Students – whether at university or school – can get help from many places. They can go to a tutor, parent, teacher, a friend or consult a textbook.
But at which point does getting help cross the line into cheating?
Sometimes it’s clear. If you use a spy camera or smartwatch in an exam, you’re clearly cheating. And you’re cheating if you get a friend to sit an exam for you or write your assignment.
At other times the line is blurry. When it’s crossed, it constitutes academic misconduct. Academic misconduct is any action or attempted action that may result in creating an unfair academic advantage for yourself or others.
What about getting someone else to read a draft of your essay? What if they do more than proofread and they alter sections of an assignment? Does that constitute academic misconduct?
Learning, teaching or cheating?
There are a wide range of activities that constitute academic misconduct. These can include:
fabrication, which is just making things up. I could say “90 % of people admit to fabricating their assignments”, when this is not a fact but a statement I just invented
falsification, which is manipulating data to inaccurately portray results. This can occur by taking research results out of context and drawing conclusions not supported by data
misrepresentation, which is falsely representing yourself. Did you know I have a master’s degree from the University of Oxford on this topic? (Actually, I don’t)
plagiarism, which is when you use other people’s ideas or words without appropriate attribution. For instance, this list came from other people’s research and it is important to reference the source.
Sometimes students and teachers have different ideas of academic misconduct. One study found around 45% of academics thought getting someone else to correct a draft could constitute academic misconduct. But only 32% of students thought the same thing.
In the same survey, most academics and students agreed having someone else like a parent or friend identify errors in a draft assignment, as opposed to correcting them, was fine.
Students and academics agree having someone else identify errors in your assignment is OK. Correcting them is another story.from shutterstock.com
Generally when a lecturer, teacher or another marker is assessing an assignment they need to establish the authenticity of the work. Authenticity means having confidence the work actually relates to the performance of the person being assessed, and not of another person.
The Australian government’s vocational education and training sector’s quality watchdog, for instance, considers authenticity as one of four so-called rules of evidence for an “effective assessment”.
The rules are:
validity, which is when the assessor is confident the student has the skills and knowledge required by the module or unit
sufficiency, which is when the quality, quantity and relevance of the assessment evidence is enough for the assessor to make a judgement
authenticity, where the assessor is confident the evidence presented for assessment is the learner’s own work
currency, where the assessor is confident the evidence relates to what the student can do now instead of some time in the past.
Generally speaking, if the assessor is confident the work is the product of a student’s thoughts and where help has been provided there is proper acknowledgement, it should be fine.
Why is cheating a problem?
It’s difficult to get a handle on how big the cheating problem is. Nearly 30% of students who responded to a 2012 UK survey agreed they had “submitted work taken wholly from an internet source” as their own.
In Australia, 6% of students in a survey of 14,000 reported they had engaged in “outsourcing behaviours” such as submitting someone else’s assignment as their own, and 15% of students had bought, sold or traded notes.
Getting someone to help with your assignment might seem harmless but it can hinder the learning process. The teacher needs to understand where the student is at with their learning, and too much help from others can get in the way.
Some research describes formal education as a type of “signal”. This means educational attainment communicates important information about an individual to a third party such as an employer, a customer, or to an authority like a licensing body or government department. Academic misconduct interferes with that process.
It appears fewer cheaters are getting away with it than before. Some of the world’s leading academic institutions have reported a 40% increase in academic misconduct cases over a three year period.
Technological advances mean online essay mills and “contract cheating” have become a bigger problem. This type of cheating involves outsourcing work to third parties and is concerning because it is difficult to detect.
But while technology has made cheating easier, it has also offered sophisticated systems for educators to verify the work is a person’s own. Software programs such as Turnitin can check if a student has plagiarised their assignment.
Institutions can also verify the evidence they are assessing relates to a student’s actual performance by using a range of assessment methods such as exams, oral presentations, and group assignments.
Academic misconduct can be a learning and cultural issue. Many students, particularly when they are new to higher education, are simply not aware what constitutes academic misconduct. Students can often be under enormous pressure that leads them to make poor decisions.
It is possible to deal with these issues in a constructive manner that help students learn and get the support they need. This can include providing training to students when they first enrol, offering support to assist students who may struggle, and when academic conduct does occur, taking appropriate steps to ensure it does not happen again.
The Australian construction industry has grown significantly in the past two decades. Population growth has led to the need for extensive property development, better public transport and improved infrastructure. This means there has been a substantial increase in waste produced by construction and demolition.
In 2017, the industry generated 20.4 million tons (or megatonnes, MT) of waste from construction and demolition, such as for road and rail maintenance and land excavation. Typically, the waste from these activities include bricks, concrete, metal, timber, plasterboard, asphalt, rock and soil.
Between 2016 and 2017, more than 6.7MT of this waste went into landfills across Australia. The rest is either recycled, illegally dumped, reused, reprocessed or stockpiled.
But with high social, economic and environmental costs, sending waste to landfill is the worst strategy to manage this waste.
What’s more, China introduced its “National Sword Policy” and restricted waste imports, banning certain foreign waste materials and setting stricter limits on contamination. So Australia’s need for solutions to landfill waste has become urgent.
China has long been the main end-market for recycling materials from Australia and other countries. In 2016 alone, China imported US$18 billion worth of recyclables.
Their new policy has mixed meanings for Australia’s waste and resource recovery industry. While it has closed China’s market to some of our waste, it encourages the development of an Australian domestic market for salvaged and recycled waste.
But there are several issues standing in the way of effective management of Australia’s construction and demolition waste.
In Australia, the main strategy to reduce the waste sent to landfill is the use of levies. But the effectiveness of levies has been questioned in recent years by experts who argue for smarter strategies to manage waste from construction and demolition. They say that imposing a landfill levy has not achieved the intended goals, such as a reduction in waste disposal or an increase in waste recovery activities.
To slow down the filling of landfills, Germany introduced “the German Packaging Ordinance”. This law made manufacturers responsible for their own packaging waste. They either had to take back their packaging from consumers and distributors or pay the national packaging waste management organisation to collect it.
Australia has no specific EPR-driven legal instrument for the construction and demolition waste stream, nor any nationally adopted EPR regulations.
Waste piled at a demolition site at Little A’Beckett Street in Melbourne in April 2019.Salman Shooshtarian, Author provided
These schemes have provided an impetus for industry engagement in national integrated management of some types of waste, such as e-waste, oil, batteries and fluorescent lights. Voluntary industry programs also cover materials such as PVC, gypsum, waffle pod and carpet.
For instance, since 2002, the Vinyl Council of Australia has voluntarily agreed to apply EPR principles. Armstrong Australia, the world’s largest manufacturer of resilient PVC flooring products, collects the offcuts and end-of-life flooring materials for recycling and processing into a new product. These materials would otherwise have been sent to landfill.
In another example, CSR Gyprock uses a take-back scheme to collect offcuts and demolition materials. After installation, the fixing contractor arranges collection with CSR Gyprock’s recycling contractor who charges the builder a reasonable fee.
Connecting industries
But extending producer responsibility in a sustainable way comes with a few challenges.
Everyone in the supply chain should be included: those who produce and supply materials, those involved in construction and demolition, and those who recover, recycle and dispose of waste.
The goal of our work is to connect organisations and industries across the country so waste can be traded instead of sent to landfill.
But the lack of an efficient supply chain system can discourage stakeholders from taking part in such schemes. An inefficient supply chain increases the costs associated with labour and admin staff at construction sites, transport, storage, separation of waste and insurance premiums.
All of these are not only seen as a financial burden but also add complexities to an already complicated system.
Australia needs a system with a balanced involvement of producers, consumers and delivery services to extend producer responsibility.
How can research and development help?
In our research, we’re seeking to develop a national economic approach to deal with the barriers preventing the effective management of construction and demolition waste in Australia, such as implementing an extended producer responsibility.
And a project aimed to find ways to integrate supply chain systems in the construction and demolition waste and resource recovery industry is supporting our efforts.
The goal is to ensure well-established connections between all parts in the construction supply chain. A more seamless system will boost markets for these materials, making waste recovery more economically viable. And that in turn will benefit society, economy and the environment.
In an enormous week for economic news at the start of the month, parliament passed the government’s three-stage personal income tax plan, and the Reserve Bank cut official interest rates to an unprecedented low of 1%.
It happened against the backdrop of a flagging economy in dire need of stimulus.
As the bank cut rates to a record low, its governor Philip Lowe again warned about the waning power of rates (monetary policy) to lift the economy.
Monetary policy does have a significant role to play and our decisions are helping support the Australian economy. But, we should not rely on monetary policy alone. We will achieve better outcomes for society as a whole if the various arms of public policy are all pointing in the same direction.
Lowe and many others – including yours truly – have repeatedly pointed out that spending on physical and social infrastructure can do what lower rates can’t do well – boost the economy while lifting its productivity. So, too would other productivity-enhancing reforms, particularly in the labour market.
And, of course, the government’s tax cuts will also stimulate the economy when they come into effect.
With tax cuts, timing’s the thing…
The obvious problem is that much of stimulus from those tax cuts will happen years from now, rather than today.
What the government should have done was insist on enacting all three stages of their tax plan immediately. Not staggered over several years, not in 2024-25. Now.
That would have, of course, pushed the budget into deficit in the short run, and that would would have run counter to the government’s narrative about being responsible economic managers.
But how responsible is it to prioritise one’s own political brand over the economic health of the nation?
Let’s not forget where the timing of the government’s tax plan came from. 2024-25 is outside the budget’s so-called “forward estimate” period and thus the impact on the deficit or surplus projections is not apparent.
It was the same rationale that underpinned the glacial, decade-long pace at which the government’s “enterprise tax plan” was to move to a 25% company tax rate. And it is the same set of dodgy accounting tricks that Wayne Swan was a master of for everything from health to education spending commitments.
…and the timing could be immediate
Productive infrastructure spending is hard to enact quickly. Spending on social infrastructure like education and training has a long lead time.
And structural reform of the industrial relations system might is probably the hardest and longest of all to put in place.
They are real constraints.
The Reserve Bank faces another, the so-called “zero lower bound” of conventional monetary policy and the complexities and uncertainties of unconventional policies such as quantitative easing.
But a government which won a mandate for its tax policies, and who frankly has the Labor opposition in a tailspin, could have insisted on all three stages of the tax cuts immediately.
The only thing standing between the economy and the aggressive fiscal stimulus it needs is the government’s obsession with balancing the budget regardless of the circumstances.
We’re not in the best of times
Don’t get me wrong, I think debt and deficits most certainly do matter. The government deserves credit for chipping away at the structural budget deficit, and we shouldn’t be running deficits in good economic times.
But we’re not in good economic times. We’re standing on the precipice of the first recession in nearly three decades. We’re looking at highly uncertain global conditions, domestic economic growth that has slowed to a trickle, sluggish wages growth, persistently high underemployment, and even the possibility of Japanese-style deflation.
The irony is that if, with the failure to enact sufficiently bold stimulus, we do tip into a recession, the red ink will flow all through the budget. Unemployment benefits and welfare payments will rise, personal and corporate income receipts will fall, GST revenue will drop. And young people who enter the labour market during a recession will suffer for years to come.
The downsides of not enacting sufficient fiscal stimulus far outweigh whatever benefits there are of a glide to path to budget balance while avoiding a recession.
It’s certainly not the time for hand-wringing
Coming back to Lowe’s admonition that we need the “various arms of public policy…pointing in the same direction”, here’s where we currently stand: The bank has acted, but far too late. For years it told us that 5% unemployment was as good as it could get long-term, to be patient and to wait for higher wage growth and inflation.
It’s been a mere five weeks since Lowe stopped impersonating Charles Dickens’ character Wilkins Micawber, who was fond of saying “something will turn up”.
Now the treasurer Josh Frydenberg is giving us his version of the same routine. On one hand he says personal income tax cuts are crucial to boosting employment and spending. On the other hand, he says we’d better wait.
The Australian economy can’t afford to wait for aggressive stimulus. The government has shown more concern for its political brand than for our economic health.
The term “self-sufficiency” commonly evokes images of communes, yurts and 1970s hippies, most likely living off the land in northern New South Wales. More recently, it has been linked to an explosion of interest in solar powered “off-grid” living, tiny houses, ethical food networks and complementary health practices, along with a hipster-driven return to the artisanal and hand-made.
But these are just a small part of a much larger story. Australians have, in fact, dreamt of going back-to-the-land since the latter part of the 19th century. Those who embraced an ethic of self-sufficiency included anarchists, suffragists seeking opportunities for unemployed women, Catholic agrarians wanting to nurture both the soul and the soil, and a grassroots collection of organic farmers trying to bring attention to “Mother Earth”.
Each of these pioneers looked beyond “unhealthy” cities to the land as a source of salvation, seeking answers and alternatives to some of the problems of industrial modernity, and sharing in a vision of “the good life”.
A century before today’s ‘off-grid’, tiny house fans, Australians sought solace by going back to the land.shutterstock
Dirty, corrupt cities
The story begins in the late 19th century when urban reformers across North America, England, Europe and Australia started to identify a decline in societal values and standards, sparked by economic insecurity and rapid social change. With growing anxiety around “dirty and corrupt” cities, a transported image of the English “rural idyll” became a ready source of inspiration.
In Australia, this idea was equally shaped by the romance of bush ballads, alongside the popular landscape art movement. But rather than simply gaze at the landscape or go bush-walking on weekends, a number of urban Utopians wanted to get back to nature, hoping to reimagine and reconstruct society.
David Andrade was one of them. Born to Jewish merchants in Collingwood in 1859, he grew up with an acute sensitivity to the inequalities he saw around him. After co-founding the first Anarchist Club in Australia and spending years publishing and speaking across Melbourne, Andrade came up with a bold vision he called “Social Pioneering”. It envisaged opening up “agricultural, pastoral and industrial pursuits” for people with no access to land, bringing them closer to nature and basic subsistence living to avoid the dangerous economic fluctuations of the market.
David Andrade pictured in the 1890s.www.marxists.org/glossary/people/a/n.htm
In 1893, during a worsening economic depression, Andrade established “Liberty Hall” in central Melbourne. This radical venture housed a progressive “bookery”, the earliest vegetarian restaurant and hosted numerous lectures on topics like socialism, mesmerism, vaccination, free thought and spiritualism.
Andrade laid out plans for a co-operative community called “Freedom” on Lake Boga along the Murray River as an “enlightened salve for poor city wage-slaves”.
However, with little support for such a wild venture, in 1894, he and his wife Emily instead moved to the newly opened settlement of Sassafras in the nearby Dandenong Ranges with their three children, and a fourth on the way. Under a government scheme known as Village or Closer Settlement, which opened up large tracts of arable but often difficult land to the urban unemployed, the Andrades were among thousands who looked to small-scale farming on small rural “homesteads”.
Sadly their dream of agricultural independence and collective Utopia remained elusive. In 1897, devastating fires burnt out the settlement. David was committed to Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum soon after with his “reason having been broken down”. Emily and the children were forced to move back to the city and much of the radicalism of Andrade’s pioneering ventures soon faded.
Still, many others continued to battle capricious natural elements, poor soils, and the harsh realities of making a living from the land, buoyed by the potential of subsistence agriculture and the autonomy of working for oneself.
Womanly but not weak
While it was acceptable for both urban and rural women to garden domestically, it was hard for women to make a living from their gardens in the cities. Away from city dwellers’ conventions and expectations, they had more luck.
Horticulture for Ladies. The Australasian, 18 Feb, 1899.The Australasian
In December 1892, suffragist Mary Sanger Evans began promoting silk growing, or sericulture, as an ideal vocation for “womanly agriculture” pursuits as the Depression set in. Defying the view that “real men do real farming”, sericulture was promoted as a feminine practice. Soon after, Evans formalised her ideas into the Women’s Cooperative Silk Growing and Industrial Association. It had a charter to
open up new fields of productive industry for workless women of all classes, from the refined gentlewoman, thrown perhaps suddenly to depend on her own exertions, to the factory girl or motherless waif – industries healthful and elevating, and, if properly carried out, highly profitable – all of them too, productive from the soil direct.
With the support of prominent women such as the wife of NSW Governor Robert Duff, the organisation purchased a 44-acre farm lease at Wyee, north of Sydney. They called it “Wirawidar”, the Indigenous name for “woman’s ground”. Continuing to farm until 1901 during drought and difficult economic conditions, their efforts inspired urban women to look away from the cities towards the power of the soil.
With the support of her brother Justice Henry Higgins, suffrage activist Ina Higgins also realised that women could gain “autonomy and freedom” from a rural smallholding. After years agitating for a course to be made available for women at the Burnley Horticulture College, Ina became one of its first graduates in 1900. She then became Australia’s first professional female landscape gardener.
With the support of fellow suffrage and peace activists Vida Goldstein, Adela Pankhurst and Cecilia Ann John, Ina set up a farm in Mordialloc on the fringe of metropolitan Melbourne in 1913. Members of the Women’s Rural Industries Cooperative worked variously in an orchard, a nursery, raising poultry and horses, bee-keeping, and growing flowers and vegetables. Like Wirawidar, it was established for single or divorced women to provide for themselves, their children, and earn an income.
Ina Higgins in the garden at ‘Killenna’, 1919.Palmer Papers, National Library of Australia, PIC Album 885/7 #PIC/P778/562
Paying no attention to class or dress dictums, they scandalised the public with their “rational dress” of a “brown knickerbocker suit.” While Higgins gave instruction on horticulture, the press reported that one co-op member, Cecelia John, was “as good as a man” since she could “drive a car, paint a house, erect poultry sheds, and [is] planning on turning a corner of the big barn into a bathroom at the least expense.”
With only six permanent workers, the farm managed to survive and succeed until the end of the war, but failed due to lack of capital and shortages of water. Higgins later continued educating young women in horticulture at Dookie Agricultural College, and paved the way for future “women of the soil” such as renowned landscaper Edna Walling.
The gospel of simplicity
During the 1930s a “lure of the pastoral” found popular resurgence through a nation-wide Country Life Movement. It united public and political sentiment, reaffirming the moral and political superiority of rural areas and small towns.
Within this push, aspiring political activist Bob Santamaria helped launch the National Catholic Rural Movement in 1938. He advocated for a form of “cottage Catholicism” within a new social order that was neither capitalist nor communist, but would bring the “countryside back to Christ”. The movement believed that in order to find the “true” source of one’s religious being, one had to embrace “honest, wholesome toil”.
Out of these ideas emerged the agricultural community of Whitlands. Established in 1941 near the base of Victoria’s Mount Buffalo, it celebrated the “dignity of manual labour” within a strong monastic tradition. By the end of the war, its valiant and charismatic leader Ray Triado had attracted dozens of young urban Catholics – men, women and their families – away from their comfortable city lives.
An acclaimed track athlete, and later an associate to a High Court Judge, at 30, Triado traded this world for a life of hunting, building and farming. A troubadour and storyteller, his community was built around simple daily rituals, of song, prayer and work. Numbering a few dozen in its later years, a variety of people were drawn to create a “world of the village around and permeated by God’s presence.”
Ray Triado in the 1940s.Graeme Butler
Whitlands quickly became notorious amongst Melbourne’s high society for its radical departure from comfortable, conventional Catholicism, and its rejection of the materialistic culture of modern Australia. Some, such as regular visitor and journalist Niall Brennan supported the program and reported in the Catholic press of male “monks” in overalls, working shirts and shorts who “chanted Matins, Lauds and Prime, milked cows, cut wood and lit fires”.
Single women were also drawn to the farm as they saw a vital opportunity to escape the monotony of urban domesticity. Though the women maintained separate living quarters, such a scandalous situation led to calls from within Catholic institutions to dissolve the community.
The chapel at the old Whitlands site, which survives today.Author provided
In 1950, a dozen dedicated Whitlands members made a “pilgrimage” of over 250km from the farm to Melbourne to petition Archbishop Mannix against its closure. They succeeded in keeping the farm open – but the early idealism was soon lost. Many members moved on, while a few families settled nearby.
Soil and Civilisation
Long before the rise of the modern environment movement, farmer Elyne Mitchell (author of The Silver Brumby) published Soil and Civilisation in 1946. This book was an early attempt to explain to Australians the importance of the connection between human and ecosystem health. In addressing problems facing industrial agriculture and society at large, she wrote that, divorced from his roots, (i.e the earth) “man loses his psychic stability.”
Soil was at the heart of many later self sufficiency movements.shutterstock
Her sentiment echoed a growing movement of farmers across southern Australia that had united from the mid-1940s through the Living Soil Association in Tasmania, Australian Organic Farming and Gardening Society of NSW and the Victorian Compost Society.
Drawing on the work of British organic pioneers such as Lord Albert Howard, they argued that all organic wastes, such as plant matter and animal manure, must be returned to the soil to decay and replenish soil humus. They also felt that nature’s “law of return” could be used as a model to alleviate some of the problems faced by ever growing, all consuming cities.
Editions of the Organic Farming Digest from the late 1940s.Author provided
Challenging the dominant vision of agricultural progress, particularly the use of artificial fertilisers and chemical pesticides, the organic growers looked to the model of the small, family farm for salvation. Though not strictly a call “back-to-the-land” since many were already farming, or working their suburban gardens, these campaigns encouraged ordinary people and producers to consider the origins of their food, and contemplate the wider outcomes of its production.
Banner for Victorian Compost News, March 1950.Author provided
Michael J. Roads was one of these early proponents. He had moved from England to Tasmania in 1963 with his family. After years farming cattle, Roads saw how problems of greed, the rapid commercialisation of life, and a spiral of harmful farming practices were affecting both individuals and society as a whole.
In 1970 he published A Guide to Organic Living in Australia. It reflected on a growing movement “back to the earth” seeking solace in the bush and the simplicity of self-provision. In it, he shared his own story of spiritual transformation that had occurred when he began to revere the power of nature.
Spreading his message that nature, the soil and human happiness are inextricably linked, Roads continues to publish, travel the world, and teach others the insights he learned as a small farmer on a secluded mountain in Tasmania.
Roads was joined soon after by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren who transformed this philosophy into the practice of Permaculture. In turn, it helped motivate the counter-cultural movement as growing food organically for self-sufficiency became a critical way to rebel and achieve social change.
The 1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival established self-sufficiency as central to its political and social doctrine. From this point on, personal self-sufficiency was seen as a means of survival, but also of achieving broader political, social and environmental reform. It continues to stand for a way of reducing consumption, getting back to basics, engaging with DIY projects, using renewable energies, and fostering community networks today.
Ardern, wearing a hijab, is depicted on the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.EPA, CC BY-ND
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s decision to wear a headscarf following the Christchurch mosque attacks in March has earned her worldwide praise. But in an online backlash, critics pointed out that women in conservative Muslim countries have no choice and risk public rebuke, fines or even arrest if they don’t cover up.
This is a longstanding controversy around the Muslim veil. Is it a tool for oppressing women or can it also carry other meanings?
Our explorative research, based on interviews with young Muslim women living in a New Zealand city, shows how they use their everyday lives and identity to change stereotypes of oppression.
In the aftermath of the September 11 (9/11) 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and the subsequent “war on terror”, veiled Muslim women received much attention from Western politicians, media and academics. Debates tended to frame Muslim women, their culture and their veils either as symbols of oppression by Islam, or as part of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.
A perception of oppression of Muslim women continues today, but what is often missing in these hegemonic debates is the way in which many contemporary Muslim women reinterpret, understand and perform Islam.
Technology and social networking sites allow Muslim women to show there are many ways of understanding and practising Islam and veiling. In our study, we present two main ways in which young Muslim women use Instagram and Facebook to offer alternative discourses about Muslimness and womanhood.
The young Muslim women we interviewed join their sisters from all over the globe in promoting Islamic fashion. This movement aims to challenge the popular culture in which Islamically defined modesty and the veil are presumed to be ugly, oppressive and inimical to fashion, including the wearing of fashionable clothes designed to draw attention to the body.
Young Muslim women consciously mobilise social networks, posting photos and using hashtags that show them as fashion savvy consumers. Nurul Shamul is the first veiled woman in New Zealand to participate in the Miss Universe New Zealand beauty pageant contest. She explains:
As a Muslim woman, we need to be modest and we should not be chasing validation or approval from others by trying to look beautiful. But it was important for me to enter the contest with the intentions that I wanted to pave the way for girls and show that it is possible to look beautiful and fashionable but modest at the same time. It is better that there is someone like me that other Muslim girls can look up to and relate to.
Hashtag Hijabista
Nurul uses social networks to break the stereotypes and refute a binary view of the veil and fashion. Another young Muslim woman, Hassun Ali, uses Facebook and Instagram to change the discourse of veiled Muslim women. In several posts, Ali appears with stylish, colourful headscarves to suit her body-wrapping dresses and high-heeled footwear.
Ali always accompanies her photos with hashtags such as #muslimahfashion, #hijabista and #hijabfashion.
Most of the veiled participants stated that the Quran is the most valid source of information that requires Muslim women to wear the veil (hijab). Ali’s posts suggest that they reinterpret the Quranic verses (which call on Muslim women to display their beauty and draw their veils over their bosom) and rework their hijabs.
Young Muslim women in Hamilton do not wear the hijab to necessarily hide their femininity in public. Instead, they revisit the precepts of Islamic veiling and create multiple styles of modesty that are intriguing and draw attention.
Socially integrated Muslimas
Stereotypes say Muslim women are docile, self-segregated, and their faith and hijab prevent them from engaging in public life. Our interviewees reject such assumptions and actively use social media to change those negative images.
Yasmin Borhan, a primary school teacher, explains:
At this specific time, after 9/11, I feel I have much more responsibilities as a Muslim woman in the society. I wonder, even though I am a New Zealander, to people here I am not a true New Zealander. I find out I have to present who I am. I feel like I have to act in a really good manner.
Most of Borhan’s posts focus primarily on her involvement with broader communities in Hamilton. In one post, she appears with a big smile while collecting donations as a volunteer for the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation.
Several other young interviewees also post their everyday lives on Facebook and Instagram. Their main aspiration is to change hegemonic views of Muslim women as powerless and excluded from social life. They also hope their posts encourage other Muslim women to become more socially active. For example, interviewee Mona Nabilah says:
I think in terms of Muslim women’s confidence, we could do more to raise their awareness of how important it is to be out there. I feel because the media is working to our disadvantage all the time, Muslim women stick together into their own communities because they are too afraid or they’re too shy.
Muslim women are working hard, online and offline, to reflect and increase their active presence in public arenas and break down stereotypes. Social media are the communicative spaces through which Muslim women show, verbally and visually, who they are and what their lives look like. Their posted photos are colourful, inspired by fashion, yet daring, thought provoking, and tend to reveal their everyday lives.
For us, the phenomena of hijab fashion and socially engaged Muslim women, and especially the current social media chapter, open opportunities for women to exercise their power and authority on matters pertaining to Muslim women’s bodies. Far from a binary categorisation of the oppressed and the oppressor, these phenomena signal a world in which Muslim women hybridise their faith and piety with modern ideas of feminism, activism and consumerism.
If the Morrison government manages to have a referendum passed to give Australia’s Indigenous people constitutional recognition it will be truly remarkable.
A prime minister who has previously taken little interest in this area, at least publicly, would have done something that proved beyond Tony Abbott, for whom it was a cause.
Scott Morrison and his minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, would have stared down conservative colleagues, cut a deal with Labor, and persuaded enough Indigenous leaders to get on board.
Finally, the government would have overcome the public’s inherent negativity towards referendums.
It would, one might say, be another miracle.
But miracles are rare and on present indications this one will be extraordinarily hard to land.
We are yet to see how seriously committed Morrison will be to the recognition push. For a chance of success, he’ll need to put his back into it.
His appointment of Wyatt, a man of Noongar, Wongi, and Yamatji heritage, was a statement in itself. The nomination of recognition for early attention was a surprise – and another indication that we have yet to get a grasp on Morrison as prime minister (as distinct from campaigner).
There has been much talk about his lack of an agenda but the unveiling of a couple of significant priorities – industrial relations and now Indigenous recognition – suggests there might be more there than we suspected.
It’s important to be clear about what Wyatt – who outlined his proposals in a speech on Wednesday – is saying. The government’s ambit hope is to put a referendum for recognition during this parliamentary term. But this will only happen if two conditions are met: it can get consensus on the content of what would go into the constitution, and there’s a high probability of a favourable outcome. The latter means winning not just the overall vote but the vote in four of the six states. Both content and potential support will present major problems.
What of the timetable? If the government really wants to give constitutional change a red hot go, there is a case for pushing it hard and quickly. Support doesn’t necessary build as time passes – beyond a certain point, it can erode.
But judging whether and when there would be sufficient likely public backing for a Yes vote would be tricky. Post May 18, everyone has become rather chary of polls. And things could quickly change in the final countdown.
History shows the voters’ penchant to say No. Despite the triumph of the 1967 referendum to give the federal government power to make laws for Aboriginal people and count them in the census (carried overwhelmingly in every state), in general referendums fail. Only eight have been passed – the last in 1977.
Formulating the question will be an extremely challenging hurdle to climb over.
A constitutional change that acknowledged Australia’s First Peoples but didn’t go much beyond that would be easiest to get through government ranks and the popular vote.
It is hard to see either Indigenous leaders or Labor accepting just that.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders in their 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart called for “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the constitution”.
But the indications are a Voice would not be part of the government’s constitutional model. Wyatt does want a Voice at the national level, but he is vague about its form, and the official line is that Morrison has “no plans” for the Voice.
Labor was committed at the election to putting into the constitution a Voice – which would be an input to the political process, not any sort of third chamber of Parliament – and the ALP would come under attack from Indigenous leaders if it walked away from this.
Writing for the Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday Labor’s Pat Dodson, shadow assistant minister for reconciliation and constitutional recognition (and an Indigenous man dubbed “the father of reconciliation”) declared:
We either deliver the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full or continue down the failed path of soft reconciliation measures.
The shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney (also Indigenous), who is working closely with Wyatt and will do some travelling with him, may be more flexible than Dodson. Nevertheless she said after Wyatt’s speech:
We are at a point in our development, in our history where a Voice to the parliament absolutely has to be entrenched in the Australian Constitution.
Morrison has had talks with Anthony Albanese to pursue bipartisanship on Indigenous issues and the Labor leader was optimistic on Thursday that a successful recognition referendum in the next three years was “absolutely realistic and doable”.
But former deputy prime minister John Anderson, a member of the review panel Abbott set up to examine possible pathways to constitutional recognition, says that while he’s sympathetic to what Wyatt is undertaking, “finding the necessary national unity to avoid hurt and disappointment will be far from easy”. One huge problem, Anderson believes, will be getting Aboriginal people to come together on an agreed model.
Those in the Coalition party room and in the right wing commentariat who are critical of the move for recognition will use the spectre of the Voice as a scare tactic.
The recognition issue will be one test of whether the right, though tamed since Malcolm Turnbull’s overthrow, will seriously arc up within the Liberal party in this term.
But Wyatt has attracted enthusiasm from some colleagues. NSW Liberal John Alexander was quick to declare, “I’m with Ken on this, he has my full support for the process he has initiated and I hope it can conclude with a successful referendum vote and form of ‘Voice’ we can all be proud of”.
Of particular importance, many big corporations, including mining companies, now have progressive positions on indigenous affairs and will swing in behind the move. Wyatt has indicated he would be looking to them to help carry the debate, particularly in his home state of Western Australia, where a referendum would potentially be a hard sell.
He’d be encouraged by sentiments such as from Woodside, which said the company was “proud to give our support to this process as we continue to walk together with courage towards a reconciled Australia”.
As with same-sex marriage, indeed probably more so, the corporate world is talking up an important social issue and prodding the politicians to act.
If Morrison has to retreat on Indigenous recognition, it is unlikely to make a great amount of difference to him. It won’t affect the outcome of the next election.
For Wyatt the issue is different. This is a fight he is undertaking for his people. The stakes are personal, and must feel frightening high.
In 1960 DC Comics introduced the “Bizarro” planet of “Htrae”. Created with a duplicating ray, the planet’s inhabitants are all imperfect versions of Superman and Lois Lane, doing “opposite of all Earthly things”.
They go to bed when the alarm clock rings. They eat only the peel of a banana. They earn degrees by failing subjects. And they invest in “bizarro bonds” that are “guaranteed to lose money”.
Today a bizarro bond is no longer comic-book fantasy.
Now the governments of Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland are selling ten-year bonds with negative interest yields.
The normal attraction of a bond is that, for an upfront payment, the issuer pays you back more – paying interest on the principal over a given number of years, and the principal at the end.
Government bonds – which are the main way governments fund deficits – have been particularly attractive to investors wanting minimum risk, because a government can generally be relied on to pay its debts.
But bonds with a negative interest rate mean bond holders are effectively paying governments to hold their money for them.
The existence of these bizarro bonds, and the fact anyone wants to buy them, tells us much about how strange global economics now are, and that expectations are low about things changing any time soon.
Why would anyone want to buy such a bond? The main reason is still the same. A government bond is safe. It’s just that now the bond doesn’t guarantee a minimum return but a minimum loss.
Take, for example, the Swiss government bond that currently costs SFr103.15, pays no interest and will return just SFr100 when it “matures” in June 2029. The holder knows they’ll lose more than 0.3% over a decade, but no more. A term deposit in a Swiss bank is no better, with interest rates of about -0.3%, and less safe. Buying shares or gold might return more, but carry a bigger risk of losing a lot more.
For foreign purchasers there is an additional consideration – they may be hoping the Swiss franc will strengthen against their local currency – but for Swiss citizens it largely comes down to paying the government to keep their money safe.
Short-term rates
Bond yields reflect a number of factors, but the most crucial one is expectations about short-term interest rates as well as inflation.
Right now interest rates around the world are at historically low levels, and there is is little expectation they will increase any time soon.
This is important because an investor can weigh the value of buying a ten-year bond against any other investment, particularly against buying a one-year government bond and then, when it matures next year, buying another one-year bond, and so on.
Suppose interest rates are about 1% but everyone buying bonds expects rates to rise. The ten-year bond would then need to offer a yield more than 1% to be competitive with simply buying one-year bonds and rolling them over (on the basis the yield offered will more than 1% next year). The ten-year yield would need to match the average expected returns from one-year bonds over a decade.
The market for negative yields on ten-year government bonds in Japan and Europe therefore implies that most investors are expecting near-zero or negative interest rates will be maintained by central banks for some years to come.
The yields on government bonds still in positive territory imply something similar. In Australia, for example, where the ten-year yield hit a historic low below 1.3% in June, the implication is that markets expect the Reserve Bank Australia to keep the cash rate at or below its current all-time low of 1% for a considerable period.
All this suggests markets are not optimistic about global economic growth (possibly due to concerns about higher US tariffs). It is the same with other long-term interest rates, such as term deposits offered by banks.
Implications
Negative interest rates are extremely rare. Even rates as low as 1% are historically unusual. In his epic study of interest rates, A History of Interest Rates (1963), author Sidney Homer suggests rates lower than 3% were virtually unknown in ancient Mespotamia, Greece or Rome, or in medieval and renaissance Europe.
Bank of England data show there were just three months between 1935 and 2012 when the yield on ten-year UK government bonds dropped below 2%. Since mid-2015, they have not been above 2%, and are now below 1%.
For governments, this could be a rare opportunity. It’s an ideal time to borrow. This should make infrastructure projects more economically viable.
In Australia, the Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe has argued quite forcefully for more spending on infrastructure. “This spending not only adds to demand in the economy, but it also adds to the economy’s productive capacity,” he said in June.
Recently, I wrote that Ken Wyatt’s appointment as the minister for Indigenous Australians was a momentous occasion in Australian history. The appointment showed the government is committed to doing things differently when it comes to its responsibilities and obligations to Indigenous Australians.
For Indigenous communities, the speech held much promise and provided key details on what the Morrison government’s approach to Indigenous affairs will look like over the next three years. This is major turning point that could result in real change after years of little progress.
New language on Indigenous affairs
Perhaps most significant was the rhetoric Wyatt used – it mirrored the language long used by many Indigenous Australians, but notably lacking in previous government addresses on these issues. Wyatt noted how previous governments have failed Indigenous Australians, acknowledging how even the
most well-intentioned modern policies and programs have still tended to take a top-down, command and control approach.
Wyatt echoed legitimate concerns with the way the government approached its Indigenous policies in the past, noting that it had been as
if Aboriginal people didn’t know what they needed or wanted.
He further noted that dominant attitudes toward Indigenous affairs had ignored “proud members of one of the world’s longest-lived civilisations,” pretending as if they
had nothing to say, no wisdom to offer, about what would help their families thrive and their communities flourish.
The significance of a cabinet minister, especially one responsible for Indigenous affairs, highlighting these aspects of Australian history and society is massive. The change in comparison to earlier ministers who ignored or dismissed these truths is remarkable.
While Wyatt demurred on specific details, emphasising a “consensus option,” he did otherwise commit to a referendum within three years. This is another significant step toward implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
It is important to note that the final report of the Referendum Council, as well as the bi-partisan, parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition, both affirmed that a First Nations voice as called for by the Uluru Statement was the most sensible and widely supported option for reform.
Also supporting the conclusions of the Referendum Council and the Joint Select Committee, Wyatt emphasised that “the constitution remains key.” Both found that current representative mechanisms for Indigenous peoples were not working. And both agreed that only a First Nations voice would provide the type of representation required to empower Indigenous peoples and communities.
The Referendum Council advised Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to hold a referendum on establishing a voice to parliament in 2017, but Turnbull rejected the recommendation.Paul Miller/AAP
A move away from top-down policy
Wyatt touched on many other issues that are important to Indigenous communities and are aimed at bringing more local input to policy-making.
On the issue of truth telling, he poignantly recognised that without truth
there can be no agreement on where and who we are in the present, how we arrived here and where we want to go in the future.
More details were also provided on the role of the new coordinating agency called the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA). The NIAA aims to coordinate efforts across all levels of government and Indigenous communities to allow Indigenous peoples to empower themselves.
Wyatt specifically indicated that he doesn’t intend policy to come from the NIAA or his office. Rather, policy actions are to be supported by all levels of community and the state and territory governments to enable communities to own their own policy actions.
This is continued movement away from what Wyatt described as the history of “a top-down, command and control approach” that has failed Indigenous Australians.
Wyatt emphasised this by saying that his intention is “to have genuine conversations, not only with Indigenous leaders and peak bodies, but with families, individuals and community organisations so that I can hear their voices.”
This addresses the long history of Indigenous peoples not being listened to and rather being told what will happen. Wyatt noted again that
the most important thing that I and the agency will do is to listen – with our ears and with our eyes.
One area of concern
The speech also raised the priority issues of youth suicide, the revival and maintenance of Indigenous languages (with a pledged A$10 million), and the expansion of programs aimed at supporting Indigenous businesses, such as the Indigenous Procurement Policy, which provides incentives for Indigenous businesses to grow.
Wyatt also reemphasised the creation of the new position of a national suicide prevention adviser to coordinate and advise on already announced funding and increased support service delivery.
It is still early and only time will tell whether these actions will help, but at least one area of the speech raises concern: Wyatt’s commitment to revamp the the Community Development Program aimed at employment, training and development for Indigenous communities. By creating community advisory boards, Wyatt claimed that the
CDP has been reformed to ensure communities have a say in the way the programme is run.
The problem, however, hasn’t just been how the program is run. Many have been advocating for the abolishment of the CDP, rather than its reform.
Too many Indigenous people in the program work significant hours for less than minimum wage and face punitive punishments for non-compliance with regulatory requirements. This includes being fined for failing to show for work, which impacts the participants’ ability to purchase life necessities.
In attempting to force participants into work, the CDP fails to understand the challenges of remote communities and, as such, unfairly discriminates against Indigenous people. The CDP is effectively a “work-for-the-dole” program that punishes poverty rather than empowering communities.
Overall, Wyatt’s speech continued to build on the early optimism surrounding his appointment. His notable change in rhetoric from previous governments and his commitment for early action to build on reforms, such as the Council of Australian Governments’ partnership agreement with peak Indigenous organisations to close the gap in health, education and employment opportunities and the Indigenous Advancement Strategy Evaluation Framework, are welcome.
Most importantly, Wyatt’s recommitment to constitutional reform moves the nation one step closer to achieving those important reforms of voice, treaty and truth from the Uluru Statement from the Heart. As Wyatt noted, this is
too important to get wrong, and too important to rush.
The news of a fatal dog-bite incident in Melbourne last night has shocked dog lovers around the country.
A 61 year old man was dead by the time police arrived at the property in Mill Park; his 58 year old wife is in hospital with serious injuries. The dog in question, a Staffordshire terrier, belonged to the couple’s son.
At first glance, the dog seems almost to have led a “double life” – strongly vouched for as a deeply loyal animal who would defend its family members and protect familiar children, and yet also be capable of sudden viciousness.
While, of course, we cannot know what exactly happened, this horrifying attack raises many questions. Are some dogs not suitable as family pets? What can we do to prevent further cases like this?
The Staffy problem
The American Staffordshire terrier is a breed (that can be registered) whereas, its cousin, the American pit bull terrier is a type (that cannot be registered and has no strict breed standard for breeding purposes). The pit bull was bred to fight other dogs: it is strong and fast, with powerful jaws. In the fighting pit, they also needed to be impulsive and quick to engage with their opponents.
However, it’s an over-simplification to declare an entire breed “too dangerous”. In every incident like this, many factors lead to the first bite and even more factors feed into a second and third bite. This is why most veterinarians call for a “deed-not-breed” approach, arguing that blaming a dog because of its genes overlooks the role of nurture and circumstance.
The reality is that any breed can defend itself when pushed. A case in point is a report from Oklahoma last year, in which a pack of dachshund crosses killed a middle-aged female neighbour.
There’s at least one recorded instance of dachshunds killing a person.Izumi Jones/Unsplash
Unfortunately for Staffordshire (bull) terriers, many muscular breeds have attracted an unhelpful fan-base among people who feel their dog should reflect their personal machismo.
But reliable data on aggressive dogs are very difficult to come by.
“Bites” and “attacks” are both reported by local councils or counties, and the difference between the two may be significant. In Australia, dogs can be declared dangerous or menacing by local councils based on a single disputed claim or without ever injuring a person.
Hospitals record data on patients who have been physically attacked or bitten by dogs severely enough to require medical attention. However, hospitals do not investigate these cases, so the accuracy of such data is questionable.
Social media may offer a chance to gather better first-hand data. A fascinating analysis of 143 dog-bites posted on YouTube has revealed how dogs behaved before biting people and how the people involved over-looked warnings from the dogs.
A doggy personality
Recent studies suggest domesticated dogs are uniquely good at communicating with humans. The extremely wide variety in breeds also makes them an interesting research model for investigating both human and canine genes.
Obsessive compulsive disorder is a terrific example: tail-chasing dogs are ideal models for research that may help humans afflicted with repetitive tendencies, such as compulsive hand-washing.
As it happens, the so-called “bull breeds” are over-represented in studies of tail-chasing.
In many ways, veterinary behavioural medicine has developed along similar lines to the human psychiatric field. One area particularly relevant area is the study of individual motivation and personality.
This is the focus of a series of studies by Dr Jacqui Ley, an Australian veterinary behaviour specialist. She asked more than 1,000 owners to rate their companion dogs on more than 60 personality adjectives.
Statistical analysis identified five underlying characteristics that could be used to cluster the owners’ responses into the following categories: extraversion, neuroticism (or cautiousness), self-assuredness/motivation, training focus and amicability.
These are remarkably similar to the so-called Big Five personality types described in humans: extraversion, neuroticism, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.
It will be interesting to see how successful these five labels are in describing the traits of dogs as scored by behavioural tests, and how stable this system of labelling is over the life of a dog.
Impulsivity in dogs is also increasingly considered in the context of aggressive behaviour. It refers to the relative lack of impulse control and has prompted the development of a psychometric tool to assess the trait in one’s own dog.
The importance of temperament
Even though the selective pressures humans have applied to dogs over the centuries have changed, we’ve been steadily filtering out genes that weren’t useful to us.
The earliest proto-dogs were those that could tolerate being close to humans to forage in their waste. Of course, any of these ancestors unable to adapt to the human household have been removed from the gene pool, especially if they were inappropriately aggressive.
These days, responsible pet owners are encouraged to desex even the most well-adapted companion dogs. While this has brought about a welcome reduction in unwanted canine pregnancies, it has also meant a greater proportion of dogs in our community are the product of dog breeders who don’t prioritise adaptability and social skills. Instead, they select for characteristics of appearance.
So, to generalise, we now have something of a mismatch: humans who are less experienced at interacting with, training and managing dogs than their forebears, are being matched with dogs bred more for aesthetics rather than easy-going temperaments.
The clash of these cultures undoubtedly makes it all too easy for tragic attacks to take place. The media then vilifies dogs, making people fearful – which can, in turn, worsen the dog-human relationship.
Dogmanship
Dogmanship, or perhaps more correctly dogpersonship, is an emerging science that considers the role of humans in the dog-human relationship and explores why some people are much better with dogs than others.
Drawing heavily on the science of emotional intelligence, it investigates how people can read the signals each dog is giving and respond accordingly.
Common advice from education programs includes how and when to approach dogs, how to recognise dog body language that may signal fear, anxiety, uneasiness, conflict, or aggression, and how to keep safe when approached by a strange dog, as well as parental supervision at all times.
In an attempt to outlaw powerful dogs originally bred for fighting, breed-specific legislation has been introduced in many countries, but it is very controversial – not least because so many of the dogs targeted are arguably types rather than breeds.
As our understanding of dog behaviour traits improves and as we better appreciate what characterises good dogmanship, we can expect to see fewer dog bites. Then we won’t need to wait for dogs to bite people before we identify them as a risk and begin to manage them accordingly.
Paul McGreevy is the author of A Modern Dog’s Life (2009), published by NewSouth.
For nine hours, my colleague Michael Shackleton and I held onto our scooters for dear life while being slapped in the face by spiked jungle plants in the mountains of Cambodia. We only disembarked either to help push a scooter up a slippery jungle path or to stop it from sliding down one.
With our gear loaded up on nine scooters – 200 metres of fishing nets, two inflatable kayaks, food for five days, hammocks, preservation gear for collection of DNA, and other assorted scientific instruments – we at last arrived at one of the few remaining sites known to harbour the critically endangered Siamese crocodiles.
The Siamese crocodile once lived in Southeast Asian freshwater rivers from Indonesia to Myanmar. But now, fewer than 1000 breeding individuals remain.
In fact, during the 1990s the species was thought to be completely extinct in the wild. Then, in 2000, scientists from Fauna and Flora International found a tiny population in the remote Cardamom Mountains region of Cambodia.
We travelled to this remote wilderness in 2017 to determine habitat suitability for the reintroduction of captive-bred juvenile Siamese crocodiles. We wanted to understand the food web there to see whether it contains enough fish to sustain the young crocs.
It took eight hours of travel through remote jungle paths to reach our first site.Author provided (No reuse)
Our journey would not have been possible without the help of Community Crocodile Wardens – local community members who patrol the jungle sanctuaries for threats and record crocodile presence. Wardens also conduct crocodile surveys further afield to discover new populations or to identify new areas of potential suitable crocodile habitat for juvenile releases.
Our recent study found to ensure the species survives, reintroduction locations must be protected from fishing pressure – both from a food supply perspective, but also from risk of entanglement in nets.
A species in decline
When we arrived at our site, northwest of the village of Thmor Bang, our day was capped by what we came to know as the standard evening downpour, despite assurances that we had, in fact, timed our trip for the dry season.
Kayaks were inflated, nets set, and sampling was underway. This proved laborious – to ensure crocodiles didn’t drown, we couldn’t leave nets unattended in the water overnight, but instead checked them every hour until morning.
Siamese crocodiles are generally not aggressive to humans, but they come into conflict with people when caught in fishing nets.
This often leads to the crocodile drowning and the fishing net being ruined. It’s a disaster on both counts, because fish is the only source of protein for many local communities in Cambodia.
A Siamese crocodile habitat: deep jungle pools separated by shallow rock shelves, known locally as ‘anlongs’ every few kilometres.Author provided (No reuse)
Like many other apex predators around the world, the Siamese crocodile is also in decline because of habitat destruction and poaching for their skins.
Their potential large size and generally placid nature means they are highly prized by crocodile farmers who use the skins for handbags and footwear. Crocodile farmers also often hybridise the Siamese crocodiles with other non-native crocodile species.
This means programs for Siamese crocodile reintroduction and breeding must carefully genetically screen all young crocodiles bred in captivity to make sure they’re not actually hybrids, so the “genetically pure” wild populations can remain.
Finding fish bones in croc poo
Despite a pretty good understanding of captive Siamese crocodile behaviour and biology, very little is known about Siamese crocodiles in the wild, such as what they eat or how much food they need to raise an egg to adulthood.
Our only reliable indication of diet comes from scats (crocodile poo or “shit of croc” as we came to call it) collected along the river banks inhabited by remnant populations.
Collecting DNA samples from fish in the middle of the night.Author provided (No reuse)
Carefully collected poo samples containing scales and bones tell us fish and snakes make up a significant proportion of the Siamese crocodile diet.
But the shrouded, mystical, extremely remote and virtually inaccessible jungle in the Cardamom Mountains has ensured we know next to nothing about fish communities within habitats set for the release of captive crocodile. And this information is particularly important for prioritising release locations for captive bred juveniles.
We spent four days sampling fish communities and then repeated the process at two other equally remote locations within the Cardamoms, requiring two days travel between each.
We saw groups of gibbons moving through the forest and macaques climbing down from trees to drink at the river. But at last we spotted a wild Siamese crocodile after dark, swimming in our morning bathing pool, on our second-last day.
This is the only Siamese crocodile we saw, and it was swimming in the pool we used to bathe.Author provided (No reuse)
Ultimately, we distinguished 13 species of fish from the Cardamom Mountains, confirming the presence of two previously unconfirmed species groups for the region.
What’s more, we found fish density was highest in areas with more Siamese crocodiles, and lowest in areas with more human fishing pressure.
Understanding the food web of crocodile reintroduction sites is important, because conservation managers need to understand the ecological carrying capacity of the system – the number of individual crocodiles that can be supported in a given habitat. Learning this is especially important when historical information does not exist.
Preservation of fish stocks within Siamese crocodile habitats is critical for survival of the species. But a key challenge for natural resource managers of the Cardamom Mountains is balancing crocodile density with local fishing necessity, and to do this, we need more information on Siamese crocodile biology.
The bodies of the Karida village massacre victims in Papua New Guinea’s Hela province have been buried as fearful villagers in the district have fled to safety, reports NBC News.
The victims in the Tari Pori district were buried late yesterday afternoon in the presence of Hela Provincial Administrator William Bando, the provincial police commander, police and defence force personnel.
Karida Community leader Jimmy Hox told NBC News reporter Lyanne Togiba the situation was still tense and everyone in Karida 1 and 2 villages had fled, fearing the return of the attackers.
Hox is now calling for police and defence force officers to restore peace and normalcy in the area.
He said they were living in fear, with villages deserted in the area where the murders happened.
Hox said the people also needed food and water as they hid out in the bush and mountains in fear of their lives.
-Partners-
NBC News did not confirm the number of deaths. Other media have reported between 22 and 24 being killed in the massacre.
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.
Why is the Sun orange when white stars are hottest? – Rain, age 6, Toowoomba.
Hi Rain. Thanks for sending in your excellent question.
The reason the Sun shines so bright is that it’s hot. And the colour it glows depends on how hot it is.
You are right that a star that glows white is hotter than one that glows orange.
And it’s true the Sun often looks orange. But it isn’t really orange. It is white. Well, it’s a bit on the yellow side but it’s mostly white.
The very hottest stars actually glow blue. We call them blue giant stars.
These blue giants are around 80 times larger than our Sun – so they are really, really big. They live and die very quickly. They are so hot and so big they burn through their fuel very quickly and last just a few million years.
That might sound like a long time but it’s not much compared to how long our Sun will live.
When our Sun was a million years old, it was still just a child. It’s about 5 billion years old now and will live to about 10 billion years. So you could say the Sun is now middle-aged. It’s about halfway through its life.
So blue giants are hottest, white stars are very hot, but there are also orange stars that burn less hot. There are even red stars, which are a bit cooler again. They are a half or even a quarter the size of our Sun and while they are still burning hot, they are nowhere near as hot as our lovely Sun.
The hottest stars are actually blue.Shutterstock
So why does the Sun look orange, then?
A lot of the pictures we take of the Sun make it look orange because of special filters we use to take the photo. The Sun is putting out so much light that we would not be able to photograph the detail on its surface unless we cut some of the brightness out. That’s what the filters do.
NASA uses filters to take photos of the Sun and the filters make it look orange.NASA
At sunrise and sunset, the Sun can look especially orange to our eyes. That’s because, at those times of day, its light has to travel through a lot of the Earth’s atmosphere (the layer of swirling air that surrounds our planet). And all the dust and stuff in the atmosphere makes the light scatter and change so it looks less blue and more orangey-red.
Only Bored Astronomers Find Gratification Knowing Mnemonics
In the olden days, astronomers used letters to try to sort different types of stars. As we learned more about stars, the order changed, and labels became quite mixed up! Today we still use this naming system to remember the order of stars from hottest to least hot. It goes like this: O, B, A, F, G, K, M. (Some versions have more letters at the end).
The O-stars are the blue giants, while our Sun is a “G-class” star. That means it’s not the hottest but it’s not the coolest either.
Those letters are hard to remember, so astronomers came up with different tricks to remember it. One memory trick is called a “mnemonic” where you pretend each letter stands for a word. It’s easier to remember a sentence instead of a bunch of letters.
One student in my class came up with this mnemonic: “Only Bored Astronomers Find Gratification Knowing Mnemonics” (gratification means something like happiness).
Another one I like is: “Orange Butterflies And Frogs Get Knitted Mittens”.
Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.auPlease tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.
Indigenous public policy fails consistently. The research evidence is compelling. Across post-settler colonial societies like New Zealand, Australia and Canada, schooling is not as effective for Indigenous citizens, employment and housing outcomes are not as good, and health outcomes are worse.
In New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi is broadly accepted as an agreement offering solutions to policy failure. It protects the Māori right to self-determination and obliges the state to ensure that public policy is as effective for Māori as it is for everybody else.
Last week, the Waitangi Tribunal affirmed both these general principles in respect to health policy, but in its comprehensive report on the primary health care system, it found that despite clear intentions, the state fails to deliver good outcomes for Māori.
In effect, the tribunal found the state fails because it does not stand aside to allow Māori self-determination to prevail. Self-determination is a right that belongs to everybody. Under the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which New Zealand accepts as an “aspirational” document, self-determination means that:
Indigenous peoples have the right to determine and develop priorities and strategies for exercising their right to development. In particular, Indigenous peoples have the right to be actively involved in developing and determining health, housing and other economic and social programmes affecting them and, as far as possible, to administer such programmes through their own institutions (Article 23).
Under the Treaty of Waitangi the right to self-determination may be expressed in at least two ways. Firstly, the treaty affirms Māori rangatiratanga, or chiefly authority over their own affairs. Secondly, it gives Māori the “rights and privileges of British subjects”.
The latter was a relatively meaningless status in 1840, when the treaty was signed by representatives of the Crown and Māori tribes. But in 2019, citizenship has replaced subjecthood as a substantive body of political rights and capacities for many New Zealanders, though not always for Māori.
The tribunal’s Health Services and Outcomes Inquiry report is explicit. Poor Māori health persists because health policy doesn’t honour the treaty. Solutions, it says, lie in the treaty partnership between Māori and the Crown.
The idea of a treaty partnership is well established in New Zealand policy. But the tribunal report reinforces the idea that it is an unequal partnership, with the Crown acting as a senior party and crowding out space for Māori policy leadership. On the other hand, it makes at least two potentially transformative recommendations.
The first is that the Crown and Māori claimants in health care agree on a methodology for assessing underfunding of Māori health providers. The tribunal found that underfunding is in breach of the treaty and one of the variables that explains poor Māori health outcomes.
Secondly, the tribunal recommended the Crown and claimants “explore the possibility of a standalone Māori health authority”. This authority could become the principal funder of primary health services for Māori citizens. Māori health providers would make bids for contestable funding to the authority which, unlike District Health Boards, would have a predominantly Māori membership.
The authority would assess self-defined Māori health needs against established Māori cultural values. It could also have the capacity to commission research and contribute to national policy debate.
Services would be purchased from Aboriginal community controlled health services, mainstream primary health care services and hospitals, and other services. The authority would ensure that all purchased services meet set criteria including clinical standards, cultural appropriateness, appropriately trained workforce, data collection and performance reporting against identified targets such as the national Indigenous health equality targets.
The proposal’s rejection was never fully explained. But it remains instructive to New Zealand as a way of making Māori policy work through self-determination.
Independent Māori decisions about which health programmes to fund, and from which providers, potentially brings Māori people and values to the centre of the policy process. It means that Māori people are not the subjects of state policy. They become its agents, exercising meaningful citizenship and the right to take responsibility for their own affairs. The concept of Māori as junior partners to the Crown is replaced by decision making authority.
An independent funding agency could also strengthen democratic accountability to Māori people who would not need to wait for an invitation to join the policy process, but would be at its centre. Liberal democracies exclude Indigenous people and perspectives as a way of protecting majority interests. But as the tribunal found, exclusion can explain why policy fails.
Meanwhile, Indigenous Australians have proposed a constitutionally enshrined “voice” to parliament, a truth telling commission and treaties between Indigenous nations and the state to acknowledge enduring Indigenous sovereignty. Victoria and the Northern Territory have started the process of treaty negotiation, but last year, a new government in South Australia “paused” the negotiations begun by its predecessor. It didn’t think that treaties could contribute to better lives for Indigenous people.
In Zealand, the treaty is not a panacea for better lives for Māori. But in 2019, it remains as the Māori government minister, Sir Apirana Ngata, put it in 1922.
[It] is widely discussed on all marae. It is on the lips of the humble and the great, of the ignorant and of the thoughtful.
Ultimately, the treaty’s transformative capacity depends on how it is interpreted, especially whether self-determination is allowed to trump partnership.
While the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has made incredible improvements to the lives of many Australians living with disabilities, not everyone is benefiting from the scheme in the same way.
Our review, published recently in journal BMC Public Health, found the structure of the NDIS may be exacerbating existing social inequities. Women, rural and regional Australians, and those from poor households are more likely to miss out on disability care than their peers.
In a survey of of economically disadvantaged people with a disability, 31% were not even aware of the NDIS. A further 41% had heard of the NDIS and were eligible but had not applied due to bureaucratic complexities.
Women make up 49% of Australians with a disability but just 37% of NDIS participants. Further research is underway to help us understand why this is the case but it’s likely a reflection of broader gender inequities.
Men are also more likely to successfully secure NDIS services than women, which allows them to negotiate better deals and services from their allocated funds.
Accommodating the diversity of people’s circumstances is essential for the NDIS to achieve its goal of improving the lives of Australians with disability.
Market-based policies can exacerbate inequities
A 2018 Senate inquiry into NDIS readiness found there were often too few providers equipped to deliver disability support services, especially in remote and regional areas.
Without enough good-quality providers with space to take on more clients, people may miss out on services. Our review found this was more likely to occur for women, people with lower education levels, and those in remote and regional areas.
Where markets are failing or thin, those who are most equipped to get in early and establish service contracts are at an advantage over those who cannot.
Those who get in early have more options.Olesia Bilkei
A local service provider can only take on so many customers before it hits limits on staffing and resources. Those who get in early manage to secure services for themselves. Those who don’t may miss out on services entirely, especially where there are only a few specialist providers.
There are many reasons why someone might not get in early, such as having other care duties, living remotely, living in unstable housing, or not having the energy to work through the complicated system.
Self-managers get better services
Every NDIS participant is allocated a personal budget that matches their needs and goals. There are three ways for participants to manage NDIS budgets:
administered by the participant (self-managed)
chosen by the participant but administrated through a plan manager who pays invoices on behalf of the participant (plan-managed)
NDIA managed, where services are chosen by the participant from registered NDIS providers only.
Or the participant may opt for a combination of these options.
The 24% of self-managed participants carry the most administrative burden. They manage contracts and invoices themselves. But they also have the most flexibility to secure services, negotiate with service providers on price and access tailored services.
Many service providers are declining to take on contracts with people who do not self-manage, because these participants take more time and pay less. This leaves those least able to manage their services without access to the most flexible and boutique services.
Up to 40% of NDIS participants with an intellectual disability would like more training on NDIS tasks so they can better self-manage or choose services. In particular, they want to develop their skills in looking after money, using computers, finding the right service, making choices and ensuring they’re heard.
The system privileges an ‘ideal norm’
The NDIS system is bureaucratically complex, and many people find it difficult to navigate. In this way, it seems be catering to a concept of an “ideal norm”: a person who can navigate the NDIS bureaucracy and take on complex additional administrative burdens.
The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA, the agency charged with implementing the NDIS), for example, has been sending letters to blind people in formats they cannot read, such as printed letters without braille and PDF files that are incompatible with screen readers. This is due to to be rectified this month.
Control over services may also be limited for people who are geographically or socially isolated, or do not have the skills to navigate NDIS systems to access plans, run budgets and find services.
What can be done?
Addressing market failures and a scarcity of providers is essential to ensuring the benefits of the NDIS are equitable.
Supporting people to navigate bureaucratic complexity in the scheme will level the playing field.
The recent pricing changes for service providers to travel to remote and regional areas may help address provider shortfalls. Further, plans to maintain critical supports for essential services such as feeding and bathing in areas with too few providers will help address market failure.
Greater funding support is needed for advocacy groups to help NDIS participants, including those economically disadvantaged and homeless, to access and navigate the NDIS bureaucracy.
Finally, to allow better assessment of equity in the NDIS, we need better data. We need a large-scale evaluation of the performance of the NDIS, similar to the previous evaluation of NDIS trials. Existing data held within government on NDIS access should be reported publicly.
We need such actions to bridge the gap between Australians who are socially and financially equipped to navigate the NDIS and those who are not, or else people with critical needs may go without services and support.
Why do we tell stories, and how are they crafted? In this series, we unpick the work of the writer on both page and screen.
One of the major considerations when creating an ongoing television series is its “story world”, made up by its place, people, themes, style and tone. Central to this world is the setting, known in television writing as the “hub” or “precinct”, which serves the need for constant generation of characters and storylines.
Well-known examples of a hub or precinct include Ramsay Street (Neighbours), Sun Hill Police Station (The Bill), the White House (West Wing) and the eponymous Happy Valley.
With its high turnover of criminals, and the pressure-cooker effect of locking up many characters within the same walls, a prison is a particularly useful story hub for a TV drama series. The Melbourne-set and produced series Wentworth, now in its seventh season on Foxtel in Australia, is a good example of how this can work.
Wentworth reimagines cult show Prisoner, bringing together cold killers, pretty criminals and correctional officers – some of them also corrupt – in the one space. With a series of “top dogs” ruling the roost – from fiery mum Bea Smith (Danielle Cormack) to vigilante leader Kaz Proctor (Tammy Macintosh) – personalities clash, friendships and relationships evolve, and death threats, set-ups and escape attempts are frequently made.
TV series are often called “returning series”, usually because the setting plays such a vital role in structuring the story. Each week we come back to the same village, hospital, police station or school to see how the characters react to new challenges.
For prison dramas such as Wentworth, mostly the characters do not so much return as remain. Confined within cells, rec rooms, canteens and exercise yards, characters find themselves creating their own dramas, defining their own hierarchies, and of course dreaming up ways to get out (legally or otherwise).
Writers can introduce new characters at any time – for any crime – and mainstay characters can be dispatched with little narrative contrivance, because the prisoners’ lack of control over their own movement is a given.
Kate Jenkinson, Leah Purcell and Susie Porter in Wentworth. The enclosed space of a women’s prison is ripe with potential for new characters and conflict.Sarah Enticknap
Many TV series creators have explored the possibilities of detention as a story hub, generating shows such as Porridge (1974-77), Prison Break (2005-17) and most recently Orange is the New Black (2013-present). Mostly shot in a few indoor spaces, prison stories are cheaper to produce than many other scripted television series.
Characters in Wentworth have much at stake in each encounter. From eating breakfast to exercising in the yard, they may lose their freedom, social position, familial ties and even their lives. The prison corridor can readily become a place for compassion or conflict, solidarity or rioting.
Queueing to use the public telephone, where we typically see teary connections with loved ones, can easily slip into hierarchical games among the inmates, and sometimes violence. Because of the setting, the extreme stakes and emotional power of melodrama are never far from the surface.
Female-focused storytelling
Wentworth’s story hub is distinctive, because it brims with women. Wentworth Correctional Centre is a (fictional) social space constructed primarily by and for women. This allows for a variety of female identities and experiences to be played out.
As part of a global movement to better represent women on screens (and behind the scenes), including Screen Australia’s Gender Matters program, this show is very timely. Not only does it increase representation of women on screen, it also demands a greater breadth of female characters simply because all of the inmates – and the majority of the staff – identify as female. Women are Governors and “Top Dogs”, the brutalised and the perpetrators.
All of these character types, backgrounds and motivations come together within the powerful female world of Wentworth. In the first season, the prison functions as a magnetic narrative force, drawing the characters towards their incarcerated state. The causes of their custodial sentences are dramatised via flashbacks, so we see their various positions in society before they become levelled as prisoners.
Danielle Cormack as Bea in Wentworth. The first season of the show looks at how the characters ended up in prison.Fremantle Media/Foxtel
In later seasons, the prison functions as a kind of decentralising force as the narrative follows selected characters trying to establish new lives on parole. For example, Liz Birdsworth (Celia Ireland) is released to a halfway house, where she must deal with violence and theft; and inmate Franky’s (Nicole da Silva) attempt to establish a legal career after her release is told over two seasons.
The sheer number of female characters also demands diversity: there are women of various ages, ethnicities, social classes, body shapes, genders, religions and sexualities. This creates a world in which social norms, power dynamics and gender categories can be disrupted and challenged.
With a cast largely made up of female characters, Wentworth represents a diversity of women.Freemantle Media/Foxtel
Many of the central characters in Wentworth are lesbian or bisexual. When Franky and her psychologist Bridget develop a strong relationship in season three, for example, the forbidden couple became a fan favourite tagged “Fridget”.
The frequency of representing taboo and marginalised sexualities is a major contributing factor in the enduring appeal of women-in-prison stories.
But the prison of this television series is still an imaginary world, where characters and stories are played for the tastes and thrills of mainstream audiences, rather than to compassionately illuminate the experiences of the 43,000 Australians who live in our prisons. Although Wentworth features more major Indigenous characters than the average Australian television series (the current season features two Indigenous Australian main characters in an ensemble of ten), it still fails to adequately represent or address the horrifically high rate of Indigenous incarceration here.
Wentworth has been praised elsewhere as “a striking example of how to make strongly dramatic, addictive TV using a confined setting”, in a series that is “dark, tense and fully female-centric”.
Inbuilt with drama, rivalries, collusions, hierarchies and forced interactions between characters, Wentworth epitomises how a TV series is not just haphazardly set somewhere, but rather how its precinct can be pivotal in supplying all the necessary elements of drama.
By placing women at the centre of the narrative, Wentworth’s female-centric world also creates opportunities for real industry change.
The first Indigenous minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, says on the government’s proposal to constitutionally recognise Indigenous Australians: “I’m optimistic about achieving the outcome because if the words are simple, but meaningful, then Australians will generally accept an opportunity to include Aboriginal people in the Constitution.”
But he concedes Indigenous leaders would not take the same minimalist approach he is advocating for, but says it is “pragmatic”.
What I want to see us make some gains. Later on as we mature as a nation, then we can have another debate of what the next phase is.
He admits getting support for the constitutional referendum in his home state of Western Australia would be difficult but he would be looking to the big mining companies – which have been supportive of the Uluru Statement of the Heart – to help make the case there.
As for issues affecting Indigenous communities, such as high youth suicide rates, he says there is “a sense of futility for some young people. The issue of broken relationships. The way in which young people have expressed the need for their culture to be valued”.
On the way forward, he is looking into “support structures that need to go into place on the ground” and thinks “there is a way that we can have some of this with existing resources”.
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Smith, Research Fellow, Department of Pacific Affairs, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University
As China grows more powerful and influential, our New Superpower series looks at what this means for the world – how China maintains its power, how it wields its power and how its power might be threatened. Read the rest of the series here.
One of the earliest guests I had on The Little Red Podcast, the podcast I co-host with former China correspondent Louisa Lim, said something that stuck with me about the view of China in the rest of the world. John Fitzgerald, a well-known historian of China’s diaspora, confidently declared that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “couldn’t care less” about what non-Chinese Australians thought of it and its actions.
Looking through the results of the recent Lowy Institute Poll on Australians’ attitudes toward China, this is probably a good thing for the party.
The Australian public’s confidence in China’s ability to act as a responsible power has fallen off a cliff. In just one year, it dropped from more than half of Australians to just 32%. That’s a dire number.
That wasn’t the only surprise in the poll. Four-fifths of respondents agreed with the proposition “China’s infrastructure investment projects across Asia are part of China’s plans for regional domination”, and 73% believed Australia should try to prevent China from expanding its influence in the Pacific.
The poll was released in late June, at a time when China’s image was taking a hit internationally. Millions of people took to the streets in Hong Kong to protest a now-defeated extradition bill that could have seen Hong Kong residents sent to China on suspicion of crimes.
Then came news in Australia that the wife of an Australian writer who has been detained since January was herself interrogated by Chinese officials and blocked from leaving the country.
Even for a country that purportedly doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks, trust is hard to come by these days.
A matter of trust
It’s not entirely clear why so many Australians now distrust the Chinese state to the point where they believe our government should actively counter it (although perhaps not go to war with it).
There’s little evidence to suggest that one issue alone has caused this sharp decline in trust. For instance, the Communist Party’s most egregious recent violation of human rights, the detention of up to 1.5 million Uyghurs simply for being, well, Uyghurs has touched relatively few Australians.
Nor has the Australian government felt the need to act – it has said little on the matter.
Rather, the decline in trust seems to be the result of an accumulation of negative news on China — some well-informed, some half-baked (such as the 60 Minutes expose on a Chinese “military base” in Vanuatu). And for some, it’s based on personal experiences.
Last month, for instance, Australian National University revealed a massive data breach in the school’s computer system, including tax file numbers, bank accounts and passport details. The sophistication of the attack, which came after multiple attempts, meant there was only possible one suspect, according to senior intelligence officials: China.
Stealing people’s bank details might be profitable for the hacking team, but it doesn’t win hearts and minds for the Chinese state. Actions like this do more to damage China’s image than the words of noted China critics Clive Hamilton and Clive Palmer.
This sort of intimidation has been on the rise under Xi’s leadership in recent years. Academics who are critical of China now expect to be targeted by the CCP.
A podcast like mine, banned in China, doesn’t help. In the wake of an episode about China’s real-time censorship of its own historical record, I was hit by a denial-of-service attack that our university’s IT service struggled to fix. I gave up doing research inside China a while ago, after it became clear that my former colleagues and friends in rural China were increasingly at risk.
Even colleagues who have signed petitions calling on the Australian government take an evidence-based approach to China policy have been warned off continuing their in-country research by their Chinese research partners, ending collaborations which often stretched back decades.
To the outside world, this obsession with control looks like weakness rather than strength. A sanitised image of life inside China will do nothing to build trust in China as a responsible power.
This is the image of China that Xi Jinping wants to export to the world: happy, prosperous and non-threatening.How Hwee Young/EPA
Misplaced attempts at soft power
So how does China go about winning back a 20-point drop in trust?
To answer this question, I have to borrow a famous line from the film, The Princess Bride:
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
When it comes to the concept of soft power, the Chinese state misses the basic point that it doesn’t work particularly well. Money can’t buy you love, or in Joseph Nye’s terms, if your ideology and your culture have no appeal, cash won’t fix that.
Yet, the Communist Party is now a firm believer in soft power, built around its confidence that China’s ancient culture can return it to its legitimate status as the preeminent civilisation in the world. This confidence may be misplaced, as anyone who sat through the ponderous, state-backed, blockbuster film The Great Wall can testify.
To date, the target of China’s soft power push appears to be a largely Chinese audience. The purpose of its designated soft power tools, from Confucius Institutes to the English-language news service CGTN, is to impress on both the domestic constituency and Chinese communities abroad that China now looks and acts like a rejuvenated great power.
This officially approved cultural soft power package might not sell to non-Chinese audiences in Australia or, well, anywhere. But China has recently been trying another tactic – economic soft power. This is specifically aimed at the developing world: China positions itself as a nation that overcame colonial oppression to emerge from grinding poverty and become an economic powerhouse.
Under former President Hu Jintao, the party tiptoed away from the notion that China would pursue a “peaceful rise”, because they worried the word “rise” sounded threatening, even preceded by “peaceful.”
Now, under Xi’s watch, there is a new catchphrase to describe China’s rise. Anchors on CGTN happily ask European and African interlocutors about the merits of “the China model” for economic development, in which the state acts as chess master, guiding the economy and society at every turn.
Some nations are buying into this. Last weekend, a taskforce of Solomon Islands MPs and bureaucrats presented their recommendation to parliament over whether to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. While many Solomon Islanders, including Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, are reluctant to switch, the country’s close economic ties with China make such a move feel inevitable.
A Chinese development model that promises an escape from poverty has appeal across the Pacific – and beyond.
Trust on both sides of the wall
Whether Beijing is able to turn around this trust problem depends, in part, on how much China begins to trust itself in the rest of the world.
Forthcoming research my ANU colleagues and I are conducting with Hong Kong-based researchers examines attempts by Chinese state actors to influence the 2019 Australian federal election.
Preliminary results indicate that the Communist Party didn’t give a hoot which party won. The goal of Chinese propaganda during the election, rather, was to create a sense of distrust among Australian-Chinese communities by depicting Australia as a racist, unwelcoming place.
We should be mindful of attempts by elements of the Communist Party to influence our political processes. Yet it’s crucial to remember the CCP targets many groups in Australia, including private businesses run by former Chinese citizens, religious groups and student organisations, not because they are all loyal party stooges, but because the party does not trust them.
The challenge for China, if it wants to be trusted by the rest of the world, is how to move beyond Mao Zedong’s famous dictum:
Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the utmost importance for the revolution.
This thinking should have no place in a globalised world, but in CCP circles, it’s back in vogue.
The challenge for Australia’s leaders is to recognise China’s current political reality, but not be drawn into the same binary, simplistic thinking. There’s enough of that going around.
Papua New Guinea has responded with outrage over the killings of at least 22 people, including two pregnant women, in tribal violence Prime Minister James Marape has called the “saddest day of his life”.
The Post-Courier reported that at least 22 and up to 24 had been killed, after earlier reports said 16 had died.
Marape warned the perpetrators “I’m coming for you” and that they faced the death penalty after the slaughter in his electorate of Tari-Pori.
“Today is one of the saddest day of my life, many children and mothers innocently murdered in Munima and Karida villages of my electorate by Haguai, Liwi and OKiru gunmen,” Marape said in a statement on his Facebook page.
Health workers told local television EMTV that 16 people died in a 30 minute revenge attack on Monday and “it was difficult to identify the bodies because they were all chopped to pieces”.
Photos of the dead were posted on social media showing their bodies gathered up in mosquito nets.
Red Cross condemns killings The International Committess of Red Cross (ICRC) regularly provides humanitarian aid after tribal fighting and wants access to the conflict zone.
“It’s quite horrifying, we can’t independently confirm the casualties but these sort of actions is exactly what we encourage all parties to the tribal fighting in the Highlands to completely avoid,” said Ahmad Hallak, head of mission in PNG for the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) told SBS.
“In the last year at least I haven’t heard of any attacks that have killed so many innocent bystanders not directly involved in the fighting, it’s definitely concerning and I hope it’s not the start of a trend.
“With the introduction of modern weapons we are seeing more and more the humanitarian consequences that you see in countries that dominate dominate the news, on a much smaller scale, but similar humanitarian consequences.”
Tribal fighting in the PNG Highlands is commonplace but now it is fuelled by tensions over wealth distribution to rival impoverished landowners from the country’s billion dollar resources boom.
“There is a lot of disgruntled land owners who are dissatisfied with the gas agreements, they’re not satisfied with how the government and how multinational corporations have done deals with them,” said Chimbu highlander Bal Kama, a PhD candidate in law and governance at the Australian National University (ANU).
PM warns attackers ‘time is up’ PNG police said it followed the killing of six people in an ambush after a compensation ceremony on Saturday.
“This is not a tribal fight where the opposing villages face each other on field [sic], this is guerrilla warfare,” chief inspector Teddy Augwi told the Post-Courier.
“The relatives of the deceased retaliated outside Karida village in an executed plan, raided and using high-powered rifles shot dead the … people.”
Marape warned the attackers their “time is up”.
Prime Minister James Marape … warning to the perpetrators that “your time is up”. Image: Twitter/SBS Twitter
“To all who have guns and kill and hide behind the mask of community, learn from what I will do to criminals who killed innocent people, I am not afraid to use strongest measures in law on you,” he said.
“Last week I responded to question on death penalty on the floor of Parliament, it is already a law.”
PNG has not repealed capital punishment though no-one has been executed for decades.
“With this incident the prime minister has made a commitment to see that the death penalty mechanism is put into place, the law has already been passed,” Kama said.
“Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a matter for debate, but I think we’ll see some development on that shortly.”
Local authorities in Tari have called for the government to order the deployment of security forces protecting resource mining projects to protect local communities.
“My electorate in Hela Province hosts LNG and power transmission line for Porgera gold mine and since 2012 I have been requesting for more permanent police yet Konedobu police headquarters has not supported me,” Marape said.
“How can a province of 400,000 people function with policing law and order with under 60 policemen, and occasional operational military and police that does no more than band-aid maintenance.
“In memory of the innocent who continue to die at the hands of gun-toting criminals, your time is up, before I had someone else to report to, now I have no one else to report to but the innocent you kill.”
When he was elected in May, Marape promised to make PNG the “wealthiest black Christian nation” on Earth using resource royalties.
Stefan Armbruster is the Brisbane-based correspondent for SBS World News, reporting on Queensland and the Pacific region. This article is republished with permission.
TikTok is one of the fastest growing social media platforms on the planet, with more than 500 million active users. Only YouTube, Facebook and Instagram boast more.
TikTok allows users to create short videos with music, filters and other features. But while it’s now used globally by young people, many adult social media users have never heard of it. That’s by design.
In 2016, we conducted an ethnographic study on social media use among families with preteen children in Melbourne. Although most young participants in the study were considered by their parents to be “too young” for social media, some had accounts on a new platform called Musical.ly – now known as TikTok.
We soon realised that the preteen demographic was central to Musical.ly’s success – and to its evolution. The rapid increase of smartphone ownership among preteens presented a relatively uncaptured potential user base for social media.
Many big players have made recent attempts to capture this particular audience. Snapchat’s SnapKidz, YouTube Kids and most recently Facebook’s Messenger Kids all focused on creating a “child-friendly” version of the main app.
The creators of Musical.ly did their homework. They not only identified potential future users of the app, but also non-users that might hamper their success. In order to reach preteen audiences, social media apps need to get past the gatekeepers of preteen online engagement: the parents.
Musical.ly’s description in app stores promoted it as a creative tool rather than a social media platform.Author provided
From the beginning, Musical.ly presented itself as a tool for creativity and play rather than a social media platform. This tactic enabled Musical.ly to alleviate parental concerns associated with childrens’ use of social media. The app store description reads: “the world’s largest creative platform.”
Childrens’ engagement with digital devices is often driven by their desire for creative expression, entertainment and social interaction. Musical.ly successfully engineered playfulness and performativity as its key features.
For example, its cleverly coined “best fan forever” feature mimics elements of popular teen culture allowing users to establish a special connection with features like duet videos. “BFFs” individually record their videos of the same song, which the app then combines into a duet. In this way, users are incentivised to spend more time interacting together on the app.
Everything you can do on Instagram
While TikTok still bills itself a “community of global creators”, it’s more than just a toy for children. TikTok allows users to follow and interact with “public” profiles. They can follow each other (reciprocity not required), like and comment on videos, and send direct messages to each other.
In other words, TikTok meets all elements of a social networking site. In fact, the app’s infrastructure largely resembles Instagram.
The user base is the most valuable asset of any social media platform. During 2016 and 2017, Musical.ly, a social media start-up from China, was trending among most downloaded apps on both Apple and Google’s app stores.
This led to its acquisition by the Chinese media giant ByteDance for US$1 billion. We have seen similar scenarios before, when a successful start-up is acquired by a bigger player on the market.
When it acquired Musical.ly, ByteDance was mostly focused on news and was largely absent from social media landscape. But it did own a short-video sharing platform branded as Douyin. At the time, Douyin was not well known outside of China.
In 2018, ByteDance decided to merge Douyin and Musical.ly under the name TikTok. While the merger brought some new features, the process was virtually undetectable to users, who kept their accounts and all preexisting content and followers.
In other words, overnight the Musical.ly user database became the TikTok user database. While Musical.ly was more popular among global north, TikTok dominated the Asian market, positioning the newly merged app for a wider global audience reach.
Unwanted attention
In its early days TikTok managed to fly under the radar, but its rapid growth and growing user base has brought the app unwanted public scrutiny.
In 2018 the Indonesian government temporarily banned the app amid accusations it was disseminating pornography and blasphemy. In February 2019, India’s High court requested both Google and Apple remove TikTok from Indian app stores following accusations the platform was spreading pornographic and violent content.
Possibly the largest hit came earlier this year when US Federal Trade Commission fined TikTok a record-setting US$5.7 million (A$8.2 million) for collecting and storing the personal information of people under the age of 13 without obtaining parental consent (as required by law).
As TikTok has come to the public’s attention, parents and commentators have increasingly expressed concerns regarding potential predatory behaviour, bullying and exposure to the age-inappropriate content on the app.
Some may see TikTok as just another social media platform that will soon disappear, but it’s more than that. It’s the first social media platform based in China that commands unparalleled popularity in both Asian and Western markets.
This undermines the dominance of US companies on the global social media market. TikTok’s challenge going forward will be to live up to the promise of networked play and creativity, while ensuring the personal safety and data security of its users.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Smith, Research Fellow, Department of Pacific Affairs, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University
As China grows more powerful and influential, our New Superpower series looks at what this means for the world – how China maintains its power, how it wields its power and how its power might be threatened. Read the rest of the series here.
One of the earliest guests I had on The Little Red Podcast, the podcast I co-host with former China correspondent Louisa Lim, said something that stuck with me about the view of China in the rest of the world. John Fitzgerald, a well-known historian of China’s diaspora, confidently declared that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “couldn’t care less” about what non-Chinese Australians thought of it and its actions.
Looking through the results of the recent Lowy Institute Poll on Australians’ attitudes toward China, this is probably a good thing for the party.
The Australian public’s confidence in China’s ability to act as a responsible power has fallen off a cliff. In just one year, it dropped from more than half of Australians to just 32%. That’s a dire number.
That wasn’t the only surprise in the poll. Four-fifths of respondents agreed with the proposition “China’s infrastructure investment projects across Asia are part of China’s plans for regional domination”, and 73% believed Australia should try to prevent China from expanding its influence in the Pacific.
The poll was released in late June, at a time when China’s image was taking a hit internationally. Millions of people took to the streets in Hong Kong to protest a now-defeated extradition bill that could have seen Hong Kong residents sent to China on suspicion of crimes.
Then came news in Australia that the wife of an Australian writer who has been detained since January was herself interrogated by Chinese officials and blocked from leaving the country.
Even for a country that purportedly doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks, trust is hard to come by these days.
A matter of trust
It’s not entirely clear why so many Australians now distrust the Chinese state to the point where they believe our government should actively counter it (although perhaps not go to war with it).
There’s little evidence to suggest that one issue alone has caused this sharp decline in trust. For instance, the Communist Party’s most egregious recent violation of human rights, the detention of up to 1.5 million Uyghurs simply for being, well, Uyghurs has touched relatively few Australians.
Nor has the Australian government felt the need to act – it has said little on the matter.
Rather, the decline in trust seems to be the result of an accumulation of negative news on China — some well-informed, some half-baked (such as the 60 Minutes expose on a Chinese “military base” in Vanuatu). And for some, it’s based on personal experiences.
Last month, for instance, Australian National University revealed a massive data breach in the school’s computer system, including tax file numbers, bank accounts and passport details. The sophistication of the attack, which came after multiple attempts, meant there was only possible one suspect, according to senior intelligence officials: China.
Stealing people’s bank details might be profitable for the hacking team, but it doesn’t win hearts and minds for the Chinese state. Actions like this do more to damage China’s image than the words of noted China critics Clive Hamilton and Clive Palmer.
This sort of intimidation has been on the rise under Xi’s leadership in recent years. Academics who are critical of China now expect to be targeted by the CCP.
A podcast like mine, banned in China, doesn’t help. In the wake of an episode about China’s real-time censorship of its own historical record, I was hit by a denial-of-service attack that our university’s IT service struggled to fix. I gave up doing research inside China a while ago, after it became clear that my former colleagues and friends in rural China were increasingly at risk.
Even colleagues who have signed petitions calling on the Australian government take an evidence-based approach to China policy have been warned off continuing their in-country research by their Chinese research partners, ending collaborations which often stretched back decades.
To the outside world, this obsession with control looks like weakness rather than strength. A sanitised image of life inside China will do nothing to build trust in China as a responsible power.
This is the image of China that Xi Jinping wants to export to the world: happy, prosperous and non-threatening.How Hwee Young/EPA
Misplaced attempts at soft power
So how does China go about winning back a 20-point drop in trust?
To answer this question, I have to borrow a famous line from the film, The Princess Bride:
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
When it comes to the concept of soft power, the Chinese state misses the basic point that it doesn’t work particularly well. Money can’t buy you love, or in Joseph Nye’s terms, if your ideology and your culture have no appeal, cash won’t fix that.
Yet, the Communist Party is now a firm believer in soft power, built around its confidence that China’s ancient culture can return it to its legitimate status as the preeminent civilisation in the world. This confidence may be misplaced, as anyone who sat through the ponderous, state-backed, blockbuster film The Great Wall can testify.
To date, the target of China’s soft power push appears to be a largely Chinese audience. The purpose of its designated soft power tools, from Confucius Institutes to the English-language news service CGTN, is to impress on both the domestic constituency and Chinese communities abroad that China now looks and acts like a rejuvenated great power.
This officially approved cultural soft power package might not sell to non-Chinese audiences in Australia or, well, anywhere. But China has recently been trying another tactic – economic soft power. This is specifically aimed at the developing world: China positions itself as a nation that overcame colonial oppression to emerge from grinding poverty and become an economic powerhouse.
Under former President Hu Jintao, the party tiptoed away from the notion that China would pursue a “peaceful rise”, because they worried the word “rise” sounded threatening, even preceded by “peaceful.”
Now, under Xi’s watch, there is a new catchphrase to describe China’s rise. Anchors on CGTN happily ask European and African interlocutors about the merits of “the China model” for economic development, in which the state acts as chess master, guiding the economy and society at every turn.
Some nations are buying into this. Last weekend, a taskforce of Solomon Islands MPs and bureaucrats presented their recommendation to parliament over whether to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. While many Solomon Islanders, including Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, are reluctant to switch, the country’s close economic ties with China make such a move feel inevitable.
A Chinese development model that promises an escape from poverty has appeal across the Pacific – and beyond.
Trust on both sides of the wall
Whether Beijing is able to turn around this trust problem depends, in part, on how much China begins to trust itself in the rest of the world.
Forthcoming research my ANU colleagues and I are conducting with Hong Kong-based researchers examines attempts by Chinese state actors to influence the 2019 Australian federal election.
Preliminary results indicate that the Communist Party didn’t give a hoot which party won. The goal of Chinese propaganda during the election, rather, was to create a sense of distrust among Australian-Chinese communities by depicting Australia as a racist, unwelcoming place.
We should be mindful of attempts by elements of the Communist Party to influence our political processes. Yet it’s crucial to remember the CCP targets many groups in Australia, including private businesses run by former Chinese citizens, religious groups and student organisations, not because they are all loyal party stooges, but because the party does not trust them.
The challenge for China, if it wants to be trusted by the rest of the world, is how to move beyond Mao Zedong’s famous dictum:
Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the utmost importance for the revolution.
This thinking should have no place in a globalised world, but in CCP circles, it’s back in vogue.
The challenge for Australia’s leaders is to recognise China’s current political reality, but not be drawn into the same binary, simplistic thinking. There’s enough of that going around.
Indonesia has returned a container load of recyclables back to Australia, because the material did not meet stringent import requirements.
It is the latest Southeast Asian country to refuse Australia’s recycling waste. In January 2018, China stopped buying our recyclables until contamination was reduced significantly.
To achieve this, Australia needed to reduce contamination in commercial and household recycling, and improve our sorting facilities so they can identify and remove the types of materials causing concern.
This should have been a wake-up call that we need to improve our recycling industry and take urgent steps to reduce our reliance on overseas destinations for our recyclables. But did we? Clearly, the answer is no.
Dealing with difficult waste
In July the Philippines turned away 69 containers (about 1,500 tonnes), of materials incorrectly labelled as plastic and containing unacceptable contaminants. Malaysia has also threatened to send recyclables back to the originating country if the loads contain contaminants.
Looking at photos of the material rejected by Indonesia, it is clearly a typical load of baled recyclables that could have come from any sorting facility in Australia. It contains recyclables, but also contamination like used nappies, clothing, food scraps, paper and cardboard in the plastic recycling, metals and plastic in the paper recycling and some containers that once had motor oil or detergents in them.
While I personally suspect it’s slightly over the top to call this “hazardous” material, as some news reports have – the same loads are shipped to some facilities in Australia – it is a moot point. Indonesia can set whatever rules they deem necessary to protect the health of their communities and environment.
Indonesia is not the only country to turn back contaminated waste.FULLY HANDOKO/EPA/AAP
This continues after strong warnings that unless we provide clean recyclables, we will not have access to these overseas markets.
So what is contamination?
Recycling is basically divided into “streams”. Mostly these streams contain one or two types of materials. For example, we have a cardboard stream, plastic stream or in some instances commingled stream which contains plastic, aluminium, steel and glass containers.
“Contamination” refers to materials that are not wanted in that stream because they interfere with the proper treatment of a given load. Plastic in a load of cardboard and paper is contamination; so are clothes in a plastic load. It does not necessarily need to be toxic chemicals or other things that come to mind when we think of “contamination”.
However, containers used for detergents, disinfectants, and the broad range of household chemicals do contain residues. While some of these fluids and powders do get removed (often while materials are being baled), some residues remain and this can also cause issues for those wishing to use the recyclables as their raw materials.
So it is no wonder Australian businesses are reluctant to use what we currently sort and send out as their raw materials. If the recyclables materials contain contaminants at a high level, then the business who could have used them would have to expend resources to clean up the loads. Apart from that cost, they then have to dispose of the unwanted materials to landfill.
Additionally, due to some uncertainty in the quality of the recyclables, manufacturers are concerned whether their products will be of the required standard and if not, will that affect the customer base. Remember, when recycled paper was first on the market there was some concern about inferior “whitness” and this affected sales. (Ironically, now most business use recycled paper this situation is somewhat reversed.)
How can we fix it?
Ultimately, the issue is not how we can get other countries to accept our waste. Australia needs to improve our capacity and willingness to use recycled materials ourselves.
We have seen progress recently with Australian companies using recycled materials in new and innovative ways. Plastics used in road construction or in building materials is just one example.
But unless our recycling is better sorted, it won’t be used by domestic companies. Even products made with recycled material need to be clean, safe and reliable.
So what can we do about it? Of course, the obvious first step is to invest more into recycling facilities so they can sort more efficiently. However, we all need to take responsibility for what we put into the recycling at home or work. Many contaminants can easily be avoided with a little more care, so familiarise yourself with what can be recycled by your home council.
Finally, recycling is not a panacea. We need to seriously reduce the amount of waste we create, as individuals and a society. Without this, the problem will only continue to grow.
Chess has long been an important part of school culture. Many people believe chess has a range of cognitive benefits including improved memory, IQ, problem solving skills and concentration.
But there is very little evidence supporting these conclusions. We conducted two studies (still unpublished) that found educators and parents believe chess has many educational benefits. But children in our study who played chess did not show significant improvements in standardised test scores compared to children who didn’t play.
The first study looked at the perceptions of educators and parents regarding the benefits of playing chess.
In 2016, 314 participants – which included school principals, teachers, chess-coordinators and parents in parts of Queensland and NSW – filled out an anonymous, online survey.
Participants were asked to state how much they agreed or disagreed with 34 statements about the benefits of playing chess, such as: learning chess helps children develop critical thinking abilities.
Most participants either agreed or strongly agreed with most of the statements for chess benefits. For instance, almost 80% (249 out of 313) strongly agreed learning chess had educational benefits for children.
Another 87% (269 out of 310) strongly agreed learning chess helps children develop problem solving abilities. And 59% (184 out of 314) strongly agreed learning chess has benefits for Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Children.
Some questions in the survey and the answers given by participants.
The survey also included a space for comments. Some comments from participants included:
Chess is a great activity for all children to be involved in. It is one of a number of activities that schools can offer that assist in the academic, social and emotional development of children.
One parent said:
Since starting classes [my son] has become a full-time student and is managing social situations a lot better than before. Chess has pushed him to think in different ways.
But does it?
Previous studies that explored whether chess improves children’s cognitive abilities have had mixed results.
Some studies have found playing chess was linked to better thinking abilities. For instance, a significant 2012 New York study found that children in a group that had learnt either chess or music performed slightly better than children in the group who learnt neither.
But the study also noted the improvement in the chess group was not statistically significant.
A 2017 trial of more than 4,000 children in England found no evidence that chess instruction had any effect on children’s mathematics, reading or science test scores.
We wanted to test if there was, in fact, a positive correlation between learning to play chess and learners’ verbal, numerical and abstract (visual) reasoning skills. The study explored this in Year 1 to Year 5 students in a private school in Queensland.
In particular, the study examined whether a range of chess-related and non-chess related variables affected the standardised test scores of the chess group as compared to the control groups.
The study consisted of 203 students (with approval of their parents) who opted into the study. They made up four groups (based on the same approach as the 2012 New York study mentioned above). The groups were made of:
46 students who learnt to play chess
48 students who learnt to play music
37 students who learnt to play chess and music
72 students who neither learnt chess nor music
Weekly chess lessons were given to 83 students for six months: 24 from Year 1, 20 from Year 2, 8 from Year 3, 18 from Year 4 and 13 from year 5.
Weekly music lessons were given to 85 students for six months: 16 from year 1, 15 from year 2, 12 from year 3, 23 from year 4 and 19 from year 5.
Many schools have chess programs, and there are state and nation wide competitions.Author provided
We used standardised tests to measure whether there was any significant change in the scores of the different groups.
Year 1 and 2 students were tested using the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM) tests, which are multiple-choice intelligence tests of abstract reasoning.
Grade 3, 4 and 5 students were tested using the ACER (Australian Council of Educational Research) General Ability Tests (AGAT), used to assess learners’ reasoning skills in three areas: verbal, numerical and abstract (visual).
There were small improvements in the standardised test scores of the chess and music groups but these were not statistically significant.
Our findings don’t mean learning to play chess has no benefits for cognitive skills. There are many different types of thinking and measures of intelligence we do not yet fully understand. This is especially relevant in a world where conceptual thinking has become such a vital skill.
The different ways of thinking associated with the benefits of chess may include creative thinking, critical thinking, logical thinking, intuition, logical reasoning, systemic thinking, strategic thinking, foresight, convergent thinking, analytical thinking, problem solving and concentration.
Further research should aim to explore which type of thinking chess may improve, if we are to agree with the positive views of academics, educators, parents and players.
People experiencing homelessness and poor mental health are among Australia’s most vulnerable citizens. Without secure housing and an accessible mental healthcare system, recovery from mental illness is seriously compromised.
And the upcoming Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System will be judged by how it responds to this crisis of mental health and housing.
In recent weeks, we conducted a census of data from the Melbourne-based community agency, Launch Housing, and found 44% of the 2,023 clients were experiencing mental illness. Only half of these clients were receiving support from a mental health service.
Our interviews with these clients show how the Victorian mental health system repeatedly fails this group. Without exception, these clients emphasised the significance of safe and long-term housing to mental health stability and recovery.
One person told us:
you’re homeless and that’s the most important thing […] your mental state, it’s just got to be put on hold […] you don’t want to go and see anybody about your mental state because you need housing and that’s all you’re really concentrating on: where am I going to sleep tonight?
People often cycle through the mental healthcare system. This system includes primary health care services, and specialist community based and inpatient services in hospitals. Many then exit this system into homelessness, only to return repeatedly to hospital-based care, and sometimes the prison system.
In Victoria, for instance, more than 500 people are being discharged from acute mental healthcare each year into rooming houses, motels and other forms of homelessness. And discharging someone into homelessness is unacceptable.
Launch Housing client Steve says having a safe, stable home is imperative to his mental health.Author provided (No reuse)
Tragic consequences
These failures of the mental health and housing systems sometimes lead to tragic consequences.
A review of Launch Housing’s client death register shows there were 45 known deaths of current or former clients for the period of June 2018 to June 2019.
Not all deaths are directly attributable to mental health. But of the 45 people who died of different causes in this period, mental health was a contributing factor to many of them. Thirty-seven people had a self-disclosed mental illness and 18 were in contact with mental health services at the time of their death.
These are not new problems, and past reviews of Australia’s mental health system have resulted in missed opportunities for action. Fortunately, there are known solutions.
Here are three steps Australia can take to significantly improve the mental health of people experiencing homelessness.
1. Sustain rental tenancies
Programs such as those sustaining a rental tenancy when someone has a mental health episode are immensely valuable.
They help households with people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness by providing financial and practical assistance to establish and maintain their private rental tenancies.
With a persistent shortage of affordable private rentals and a gross under-supply of social housing in Victoria, sustaining tenancies is critical.
Akemi, a Launch Housing tenant who is living with a mental illness, says accessing mental health services while he was experiencing homelessness was virtually impossible.Author provided
2. Improve support from hospital with appropriate housing
During the transition away from hospital after a mental health episode, people should be supported with appropriate housing.
It’s common for adults experiencing homelessness and mental illness to be hospitalised and then discharged without a safe place to live, such as the hundreds of Victorians who left mental healthcare and landed into a form of homelessness.
What’s more, American research from 2013 into intermediate care for people experiencing homelessness showed that medical respite programs reduce future hospital admissions, inpatient days, and hospital readmissions. They also result in improved housing outcomes.
Medical respite programs provide a supportive, home-like environment and services to people who are at risk of or experiencing homelessness, such as The Sister Francesca Healy Cottage (The Cottage) in Melbourne. Sadly in Australia, such important services are in short supply.
3. Provide permanent supportive housing
Currently, people’s housing needs are “invisible” to the mental health system and there’s a presumption that patients are adequately housed.
So it’s important to boost the number of permanent supportive housing for people experiencing episodes of mental illness, and who are also heavy users of health and criminal justice services, crisis-related homelessness services and emergency housing services.
It also makes financial sense for the Victorian government to evaluate the need for permanent supportive housing.
The Victorian Royal Commission has an opportunity to recognise the critical connection between mental illness and housing stability.Daniel Pockett/AAP
This was recently shown by the Brisbane Common Ground initiative. They found that each year, governments can save more than A$13,000 per person if the chronically homeless had access to secure, long term housing and relevant support services.
Launch Housing provides a Common Ground service in Melbourne, but it warrants expansion, as promised by Lord Mayor Sally Capp in 2018.
The Royal Commission has the opportunity to recognise the research evidence showing homelessness and poor mental health outcomes are connected, and to recommend to the state government solutions that are known to work.
Such recognition will provide the Victorian state government with policies to make housing a feature of a reformed mental health system.
Without a place to live it’s nearly impossible to take care of your mental health needs.
Now it’s the Coalition that’s being accused of a “retiree tax”.
As interest rates have come down over the past four years, the rate that retirees are “deemed” to have earned for the purpose of the pension income test hasn’t budged, meaning that although retirees have been earning less (in some cases a good deal less), they haven’t been getting more access to the pension.
Depending on how you look at it, it’s either been making a mockery of the idea of an income test, or making the test more restrictive.
So how did it happen? Why is income “deemed” rather than actually measured when determining eligibility for government benefits, and is the system hopelessly compromised?
It’s important to understand what deeming is and where it came from if we are to understand the debate that will ensue when the government completes its review of the deeming rate in the next few weeks.
Where did deeming come from?
Modern day deeming was introduced by former prime minister Paul Keating in his final budget as treasuer in 1990.
many pensioners still disadvantage themselves by holding their savings in accounts that pay little or no interest
He was being diplomatic. It was widely believed that many retirees deliberately earned low rates on their savings in order to qualify for the pension or get a bigger pension. It cost the government money (while making the banks money) and it cost many of the pensioners money, because they lost more in interest than they gained in pension – although for those that used low earnings to ensure they at least got some pension, the associated benefits cards made it worth it.
From March 1991 cash and deposits were to assumed to be earning at least 10%, whatever they actually earned. If they earned more than 10% they were treated as earning more.
Except for the first A$2000. That was treated as earning only what it did, because many pensioners held small savings in low interest accounts for day to day purchases.
How has it changed?
Deeming is different today. It applies to more assets, including gold, managed investments, superannuation account-based income streams and listed shares; and it is used to assess eligibility for more benefits, including veterans and disability pensions.
And it’s no longer a win-win for the government. If someone earns more than the deeming rate, their income is assessed at only the deeming rate.
if your investment return is higher than the deemed rates, the extra amount doesn’t count as your income
There are two rates: one for the first $51,800 of financial assets (for a couple, the first $86,200) which is currently 1.75%, and the other for those assets in excess of that amount, which is currently 3.25%.
(In its first budget in 2014 the Abbott government tried to cut the threshold to $30,000 for singles and $50,000 for couples but was thwarted by the Senate.)
We deem by whim…
But there’s nothing automatic about setting the rates. It’s up to the government (specifically the minister for families and social services) to adjust them, or not, as it sees fit.
Both the high and low deeming rate used to be below the Reserve Bank’s cash rate (with the low rate typically 1.5 to 2 percentage points below the high rate), but after the cash rate dived in 2016 they have been left above it, in the case of the low rate, for the first time ever.
The high deeming rates have meant applicants have been means tested on income they haven’t received.
Deeming rates versus RBA cash rate, 1996 – 2019, per cent
Back when the deeming rates were lower relative to deposit rates, each of the big four banks offered “deeming accounts” that paid the deeming rates.
Today none of them do. They are not allowed to call accounts deeming accounts unless they pay the deeming rate, so instead they have retitled them “retirement accounts”.
The National Australia Bank’s retirement account (closed to new customers) pays just 0.20% for the first $10,000, well below the lowest deeming rate of 1.75%. The ANZ and the Commonwealth pay 0.25%. Westpac pays 0.3%. If you have more than $250,000 on deposit it pays 1.5% on the part above $250,000, which is still lower than the lowest of the two deeming rates.
Labor believes that not cutting deeming rates since 2015 has saved the government more than $1 billion per year in pension payments. It’s a significant portion of the $7.1 billion surplus it has forecast for 2019-20.
That is probably why the government has said it will take its decision about rates to its expenditure review committee, in what amounts to an admission that those decisions have as much to do with government finances as they do with treating applicants for pensions fairly.
There’s actually a case for extending deeming
As unrealistic as deeming rates have become, there’s a case for extending their use.
At the moment applicants for the pension face two means tests: one for assets and one for income.
Both the Henry Tax Review and the Abbott government’s National Commission of Audit recommended replacing them with a “merged means test” of the kind Australia had up until the 1970s.
Instead of an assets test, all assets would be deemed to earn a prudent rate of return; among them cars, holiday homes, investment properties, and high-value family homes.
The Commission put the case this way:
Exempting the principal residence from the means test is inequitable as it allows for high levels of wealth to be sheltered from means testing. For example, under current rules a single person who owns a $400,000 house and has $750,000 in shares ($1.15 million in total assets) would not be eligible for the pension, while a similar person with a principal residence worth $2 million and $100,000 in shares ($2.1 million in total assets) would be able to claim a pension at the full rate.
It’s a worthwhile idea whose time might come, but it is unlikely to come while deeming rates are seen to be unfair and capriciously set.
The government has an opportunity to restore confidence in deeming and pensions. The decisions it is about to make will show how important it thinks that is.
The Queensland government’s in-principle agreement to pay A$190 million in compensation for the wages withheld from more than 10,000 Indigenous workers is a watershed moment for the stolen wages movement.
Indigenous people across Australia have been fighting for their denied and withheld wages for decades, both on the streets and in the courts. There have been some victories along the way and many setbacks.
The significance of the Queensland settlement (to settle a class action) is that it marks the first recognition these claims have legal as well as moral and political merit. Its ramifications are potentially limited, however, given the full injustice of how Indigenous wages were stolen.
A significant contribution
Historically Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women found work in farming, mining, roadbuilding, irrigation, fencing, gardening, pearling, sealing, fishing and domestic duties. But they were most concentrated in the cattle industry of northern Australia, from Western Australia to Queensland.
Tens of thousands worked on cattle stations from the 1880s to 1970s. The beef industry could not have survived without them. In 1913, the federal government’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, Baldwin Spencer, noted that “under present conditions, the majority of cattle stations are largely dependent on the work done by black “boys”. In the 1930s, when the rest of the economy floundered in the Great Depression, Indigenous labour helped keep the industry profitable.
Cattlemen at Victoria River Downs Station, Northern Territory, in 1953.Frank H. Johnston/National Library of Australia
Systemic stealing
Indigenous workers were entitled to be paid two-thirds of other workers, but even then employers often paid them less. Sometimes the low value of their wages was disguised by being paid in food and clothing rations. Sometimes workers were provided “store credit”, which could only be used to buy exorbitantly priced items.
Station managers may have justified under-payment on the basis they were “caring” for workers through providing scant food, clothing and accommodation.
Governments, meanwhile, “withheld” income – often putting money into trust funds that Indigenous people were unable to access. The Queensland government’s $190 million offer is to settle a class action claim for it misappropriating such trust funds.
The fact Indigenous people were vulnerable to such exploitation for decades was made possible by an intricate legislative regime that gave the state expansive powers over their lives. In all states and territories, Aboriginal Protection Acts gave the government officials the power to control the money earned by Indigenous workers.
In Queensland, historian Rosalind Kidd has estimated that 4,500 to 5,500 Indigenous pastoral workers may have lost wage entitlements worth more than $500 million between 1920 and 1968.
Redress schemes
There have been redress schemes in Western Australia, Queensland and New South Wales.
The Queensland government set up the first redress scheme in 2002. It set aside $55.6 million to compensate any individuals who could supply documentary evidence their wages or savings were taken by the Queensland government. If they could do so – and there was a deadline of 2006 on claims – the scheme provided an ex gratia payment of $2,000 to $4,000.
These conditions set a high bar, and $21 million went unclaimed.
Western Australia established its scheme in 2012. It also involved a small ex gratia payment ($2,000) with a limited window to make claims. Claimants called the scheme insulting and mean-spirited. The ABC reported a source that said state treasury officials agreed individuals were owed as much as $78,000, and the government kept the work of its stolen wages taskforce quiet for years, waiting for potential claimants to die.
In distinction to these two schemes, the NSW Trust Funds Repayment Scheme (2006 and 2010) matched the wages withheld in trust funds between 1900 and 1969. It paid $3,521 for every $100 owed, or an $11,000 lump sum where the amount could not be established. This was the closest model to a reparations scheme, though also inhibited by bureaucratic requirements and time limitations.
Due to the limitations of all these state redress schemes, in 2006 a Senate Inquiry into Stolen Wages recommended a national scheme. But no federal government since has acted on this recommendation.
Legal claims
Stolen wages claimants have taken their cases to court in Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland – but it is only in Queensland that they have had some success.
One of those is the case of James Stanley Baird, who sued the Queensland government for withheld wages on the basis that paying under-award wages to Indigenous workers was in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. The state government compensated Baird and other plaintiffs the difference owed to them in damages and provided an apology.
Implications
The current settlement is based on a legal claim that the Queensland government breached its duty as a trustee and fiduciary in not paying out wages that were held in trust. The outcome is the most significant repayment for stolen wages plaintiffs in Australian history. Yet the benefits may be confined.
First, in Queensland there is a rich archive of documents (substantially unearthed and analysed by historian Rosalind Kidd) to prove the government misappropriated funds. Such a record may not exist elsewhere.
Second, the settlement only applies to wages placed in “trust accounts”. It has no implications for wages denied to Indigenous workers in other ways, such as by private employers who booked down wages or otherwise refused to pay.
For justice for all wronged Indigenous workers, there needs to be broad-based reparations for stolen wages. This requires truth commissions and a commitment by governments and anyone else that profited from that theft to restore what is owed.
When the 22-year-old David Bowie penned Space Oddity, a song that would ultimately become a recognised classic, he was a burgeoning pop artist without a record deal. A folk singer without a gig, a sometime mime, and a purveyor of ice creams. His first serious relationship, with the actress Hermione Farthingale, was in free fall.
It was December 1968, and Bowie’s manager Kenneth Pitt was collating a promotional film to pimp his client’s wares to London television and film producers. He requested Bowie pen a “special piece of new material” to contemporise the otherwise retrospective nature of the film.
And then, on Christmas Eve, astronaut Bill Anders captured his iconic photograph of Earth from the Apollo 8 spacecraft while circumnavigating the Moon.
Earthrise, December 25, 1968NASA
The Earthrise image was still resonating in the public’s imagination when Bowie retreated to his room in Clareville Grove, London to write his space cabaret. Composing on a 12-string Hagstrom guitar with a little sonic weirdness from a Stylophone given to him by Marc Bolan, he came up with Space Oddity.
A blatant commercial object, a “pragmatic” turn by a fledgling artist, the song would become an anthem for space exploration for decades (and for TV news obituaries on the occasion of Bowie’s death in 2016).
Space Oddity tells of an astronaut Major Tom, launched into space in a manner akin to the Apollo missions. Yet in this instance all does not go according to plan and he is left adrift in the abyss of space, “floating ‘round my tin can, far above the Moon.”
At the time it was considered a “novelty song” to hang alongside other opportunists riding the vapor trails of the Saturn V. (Omega watches, Tang, Space Food Sticks etc). Bowie was acutely aware of the commercialisation of the space exploration story, of course. “You have really made the grade, and the papers want to know whose shirts you wear,” exalts ground control as Tom hurtles towards the heavens.
Eschewing the typical pop song template, Bowie designed the piece as if it was a dramatic play. “I think I wanted to write a new kind of musical,” he reflected in 2002, “and that’s how I saw my future at the time.”
The song – one of his earliest and perhaps most outrageous musical assemblages – is also indicative of the artist he would become, a restless creative magpie perched by the wireless, plucking phrases and vocal stylings from the inbound radio waves.
The definitive version, recorded in late June 1969 at Trident Studios, was pressed and released as a single within three weeks – on July 11 – to leverage the hype of the impending Apollo moon landing. It also sealed a new recording deal with Mercury Records. Bowie was back.
However, his long-time producing partner Tony Visconti refused to work on the song, citing it as a distasteful departure from the singer’s hippie folk leanings. Visconti’s unease led him to recommend Gus Dudgeon (who would later work with Elton John) as producer. The song’s adventurous orchestration and unsettling harmonics owe much to Dudgeon’s ambition.
Through resonance, tone and unexpected harmonic shifts Bowie and Dudgeon achieved a meta-pop song full of cultural and musical references. There are lyrical and tonal references to the Bee Gees’ New York Mining Disaster 1941 while an acoustic passage signposts Old Friends by Simon & Garfunkel. Even the metallic chimes of the Stylophone recall the pulsating intro of the Beatles’ I Am The Walrus. This was music for space, both inside and out, an experimental sonic palette that would open up a whole new genre of musical art direction.
Of course, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey hangs heavily over proceedings. The two works are not only linked by name, but by their respective critiques of the cultural zeitgeist of “space fever”.
A sense of melancholia and detachment permeates Bowie’s recording. Yet, Major Tom’s predicament – floating in a tin can far above the world – is perhaps not the perilous event we might suspect. He seems quite OK with it all. Even his observation that there is “nothing I can do” comes across as somewhat of a relief.
We are never really sure whether the communication breakdown with ground control was accidental or by design. In Norman Mailer’s Apollo 11 chronicle Of a Fire on the Moon, he notes that the “obvious pleasure” of the astronaut, “was to be alone in the sky.
Rushing towards the stars
Still, in a 1980 interview, Bowie revealed Major Tom’s dilemma was a comment on what he saw at the time as the limits of American exceptionalism:
Here we had the great blast of American technological know-how shoving this guy up into space, but once he gets there, he’s not quite sure why he’s there. And that’s where I left him.
For such a challenging work, the press reaction in Britain to Space Oddity was largely positive, Tony Palmer, writing in the Observer, appreciated the song’s cynical air at a time when “we cling pathetically to every moonman’s dribbling joke, when we admire unquestioningly the so-called achievement of our helmeted heroes.”
Music journalist Penny Valentine’s review for the ensuing album, which would feature Space Oddity as the lead track, observed that Bowie had captured “the rather frightening atmosphere we all live in as the backdrop to his songs.”
Cover of Space Oddity, the album.Author provided
Indeed, come July 1969, the promise of the sixties and the hippy trip of the free love movement were a few festivals and a bunch of ghoulish murders away from coming to an end. The sense of being adrift like Major Tom was not just a fantasy construction any more.
The song’s television debut would be on July 20 when the BBC aired the track during the Apollo broadcast, albeit after the Lunar Module had safely touched down. A scenario that even surprised Bowie – “of course, I was overjoyed that they did”.
Despite its contrived beginnings, Bowie designed a cultural touchstone for a historic moment of human engineering and blind courage. Even 50 years hence, he appears to us fully formed on Space Oddity as a moonstruck balladeer and completely in synch with the times.
The immaculately dressed changeling who would go on to hit the glam rock jackpot with his alien stage persona Ziggy Stardust. A character who captured the abrasive temperament of the moment as he straddled the jet-trails of our collective rushing towards the stars.
The high number of cases has led some people to question the effectiveness of the flu vaccine, and whether it’s worth getting if it doesn’t guarantee you won’t get the flu.
The flu vaccine is designed to cover the strains of the flu anticipated to circulate during the season. But even with the most sophisticated scientific processes, determining the right strains to include in the vaccine isn’t 100% foolproof.
Sometimes the virus undergoes major genetic changes or “mutations” in a relatively short space of time. Reports of a “mutant strain” this year means there’s concern some people might catch a strain the vaccine hasn’t protected against.
It’s too soon to tell the full extent of the effects of this mutation on how well the vaccine has worked. But the 2019 vaccine is showing early signs of being a good match for the common strains of the flu circulating this season.
What’s in a name?
Influenza or “flu” isn’t just one virus; different strains circulate each season.
Flu viruses that cause seasonal epidemics in humans fit under one of two major groups: influenza A or B.
Influenza A is further broken down into strains or subtypes based on surface proteins called hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).
We’re currently concerned about two subtypes which cause outbreaks in humans: A/H1N1pdm09 and A/H3N2.
Influenza B viruses are similarly categorised into strains based on two distinct lineages: B/Yamagata and B/Victoria.
Understanding the circulating strains is important because it gives us clues as to which age groups will likely be worst affected. Influenza A/H3, for example, has historically been associated with higher rates of disease in people aged 65 and over.
But the circulating strains are also important because they inform how the vaccine will be developed. A good match between the vaccine strains and what is circulating will mean the vaccine offers the best possible protection.
So how do we decide which flu strains are covered by the vaccine?
Every year, a new vaccine is produced to cover the strains that are predicted to be circulating in the northern and southern hemispheres. The World Health Organisation (WHO) uses a range of measures to determine which strains should be included in the vaccine.
Many of us who were vaccinated this year would have received a quadrivalent vaccine. This means it covered four strains in total: two strains of influenza A, and two strains of influenza B.
People aged 65 and over are offered a “high-dose” trivalent vaccine, which covers both A strains, and one B strain.
The Australian Influenza Vaccine Committee (AIVC) reviews the results and makes recommendations for the Australian vaccine, which in 2019 covered the following strains:
an A/Michigan/45/2015 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus
an A/Switzerland/8060/2017 (H3N2)-like virus
a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus (Victoria lineage) – not included in the trivalent vaccine recommendation
a B/Phuket/3073/2013-like virus (Yamagata lineage).
Do we always get it right?
The basic premise of forecasting is that it’s a “best guess”. It’s a highly educated guess, based on analysis and evaluation, but it’s not a guarantee.
The effectiveness of a vaccine depends on a number of factors, only some of which are within our control. While the choice for the vaccine is made on the best evidence available at the time, the viruses circulating in the population undergo changes as they replicate, known as antigenic “drift” and “shift”.
Flu viruses change every year so researchers have to make an educated guess about which ones might circulate.Image Point Fr/Shutterstock
If the changes are only small, we can still get good cross-protection.
Less frequently, a big genetic “shift” happens. If this occurs after vaccine development has started and the strains have been chosen, we are dealing with a so-called “mutant flu” and the vaccine will likely not be a good match.
So is this year’s vaccine is working?
Data available for this year are showing the majority of influenza cases in Australia have been influenza A – with some states reporting more H3N2 than H1N1, and others reporting a more even mix of both.
The WHO Collaborating Centre in Victoria is also reporting that the majority of specimens of all four strains they’ve tested this year appear to be similar to the vaccine strains.
While early indications are that the vaccine has been a good match in the 2019 season, the WHO Collaborating Centre has also recently confirmed there has been a mutation in the A/H3N2 strain this season.
It’s not clear yet if this mutation will have a significant impact on vaccine effectiveness, but it may at least partially explain the high case numbers we’ve seen so far.
Large vaccine effectiveness studies done at the end of the flu season will help assess the impact of this mutation. In the meantime, a mismatch on only one strain means the vaccine will still provide reasonable protection against other circulating strains.
It’s still worth being vaccinated
In the same way wearing a seat belt is no guarantee we won’t be injured in a car accident, a flu vaccine is no guarantee we won’t develop influenza this season.
A person’s underlying susceptibility, due to factors such as their age and health, will also influence how well a vaccine works.
But the flu shot remains a safe and reasonably effective strategy to reduce your risk of serious illness.
While flu epidemics remain complex, advice to prevent flu transmission remains simple. Regularly washing our hands, covering our mouth when we cough or sneeze, and staying home when we’re unwell are things we can all do to help stop the spread.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gillian Oliver, Associate Professor and Director, Centre for Organisational & Social Informatics, Monash University
The recent case of paper medical files from a Brisbane hospital found on a busy street highlights the need for secure, controlled disposal of medical records.
The files were said to be from out-patient clinics and contained patient names and their appointments, but not medical details. Now Queensland Health is investigating the circumstances of how the files came to be found in public, rather than being safely destroyed by a contractor.
So how are hospitals and clinics handling their old paper records as they move to electronic systems? How are they dealing with the tsunami of files that need to be safely disposed of?
Your medical records, whether paper or electronic, need to be kept while they’re relevant to your care, with restricted access to protect your privacy. But who decides when medical records are no longer needed? What happens then?
Governments at all levels have legislation for this. For instance, the Queensland health department specifies what is destroyed and when, according to a schedule from Queensland State Archives. This covers medical records in the public health care system in physical form (paper, photographs, film), in electronic form or a mixture of the two.
This, for example, says “records displaying evidence of clinical care to an individual or groups of adult patients/clients” should be kept “for ten years after last patient/client service provision or medico-legal action”. There are a number of exceptions relating to, for example, clinical trials, mental health and communicable diseases. For each exception, there is a specific time period of how long the file needs to be kept.
Hospitals can contract commercial services to destroy paper files. But the document owner, in this case the hospital, is ultimately responsible for ensuring this is carried out legally.
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has established practice standards for GP clinics. These require the secure destruction (for instance, by shredding) of paper records before disposal.
So, hospitals and GP clinics need to develop and implement policies and procedures that state explicitly when and how medical records should be disposed of, and also keep a record of when that happens.
However, to determine whether an individual medical record among the vast quantities held has passed its “use by date” can be extremely resource-intensive for administrative staff.
This means the ultimate driver of paper record destruction is more likely to be the need to free up expensive office or storage space. It’s this sort of scenario that might eventually play out into records being accidentally or deliberately dumped wherever, whenever.
The move towards digital records
The Brisbane situation highlights the limitations of “business as usual” in relation to medical records, which includes paper records held in multiple locations, in hospitals, in GP clinics and with specialists.
Consider your own medical record “paper trail”, which may include files from hospital admissions, records held by your local doctor or other specialist, and results of blood tests and x-rays performed elsewhere.
At both a personal and whole-of-population level, there are clearly numerous opportunities for unintended access to these physical documents. Centrally and securely stored electronic records can address this risk, and also carry a number of other advantages.
Privacy breaches relating to paper medical records are in part a function of a worldwide transition from a trusted familiar environment of paper records to electronic medical records.
This dramatically multiplies the volume of paper records needing to be destroyed — from only those that are “out of date” to every record that is scanned and made redundant.
The Brisbane case also highlights the sensitivity of medical records in all their forms, a factor also playing out in the My Health Record debate.
Like all transitions of this scale, there are a range of costs involved in moving from paper to electronic medical records, one of which is the prospect of further paper record data breaches as mountains of redundant records are destroyed. However these transition costs need to be balanced against the ultimate benefit of electronic records.
Even accepting these benefits doesn’t necessarily mean people will automatically become more comfortable with electronic medical records, like My Health Record. For that to occur, people also have to overcome a general lack of trust in government.
However, our research shows it is possible to encourage people to use online government services. By harnessing behavioural science, we have shown that providing customer support and promoting the benefits and ease of online services helps the transition from queuing and paper forms to using online services.
Hope for the future
In the rush to drag people to shiny new online platforms, this illustrates the simple act of talking people through the advantages and supporting their transition can address many of the psychological barriers to change.
Then, hopefully, we can see the end of paper medical records and services, and fewer paper records being dumped on the side of the road. As long as paper records exist they will be vulnerable to unauthorised access – either within a storage facility or in transit to destruction. However, each case of unauthorised access is dwarfed by the number of paper records successfully and securely destroyed, never able to be physically accessed again.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elizabeth Sinclair, Senior Research Fellow, School of Biological Sciences and The UWA Oceans Institute, University of Western Australia
What did we use before single-use plastics became ingrained in our everyday lives? Before the 1980s, plastic bags were a rarity in our supermarkets. In 2019, excessive plastic use feels not just normal, but necessary to sustain our hectic lifestyles. From takeaway containers and supermarket packaging to cheap, low-quality goods, plastic permeates our daily lives.
However, with every passing year the scale tips further against the immediate convenience of single-use plastics, and towards the extreme inconvenience of piles of waste. The true cost to society and the environment of a “disposal economy” is becoming increasingly stark.
Finding solutions to eliminate plastic waste in everyday life presents challenges, particularly during large events such as professional conferences. At some time during our careers as academics, scientists, researchers, or industry professionals, we may be part of a conference organising committee. Back in the 1990s, conferences proudly tallied how many coffee cups they used – how times have changed.
As organisers of this week’s national conference of the Australian Marine Sciences Association, we took on the challenge to walk the walk rather than just talk the talk – by holding a plastic-free conference for 570 marine science professionals, academics, and students. But how do you cater for so many people while limiting waste and using no plastic at all?
Turning the tide – be part of the solution
We started this journey 12 months ago, once we knew the challenge we were facing: a marine conference, themed around the blue economy, during July, in the Western Australian port city of Fremantle – the birthplace of the Plastic Free July movement.
From day 1, we were clear we wanted to eliminate plastic and reduce overall waste – everything from day-to-day rubbish to plastic take-home novelties that feature at so many conferences but inevitably make their way into landfill.
Recycling is only a small part of the solution. We need to “refuse, reduce, and recycle” to really tackle plastic.
What we did
We began by selecting a like-minded event organiser to work with us. Then we looked for non-plastic alternatives for obvious conference items. Here’s what we came up with:
No plastic here at AMSA 2019.Angela Rossen, Author provided
stiff cardboard name badges with no plastic pockets
bamboo lanyards with metal clips
100% natural conference tote bags
no printed envelopes for registration packs, and no printed conference abstracts
all necessary printing was done on sustainably sourced paper, by a company using a solar-powered printer
delegates were asked to bring their own reusable water bottles and coffee cups, or pre-register to buy a reusable coffee cup at the conference
coffee carts with returnable cups that can be washed and reused
water jugs with glassware (or to refill personal water bottles) at the back of each presentation room
no packaged mints or lollies
sustainably sourced pencils instead of pens (with sharpening stations provided!)
plates, silverware and glassware for all meal breaks
vegetarian catering for tea breaks
all exhibitors, workshop organisers and additional functions (such as the student night and public lecture) were committed to reducing plastic waste for free giveaway products and catering.
Most importantly, we delivered these changes without increasing the budget or impacting the bottom line.
What we learned
Plan early. Going against the grain can take a bit of work, but there are usually plastic-free options available. Take the extra time and file the solution away for your next event.
Work with everyone. Create a shared goal with your whole team: event organisers, venue, exhibitors, caterers – more ideas make for better solutions. This creates a ripple effect, not only for the event, but in developing more sustainable practice for other events.
Do a site visit. Identify potential problems and devise solutions ahead of time. Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, founder and executive director of Plastic Free July, visited our conference venue and provided valuable insights.
Don’t assume. At another marine conference we attended, plastic water bottles were replaced by jugs of water (great!) and polystyrene cups (not so great!). Not all suppliers are knowledgeable about sustainable materials, so make the effort to talk through what plastic-free and zero-waste really mean.
Removing ‘hidden’ plastics
No matter how much planning you do, there will always be “hidden plastics” in the supply chain. It is impossible to control every aspect of operation of the conference venue, their suppliers (food, linen services, waste removal), and the other hotels used by delegates (who may provide guests with water bottles, drinks, and personal hygiene products in rooms).
Early buy-in by all service providers can help reduce this, but remember the goal is to change people’s attitudes towards waste, not to reinvent the entire events industry in one conference.
But if we can do it for 570 people, then everyone can start making similar changes at their own home and workplace too.
AMSA will host its annual public lecture, sponsored by the UWA Oceans Institute, in Fremantle on Wednesday July 10 at 6.30pm. It addresses the issue of plastic pollution and what can be done about it, both globally and locally.
The plight of welfare beneficiaries came into focus last week with a photo taken outside an Auckland Work and Income office, of clients who had been queuing from 2am in order to apply for emergency hardship payments. This has sparked a debate about whether the Labour-led Government is doing enough to provide for this group in dire need, with some arguing that things are actually getting worse for those at the bottom.
The original news story by Nita Blake-Persen was published on the RNZ website, and relayed how “Parents lined up in the torrential rain for hours this morning outside Manurewa’s Work and Income office to meet with advocates who help them with their claims. Without them, they say their desperate pleas for cash are almost always denied” – see: People queue from 2am outside Work and Income for help.
The first person in the queue, who arrived at 2am, told the reporter he needed a grant, as he was struggling to buy basic necessities for his three children: “I need to buy long pants, jumpers, jerseys and that, and then I need to get food, because I stay in a three bedroom house – I pay $610 a week.”
Like others lined up at the Work and Income office, he had come on that particular Thursday because the advocacy group Auckland Action Against Poverty (AAAP) come along on that day every week to help beneficiaries obtain their full entitlements. Those advocates claim that beneficiaries are otherwise being turned away from proper grants.
One of the AAAP advocates appealed to the Prime Minister to sort out the situation – Kathleen Paraha challenged Jacinda Ardern, saying: “The government needs to get off their bums and come down and have a look for themselves.”
The story has provoked some strong reaction on Twitter, with many saying it epitomises this Government’s failure to deliver the transformation it has promised. For example, Newsroom editor, Tim Murphy, stated “This is one of those stories that will be remembered about a government’s time in charge”, and “The more that this Governments term progresses, the more clear it is that that they are at their core no better than the last guys, or the ones before that. Virtuous media soundbites & photo ops aren’t making a difference”.
And his business journalist colleague Bernard Hickey pinpointed the conservative fiscal approach of Ardern and her Government as being responsible, saying the 2am welfare scenes occurred “At the same time as a ‘progressive left’ Government has a $7b budget surplus and has net debt so low that even Moody’s says we could almost double it and keep our AAA rating. Yet…budget Rules…”
Political activist and former MP Sue Bradford suggested that the Government was not following through on its promises: “Minister Sepuloni used to talk about the culture change she wanted at Work & Income, but the ongoing desperation of people who need help to get the most basic of needs from W & I flies in the face of Labour’s supposedly ‘kinder’ approach to welfare.”
In the blogosphere, some on the political left expressed their frustration. Steven Cowan blogged to say the continued plight of beneficiaries was a case of Paying the price of Jacinda Ardern’s austerity policies. He argued “these Auckland beneficiaries provide more stark evidence of a society where the depth of poverty continues to deepen and the chasm of inequality continues to widen”.
And he pointed out that “It was only two months ago that the Labour-led government declined most of the recommendations of its own welfare working group”. Similarly, Martyn Bradbury argued the incident was an example of The Toxic culture of WINZ & MSD laid bare,
But is it really fair to see the 2am Manurewa event as representative of the Government’s failed welfare reform agenda? The Minister of Social Development, Carmel Sepuloni, went on RNZ’s Checkpoint programme to dispute this version of the story – see: Long queues outside MSD ‘shocking’ but not the norm – minister. Sepuloni’s reaction to the story was: “I saw the image and I saw the story and no one would pretend that it’s not shocking to see that… that is not a normal occurrence at MSD (Ministry of Social Development) offices around the country.”
The Minister’s main point was that the queues from 2am in this instance were not directly due to Work and Income decisions, but because the advocacy group AAAC had arranged for beneficiaries to gather in a way that they needed to arrive early to get the chance of advocate help.
She said: “They’re not meeting with MSD at that hour, they’re actually meeting with their advocates… We tell AAAP… on Thursdays they have guaranteed appointments for their clients, that we will see them on that Thursday – so there’s no reason for them to turn up at that hour of the morning.”
In another interview, Sepuloni explained “I am advised that the long queues seen at Manurewa are the result of benefit recipients being encouraged by their advocates to all congregate at the same time on Thursdays”. She has also called on AAAP to work differently to help beneficiaries: “The queues can be avoided if AAAP works with MSD to deal with these cases in an orderly way across the week, rather than creating a bottleneck that forces everyone to be there at once in the rain” – see Michael Daly’s Auckland Action Against Poverty hits back at Government over WINZ queues.
The same article reports Work and Income regional commissioner Mark Goldsmith claiming that the AAAP advocacy group had refused “numerous attempts” made to work together. And, further, that “We would be happy to pre-book appointments with clients and AAAP advocates so clients don’t have to wait, but so far AAAP haven’t agreed to this.”
The group has responded, disputing this: “It’s categorically untrue we’ve refused to engage with MSD re:Manurewa.” And in open letter to the Government, published on The Spinoff, the group say: “When you say we should go to different offices to spread out the work of Ministry Social Development staff and avoid ‘creating a bottleneck’, what you are admitting is that MSD staff all over Aotearoa New Zealand are failing the people they are meant to be assisting. You are admitting that there is something seriously wrong with our welfare system” – see: We should not have to do MSD’s job for them.
The group also challenges the Government on its welfare policies in general: “There is enough money to end poverty but you need to be bold. You need to tax wealth and redistribute it into social welfare and public housing. You need to spend that surplus you are sitting on. It is socially and fiscally irresponsible to allow people to continue to live in poverty. We would like to see this rhetoric on well-being and kindness materialise in the lives of the people we work with.”
To get a better understanding of the work that the AAAP group is doing with welfare beneficiaries at the Manurewa office, it’s worth reading Michael Daly and Joel MacManus’ Minister responds to Manurewa Work & Income queue problem. In this, it’s explained: “The arrangement with Work and Income was that AAAP advocates were allowed to help 65 people in the queue on Thursday mornings. There were usually about seven advocates at the office, and they interviewed those 65 people.”
AAAP coordinator Ricardo Menendez March is reported saying: “In reality we always see far more. People have the right to have a support person at Work and Income… Throughout the day we end up helping far more people, explaining to them the process and making sure the case managers are doing their work and following the law adequately”.
Menendez March says that this has been going on for about two years, during which time the queues have always existed but are getting worse. Why? He says: “We know beneficiaries have been the most disproportionately impacted by the rising cost of rent. More people than ever require hardship grants to get by.” And according to this article, “The Manurewa WINZ office gave out $698,000 in Special Needs Grants for food last year, the highest in the country by more than $200,000.”
This article is also useful for providing the Government’s side of the story on what it is changing at the frontline to help welfare recipients, with Sepuloni stating: “this Government has sent a clear instruction to frontline MSD staff that anyone coming in is to be provided with the full financial support they are legally entitled to…. As a result of this instruction the number of hardship grants provided by this government has increased 60% year on year. The value of hardship grants has gone from $81m to $128.5m from March 18 to March 19.”
In addition, the article points out that “The Government has also announced funding for 263 new frontline MSD staff over the next 4 years.”
What else can be done to alleviate the plight of those on benefits? University of Auckland economist Susan St John has come up with a list of possible solutions that could be implemented immediately. Her “emergency package” includes the “Payment of the full Working for Families tax credits to all low-income families”; “An increase in the allowable income before any benefit is lost to 10 hours at the minimum wage or $170 per week”, and “A suspension of all student loan repayments for families who get Working for Families” – see: Poverty: not an earthquake but still a crisis.
As to what reforms the Government has already come up with, St John is derisory: “The tiny changes made in the 2019 budget will miserably fail to make a difference to the immediate problem. Worse still they don’t come in until April 2020.”
And like other economists, she criticises the fiscally-conservative approach of the Government as being at the root of their failure to act: “It may be laudable for the Government to be fiscally responsible, but not in the very narrow ways it has chosen. The nation is facing a crisis, it’s like a slow earthquake shaking our values to the foundation. You don’t store up goodies for the future when faced with life damaging catastrophes, you invest in reversing the damage and in preventing further damage.”
These days all text is digital. From writing an email to publishing a new edition of War and Peace, text nearly always exists on a computer first. Yet there are writers who take full advantage of the computer’s possibilities, utilising new technologies to broach complex subject matter.
Electronic or digital literature does not refer to e-books, but to works that depend on electronic “code” to exist. Put simply, you can print an e-book, but you cannot print electronic literature.
Within the field there is emphasis on experimentation. Many works are the result of authors simply trying new things out and seeing what happens. Here, then, are ten significant works of electronic literature you should know about.
Alan Bigelow’sHow to Rob a Bank reinvents Bonnie and Clyde for the digital age. It can be viewed on a smart phone or in-browser. Users swipe the touchscreen or hit the space bar to reveal a narrative told through iPhone web searches, text messages, and app activities.
Critiquing a classic
Digital poet Benjamin Laird wrote Core Values in response to Dorothea Mackellar’s classic Australian poem My Country. Laird’s work is displayed in a three-dimensional box, viewed in-browser or using a virtual reality headset.
Text is broken, animated, and infused with geographical coordinates and data. Unlike Mackellar’s “sweeping plains”, “mountain ranges”, and “flooding rains”, Laird’s poem evokes claustrophobia. It critiques Mackellar’s poem, creating an Australia where the reader feels trapped.
Benjamin Laird’s Core Values critiques the classic Australian poem My Country.Courtesy the artist
Rewriting AI
Montréal-based David Jhave Johnston produced ReRites, using artificial intelligence trained to imitate contemporary poetry. The AI generates text which is then edited by Jhave. Recordings show this process in real time.
Jhave’s ReRites.
Twitterbots
Piotr Marecki’sCenzobot is a Twitter “bot” (an automatically generated Twitter account) that tweets fragments from real Polish censors’ reviews of publications from the communist era.
Marecki conceived of this project following the Twitter Bot Purge of February 2018. He suspects Cenzobot will also be purged. Indeed, it is the goal of his work.
An environmental statement
The term “cloud” computing emerged because clouds are perceived to be infinite resources. However, neither type of cloud is infinite, and few people acknowledge the energy used by large data centres. J.R. Carpenter’sThe Gathering Cloud tackles the environmental impact of “cloud” computing by calling attention to the clouds above us.
Fragments from Luke Howard’s 1803 Essay on the Modifications of Clouds are pared down to produce Carpenter’s poetic verses with hypertext links that users can interact with.
The poetry is accompanied by animations of animals, which bridge the link between clouds in the sky and “cloud” computing. A cumulus cloud weighs as much as 100 elephants. By indicating 100 elephants in animation, the full weight of “cloud” computing’s environmental impact is evoked.
J.R. Carpenter’s The Gathering Cloud explores the environmental impact of cloud computing.Courtesy the artist
Choosing cards from the box, subjects discussed what the words meant to them and how the words’ meanings had changed. This research informed the project that includes woven imagined dialogues around each term.
Users click on the word to learn the story behind its meaning. Each word is connected to several others, forming a linguistic maze users are encouraged to get lost in. A Dictionary of the Revolution is available in both Arabic and English.
Amira Hanafi’s A Dictionary of the Revolution explores the language of the Egyptian revolution.Courtesy the artist
The work arranges media fragments in six-minute cycles to suggest a narrative between four characters. The interface changes every 30 seconds, or whenever the user clicks the screen, creating an ever-evolving story.
Robot interaction
The Listeners by John Cayley is a third-party app that creates a work of spoken, interactive literature. It builds on the infrastructure of the domestic robot “Alexa” (it is also possible to experience The Listeners using a smartphone and the Alexa app).
The user begins by addressing Alexa, saying: “Alexa, ask The Listeners.” The Listeners responds, listening and speaking in its own way. The user may extend the performance by saying “Continue” or “Go on” or “I am filled with anger”. This work explores themes of surveillance, and the very notion of allowing a domestic robot such as Alexa into one’s home.
Poetry/fiction hybrids
Jason Nelson’sNine Billion Branches is a poetic narrative accessed online. Each page has numerous arrows, poems, and highlighted areas to read, play, and explore.
Nine Billion Branches is preoccupied with the poetry of the immediate world. Poetry exists beside photographs of escalators, garbage bins, and bedside tables. Much of Nelson’s recent work exists beyond the web, sometimes projected onto real buildings or landscapes.
Virtual reality
In the past decade, Mez Breeze has merged digital literature with virtual reality. In 2017, she created the virtual reality Poem/Experience Our Cupidity Coda, which can be viewed online or with a virtual reality headset.
This work emulates the conventions of early cinema. Just as early motion picture devices had the viewer look through a peephole window, the viewer (or reader) of Our Cupidity Coda is encouraged to treat the virtual reality headset in the same way.
Earth’s magnetic field protects and makes our planet habitable by stopping harmful high-energy particles from space, including from the Sun. The source of this magnetic field is the core at the centre of our planet.
But the core is very difficult to study, partly because it starts at a depth of about 2,900 kilometres, making it too deep to sample and directly investigate.
Yet we are part of a research team that found a way to get information about Earth’s core, with details published recently in Geochemical Perspective Letters.
The core is the hottest part of our planet with the outer core reaching temperatures of more than 5,000℃. This has to affect the overlying mantle and it is estimated that 50% of volcanic heat comes from the core.
The layers of the Earth from the outer crust to the inner core.Shutterstock/VRVector
Volcanic activity is the planet’s main cooling mechanism. Certain volcanism, such as that which is still forming volcanic islands of Hawaii and Iceland, might be linked to the core by mantle plumes that transfer heat from the core to Earth’s surface.
Yet whether there is any exchange of physical material between the core and the mantle has been a subject of debate for decades.
Our findings suggest some core material does transfer into the base of these mantle plumes, and the core has been leaking this material for the past 2.5 billion years.
We discovered this by looking at very small variations in the ratio of isotopes of the element tungsten (isotopes are basically versions of the same element that just contain different numbers of neutrons).
To study Earth’s core, we need to search for chemical tracers of core material in volcanic rocks derived from the deep mantle.
We know the core has a very distinct chemistry, dominated by iron and nickel together with elements such as tungsten, platinum and gold that dissolve in iron-nickel alloy. Therefore, the metal alloy-loving elements are a good choice to investigate for traces of the core.
The search for tungsten isotopes
Tungsten (chemical symbol W) as the base element has 74 protons. Tungsten has several isotopes, including 182W (with 108 neutrons) and 184W (with 110 neutrons).
These isotopes of tungsten have potential to be the most conclusive tracers of core material, because the mantle is expected to have much higher 182W/184W ratios than the core.
This is because of another element, Hafnium (Hf), which does not dissolve in iron-nickel alloy and is enriched in the mantle, and had a now-extinct isotope (182Hf) that decayed to 182W. This gives the mantle extra 182W relative to the tungsten in the core.
But the analysis required to detect variations in tungsten isotopes is incredibly challenging, as we are looking at variations in the 182W/184W ratio in parts per million and the concentration of tungsten in rocks is as low as tens of parts per billion. Fewer than five laboratories in the world can do this type of analysis.
Evidence of a leak
Our study shows a substantial change in the 182W/184W ratio of the mantle over Earth’s lifetime. Earth’s oldest rocks have significantly higher 182W/184W than than most rocks of the modern-day Earth.
The change in the 182W/184W ratio of the mantle indicates that tungsten from the core has been leaking into the mantle for a long time.
Interestingly, in Earth’s oldest volcanic rocks, over a time frame of 1.8 billion years there is no significant change in the mantle’s tungsten isotopes. This indicates that from 4.3 billion to 2.7 billion years ago, little or no material from the core was transferred into the upper mantle.
But in the subsequent 2.5 billion years, the tungsten isotope composition of the mantle has significantly changed. We infer that a change in plate tectonics, towards the end of the Archean Eon from about 2.6 billion years ago triggered large enough convective currents in the mantle to change the tungsten isotopes of all modern rocks.
Why the leak?
If mantle plumes are ascending from the core-mantle boundary to the surface, it follows that material from Earth’s surface must also descend into the deep mantle.
Subduction, the term used for rocks from Earth’s surface descending into the mantle, takes oxygen-rich material from the surface into the deep mantle as an integral component of plate tectonics.
Experiments show that increase in oxygen concentration at the core-mantle boundary could cause tungsten to separate out of the core and into the mantle.
Alternatively, inner core solidification would also increase the oxygen concentration of the outer core. In this case, our new results could tell us something about the evolution of the core, including the origin of Earth’s magnetic field.
Cartoon showing the differences in tungsten isotope ratios between the Earth’s core and mantle, and how the Earth’s core might be leaking material into the mantle plumes.Credit: Neil Bennett
Earth’s core started as entirely liquid metal and has been cooling and partially solidifying over time. The magnetic field is generated by the spin of the inner solid core. The time of inner core crystallisation is one of the most difficult questions to answer in Earth and planetary sciences.
Our study gives us a tracer that can be used to investigate core-mantle interaction and the change in the internal dynamics of our planet, and which can boost our understanding of how and when the magnetic field was turned on.
The Morrison government plans to hold a referendum in the next three years on whether to enshrine constitutional recognition of Australia’s Indigenous people.
Announcing the commitment on Wednesday, the minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, said he would
develop and bring forward a consensus option for constitutional recognition to be put to a referendum during the current parliamentary term.
He said he had begun seeking the counsel of Indigenous leaders on the best way forward.
Wyatt stressed the importance of bipartisanship, and will establish a cross-party parliamentary working group to assist with engagement to develop a “community model” for the referendum. The referendum’s chances of passage will depend on achieving a high degree of consensus with Indigenous communities and MPs in both major parties.
Labor’s shadow minister for Indigenous affairs, Linda Burney “will be integral to this process”, Wyatt told the National Press Club in a major speech outlining the Morrison government’s approach to Indigenous affairs. Both Wyatt and Burney are Indigenous.
Wyatt did not indicate how he envisioned changing the constitution, which has been highly controversial in the last few years.
The May 2017 “Uluru Statement from the Heart” called for “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the constitution”.
The Referendum Council proposed a national Indigenous representative assembly be added to the constitution, but this was rejected by the Turnbull government.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has recently shifted course and begun speaking with Labor leader Anthony Albanese about a bipartisan approach to constitutional recognition. Without bipartisanship, any referendum is doomed to failure; passage is difficult enough even with agreement of the major parties. The last successful referendum of any sort was in 1977.
Changing the constitution through a referendum requires an overall majority of votes and a majority in a majority of states. When Prime Minister Tony Abbott wanted to hold a referendum on Indigenous recognition, the plan slipped away amid arguments over its content and doubts about getting the necessary support.
Wyatt also promised the development of “a local, regional and national voice”. He did not spell out the detail of a national “voice”.
He said the concept of the “voice” in the Uluru Statement from the Heart “is not a singular voice”.
It is a cry to all tiers of government to stop and listen to the voices of Indigenous Australians at all levels.
All they want is for governments to hear their issues, stories of their land and their local history.
He said Indigenous communities are asking the three tiers of government to stop and take the time to listen to their voices.
The national interest requires a new relationship with Indigenous Australians based on their participation and establishing entrenched partnerships at the community and regional levels.
Wyatt also said he would work on “progressing how we address truth telling.
Without the truth of the past, there can be no agreement on where and who we are in the present, how we arrived here and where we want to go in the future.
On the treaty issue, he said it was was important for states and territories to take the lead.
Wyatt said the significance of symbolism must never be forgotten but “it must be balanced with pragmatism that results in change for Indigenous Australians”. He highlighted the new National Indigenous Australians Agency, which was set up by Morrison to oversee Indigenous affairs policy.
With the establishment of the agency on 1 July, we began a new era for the government to work in partnership with Indigenous Australians. It will provide opportunities for growth and advancement in education, employment, suicide prevention, community safety, health and constitutional recognition.
The most important thing that I and the agency will do is to listen – with our ears and with our eyes.
I intend to have genuine conversations, not only with Indigenous leaders and peak bodies, but with families, individuals and community organisations so that I can hear their voices and work together to agree to a way forward for a better future for our children.
He also wanted businesses “to sit with me around boardroom tables – and around campfires – and discuss how they can contribute”.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shahram Akbarzadeh, Professor of Middle East & Central Asian Politics, Deputy Director (International), Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University
Iran’s announcement last Sunday that it would break the limit on uranium enrichment agreed to in the nuclear deal with world powers was not a surprise. It came hot on the heels of another breach only a few days earlier on the 300-kilogram limit agreed to in the deal on stockpiles of low-enriched uranium.
Iran had warned Europe that it would start dismantling the nuclear accord if the promised economic benefits of the agreement did not materialise. A year after the US withdrew from the nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, and imposed very strict sanctions on Iran, the Iranian leadership appears ready to give up on finding a diplomatic solution to this deadlock.
This bodes ill for the future of President Hassan Rouhani and regional security. A weakened Rouhani will find it difficult to fend off his hard-line critics in Iran and keep the nuclear deal alive.
With every step away from diplomacy, the hard-liners have taken a step forward and appear to be now setting the political agenda in Iran.
Rouhani’s riskiest gamble
The JCPOA was signed in 2015 between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany.
This was Rouhani’s greatest achievement and riskiest gamble. He faced the ire of hard-liners in Iran who continue to have a formidable presence in the parliament, as well as the security and judicial system.
They accused Rouhani of selling out Iranian sovereignty and betraying the ideals of the Islamic revolution by scaling back Iran’s nuclear program and subjecting it to an unprecedented international monitoring regime.
Rouhani nonetheless pushed through his agenda of finding a diplomatic solution to Iran’s isolation because he believed that years of sanctions and mismanagement had pushed the Iranian economy to the brink of collapse.
He staked his political fortunes on bringing Iran out of isolation.
The JCPOA was the compromise deal to assure the international community that Iran would not pursue a nuclear weapons program in return for sanctions relief to revive the Iranian economy.
But US President Donald Trump never liked the deal. He campaigned against it and often questioned Iran’s commitment to it, though the UN International Atomic Energy Agency consistently reported on Iran’s compliance with the terms of the agreement.
Trump’s decision to tear up the nuclear deal was seen by the conservatives in Iran as a vindication of their feelings towards the United States. They lambasted Rouhani for putting his trust in the US.
In May 2019, the situation got even more tense after Trump announced that US warships were sailing to the Persian Gulf to counter potential Iranian hostility. No intelligence regarding a suspected Iranian threat was shared.
The escalation of tensions following the alleged Iranian attack on two oil tankers last month, and the downing of a US reconnaissance drone by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards has made it very hard to find a diplomatic solution. Drums of war are silencing voices of diplomacy.
While Rouhani came to office with an olive branch, he realises that he has effectively lost the political contest against his hard-line critics. He has another two years in office, but is at risk of losing the presidency if the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who yields ultimate power in Iran, is disillusioned with his performance.
This realisation has seriously undermined Rouhani, who appears to have adopted the language and posture of the hard-liners in relation to the US. It is unclear if this can save him in office, or embolden his critics who seem to be gaining significant momentum.
This was a significant development for the hard-liners in case they seek to assert political control. Basij has been a ruthless security force inside Iran, and under Soleimani, could provide the necessary street support for a potential coup against Rouhani.
Soleimani has enjoyed a meteoric rise in Iran due to his performance as commander of Quds Force, the Revolutionary Guards’ international arm operating mostly in Iraq and Syria to defeat the Islamic State.
He is considered a war hero by the public and now has the confidence of the Supreme Leader. This is an ominous development for Rouhani.
A woman carrying a picture of Qasem Soleimani during an anti-US demonstration in Tehran earlier this year.Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA
Breaking with the tenets of the nuclear deal was also clearly not Rouhani’s objective, as it would reverse his hard-won diplomatic gains and discredit his legacy.
Iran’s recent breaches on uranium enrichment and stockpiles were incremental steps to exert pressure on European leaders to adhere to their promises of sanctions relief. This strategy was predicated on the assumption that Europe has more to lose with the collapse of JCPOA than a rift with the United States. It can only be described as a desperate move, showing that Rouhani is fast running out of options.
The window of opportunity for a diplomatic solution is fast closing and the alternative scenario of the return of a combative government in Tehran is looking more and more unavoidable. This would shut the doors to diplomacy and increase the chance of confrontation with the West.
Trump accused Iran of not wanting to sit at the table. He may be fulfilling his own prophecy.
Alice Gorman is a space archaeologist working on space junk in Earth orbit, deep space probes, and planetary landing sites. She explores what we can learn from these items and places as material objects, and also their heritage significance – what they actually mean for people and communities on Earth.
Alice features in The Conversation’s podcast series To the Moon and beyond, published to mark the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing of July 1969. This is an edited extract from Alice’s interview with The Conversation’s Sarah Keenihan, published as part of our occasional series Zoom Out.
There is a lot of documentation about what’s been left on the Moon – but it’s amazing how much we don’t know.
There are things that have gone missing, like part of a thermal blanket that got ripped off a landing module. There are things that may have gone up there that we didn’t know about. An Apollo test module went walkabout in solar orbit and has only recently been found again.
This is actually where archaeology becomes interesting. I don’t believe, for example, that anyone has ever fully documented the position of all of the boot prints of the Apollo astronauts on the Moon.
We know what they look like. We know that they’re there. They’re reproduced in countless photographs of the Apollo sites.
But has anyone ever actually catalogued them? Has anyone studied them for what they can tell us about how these human bodies moved across the lunar landscape, how they adapted to this environment so different to that of Earth?
Footprints, wheel tracks and the Rickshaw–type portable workbench on the Moon, with the US flag in 1971.NASA
What archaeology does is look at the difference between what people say they do, and what they actually do. Those footprints may reveal that astronauts were doing things that they didn’t even consciously recognise, since they didn’t speak about them or record them.
If you did an archaeological study of those footprints, we would expect to see differences from Apollo 11 through to Apollo 17.
We ought to be able to see the evidence of how each astronaut crew incorporated the knowledge of the previous one, and how the design of the suits and the equipment was changed or adapted from each previous mission. We should be able to actually chart this using physical evidence.
Protecting the Moon’s heritage
We must be strategic in how we protect our heritage on the Moon.
In 1969 the Apollo 12 mission landed just 180 metres away from Surveyor 3 – a robotic landing craft the US sent to the Moon in 1967. The astronauts approached Surveyor 3 and removed a camera and some other bits and pieces to take back to Earth.
When NASA analysed the materials, they found that the landing of Surveyor 3 itself plus the landing of Apollo 12 just on the edge of the crater had blown up lunar dust, which had abraded surfaces.
This gave us an idea of the dangers of lunar dust for human-manufactured materials.
Astronaut Alan Bean was part of the Apollo 12 lunar landing mission.NASA
A lot of the new missions being planned at the moment are talking about going to the Apollo and other sites, and removing samples for analysis that they can use to to gauge the impact of the lunar environment on human materials.
This is obviously extremely useful for planning missions further into the future, but at the moment there isn’t any sort of systematic way to do this. They could approach the Apollo sites and in the process completely erase all of those footprints and cause further damage by stirring up the lunar dust again.
There is an archaeological principle that you never excavate all of a site. You always leave an unexcavated deposit, or you leave rock art on the walls. You leave material for future scientists to sample because we don’t know what techniques will be available in the future.
If we look at this from an archaeological perspective first of all, we ought to be sitting down and thinking: OK, what materials do we really need to collect? We’ve got the baseline from Surveyor 3 – what are the best materials to compare to that?
Perhaps we don’t need to take physical samples. We may have techniques we can use to remotely gather data from these sites without being destructive.
We also need to consider access to data. Let’s just say a Space X lunar mission visits a previous landing site – maybe one of the Apollo ones, and removes samples, studies them now. These objects are the property of the US government under the Outer Space Treaty. But SpaceX is a private company. Are they required to share the results of this analysis with their competitors?
This is something I haven’t seen much discussion about yet, but it needs to be worked out as everybody’s planning to go back to the Moon.
Cemeteries in space
It’s 50 years since humans went to the Moon – and now people are so focused on getting to Mars.
But what happens when another planet becomes home, when the first generations are born, live, and just as importantly, die in space?
I often think the first death in space is going to be a big turning point for how we relate to it. There haven’t really been any so far. There was the unfortunate USSR Soyuz 11 mission to Earth orbit, where three cosmonauts died when they left the spacecraft – but they were recovered on Earth. [The crew died on their descent back to Earth after a technical fault caused their Soyuz capsule to depressurise.]
There have been other deaths, for example on the tragic Space Shuttle accidents, but they haven’t actually been in space.
It’s something people often overlook when talking about the prospect of settling on Mars. The risks are so great. People are going to die. They’re probably going to die if there’s any human settlement on the Moon as well.
So how will that impact how we look at space?
The first living things have already died on the Moon. The recent experiment in the rover deployed by China had little seeds inside that sprouted and then died.
Death is already “off Earth”, and we can expect more deaths in the future.
This is going to have to change how we feel about space. When we look at those planets in the sky and think there are cemeteries there; perhaps there are human bodies being incorporated into the lunar regolith or into the red Martian dust.
How does that make these places feel to us if they become cemeteries?
The Moon in 2069
In terms of sites on the Moon right now, there are around 50 different places where human culture has landed, and they’re quite diverse. A huge amount of USSR stuff, a huge amount of US stuff – but also Japanese and Indian and Chinese.
If we look 50 years into the future I expect that landscape will be even more diverse. We will have many countries who maybe at the moment are not considered to be spacefaring, but who will have sent their own missions to the Moon. Or maybe they’ve had experiments that are part of other people’s missions. Maybe they’ve sent their own astronauts.
I think the Moon is going to be culturally very diverse, with an archaeological record that reflects all of those different cultures as well.
We can also expect there will be mining installations. It’s likely these will be focused on the lunar poles, in craters where the Sun has not shone for 2 billion years. They’ve been in deep shadow all this time. They’re filled with this valuable resource people can use for fuel: water ice. So the craters might be the industrial centres of future lunar industries.
We may not see all of this from the surface of the Earth – but there will be satellites constantly streaming back footage of the surface, so we can see what’s going on there.
We might have our particular astronauts we like to follow. There might be constant updates on social media streams about what what they’re doing on the Moon.
A close-up view of the face of astronaut and Apollo 10 commander Thomas P. Stafford in 1969. Astronauts are already very active in social media and this is likely to increase.NASA
We may be very intimately involved in the daily lives of these astronauts.
It’s likely there will be a form of lunar tourism, which involves us projecting ourselves into robots and going for a little jaunts across the lunar surface.
But I suspect the lunar tourism industry may not completely take off in the way people are imagining – simply because there will be too much at stake in protecting proprietary information about technologies and resources on the Moon.
In the future it won’t be rare anymore to think about being an astronaut. At the moment, over 500 people have been in space. Only those very few Apollo astronauts have been to the Moon.
Looking forwards, there’ll be hundreds of people who’ve been to the Moon and back, maybe even thousands. These experiences may not be rare and extraordinary anymore.
We might get sick of hearing people tell their stories about the work they did on the Moon. Maybe this will be commonplace. The Moon will just be like thinking about Antarctica. It’s remote, but still part of our world.
In his latest book, strategist and defence analyst Hugh White has gone nuclear, triggering a debate about whether Australia should develop and maintain its own nuclear arsenal.
But developing and sustaining modern nuclear weapons requires a certain combination of technologies and industries that Australia simply does not have. In fact, it may be safely estimated on the basis of approval and construction times for nuclear power reactors in other western countries that it would take some 20 years to establish such capabilities in the present legal and economic environment.
White argues quite rightly that China may eventually overtake the US in terms of its industrial production and military reach. Speculating that this could entail a strategic withdrawal of the US from the western Pacific, he suggests Australia might find itself without the American defence umbrella to deter Chinese influence, or worse.
But Australia would struggle to replace its long and successful alliance with the US with a limited nuclear deterrence capability. Even ignoring the issues generally involved in adopting new defence capabilities – evident in the many problems hindering Australia’s efforts to replace its ageing submarine fleet – the idea is fanciful given our current stance on nuclear energy.
Nuclear power reactors, uranium enrichment plants, missile technology and high-tech electronics manufacturing would all be essential to support truly independent efforts to develop a compact nuclear weapon that could be delivered by missile from a submarine and kept in a permanent state of readiness.
Neither power reactors nor enrichment facilities exist in Australia today, despite some pioneering research in both areas in the past.
Australia’s missile development and high-tech electronics sectors, meanwhile, are in catch-up mode or in their infancy due to years of economic reliance on mining, tourism and services. Advancing and establishing nuclear industries for the sole purpose of developing a nuclear weapons program would neither be practically nor economically viable.
Political will for nuclear energy?
The only way such industries could be developed realistically would be if Australia added nuclear power to its suite of power generation technologies.
Of course, Australia has large uranium deposits and a well-established uranium mining and export industry. And there appears to be increasing public support for nuclear power. A recent survey found that 44% of Australians support nuclear power plants, up four points since the question was last asked in 2015. Other polls indicate support might even be higher.
A well-developed nuclear power industry would eventually give Australia almost all the necessary technologies, personnel and materials to make and maintain a nuclear weapon. This includes, in particular, the ability to enrich uranium and breed plutonium.
But herein lies the problem. Even if the public did eventually support a nuclear energy program, it remains unclear whether the necessary political will would be there.
Legally, the Howard government banned domestic nuclear power plants in the late 1990s – an act that would now need to be overturned by parliament.
In 2006, the federal government commissioned an inquiry led by Ziggy Switkowski into the future feasibility of nuclear power generation in Australia. The final report found that nuclear energy would be 20-50% more expensive than coal without carbon pricing. It also said a nuclear power industry would take between 10 and 15 years to establish.
Ziggy Switkowski, a former nuclear physicist, was chosen by the Howard government to lead the inquiry into nuclear energy in Australia.Glenn Hunt/AAP
Recently, Energy Minister Angus Taylor said the Morrison government was open to reversing the country’s nuclear energy ban, but only if there was a “clear business case” to do so. With the current widespread availability of cheaper, renewable energies in Australia, this makes the economics of nuclear power generation less convincing.
Lastly, in order to ensure true self-reliance, a delivery option for a nuclear weapon would have to be developed without purchasing technologies from other countries, such as the US. This would be incredibly costly and difficult to do.
When it comes to this sort of missile technology and high-tech electronics manufacturing, Australia is currently not leading in research and development.
Australia’s long-time stance against nuclear weapons
Even though Australia is not in a position to contemplate nuclear weapons due to its technological and industrial limitations, there are moral arguments against pursuing such a goal that should be considered carefully.
Australians should remind themselves that these treaties have greatly contributed to peace and security in the world. Abandoning such longstanding principles of its foreign policy, which are aimed at creating a better, more peaceful world, would be an implosion of Australian character of massive proportions.
If you listen to any number of love songs, dating “experts”, or plunge head first into a romance novel, you’re likely to think it’s in our destiny to find that special someone – your soul-mate.
But how do you know if you’ve found “the one”? Will the birds sing? Will you see fireworks or a shooting star?
And for those who are yet to find “the one”, should you keep searching, or is it a misguided quest?
Research into the science of relationships spanning the last two decades shows maintaining a “destiny” mindset – that we are all meant to find that ideal person who completes us in every way – can be problematic for our love lives.
For some, this mindset can even include a mental picture as to what that person should look like.
What are the costs of a mindset?
A destiny mindset may make a person less open to developing a relationship with someone who possesses many excellent qualities, but does not match an individual’s mental picture of “the one”.
A person who holds a destiny mindset may be more likely to focus on the potential faults or inadequacies of another, for example, rather than centre on their good qualities.
Potential love interests may not measure up.Stanley Dai
On the other hand, a person may not pursue a potential love interest in the hope that something better comes along that matches their vision of destiny. By maintaining a destiny mindset, they may reject real opportunities at finding love.
For those in an existing relationship, maintaining a destiny mindset can be associated with relationship satisfaction, if the current relationship closely (if not perfectly) matches one’s idea.
But if the relationship is not in line with one’s vision of destiny, or if the relationship is evaluated as no longer matching one’s destiny, dissatisfaction can ensue.
Research suggests people who hold a destiny mindset don’t work as hard at their relationships because they have a very fixed view of their partner and relationship. They tend to accept things the way they are – either a relationship is meant to be or it is not – rather than putting in time and effort to make relationships things work and deal with relationship problems.
Is there a better alternative?
In contrast to a destiny mindset, some people hold a “growth relationship” mindset. This includes beliefs and expectations that a partner and relationship has the capacity to develop and change over time, and that problems or challenges can be overcome.
Relationships have their highs and lows and take work to maintain.Toa Heftiba
People with a growth mindset experience various positives such as greater relationship and sexual satisfaction and have a better, more constructive way of handling conflict. A growth mindset has also been found to reduce the risk of a relationship ending.
Can you have both?
Some people recount meeting their partner and knowing they were “the one”. But when describing how their relationship has progressed over time, it’s clear they put time and effort into it and work on problems when they arise.
These people may hold beliefs about destiny, but overall, hold more of a growth mindset about their relationship.
These couples often acknowledge their partner and relationship has changed, for example, and often note that they’ve helped each other develop and grow over time.
So if you work hard at your relationship, and you and your partner help one another develop and grow, you may get to know each other so well that you feel as if you share one soul. Maybe that’s what is meant by a true soul-mate.
Last week, Victoria Police arrested seven people who were alleged members of a professional begging “syndicate”. They were flown in from China on tourist visas.
In reporting this story, Australian media generated a considerable amount of public outrage. The idea that people who beg are somehow “faking” homelessness or poverty is one often used in tabloid media. Add an element of foreignness, and this story appears especially scandalous.
Most of the time, accusations of so-called “professional” begging are misleading, intended to demonise those who beg as deceitful and to legitimise the vilification of people who beg and/or are homeless.
But in this case, it appears the label is accurate, or, more accurate than usual anyway. And given the commonalities shared by those arrested, such as age, nationality, and that they were reportedly living together in Melbourne’s CBD, there does appear to be a level of coordination involved.
Still, this doesn’t make their poverty and desperation any less legitimate, nor their exploitation more acceptable, and the use of criminal charges does not seem appropriate.
Acting Inspector John Travaglini said the seven people arrested were identified as being ‘professional beggars’.Erik Anderson/AAP Image
And given homelessness and begging are emotive issues prone to hyperbole and misinformation, this story highlights a few misconceptions worth addressing.
There’s no such thing as ‘professional begging’ in the law
In state law, there is no such thing as “professional begging”. Begging is a crime under Victoria’s Summary Offences Act, which makes no mention of “professionalism” or coordination other than to prohibit the procuring of a child to beg.
The people in this case have also been charged with possessing proceeds of crime. But this is only possible because begging, controversially, remains a criminal offence in Victoria, whereas other states have decriminalised the activity.
What’s more, it has been alleged in the past, but denied by the police, that Victoria Police has confiscated money from people begging in Melbourne.
Being homeless has a broad definition
Acting Inspector John Travaglini from Victoria Police stated that because those arrested were residing together, their claims of homelessness were “false” and “deceitful”.
As well as rough sleeping, homelessness in Australia involves being in situations that fall below the minimum standard of housing, such as couchsurfing, staying in bedsits, hostels or boarding houses, or in living arrangements that are unsafe or overcrowded.
Given those arrested were reportedly sharing the same accommodation, they may very well meet definitional criteria for homelessness.
Begging and rough sleeping are not the same thing. Some homeless people beg, others don’t. Some people who have somewhere to sleep engage in begging, because they are very poor or otherwise marginalised.
Those arrested had somewhere to sleep, but it doesn’t mean they are not extremely poor.
Travaglini also claimed these people were not vulnerable, unlike others who beg. But the arrested individuals were aged in their late 60s and 70s, and allegedly flew to another country for the purpose of begging on the streets: they look pretty vulnerable to us.
So if the allegations are true, these people seem especially vulnerable. Think of the older Australians you know: how many would agree to be flown to China to beg on the streets there?
Were criminal charges appropriate?
Ten years ago, the idea of people flying to Australia to beg as a scheme to make money might have seemed unlikely. But in an increasingly globalised and connected world, poverty and vulnerability have fewer geographic limitations.
It’s likely that Australia, given its enviable standard of living and economic standing, will see more examples of these kinds of activities, not fewer. And how we respond to these kinds of events will have increasing importance in the years to come.
In this case, we certainly support an intervention into this seemingly exploitative situation. But we question the appropriateness of criminal charges for those deployed on the streets to beg.
Charges may be appropriate for those coordinating this apparent scheme. But, like society’s responses to illegal drug use, levelling criminal charges at those on the bottom rungs of the hierarchy is unlikely to address anything in a meaningful way.
There is often debate about whether you should give to people who beg, and people will likely come to their own conclusions on this.
What worries us is that stories such as these further entrench public perceptions of the homeless as criminal, and of the vulnerable as exploitative and, worse, potentially dangerous.
We urge that people, should they wish, continue to give donations to those who seek them, and, more crucially, to demand action on homelessness and poverty from their politicians. Because continued inaction on these issues, whatever form they take, is the true crime.
