Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Daly, PhD Candidate & Casual Lecturer in Urban Design, University of Melbourne

Successful city squares act as nodes that connect places. They facilitate flows of people going about their daily lives through them as much, if not more, than they attract people to them. These flows enable the kind of random encounters Jane Jacobs saw as the lifeblood of cities.

Melbourne’s Federation Square is a destination, rather than a node through which everyday life flows. To argue that tenancies, programming, governance and funding alone are behind the square’s problems is to ignore the basic issue that underpins the need for them in the first place. Federation Square was always going to struggle as a public space because it always needed to draw people to it, rather than through it.

Read more: For what shall it profit a city if it loses its civic soul? A plea to preserve Melbourne’s Fed Square

What about everyday life in Federation Square?

As part of research exploring intercultural encounter in the public spaces of Western cities, I spent more than 200 hours in 2017 and 2018 observing and documenting life in Federation Square. I also interviewed its designers, managers and users.

The patterns of occupation and use are very consistent. Most people are tourists and visitors, rather than locals. They walk around, take photographs and leave. Few linger.

Some occupy the edge of the plaza at lunchtime, but the most occupied area is the part of the plaza that faces the city. This is no coincidence; people want to observe other people.

On occasion, large groups occupy the plaza, mainly school groups during weekdays and AFL fans on the weekend. Otherwise, it is relatively quiet.

Several factors constrain how people use the plaza. Security guards enforce rules that prohibit many everyday practices, like ball playing, skateboarding and busking. Extensive use of CCTV aids enforcement.

The topography is challenging for the mobility impaired, while the surface of the plaza is challenging for anyone on wheels or in heels. Not much can take place without a permit.

In other words, Federation Square operates like a venue, not a public space.

My research also showed that these factors have a disproportionate impact on local minority ethnic groups. Several interviewees reported feeling out of place. They felt unworthy of a space that is, for them, “too fancy” and unaffordable. For these groups, Federation Square is like the beautifully designed, highly curated home full of expensive furniture and artworks, rather than the somewhat messy but cosy family home.

Read more: Neighbourhood living rooms – we can learn a lot from European town squares

So why do Melburnian’s love Federation Square?

Melburnians love Federation Square for the same reasons that the Victorian state government built it in the first place; it has significant symbolic capital. This is also why Apple wanted to locate there and not in a dozen other viable places in the city.

Melbourne had always lacked an icon, a symbol of the city, something to identify itself to a global audience. It also lacked a civic square. The centenary of Federation in 2001 offered an opportunity to address both.

Apple understood this. Locating one of these “Town Square” flagship stores in Federation Square would position them within of the most recognisable places in (what was then) the world’s “most liveable city”. The Apple controversy can therefore be better understood as a battle for the square’s symbolic capital.

However, it also holds significant symbolic value for the general public – as the civic square so long denied to them since Hoddle first laid out the grid and deliberately excluded public squares. The community campaign slogan against the Apple proposal – “Our City, Our Square” – pointedly captured this symbolic status.

How to (not) fix Federation Square?

The Victorian government’s recently announced review of the future of Federation Square is a clear admission the square is failing. Such a review will have to include recommendations to fix these failings. But how?

The dictionary defines the verb “to fix” as “to make firm, stable, or stationary” or “to give a permanent or final form to”. The recent heritage protection given to Federation Square, which arose out of the Apple controversy and ultimately ended its proposed tenancy, comes with the risk of locking in the future form, uses and role of the square.

Fixing Federation Square will be significantly more challenging than finding the “right” tenancies or changing how the space is governed and financed. Resolving the obvious urban design problems will mean developing over the rail yard to the east – a site perhaps more suited for Apple’s town square concept – to draw everyday life through Fed Square. It will also require changing the role of Flinders Street and Swanston Street-Princes Bridge to create more connections for pedestrians. It could also entail a significant redesign of the existing square.

Federation Square was always going to struggle because it relied on drawing people to it, rather than through it.

– ref. Apple controversy masks the real failures of Federation Square – http://theconversation.com/apple-controversy-masks-the-real-failures-of-federation-square-116995

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kris Gledhill, Professor of Law, Auckland University of Technology

A criminal trial for murder or manslaughter is the usual response to a criminal killing. Initially, the alleged perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque attacks, who The Conversation has chosen not to name, was charged with murder and attempted murder.

But last month New Zealand police announced a charge of carrying out a terrorist act had been added. This followed discussion between the police, the crown solicitor for Christchurch and Crown Law, the government’s in-house legal firm headed by the solicitor-general.

Read more: Charging the Christchurch mosque attacker with terrorism could be risky – but it’s important

The offence of engaging in a terrorist act can only be prosecuted if the attorney-general consents, which explains why central government was involved. This is the first time an alleged terrorist faces trial in NZ.

Terrorism charge adds complexity

A terrorism act is criminal under section 6A of the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002. This law was introduced to implement New Zealand’s obligations under international treaties and decisions made by the United Nations, particularly in response to significant terrorist activity during recent decades.

In its original form, it created various terrorism-related offences, such as belonging to or supporting groups that committed terrorist acts, but did not make it criminal to carry out a terrorist act. This offence was added by the Terrorism Suppression Amendment Act 2007.

Criminal offences usually involve a criminal act and also a criminal state of mind. The mass shooting is the basis for the allegation of a terrorist act. For the necessary criminal mindset, two things are required: an intention to induce terror, and a purpose of advancing an ideology or political or religious cause.

This is more complex than the original murder and attempted murder charges. While the criminal act is essentially the same, the mindset question is different. In murder and attempted murder charges, the question is whether there was an intention to kill, which is much narrower.

TV homicide dramas, particularly those from the USA, often have a focus on the motive or purpose of a defendant. But a motive is usually just a way of allowing the prosecutor to show the killing must have been deliberate. In a terrorism charge, it becomes central.

Read more: Establishing fitness to stand trial as the first step in Christchurch attack court process

Risk of grandstanding

The additional terrorism charge does not add to the maximum sentence available. It is life imprisonment for murder and for engaging in a terrorist act. The Sentencing Act 2002 requires a life sentence for murder unless exceptional circumstances make that manifestly unjust.

A life sentence is usually a sentence with two parts, one being a minimum that has to be served for punishment and a second based on the risk of further offending. In short, the person remains in prison for at least the punishment period and thereafter until the Parole Board thinks they are safe to be released. This can be never.

For a murder conviction, the minimum term must be at least 17 years if it was a murder committed as part of a terrorist act. The same applies if there are two or more murder charges. The punishment period may also be the rest of the life of the accused person, meaning that release is never considered. Multiple murders in a terrorist context will be an obvious candidate for such a sentence.

What, then, are the justifications from a prosecution perspective for adding the terrorism charge? The thought pattern is likely to have been along the lines of simply being accurate about what the prosecution thinks the evidence shows.

There is a solid democratic basis for this in that parliament has decided that it is appropriate to criminalise a terrorist act, including when it involves murder. Prosecutors should therefore look to identify and prosecute a case that fits the description set out in the statute.

What of the risks? First, it will likely extend the length of the trial, without adding to the sentencing options. Second, by requiring proof of motive and ideology, there is a risk of providing a platform for grandstanding.

The issues in relation to murder and attempted murder are very focused and the judge can control any efforts to go beyond them. The same should apply to the terrorism charge. There is no defence that the ideology was justified. Nevertheless, having to prove the motivation will inevitably mean the exposure of hateful ideas.

– ref. Explainer: what the additional terrorism charge means for mosque attack trial – http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-the-additional-terrorism-charge-means-for-mosque-attack-trial-117815

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin Zobel, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Graduate & International Research, University of Melbourne

This article is part of our occasional long read series Zoom Out, where authors explore key ideas in science and technology in the broader context of society and humanity.

When Australia joined the global internet on June 23, 1989 – via a connection made by the University of Melbourne – it was mostly used by computer scientists.

Three decades later, more than 86% of Australian households are connected to the internet.

But it was a slow start. At first, network capacity was limited to very small volumes of information.

This all changed thanks to the development of vastly more powerful computers, and other technologies that have transformed our online experience.

One of those technologies is probably in front of you now: the screen.

Look at how you view the web, email and apps today: not just on large desktop screens but also handheld devices, and perhaps even an internet-connected wristwatch.

This was barely imaginable 30 years ago.

Connected to the world

By the time Australia first connected, the internet had been developing for 20 years. The very first network had been turned on in the United States in 1969.

Australia too had networks during the 1980s, but distance and a lack of interest from commercial providers meant these were isolated from the rest of the world.

This first international link provided 0.5 megabits of national connectivity. Just half a megabit for the whole country! Today that would only only be enough for, in total, four Australians to simultaneously access music from an overseas streaming service (encoded at 128kbs), or for just one movie to be transferred to Australia per day.

But at that time digital music, video and images were not distributed online. Nor was the internet servicing a large community. Most of the users were academics or researchers in computer science or physics.

With continuous connection came live access. The most immediate impact was that email could now be delivered immediately.

At first, email and internet news groups (discussion forums) were the main traffic, but the connection also gave access to information sharing services such as Archie (an old example here) and WAIS, which were mostly used to share software.

There was connection too, in principle at least, to the newly created world wide web, which in June 1989 was just three months old and largely unknown. It wouldn’t become significant for another four years or so.

This turning-on of a connection was not a “light in a darkened room” moment, in which we suddenly had access to the resources that are now so familiar to us.

But it was a crucial step, one of several developments maturing in parallel that created the technology that has so drastically transformed our society, commerce and daily lives. Within just a few years we were surfing the web and sending email from home.

The technology develops

The first of these developments was the internet itself, which was and is a cobbling-together of disparate networks around the globe.

Australia had several networks, ranging from the relatively open ACSNET (now called AARNET) created by computer science departments to connect universities to, at the other extreme, proprietary, secure networks operated by defence and industry.

When Melbourne opened that first link, it provided a bridge from ACSNET to the networks in the United States and from there to the rest of the world.

Just as important were developments in the underlying technology. At the time, the capacity of the networks was adequate – just. As the community of users rapidly grew, it sometimes seemed as though the internet might utterly break down.

By the mid-1990s bandwidth (the volume of digital traffic that a network can carry) increased to an extent that earlier had seemed unimaginable. This provided the data transmission infrastructure the web would come to demand.

Another development was computing hardware. Computers were doubling in speed every 18 months, as had been predicted. They also became much cheaper.

Computer disks were also growing in capacity, doubling in size every year or so. The yet-to-appear web would require disk space for storage of web pages, and compute capacity for running servers, which are applications that provide a door into a computer, giving users remote access to data and software.

In the 1980s these had been scarce, expensive resources that would have been overwhelmed by even small volumes of web traffic. By the early 1990s growth in capacity could – just – accommodate the demand that suddenly appeared and homes were being connected, via dial-up at first.

A new operating system

But it is a third concurrent development that is, to me, the most remarkable.

This is the emergence of the UNIX operating system and of a community of people who collaboratively wrote UNIX-based code for free (yes, for no charge). Their work provided what is arguably the core of the systems that underpin the modern world.

UNIX was created by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and a small number of colleagues at AT&T Bell Labs, in the US, from 1970.

At that time, operating systems (like iOS on today’s Apple phones) were limited to a single type of computer. Code and programs could not be used across machines from different manufacturers.

UNIX, in contrast, could be used on any suitable machine. This is the reason UNIX variants continue to provide the core of Apple Mac computers, Android phones, systems such as inflight entertainment and smart TVs, and many billions of other devices.

The open source movement

Along with UNIX came a culture of collaborative code development by programmers. This was initially via sharing of programs sent on tape between institutions as parcels in the mail. Anyone with time to spare could create programs and share them with a community of like-minded users.

This became known as the open source movement. Many thousands of people helped develop software of a diversity and richness that was beyond the resources of any single organisation. And it was not driven by commercial or corporate needs.

Programs could embody speculative innovations, and any developer who was frustrated by errors or shortcomings in the tools they used could update or correct them.

A key piece of open source software was the server, a computer system in a network shared by multiple users. Providing anonymous users with remote access was far from desirable for commercial computers of the era, on which use of costly computing time was tightly controlled.

But in an academic, sharing, open environment such servers were a valuable tool, at least for computer scientists, who were the main users of university computers in that era.

Another key piece of open source software was the router, which allowed computers on a network to collaborate in directing network requests and responses between connected machines anywhere on the planet.

Servers had been used for email since the beginnings of the internet and initially it was email, delivered with the help of routers, that brought networked desktop computing into homes and businesses.

When the web was proposed, extending these servers to allow the information from web page servers to be sent to a user’s computer was a small step.

What you looking at?

The last component is so ubiquitous that we forget what is literally before our eyes: the screen.

Affordable computer displays in the 1980s were much too limited to pleasingly render a web page, with resolutions of 640×480 pixels or lower, with crude colours or just black and white. Better screens, starting at 1024×768, first became widely available in the early 1990s.

Only with the appearance of the Mosaic browser in 1993 did the web become appealing, with a pool of about 100 web sites showing how to deliver information in a way that for most users was new and remarkably compelling.

The online world continues to grow and develop with access today via cable, wireless and mobile handsets. We have internet-connected services in our homes, cars, health services, government, and much more. We live-stream our music and video, and share our lives online.

But the origin of that trend of increasing digitisation of our society lies in those simple beginnings – and the end is not yet in sight.

– ref. 30 years since Australia first connected to the internet, we’ve come a long way – http://theconversation.com/30-years-since-australia-first-connected-to-the-internet-weve-come-a-long-way-118998

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Klugman, Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, Institute of Sport, Exercise and Active Living, Victoria University

In 1890, a columnist for the Queenscliff Sentinel, an early Victorian newspaper, sardonically announced that the raucous noise of barrackers at footy matches was one of the wonders of the world:

What a babel of sound! What a magnificent uproar! What a glorious cloud-shattering eruption of profanity!

Today, the Australian Football League feels quite differently about the unbridled enthusiasm of supporters at games, and in recent weeks, has sought to quell this profane uproar. In a perplexing move that was widely mocked by fans, the league dispatched “Behavioural Awareness Officers” in high-vis vests to patrol venues for barrackers who were being too loud or otherwise offensive.

It was a heavy-handed approach that backfired. On Wednesday, the AFL chief executive, Gillon McLachlan, apologised to

people who are going along to the football to have a day out who feel that they haven’t been able to do that.

Yet, McLachlan was at pains to emphasise that the AFL’s philosophy on crowd behaviour remained unchanged.

We want our fans to come to the footy and be themselves. Equally, we want the men, women and children of our game to feel safe.

The ‘delightful privilege’ of abusing umpires

This issue has been a long-standing dilemma for sport officials as long as Australian rules football and other sports have excited the passions of crowds.

When Australian rules football became a mass-spectator sport in the late 1800s, the game’s fans became infamous for their emotional outbursts during matches. They yelled, stamped, prayed, grieved, and celebrated with gusto.

In Melbourne, the birthplace of Australian rules football, the word “barrack” was coined to describe the way supporters jeered and shouted abuse, especially at umpires.

It was not a compliment. Like other sports fans, the barrackers who started flocking to football matches were pathologised by newspaper columnists. To them, barrackers seemed sick, fevered, even mad.

There were concerns that barrackers threatened the safety of umpires, players and other supporters. But there was also money to be made from such madness. Obsessed fans not only paid to attend games, they consumed everything related to their teams, such as media and merchandise.

Read more: To eliminate misogyny, the AFL needs social change, not just crisis management

Over time, the turbulent emotions of sports fans became more tolerated. In 1888, Victorian Football Association secretary TS Marshall, the most powerful football official of the time, signalled the new public attitude toward barracking when he described it as

the delightful privilege of abusing umpires, and players to the top of his bent.

Soon, to “barrack” would come to mean “support” (albeit loudly and offensively). Yelling remained a central component to barracking throughout the years, as the Collingwood Football Club song made clear from 1906.

See the barrackers a shouting, as all barrackers should.

When barracking turned ugly

For over half a century, the sometimes vitriolic nature of barracking did not overly trouble Australian football officials. But in the 1980s, concern grew over the way many spectators were using the “delightful privilege” of barracking to racially abuse Indigenous players.

Matters came to a head in 1993 when Nicky Winmar lifted his St Kilda jumper and pointed with pride to his dark skin after being vilified by Collingwood supporters.

After initially downplaying the problem, the AFL moved to outlaw racial and religious vilification by both players and fans. Their actions were widely lauded, and AFL administrators believed the problem was largely contained. Some clubs banned barrackers for racist abuse, but overall, the problem didn’t seem as entrenched as the racial vilification of black football players in much of Europe.

In 2015, however, AFL barrackers turned booing into “an act of racial hatred” directed at the Indigenous player Adam Goodes.

Read more: Booing Adam Goodes – racism is in the stitching of the AFL

Goodes, one of the greatest men to play the game, was made to feel unsafe. To their shame, the AFL and most clubs responded defensively, unwilling to call the booing racist. Goodes soon retired from the game.

A reactive, ineffective approach

It is this sense of shame that has framed the AFL’s current crackdown on barracking.

Earlier this month, The Final Quarter, a documentary chronicling the vilification of Goodes, was released. On the same day, the AFL issued an unreserved apology for failing to support Goodes when he was being booed during his final season as a player.

One day later, a barracker was evicted from a Carlton-Brisbane game for yelling “bald-headed flog” at an umpire. Later that long weekend, a Collingwood fan was warned that his barracking was too loud and he would be evicted if he continued to shout. Soon after, the “Behavioural Awareness Officers” started patrolling the crowds for unruly fans.

The AFL clearly wanted to stop the behaviour of some barrackers from making other spectators feel unsafe. But the change in policy felt too arbitrary and reactionary – the league did not consult, explain or seek to educate AFL supporters about it.

The result was confusion, angst and resentment among fans. To many, a core aspect of barracking – the “delightful privilege” of shouting out at umpires and players – was under threat. The issue began dominating conversations about football. And the league, perhaps concerned about the damage to its brand, quickly backed down.

The AFL is frequently celebrated for the inclusivity of its fan culture, especially the large percentage of female fans. Yet, the shouts of barrackers are regularly sexist and homophobic. This makes some spectators feel unsafe and unwelcome at games. The league needs to address this.

Read more: Racial abuse is rife in junior sports – and little is being done to address it

But a blanket ban on vociferous barracking is not the answer. Instead, the AFL needs to work with its passionate fans, rather than against them. It needs to demonstrate to fans how certain forms of abuse create unsafe environments, and to set clear limits indicating what forms of abuse are unacceptable beyond racial and religious vilification.

At issue are the values of the league and the effects of certain words. Challenging questions need to be asked and answered. Is it OK to call an umpire a “bald-headed flog”? Is it OK to tell a male player that he kicks “like a girl”?

This is too important an issue to be addressed in a hurried and reactive manner. The “magnificent uproar” of footy has been a central part of the game for over 100 years. It should remain so, but in a way that neither threatens nor vilifies others.

– ref. Loud, obnoxious and at times racist: the sordid history of AFL barracking – http://theconversation.com/loud-obnoxious-and-at-times-racist-the-sordid-history-of-afl-barracking-119080

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dr Violetta Wilk, Lecturer & Researcher in Digital Marketing, Edith Cowan University

It’s a simple building. A shed, really. You can’t go inside, and even if you could, there’s nothing in there. For decades it was derelict, an eyesore to which locals paid little attention.

But this humble boat shed, on the shore of the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia, has become a social media superstar. Known around the world simply as the #blueboathouse, since being restored in the early 2000s it has become Perth’s second-most popular spot for tourist selfies.

On Instagram there are now more than 15,000 #blueboathouse-tagged posts. That’s still less than half the 81,000 posts for Elizabeth Quay, the city’s purpose-built entertainment and leisure precinct, but the quay did cost the state government A$440 million to build, compared with nothing for the privately owned boat shed.

It will, though, now cost Perth’s city council A$400,000 to build a public toilet near the boat shed, due to the sheer volume of Insta-happy visitors. An Insta-toilet, if you will.

In terms of value for marketing dollars, it’s a bargain.

Between Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tripadvisor and other social media, the #blueboathouse has generated global awareness about Perth potentially worth millions of dollars. Tourism advertising gurus could brainstorm for months and not come up with something as cheap or effective.

It signifies the profound effect that social media is having on consumer markets, the rise of organic marketing and the phenomenon of “unpaid influencers”.

The rise of the unpaid influencer

As a researcher, I am fascinated by this phenomenon, which sees everyday consumers (tourists, in this case) become advocates for the brands or destinations they have experienced. In marketing we call them “online brand advocates”. They are a brand’s most authentic marketing investment.

Tourism provides a textbook example of the way social media is blurring the boundary between media use and marketing. With the selfie now the virtual vehicle for instantly sharing holiday happy snaps and proving “I was there”, platforms such as Instagram have become powerful dictators of what’s hot. Each day Instagram users post 95 million photos and videos. Some of these posts, bound by a hashtag, inspire emulation.

Selfie-taking has been embraced by Asian cultures. Chinese and Japanese social media users refer to “ASS” – Asian Selfie Spots. Becoming recognised as such a spot can be a transformative experience for a local economy.

Read more: #MeTourism: the hidden costs of selfie tourism

But wait, you ask, has the chance to visit a boat shed really led someone in, say, Beijing, to book a ticket to Perth rather than Las Vegas?

Another unlikely Asian Selfie Spot in Australia suggests it might have.

This is Sea Lake, in northwest Victoria.

It is one of the state’s most isolated towns, and also one of its smallest, with a population of about 600. Its name comes from the nearby Lake Tyrrell, which most of the year is effectively a salt lake.

Until a couple of years ago, Sea Lake was not on anyone’s list of must-visit locations.

But then some photos of what happens in winter, when the shallow, salty depression of Lake Tyrrell is covered in a few centimetres of water, changed all that.

A trickle of Chinese tourists turned into a relative flood, inspiring new investment and an economic boost for a drought-stricken community in decline.

Seeking authenticity

The influence of platforms like Instagram was recognised reasonably quickly by commercial interests. It led to a whole new industry of “influencers” – social media personalities with large followings who take cash or gifts to promote brands. Sometimes they are upfront about the fact they are being paid to spruik products; sometimes they are not.

The influencer market worth is difficult to calculate, and 2020 predictions range anywhere from US$2.3 billion to US$16.6 billion.

But even as it is reportedly growing exponentially, there’s also a growing feeling that the paid-influencer market is perverting what social media is meant to be about – engagement with authentic storytelling. Instagram has recognised this shift and earlier this year trialled removing “likes” and follower numbers as a means to limit people cashing in on their popularity.

Read more: Why do people risk their lives for the perfect selfie?

Against the paid influencers, we see the rise of the unpaid influencers. They generate organic, authentic social media exposure; and because they’re just like you or me (they might even be you or me) they’re highly relatable and trustworthy.

More and more they inform the decisions we make, from choosing a restaurant to booking a holiday.

So perhaps take another look at that local derelict building or dried-up lake. You never know, it might just be a future tourist hotspot waiting to happen.

– ref. How a humble Perth boathouse became Australia’s most unlikely tourist attraction – http://theconversation.com/how-a-humble-perth-boathouse-became-australias-most-unlikely-tourist-attraction-119079

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alyssa Weinstein, PhD Candidate, Australian National University

All living things are divided into six kingdoms: plants, animals, fungi, protists (protozoa and some algae), and two types of bacteria – eubacteria and archaebacteria.

The idea of being able to send instructions to organisms in different kingdoms is fascinating. Imagine telling mould to stop growing on your bread, or instructing your lawn not to grow higher than 10 cm.

Communication within a kingdom is hard enough – can you stop your cat vomiting on the floor? The more distantly organisms are related to one another, the more different the signals they use to communicate.

Despite this difficulty, some creatures do manage to send instructions across the kingdom barrier, all thanks to some clever chemistry.

Read more: Warty hammer orchids are sexual deceivers

Cunning orchids con wasps

One fine day in the 1920s, the now-famed Australian naturalist Edith Coleman brought some Cryptostylis orchids home from the bush, and made a fascinating discovery. Something strange was going on in her garden.

She was shocked to discover the orchids were attracting a plethora of bright orange male wasps which appeared to be trying to mate with the orchids. During their futile efforts, the insects inadvertently pollinated the flowers. This is useful for the orchid, but not for the wasps, who are wasting valuable time, effort, and sperm that were destined for partners of their own species.

Coleman had a hunch that chemistry was involved, so she set up an experiment to prove her hypothesis: covering flowers in muslin cloth to remove visual signals and leaving just floral scent to lead the wasps to the flowers. She was right – wasps were still attracted to flowers covered in cloth.

Almost 100 years later, my colleagues and I have proved Coleman right and discovered the specific chemical compound the orchids use to trick wasps into approaching them.

Working this out meant isolating one of the hundreds of chemical compounds in an orchid. To do this, we let the wasps choose.

We extracted all the compounds from flowers using a solvent, and then divided that into lots of smaller extracts. Each extract was then presented to the wasps to see whether they turned their nose up at it or not. It was very exciting when wasps picked a particular extract by flying up to it!

We then took these “wasp-selected” extracts and divided them into even smaller parts until we only had one tiny extract left, containing a single compound.

Fungi hitch a ride with bark beetles

Animals have spread around the world thanks to their mobility, be it walking, flying, or swimming. Dispersal is more of a problem for fungi – have you ever seen a self-propelled mushroom?

Most fungi rely on the wind to blow their spores to new destinations. A portion of the millions of spores will land somewhere suitable, such as a moist forest floor.

But what if you were a fungus that wanted to go somewhere more specific – say, the inside of a tree? Well, some resourceful European fungi have got this one figured out.

These fungi live inside pine trees, feeding on the wood, which eventually kills the tree. When this happens, the fungi need to move house, so they use some clever chemistry to call a beetle taxi to take them to their new home.

The fungi produce a mixture of chemical compounds that attract tree-boring beetles. The beetles prefer to chew on trees containing the scent-producing fungi, and when they eventually move on to new trees they take the fungi with them.

So what is in this magic chemical mixture that attracts beetles? It turns out one of the components of the mix is actually a compound that beetles use to communicate with each other.

This compound is a beetle aggregation pheromone, which beetles release when they’re hanging out to let other beetles know that they can come and hang out too. So when the fungi release this compound, they are inviting beetles to come and hang out so that the fungi can hitch a ride to the next tree.

So what can we do with this curious chemical knowledge?

The combination of beetles and fungi feeding on the pine trees can be very destructive, and causes major economic losses to pine plantations. Knowing the chemicals involved in attracting the beetles to trees is a major step forward in protecting the trees, as humans can then use these chemicals to trick beetles by attracting them to scented traps instead of trees.

For our orchid example, having a compound that attracts pollinators can help conserve rare orchids, such as Cryptostylis hunteriana. Rare orchids sometimes need to be translocated – a process in which new orchid populations are started by introducing individuals into suitable habitat.

For an orchid habitat to be suitable, it’s very important that it contains the species that pollinate the plant. Pollinator-attracting compounds can be used to survey potential translocation sites to work out if pollinators are present.

Other research moves underwater for an application. Scientists have decoded the mating pheromones of reef-destroying crown of thorn starfish, and hope to use this to lure the starfish en masse into traps.

Read more: Love connection: breakthrough fights crown-of-thorns starfish with pheromones

Aside from these direct uses, understanding these unique ecological interactions gives us insights into evolutionary processes and the complexity of the fascinating natural world in which we live.

– ref. Curious cases of chemical cross-kingdom communication – http://theconversation.com/curious-cases-of-chemical-cross-kingdom-communication-119166

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Luckman, Senior Research Officer, Centre for Higher Education Equity & Diversity Research, La Trobe University

In recent days, the Productivity Commission released its evaluation of the demand-driven funding system for universities. From around 2009, until the funding model was suspended in 2017, universities were free to enrol unlimited numbers of students in most undergraduate courses.

The Commissioned described the policy as a “mixed report card”. It argued the demand-driven system led to increased participation from students from low socio-economic backgrounds, but that it didn’t improve access for regional or Indigenous Australians.

In reality though, Indigenous student enrolments rose dramatically under the demand-driven system.

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

Indigenous university starters are older

The Commission’s report draws almost exclusively on data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Youth (LSAY), which covers people aged between 15 and 25. But student data from the Higher Education Information Management System (HEIMS) shows undergraduate Indigenous students are considerably older when they start university than their non-Indigenous counterparts.

The below chart shows only 42.3% of Indigenous students started university aged 19 or younger, compared with 57.5% of non-Indigenous students.

Our analysis also shows 36% of Indigenous students started university aged older than 25, which makes them outside the cutoff for the LSAY dataset. This is compared with only 21% of non-Indigenous students. This means the Commission’s analysis under-reports Indigenous participation.

Rise in Indigenous student enrolments

The federal government’s data on student enrolments show a dramatic increase in Indigenous students starting university between 2009 and 2017, the years the demand-driven system was active.

Over this period, the number of Indigenous students starting university more than doubled, while the total number of domestic undergraduates starting university increased by only around 50%.

The below chart shows 2,786 undergraduate Indigenous students started university in 2008. This increased to 5,867 by 2017.

During the period of the demand-driven system, the Indigenous university participation rate increased from 1.5% to 2%, although this remains well below population parity of 3.3%.

There are also early signs that the expansion of Indigenous students starting university slowed in 2018, which was the first year the demand-driven system was suspended.

Read more: Labor wants to restore ‘demand driven’ funding to universities: what does this mean?

Student achievement remained the same

The rapid increase in Indigenous students starting university also came without an obvious decline in student achievement. Department of Education data, which outlines the completion rate for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students six years after they started their degree, shows the completion rate for Indigenous students remained relatively similar over the duration of the demand-driven years.

This contrasts with the slight decline in the achievement of the non-Indigenous cohort over the same period. However, as the below chart shows, there remains a substantial gap in the completion rates of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

Both the success and retention performance indicators for Indigenous students show a similar trend. There is a large gap in achievement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, but there has been consistent improvement in these indicators over the past nine years.

Again, this suggests the rapid increase in Indigenous enrolments did not come at the cost of academic standards or performance.

The above chart also highlights Indigenous students typically progress through their courses at a slower pace than non-Indigenous students. Six years after starting their qualification, 16.5% of Indigenous students were still studying, compared to only 11.9% of non-Indigenous students.

Gaps in access and achievement remain unacceptable, as does the ongoing racism and discrimination faced by many Indigenous staff and students. Universities Australia has acknowledged many of these issues in its Indigenous Strategy but deeper institutional and government reform is required.

Read more: Laying pathways for greater success in education for Indigenous Australians

However, the demand-driven system itself certainly improved Indigenous participation in higher education. Restoring the system should be a high policy priority.

– ref. Three charts on: how uncapped university funding actually boosted Indigenous student numbers – http://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-how-uncapped-university-funding-actually-boosted-indigenous-student-numbers-119082

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Neema Nassir, Lecturer, University of Melbourne

“When will driverless cars be out on the streets?” I’m often asked this question and I usually refrain from answering it. Before we ask when, we should ask ourselves what do we need from autonomous vehicles?

One answer is “suburban mobility”. It’s among the most critical challenges we face in Australian cities, and automated vehicles could offer a solution.

Read more: We must plan the driverless city to avoid being hostage to the technology revolution

In particular, automated services – either expanded and frequent fixed-route services feeding major transit hubs, or flexible mobility-on-demand door-to-door trips – could stop the downward spiral of suburban public transport.

Reviving suburban bus services

Australia’s population is expected to grow by 50% over the next 30 years. Much of this growth will be in the outer suburbs of capital cities. Almost half of our population already lives in these suburbs.

Given the growth of the suburbs, efficient mobility in these areas is essential for economic growth on par with the population. The future sustainability and livability of our cities also depend on efficient mobility options.

A 2018 Infrastructure Australia report identified the inefficiency and shortage of public transport in our suburbs as a problem.

At present, as a result of inadequate public transport and car-oriented developments, suburban residents depend heavily on private cars. Combined with rapid suburban growth, the heavy reliance on cars will lead to massive increases in traffic congestion and delays. This will cause heavy economic and environmental costs.

An effective public transport system can curb the dominance of private cars and serve as a competitive alternative that can meet our future mobility needs more sustainably and equitably. Frequent and accessible bus services in expanded suburbs, including connections to the rail network, are essential. At present, public transport is used for only about 5% of trips by suburban households.

Read more: Designing suburbs to cut car use closes gaps in health and wealth

A problem of costs

The problem is that suburban bus services typically fail to recover their operating costs from fare revenue. This is due to sparse ridership, longer travel distances and, most importantly, labour-intensive bus operations.

As a result, these services are uneconomical, often scarce, and depend heavily on government subsidies. Rising labour costs and worsening traffic congestion (leading to more driver hours required for the same service) mean bus operation becomes increasingly expensive.

Budget deficits can trigger service cuts and fare hikes, which in turn lead to ridership declines and further revenue losses. We see this “downward spiral” for bus services around the world (for examples, see here, here, and here).

A comprehensive analysis of 25 North American cities found a sharp decline in public transport ridership over the past few years. This was mainly due to reduced bus services.

Without significant interventions, growing suburban populations will be either forced to drive or excluded from societal opportunities.

Read more: Don’t forget buses: six rules for improving city bus services

Autonomous opportunity

Automated vehicle technology presents an unprecedented opportunity to transform the suburban public transport system into an effective substitute for private cars.

We can expect 40-60% savings in operational costs from driverless buses. With options of smaller vehicles and larger fleets of automated buses and shuttles, public authorities could afford to deliver more frequent, flexible services to a wider suburban area.

Such improvements would reduce passenger waiting times and walking distances – the main deterrents for users – and so could increase ridership and revenue. These outcomes can create a virtuous cycle for suburban services, leading potentially to self-sufficiency for suburban public transport.

In 2015, the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE) estimated the societal costs of traffic congestion in Australian major cities at A$16.5 billion a year. This was projected to reach A$27 billion to A$37 billion by 2030. Automated vehicles could lower this cost.

A well-connected network can encourage people to give up private cars for public transport. Autonomous vehicles can be used to make suburban bus services more frequent and accessible, providing mobility for a growing suburban population that is prone to car-dependency. These bus services can improve connectivity to rail and give individuals access to economic opportunities, education, health care and social activities without having to drive.

Read more: Driverless cars really do have health and safety benefits, if only people knew

So when will these buses be on our streets?

Automated buses have been tested in real-world trials to identify and overcome barriers to deployment, including safety, technology and legal issues. Most of these have been in Europe, but Australia has had several trials in Adelaide, as well as in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Darwin, Canberra and a few regional centres.

These trials clearly demonstrate that, given adequate planning and investment, fully automated buses – particularly those running on fixed routes and dedicated lanes – can operate commercially now. Flexible-route, automated services mixed with regular traffic may take longer to become a reality.

– ref. Driverless buses can help end the suburbs’ public transport woes – http://theconversation.com/driverless-buses-can-help-end-the-suburbs-public-transport-woes-117258

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

Amid all the fanfare around New Zealand’s so-called “well-being budget”, you would be forgiven for thinking our neighbour to the east had revolutionised its priorities and how to measure them.

Let’s recap. During the midst of Australia’s federal election campaign in late May, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern unveiled a budget framework in which spending on measures to tackle things such as mental health, domestic violence, homelessness and addiction would be treated as an investment.

Each of those would be goals in their own right, in addition to the usual goal of growth in gross domestic product.

In truth, the idea isn’t exactly new, and for years Australia’s treasury was among those leading the way.

Once were innovators

For decades Australia’s treasury has put these words at the heart of its mission statement:

to improve the well-being of the Australian people

In the decade leading up to 2016 they were accompanied by five specific yardsticks that constituted a little-publicised well-being framework.

The wording varied over time, but encompassed:

• the opportunity and freedom that allows individuals to lead lives of real value to them

• the level of consumption possibilities available to the community over time

• the distribution of outcomes across different social groups, geographic regions and generations

• the overall level and allocation of risk borne by individuals and, in aggregate, by the community

• the level of complexity confronting Australians in making decisions about their lives.

They were yardsticks that forced the treasury to consider access to resources as well as the amount of resources. They required it to consider sustainability as well as growth.

Then Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s appointee as treasury secretary John Fraser ditched it. As he told a 2016 Senate hearing, he wrote a different corporate plan “between 6 and 8.30 one night as I was waiting to go out to dinner”.

In his view all that really mattered was jobs and growth. “We are talking about living standards,” he said. “And if living standards are not about well-being, then I do not know what is.”

Read more: New Zealand’s ‘well-being budget’: how it hopes to improve people’s lives

Fraser told the Senate he had never known anyone to use the well-being framework since he had returned to the treasury from two decades in investment banking, and that it wasn’t much use unless it was used.

He might have been right. The treasury exists to serve the government of the day. It’s all very well having an internal framework to assess policy proposals, but if there government won’t embrace it, there’s little point.

Everything old…

The idea that gross domestic product doesn’t measure everything we can and should care about goes back to debates among economists and philosophers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In the 18th century, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed a “hedonic interpretation of utility” that was essentially based on pleasure and it’s opposite, pain:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.

Naturally he and his contemporaries were were a little vague about how to measure pleasure and pain. And as Australia’s treasury acknowledged up until 2016, there’s more to well-being than pleasure and pain anyway. Among other things, there’s also freedom.

In 2008 French President Nicholas Sarkozy set up a “Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress” to advise him on broader measures. One of its members was Nobel Prizewinner Amartya Sen, whose work was referenced in Australia’s well-being framework.

Read more: The search for an alternative to GDP to measure a nation’s progress – the New Zealand experience

In 2010 Britain’s Conservative prime minister Prime Minister David Cameron declared that it was time Britain focused not just on GDP but on GWB – “general wellbeing”.

No well-trained economist I know thinks GDP is a perfect measure of societal health. It’s both under-inclusive in that it fails to account for non-market production such as takes place within a household, including childcare and the production of breastmilk, and over-inclusive in that it treats pollution, carbon emissions and things such as infant formula as good even if their effects are bad.

But one thing that GDP has going for it is that it can measure well-being based on the choices people actually make. If someone is willing to pay A$4.50 for a latte from a certain coffee shop, that tells us something about what that latte does to their well-being.

Read more: Mental health wins record funding in New Zealand’s first ‘well-being budget’

Using this so-called “revealed preference approach” we can work out what matters to people based on what they do. Aggregating it up – 300 lattes, 211 bananas, two Teslas, and one partridge in pear tree and so on – should give us a good idea of how we are all going.

Except that some things don’t get counted, and, as Ardern points out, some things we do, such as overusing alcohol and drugs, we might be better off not doing.

…is new again

Ardern’s well-being budget is unfinished, but it’s a move in the right direction.

Human capital in the form of education, the environment, mental health and social capital are worth measuring and investing in.

Here at the University of NSW, Rosalind Dixon, and I have produced a framework for measuring social investments as part of the Grand Challenge on Inequality.

Across the Tasman, Ardern’s predecessor from the other side of politics Bill English prepared the way introducing social impact bonds that paid investors a return based on social outcomes.

Ardern is in good company. She has stolen a march on Australia.

– ref. Vital Signs: Once were Kiwis. Here’s the hidden history of Australia’s own well-being framework – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-once-were-kiwis-heres-the-hidden-history-of-australias-own-well-being-framework-119111

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Vatsikopoulos, Lecturer in Journalism, University of Technology Sydney

The inaugural Walkley Award for Media Diversity will be announced on June 26, and has had an impressive number of entries for what was once regarded as a niche area.

Diversity in the media is no longer just about minorities; it is well and truly a mainstream issue. Streaming company Netflix has appointed an executive to oversee its diversity and inclusion strategy.

British media companies like The Financial Times, The Telegraph and Sky are following suit. Research by McKinsey found that ethnically and culturally diverse companies had a 33% likelihood of outperforming others.

As we face a growing tide of unregulated hate speech, the role of the media is crucial in normalising diversity and demolishing the “othering” of difference that divides us. So how is the Australian media faring in the diversity stakes?

Last year, the Screen Diversity Inclusion Network (SDIN) introduced an inaugural award for producers and projects delivering diverse storytelling. It went to Ned Lander Media for the first Australian Indigenous animated children’s series “Little J and Big Cuz”, broadcast on NITV and ABC.

The screen diversity network represents the peak commercial network body FreeTV as well as the public broadcasters and national and state screen funding bodies; all 22 members have signed a charter to promote diversity.

SDIN spokeswoman Georgie McClean says things are changing. Network Ten and Screen Australia’s “Out Here” initiative, for instance, supports filmmakers with funds to make documentaries on LGBTQI+ communities in regional and rural Australia.

The Nine Network’s Today Show is fronted by two women; its entertainment reporter is Indigenous journalist Brooke Boney, and Syrian-born Sara Abo is a journalist on 60 Minutes. Channel Seven was recently given an international TV Excellence award for its portrayal of LGBTQ issues on Home and Away. It has also promoted female directors.

But there is still much work to be done in the journalistic sphere. Recent research by Deakin University academics, for instance, found that more than a third of media articles reflected negative views of minority communities.

The Media Diversity Walkley will award reporting that is nuanced enough to alter perceptions and attitudes, challenge stereotypes and fight misinformation. (The finalists are all ABC journalists). The Walkley Foundation created the award with the assistance of a non-profit organisation called Media Diversity Australia, set up by two ex-ABC employees, Isabel Lo and Antoinette Lattouf.

“It’s not a ‘brown award for brown people’ because all journalists irrespective of background have a responsibility to be fair and balanced in the often complex area of culture and disability reporting,” said Lattouf, director of the organisation and a senior reporter with Channel 10.

Media Diversity Australia has begun a diversity audit of free to air journalism across all Australian networks. From morning television to late night current affairs, it will interview content makers and senior editorial staff. The research will be carried out by several academics, including former Race Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane. As Latouff explains: “The academics will then draw on international comparisons and evaluate strategies that have worked abroad in places like Canada and the United Kingdom and America and make suggestions for local media outlets.”

So how much catching up has Australia got to do? Deborah Williams is the executive director of the UK’s Creative Diversity Network, which works to improve representation in the United Kingdom. Recently, she was asked this question by Professor Larissa Behrendt on ABC Radio.

Australia, she replied, “is where the UK was 20 years ago”. Both women then erupted into embarrassed giggles, agreeing there was still work to be done.

The importance of empathy

That diversity is good for business is well documented. Advertising campaigns now regularly feature diverse faces and blended families. But the media has an important role in reflecting difference and eliciting empathy for those from diverse backgrounds.

When the Easter Sri Lankan suicide bombings devastated a country that had only just emerged from a 30-year civil war, the world was shocked. But incredibly, according to Google Trends, there was up to nine times more search interest in the Paris Notre Dame fire than there was for the Christian dead in Sri Lanka within 24 hours of each event.

ABC journalist Avani Dias wrote a moving oped challenging our deficit of empathy for the victims of this bombing. “You may have also been at an Easter service or celebrating the holiday with your family,” she wrote. “This is relatable. … Maybe you haven’t travelled to Sri Lanka – it’s true that fewer Australians travel there than France – but all of this is relatable. All of this should be close to home.”

Relatability and empathy is what makes storytelling powerful. Brooke Boney is a young Gamilaroi Gomeroi woman who moved from morning radio on ABC Triple J’s Hack to Channel Nine’s Today Show. Within days of starting work there, she had made an impact.

For a moment, last January, I thought I was watching SBS when presenter Deborah Knight declared “we are a country with a diversity of cultures” and then threw to Boney for her thoughts on the significance of Australia Day.

“I can’t separate the 26th of January with the fact that my brothers are more likely to go to jail than they are to school,” said Boney. “Or that my little sister or my mum are more likely to be beaten and raped than anyone else’s sisters or mum. And that started from that day. So, for me it’s a difficult day and I don’t want to celebrate it … That is the day that it changed for us. What some people would say is the end. That’s the turning point.

The audience got a measured, normalised discussion and a dose of empathy. Co-host Georgie Gardner finished with, “Thank you for the insight Brooke”. And at breakfast tables across the country, a conversation was started.

Pigeonholing

The ABC should be commended for its work in hiring and training journalists like Boney and Dias, but it has a problem retaining them.

Media Diversity Australia has been conducting workshops in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and surveying former ABC staff of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Chair Isabel Lo says there is dissatisfaction in how some are treated at the national broadcaster.

One experienced reporter, she says, was often mistaken for a cadet or work experience junior. “They often feel pigeon-holed when it comes to stories they are enlisted to cover or when their opinion is sought.”

The ABC has had various programs in place aimed at achieving diversity in staff and content. Several years ago, there was the Diversity Action Group. That was disbanded and there is now a Diversity and Inclusion Standing Committee. It has series of interconnecting groups containing heads of departments at the top, who work across and down to diversity “champions”.

These are people representing women, Indigenous, disabled and LGBTIQ employees and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The champions are often consulted on broadcasting content issues relating to diversity.

But Isabel Lo says this can inadvertently lead to pigeonholing. “One reporter was continually referred to as Chinese and asked about Chinese New Year and for Mandarin translations, despite repeatedly telling them that is not where the individual’s family hails from, they are in fact Vietnamese.”

Done badly, diversity policies can backfire. According to former UK broadcaster Trevor Phillips, some efforts at diversity are “tokenistic” with many television stations “self-congratulating their efforts”.

Quoted in the Press Gazette, he said a lack of diversity at the top of the industry had led to “big mistakes”.

“Our efforts, I would be generous to describe them as tokenistic. The gap between the self-estimation in this field and its actual reality is probably wider than in any other sector I know.”

He said policy is driven by fear of being seen to be racist rather than actually facilitating equality of opportunity.

Is the ABC meeting its own diversity targets?

When Michelle Guthrie took over from Mark Scott as ABC managing director, she made a commitment to diversity a top priority. Speaking in October 2016, she stressed that diversity is key to relevance.

I have driven this issue hard in my first six months at the ABC. Not because as a daughter of Chinese Australian parents I can claim some sort of moral superiority on the issue. But it is because the ABC Board and I fervently believe that the national broadcaster can only truly reflect cultural diversity if it lives it.

But at the time of her departure three years later, her final Equity and Diversity Annual Report had failed to meet several long-held targets.

While targets for a required percentage of employees across the board to be women and Indigenous employees were met, the percentage of senior executive roles occupied by those from non-English speaking backgrounds fell to 10.2% (despite a target of 15%). Meanwhile, the percentage of content makers from a non-English speaking background rose marginally from 8.7% to 9% – well short of the 12% target.

The percentage of employees with disabilities – across the board – actually fell from 7% to 5.7%.

While the ABC publishes its diversity figures online, all other free to air television stations were also contacted for information on their diverse hires. Either none was available or emails were not returned.

After three email requests, SBS sent a response that was too late to be analysed properly for this publication. An SBS spokesman said 51% of employees speak a language other than English at home and 44% were born overseas. However, these figures also include the specialist language radio programs. The overall figure for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees is 4%, but this includes NITV. 14% of employees identify as being members of the LGBTIQ community and SBS took home brand of the year for the third year in a row at the LGBTI Awards.

I sent a list of questions to the ABC seeking a response to its diversity figures and to Media Diversity Australia’s claims about the pigeonholing of employees from culturally diverse backgrounds. An ABC spokesperson said having a diverse workforce is a strategic priority and a standing agenda item at every leadership team and board meeting. Said the spokeswoman:

There is clearly more work to do to achieve our goals and targets – particularly in relation to cultural diversity. Its disappointing the diversity measures we have in place haven’t yet had more of an impact on the representation of cultural diversity in our content making teams and that we fell short in our targets for the representation of NESB employees in our workforce.

The ABC endured debilitating funding cuts during Guthrie’s tenure, with an estimated accumulated reduction of $393 million over five years. The spokesperson says external pressures such as a climate of budget cuts and hiring freezes have affected the ABC’s ability to meet its diversity targets.

Following the most recent headcount freeze, initiated in early July 2018, the number of jobs advertised externally dropped from 64% (in the second quarter) to 28% (in the third quarter) reducing the opportunity to pursue our diversity targets through external recruitment.

Research worldwide shows that when budgets are cut, so are diverse hires.

Isabel Lo agrees. Working under the spectre of austerity is “stressful at the best of times,” she says, but tends to penalise those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. “They are arguably the newer and more junior hires on short-term contracts, easily expendable when making budget cuts.”

The ABC is facing more cuts, according to managing Director David Anderson, and this does not bode well for diversity. This week he flagged prioritising a diversity of political views among panel show guests.

ABC Chair Ita Buttrose has already highlighted the need for an ABC board with relevant media experience. But what has never been achieved, and arguably is needed more than ever, is a board that reflects the diversity of Australia.

– ref. Friday essay: diversity in the media is vital – but Australia has a long way to go – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-diversity-in-the-media-is-vital-but-australia-has-a-long-way-to-go-116280

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

As hissy fits go, it was a beauty. Pauline Hanson was very cross indeed. Senate leader Mathias Cormann hadn’t called her, even though he was reportedly negotiating on the government’s $158 billion package of income tax cuts.

Venting on Sky on Wednesday night, Hanson said: “I don’t think he’s got the guts to pick up the phone and actually talk to me. And to turn around and say that he’s negotiating with crossbenchers is not the truth, because he’s not negotiating with me”.

She went on to rail about the Liberals preferencing One Nation below Labor, doing “grubby deals” with Clive Palmer and trying to destroy her.

The three-stage 10-year package, which promises an extra tax offset for low and middle income earners, is the big game in town for the first days of the new parliament, which opens the week after next, and it’s causing some grief for both sides.

Read more: Frydenberg declares tax package must be passed ‘in its entirety’

Despite the government’s confident words during the election campaign, the Tax Office has declined to pay the offset of up to $540 until the legislation is passed. This means the July 1 deadline from when the offset was supposed to be available will be missed. (Although people will get from July 1 the tax cut in the pipeline from last year’s budget.)

If the tax legislation is passed quickly, a few weeks’ delay for the offset is no big deal, especially as many people won’t be putting in their tax returns for a while. But the pressure on the government to deliver the first stage of its plan ASAP – not least because the economy needs the stimulus – reduces its ability to hold out indefinitely on its insistence it won’t split the package to accommodate objections to the later cuts.

Labor is in even more of a bind. It is happy to tick off the first stage – worth $15 billion – but has yet to decide its position on stages two (costing $48 billion and starting 2022-23) and three (costing $95 billion and commencing 2024-25).

Its objections are particularly to the last stage, which delivers cuts for higher income earners. Both the later stages come after the next election, due early 2022.

Those urging Labor should try to block at least stage three argue, apart from the equity issue, that mounting economic uncertainty makes it irresponsible to lock in such big tax cuts out in the “never never”.

On the other hand, a strong case can be made on grounds of principle and practicality for Labor to wave the whole package through.

The question of when a party or politician has a “mandate” is vexed.

On one view an opposition can claim it possesses a mandate to stay faithful to positions it advanced before an election even after it has lost that election.

But when the Morrison government went to the polls with the tax package as its prime policy, it does seem to have a strong case to say the parliament should pass it.

The same point would have applied if Bill Shorten had won. He would have had a mandate for his proposed changes to franking credits and negative gearing – both opposed by the Coalition.

Read more: Mine are bigger than yours. Labor’s surpluses are the Coalition’s worst nightmare

It doesn’t help maintain faith in the political system, or in election promises, for parties to try to govern from opposition, despite the Senate’s voting system sometimes facilitating this. Voters should be able to expect that major election policies of the winning side are implemented (perhaps with some alterations at the edges by parliament).

It is another matter when, as happened with the Abbott government’s 2014 budget, big new controversial initiatives are brought in soon after the election campaign, during which they were not flagged.

The practical reason against Labor going to the barricades on the tax package is that as it regroups, there is little to be gained by taking on this particular battle, especially when it is trying to reposition itself as appealing better to “aspirational” voters and leaving behind language attacking the “top end of town”.

Labor might be right that the proposed long term tax cuts could look irresponsible later, but if so, that is a fight to be had at the next election, when the ALP could highlight doubts it had previously registered.

There are divisions in Labor about what to do. Victorian MP Peter Khalil this week said if the government won’t split the package, Labor should vote for it all. Anne Aly, a backbencher from Western Australia, expressed concern about the package’s implications against a darkening economic outlook. The ALP has asked the government for more information. Albanese is consulting within the party before shadow cabinet decides the position it takes to caucus.

While the government is keeping rhetorical pressure on Labor, it has an eye to the alternative route – to get the package through via the crossbench.

Read more: Coalition likely to have strong Senate position as their Senate vote jumps 3%

For Cormann, the new Senate is easier than the last, not least because the non-Green crossbench has been slashed at the election.

To pass legislation opposed by Labor and the Greens the government needs four of the six non-Green crossbenchers. These include two from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, two from Centre Alliance, South Australia’s Cory Bernardi, and Tasmania’s Jacqui Lambie.

Bernardi will vote with the Coalition. He has said he wants to help the Morrison government as much as possible, and on Thursday he announced he is winding up his Australian Conservatives party. It’s not clear whether he’ll seek to rejoin the Liberals, from whom he defected in 2017.

Cormann has been in discussion with Centre Alliance about their push for lower gas prices, and an agreement on some action appears likely. While this deal is formally separate from the tax package, he and they both have that front of mind.

This would leave one vote to be collected.

Lambie refuses to comment on her position. Hanson said earlier this month she was “not sold” on the current package and “therefore not likely to support the measures” – and proposed some of the funds be used for a coal-fired power station and a water security scheme.

After Wednesday’s outburst, Cormann was (of course) on the phone to her at crack of dawn Thursday. On her account, he said: “I’m not negotiating with crossbenchers with this at all. We have our three stages. We’re going pass that no matter what”.

The government aims to keep the heat on Albanese. By the same token, if the crossbench has to come into play, Cormann won’t want a repeat of last term, when he couldn’t muster the numbers to deliver tax relief to big companies.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Those tax cuts test Albanese and provoke Hanson – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-those-tax-cuts-test-albanese-and-provoke-hanson-119185

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

Queensland Liberal senator James McGrath had said the ABC’s headquarters in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane should be sold, and the funds used to retire government debt.

In the latest Coalition attack on the national broadcaster, McGrath declared: “The ABC currently operates like a closed-shop, left-wing vortex with an appointments process more secretive than the selection of the Pope”.

The ABC has faced repeated criticism and claims of bias since the Coalition was elected in 2013. A year ago the Liberal Party’s federal council urged it should be privatised – a call immediately rejected by the government.

McGrath said it “needs to shift its headquarters away from the inner-city latte lines to where the ‘quiet Australians’ live, work and play”. It was long past time that it moved to the suburbs or regions, he said.

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

Questions on notice submitted under Senate estimates showed the ABC’s property portfolio was worth $522 million, he said. “Of the 37 properties in the ABC’s portfolio, Ultimo, Brisbane South Bank and Melbourne Southbank account for 81% of the portfolio’s value. That’s $426 million. What is this achieving for the taxpayer?”

McGrath said given modern technology, there was no reason why the ABC couldn’t operate out of places such as Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Caboolture or Beenleigh.

“For the purposes of conducting interviews, the ABC could easily copy the Sky News model of a small booth close to capital city CBDs.”

He said this was part of a three point plan he proposed for the ABC “to return to its core duties of delivering accurate, factual and unbiased news services and content”.

“The other parts of the plan include calling for all ABC roles to be advertised externally to broaden the diversity of views within the organisation, and for the government to commit to a full review of the ABC’s Charter, taking into account the changing media environment.”

Read more: Why the raids on Australian media present a clear threat to democracy

McGrath issued his statement off the back of comments by Nationals leader Michael McCormack who, when asked on Thursday whether the ABC, if it had more funding, could fill gaps left by WIN closures, suggested it could save money by relocating from Ultimo.

“I’m sure that there are plenty of empty shop fronts in Sale or Traralgon or elsewhere where the ABC could quite easily relocate to a regional centre and save themselves a lot of money and then invest that money that they’ve saved by not being in the middle of Sydney, where they don’t need to be, out at a regional centre.”

McCormack’s office later described his comment as tongue-in-cheek. McGrath’s office said his statement was not tongue-in-cheek.

WIN TV is shutting down newsrooms in Orange, Dubbo, Albury, Wagga Wagga in NSW, and Wide Bay in Queensland. McCormack, who formerly edited The Daily Advertiser in Wagga, said he was saddened by the decision.

“I appreciate that the market is tight and the margins are very slim. But I’m really disappointed that WIN has taken this decision. I’m really disappointed that those news bureaus are closing because they’ve done such a sterling job, in some cases, for up to 30 years.”

– ref. Government senator urges sale of ABC city properties – http://theconversation.com/government-senator-urges-sale-of-abc-city-properties-119187

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

Senator Cory Bernardi will wind up his Australian Conservatives party, after its abysmal showing at the election.

Bernardi, who defected from the Liberals and formed the party in 2017, said on Thursday: “The inescapable conclusion from our lack of political success, our financial position and the re-election of a Morrison-led government is that the rationale for the creation of the Australian Conservatives is no longer valid. “Accordingly, I will shortly begin the process of formally deregistering the Australian Conservatives as a political party.”

Read more: As South Australia heads to the polls, the state is at a crossroads

There has been speculation that the South Australian senator – who is making it clear he wants to do all he can to help the Morrison government – may seek to rejoin the Liberals.

He told The Conversation: “I have not thought about it. My focus has been on the future of the [Australian Conservatives] party and will now consider what role I may or may not play in the next parliament”.

In his statement he said, “the Morrison government victory and policy agenda suggests we are well on the way to restoring common sense in the Australian parliament. That is all we, as Australian Conservatives, have ever sought to do.”

The Australian Conservatives attracted some disillusioned Liberal supporters while Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister.

The party swallowed the small conservative party Family First, which briefly gave it two South Australian state parliamentarians. It also briefly had representation in the Victorian parliament, with the defection to it of a Democratic Labour party upper house member.

Read more: Bernardi split is symptomatic of a fractured political system, here and abroad

Bernardi said times were “very different” when he launched his party in early 2017.

“Malcolm Turnbull was leading a Labor-lite Coalition into political oblivion. As they abandoned their supporter base in pursuit of green-left policies, major party politics became an echo chamber rather than a battle of ideas.

“The fact that over 22,000 people formally joined the Australian Conservatives in our first year demonstrated just how badly the Coalition were haemorrhaging supporters who wanted their enduring values and traditional principles upheld.

“However, the decision to make Scott Morrison prime minister truly changed the political climate and our political fortunes.

“Rather than punish the Coalition for another new leader, many Conservatives breathed a sigh of relief that a man of faith and values was leading the Liberals back to their traditional policy platform.”

Read more: Bernardi should have resigned his Senate seat: here’s why

Bernardi said that at the election the party polled “a tiny fraction of the votes” required for success.

“We can make all the excuses in the world for the result but it is clear that many of our potential voters returned to supporting the Coalition when Malcolm Turnbull was replaced by Scott Morrison.

“Although we made it clear in the lead-up to the campaign that we were only running in the Senate so as not to be the catalyst for a change of government, our message didn’t get through.”

He said that while he had been urged to “deliberately court controversy” during the election to win attention, this “would have undermined the very premise of what we offered to the Australian people – a credible and principled alternative to the political fringe.

“Unfortunately steady and sensible didn’t work and it was frustrating that some single interest parties gained more votes than we did.”

– ref. Cory Bernardi to disband Australian Conservatives – http://theconversation.com/cory-bernardi-to-disband-australian-conservatives-119186

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Terry Goldsworthy, Associate Professor in Criminology, Bond University

Last week, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton reignited the debate about new spying powers for Australian authorities during an interview on the ABC Insiders program.

His comments followed a police raid on a journalist’s home earlier this month related to the leaking of sensitive documents detailed in a story published in 2018. The documents outlined discussions and proposals for new powers for the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) to monitor Australian citizens.

Dutton was at pains to deny this on Sunday’s ABC Insiders interview, stating:

Well if you look back to what I said at the time, we don’t support spying on Australians, that was a complete nonsense.

But he went on to say:

I think there needs to be a sensible discussion about whether or not we’ve got the ability to deal with threats that we face.

So let’s take a look at the powers the ASD currently has, and whether new powers are really needed.

Read more: Why the raids on Australian media present a clear threat to democracy

What is the role of the ASD?

The ASD became a statutory agency in 2018 following the recommendations of an intelligence review in 2017.

It sits within the Defence portfolio and is responsible for:

• cyber security
• collection and communication of foreign signals intelligence
• prevention and disruption of offshore cyber-enabled crime
• support for military operations
• assisting the national security community in Australia.

Its focus is on activity that takes place outside Australia.

What new powers are we talking about?

The government hasn’t revealed any official plans to increase the powers of the ASD, but the original 2018 story written by Daily Telegraph journalist Annika Smethurst cited leaked documents suggesting the ASD would gain powers to secretly spy on Australian citizens.

The powers proposed in the documents reportedly included the ability to access emails, bank records and text messages of Australian citizens without their knowledge. (Currently, under the Federal Intelligence Services Act, the ASD is restricted to gathering intelligence and fighting cyber crime offshore.)

Under current laws, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) are the primary federal organisations with the power to undertake actions against individuals or organisations within Australia. The Intelligence Services Act does allow for requests of assistance to be made of the ASD, but these must be at the direction of the responsible minister.

In the case of ASIO, the Attorney-General can issue a warrant for the use of special powers, such as entering a premises to insert listening devices. A warrant to question or detain a person can only be obtained by applying to a judge appointed by the Attorney-General.

The AFP primarily obtains its search warrants and powers under the Commonwealth Crimes Act. It needs to convince a judge that there is reasonable grounds for issuing the warrant.

By contrast, Smethurst’s story alleged that the expanded powers would allow the ministers for defence and home affairs to authorise a warrant sought by the ASD to undertake onshore actions, without judicial oversight.

Read more: Explainer: how the Australian intelligence community works

Are the new powers needed?

On Sunday’s Insiders program, Dutton attempted to frame the argument for new powers in terms of criminal activity. He used the examples of online paedophilia and cyber attacks on institutions such as banks and universities.

For that argument to work, we would have to see cyber attacks on our institutions originating from within Australia. That is simply not a current threat, and this has certainly not been the case generally.

The Office of the Information Commissioner reported that in the 12 months to March 31, 2019, there were 964 data breach notifications under the National Data Breach scheme, 60% of these were criminal or malicious. But no specific details are provided as to where the threat originated from.

The reality is that law enforcement agencies already have powers that allow them to access emails, bank records and text messages of Australian citizens – usually after satisfying a judge there is a reasonable need to do so.

The AFP currently targets online child abuse and paedophilia with the Virtual Global Taskforce, which cooperates with INTERPOL, EUROPOL and other law enforcement agencies. The AFP Child Protection Operations (CPO) team “performs an investigative and coordination role within Australia for multijurisdictional and international online child sex exploitation matters. It deals with cases in the online, and travel and tourism environments”.

In addition, the AFP’s Cybercrime Investigation teams within the Australian Cyber Security Centre can undertake targeted intelligence to investigate cybercrimes of national significance. In any event, either ASIO or the AFP can make requests for assistance from the ASD under the Act as required.

The key difference is that under the new proposals is that some of these activities could being done in secret.

Read more: A state actor has targeted Australian political parties – but that shouldn’t surprise us

We should be concerned

The leaked proposal effectively suggests a blurring of the line between an externally focused defence organisation and internally focused law enforcement agencies. If the new powers are in line with those reported last year, they could potentially sideline the Attorney-General, and give the home affairs and defence ministers power in the approval process for use of the ASD’s functions.

It would take powers primarily designed to defend Australia against external threats and use them for internal investigations against Australian citizens.

Australians should rightly be concerned about any shift to an intelligence or investigative model that is based on the introduction of greater powers on the one hand, and less oversight and governance on the other.

The case needs be made that current laws and powers are ineffective and that there is a real need for any additional powers. Only then should serious consideration be given to the proposals outlined above. Issues of governance and transparency should be paramount in any realistic discussion of increasing the role and power of the ASD.

– ref. Why we should be wary of expanding powers of the Australian Signals Directorate – http://theconversation.com/why-we-should-be-wary-of-expanding-powers-of-the-australian-signals-directorate-119078

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kellie Bousfield, Associate Head of School, School of Education, Charles Sturt University

This week’s New South Wales budget delivered some good news for education. The government promised 4,600 extra public school teachers, more than 600,000 free TAFE and VET courses, additional funds for building and refurbishing schools, and an allowance for an extra 100 school counsellors or psychologists.

But the government’s commitment came with a caveat. Schools will need to justify these, and future budgetary allocations and spending, through explanations for their need and by delivering quantifiable outcomes.

At first glance, this may appear fair. After all, as NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet pointed out:

… parents want to know that every dollar we spend will improve their kids’ education.

However, experience (and research) tell us this simple method of aligning funding with targeted outcomes – essentially providing funding not based on need but on results – can have some unintended consequences. These can be detrimental to the quality of education and particularly affect the most marginalised students.

Funding for outcomes

“Outcome budgeting” seems to be the buzzword of the NSW 2019-2020 budget. Its intention appears both simple and noble.

In plain terms, it seeks to integrate what it considers previously “unconnected” planning, budgeting and reporting into a coherent framework of performance management – a situation in which government spending can be justified via measurable outcomes.

According to the NSW government’s budget website, in outcome budgeting:

… it is not just the finances that matter, but how success will be tracked and how citizens will be kept informed throughout delivery. It ensures ongoing focus on value for money, not just during planning but through implementation.

The government has indicated a broad commitment to outcome budgeting across all areas of concern. But the treasurer said education was the first department of concern and will set the stage for the others. As the budget statement notes:

Every cluster in the NSW Government will be following the Department of Education with outcome-focused plans that provide a clear roadmap to delivering results.

Applying outcome budgeting to an area as complex as education is fraught with danger. Arguably, what the NSW government is proposing is a further intensification of the audit culture (think NAPLAN, My School) that has plagued Australian schools for much of the last decade.

Rather than improved academic outcomes, this period in Australian education has been characterised by stagnant and/or declining educational results, both domestically and in international comparisons.

International literature has previously shown an association between an audit culture (a focus on standardised testing) and a decline in educational outcomes. And while specific details of how concrete outcomes will be measured remains scant, the government’s strategic plan suggests it is committed to standardised testing as a basis for measurement.

Focusing on outcomes can hamper teaching

Unsurprisingly, the announced linking of funding to outcomes has generated some criticism in academic and media circles. This is because much research in Australia and overseas has pointed to the profound impact that focusing on accountability and targeted results can have on pedagogy, teachers and students.

Standardised tests such as NAPLAN, when used as a basis for managing performance through the data they provide, can change the role and conduct of teachers. Research shows this can result in:

Teachers engulfed by an audit culture, where results of standardised tests are viewed as the sole indicator of the effectiveness of their teaching, can deem such practices as necessary.

Focusing on standardised testing outcomes has also affected students. This has been evidenced through:

Audit culture can affect vulnerable students the most. Research on NAPLAN, for instance, suggests focusing on standardised test results serves only to lock in outcome inequality for low socio-economic and linguistically diverse students. This is due to teachers having reduced opportunities to enact the pedagogy crucial to such students’ success.

These findings echo similar research in the US and UK demonstrating the disproportionate negative consequences for low socio-economic students and ethnic minorities subject to standardised testing.

There is no question improved educational outcomes are important. As is a plan for how we get there. But how we set about achieving this requires careful consideration and reflection rather than a one-size-fits-all approach across disparate areas of government.

Success in education should not be simplified to concrete outcomes, specifically results in standardised tests, alone.

– ref. NSW budget: giving schools extra money only if they meet ‘outcomes’ can hamper teaching standards – http://theconversation.com/nsw-budget-giving-schools-extra-money-only-if-they-meet-outcomes-can-hamper-teaching-standards-119087

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Maguire, Associate Professor, University of Newcastle

Four men – three Russians and one Ukrainian – will be charged in relation to the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which killed all 298 passengers and crew on board.

Dutch prosecutors will launch a criminal trial in The Hague on March 9, 2020. But the accused are beyond the jurisdiction of the court, and will most likely be tried in absentia. This means the accused will not be physically present in the court room.

The prosecutors argue the four accused were jointly responsible for obtaining a BUK TELAR missile launcher (a launcher for self-propelled, surface-to-air missiles allegedly owned by the Russian military) in the city of Kursk, and launching it from Ukraine.

They say the four men are responsible for the atrocity because they had the intention to shoot down an aircraft, and obtained the missile launcher for that purpose.

Read more: Ukraine: with parliament dissolved, new president must now get serious – here’s how

While investigators have not accused any suspects of actually firing the missile, they say in future they may identify others with that responsibility.

For the victims and their loved ones, these Dutch criminal trials present the best hope of legal acknowledgement for the tragedy.

The MH17 atrocity

On July 17, 2014, flight MH17 was travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down over Ukraine.

The Joint Investigative Team (JIT), led by Dutch authorities and comprising investigators from Malaysia, Australia, Belgium and Ukraine, concluded in 2016 that the flight was shot down by a Russian BUK missile.

The JIT identified the launch location as a field in eastern Ukraine, which at the time was in territory controlled by pro-Russian fighters.

The countries central to the investigation – including Australia, which lost 38 people – and the victims’ families have explored a range of legal strategies to assign blame for the attack.

Then Foreign Minister Julie Bishop initially proposed a war crimes trial for MH17, but this was vetoed by Russia in the UN Security Council.

Some civil claims on behalf of victims’ families are ongoing before the European Court of Human Rights.

And hearings are ongoing before the International Court of Justice, where Ukraine seeks to make a case against Russia. Ukraine cites the MH17 atrocity as characteristic of broader Russian aggression and lack of respect for Ukrainian sovereignty and independence.

Russia’s response

The Russian Foreign Ministry rejected this week’s announcement, in line with its earlier rejections of the JIT conclusions. It said:

Once again, absolutely groundless accusations are being made against the Russian side, aimed at discrediting the Russian Federation in the eyes of the international community.

Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier called the crash a “terrible tragedy”, but said Russia bore no responsibility for it.

Russian officials have claimed they were prepared to assist the investigation but had been “frozen out” of it.

Who are the accused?

Three of the four accused are Russian nationals, believed to be living in Russia.

Igor Girkin is a former colonel in the Russian security service. At the time of the atrocity, Girkin was the minister of defence in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, a pro-Russian separatist region of Ukraine.

The other two Russian accused, Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov, are former Russian military intelligence agents who worked under Girkin.

Leonid Kharchenko is the only Ukrainian national accused. Investigators are not certain of his current location. At the time of the atrocity, Kharchenko led a separatist combat unit.

The specific charges in relation to the four named suspects will be:

1. Causing the crash of flight MH17, resulting in the death of all persons on board, punishable pursuant to Article 168 of the Dutch Criminal Code

2. The murder of the 298 persons on board of flight MH17, punishable pursuant to Article 289 of the Dutch Criminal Code.

The investigation is ongoing and continues to call for witnesses to assist.

What are the prospects for the trial?

Dutch investigators will issue international arrest warrants for the four accused and place them on international wanted lists. But they won’t issue extradition requests because they know already that no extradition of nationals is available under the Ukrainian or Russian constitutions.

It seems impossible for the Dutch court to gain actual jurisdiction over the Russian accused. Potentially, should Ukrainian authorities apprehend Kharchenko, he could be tried via video-link.

The Netherlands and Ukraine have entered into an agreement that would permit such an arrangement and – should Kharchenko be convicted – allow for his imprisonment in Ukraine.

Read more: Challenges persist for multiple legal actions regarding MH17

The charges and any penalties originate in Dutch, rather than international, criminal law. Convictions for murder or the intentional downing of an aircraft could result in sentences of up to life imprisonment.

It’s fair to question the value of a prosecution without a court having actual jurisdiction over the accused. The only real answer is that such a trial would enable the presentation and adjudication of evidence and the judgement of a court as to whether charges are made out.

As time goes, the chances of successful prosecutions decline. Meanwhile, interested countries and the victims’ families continue to call for legal redress for the atrocity.

It is also legitimate to ask whether a court can ensure a fair trial for accused persons tried in absentia.

Although it is not explicitly prohibited by international human rights law, the absence of defendants and presumably any legal representative from the courtroom means the accused will not hear the evidence against them or have the ability to present a defence.

Given the four named accused are beyond the actual jurisdiction of the Dutch courts, it can be argued that they (and, at least in the case of Russia, their country) are wilfully avoiding the process of justice. This may be, for some or many observers, sufficient justification for trying them in their absence.

– ref. MH17 charges: who the suspects are, what they’re charged with, and what happens next – http://theconversation.com/mh17-charges-who-the-suspects-are-what-theyre-charged-with-and-what-happens-next-119155

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Humphries, Senior lecturer in Ecology, Charles Sturt University

Given her new role as federal environment minister, one of Sussan Ley’s comments in an interview with Nine Newspapers was eyebrow-raising, to put it mildly. She said:

Sometimes the environment doesn’t need all its water but farmers desperately do need water.

This is inaccurate and concerning, but not all that surprising, given the attitude to water and rivers of some in the community and federal government.

In this age of water sharing and trading, and storing water in dams, it is easy to lose sight of what water is to a river, and how every drop of water that enters (or should enter) a river defines the character and function of that river.

Ultimately, the community – not scientists or even river managers – decides how much water a river should get. But it’s essential to be honest about the effects these decisions have on rivers and the ecosystems they support. This is vital for long-term environmental sustainability, upon which all our industry, agriculture and indeed our society are based.

Crises and concerns

Recently the Murray-Darling river system has suffered several crises, including fish kills, hypoxic water, acid-sulfate soils, and algal blooms. These are all wake-up calls that the way we manage rivers are not working.

Read more: Damning royal commission report leaves no doubt that we all lose if the Murray-Darling Basin Plan fails

But besides these disastrous incidents, there are many other ways in which river ecosystems are changing, that are not as obvious to the general public.

Contraction of native species’ ranges, local extinctions, success of invasive species and the “need” to stock non-native recreational fish species are just a few of the insidious symptoms of a general malaise.

Water to a river is like air to a balloon. Let out a little air and the balloon is still balloon-shaped, albeit less taut than before. But let out more air and there comes a point, which is hard to predict exactly, when the balloon suddenly collapses. By this analogy, the Murray-Darling Basin is very deflated indeed.

The point is that if we take water out of a river, or change the patterns of its flow, we inevitably change the nature of that river. Irrigators undoubtedly need water. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we’re not altering the river and its ecosystems by allowing them to take it.

Do we want healthy rivers?

Our job as river scientists is not to say what type of river the community wants. Our job is to inform people on what the actions of changing river management will do to a river and its life.

We already have seriously degraded river ecosystems. Restoring them is exceedingly unlikely under current demands and management. But if we take even more of a river’s water away, we need to acknowledge that the river will become yet a different river, and in some cases, one that we hardly recognise.

The public backlash following the fish kills earlier this year suggests that the community has decided that further degradation of our rivers is not acceptable.

Read more: 5 ways the government can clean up the Murray-Darling Basin Plan

– ref. Memo to the environment minister: a river does need all its water – http://theconversation.com/memo-to-the-environment-minister-a-river-does-need-all-its-water-119089

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gerhard Hoffstaedter, Senior lecturer in Anthropology, The University of Queensland

This week, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, labelled the world’s refugee problem a crisis that is primarily impacting developing countries, who are hosting most of the world’s 70 million displaced people.

It’s the highest number of people fleeing violence since the second world war, the agency said in a report. Last year, 37,000 people were forced to flee their homes every day.

My colleague and I have conducted extensive research on refugees at the US-Mexico border and in Southeast Asia and Australia, studying the lives of people in detention, in transit, and resettled in host countries. In all these cases, an enduring problem is that nations are not doing enough to provide adequate protection for refugees.

Australia, and the international community as a whole, needs to do more to help the world’s most vulnerable people. Here are five solutions we believe can work.

1. Give them their rights: enforce international conventions

Most countries have either signed the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol. These ensure basic rights and protections for refugees, in addition to other human rights conventions.

However, many nations maintain reservations on key articles, have not implemented the agreements or simply do not comply with their international obligations. Others do not provide access to these protections for people without legal status, such as refugees.

Addressing the nonexistent enforcement mechanisms of international conventions, agreements and declarations is the first step for improving refugees’ rights.

2. Share the responsibility: regional refugee compacts

In December 2018, the UN Global Compact on Refugees was agreed to by 181 countries. The document has the following objectives:

• easing the pressure on host countries
• helping boost the self-reliance of refugees
• expanding access to third-country resettlement options
• supporting conditions in refugees’ home countries to help them safely return.

The global compact also includes recommendations for similar regional and national action plans.

Cooperation of this sort has been attempted in our region before with the Bali Process, which focused on cross-border people smuggling and trafficking. But this agreement had an adverse effect by criminalising the movement of people across borders to seek asylum.

A regional refugee compact would shift the focus away from border protection and deterrence and instead ensure refugees receive the protections they need in transit and on arrival in host countries.

Read more: Asylum Solutions: we need a regional refugee compact

3. Treat refugees like human beings: close detention centres

According to the UNHCR, detention should be considered a last resource for countries dealing with influxes of refugees. And yet, refugee confinement has become common practice.

All over the world, the closure of borders and privatisation of immigration detention centres have resulted in a rapid increase in the imprisonment of refugees, including women and children. Although Australia has moved hundreds of refugees off Manus Island and Nauru in recent years, there are still 915 remaining in detention centres on the islands.

It is paramount that detention centres and offshore processing centres be closed. The practice is not only cruel, it’s expensive. According to the Refugee Council of Australia, it costs more than A$573,000 a year to hold just one refugee in detention on Manus or Nauru.

Read more: Secrecy over Paladin’s $423 million contract highlights our broken refugee system

The International Detention Coalition has identified over 250 alternatives to detention, such as providing temporary legal status to refugees while they await decisions on their permanent status.

Another alternative is to increase global refugee resettlement quotas. These quotas have been decreasing sharply around the world in recent years. The US, for instance, resettled fewer refugees than Canada in 2018.

4. Allow them to participate: work rights for refugees

Refugees should not be treated as passive recipients of humanitarian aid and charity – they should be permitted to work.

Providing working visas for refugees in transit countries, as well as those on bridging visas or waiting for their asylum claims to be processed, would help them earn a livelihood and contribute to society.

In Malaysia, for example, refugees have no work rights at all and have to work illegally in the shadow economy. In Australia, work rights for many refugees on bridging visas depend on the discretion of the Home Affairs department.

Another important issue: permitting refugees the right to work must also come with safeguards to prevent their exploitation.

5. Let them in: open borders

This “refugee crisis” is really just a crisis of who has the right to move. Thanks to the birthright lottery, some people are able to move freely across borders, while others remain trapped in violence and poverty.

If borders were open to all, the human smuggling business would cease to exist. And refugees of all sorts, including those displaced by climate change, would be able to enjoy work rights and access to health care and education.

Read more: A refugee law expert on a week of ‘reckless’ rhetoric and a new way to process asylum seeker claims

Even though we live in an era where more walls are going up between nations, we have evidence this does not stop migration.

And the evidence for the economic benefits for open borders is unambiguous. According to some estimates, opening the world’s borders could increase global GDP by US$100 trillion. We just need to take a bold step and give refugees a right already enjoyed by some – the right to move.

The authors will be discussing the world’s response to the global refugee crisis at a talk on Thursday, June 20, at the University of Queensland.

– ref. There are 70 million refugees in the world. Here are 5 solutions to the problem – http://theconversation.com/there-are-70-million-refugees-in-the-world-here-are-5-solutions-to-the-problem-118920

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gerhard Hoffstaedter, Senior lecturer in Anthropology, The University of Queensland

This week, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, labelled the world’s refugee problem a crisis that is primarily impacting developing countries, who are hosting most of the world’s 70 million displaced people.

It’s the highest number of people fleeing violence since the second world war, the agency said in a report. Last year, 37,000 people were forced to flee their homes every day.

My colleague and I have conducted extensive research on refugees at the US-Mexico border and in Southeast Asia and Australia, studying the lives of people in detention, in transit, and resettled in host countries. In all these cases, an enduring problem is that nations are not doing enough to provide adequate protection for refugees.

Australia, and the international community as a whole, needs to do more to help the world’s most vulnerable people. Here are five solutions we believe can work.

1. Give them their rights: enforce international conventions

Most countries have either signed the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol. These ensure basic rights and protections for refugees, in addition to other human rights conventions.

However, many nations maintain reservations on key articles, have not implemented the agreements or simply do not comply with their international obligations. Others do not provide access to these protections for people without legal status, such as refugees.

Addressing the nonexistent enforcement mechanisms of international conventions, agreements and declarations is the first step for improving refugees’ rights.

2. Share the responsibility: regional refugee compacts

In December 2018, the UN Global Compact on Refugees was agreed to by 181 countries. The document has the following objectives:

• easing the pressure on host countries
• helping boost the self-reliance of refugees
• expanding access to third-country resettlement options
• supporting conditions in refugees’ home countries to help them safely return.

The global compact also includes recommendations for similar regional and national action plans.

Cooperation of this sort has been attempted in our region before with the Bali Process, which focused on cross-border people smuggling and trafficking. But this agreement had an adverse effect by criminalising the movement of people across borders to seek asylum.

A regional refugee compact would shift the focus away from border protection and deterrence and instead ensure refugees receive the protections they need in transit and on arrival in host countries.

Read more: Asylum Solutions: we need a regional refugee compact

3. Treat refugees like human beings: close detention centres

According to the UNHCR, detention should be considered a last resource for countries dealing with influxes of refugees. And yet, refugee confinement has become common practice.

All over the world, the closure of borders and privatisation of immigration detention centres have resulted in a rapid increase in the imprisonment of refugees, including women and children. Although Australia has moved hundreds of refugees off Manus Island and Nauru in recent years, there are still 915 remaining in detention centres on the islands.

It is paramount that detention centres and offshore processing centres be closed. The practice is not only cruel, it’s expensive. According to the Refugee Council of Australia, it costs more than A$573,000 a year to hold just one refugee in detention on Manus or Nauru.

Read more: Secrecy over Paladin’s $423 million contract highlights our broken refugee system

The International Detention Coalition has identified over 250 alternatives to detention, such as providing temporary legal status to refugees while they await decisions on their permanent status.

Another alternative is to increase global refugee resettlement quotas. These quotas have been decreasing sharply around the world in recent years. The US, for instance, resettled fewer refugees than Canada in 2018.

4. Allow them to participate: work rights for refugees

Refugees should not be treated as passive recipients of humanitarian aid and charity – they should be permitted to work.

Providing working visas for refugees in transit countries, as well as those on bridging visas or waiting for their asylum claims to be processed, would help them earn a livelihood and contribute to society.

In Malaysia, for example, refugees have no work rights at all and have to work illegally in the shadow economy. In Australia, work rights for many refugees on bridging visas depend on the discretion of the Home Affairs department.

Another important issue: permitting refugees the right to work must also come with safeguards to prevent their exploitation.

5. Let them in: open borders

This “refugee crisis” is really just a crisis of who has the right to move. Thanks to the birthright lottery, some people are able to move freely across borders, while others remain trapped in violence and poverty.

If borders were open to all, the human smuggling business would cease to exist. And refugees of all sorts, including those displaced by climate change, would be able to enjoy work rights and access to health care and education.

Read more: A refugee law expert on a week of ‘reckless’ rhetoric and a new way to process asylum seeker claims

Even though we live in an era where more walls are going up between nations, we have evidence this does not stop migration.

And the evidence for the economic benefits for open borders is unambiguous. According to some estimates, opening the world’s borders could increase global GDP by US$100 trillion. We just need to take a bold step and give refugees a right already enjoyed by some – the right to move.

The authors will be discussing the world’s response to the global refugee crisis at a talk on Thursday, June 20, at the University of Queensland.

– ref. There are 70 million refugees in the world. Here are 5 solutions how to help them – http://theconversation.com/there-are-70-million-refugees-in-the-world-here-are-5-solutions-how-to-help-them-118920

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gerhard Hoffstaedter, Senior lecturer in Anthropology, The University of Queensland

This week, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, labelled the world’s refugee problem a crisis that is primarily impacting developing countries, who are hosting most of the world’s 70 million displaced people.

It’s the highest number of people fleeing violence since the second world war, the agency said in a report. Last year, 37,000 people were forced to flee their homes every day.

My colleague and I have conducted extensive research on refugees at the US-Mexico border and in Southeast Asia and Australia, studying the lives of people in detention, in transit, and resettled in host countries. In all these cases, an enduring problem is that nations are not doing enough to provide adequate protection for refugees.

Australia, and the international community as a whole, needs to do more to help the world’s most vulnerable people. Here are five solutions we believe can work.

1. Give them their rights: enforce international conventions

Most countries have either signed the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol. These ensure basic rights and protections for refugees, in addition to other human rights conventions.

However, many nations maintain reservations on key articles, have not implemented the agreements or simply do not comply with their international obligations. Others do not provide access to these protections for people without legal status, such as refugees.

Addressing the nonexistent enforcement mechanisms of international conventions, agreements and declarations is the first step for improving refugees’ rights.

2. Share the responsibility: regional refugee compacts

In December 2018, the UN Global Compact on Refugees was agreed to by 181 countries. The document has the following objectives:

• easing the pressure on host countries
• helping boost the self-reliance of refugees
• expanding access to third-country resettlement options
• supporting conditions in refugees’ home countries to help them safely return.

The global compact also includes recommendations for similar regional and national action plans.

Cooperation of this sort has been attempted in our region before with the Bali Process, which focused on cross-border people smuggling and trafficking. But this agreement had an adverse effect by criminalising the movement of people across borders to seek asylum.

A regional refugee compact would shift the focus away from border protection and deterrence and instead ensure refugees receive the protections they need in transit and on arrival in host countries.

Read more: Asylum Solutions: we need a regional refugee compact

3. Treat refugees like human beings: close detention centres

According to the UNHCR, detention should be considered a last resource for countries dealing with influxes of refugees. And yet, refugee confinement has become common practice.

All over the world, the closure of borders and privatisation of immigration detention centres have resulted in a rapid increase in the imprisonment of refugees, including women and children. Although Australia has moved hundreds of refugees off Manus Island and Nauru in recent years, there are still 915 remaining in detention centres on the islands.

It is paramount that detention centres and offshore processing centres be closed. The practice is not only cruel, it’s expensive. According to the Refugee Council of Australia, it costs more than A$573,000 a year to hold just one refugee in detention on Manus or Nauru.

Read more: Secrecy over Paladin’s $423 million contract highlights our broken refugee system

The International Detention Coalition has identified over 250 alternatives to detention, such as providing temporary legal status to refugees while they await decisions on their permanent status.

Another alternative is to increase global refugee resettlement quotas. These quotas have been decreasing sharply around the world in recent years. The US, for instance, resettled fewer refugees than Canada in 2018.

4. Allow them to participate: work rights for refugees

Refugees should not be treated as passive recipients of humanitarian aid and charity – they should be permitted to work.

Providing working visas for refugees in transit countries, as well as those on bridging visas or waiting for their asylum claims to be processed, would help them earn a livelihood and contribute to society.

In Malaysia, for example, refugees have no work rights at all and have to work illegally in the shadow economy. In Australia, work rights for many refugees on bridging visas depend on the discretion of the Home Affairs department.

Another important issue: permitting refugees the right to work must also come with safeguards to prevent their exploitation.

5. Let them in: open borders

This “refugee crisis” is really just a crisis of who has the right to move. Thanks to the birthright lottery, some people are able to move freely across borders, while others remain trapped in violence and poverty.

If borders were open to all, the human smuggling business would cease to exist. And refugees of all sorts, including those displaced by climate change, would be able to enjoy work rights and access to health care and education.

Read more: A refugee law expert on a week of ‘reckless’ rhetoric and a new way to process asylum seeker claims

Even though we live in an era where more walls are going up between nations, we have evidence this does not stop migration.

And the evidence for the economic benefits for open borders is unambiguous. According to some estimates, opening the world’s borders could increase global GDP by US$100 trillion. We just need to take a bold step and give refugees a right already enjoyed by some – the right to move.

The authors will be discussing the world’s response to the global refugee crisis at a talk on Thursday, June 20, at the University of Queensland.

– ref. There are 70 million refugees in the world. Here are five solutions how to help them – http://theconversation.com/there-are-70-million-refugees-in-the-world-here-are-five-solutions-how-to-help-them-118920

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Carson, Associate Professor at La Trobe University. Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University

On today’s episode, we hear from Caroline Fisher, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Canberra and lead author of the 2019 Australian edition of the the Digital News Report.

The annual report has found that public trust in the news media is falling. It also finds that Australians are worried about “fake news”. Perhaps as a result, we access news less often and have lower interest in it compared to citizens in many other countries. Yet, when it comes to keeping us up to date, we think the news media passes the test.

It’s the fifth year of the report, which comes from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. There are 38 countries involved and it’s an annual snapshot of media: how they’re using it and what they think of it.

You can hear the full interview and details of the report here on Media Files.

Read more: Australians are less interested in news and consume less of it compared to other countries, survey finds

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Additional credits

Producer: Andy Hazel.

Theme music: Susie Wilkins.

Image

Shutterstock

– ref. Media Files: Australians’ trust in news media is falling as concern over ‘fake news’ grows – http://theconversation.com/media-files-australians-trust-in-news-media-is-falling-as-concern-over-fake-news-grows-119099

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Donovan, Urban Designer and Sessional Lecturer, La Trobe University

Seen through the eyes of new mothers, our towns and cities can often seem like uncomfortable and uninviting places to breastfeed. Although the physical characteristics of a place are not the only factors that influence how a woman feeds her child, they can be important. The physical surroundings can sway the balance of influences that may deter women from breastfeeding, bring it to a premature conclusion, or compel women to isolate themselves in their own houses so they might continue to breastfeed.

Our study reveals that the deterrents to breastfeeding can be diminished by “hardwiring” our towns and cities so mothers are more likely to feel confident that breastfeeding is a supported, realistic and pleasant option for them.

Read more: For breastfeeding in public, laws are not enough

This is a serious matter. Whether children are breastfed or not is a significant influence on the trajectory of their lives. It improves their rates of survival, and has been linked to increased IQ and reduced obesity in later life. It helps protect mothers from some cancers.

Breastfeeding helps broader society too. By reducing the incidence of many infant illnesses and chronic diseases, it eases the load on an overburdened healthcare system.

To achieve these benefits, UNICEF and WHO recommend exclusive breastfeeding from within an hour of birth until the baby is six months old. After that, breastfeeding should complement solid food for up to two years or beyond.

Read more: Breastfeeding has been the best public health policy throughout history

However, in Australia, although 96% of babies are breastfed at first, rates decline rapidly. Only 39% were exclusively breastfed to three months and only 15% were exclusively breastfed to five months.

If, as a society, we want to make sure the benefits of breastfeeding are spread as widely as possible, we need to look at what is bringing breastfeeding to a premature conclusion and what we can do about it.

What makes a place breastfeeding-friendly?

Breastfeeding-friendly towns and cities are communities where the imperatives of supporting women to breastfeed and participate in society can be reconciled with all the other things we look to our surroundings to provide. This has interlinked physical and emotional dimensions.

The ergonomics of physical comfort are quite well understood, but those of emotional comfort less so, although they have a significant bearing on breastfeeding. For example, if a mother feels unsafe or fears disapproval when breastfeeding in public, she is less likely to do so. However, if she feels it is important to breastfeed, this may be enough to overcome this disapproval or discomfort.

Our research found there is a “feedback loop” between building high-quality environments that support breastfeeding, and people’s attitudes. Many women find it reassuring to see other women breastfeed in a place, offering them evidence that they can too. As a participant in the consultation session in Bendigo said:

Seeing it happen more often helps.

For other women the presence of comfortable, pleasant and safe surroundings in a shared space may be the key requirement to breastfeed. A workshop participant in the Royal Women’s Hospital suggested:

All we need is somewhere nice to sit.

Thus, if we make places more physically comfortable and welcoming, these “pioneer” breastfeeding mothers may help change attitudes and embolden other women to choose to feed there.

Furthermore, we wear our surroundings like a cloak and its qualities or their absence say something about us. An investment in good design in the places where breastfeeding is particularly likely will foster the general view that breastfeeding is something the whole of society welcomes.

Read more: Want to breastfeed? These five things will make it easier

Changes on the ground, and in hearts and minds

Creating a sense that our towns and cities are breastfeeding-friendly requires cultivating change in people’s hearts and minds as much as it is about making changes on the ground.

This is a more than a matter of just improving the design of dedicated breastfeeding rooms. Although these provide a choice for women seeking privacy, such rooms keep breastfeeding a hidden activity. This leaves the balance of the public realm breastfeeding-unfriendly, requiring a mother to restrict her life to those places where these rooms can easily be found.

Equally, it is not practical to vastly increase the number of dedicated breastfeeding places. This would demand much space and resources that would otherwise be available to meet society’s other diverse needs.

Instead, breastfeeding-friendly towns and cities are places where, in addition to dedicated breastfeeding spaces, much of the infrastructure that enables people to participate in and enjoy community life (workplaces, parks, shopping centres, community buildings) can also be comfortably and discreetly used for breastfeeding. As the sequence below shows, this liberates mothers from a polarising mental map of a few scattered breastfeeding places in a vast area of breastfeeding-unfriendly ones.

Changing the messages feeding mothers get from their surroundings

The design guidelines we prepared identify the qualities of spaces that we found are likely to invite women to breastfeed. These qualities can be interpreted as:

• dignified, safe and physically comfortable
• accessible
• compatible with their other needs and responsibilities
• offering a high level of amenity.

The guidelines identify how these qualities can be expressed in a range of places, as well as how the characteristics that deter breastfeeding can be excluded.

– ref. Here’s how to make our cities breastfeeding-friendly – http://theconversation.com/heres-how-to-make-our-cities-breastfeeding-friendly-110176

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Larkin, Senior Lecturer in Musicology, University of Sydney

Review: Indies & Idols, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Sydney Opera House

“The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”: what Samuel Johnson wrote about metaphysical poetry might have seemed transferrable to the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Indies & Idols program, where 20th-century Polish modernist composers were cheek-by-jowl with contemporary singer-songwriters and rock stars.

And yet, as so often with the ACO’s more eclectic offerings, there were plenty of resonances to be heard across the afternoon. This was less surprising after Artistic Director Richard Tognetti explained that the rock musicians openly acknowledged the influence of the seemingly inaccessible avant-garde.

Surprising though this may seem, the boundaries between popular music and classical music have always been more permeable than such terms suggest. Certain classical works have jumped the imaginary wall supposedly sealing high art off from popular tastes and become culturally ubiquitous: one need only think of the Ode to Joy or Flight of the Bumblebee.

Nor is the idea of the timeless masterpiece unique to classical music. Popular music, too, has undergone its own canonising process, so that the output of the Beatles and Bach are both recognised as “art” transcending their historical moment.

Beyond matters of reception, both sides have benefited from the fructifying influence of the other. Classical music has long mined vernacular music traditions, from folksong importations by Haydn and Beethoven (to name but two) to jazz influences in Debussy and Ravel, while Duke Ellington’s Black, White and Beige and the Beatles’ Revolution 9 show that this stimulus was a two-way street.

Read more: Revolution 50: The Beatles’ White Album remixed

Rarely has a cross-cultural debt been as openly acknowledged as in The National’s Bryce Dessner’s Réponse Lutosławski, a five-movement work written in response to the Polish composer’s Musique funèbre (1958). Although it would have been performable by the ACO’s all-string line-up, the latter work was not heard on this program; instead, Lutosławski’s shorter Overture for Strings opened the concert. This strongly Bartokian work with its quirky pizzicato passages and glissando ornaments crackled with energy.

Even if Dessner’s specific model wasn’t showcased, there were enough textural similarities to enable some kinship to be discerned: col legno (hitting the string with the wood of the bow rather than the hair), siren effects, etc. There was perhaps more expressive lyricism in the Réponse than in the source material, with shimmering textures and fluid figuration prepondering.

In terms of performance, the Suite by Sufjan Stevens which closed the first half was particularly outstanding. Stevens’s 2001 electronic album Enjoy your Rabbit was rearranged for string quartet in 2009 as Run Rabbit Run. The Suite utilises four of the five arrangements by Michael Atkinson, reordered into something approaching the expected sequence of movements in a string quartet. Although less overtly Polish-influenced than the other 21st century compositions, it too employed scrub tremolos, slides and knocking on the wood of the instrument.

The opening Year of the Ox established the tonal sound world (later punctuated by noise effects) and good-humoured mood. The highly rhythmical Enjoy your Rabbit equated with a Scherzo, fading out into static at the end. The third movement, Year of Our Lord was a meditative sound-sheet, the slow changes giving it the feel of something static, even architectural. Energy was restored in the final Year of the Boar, with the players clearly enjoying the thrill-ride as much as the audience.

Stylistic jolt

By far the biggest stylistic jolt in the afternoon came at the start of the second half when Penderecki’s Aria was followed by the same composer’s String Quartet No. 1. Written for a film score, the Aria is an exercise in Baroque pastiche, almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

These mellifluous melodies gave way to the seemingly aleatoric landscape of jagged percussive effects and instrumental screams that dominate the uncompromising String Quartet.

Jonny Greenwood’s Suite from There Will be Blood followed without a break. Comparatively friendly in its musical syntax, it had coherence away from its filmic source, now bristling with determination (Future markets), now hypnotic (Prospector’s Quartet), with visually fun elements such as seeing the cellos play in banjo position (Proven Lands).

Tognetti, who since the interval had been directing rather than playing, supplemented the orchestral sound with a few notes on the synthesiser.

In some ways, the best was saved until last with Tognetti’s arrangement of Szymanowski’s String Quartet No. 2. The opening movement plunges the listener into the world of post-impressionist decadence that is the composer’s hallmark, the deliciously aestheticised sound world created through mutes and sul tasto effects (bowing above the fingerboard for a less focused timbre).

The second movement was a frantic waltz above a lively accompaniment, with cleverly varied textures and several nice solos. The impassioned final movement (not Lento throughout, despite what was written in the program book) offered a thrilling conclusion where the players’ commitment was once again palpable.

For the encore there was a return to the output of Jonny Greenwood, this time in the form of Radiohead’s How to disappear completely from Kid A. With Satu Vänskä providing vocals in the original tenor register of Thom Yorke, the swooping, haunting sounds from the much processed original were recreated in analogue form.

This Messiaen-and-Penderecki influenced track thus returned to the classical arena that inspired it: a fitting closing of the circle.

The ACO’s Indies & Idols can be seen in Perth on June 19, Melbourne June 23 and 24 and Sydney June 25, 26, 28 and 29.

– ref. Cross-over cocktail: Indies & Idols mixes rock stars with modern Polish composers – http://theconversation.com/cross-over-cocktail-indies-and-idols-mixes-rock-stars-with-modern-polish-composers-118992

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alina Donea, Senior Lecturer, Monash Centre for Astrophysics, Monash University

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.

If nothing can burn without oxygen then how is the Sun burning? – question from Shashikant Patil.

It’s true that here on Earth, if you want to burn something you need oxygen. But the Sun is different. It is not burning with the same kind of flame you would have on Earth if you burned a candle.

Have you heard of a nuclear reaction? It is a very powerful process that causes a lot of energy to be released. Well, inside the giant ball of gas that we call the Sun, a nuclear reaction is happening right now.

This means light particles are smashing into each other very, very fast. They hit each other so fast and so hard they sort of glue together. This is what scientists call “fusion” and it can cause other elements and atoms to be created. All this activity causes a lot of energy to be released, which heats up everything near it.

The hottest part of the Sun is its core. The heat and light spreads out from the centre of the ball of gas toward the edges, and that’s what makes the Sun glow.

So there is no normal “flame” in the Sun – at least not like the flames we have in a fire here on Earth – because the energy and light and heat is coming from the nuclear reaction.

And because there’s no normal flame, you don’t need oxygen.

Read more: Curious Kids: why does the world store nuclear waste and not just shoot it into the Sun or deep space?

Did you know the Sun is also loud?

All this activity inside the Sun creates a lot of sound waves. So the Sun is loud and vibrates like a church bell.

The high temperatures inside make sound waves travel super fast and smash into each other, and that’s what causes the vibration. Solar quakes shake the Sun very ferociously. These can cause what we call “solar flares”, where a powerful burst of energy shoots out from the Sun.

Here’s a video of a solar flare that happened in 2017:

I am an astrophysicist fascinated by the vibrations of the Sun. I am searching to discover more quakes inside the Sun and other stars, too (after all, the Sun is just a star).

If you are interested in finding solar quakes, too, check out the pictures from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Read more: Curious Kids: Is there anything hotter than the Sun?

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

Please 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.

– ref. Curious Kids: how is the Sun burning? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-is-the-sun-burning-112415

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Oliver Griffith, ARC DECRA Fellow, University of Melbourne

Many women realise they are pregnant before they’ve even done the test – perhaps feeling a touch of nausea, or tender, larger-than-usual breasts.

For a long time, biologists had thought most marsupials lacked a way to recognise a pregnancy.

But new research published today shows a marsupial mum knows – in a biological sense – when she’s carrying a young one before they make their journey to the pouch.

Read more: All female mammals have a clitoris – we’re starting to work out what that means for their sex lives

This knowledge changes how we think pregnancy evolved in mammals. It may also help in breeding programs for threatened or endangered marsupials by contributing to new technologies such as a marsupial pregnancy test.

Marsupials do things differently

When people think of marsupials – animals that mostly rear their young in a pouch (although not all marsupials have a pouch) – kangaroos and koalas tend to spring to mind. But marsupials come in a range of shapes and sizes.

Australia has about 250 species of marsupials, including wombats, possums, sugar gliders, the extinct Tasmanian tiger, and several endangered species such as the Tasmanian devil.

In addition to Australia’s marsupial diversity, there are also 120 marsupial species in South America – most of which are opossums – and just one species in North America, the Virginia opossum.

One thing all marsupials have in common is they give birth to very small, almost embryonic, young.

Because marsupial pregnancy passes so quickly (12-40 days, depending on the species), and marsupial young are so small and underdeveloped at birth, biologists had thought the biological changes required to support the fetus through a pregnancy happened as a follow on from releasing an egg (ovulation), rather than a response to the presence of a fetus.

Marsupial pregnancy is quick

One way to explore the question of whether it is an egg or a fetus that tells the marsupial female to be ready for pregnancy is to look at the uterus and the placenta.

In marsupials, just like in humans, embryos develop inside the uterus where they are nourished by a placenta.

Previously, biologists thought all of the physiological changes required for pregnancy in marsupials were regulated by hormones produced in the ovary after ovulation.

If this hypothesis is right, then the uterus of pregnant opossums should look the same as the uterus of opossums that ovulate but don’t have the opportunity to mate with a male.

To test this hypothesis, my colleagues at Yale’s Systems Biology Institute and I examined reproduction in the grey short-tailed opossum.

Signs of pregnancy

We looked at two groups of opossums: females that were exposed to male pheromones to induce ovulation, and females that were put with males so they could mate and become pregnant.

We then used microscopy and molecular techniques to compare females from the two groups. Contrary to the current dogma, we found that the uterus in pregnancy looked very different to those females that did not mate.

In particular, we found the blood vessels that bring blood from the mother to the placenta interface were only present in pregnancy. We also noticed that the machinery responsible for nutrient transport (nutrient transporting molecules) from the mother to the fetus was only produced in pregnancy.

While hormones may be regulating some aspects of maternal physiology, the mother is certainly detecting the presence of embryos and responding in a way that shows she is recognising pregnancy.

How this knowledge can help others

Given that recognition of pregnancy has now been found in both eutherian (formerly known as placental) mammals like ourselves and marsupials with the more ancestral reproductive characters, it appears likely that recognition of pregnancy is a common feature of all live bearing mammals.

Read more: Sexual aggression key to spread of deadly tumours in Tasmanian devils

But this knowledge does more than satisfy our curiosity. It could lead to new technologies to better manage marsupial conservation. Several marsupials face threats in the wild, and captive breeding programs are an important way to secure the future of several species.

One such species is the Tasmanian devil, which faces extinction from a dangerous contagious cancer. Captive breeding programs may be one of the only mechanisms to ensure the species survives.

But management can be made more difficult when we don’t know which animals are pregnant. Our research shows that maternal signals are produced in response to the presence of developing embryos. With a bit more research, it may be possible to test for these signals directly.

New reproductive technologies are likely crucial for improving outcomes of conservation programs, and this work shows, that to do this we first need a better understanding of the biology of the animals we are trying to save.

– ref. New research could lead to a pregnancy test for endangered marsupials – http://theconversation.com/new-research-could-lead-to-a-pregnancy-test-for-endangered-marsupials-118772

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacki Montgomery, Lecturer, Advertising and Media, Western Sydney University

Increasing numbers of women lack a safe and secure place to call home. But most women who are homeless are “invisible”. You don’t see these vulnerable women sleeping on the streets – most are forced into “couch-surfing”, staying in crisis or temporary accommodation, or sleeping in their cars.

We interviewed past participants in the Vinnies CEO Sleepout and people who have experienced homelessness. The stories of women who are homeless highlight the many forms that homelessness and the attendant vulnerability can take.

Read more: Homelessness soars in our biggest cities, driven by rising inequality since 2001

The most frequent cause of their homelessness is family violence. From 2015-2017, the number of women hospitalised due to partner assault rose by 23%. In Australia, one woman is killed by a current or previous partner every nine days. A woman is hospitalised because of domestic violence every two hours.

The largest number of homeless women is between the ages of 25 and 34, a number that is increasing year on year.

Our study explores women’s homelessness as part of wider study of the immediate and ripple effects of the Vinnies CEO Sleepout – an annual event where CEOs sleep rough for one night to raise funds and awareness.

Female CEOs are particularly likely to respond to the issue of women’s homelessness, and to seek to raise others’ awareness, once their awareness of it is raised. For example, CEO Jen Driscoll said she was staggered at the proportion of women and children who are homeless and unsafe.

You can’t start to tackle an issue more broadly, unless you know what the issue is. It’s not just about sleeping rough, it’s about everything else that goes along with this path that leads you to the place of being homeless. And having a safe home is just a base-level requirement to being a human.

Read more: Take heart, charity stunts can make CEOs better people

Many paths to homelessness

Priyanka, 31, has been couch-surfing for six months, hiding from her ex-husband. After emigrating from India, he had been unable to find secure work and their relationship deteriorated.

His physical assaults left Priyanka unable to go to work and she lost her job. She now fears for her life.

I just always feel like I’m on high alert. And the stress of not knowing where I’m going to live is huge.

Priyanka tries to hide the shame and embarrassment she feels from couch-surfing. Her Facebook feed tells family back home of a successful, happy life in Sydney.

Coreen, 25, left Gunnedah with her boyfriend for the bright lights of Sydney. He returned home after six months, leaving her isolated and broke. An online job ad she answered “turned out to be a private escort service, and at the time, I didn’t feel I had much choice. She let me live there.”

Eventually, Coreen left as all the money she made went to pay the rent.

I started working at other parlours around Sydney. Because when you work there, sometimes they let you stay there. I started taking drugs. With that kind of work, it got you through your shift.

Coreen is now off drugs, seven months pregnant and staying at a refuge. Her future is uncertain – she doesn’t want to return to sex work and feels she cannot return to Gunnedah.

Read more: ‘Just a piece of meat’: how homeless women have little choice but to use sex for survival

Kim, 34, had been homeless for a dozen years after being kicked out of home at 18. She slept in cars and on couches and became pregnant with her daughter at 21.

Having my daughter saved my life. I didn’t care much about myself before that, but I didn’t want to be homeless with a baby.

While living in a refuge, she was assaulted by a male worker. She applied for public housing and was placed on the New South Wales waiting list. With more than 52,000 applicants, the average wait time for a two-bedroom property in Sydney is over 10 years.

To survive, Kim endured a series of abusive relationships, just to keep a roof over her daughter’s head.

Once, I was working as a nanny, and my ex showed up. I was trying to mind a baby and I had to phone the police. That got me fired.

At 31, Kim was offered a public housing apartment, where she now lives. She is working with a domestic violence counsellor she met through Vinnies to overcome the psychological scars of years of abuse.

Read more: Look beyond crisis accommodation so people like Courtney Herron aren’t homeless in the first place

Awareness is first step towards action

Kim will share her story at the next Vinnies CEO Sleepout on June 20.

The annual sleepout is in its 14th year and has raised more than A$50 million to provide essential services for people experiencing homelessness.

Female leaders make up about 19% of those participating in the CEO Sleepout, a slightly higher proportion than the 17.1% of CEOs in Australia who are female. Those who participate are motivated to make a difference. As one said:

I just have a tiny sliver of this experience sleeping out in the cold. The sleepout brings together people who have larger spheres of influence, who can exchange ideas and push the message out more broadly.

– ref. ‘I didn’t want to be homeless with a baby’: young women share their stories of homelessness – http://theconversation.com/i-didnt-want-to-be-homeless-with-a-baby-young-women-share-their-stories-of-homelessness-118180

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julaine Allan, Senior research fellow, Charles Sturt University

A young man recently turned up at a rural drug and alcohol service in New South Wales seeking help because of an infection in his arm. He said he had injected the drug Krokodil, which had not previously been reported in Australia.

Krokodil is a street name for desomorphine, a semi-synthetic drug that has similar effects to heroin and morphine. It’s called semi-synthetic because it is created in a chemical process but it’s made primarily from a drug, usually codeine, that comes from the opium poppy.

The short-term effects of Krokodil include relaxation, euphoria, slow and shallow breathing, and pain and swelling at the injection site.

The long-term effects can include blood clots, swollen veins, severe tissue damage, skin and muscle infections that cause black or green scaly skin around injection sites, sleeplessness, exhaustion, physical and psychological dependence, memory loss, speech problems, gangrene and death.

People who use Krokodil are usually injecting opioid drugs such as heroin or prescription painkillers. These drugs cause physical and psychological dependence that drives people to seek out any similar product when withdrawal symptoms kick in.

Krokodil is usually injected but can be swallowed. It takes two to three minutes to have an effect that lasts about two hours.

Read more: The rise and fall of Russia’s ‘flesh-eating drug’ krokodil

A bit of history

Desomorphine was first made in 1932 in the United States by scientists testing the effects of different types of morphine on rats and mice. It was found to be strong, short-acting, and caused less nausea than morphine.

Desomorphine is eight to ten times stronger than morphine (1mg of desomorphine has the same effect as 10mg of morphine).

Trials of desomorphine on people started in 1934. People with cancer were given desomorphine to see whether it could control their pain. It did work but only for a short time – about two to three hours – and higher doses did not make it last any longer.

Tests for dependence on desomorphine found that tolerance increased rapidly, so more was needed for the same effect. It causes physical dependence after about ten days of regular use and leads to similar withdrawal symptoms to morphine and heroin.

Desomorphine was used in Russia and Switzerland to treat strong pain until 1981 under the brand name Permonid, but disappeared from use as other drugs delivered fewer side effects and more effective pain relief.

Desomorphine and is not currently used in medical practice.

Desomorphine as Krokodil

The first reported use of desomorphine as Krokodil was in Russia in 2003. Krokodil was thought to be popular among people who injected drugs in Russia because codeine was available without a prescription and heroin was scarce.

Krokodil can be made at home from drugs containing codeine or other opioids mixed with things like paint thinner, petrol, the red tips from matches, and hydrochloric acid. The mixture is heated in a process often called “homebake”.

Read more: Weekly Dose: cocaine, the glamour drug of the ’70s, is making a comeback

The chemical reactions caused by cooking makes a stronger product than the codeine it started with. A yellowish to light brown liquid is produced with a strong acid-like smell.

The name Krokodil is thought to come from a step in the cooking process where codeine turns into a chemical called a-Chlorocodide, and also because it often causes ulcers and scaly skin that look like crocodile skin where it has been injected.

Crocodile skin

In 2012 over-the-counter codeine was banned in Russia and reports of Krokodil use declined. But between 2013 and 2015, media reports of Krokodil use in the United States and United Kingdom gave the impression its use remained widespread.

The reports focused on the skin infections and examples of gangrene said to be related to the drug. They referred to Krokodil as a flesh-eating drug and suggested users became zombies.

Poor injecting practices and poisons cause skin and vein problems, including infections, in people injecting any type of drug. But injuries from Krokodil can be more serious.

Read more: Krokodil: how ‘flesh-eating zombie drug’ is causing a global crisis

These effects are caused by the toxic chemicals used during the homemade drug process. The symptoms are exacerbated when people using Krokodil don’t seek treatment soon enough, or don’t return for follow-up care, probably because of their heavy involvement in drug use. The infections can be treated if caught soon enough and monitored.

Medical case reports have identified infections and rotting skin down to the bone at injection sites. This can include jaw osteonecrosis (jawbone exposure in the mouth) where ulcers and skin infections have affected a person’s gums.

Many people who have injected Krokodil into their mouths require surgery to cut away the tissue and sometimes infected parts of the jawbone. Some people have died within three years of starting to use the drug because of infections.

Is Krokodil coming to Australia?

In 2016, police and health representatives said there were no reports of Krokodil in Australia even though the media had warned of the possibility. Drug monitoring programs have not reported Krokodil use.

The appearance of Krokodil in rural NSW has probably got more to do with an entrepreneurial drug dealer making up for a shortage of opioids than widespread manufacture and use of the drug.

Read more: Monkey Dust, Krokodil, Nyaope: why new drug concoctions keep appearing

– ref. Weekly Dose: Krokodil, the Russian ‘flesh-eating’ drug, makes a rare appearance in Australia – http://theconversation.com/weekly-dose-krokodil-the-russian-flesh-eating-drug-makes-a-rare-appearance-in-australia-117594

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Graham, PhD Candidate, Charles Darwin University

Many parents believe teaching their child to read is the best way to get them ready to start school, but teachers often disagree. Teachers generally consider it more important for children to know how to regulate their emotions, be confident in their abilities and be curious learners.

Parents and teachers in my study

In a recent study, I wanted to find what parent beliefs and behaviours were most effective in helping children succeed at school.

I collected data from 120 parents on what they believed was their role in supporting their child’s learning, as well how often they did certain things to prepare their child to succeed at school.

These were often regular activities parents did that would help prepare their child for school but weren’t necessarily done with that goal.

My study also included 52 teacher and parent pairs in schools around South Australia and the Northern Territory. I married up what parents reported they did with their child before starting school with how these children fared at school across a range of developmental areas.

I also conducted follow-up interviews with 16 parents. Some were employed while others were stay-at-home parents. I interviewed fathers and mothers, as well as parents from different cultural and economic positions.

Reading most important to parents

Literacy was what mostly came to mind when parents discussed how they prepared their child for school, usually in informal and incidental ways, such as shared reading. Around 94% of parents did literacy activities three or more times a week.

One father told me:

We’ve read to them since the day they got out of hospital basically […] so they have both had wide exposure to reading and books. Both the kids have got upwards of 200 to 300 books in their room.

Literacy development is important in the early years and offers a host of benefits to children. A recent study found parents who read one book a day with their child are giving their child a 1.4 million-word advantage over their peers who have never been read to.

Read more: Five tips to help you make the most of reading to your children

Playing with children

I asked parents to indicate how many toys and learning materials their child had at home, from a checklist of 29 widely accessible items. These included balls, colouring books and building blocks.

My later analysis showed the more play-based resources a child had at home, the more prepared they were for the academic demands of school.

This doesn’t mean parents must spend more to ensure their child’s success. Paediatricians recommend simple toys, rather than electronic or expensive ones, as best for supporting child development.

Parents preferred playing and other informal activities over formal learning, the interviews showed. Around 64% of parents said they engaged in cognitively stimulating activities three or more times a week.

Most parents said they engaged in unstructured play with their child, which often led to conversations and incidental learning. Parents spoke of using their child’s play time as opportunities to engage with their child’s interests and design activities around them with the goal of learning.

Read more: Let them play! Kids need freedom from play restrictions to develop

Gaps between teachers and parents

But there was some disparity between what parents most valued in preparing the child for school (literacy) and what teachers found most important for school-readiness.

Around 62% of teachers in my study were concerned about at least one aspect of children’s development. More than 45% of these related to the child’s emotional readiness – in particular, a child’s confidence in their ability and self-regulation skills.

These concerns aren’t surprising. Research from the UK also showed teachers felt academic skills weren’t as important as children being confident, independent and curious learners.

In other research, one teacher said:

We can teach them to write their name, but it’s more important to have kids who can function in the classroom.

This doesn’t mean parents are failing their children; it reflects the difficulty parents face in teaching social and emotional skills.

Read more: Is my child being too clingy and how can I help?

It’s a shared responsibility

More than 90% of parents in my study saw the role of teaching children emotional regulation as a shared responsibility between them and teachers. Research has long recognised education as a collaborative task, with both parent and teacher knowledge being important.

In the landmark UK EPPE study, children experienced greater cognitive gains in preschool centres that had high levels of parental engagement. The most effective settings shared information relevant to the children with staff and parents, and parents had a greater say in decision-making about their child’s learning.

Read more: Preschool benefits all children, but not all children get it. Here’s what the government can do about that

Parents need more help

A child who spends their preschool years in a play-based, nurturing and responsive environment, with a range of conversations, experiences, peers and resources, will likely adjust well to the demands of school.

But how can parents teach their child emotional regulation and the adjustment skills they need to function in the classroom?

Research shows that parents should look for teachable moments, harnessing children’s interests to incorporate learning into daily life. They can use these opportunities as a vehicle to hold positive conversations and boost a child’s confidence.

Social connections are also important. Children should have plenty of opportunities to play with their friends.

Being a role model is especially important. Parents should model self-regulation, keeping calm when dealing with mistakes and scaffolding their children to develop these tricky skills. They could be positive about school and how much fun their child will have when they go.

It’s important to find times to talk with your child about their feelings so they learn to be aware of their own emotions.

Some research has also found mindfulness for kids can help them learn greater self-control.

– ref. Here’s what teachers look for when kids start school – http://theconversation.com/heres-what-teachers-look-for-when-kids-start-school-116523

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Lecturer in Architecture, UNSW

Hundreds of residents in a Sydney apartment complex, the 122-unit Mascot Towers, were evacuated last Sunday when cracks began to appear due to a serious structural failure. And it isn’t clear when the residents can return.

This crisis echoes the structural failure at Opal Tower and its evacuation on Christmas Eve last year. We have seen a series of serious building failures and fires in recent years. And state and federal governments have had more than year to act on recommendations for better construction regulations, but instead they’re shifting blame.

Although each building failure was different, the end result is the same: misery for the residents and a looming financial disaster for the owners.

Read more: Flammable cladding costs could approach billions for building owners if authorities dither

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian said:

We’re getting to the bottom of what happened. The NSW government will hold everybody to account, that’s our role.

But the government’s role is to regulate sufficiently to prevent building failures in the first place, not to hold people to account after the event.

Read more: Housing with buyer protection and no serious faults – is that too much to ask of builders and regulators?

Building regulations since the Great Fire of London

Prevention of construction failures has been the bedrock of building regulations ever since the Great Fire of London in 1666. In the aftermath, the English government realised there was not much use in raking through the ashes and trying to hold people to account, and that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure. This led to the parliament passing regulations to prevent the spread of fire between buildings.

Governments all around the developed world took the lesson of the Great Fire to heart. Their common goal has been to proactively ensure buildings are constructed properly and are safe as a result.

This has been a pretty successful effort and most significant building failures since 1666 have contributed to a more comprehensive and effective regulatory regime.

Serious building failures appear to be more frequent

Prior to the Opal Tower emergency, there had been only one significant evacuation of a multi-unit residential building in NSW due to structural failure. That was a result of the 2009 gas explosion at Eastgate Towers in Bondi Junction.

However, depending on which research you read, either 72% or 97% of strata apartments suffer from serious defects when they’re finished.

There have also been a series of other problems with recent buildings. These include lead in water caused by imported brass plumbing components, non-complying imported electrical cables and failures in the installation of fire doors, fire walls and fire door frames.

Read more: Australia has a new National Construction Code, but it’s still not good enough

Why has this happened?

The states progressively introduced the Building Code of Australia (now the National Construction Code) during the 1990s as part of an agreed plan between the states and the federal government to make building regulations less prescriptive.

The aim was to reduce the cost of construction by favouring “innovation” over conservative “deemed to satisfy” regulations. Innovation, in these terms, meant finding ways to make buildings cheaper to build.

This move coincided with the globalisation of the building materials supply industry and a boom in the construction of tall apartment buildings in Australia.

Some of the innovation has been innocuous, or even beneficial, such as the introduction of a variety of lightweight interior wall systems, but some have resulted in substantial remediation bills – combustible cladding being the prime example. Inspection and responsibility for the plethora of imported components is virtually non-existent.

Read more: Don’t overlook residents’ role in apartment building safety

The downstream cost of failure has landed squarely in the laps of the building owners, many of them owners of tall apartments.

It’s difficult to estimate the total bill for remedial works to tall apartment buildings built over the last 25 years, but it may well exceed the Productivity Commission estimates of savings resulting from the introduction of the National Construction Code.

Blame shifting and ineffective regulations

The federal minister responsible for building regulations, Karen Andrews, says the states are to blame.

And some states, including NSW, have resorted to tough talk about crackdowns on “dodgy” certifiers and “dodgy” builders. In reality, the problem is dodgy government regulation, by both federal and state governments.

The federal and state governments already have an initial plan for fixing these problems. The Shergold-Weir report was delivered to the Building Ministers’ Forum in February 2018.

As the report said:

After having examined the matters put to us, we have concluded that the nature and extent [of building defects] are significant and concerning. The problems have led to diminishing public confidence that the building and construction industry can deliver compliant, safe buildings which will perform to the expected standards over the long term.

Since then, state and federal governments have done almost nothing to implement the recommendations of the report, despite the 2018 Christmas Eve failure at Opal and the fire at Neo200 in Melbourne the following February.

The report itself states:

The recommendations have been designed to form a holistic and structured framework to improve the compliance and enforcement systems of the [National Construction Code] across the country. They form a coherent package. They would best be implemented in their entirety.

In NSW, the published response to Shergold-Weir is a patchwork focusing on holding people to account after a building construction event. This is the reverse of the proactive approach developed following the Great Fire of London.

Read more: Beyond Opal: a 10-point plan to fix the residential building industry

The NSW government is set to appoint a building commissioner to oversee qualifications and to review building documentation.

But this will likely not achieve much, unless the government commits to upskilling workers throughout the industry and backs up desktop audits by increasing direct inspections on site. Neither of these things appears to be part of its plan.

All governments must take an active role in fixing the defective regulatory regime they have created. If they can’t get on with this process in a timely way, we will need yet another royal commission to sort it out.

The least Premier Berejiklian can do is to treat the Mascot Towers and Opal events in the same way the government treats natural disasters and provide housing assistance to residents who have been displaced through no fault of their own.

– ref. Buck-passing on apartment building safety leaves residents at risk – http://theconversation.com/buck-passing-on-apartment-building-safety-leaves-residents-at-risk-119000

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

It is often claimed that Australia’s superannuation system will ease the budgetary burden of an ageing population. It’s certainly the impression put about by those pushing for an increase in employers’ compulsory contributions from 9.5% to 12%.

But new estimates suggest that for up to a century that wouldn’t be the case. Indeed, for decades to come, an increase in compulsory super contributions of the kind Labor is committed to and the Coalition has leglislated would add to, rather than ease, the burden on taxpayers.

That’s in addition to the A$20 billion a year such an increase would take from workers’ salaries each year, often without giving them a better income in retirement.

Here’s why super is a burden on the budget

It is evidence that will be crucial to the inquiry into Australia’s retirement system foreshadowed by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

It isn’t that superannuation doesn’t save the government money on pensions, it is that it costs it more in tax breaks than than it saves on the pension.

The money employers pay into super accounts doesn’t come from nowhere. Most of it comes from money employers would have paid out at wages, taxed at the appropriate tax rate. Paid into super accounts, it is generally taxed at only 15%, a concession the Treasury believes will cost A$17 billion next financial year.

Lifting compulsory super from 9.5% to 12% as is legislated over the five years from 2021 to 2015 will deprive the Treasury of an extra A$2 billion to A$2.5 billion per year.

Read more: Frydenberg should call a no-holds-barred inquiry into superannuation, now, because Labor won’t

In 2013 the Treasury estimated that the extra revenue foregone from tax breaks after contributions were lifted from 9% to 12% would exceed the budget savings on the pension by 0.4% of GDP a year.

Eventually – by 2050 – the net budgetary cost of super tax breaks would be “only” 0.2% of GDP a year. The extra cost of the tax breaks would continue to exceed the savings on the pension until about 2060, with the resulting debt not paid off in savings on the pension for decades.

The latest projections are bleaker

More recent modelling from actuarial firm Rice Warner paints an even worse budgetary picture.

It finds that lifting compulsory super contributions to 12% “will not have much impact on the age pension for many years”, and will save the budget only about 0.1% of GDP in lower age pension spending in the second half of this century.

In contrast, the extra super tax breaks from higher compulsory super will cost an average of 0.22% of GDP “throughout this century”. In other words, the government wouldn’t break even on compulsory super until well into the 22nd century.

And the latest Rice Warner modelling shows that lifting compulsory super contributions even further, to 20%, would barely change the future trajectory of age pension spending.

Age pension spending would fall by just 0.2% of GDP by 2050 and 0.3% by 2100, while the budget cost of the super tax breaks climbed to 0.8% of GDP by 2050 and 0.6% by 2100.

The budget cost higher compulsory super would be lower if super tax breaks were wound back. But super tax breaks would need to be cut by about $10 billion a year – out of about A$30 billion – before compulsory super would start to save the budget real money.

The Turnbull government’s package of super tax changes in 2016 saved only A$750 million per year.

We are indeed spending less on the pension

Spending on the age pension is slowing, despite the ageing of Australia’s population. Australia spends just 4% of GDP on pension benefits (including disability and other pensions) and is expected to spend just 3.7% by 2055. The OECD average is 9%.

In the main, this is because of the design of our scheme. Australia’s age pension is more tightly means-tested than those elsewhere, and the maximum rate is the same for everyone, rather than set as a proportion of workers’ pre-retirement earnings.

And the income and assets test thresholds are indexed to inflation rather than living standards. If living standards grow 1% faster than inflation, as they have, the real value of the thresholds will fall by a third over a working life, cutting the pension to which Australians are entitled.

But that’s how it’s designed

Compulsory super has also played a part. Under the income and assets test, retired Australians with large super savings are often eligible for only a part-pension or no pension.

The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia estimates that age pension spending is A$9 billion lower than it would be without compulsory super. $9 billion is a fraction of the A$30 billion cost of super tax breaks. Although there is debate about how to measure the total cost of those concessions, there is no debate that they cost the budget more than they save.

Lifting compulsory super to 12% of wages would cost even more, at a time when the budget isn’t flush with funds.

Whatever other arguments there are for lifting compulsory super contributions, and the Grattan Institute does not think there are many, the argument that it will safeguard the budget against the costs of ageing cannot be among them.

Read more: Why we should worry less about retirement – and leave super at 9.5%

– ref. Myth busted. Boosting super would cost the budget more than it saved on age pensions – http://theconversation.com/myth-busted-boosting-super-would-cost-the-budget-more-than-it-saved-on-age-pensions-119002

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Darren Paul Fisher, Head of Directing, Department of Film, Screen and Creative Media, Bond University

“Elsa, the past is not what it seems.” The opening line from the latest Frozen II trailer invites us to revisit not only the original world of the film but to re-think its meaning.

Of course, this is a well-worn technique with most sequels – a deeper dive into the mythology, sometimes deepening the experience (The Empire Strikes Back), sometimes complicating it to catastrophic effect (The Phantom Menace).

However, it’s also an important time to reflect on what the original Frozen meant to our world, a very different time in 2013, and to make a bold claim: I think that Frozen is perhaps the most important feminist film ever made.

It is still the most successful animated musical of all time, having made over $1.2 billion in the cinema alone, not including the merchandising that permeates children’s bedrooms all over the world.

To set the scene, in 2013 Obama was still president and Harvey Weinstein still respected, if not awed, as a film producer. No #metoo, little significant dialogue in the screen world on gender equality (although Geena Davis was making increasing impact with her Institute on Gender in Media, founded back in 2004), and even less on racial diversity and gender fluidity.

Frozen, a Disney animation about two princess sisters, one with the power to manipulate ice and snow, had been in development for decades, based on the Hans Christian Andersen Snow Queen story. Elsa was the villain. The film that audiences finally saw was somewhat of a happy accident: when one of the directors heard Let It Go for the first time (the now-forever-torch-song-of-self-acceptance), it inspired her to completely re-think the story and reshape it around sisterly love.

The overriding messages of the film are almost embarrassingly simple: suppressing your authentic self is hugely damaging; fear is negative; love is positive. But here’s the meta-level kicker: it’s a fairytale (and a Disney one, at that) that tells us that princesses-in-jeopardy do not need a male to save them, thank you very much.

The Nevermind of this screen generation?

The take-home is clear: Women no longer need to be defined by their relationships to men. Here even romantic love is presented as problematic for the female characters, instead of a solution (opposite to the tradition of female love being the complication to the male hero’s journey). When Anna rejects her “true” love Kristoff to sacrifice herself for her sister, it is a deliberately symbolic meta-gesture, that had a far bigger impact than the filmmakers could have genuinely expected.

It’s important to note here, that the problem (women always presented as objects-to-be-saved – especially princesses) was largely one created by Disney, although they should be given kudos for also being the one to eventually smash the trope. But it is also absurd that in 2013 the idea that women could have agency (and stories) independent of men should have been so culturally significant.

Still, the fact that a Disney blockbuster overturned this trope was key. The huge commercial success of Frozen proved that these stories make money, influencing the mainstream to generate similar tales. Just look at the current output of Marvel and DC. The idea of women not defined by men has become a given, part of the intellectual fabric of an entire generation of girls and boys, something a challenging indie or art-house film could never hope or expect to achieve.

And Frozen did something even more rare, it closed the door on those old damsel-in-distress characterisations, perhaps forever, in the same way that Dances with Wolves forever closed the door on the representation of American Indians as one-dimensional savages (noble or otherwise).

In fact, I think Frozen has become the Nevermind of this screen generation; just as the seminal Nirvana album instantly dated all rock that come before it, Frozen magically made all previous fairy tales hopelessly old-fashioned.

A different world

So what for Frozen II (which will open in Australian cinemas on November 28)? It’s arriving in a very different world from its predecessor. Story-wise, from the “autumnal” feel to the trailer, it’s clear that the film is going to be the second of four movies/seasons (no points for that one), and the “past is not what it seems” theme, combined with lots of Elsa in the sea does indicate (but I hope it doesn’t go there) that her dead parents might somehow be brought back to life.

But will it have the same cultural impact? Absolutely not. And nor should it. Frozen was a lightening-rod moment in the zeitgeist, but to try to make it to strike twice would be disastrous, both creatively and financially. I am keen to see what happens to Elsa and Anna, but would worry if the film attempts to up the thematic stakes to extend the cultural conversation.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love Disney and other studios to make films that better represented our ethnically, sexually and gender diverse populations (intersectional feminism, anyone?), but I think that might just be too much pressure on one narrative, even with all of Elsa’s magical powers.

– ref. Frozen was our most important feminist film but the sequel won’t have the same impact – http://theconversation.com/frozen-was-our-most-important-feminist-film-but-the-sequel-wont-have-the-same-impact-118915

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Navjot Bhullar, Associate Professor – Faculty of Medicine and Health; School of Psychology, University of New England

You might have noticed that being in nature can improve your mood. Whether it’s walking in a beautiful rainforest, swimming in the ocean or a moment of wonder at the plants and animals around you, nature offers a respite from daily routines and demands.

In 1984, the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson described this innate desire to connect with natural environments – and the positive experiences we derive from this connection – as the “biophilia hypothesis”:

Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.

There is evidence to back up the link between exposure to natural settings and better psychological well-being.

And my own research suggests that virtual exposure to nature via film (videos) or virtual reality can mimic this effect.

Read more: Why a walk in the woods really does help your body and your soul

Why being in nature makes us feel better

Studies on the psychological benefits of exposure to nature show spending time in natural settings can result in:

Two major theories help us understand how exposure to nature increases mood and psychological well-being.

First, Attention Restoration Theory is the idea that natural environments restore attention. We can only focus our attention for a certain period of time before feeling mentally fatigued. A short break in natural environments helps restore it.

This sense of “restorativeness” improves our sense of well-being, and breaks the routine of our every day life. Restorativeness explains some of the association between nature experience and psychological well-being.

Then there is Stress Reduction Theory. This suggests that natural environments promote recovery from stress, which is different from attention fatigue.

Non-threatening, natural environments would have increased the chances of survival for our ancestors because they provided opportunities for reproduction, food and shelter. As a result, we’ve evolved to respond positively to such settings.

Emotional responses to aesthetically pleasing stimuli, such as green spaces, also tend to decrease physiological arousal, thus making us feel relaxed.

Read more: Virtual reality adds to tourism through touch, smell and real people’s experiences

Virtual contact with nature mimics this effect

In a meta-analysis of 32 studies, researchers compared the effects of exposure to both natural and urban environments. Results showed that exposure to natural environments showed a moderate association with higher positive mood.

This exposure doesn’t have to take place in-person. Research I conducted with my colleagues at the University of New England’s Applied Psychology Lab showed that while people got the most psychological benefit from physical exposure to nature, exposure to simulated natural environments – such as film or virtual reality – had a comparable effect.

One study showed that taking part in a virtual reality experience of a natural environment resulted in higher levels of positive affect and greater attention restoration compared to a virtual reality experience of an urban environment.

Psychological benefits seem to be dependent on the type of nature experience. Another study found that a virtual experience of wild nature (defined as natural settings, such as wilderness with little human interference) improved positive mood. By contrast, a virtual experience of urban nature (such as parks in urbanised areas) exerted its beneficial effect by reducing negative mood.

The studies also showed that simulated natural environments providing realistic representations of nature, such as interactive virtual reality, resulted in greater psychological benefits than less immersive mediums such as photographs of natural settings.

Read more: Inspired, magical, connected: How virtual reality can make you well

Increasing our daily contact with nature

In a modern world increasingly characterised by built environments, it’s not always possible to spend time in nature every day. Promoting exposure to virtual natural environments seems like an effective way of improving psychological well-being.

Simulated representations of nature can help improve urban and indoor environments where access to nature is limited, such as hospitals, urban offices, apartments, and inner city schools.

That might mean displaying photographs and moving videos of natural colours and patterns, installing living green walls, or placing potted plants in areas people move through everyday.

– ref. We know contact with nature makes you feel better. Can virtual contact do the same? – http://theconversation.com/we-know-contact-with-nature-makes-you-feel-better-can-virtual-contact-do-the-same-111752