC to ask about their collaboration on this matter, but did not receive a reply by the time the article went to press.
The PMO also clarified that the DSP was mandated to supply up to 600 citizens via its investment opportunity. The total cash value of this offering would be VT 10.74 billion (US$93 million). That number has yet to be reached.
A Parliamentary Committee was recently informed that over 4000 applications have been approved. Therefore, PRG ImmiMart Ltd, which operates the rival Vanuatu Contribution Programme, is responsible for more than 3600 citizenship approvals so far.
Under scrutiny PMO officials stressed that PRG had not processed the six applications currently under scrutiny.
The Daily Post was unable to discover any local legal professionals working to represent or defend the detainees.
Internal Affairs Minister Andrew Napuat earlier told the newspaper that these people would not be going to court in Vanuatu, as they were not accused of committing any crime in Vanuatu.
But the question of their right to appeal their extradition remains unanswered.
Also, Vanuatu authorities are empowered to summarily remove a person’s passport under certain circumstances, but a person’s right to appeal the loss of citizenship remains.
NOTE: After this article appeared in the Vanuatu Daily Post, A PMO spokesman told the newspaper that in fact only four of the six Chinese nationals arrested had applied for citizenship. The newspaper originally reported that all six had applied, but that only four had been granted citizenship, with two applications still pending. This article has been updated to reflect the clarification.
The Pacific Media Centre’s Asia Pacific Report has a content sharing arrangement with the Vanuatu Daily Post.
Have you ever walked into the ocean from a stunning Australian beach and realised the sand was covered with hundreds of ticklish leaves? This submerged canopy is a seagrass meadow, and while you might see them as a nuisance to swim past, they’re a hidden treasure.
Seagrasses are the only group of flowering plants that have adapted to the marine environment. This group comprises nearly 60 species, which typically occupy tropical and temperate regions of the world distributed across 1,646,788 km2.
There is a disproportionately large number of temperate seagrass species in southern Australia, with Zostera species dominating extensive and very diverse meadows.
Eelgrass (Zostera muelleri) is one of the dominant meadow-forming species in Australia. It has the widest distribution of its family (Zosteraceae) in temperate Australian waters, and is vital to our oceans’ health.
The Conversation
Don’t call me weedy!
These aquatic plants have evolved myriad adaptations to survive in the seas, and contrary to what many people think, seagrasses are very different from seaweeds.
Seaweeds are comparatively simple organisms: they are macroalgae with no vascular tissue, which is what conducts water and nutrients throughout a plant. In comparison, eelgrass has leaves, root and rhizomes, with flowers, fruits and seeds for reproduction.
They do, however, share one thing. Seagrasses and seaweeds are “holobionts” – meaning that they each play host to a range of microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi and microalgae that help to support their health and survival.
Climate change is not just affecting the seagrass host; the entire holobiont and even the environment it occupies are suffering from rising temperatures.
Purple plants in warm waters
My research involves studying the response of seagrass and their associated microbes to environmental degradation. I realised how much warming oceans were affecting eelgrass when I suddenly came across purple shoots in a meadow I was sampling once a month.
I was shocked. I had never seen anything like it.
While previous research has described the phenomenon of seagrass leaf reddening, I’d never heard of seagrass going purple in this specific black-purple-white pattern.
We already knew that the eelgrass accumulates red pigments as a sunscreen against the increased UV radiation that results from ozone depletion and related consequences of climate change. My PhD (soon to be published) has found that this colour change has a strong effect on the microbial communities that live on seagrass leaves.
Seagrasses establish and maintain fundamental relationships with the microbes that live among them.Valentina Hurtado McCormick, Author provided
Why should we care?
Besides producing weird sensations on human feet, eelgrass and its counterparts are a crucial part of our coastal ecosystems. Probably the best example is their nursery role in supporting juvenile fish and crustaceans.
They also provide food for a wide range of grazers, from dugongs to the green sea turtle (as featured in the movie Finding Nemo), which feed on bounteous seagrass meadows.
I could keep writing about the virtues of Zostera species (and seagrasses in general) for much, much longer, but I will leave you with a single thought: we breathe and eat from a healthy ocean, and the ocean is not healthy without seagrass.
Not just grass under your feet
Seagrass is so protective, I think of them as one of the most altruistic plants on the planet. They keep waterborne pathogens in check and neutralise harmful bacteria, keeping coral reefs healthy, and acting as an important part of the ocean’s well-being.
On the other hand, these aquatic plants also help preserve human heritage. They create a thick sediment layer on the seafloor, beneath which shipwrecks and other treasures are buried and protected from decomposition.
For some 400 million years, eelgrass and other seagrass species have protected the ocean, our planet, and the creatures who live here.
In return, we have managed to create uncountable ways to directly or indirectly threaten seagrass-based ecosystems. As a result, meadows have declined globally at the accelerated rate of 7% per year.
For many of us, seagrass meadows are simply an obstacle to get past on the way to the waves. But for those of us who spend our days with a snorkel and collection tubes, these little watery plants mean far more. When I look at a single seagrass leaf, I see an entire microcosm of interacting entities.
