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

University of Tasmania political science professor, Richard Eccleston, says a lack of a coherent energy policy could count against the Coalition in the island state.

“The party which seems to offer the more compelling commitment to climate change and renewable production will probably be well placed to capitalize on that [Tasmania’s environmental interests].”

Eccleston told The Conversation the volatile seats of Braddon and Bass could won by the Liberals.

However he says Lyons should be a “safe Labor hold” after to the controversy over the Liberals’ now-dumped candidate Jessica Whelan.

On the Senate, Eccleston says there will be an impact from the minor parties, with fisherman Craig Garland – who attracted a big vote at the Braddon byelection – “a name to watch”. But he doesn’t think Jacqui Lambie will be successful. Lambie, who resigned from the Senate in the citizenship crisis, is trying to make a comeback.

“She’s clearly got a profile but I think she’ll be struggling to get a seat at a half-Senate election.”

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– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Richard Eccleston on the electoral mood in Tasmania – http://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-richard-eccleston-on-the-electoral-mood-in-tasmania-116613

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gary Sacks, Associate Professor, Deakin University

Last week Labor pledged to consider serious steps to improve Australian diets and tackle our obesity epidemic. This would form part of a A$115.6 million plan from the Opposition to address preventable illness.

This is the first time one of the two major parties in Australia has included such a strong focus on nutrition as part of its election commitments.

Key elements of the preventive health package include promises to consider making the health star rating food labelling scheme mandatory, together with food reformulation targets for manufacturers.

But these aren’t concrete commitments. Rather, they are actions the party said it would consider as part of its preventive health pledge.

Firmly committing to these measures, and taking action on them, is crucial as we face a growing obesity crisis in Australia.

Read more: Election stays on tax and health battlegrounds

What are food reformulation targets?

Packaged foods and drinks available in Australia include many products with excessive levels of saturated fats, added sugar, and salt.

Almost half of all packaged food and drinks available in our supermarkets are classified as “discretionary”. These are foods that are not necessary as part of a healthy diet, and are recommended to be consumed only in small amounts.

There have been no significant improvements in the overall healthiness of packaged foods in Australia over the past two years. This indicates that is has not been an effective strategy to leave it up to food manufacturers to voluntarily reduce nutrients of concern.

A growing number of other countries have already legislated to reduce levels of either saturated fats, added sugar or salt in the food supply. A prominent example is South Africa, where mandatory salt-reduction targets were introduced across a range of food categories in 2013. Several countries have banned trans fats from being added to foods.

Read more: The ten things Australia needs to do to improve health

Labor has said mandatory reformulation targets will be on the cards if the industry does not voluntarily take steps to reduce unhealthy ingredients. With no good evidence that food manufacturers are systematically doing so, there is an urgent need for policy change.

Restricting the levels of harmful components such as fats, sugars and salt from the foods we eat would help Australia keep pace with other countries already taking serious action in this area.

Importantly, mandatory implementation of health star ratings would complement food reformulation targets for packaged foods.

What is the health star rating system?

The health star rating is a front-of-pack labelling system that rates the overall nutritional profile of packaged food. Each product is assigned a rating from ½ a star to 5 stars. The system provides a quick, standard way to compare similar packaged foods.

Australian governments first endorsed the health star rating scheme in 2014 for voluntary implementation. About a third of packaged foods in Australian supermarkets now display the health star rating.

Read more: Food labels are about informing choice, not some nanny state

Consumers have the right to know about the healthiness of the foods they buy. Some food manufacturers have put the health star rating on all of their products. But many food manufacturers have elected only to display the health star rating on their healthier products.

The health star rating system will work best for consumers when it’s displayed on all packaged foods. Mandatory implementation would ensure that. It would also ensure a “level playing field” for manufacturers.

If the system were to continue to be voluntary, it’s hard to imagine how implementation would increase much beyond current levels, unless powerful incentives were put in place. Simple encouragement to increase implementation is unlikely to be sufficient.

So this proposed policy, too, needs unambiguous commitment over mere consideration.

What difference would these policies make?

Unhealthy diets and obesity are leading contributors to poor health in Australia. Some 35% of the energy Australian adults consume every day comes from discretionary foods. The proportion is even higher for children.

Recent modelling shows mandatory implementation of the health star rating system would result in substantial reductions in diabetes, heart disease and stroke. The policy is also likely to be highly cost-effective. This is because it is likely to reduce government health-care costs and deliver large health benefits over the long term.

Mandatory reformulation targets are also likely to be excellent value for money.

A welcome focus on prevention

Australia currently spends far less on preventive health (as a proportion of total expenditure on health) than most other comparable countries.

Labor’s election commitment would go some way to addressing this substantial preventive health spending gap. The commitment is particularly commendable for having multiple elements, for being coordinated across different sectors, and for being evidence-based.

The proposed policies with respect to obesity are consistent with best-practice recommendations from the World Health Organisation as well as consensus recommendations from key health groups in Australia.

The commitments also address major gaps in Australia’s obesity prevention efforts when compared with international benchmarks.

Read more: Industry winning the fight against better food labelling

Labor’s announcement indicates a willingness to address one of the most critical issues influencing the health of Australians.

The challenge for Labor, should it win the election, will be to follow through with effective action. A common political road to prevention policy is that strong initial plans are met with forceful opposition from commercial vested interests (such as the processed food industry). Politicians then buckle to the pressure, and minor ineffectual policy changes are the result.

We can’t afford that now – our health depends on it.

– ref. Labor’s election pledge to improve Australian diets is a first – now we need action, not just ‘consideration’ – http://theconversation.com/labors-election-pledge-to-improve-australian-diets-is-a-first-now-we-need-action-not-just-consideration-116425

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Hamilton, PhD Candidate in Zoology, University of Tasmania

Tasmanian devils have a reputation as a fearsome animal – most of the time this is undeserved. When it comes to the mating season, however, it’s a fair judgement. Between February and April, mating can be incredibly aggressive, with male and female devils prone to biting one another both during and after the act.

That could be deadly for the devils, according to new research published online in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

Unfortunately, biting drives the spread of devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) a transmissible cancer that has been afflicting the species since the mid-1990s.

Read more: Survival of the fittest? Perhaps not if you’re a Tasmanian devil

DFTD is highly unusual for a cancer because it can transfer between individual devils and grow in its new host.

The fact that devils regularly bite one another around the mouth means tumour cells can easily transfer from an infected devil to an open wound on a healthy devil. This makes the buildup of wounds in devils extremely important to our understanding of this disease.

When devils mate

In our study, we examined the accumulation of bite wounds in a population of wild devils in northwest Tasmania.

We found males were much more likely than females to pick up high numbers of bite wounds. But these wounds appear to be related to the amount of time males spent in mating season interactions with females, as opposed to fights with other males (as we had previously thought).

In the mating season, after male devils have mated with females, they spend an extended period either confining the female in a den, or closely following her to make sure other males are unable to mate with her.

During our study we found this behaviour could go on for up to two weeks in the wild. The process is known as “mate guarding” and is relatively common in the animal kingdom.

We found the longer males spent engaging in mate guarding behaviour, the more bite wounds they received. This would seem to put successful males, who mate with a high number of females, in the firing line when it comes to acquiring DFTD.

But no pattern of sex bias in DFTD prevalence has ever been observed in the wild.

So how does this fit with our study on the increased vulnerability in males?

Disease transfer

A crucial unknown in the DFTD transmission process involves directionality – which way the deadly disease is passed on by a devil. There are two possibilities:

1. an infected devil bites an uninfected animal, transferring tumour cells (from its teeth or saliva) directly into the wound it causes

2. an uninfected devil bites into tumours on an infected animal, and cells transfer into an open wound inside the biter’s mouth.

The reality is likely to involve a combination of the two.

Our results indicate that most disease transmission occurs during extended mating season interactions, when females appear to be causing high numbers of wounds to their mates.

If DFTD can transfer in either direction during these encounters, then both the males receiving the wounds and the females causing them would be equally at risk of acquiring the disease.

Future of the devil

We have highlighted mating season encounters between the sexes as crucial transmission points for the spread of DFTD. The behaviour of male devils appears to be driving patterns that support transmission of the disease.

This information is important for potential disease management options, as it pinpoints males in good condition – who are likely to be reproductively successful – as targets for management interventions, such as vaccinations.

Most importantly, these results add one more piece to the puzzle of rapid evolution in the Tasmanian devil, in response to the strong evolutionary pressure DFTD is placing on this iconic species. With almost 100% mortality once devils reach breeding age, any advantage an individual devil might have to survive a little longer and reproduce should – over time – spread through the population.

The species has already shown remarkably rapid shifts in their life history and genome, while some are able to mount an immune response and recover from the tumours.

DFTD is spread through biting so we can expect strong evolutionary pressure for devils to become less aggressive towards each other over time.

With these new results, we can now pinpoint for the first time who (healthy, successful males) and when (guarding females after mating) the intense selection pressure on aggressive behaviour in devils will operate.

Read more: Could Tassie devils help control feral cats on the mainland? Fossils say yes

Ultimately, devils will solve the DFTD problem themselves by evolving resistance, tolerance and changing their behaviour. One of the best things we can do is let evolution take its course, giving a helping hand along the way via well guided management actions.

– ref. Sexual aggression key to spread of deadly tumours in Tasmanian devils – http://theconversation.com/sexual-aggression-key-to-spread-of-deadly-tumours-in-tasmanian-devils-116271

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Narelle Miragliotta, Senior Lecturer in Australian Politics, Monash University

The Greens are not expected to be the beneficiaries of a supposed surge in support for minor parties and independent candidates at this election. Since June 2017, Newspoll has rarely recorded the Greens’ primary vote much above 10%. And since October 2018, its vote has seemingly stagnated at 9%.

Relative to most other campaigns at this election, the Greens have had a strong run. They have avoided candidate debacles and contained the factional infighting that has blighted the Victorian and New South Wales divisions.

The party’s policy agenda contains strong appeals to its base (climate change and immigration) but also speaks to some of the concerns of Labor’s traditional working-class voter (industrial relations, education and health).

Read more: Shorten distances himself from Green overtures on climate policy

But the Greens seem quite circumspect. They are not strongly pushing for a formal coalition with Labor, nor are they talking up the prospects of a minority government. Party leader Richard Di Natale says he remains:

very confident that some time in the not-too-distant future majority governments will be the exception rather than the rule.

However, he is only talking about a “constructive” relationship with Labor.

Why are the Greens low-key?

When Di Natale was asked at the National Press Club on Wednesday about the party’s stalling electoral prospects, he struggled to articulate a reason. In the end, he countered that a single-digit outcome was likely “pessimistic”. Rather, he said:

I think we’ll continue to grow. Our trajectory has been characterised by consolidation in periods of rapid growth. And I’m sure one’s on the way very soon.

Federal voting data support Di Natale’s assessment about the arc of the party’s electoral performance. As the table below shows, the Greens’ primary vote in the House of Representatives (solid black line) and in the Senate (solid red line) has been broadly trending upwards since 1998.

But when you compare the party’s support at the state and territory level, then it becomes apparent that the strength of the Greens’ vote is mixed. The Greens poll consistently strongly in Victoria, Tasmania, Western Australia and the ACT. However, in the case of the ACT, the territory’s constitutional status means the Greens are unable to convert their support into Senate representation.

In other states, the party has experienced some difficulty in gaining a comfortable footing, even if it does manage to elect senators. South Australian voters support non-major party candidates but have tended to prefer other vehicles, such as the now (mostly) defunct Australian Democrats and more recently the Nick Xenophon Team (now Centre Alliance).

A similar pattern is apparent in Queensland, but in this case much of the momentum for minor parties is behind right-tending parties, such as Katter’s Australia Party, the United Australia Party and One Nation. In NSW, the party’s support tends to run hot and cold.

What does this mean?

The degree of electoral support for minor parties (and independents), such as the Greens, is typically contingent on the electoral health of the major parties and the number of other non-major parties in the field.

An electorally diminished Labor is generally helpful for boosting the Greens’ primary vote. For example, at the 2010 federal election, the collapse in Labor’s primary vote (-5.40%) coincided with a spike in the Greens vote (+3.97%).

If Labor’s electoral malaise presents an opportunity for the Greens then a Labor recovery can limit the Greens’ growth prospects. In 2016, as Labor showed signs of electoral recovery (+1.34%), the Greens were able to achieve only modest growth in their primary vote. Although the Greens did increase their share of the vote (+1.58%), it was not enough to return it to their 2010 levels.

Even then, the 2013 election suggests there might be limits to the Greens’ ability to profit from swings against Labor. At this election, both parties suffered a swing against them, an outcome attributed to the parliamentary alliance/agreement that the two parties entered into following the 2010 election. What this suggests is that disgruntled Labor voters are probable but not “sure bets” for the Greens.

What might the Greens expect from the 2019 federal election?

It’s important to acknowledge that the above analysis frames the Greens’ gains and losses in relation to Labor’s electoral performance, which is only a part of the story. But it does point to the fact that the Greens’ ability to achieve a double-digit share of the national vote might depend on Labor crashing out, which is not supported by the polling in 2019.

Nevertheless, even if the Greens attain only a 9% share of the primary vote, this is likely to result in them retaining some of the six Senate vacancies they are defending. According to election analyst William Bowe:

Senate contenders will need something approaching 6% to be competitive, and around 8% to feel entirely confident.

Moreover, most analysts agree that Adam Bandt will retain Melbourne. His prospects were further strengthened when his Labor opponent quit after historical social media posts came to light.

Read more: Poll wrap: Labor’s Newspoll lead falls to 51-49 on dubious assumptions as Palmer and Coalition do a deal

And while high-profile Greens challengers, such as Julian Burnside in Kooyong, are not expected to win the lower house seats they are contesting, they do complicate the contest, particularly in those seats where there is no incumbent. Major party candidates in most inner metropolitan seats can never feel entirely relaxed when a high-profile Greens candidate enters the race.

Given that the Greens’ underlying primary vote is stable, even if not spectacular, it should be sufficient to ensure the Greens are returned as important players to the Senate.

– ref. Greens on track for stability, rather than growth, this election – http://theconversation.com/greens-on-track-for-stability-rather-than-growth-this-election-116295

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chelsea Mullens, PhD candidate in the School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, University of Melbourne

In Avengers: Endgame, the highly-anticipated 22nd film in the Marvel franchise, Earth’s mightiest heroes contend with the repercussions of supervillain Thanos wiping out half of all life in the universe with the snap of his fingers.

But did he need to? Not exactly. When setting the events of Endgame in motion during Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos said:

It’s a simple calculus. This universe is finite, its resources finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correction.

Thanos turns half of all life into dust. But according to the study of resource management and geography, population reduction does not necessarily solve the problem of resource scarcity.

Read more: Avengers: Endgame exploits time travel and quantum mechanics as it tries to restore the universe

‘Relative abundance’

When Thanos snapped his fingers, he performed what 18th century scholar Thomas Robert Malthus called a “positive check” on the population. Positive checks, like Thanos’s snap, increase the death rate to reduce population to a sustainable level.

Malthus argued that population collapse and environmental degradation occurred when there were too many people and not enough food. This is when positive checks – such as famine, plague, war, and natural disaster – would occur.

However, he argued that, once population size fell, strain on the environment eased, and population would increase to suit the amount of available resources .

Thanos assumed that halving population size would solve resource over-exploitation. But according to Malthus, as resources suddenly become abundant, the population of 3.5 billion people at the start of Endgame would inevitably grow again.

Read more: A country can never be too rich, too beautiful or too full of people

The politics of distribution

Thanos also overlooked the influence of social, political, and economic processes on access to resources – known as the “distributional” argument for explaining resource scarcity.

Average global supply of food exceeds the minimum dietary energy requirement globally, which shows that the world can produce enough food, but that food isn’t reaching everyone who needs it. Uneven access – rather than overpopulation – is the problem.

When explaining his reasoning, Thanos noted that the snap would be “at random, dispassionate, fair to rich and poor alike”.

However, removing half of everyone who is rich and poor doesn’t address the underlying reasons for wealth inequity. The disparities which created inequitable distribution of food and other resources will persist, and the same patterns of resource use and access are likely to continue.

Read more: How to feed a growing population healthy food without ruining the planet

Similarly, a “political ecology” perspective argues that those with the greatest economic and political power often get to control how the environment is used, and how resources are distributed, typically at the expense of disadvantaged groups.

We see this in the ongoing civil war in Yemen, where fighting has blocked aid shipments, food prices have doubled, and food has been stolen by those with greatest access to resources.

Food insecurity and hunger among marginalised populations can occur even within affluent, industrialised societies.

In some Indigenous communities in Australia, for example, traditional diets and methods of food production and gathering have been replaced with processed foods popular on globalised markets, which often offer lower quality diets. To counter such detrimental forces of globalisation, many Indigenous communities are shifting focus back to traditional practices.

Creating paradise?

In Endgame, our heroes find that the underlying challenges which created the conditions for resource overuse persist. There might be whales in New York Bay because there are fewer ships, as Captain America notes, but Hawkeye (the archer and one of the original Avengers) is still fighting systems that generate injustice and exploitation in Tokyo.

Today, there are plenty of scholars working alternative solutions to resource scarcity, imagining a world that is sustainable for everyone.

Instead of halving the population, for example, Thanos could have created a universe built on local food production.

Or, he could have made each planet in the universe a series of circular economies, which minimise waste by maintaining, reusing, recycling, and remanufacturing resources.

All energy could have instantly been produced by low carbon sources within sustainable energy grids and power infrastructure.

Or the universe could have been reshaped to exist within the safe and just space for humanity, in which we would exert enough pressure on the earth for everyone to live free of poverty, while keeping resource use within planetary boundaries to prevent overexploitation of those resources.

Surely this could get us closer to the paradise Thanos envisioned than a terrified planet with half as many people and just as many issues.

– ref. Avengers: Endgame and why a smaller population doesn’t guarantee paradise – http://theconversation.com/avengers-endgame-and-why-a-smaller-population-doesnt-guarantee-paradise-116070

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steinar Ellingsen, Senior Lecturer in Journalism, Communication and Media, University of Wollongong

Over the past decade the profits of 160-odd regional and rural publications that make up the former Fairfax business division known as Australian Community Media (ACM) have fallen steeply.

In 2012 the division made a A$169 million profit. In 2018 it was A$67.5 million.

Nine Entertainment Co acquired the division with its $3 billion takeover of Fairfax Media last year. It has been keen to get rid of it ever since.

There are grounds for some optimism about the long-anticipated sale. It may signal better fortunes for regional publishing. But any optimism must be tempered by ongoing concerns about the viability of the local news business model.

What’s in the deal?

ACM’s new owner is a 50:50 partnership between real estate advertising mogul Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group. They are paying Nine A$125 million for the 160-odd mastheads and 130 associated websites. The deal involves Nine getting $10 million of advertising space, and content and printing sharing arrangements for a period of time.

Thorney Investment Group has established itself over the past 25 yeas as one of the most profitable investors in Australian property and resources. Its foray into local news may appear somewhat peripheral to its general investment profile, despite an ongoing investment in Domain, Fairfax’s real estate brand, which was listed as a separate entity on the Australian Stock Exchange in 2017.

Catalano, on the other hand, has a long and colourful history with Fairfax’s real estate classifieds business. He is expected to chair the new company.

A one-time property editor at The Age, he was made redundant in 2008 and went on to found, with the backing of major real estate brokers, the free property magazine The Weekly Review.

The magazine took off, winning business away from The Age’s real estate pages. In 2011 Fairfax bought half of Catalano’s Metro Media Publishing business for A$35 million. It bought the other half in 2015 (for A$72 million). It then merged the business with Domain, putting Catalano at the helm.

He left his role with Domain in January last year, just two months after its successful listing on the Australian Stock Exchange. Reportedly his resignation came amid complaints of a party-boy culture in the Domain workplace.

Catalano’s successful bid for Domain is a particular coup. He attempted to thwart Nine’s takeover bid of Fairfax at the 11th hour by proposing to buy 19.9% of Fairfax shares.

Bidding against him and Thorney were private equity giants Anchorage Capital Partners and Allegro Funds. Seven West’s regional TV affiliate, Prime Media Group, and News Corp were also rumoured to have been interested.

Changing priorities

A few months ago Crikey labelled ACM’s impending sale a “blueprint for disaster” regardless of who won the bid, describing closures and consolidation of some local papers as “almost certain”.

Catalano, on the other hand, has talked up the potential of the larger daily regional mastheads. These include The Canberra Times, The Newcastle Herald, The Border Mail (based in Albury), The Illawarra Mercury (in Wollongong), The Ballarat Courier, The Examiner (in Launceston), and the Bendigo Advertiser. Between them, these papers reach about half ACM’s total audience of up to eight million people.

Catalano says he is looking to invest “aggressively” in these areas.

Read more: Why restoring accuracy will help journalism win back credibility

Without offering much detail, he has intimated there were ways to monetise ACM’s audience that didn’t happen under Fairfax, due to it having “bigger priorities in the face of very significant structural decline in the newspaper business”.

“Under us, it’s our only priority,” he said.

However, when pushed on whether there would be efficiencies, including redundancies and closures, he conceded there was likely to be some “consolidation” in print operations.

Such consolidation might echo Fairfax’s 2017 merger of six Western Sydney suburban newspapers into a single North West Magazine.

The state of local journalism

It would be naive to be overly hopeful about a new dawn for regional newspapers given the broader context of the Australian news industry.

According to the journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, at least 3,000 journalism jobs have been lost since mass redundancies began about seven years ago. Cutbacks, the union says, have seen “rural and regional audiences lose their “voice” and their access to local information”.

At the regional daily with the largest readership, The Newcastle Herald, the editorial staff has been cut from about 100 to less than 24.

Read more: What a local newspaper means to a regional city like Newcastle

Workloads have escalated in consequence. Veteran journalist and union rep Ian Kirkwood told ABC’s Media Watch that journalists, perhaps once expected to produce one or two news stories a day, were now required to produce six, including headlines and photographs.

The New Beats study, a comprehensive longitudinal study of redundancies in Australian journalism since 2012, calculates the total revenue of Australian newspapers fell from A$6.2 billion in 2007-08 to A$3 billion in 2016-17.

The New Beats researchers say the “market failure of regional journalism” is that local advertising is simply insufficient to make a local newspaper financially viable. How Catalano is going to change that, given his stated opposition to paywalls, is an open question.

But given the unrelenting bad news faced by newspaper newsrooms over the past decade, it’s no surprise journalists are hoping for the best. The ABC reports that sources within the Canberra Times regard the deal as the best of available options. The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance has expressed cautious optimism, tempered by concerns investment in the larger regional mastheads will come at the expense of smaller publications.

Only time will tell whether it is the hopes or the fears that are the most prophetic.

– ref. After a dark decade for Australia’s regional newspapers, a hopeful light flickers – http://theconversation.com/after-a-dark-decade-for-australias-regional-newspapers-a-hopeful-light-flickers-116359

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Farmer, Researcher, University of Melbourne

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.

What is brain freeze? – Question from the students of Ms Young’s Grade 5/6 class, Baden Powell College, Victoria.

Australia had one one of its hottest summers on record this year (thanks, climate change, thanks a lot). Many of us probably gobbled up an ice cream and perhaps too quickly.

After doing this, you may have been unlucky enough to get an intense squeezing or stabbing sensation on your forehead, your temples or the back of your head. This is brain freeze, also known as an “ice cream headache”.

“So” you say, feeling smart, “brain freeze is just a kind of headache! I already know all about those”.

You are, of course, correct. But brain freeze is a bit weird. While it’s true that you do put ice-cream inside your head to eat it (your mouth is technically part of your head), you don’t typically put it into the parts of your head that hurt when you experience brain freeze. To put ice-cream into your forehead or temples would be a very weird surgical procedure that I do not advise you to try at home or anywhere else. It’s also hard to imagine a situation in which it would be medically necessary so it seems unlikely that it would be available on Medicare.

So why do your forehead and temples (or even the back of your head) hurt when you put ice cream in your mouth too fast?

There are several different ideas as to why, but the answer definitely has something to do with what happens when we cool down the roof of our mouth.

When you cool down the roof of your mouth, the coldness is picked up by nerve cells that live there and whose job it is to detect cold. This information about coldness is sent to your brain via a nerve. When the roof of your mouth is very cold, these cells (and so this nerve) will be very active.

Now, this nerve also contains information from other cells, including the ones that detect cold and painful stimuli from other parts of your head, including your very face.

It may be (we’re honestly not sure) that when the cells that sense cold in the roof of your mouth are very active, this somehow also activates the bits of the brain that are usually activated by the face cells. As a result, the cold fools your brain into thinking that your forehead hurts.

Another possibility is that, as delicious icy treats quickly cool down our tongues and mouths, it actually cools the blood in blood vessels that supply blood to your head. These blood vessels respond by changing how much blood flows into your brain. Only a few scientists have actually tried to measure this, and those that have don’t even agree about whether there is more or less blood going into your head. Everyone, however, agrees that it hurts.

It may be some combination of these two things: that activation of nerves causes a change in how much blood is going into your head. It might even be both things together!

Why don’t we know how brain freeze works?

Here’s the thing about science: “what is brain freeze” is a fantastic question for a curious scientist to ask, but to get the answer, scientists need to convince other people (politicians, other scientists and members of the public) that they should be given the time and money to answer that question.

Unfortunately, the availability of time and money are not as boundless as the curiosity of scientists.

The result of all this is that sometimes, simple and beautiful questions like “what is brain freeze?” don’t get as much attention as other questions that might seem more pressing.

Instead, these beautiful questions fall away, like a scoop of ice cream loosened by an enthusiastic but careless scientist who may not have the time or resources to investigate brain freeze in the lab, but excitedly discusses it with a friend over an ice cream anyway. My advice? Stay curious. Eat ice cream. Slowly.

Read more: Curious Kids: If Australia is at the bottom of the world, why are we the right way up?

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

Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Read more: Curious Kids: If Australia is at the bottom of the world, why are we the right way up?

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

Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

– ref. Curious Kids: what is brain freeze? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-what-is-brain-freeze-112774

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

Jumping beyond May 18, we know a good deal more about how a Shorten government ministry would look than the shape of a re-elected Morrison government.

A rash of ministers quitting politics at the election has left some significant holes to be filled if the Coalition managed to hang on.

This would provide opportunities for up-and-comers, but it raises a lot of questions about who’d be responsible for what. And that’s leaving aside the need to reshuffle some incompetents.

The loss of cabinet minister Kelly O’Dwyer means we don’t know who’d fill the key portfolio of jobs and industrial relations. Morrison would also be in search of a minister for women, a post held by O’Dwyer. Michaelia Cash second time round perhaps?

Indigenous affairs, which has been the responsibility of Nationals Senate leader, Nigel Scullion, would be vacant, as would human services and digital transformation, the outgoing Michael Keenan’s patch.

Read more: View from The Hill: Shorten presents the ‘case for change’ in sleek launch

Morrison has already nominated Linda Reynolds as defence minister if he wins – she’d replace Christopher Pyne, another retiree.

It was a promise driven by politics – Morrison wanted to promote a woman. When Steve Ciobo, who held defence industry, announced he was quitting, he stepped down from the ministry immediately, unlike most departees, who stayed until the election.

This enabled Morrison to elevate Reynolds from a parliamentary secretary into the defence industry job and cabinet (with the defence portfolio promise for later, if there was a later).

Morrison could then boast a record number of women (seven) for a federal cabinet.

If he wanted to retain that number he’d have to find another woman to replace O’Dwyer. One possibility would be Sussan Ley, now a parliamentary secretary, who previously served in cabinet (but is now fighting for her seat of Farrer against an independent challenger).

In a new Morrison government there would once again be women in both foreign affairs and defence, as was the case when Julie Bishop was foreign minister and Marise Payne defence minister. Payne would stay in her present foreign affairs post.

Pyne’s job of leader of the house, very important in managing tactics, would have to be filled. Maybe Christian Porter? (We can assume, in the event of a government win, it would be likely attorney general Porter and home affairs Minister Peter Dutton would have kept their seats.)

Read more: Up close and personal: Morrison and Shorten get punchy in the second leaders’ debate. Our experts respond.

If the Coalition hung on, presumably Michael McCormack would survive as Nationals leader, and consequently as deputy prime minister, despite the pressure he has been under.

The most obvious elevation to a Morrison cabinet would be Arthur Sinodinos, a one time cabinet minister who has only recently returned to parliament after a long illness.

Reshuffles are always unpredictable but it would be outrageous if environment minister Melissa Price were not moved. In the campaign she had been gagged and kept in the political equivalent of a dark room. One option would be to bring energy and environment together again under one minister.

A question mark is whether Morrison would give a cabinet spot to Tony Abbott (again assuming Abbott survived). Abbott would want defence – but that has been promised.

A notable feature of the campaign is that Morrison has had fewer frontbenchers at his appearances than has Bill Shorten. This is a function of gaps, poor performers, and the difficult fights some ministers are having in their seats, which are keeping them tied down.

A Liberal prime minister selects their frontbench team, with the exception of the Nationals, who are chosen by their own leader. The number of spots going to the Nationals depends on the proportion of seats they have. Portfolios are allocated by the PM, with some of those going to Nationals automatically, and others a matter of negotiation.

In Labor the factions get their allocations according to their proportions in the caucus, and choose their people. Shorten would have leeway to secure the odd “captain’s pick” in the factional line up.

If she wasn’t chosen on the right’s factional ticket, there’s no doubt Shorten would want Kristina Keneally in his ministry. She’s had a prominent role as “bus captain” in the campaign, and at press conferences.

The Labor leader chooses the portfolios. Shorten has already announced Pat Dodson would be his minister for Indigenous affairs (now he’s shadow assistant minister).

Read more: VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on candidate troubles – and pre-polling

The reason we know more about a post-election Labor ministry is that most of its occupants are already “shadowing” the jobs they’d hold. Chris Bowen pointed out recently that half of the shadow cabinet had been in the same roles for the past six years.

But while most “shadows” would slot into similar roles in office, there’d be some shuffling at the edges.

For example, who would be put in charge of home affairs? Defence spokesman Richard Marles would be an obvious choice, though he mightn’t want the switch.

Bowen has produced some interesting statistics about how experienced a Labor cabinet would be. If Labor were elected, “we would come into government with the most experienced incoming cabinet in 50 years,”‘ he told the National Press Club.

“When the Hawke government was elected, there were three cabinet ministers that had sat at the cabinet table previously. When the Howard government came to power in 1996 there were also three with prior cabinet experience.

“And with Labor’s victory in 2007, there were just two cabinet members who could draw on their experience sitting around the cabinet table.

“If Labor forms a government 16 out of 21 of us in the cabinet would have served at the cabinet level before.”

– ref. View from The Hill: Lots of ministry spots to fill if Morrison wins, while many Shorten ministers would return to a familiar cabinet room – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-lots-of-ministry-spots-to-fill-if-morrison-wins-while-many-shorten-ministers-would-return-to-a-familiar-cabinet-room-116589

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

The appointment of David Anderson as managing director and editor-in-chief of the ABC is something of a relief.

It is an important early signal of how the new ABC chair, Ita Buttrose, is giving effect to her promise of bringing stability to the ABC after the chaotic events of last September in which the broadcaster lost both its chair, Justin Milne, and managing director Michelle Guthrie.

While nothing is known about the alternative candidates, quite a bit is known about Anderson.

Read more: Ita Buttrose’s appointment as new ABC chair a promising step in the right direction

He has 30 years’ experience with the ABC. Before being appointed acting managing director after Guthrie’s sudden sacking, he was responsible for all ABC radio music and broadcast television networks and for its on-demand products and services.

He seems to be well-regarded inside the organisation. The director of news, Gaven Morris, tweeted “order restored”. The comedian Shaun Micallef posted a YouTube video clip from one of his sketches, the making of which required human ballast to tilt the set on an angle. Anderson, he said, came down from his office and lent his heft to the task.

It can be safely anticipated that the ABC’s critics will see in this a cosy insiders’ choice designed to ensure the organisation remains self-referential in outlook and impervious to conservative influences.

It will be entertaining, in a droll kind of way, to see if epithets such as “the ABC collective”, “Trotskyite” and “sheltered workshop” get another run as they did when Russell Balding replaced Jonathan Shier after the latter’s chaotic reign came to an abrupt end in 2001.

Anderson’s appointment has many echoes of Balding’s. Balding too was an insider – he had been general manager of finance. He too was appointed following a chaotic reign and abrupt departure. He, too, was seen as a safe pair of hands who would restore stability, as indeed he did.

Like Balding, Anderson also inherits an ABC facing acute financial pressures and a recent history of hostility from the federal government.

However, a structural problem that was central to the way the Milne-Guthrie debacle played out is yet to be fixed.

That problem is the combining of the roles of managing director and editor-in-chief in the one person. Guthrie was hopelessly ill-suited by experience and inclination to be editor-in-chief. Anderson, whatever his other qualities, has no journalistic experience either.

Read more: ABC inquiry finds board knew of trouble between Milne and Guthrie, but did nothing

Mark Scott, who was editor-in-chief at the then Fairfax newspapers before being appointed managing director of the ABC, was exceptionally well qualified for both jobs. He has been reported as saying the chief executive of the broadcaster needs to embrace the editor-in-chief role. Scott said:

The chief executive is responsible for everything that goes to air and you cannot have a structure where finally the chief executive is not responsible.

While this is true, in most media organisations it is achieved differently. The editor-in-chief answers to the board through the chief executive; the board and chief executive answer to the shareholders – or, in the ABC’s case, to the government.

Moreover, under a structure like that, the editor-in-chief is not a board member and therefore is not a party to board decisions with the associated requirements of board solidarity.

In these two important ways, the editor-in-chief is shielded from becoming compromised, enabling him or her to make news decisions independent of corporate interests. It is called editorial independence and is the cornerstone of good journalism.

Read more: ABC inquiry finds board knew of trouble between Milne and Guthrie, but did nothing

Strong editorial leadership founded on independence liberates editors and journalists at every level to tell stories that matter to the public interest without looking over their shoulders fearful of politically inspired retribution.

There has never been a time in Australia’s modern history when there was a greater need for an editorially robust ABC.

In December 2018, Fairfax newspapers were swallowed up into the Nine entertainment conglomerate, with consequences for their editorial quality that are yet to be seen.

Fairfax controlled about 20% of metropolitan daily newspaper circulation in Australia.

News Corp, which controls about two-thirds of this circulation, has morphed into a hybrid of news service and political propaganda machine, its usefulness as a news provider declining in proportion as its propagandising mission has grown.

Fairfax’s regional newspapers were acquired last week by a former Fairfax journalist and corporate executive, Antony Catalano, along with a financial backer in the form of Thorney Investment Group.

While that provides Australia with some sorely needed diversity in media ownership, it is unlikely to have a significant impact on journalism at the national level.

Without a strong ABC news and current affairs service, the fourth estate of Australia’s democracy would be severely diminished.

The appointment of a new chair and a new managing director means that two of the three salient features of the ABC’s post-Milne landscape are in place.

The third is the composition of the board as a whole. The surviving members came out badly from the majority report of the Senate inquiry into political interference in the ABC, which was published in April.

The report found that the catalogue of events leading up to the sacking of Guthrie and the resignation of Milne “may give rise to the perception that the ABC Board had not been sufficiently active in protecting either the ABC’s independence from political interference or its own integrity”.

What, if anything, Buttrose does about that remains to be seen.

– ref. David Anderson’s appointment as ABC managing director is a relief and will further steady the broadcaster – http://theconversation.com/david-andersons-appointment-as-abc-managing-director-is-a-relief-and-will-further-steady-the-broadcaster-116540

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emil Jeyaratnam, Data + Interactives Editor, The Conversation

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety begins hearings on residential aged care facilities, or nursing homes, in Sydney today.

The standards of nursing homes in Australia have been in the public eye since the Oakden Aged Mental Health Care Service in Adelaide became embroiled in an elder abuse and neglect scandal, sparking reviews, inquiries and investigations across the sector. This was the most prominent of a series of incidents of abuse and negligence that eventually led to the establishment of a royal commission.

So what are the challenges facing nursing homes and why are they under so much strain?

How many Australians use aged care services?

In the 2017-18 financial year, more than 1.2 million Australians accessed some form of aged care service:

Residential care is the most resource-intensive category of aged care, providing higher level care to older Australians with complicated medical needs, those in the last years of life, and people who can no longer live independently in their own homes.

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

How old are residents?

A large proportion of aged care residents are 90 and over. This reflects the increasing preference of older Australians to remain in their own homes longer, and only moving into residential care when home care is no longer adequate.

Why aren’t you guaranteed a place?

Australia has a relatively large proportion of older people, with more than 15% of the population aged 65 years or over, which has resulted in strong demand for aged care places.

In 2017-18, almost a quarter of a million Australians (241,723) were approved for residential aged care, but just over 207,000 places were available. This left a shortfall of 34,581 places.

The aged care provision ratio

The supply of home care packages and residential care places is determined using the aged care provision ratio. The ratio will increase from its current target of 113 subsidised care places for every 1,000 people aged 70 and over to 125 places by 2021-22.

Minimum staffing levels

A 2015 survey by Bentley’s Chartered Accountants estimated that residents received an average of 2 hours and 48 minutes of care per day. The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation recommends residents receive 4 hours and 18 minutes of care per day.

The aged care industry does not currently have regulation related to minimum staffing levels, with the exception of a small number of publicly owned aged care homes Victoria.

Read more: Want to improve care in nursing homes? Mandate minimum staffing levels

The workforce and skills shortage

The Productivity Commission estimated in 2011 the workforce will need to grow to about 980,000 by 2050 to meet the demand of aged care consumers. (And the population projections this estimate is based on have increased substantially since then, so this number may end up being significantly higher).

But providers are already finding it difficult to adequately staff nursing homes, with 64% of residential care facilities reporting shortages in 2016. And with employee costs representing 70% of the total expenses for residential care providers (an increase from 67% of total expenses in 2015-16), there is concern that residents will not be given proper care.

Residential care providers and their financial viability

There were 210,815 operational residential care places as at June 30 2018, an increase of about 24,500 places in the last five years. Over that time, the number of providers has decreased from 1,034 to 886, mainly due to consolidation.

While profits (before tax) have almost doubled since 2012-13, only 68% of providers reported a net profit in 2016-17 (compared to 69% in 2015-16). A survey of more than 970 residential care facilities found 45% of facilities had negative earnings (before tax) in 2018, an increase from 33% in 2017.

Funding for residential aged care

Residential aged care facilities require government funding as well as resident contributions to operate.

Government contributions accounted for 67.3% (A$12.4 billion) of total provider funding in 2017-18, the majority (89%) of which is made up of the basic care subsidy.

The subsidy is calculated for each resident based on their needs using the aged care funding instrument (ACFI). To care for a resident with high needs the provider will receive a larger subsidy.

– ref. Nearly 2 out of 3 nursing homes are understaffed. These 10 charts explain why aged care is in crisis – http://theconversation.com/nearly-2-out-of-3-nursing-homes-are-understaffed-these-10-charts-explain-why-aged-care-is-in-crisis-114182

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute

In an election campaign full of giveaways but short on serious economic reform, Labor’s proposed change to childcare support is the most important economic news.

It fits in with this year’s Grattan Institute Commonwealth Orange Book, which identified getting more women into the workforce as one of the most valuable things the next government could do.

Female participation in the labour force is lower in Australia than in similar countries. It is particularly low for women working full-time.

That’s because motherhood hurts female participation more in Australia than in other countries. Before having children, Australian women are just as likely to work as men. On having children, many drop out of work and some never go back. Those who do return often pay a career penalty.

Childcare is the biggest barrier to work

Childcare is the highest hurdle. When surveyed, more than 40% of Australian women who would like more work say caring for children and its cost are the main reasons they can’t take on more hours over the coming weeks.

Women with children get relatively little financial reward for entering the workforce, and even less for working more hours. Some find working more hours costs more than it pays.

They face high effective marginal tax rates because as they work more hours they lose more family and childcare benefits as well as paying more income tax. Factoring in the cost of childcare itself, some face costs exceeding 100% of what they earn.

Here the Coalition deserves some credit. Its previous reforms to the childcare subsidy helped reduce effective marginal tax rates.

But there’s still a long way to go, with many mothers still facing very high effective rates.

Effective tax rates make returning expensive

A woman in a low-income household still loses 85 to 95 cents of every extra dollar she earns if she increases her work days from three to four, or from four to five.

Even women in middle earning households face effective marginal tax rates near 80% if they move from four days paid work per week to five.

These effective marginal rates are much higher than the headline marginal tax rate paid by those earning more than A$180,000 per year, which is the focus of many who purport to be worried about the impact of tax rates on incentives to work.

Labor will make work pay better

Under Labor’s proposal, childcare will become free for families with incomes of up to $69,000 a year, up to the hourly cap of $11.77 an hour, or $141 a day.

Families on higher incomes will still have to pay some of their childcare costs, but less than they do today.

Child care subsidy per child in care per day, 2020-21

The savings per extra day worked would be substantial.

Consider a middle-income family with two children in childcare: a primary earner bringing in the average full-time wage of $95,103 in 2020-21, and the other choosing how many days to work in a week in a job that would pay the median full-time wage of $61,000.

Labor’s plan would increase the reward for working an extra day a week by about $1,260 a year.

It would give that second earner an extra 10 cents out of every extra dollar she earns.

Gross earnings less childcare costs net of subsidy if second earner works an extra day

Now consider a lower-income family with a primary earner on $50,000 a year and a secondary earner in a job that also pays $50,000 a year full time, again with two children in childcare.

Labor’s plan will boost the reward for working two days a week rather than one by around $1,784 a year. That worker would be keeping an extra 18 cents out of every extra dollar she earned. The change would be more than big enough to lead many families to make different decisions about work.

The change will be smaller when the second income earner goes from working four days a week to five, because the subsidy tapers out. For this low income family, Labor’s plan would boost the reward for working four days rather than five by only $421, a four cents in the dollar improvement.

Gross earnings less childcare costs net of subsidy if second earner works an extra day

Again, the change is a big deal.

These improvements in effective marginal tax rates are much larger than those offered by the actual tax plans of either major party.

And the empirical evidence also suggests women caring for younger children are more sensitive than others to effective marginal tax rates, and more likely to change their decisions about working if effective marginal tax rates change.

It means Labor’s childcare plan is likely to provide a bigger economic kick for each dollar spent than either of the two sides’ proposed tax cuts.

The policy isn’t perfect

Some aspects need more work.

Labor plans to cut the subsidy suddenly from 60% to 50% for families with incomes above $174,527. The cliff will distort incentives to work for some second earners, because they’ll instantly have to pay a lot more for childcare – around an extra $5,000 a year more – the moment their household income climbs a dollar over $174,527.

Read more: The budget’s dirty secret is the hikes in tax rates you’re not meant to know about

A better approach would be to gradually reduce the subsidy rate from 60% for incomes of $174,527 to 50% for incomes above $205,000.

Childcare centres could raise their fees

Labor will also have to be careful to ensure its higher subsidies don’t simply result in childcare centres jacking up their prices and providing little benefit to families.

The existing cap on childcare subsidies of $11.77 per hour will limit any childcare fee increases. But Australians paid an average of just $9.20 per hour in 2018.

If the subsidies are higher so that many families only pay a small fraction of the cost of childcare, childcare providers will be very tempted to increase their fees up to the cap, and perhaps further. Centres serving lots of low-income families – who in many cases will pay nothing for childcare – will be particularly tempted.

Labor says it will ask the Competition and Consumer Commission to crack down on fee increases and to find ways to control child care fee increases in future. But past attempts to use the ACCC to police prices, such as during the introduction of the goods and services tax and the carbon tax, have had mixed success.

But overall, it’s a large and worthwhile reform

But overall, much of the increased subsidy is likely to be passed on to parents.

While there are limits to how much governments can influence economic growth, there are some worthwhile reforms they can pursue.

With its new childcare policy, Labor has produced one of the best there is.

Read more: Grattan Orange Book. What the election should be about: priorities for the next government

– ref. Why Labor’s childcare policy is the biggest economic news of the election campaign – http://theconversation.com/why-labors-childcare-policy-is-the-biggest-economic-news-of-the-election-campaign-116441

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Roberts, Professor in Robotics, Queensland University of Technology

How many times in the past week do you think your life was affected by a robot?

Unless you have a robot vacuum cleaner, you might say that robots had no real impact on your life.

But you’re wrong. Let’s take a look at some of the ways robots are being used right now but that you probably have no idea about.

Read more: Why R2D2 could be your child’s teacher sooner than you think

So what is a robot?

Before we start, we need to define what actually is a robot. There is no official definition of what constitutes a robot, but many roboticists (like me) consider it to be a machine that moves, or has moving parts, and that makes basic decisions while interacting with the world.

Hence, your vacuum cleaner that you leave to do its job while you are away is a robot. It senses the world around it and makes driving decisions as it sucks and sweeps.

But your washing machine is not a robot. You tell it how to wash when you select the cycle and it gets on with it. There are grey areas and the definition is debated, but let’s leave it there.

On to your past week.

Food sorting robots

If you eat rice, chances are that every grain you consumed was sorted by a robotic machine with a lightning-fast vision system.

Rice-sorting machines are miracles of automation and most people have no idea they exist. Did you actually think rice grows as uniformly (in colour and shape) as it appears in the bag you buy at the supermarket? It doesn’t.

Every grain of rice passes through a robotic machine that uses very high-speed cameras, lights and a computer. The image of each rice grain is analysed by that computer and a decision is made as to its grade. Jets of air are turned on and off to steer or flick the grain into the correct bin. This happens hundreds of times per second.

In fact, rice is not the only food that is sorted by robots, and the food-sorting market is growing rapidly. Robotic machines are available to sort wheat, pulses and seeds.

Robots for medical training

Did you see a health care professional? If you did, you should have noticed if they were human or a robot. Chances are they were a human.

But did you know that many nurses, paramedics and doctors now train on robot patients.

These training robots can simulate various conditions and give student health workers the ability to practice diagnosis and treatment of various conditions before they go near a real person. You can think of these robotic patients as being like the flight simulators that airline pilots use during their flight training.

Some of these medical training robots are life-sized and look like a real person, but some are more specialised and might be representative of just one part of a person.

Robots for police training

Have you been taken hostage in an armed robbery? I hope not. But if you were, and an armed response team from your police service attended, those police snipers that aimed their red laser dot at the criminals may have been trained using robots.

Sydney-based company Marathon Targets sells a range of highly capable mobile robots that can be shot at by military and police trainees. These robots are armour-plated (for obvious reasons) and can be used to simulate real people (targets) during live-fire training.

Robots for extracting poison

Did you take medication? If it’s medication to prevent malaria or suppress your immune system, those pharmaceuticals may have used scorpion venom as one of the ingredients.

It is quite obvious the extraction of venom from scorpions is quite hazardous to people, but the perfect job for a robot.

Robots down the sewer

You must have used a toilet? Hopefully! We do not often think about our sewers, but when they go wrong, we certainly know about it.

Fatbergs have become a major problem in many cities around the world.

Sewer inspection and maintenance is more important than ever and dome inspection workers now have robots to help them with their difficult business.

Robots and your shopping

Did you go shopping or order anything online? Did you know that many items you buy are partially moved from where they are made to where you receive them by robots?

Some container ports are now partially automated. The huge containers are offloaded from ships by human operators controlling cranes.

But from then on, the containers are handled by giant robotic cranes on wheels – known as straddle carriers. They are moved around the port, stacked, unstacked, re-stacked, and once ready for transport, they are automatically loaded onto container-carrying trucks for road transport.

Many warehouses are also operated using mobile robots. The best-known example of warehouse automation is Amazon. The retail giant built many of its warehouses specifically for mobile robots that could autonomously transport shelf units.

Amazon felt the robots it used in its warehouses were so vital to its success that it bought the robot company that made them for USD$775 million in 2012.

The robot revolution is now

So that’s just six ways that robots may have affected you in the past week. Of course there are dozens more ways in which robots are likely to have affected your life; this list is just a taster.

Read more: Robots can learn a lot from nature if they want to ‘see’ the world

The point is that the so-called upcoming robot revolution that is often talked about in the media is already happening. It’s just that most people don’t notice.

– ref. Six ways robots are used today that you probably didn’t know about – http://theconversation.com/six-ways-robots-are-used-today-that-you-probably-didnt-know-about-82067

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arthur Grimes, Professor of Wellbeing and Public Policy, Victoria University of Wellington

At the end of this month, New Zealand will release its first “Well-being Budget”. It builds on treasury’s Living Standards Framework (LSF), published last December, which introduced a suite of well-being measures, including cultural identity, environment, housing, income and consumption, and social connections.

To help interpret what this might mean for policy, I look at how well-being has been used as a guide for policy elsewhere.

Let’s first look at some prime ministerial words:

Wealth is about so much more than […] dollars can ever measure. It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB – general well-being.

And some words from treasury:

The ultimate value of the well-being framework is that it improves the quality of Treasury’s policy advice to government, through helping to identify the important trade-offs for well-being, and providing a consistent basis for understanding their impact.

Read more: It’s time to vote for happiness and well-being, not mere economic growth. Here’s why:

The eagle-eyed will have noticed some words left out of the first quotation. They are “pounds, or euros or”. The quotation is from UK prime minister David Cameron, in 2006. The second is from the Australian Treasury in 2004, prepared during the Howard government. Its framework built on an Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) publication in 2001.

In introducing the LSF, the New Zealand Treasury stated:

There is more to well-being than just a healthy economy. That’s why the Treasury has developed its Living Standards Framework (LSF) – it helps us advise governments about how the policy trade-offs they make are likely to affect everyone’s living standards.

This is an amalgam of the Cameron speech and the Australian Treasury approach of the mid-2000s. Is there anything new in the New Zealand government’s approach that conservative governments in the UK and Australia had not already considered over a decade ago?

International well-being initiatives

There was another well-being initiative in France, based on the highly publicised Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi (SSF) report in 2009. That report, headed by Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, was commissioned by French president Nicholas Sarkozy – again a conservative on the political spectrum. It recommended monitoring a broad list of indicators of well-being and sustainability to guide policy.

The UK well-being initiative died as a policy framework with the demise of David Cameron. But the Office of National Statistics has kept the UK’s well-being indicator framework alive. The Australian initiative was maintained by its treasury to inform policy considerations, but it never made it to the frontline of political debate.

The French framework is alive and well. A 2015 budget law requires the French government to report the evolution of new wealth indicators and to assess major reforms. Similar frameworks have been formally adopted as a basis for policy in several other countries.

New Zealand’s approach to well-being

The New Zealand approach is far from new, but it has some distinctive features. Most obviously, it addresses the well-being of New Zealanders rather than people elsewhere. The parallel Stats NZ well-being indicator framework, Indicators Aotearoa New Zealand (IANZ), includes a selection of measures of how New Zealand interacts with the well-being of the rest of the world.

The LSF bears close similarities to the OECD’s Better Life Index. The LSF dashboard comprises 38 indicators across 12 well-being “domains” and measurements of inequalities across different population groups for nine of those domains.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of the LSF has been to highlight differential aspects of well-being across population groups. For instance, on average, Māori perform more poorly compared to the rest of the population on almost every well-being domain. While we suspected this before, some other interesting findings emerge.

Take age, for instance. Treasury shows that while older people’s health is likely to be poorer than average (which is not surprising) they do better, on average, than the rest of the population on most other measures, including material well-being such as income, consumption and housing. Most do not require extra help from government, and they do not need the cash handout that was misleadingly labelled the “winter energy payment”.

How best to use well-being data

Most of the indicators included in both the LSF and IANZ already exist and have long been published by Stats New Zealand. My treasured 1903 (paper) copy of the New Zealand Official Yearbook contains over 750 pages of measures relating, inter alia, to well-being. For instance, it reports that there were 20 “lunatics” per 10,000 population in 1874, which rose to 34 by 1901, and that the proportion was higher among males than females.

For policy purposes, it’s not just what we measure but how we use it. While the treasury’s LSF follows a tried and true course internationally, its use has the potential to be novel. In his budget policy statement, finance minister Grant Robertson listed five priority areas for the “well-being budget”:

• transitioning to a sustainable and low-emissions economy

• boosting innovation, and social and economic opportunities in a digital age

• lifting Māori and Pacific incomes, skills and opportunities

• reducing child poverty, improving child well-being and addressing family violence

• supporting mental well-being, with a special focus on under 24-year-olds.

It’s not clear how the minister arrived at these five priorities, but prioritisation in fiscal policy is a virtue. The last National government went through a similar exercise with its Better Public Services targets that aimed to reduce long-term welfare dependence, support vulnerable children, boost skills and employment and reduce crime.

The current government has insisted that “budget bids” by public sector agencies align with the five priorities. Even defence expenditures have been analysed as contributors to societal well-being. While we shouldn’t stretch the well-being policy framework too hard (or it may become a nonsense), the stated approach could see real progress in addressing issues at the heart of these priority areas.

The acid tests

There are two key tests. The first is whether the 2019 Well-being Budget provides meaningful fillips to the five priority areas. Ignoring the opaque way in which these priorities were derived, the process will have paid dividends if it succeeds in focusing policy attention on key areas requiring social and economic policy. For too long, budgets have spread largesse thinly over many policy areas, achieving little in any of them.

The second test is whether resources are freed up for the five priority areas by cutting poorly performing programs. The winter energy payment is one example. Interest-free loans to students from wealthy families is another.

A true well-being budget will target public programs and resources to where they have the greatest bang-for-buck and will cease support for programs that have low well-being payoffs. I expect a moderate pass mark for the first test, but will be (pleasantly) surprised if I see a pass mark for the second.

– ref. New Zealand’s well-being approach to budget is not new, but could shift major issues – http://theconversation.com/new-zealands-well-being-approach-to-budget-is-not-new-but-could-shift-major-issues-116296

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julia Mynott, Research Officer, Centre for Freshwater Ecosystems, La Trobe University

Three very good dogs – named Bayar, Judd and Sasha – have sniffed out the endangered Alpine Stonefly, one of the smallest animals a dog has been trained to successfully detect in its natural habitat.

The conservation of threatened species is frequently hampered by the lack of relevant data on their distributions. This is particularly true for insects, where the difficulty of garnering simple information means the threatened status of many species remains unrecognised and unmanaged.

Read more: How many species on Earth? Why that’s a simple question but hard to answer

In alpine areas there is a pressing need for innovative methods to better reveal the distribution and abundance of threatened insects.

Alpine regions rely on cool temperatures, and since climate change will bring warmer weather and lower rainfalls, insects like the Alpine Stonefly, which lives in the alpine freshwater system, will struggle to survive.

And while insects might not be appealing to everyone, they are extremely important for ecosystem function.

Traditional survey detection methods are often labour intensive, and hard-to-find species provide limited information. This is where the labrador, border collie and samoyed came to the rescue.

La Trobe’s Anthrozoology Research Group Dog Lab in Bendigo, Victoria have been training a pool of local community volunteers and their dogs in conservation detection to use with environmental DNA sampling. Using both environmental DNA and detection dogs has the potential to generate a lot of meaningful data on these threatened stoneflies.

For seven weeks in a special program, dogs were trained to memorise the odour of the Alpine Stonefly (Thaumatoperla alpina), a threatened but iconic insect in the high plains.

The dogs have previously been trained to sniff out animal nests or faeces but not an animal itself, so this was a new approach and an Australian first.

Stoneflies are hard to catch

The Alpine Stonefly are brightly coloured aquatic insects and are difficult to find, especially as larvae in water where they live as predators for up to two years in the streams on the Bogong High Plains, Mount Buller-Mount Stirling, Mt Baw Baw and the Yarra Ranges.

They often burrow underneath cobbles, boulders and into the stream bed while the adults only emerge from the water for a few months between January and April to reproduce.

With all this in mind, it’s easy to understand why traditional detection methods can be time consuming and often ineffective.

We predominately focused on the endangered Alpine Stonefly, found across the Bogong High Plains. Their restricted distribution and habitat made them an ideal candidate to trial detection dogs and environmental DNA techniques.

Read more: We need a bank of DNA from dirt and water to protect Australia’s environment

How dogs and environmental DNA help

We collected water samples from across the Bogong High Plains, Mount Buller and Mount Stirling with trace DNA, such as cells shed from the insect. The ability to quickly take these samples from a broad area to indicate the presence of a species is important to understand distribution. But this approach limits the amount of ecological information that is gathered.

Initial training introduced the dogs to the odour of the Alpine Stonefly in a controlled laboratory setting. Then they graduated from the laboratory to small areas of bushland to search for the insect.

Once the dogs successfully completed their training, it was time to trial the dogs in the alpine environment and survey Alpine Stoneflies in their natural environment.

The trial was conducted at Falls Creek with the dogs’ three volunteer handlers. And the surveys were successful, with all three dogs finding Alpine Stoneflies in their natural habitats.

So could this success be transferred to a similar species?

Absolutely. In preliminary trials, Bayar, Judd and Sasha detected the Stirling Stonefly, a related species of Thaumatoperla that lives in Mount Buller and Mount Stirling, suggesting detection dogs can transfer their conservation training from one species to another.

This is a great find as it means this technique can be used to survey yet another species of Thaumatoperla that lives in Mt Baw Baw and the Yarra Ranges.

Read more: It’s not worth wiping out a species for the Yeelirrie uranium mine

Our research is showing that these new sampling techniques supporting conservation are an important part of keeping biodiversity protected in alpine regions.

Now that we’ve successfully trained three dogs, we’re hoping to secure funding to conduct future and more thorough surveys on the Alpine and Stirling Stonefly, and eventually on the third species of stonefly.

By developing creative techniques to detect these species, we boost our ability to document them and, importantly, to protect them.

– ref. Sit! Seek! Fly! Scientists train dogs to sniff out endangered insects – http://theconversation.com/sit-seek-fly-scientists-train-dogs-to-sniff-out-endangered-insects-116517

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paulina Billett, Lecturer, Sociology, La Trobe University

Teachers are bullied daily by parents and students. They experience the kind of harassment that would be deemed unacceptable in most workplaces. But, in the case of teachers, such treatment is often dismissed as par for the course.

Radio presenter Jon Faine recently suggested we might be overstating students’ bullying behaviour towards teachers. He said:

What now is called bullying is what we used to regard as, you know, kind of giving teachers a hard time and teasing and being little horrible monsters.

We conducted a survey of 560 teachers across Australia in 2018. In the month-long social media campaign, 80% of respondents recorded having been a victim of some form of student or parent bullying and harassment over the previous 9 to 12 months.

A separate survey also conducted in 2018 – which has been following school principals since 2011 – found one-third of Australian principals had been bullied or harassed. They reported both physical and verbal threats and abuse.

Read more: Bullies, threats and violence: who would want to be a school principal?

This doesn’t only happen in Australia. Studies in New Zealand, Luxembourg, the United States, Slovakia and South Africa all yield similar findings.

Student-to-teacher bullying and harassment has also been recorded in countries such as Taiwan, where students are taught to revere teachers, and in Finland, where the teaching profession is well regarded.

What our study found

In our study, just over 70% of participants reported having been bullied or harassed by a student in the last 12 months. Verbal aggression was the most common form of bullying. Nearly 30% of respondents recorded a student having sworn at them in the last 9 to 12 months, closely followed by yelling (28%) and disparaging verbal comments (25.5%).

Around 10% of teachers had been hit or punched by a student in the last year, 12.5% had a student damage their personal property and 16.6% had a student stand over them or invade their personal space.

Female teachers experienced student bullying and harassment slightly more often than males – 71% to 68.4%.

Female teachers were more likely to experience students standing over them or invading their personal space (9.9% to 6.9%), as well as students harassing them through phone calls or text messages (2.3% to 1.4%).

Male teachers, on the other hand, were more likely to have students organise others against them (8.3% and 6% respectively), lie about them to get them in trouble (7.6% to 6.4%), be discriminated against by students (5.5% to 2.5%) and have parents engaged to argue on a student’s behalf (11% to 9.4%).

Nearly 60% of teachers reported experiencing at least one incident of bullying and harassment by parents in the last 12 months. The most common were parents verbally disparaging a teacher (15.2%), yelling (14.4%) and arguing on their child’s behalf (13.4%).

Female teachers bore the brunt of parental abuse (nearly 60%, compared to 41% for male teachers).

Physical attacks by parents on teachers were rare, with 8.8% reporting a parent standing over or invading their personal space and just 1.1% being hit or punched by a parent.

Long-lasting impacts

Bullying and harassment have a considerable impact on teachers. Respondents in our survey reported severe repercussions for their mental health and well-being. A number of teachers said they were suffering symptoms of anxiety, depression and PTSD, including panic attacks and uncontrollable shaking.

Around 83% of respondents who we interviewed disclosed a desire to leave the profession due to teacher-targeted student and parental bullying.

A male teacher who had been in the profession for nearly 15 years told us:

[…] bullying from students […] contributed to me wanting to commit suicide. I felt worthless […] It has taken years of support, encouragement and medical and spiritual intervention to enable me to teach full-time again.

Most teachers said they didn’t feel well supported when they made a report and that responses were often tokenistic. Many interviewees accused school management of allying themselves with students and parents rather than supporting the bullied teacher. One teacher told us:

I could deal with it if there was any form of support […] Teachers have no rights anymore and all we can realistically do is tell students they have detention or call their parents. Students don’t come to detention, then what!

Read more: Teachers who feel appreciated are less likely to leave the profession

What can we do?

Bullying occurs in the context of a power imbalance. Teachers are understood to occupy a position of power over their students, which obscures the prevalence of teacher-targeted bullying in and out the classroom.

There was a feeling among respondents that student behaviour was contextualised in terms of teachers’ ability (or inability) to manage complicated situations. One teacher told us:

[…] I worry about grades on report cards and how parents will react. They no longer accept it, but instead try to influence and intimidate teachers to change the grades based on what they believe their child deserves.

Teachers also expressed dismay at their inability to create real and lasting change to bullying behaviour. Initial findings from our study call for more support by management and peak organisations for teachers who report even minor incidents.

Read more: Teenagers who are both bully and victim are more likely to have suicidal thoughts

Respondents suggested a code of conduct be created in schools. This would include a zero-tolerance policy and clear guidelines spelling out which behaviours are considered to be bullying and harassment. They suggested students and parents face penalties for breaching the code of conduct.

Teachers also called for stronger measures, such as the ability to expel students or ban parents from contacting teachers, to prevent aggressors from stepping back into classrooms or school grounds.

– ref. Almost every Australian teacher has been bullied by students or their parents, and it’s taking a toll – http://theconversation.com/almost-every-australian-teacher-has-been-bullied-by-students-or-their-parents-and-its-taking-a-toll-116058

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yvonne Meng, PhD Candidate, Department of Architecture, Monash University

When we think about public spaces, we often imagine large open areas such as squares and parks. The humble footpath is overlooked, although it is an equally if not more important public space for urban social life. Every day, most people will at some point use a footpath. Their ubiquity makes them a fundamental part of cities.

Due to their narrow form and seemingly undesigned nature, it is easy to neglect footpaths. Urban design research tends to favour the bigger picture of streets and streetscapes, or focus on architectural elements such as building forms and frontages. And planning policies tend to treat footpaths as road and transport assets, rather than as public space.

Read more: New minister for public spaces is welcome – now here are ten priorities for action

However, footpaths in urban areas support complex social systems and a wide variety of uses. They are a vital public space and deserve more attention in the planning and design of our cities.

The case for footpaths

In rapidly densifying suburbs such as Footscray in Melbourne’s inner west, footpaths can become a valuable asset to accommodate daily life. Of the 23 hectares that make up Footscray’s commercial core, only 1% is public open space⁠. This is well below the 9.9% average in the wider City of Maribyrnong area.

Despite the lack of public open space in Footscray, activity on the streets is lively due to a diverse social and cultural mix and changing tempo of street activity.

Gentrification, population growth and multi-storey apartment developments are rapidly changing the physical and demographic landscape. Over the next 20 years Footscray’s population is forecast to grow by 153.19%⁠. This means more people will need access to limited public space.

There are efforts to create more open space in Footscray. For example, in 2016 the City of Maribyrnong redeveloped an open-lot car park at Byron Street as a multilevel car park with an adjacent plaza. However, solutions of this sort have limitations because publicly owned and underdeveloped land is not readily available.

Read more: People love parklets, and businesses can help make them happen

If we rethink definitions of public space to include footpaths, we can start to establish these as spaces for social interaction rather than merely paths for getting from A to B.

More than walking

Modern footpaths are relatively recent urban space. In Western cities, records of footpaths date back to the third century BC, but only in the mid-18th century did they become prevalent in Europe. Before this there was no real physical separation between pedestrians and the carriageway.

In Melbourne, footpaths were scarce at the time the Hoddle Grid was laid in 1837. Not until the 1880s were the city’s footpaths properly paved.

In their most pragmatic form, footpaths provide a safe zone for people to walk, away from moving traffic. However, they can also be an extension of the abutting buildings. Retail goods spill out in front of shops and on kerbs, creating internalised regions. Cafes set up chairs and tables for patrons to sit outside, extending trade into the public realm.

In addition, people use footpaths to congregate or socialise. There are buskers, beggars, authorities, people waiting for transport, or simply those taking a moment to stop.

Read more: Contested spaces: living off the edge in a city mall where design fuels conflict

As a result, footpaths are an ever-changing hybrid of social, commercial and recreational use. Although there can be friction between different activities, the value of urban footpaths is that they are many things to many people.

Yet, despite being such a heavily used space, footpaths in Melbourne are often categorised in planning strategies and policies as road and transport assets. This approach is problematic as it treats them as infrastructure to be managed rather than spaces for human use.

Some cities such as New York do consider footpaths as people-oriented places. The city planning department provides design guidelines to help architects and designers. Footpaths are conceptualised as a “room” with four surfaces: the horizontal pavement, the wall of the building facing the street, the roadside, and the canopy.

This type of thinking acknowledges that footpaths are immersive spaces and the experience of walking them is integral to the success of a street.

Learning from footpath users

People devise many creative and adaptive ways of using them, and architects and planners can learn from these uses. For example, nooks and indents in buildings abutting footpaths enable people to socialise outside in opportunistic ways. However, when unplanned and unmanaged, footpaths can become a jumble of electrical boxes, signposts, café tables, and other disconnected objects.

Footpaths are also the site of temporary events such as markets, which help activate the streets. With local council support, these events not only unlock the potential role of footpaths in community-building, but also help strengthen existing cultural identities.

The weekly Mini Green Market on the corner of Hopkins and Leeds streets was born out of a longstanding tradition of informal street vending in Footscray. Despite some conflict and uncertainty in 2018, vendors can use a wide portion of the footpath to sell their wares in a regular organised event.

The conundrum facing footpaths is that, despite being a site for many diverse activities, they are not often considered an important public space in their own right. What makes a space “public” is its capability to enable a wide range of uses and allow for interaction between people. Footpaths do exactly that.

To make the most of our footpaths, Melbourne and other Australian cities need a change in mindset in how we view these public spaces. If footpaths were more carefully considered in city design and planning, they could contribute even more to the quality of the urban realm.

– ref. Don’t forget the footpath – it’s vital public space – http://theconversation.com/dont-forget-the-footpath-its-vital-public-space-115151

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

Unbelievably, given that he hasn’t moved interest rates once during his entire 33 months as governor, financial markets have Reserve Bank chief Philip Lowe odds on favourite to cut them on Tuesday, just a week and a half before we vote.

What they might be missing is that during an election campaign, a case to adjust rates isn’t enough. The case to wait must be weak as well.

Adjusting rates during a campaign can be seen as interfering with the democratic process. It unavoidably has an impact on perceptions of the economy and economic management. That said, not changing policy rates when there is a compelling case to do so can itself be seen as interfering with the democratic process.

That’s why, during campaigns, the decision becomes less about whether a change is needed than whether a change wait.

The case for cutting is strong, and weak

Inflation is shockingly low. The headline rate for the March quarter was zero. When averaged, the Reserve Bank’s measures of so-called underlying inflation produce a rate for the year to March of 1.4%.

The bank’s current forecast of an underlying inflation rate of 1.75% by the middle of the year will be missed by a lot. The forecast itself was well short of the bank’s 2% to 3% target. The bank will under pressure to downgrade the forecast or explain why it hasn’t when it releases its quarterly update on Friday.

In the absence of an election, it builds a case for an immediate rate cut. Lower inflation raises real interest rates and constitutes an unwanted tightening of monetary conditions. It also puts upward pressure on the dollar.

However, there are reasons to think that structural changes to the world’s economy make this framework is not as relevant as it used to be. Inflation is subdued around the world, yet the global economy is growing and unemployment is low.

In the new environment it isn’t at all clear that even lower interest rates would have a meaningful effect on inflation. Given that the present cash rate is at 1.5%, they would certainly ensure that the bank had less capacity to seriously cut when it was seriously indicated.

The case for waiting is anything but weak

Senior Reserve Bank officials keep intimating that the biggest trigger for the next cut will be rising unemployment. They have said they expect inflation to remain low and that the climb back to 2% will be gradual.

The case for a lower cash rate rests on both inflation staying lower than expected for longer than expected and unemployment rising.

Cutting now would respond to one of these conditions: a low inflation rate.

The April board minutes read as argument for stability:

Given this outlook for further progress towards the bank’s goals, members agreed that there was not a strong case for a near-term adjustment in monetary policy. Members recognised that it was not possible to fine-tune outcomes and that holding monetary policy steady would enable the Bank to be a source of stability and confidence.

The latest economic news has not been bad. The loss of momentum in the second half of 2018 doesn’t seem to continued in 2019. Indicators of consumer spending, consumer confidence, housing activity and business spending appear to have stabilised.

And the new information the board has received since its last meeting has on balance been positive, including a short term fiscal stimulus (presented as a tax package) announced in the budget.

In the global economic environment, indicators show signs of improvement with many equity markets hitting new highs. Global financial conditions remain easy. Asset and commodity prices are strong. Global unemployment is lower than it has been in years. There are no signs of economic or financial strains creating an urgent need to act.

It makes the case for further inaction while the bank waits and watches strong.

And some of us are savers

Often left out of discussion of rates is their effect on savers.

This was noted a few years ago by the then governor Glenn Stevens, who reported receiving letters from upset savers – typically retirees – complaining about the impact of lower rates on their incomes.

Assuming that a cut in the cash rate cuts term deposit rates by a similar amount (as it usually does) then as the Reserve Bank’s cash rate approaches zero the impact of cuts in it has bigger and bigger effects on retirees’ incomes.

A cut in a term deposit rate from 2% to 1.5% means a 25% cut means a cut in income from the deposit of 25%. But a cut from 1.5% to 1% means a cut of 33%.

It’s not only retirees that are hurt. Young people saving for housing deposits, small businesses and non-profits also use term deposits. Many have substantial operational funds sitting on deposit with banks and will be seriously hurt by lower rates. They might even effect their ability to hire, invest and pay higher wages.

So what’ll happen Tuesday?

Our political class would find it hard to believe that after two and a half years of inaction, the Reserve Bank board suddenly needed to cut rates ten days out from an election.

For that reason alone, even if the latest inflation figures presented a compelling case for cutting rates, the case for doing nothing would remain quite strong.

It’ll be up to the board, meeting at the Reserve Bank’s Martin Place headquarters in Sydney on Tuesday morning.

Ultimately rates may need to be adjusted at some point, but for now there seems enough evidence to justify sitting back and waiting throughout the election campaign, and perhaps beyond, to see how the economy performs in the second half of the year.

Read more: Vital signs. Zero inflation means the Reserve Bank should cut rates as soon as it can, on Tuesday week

– ref. Why the Reserve Bank shouldn’t (but might) cut interest rates on Tuesday – http://theconversation.com/why-the-reserve-bank-shouldnt-but-might-cut-interest-rates-on-tuesday-116354

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sue Joseph, Senior Lecturer, Writing and Journalism, FASS, University of Technology Sydney

Why do we tell stories, and how are they crafted? In a new series, we unpick the work of the writer on both page and screen.

Decades ago, American journalist and screenwriter Dan Wakefield published Between the Lines: A reporter’s personal journey through public events. In terms of reflection and consideration, Wakefield was years ahead of his time. He writes of the “shadows that lurk behind the printed word … We journalists are trained by the custom and conventions of our craft to remain out of sight, pretending not to be there but simply to know”.

He then returns to many of his own pieces of journalism, and fills in the gaps – what he was feeling, seeing, doing, behind the scenes. What actually happened, as opposed to what was reported. This does not take away from the integrity of the original report but bolsters it in terms of completeness; they are now deeper, richer stories. Possibly “truer”.

Leigh Sales does this “between the lines” of the individual narratives in her latest (and third) book Any Ordinary Day: Blindsides, resilience and what happens after the worst day of your life.

Sales recounts the stories of seven ordinary Australians whose lives, in a heartbeat, became extraordinary and visible through traumatic incident; Stuart Diver, Louisa Hope, Walter Mikac, Hannah Richell, Michael Spence, James Scott and Juliet Darling.

What makes this book so valuable is that she interweaves discussion of some of her more dubious decision-making processes as a journalist, recognising the depth of her questionable actions. This is courageous writing, particularly from such a high profile professional.

But rather than framing Sales as untrustworthy, her self-effacement pertaining to ethical breaches helps us to see how decisions are made in the field, in the heat of reporting. How mistakes are made, in the name of getting the “story”. She writes shamefully of some of these decisions, but not necessarily regretfully; all were made as part of her own learning curve, manifesting as the skilled anchor we turn to nightly on our screens.

Read more: Journalism needs to practice transparency in a different way to rebuild credibility

The power of disclosure

Sales’s book performs as part memoir/part trauma narrative/s/part investigation/part meta; and it is on page 99 that she begins her craft mea culpa. She writes:

When I look back at the mistakes I’ve made as a reporter including experiences that to this day make me feel ashamed, I can see that they were usually due to a failure of empathy […]

Authentic empathic journalistic disclosure is a means to garner more public trust, potentially portraying journalists as robust yet feeling professionals; as mortals with flaws; as fallible, but with a genuine belief in the integrity of their mission – informing the people, for the people.

Shining from the pages of Sales’ text is a self-effacing honesty, rarely accessed, around this type of journalistic thinking, craft and process. Included is not just a discussion of empathy, but demonstration of embodied empathic, on-the-ground interviewing.

The text is framed by trauma. Sales begins this hybrid narrative with her own: the breath-taking story of her near-death experience in 2014, during the emergency delivery of her second child; not only her near-death, but that of her tiny son, as well; and with his survival, the lingering probability of brain damage.

She then launches into well-formed and intimate discussions with the seven people whose stories form the basis of the book. This is Sales’ attempt at dealing with her own brush with death; a gathering of tales about resilience, fears and vulnerability.

The dominant craft on display here is her interviewing skills, and her ability to elicit authentic responses from her subjects. She writes:

I know how to craft a good line of questioning that helps [people] open up. I’m a strong listener and I follow up what people are saying.

These are the two most essential techniques a young journalist or writer can acquire – crafting the right questions and listening – and it takes practise and time to develop and evolve.

Intimate narration

What Sales also does supremely well is narrate – intimately and closely, as if she is whispering in your ear. She begins the text with second person point of view (you), unusual from a journalist and difficult to sustain.

But she gets away with it as it helps convey her main theme – ordinary days turning extraordinary in a heartbeat – and she places us in her metaphoric shoes. She switches to singular third person narration (he); then to plural first person (we), before launching into her first person voice. This technique only works when it is apt – and it is apt here.

Her research into the neuroscience around trauma is in depth but accessible; and her quest to discover more about growth following traumatic pain is insightful and (dare I write without sounding mawkish) hopeful.

“What we see about shocking blindsides doesn’t tell us anything remotely like the whole story,” she writes. “Being struck by something awful is not the end of every good part of life”. For everyone, this is knowledge worth having.

The final chapter bookends the text with more of Sales’ own story – the breakdown of her marriage (succinctly and unsentimentally narrated) and an undiagnosed illness of her eldest son (we also learn that her youngest son has shown no sign of damage from his birth ordeal).

Teaching empathy

Sales tells us of callow mistakes made starting out as a journalist. It is with this hindsight and insight – a glimpse behind the maturing practice – where we sense both her ambition and elation for her assignments. Some she executes well, sometimes fluking it; in undertaking others, she clearly believes she made unethical choices.

But she does not lend herself the freedom of simply hiding behind youth, as she writes: “ … sadly, I can identify similar mistakes when I was a senior reporter”. It is in the candid telling of these fraught back stories that the humanity of Sales is made whole.

Not just the resolute grip of the interviewer on 7.30; nor fellow journalist Annabel Crabb’s best friend – clever, funny, playful – on their podcast Chat 10 Looks 3. But the woman, in love with story and storytelling, growing into her profession.

It is easy to write that empathy must be taught to our young journalists and writers; that it may be the key to subverting the disparaging distrust the public embraces towards industry.

But how to “teach” empathy? It has to be a discussion framed by ethics – the almighty notion of swapping shoes and walking in them. Stopping in the field, just stopping for a moment, and thinking about the person or story you are pursuing. Feeling what it must feel like to be them.

Read more: Do art and literature cultivate empathy?

Now we have an idiosyncratically Australian text, written by one of the most respected Australian journalists, to teach with; one that expounds honesty about poor ethical choices, and evidence of embodied empathic interviewing. Sales’ deep enmeshing with her interviewees does not undermine the rigour of her interrogation – she still asks the hard questions and mines deeply – and the interviewees always answer, with grace.

We hear and read the back and forth of the interview with her subjects; her reflections and asides set out in print. Would she be asking these questions in this way, if she had not suffered her own cataclysmic trauma with the birth of her second son? Perhaps – I think she was getting there.

Sales writes of the end of that year, 2014, and broadcasting the coverage of two incidents that vibrated throughout the nation, binding us collectively in their thrall: the public death of cricketer Phillip Hughes and the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney.

It was all getting a little too much, on the back of her son’s traumatic birth. There was just too much palpable pain adrift, and she no longer felt safe. So she imagined this book, and by using the tools of her trade, she interviewed and wrote until it was done.

Perhaps it is journalistic therapy – conceptually, it definitely began that way, Sales admits. She was looking to write her way out of aggregated pain and sorrow. But I believe the denouement of this text is her greatest gift – the demonstration of empathy not as antithesis to good story re-telling, but as integral.

– ref. Inside the story: Leigh Sales, ordinary days and crafting empathy ‘between the lines’ – http://theconversation.com/inside-the-story-leigh-sales-ordinary-days-and-crafting-empathy-between-the-lines-107890

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

Bill Shorten’s Sunday launch in Brisbane was politics at its most slickly professional. Every box was ticked.

Indigenous dancers were part of the Welcome to Country. Pat Dodson – who would be Indigenous affairs minister in a Shorten government – pledged Labor would “walk with First Nations peoples”.

The star roles of Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek were a reminder that women are at the top of the Shorten team – something Scott Morrison can’t match.

Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, past animosities locked away, were there for heroes’ welcomes, as was Paul Keating.

Bob Hawke sent good wishes.

Shorten declared “Bob, we love you, and in the next 13 days we’re going to do this for you”.

A video had members of Shorten’s frontbench extolling the virtues of their leader and each other, putting unity up in lights.

In the audience, cheering supporters in their red t-shirts bobbed up and down repeatedly to applaud on cue.

Chloe Shorten was the final warm up speaker. A Queenslander, she started with the simple words, “it’s so lovely to be home”.

She lauded her partner in terms that might make anyone but a prime ministerial aspirant blush. “Caring, smart, funny, gentle, he is a wonderful dad, a terrible dancer, and a very proud bulldog owner”, she said, before asking the crowd “would you please welcome my husband Bill Shorten”.

Razzmatazz aside, the opposition leader – standing in front of Labor’s slogan “A Fair Go For Australia” – brought together the “case for change” in a carefully-honed, strongly delivered address. His speech cast Labor as the party for working people and the government as giving priority to the privileged.

“Today we sharpen the argument,” he said. “Today we make the choice clear.

“Our great country needs real change – because more of the same isn’t good enough for Australia.”

“Our case for change rests on all the great things we are determined to achieve for our country’s future. Everything from equality for women, to getting the NDIS back on track.

“Our agenda is ambitious – it aims high. We are choosing hope over fear. We’re choosing the future over the past.”

Labor has put out a swag of policies before and during the campaign and Shorten’s speech contained minimal new initiatives.

He announced businesses with a turnover under A$10 million which take on new workers under 25 or over 55, or a parent or carer trying to get back into the workforce, would be able to claim an extra 30% tax deduction on that salary for up to five employees.

Shorten said Labor was the only party with a plan to help youth unemployment and age discrimination. The measure would cost $141 million over the forward estimates.

Under Labor there would also be a new crackdown, flagged by Shorten during Friday’s leaders debate, on tax avoidance by multinationals. It would prevent large corporations using “dodgy royalties” to get around paying tax in Australia. This would yield $2 billion for the budget.

Shorten’s comprehensive election program spans health, education, childcare, a dental subsidy for pensioners, jobs and wages. The detail of its fiscal commitment to stronger surpluses than promised by the government will be unveiled late this week.

Central to Shorten’s policy pitch is climate change, on which he highlighted Coalition divisions and its aggressive campaign against Labor.

“In the next 13 days, our opponents and their vested interests will throw everything at us on this issue. But we will stand our ground. We will fight hard. We will defy the pseudo-science and the scare campaigns.”

On climate change Labor would “not run nor hide from the problem. We’ll get on and do something about it.

“And on this issue, perhaps above all others, the contrast and the case for change is night-and-day, black-and-white.

“If you want to see real action on climate change you need to vote for a Labor government.”

Shorten played on the years of government disunity underlining the contrast with Labor’s solid front. “If you vote Labor, you can end the chaos in Canberra – by electing a stable and united team.”

The choice, he said, was between “three more years of smug, smirking, unfair complacency under the conservatives, or a bolder, better and more equal future for Australia under a new Labor government.”

He painted Morrison as captive of Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer, and the Coalition as only interested in giving money to the rich.

“Scott Morrison cannot promise you stable government because he’s already made himself hostage to Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer,” he said.

“If the Liberals and Nationals get another three years they want to give $77 billion of taxpayer money to the highest tier of income earners in this country.”

And – to plant a hint of conspiracy – he said, “I don’t know what secret deal my opponent has done with Clive Palmer to lock in his preferences.

“But no one gets something for nothing from Clive Palmer. And I bet big tax giveaway for big business was right in the mix.”

He said that often throughout the campaign the Liberals and Nationals had claimed Australia could not afford Labor’s initiatives. “So before you vote, understand this: every time you hear the Liberals say ‘Australia can’t afford it’, what they really mean is ‘you don’t deserve it’”.

“If we win the election, our priority is not making the very rich, even richer – it’s getting wages moving again for working people.”

He promised to “respect the capacity of business and the economy to pay” for the improved wages and conditions he pledged. “But I know I can deliver a better deal for working people through negotiation and cooperation – because I’ve been doing it for 30 years.”

Shorten said the Australian economy was “not working in the interests of working people”, with wages at record lows, one million people wanting more hours of work and one million doing two jobs just to make ends meet.

“And the economy is running on empty – the fumes of zero per cent inflation last quarter.”

The Liberals “are the architects of low wages growth and they are proud of it”.

Later, in his indomitable style, Keating sharpened the contrast in an interview with the ABC. Shorten, he said, was a “pied piper” with big ideas, while Morrison was “a fossil with a baseball cap”.

– ref. View from The Hill: Shorten presents the ‘case for change’ in sleek launch – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-shorten-presents-the-case-for-change-in-sleek-launch-116580