Labor’s childcare plan: parents, children, and educators stand to benefit, but questions remain

April 29, 2019

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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jen Jackson, Education Policy Lead, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

Labor’s proposed A$4 billion reform to the childcare subsidy on Sunday confirms that early childhood is a key policy issue this election. This is on top of Labor’s previous announcement of 15 hours of funded preschool for every Australian three-year-old.

The latest announcement will no doubt be welcomed by families balancing the costs of childcare against the benefits of participation in paid work. In 2015, the Productivity Commission estimated around 165,000 Australian parents would like to work more, but were prevented due to poor accessibility or affordability of suitable childcare.

Under Labor’s proposal, families on incomes up to A$174,000 with children under five would be better off on average by A$26 a week, or A$1,200 a year per child. Most families earning up to A$69,000 would get their childcare free. Currently, they receive a subsidy of 85%. Labor’s proposal would save them up to A$2,100 annually per child.

The current subsidy gradually tapers down as earnings increase. The lowest subsidy available is 20% for the highest-earning families, before it cuts out at A$351,258. Families on incomes above A$174,000, under Labor’s plan, would continue to receive the same level of support as under current arrangements.

The current subsidy was introduced as part of the Coalition’s major childcare reforms (worth A$3.5 billion) in 2018, which included a means-tested subsidy and removal of annual caps. The reforms benefitted an estimated one million lower-income families – but also left around 280,000 families worse off, including families with neither parent in work.

ANU modelling had predicted that while the reforms would benefit low-income families, the activity test would mean families not working or studying would be at risk of missing out.

This is where early childhood policy gets complicated. Policies can be motivated by different goals. The Coalition reforms were aimed at encouraging parental workforce participation. Labor’s proposal for the childcare subsidy seem similarly motivated.

But parents are not the only beneficiaries of childcare subsidies. Quality childcare also benefits children’s learning. Many childcare programs for four-year- olds (and increasingly, three-year-olds), incorporate preschool. For children of all ages, Australian childcare providers must provide a play-based learning program, guided by the national framework.

That’s why childcare and preschool services are all known as early childhood education and care: whenever children are being cared for, they are also learning. Even a nappy change offers opportunities to support children’s learning, as skilled educators use playful, caring interactions to help young children develop skills like communication, trust and well-being.

Educators can also help families recognise these opportunities, so learning continues at home. Children in low-income households often have fewer opportunities to learn, due to factors such as stress and limited resources for investment.

By supporting access to quality early childhood services, governments can help families learn everyday ways to enhance their children’s learning.

To maximise benefits for children, all early childhood services need skilled, professional staff. Labor’s promised wage increase of 20% over eight years for early childhood educators addresses an issue that has been in the too-hard basket for too long.

Research has shown many Australian early childhood educators are paid so little they are financially dependent on others in their households — ironically while enabling financial independence for other working women.

Low wages place downward pressure on the quality of early childhood programs. Educators’ qualifications are lowest in low-income communities, where families cannot afford to meet the costs of higher wages. Government subsidies can help to break the link between educators’ wages and families’ ability to pay fees, so the best educators can reach the children who most need them.

Of course, the devil is in the detail when it comes to policy implementation. Labor has not specified how the wage increases will be delivered, instead committing to further consultation with the sector. Big questions remain about how government subsidies – to parents or educators – will be absorbed into a sector with for-profit and not-for-profit providers.

Close monitoring of the impact on childcare costs will be essential. Labor’s plan includes asking the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to investigate “excessive” childcare fees. But can support for families be increased without stimulating an increase in fees? Can educators be supported to earn a fair wage, while keeping prices fair for families?

There is much to be gained by engaging with these questions. When parents are working, the economy benefits. When children are learning, everyone benefits, as the impact of early learning lasts throughout school and beyond. Countries like Sweden and Finland show what may be possible when parents’ and children’s needs are prioritised equally.

We owe it to Australia’s children to keep these issues on the election agenda.

– ref. Labor’s childcare plan: parents, children, and educators stand to benefit, but questions remain – http://theconversation.com/labors-childcare-plan-parents-children-and-educators-stand-to-benefit-but-questions-remain-116143

Public schools actually outperform private schools, and with less money

By The Conversation -

April 29, 2019

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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Zyngier, Adjunct associate professor, Southern Cross University

It’s often claimed private schools outperform public schools. In recent days, a media report revealed the Liberal Party candidate for the Melbourne seat of Macnamara had previously written in support of public funding of private schools. The report said the candidate, Kate Ashmor, wrote a newspaper letter in 2001 in which she said:

I was only able to attend a private school via a heavy subsidy due to the income restraints of my parents, and I firmly believe that I would never have achieved the high VCE score I did if it hadn’t been for my private school education.

But our analysis of MySchool data and Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) results between 2014 and 2018 shows public schools have similar, or even better, VCE results than private schools with similar rankings of socioeconomic status. And these public schools achieve the results with far less funding per student.

Returns on investment

Those who argue in favour of public funding for private schools claim private schools are more efficient and academically outperform public schools.

The conservative side of politics believes there is no equity problem to address in Australian education. The current federal government relies on conservative researchers’ evidence denying any causal link between socioeconomic status and student academic outcomes.

Our analysis compared the results of 229 private and 278 public schools. Schools with fewer than 20 students at Year 12 were excluded, as were select-entry public schools. The analysis compared both VCE results and school-based data including funding details available from MySchool and individual school websites. The analysis took into account the socioeconomic status of the schools, using the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA).

The ICSEA is a scale that allows a comparison of the levels of educational advantage or disadvantage students bring to their academic studies. The average ICSEA across all Australian schools is 1,000.

In Victoria the average ICSEA is 1,031, while in Tasmania and the Northern Territory the average is less than 1,000. Schools above that figure are deemed more advantaged than those below. The school with the highest ICSEA in Victoria is Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Burwood (1,210).

There are 38 other private schools at the top of the rankings before the first public non-selective school, Princes Hill Secondary (1,156). In Victoria 318 schools are above 1,000, while those below average include only eight non-government schools, either Islamic or Catholic. The lowest ICSEA among these eight is 926 while the lowest public school ICSEA is 876.

What we found

Even excluding select-entry schools, public schools equal or outperform private schools with similar ICSEA rankings. Table 1 (below) shows Victorian schools’ VCE results for similar or “like” private and public schools, their median scores and percentage of 40+ scores, (only 9% of students will get a score on or above 40), total government (federal and state) funding per student as shown on the MySchool website, and Year 12 fees found on individual school websites.

When it comes to Year 12 funding, private schools on average outspend public schools by almost A$8,000 per student to achieve a similar result. The average Year 12 fee in public schools is A$753 compared to A$12,374 in private schools.

Almost 50% of funding is from federal and state funds for independent schools and 80% or more for Catholic schools. The School Resource Standard (SRS) is an estimate of how much funding a school needs to meet the educational needs of its students.

In 2018, the SRS was A$13,764 for secondary students across Australia. More than half of Victorian public schools currently receive less than the SRS.

Socio-economic status and academic achievment

Conservative commentators claim socioeconomic status has little impact on student academic performance. This is contrary to peer-reviewed research.

This analysis of the 2014-2018 VCE results demonstrates school performance is strongly correlated to the socioeconomic index of the school. The higher the ISCEA generally, the better the school performs in VCE. Postcodes “don’t equal destiny”, however, as there are some exceptions in public schools as shown in Table 1.

For example, Narre Warren South P-12 College, with more than 55% of children from non-English-speaking backgrounds and 81% of its enrolment from disadvantaged homes, outperforms most private schools with a median study score of 32 (including 32 for English and 36 for Physics). Almost 11% of its study scores are over 40%.

What about money?

Can we imagine how much better our public schools could be with the extra resources that would be available if governments transferred the A$13.7 billion spent on private schools to their public counterparts?

Spending more money on students and school buildings, well-being centres, international campuses, playing fields, equestrian facilities, rowing sheds, music centres and swimming pools seems to make no difference at all when students have similar social and economic backgrounds.

A new review of research studies shows strong evidence of a positive causal relationship between school funding and student achievement and that certain school resources that cost money have a positive influence on student results. As well, more equitable allocation of funds between schools increases equity in student outcomes.

Spending growth for private schools has outstripped spending growth for public schools over the past decade, according to the Productivity Commission. Annual funding for government schools rose about 23% to A$42 billion, while funding for private schools jumped 42% to A$13 billion.

When all other things are held equal, it seems the only factors that could be making the difference to the VCE results are the teachers and students in public schools who are defying expectations and labels. The best-performing education systems worldwide are those that combine equity with quality. They give all children opportunities for a quality education.

– ref. Public schools actually outperform private schools, and with less money – http://theconversation.com/public-schools-actually-outperform-private-schools-and-with-less-money-113914

Nothing to fear? How humans (and other intelligent animals) might ruin the autonomous vehicle utopia

By The Conversation -

April 29, 2019

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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason Thompson, Senior Research Fellow, Transport, Health and Urban Design (THUD) Research Hub, University of Melbourne

Globally, road crashes kill 1.3 million people a year and injure nearly 50 million more. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been identified as a potential solution to this issue if they can learn to identify and avoid situations leading to crashes.

Unlike human drivers, these vehicles won’t get tired, drive drunk, look at their phone, or speed. What’s more, AVs will reduce congestion and pollution, increase access to public transport, be cheaper, improve mobility for people with disabilities, and make transport fun again. Right?

Well, that’s what the brochure says.

Rightly or wrongly, billions of dollars are being poured into autonomous vehicle research and development to pursue this autopia. However, barely any resource or thought is being given to the question of how humans will ultimately respond to the AV fleet. In a city full of autonomous cars, how might our behaviour and use of city streets change?

In one scenario, people could act on the knowledge that these vehicles will stop any time someone chooses to step in front of them, bringing traffic to a halt.

People will freely use the streets if they feel it’s safe to do so, as on ‘Pedestrian Paradise Day’ in Tokyo when no cars are on the road. Ned Snowman/Shutterstock

Humans (and animals) will adapt

O⁠n⁠e⁠ ⁠o⁠f⁠ ⁠h⁠u⁠m⁠a⁠n⁠s’⁠ ⁠g⁠r⁠e⁠a⁠t⁠ ⁠s⁠t⁠r⁠e⁠n⁠g⁠t⁠h⁠s⁠⁠ is our⁠ ⁠a⁠d⁠a⁠p⁠t⁠a⁠bility⁠. We quickly ⁠⁠l⁠e⁠a⁠r⁠n⁠ ⁠t⁠o⁠ ⁠m⁠a⁠n⁠i⁠p⁠u⁠l⁠a⁠t⁠e⁠ ⁠a⁠n⁠d⁠ ⁠e⁠x⁠p⁠l⁠o⁠i⁠t⁠ ⁠o⁠u⁠r⁠ ⁠e⁠n⁠v⁠i⁠r⁠o⁠n⁠m⁠e⁠n⁠t⁠.⁠ A future road environment saturated with autonomous vehicles will be no different.

⁠F⁠o⁠r ⁠e⁠x⁠a⁠m⁠p⁠l⁠e⁠, think about why you don’t walk out in front of traffic or drive through stop signs. Because other cars could injure or hurt you, right?⁠ ⁠

But autonomous vehicles promise something new. They are being designed to “act flawlessly”.

There are two elements to this: the first is not making mistakes, and the second is compensating for the occasional errors and misjudgements that fallible humans make. Autonomous vehicles promise alignment with Asimov’s First Law of Robotics:

A robot may not injure a human.

Now imagine crossing a road or highway in a city saturated by autonomous cars where the threat of being run over disappears. You⁠ ⁠(⁠o⁠r⁠ ⁠a⁠n⁠y⁠ ⁠o⁠t⁠h⁠e⁠r⁠ ⁠mildly i⁠n⁠t⁠e⁠l⁠l⁠i⁠g⁠e⁠n⁠t⁠ ⁠a⁠n⁠i⁠m⁠a⁠l⁠)⁠ might quickly learn that ⁠⁠oncoming traffic poses no threat at all. Replicated thousands of times across a dense inner city, this could produce gridlock among safety-conscious autonomous vehicles, but virtual freedom of movement for humans – maybe even heralding a return to pedestrian rights of yesteryear.

Could an autonomous vehicle future return the streets to humans, as seen here in early 20th-century Melbourne outside Flinders Street Station? University of Melbourne Architecture, Building & Planning Glass Slides Collection

A simple example of how this might happen comes from game theory. Take two scenarios at an intersection where pedestrians and vehicles negotiate priority to cross first. Each receives known “pay-offs” for behaviour in the context of the other’s action. The higher the comparative pay-off for either party, the more likely the action.

In the left-hand scenario below, the Nash equilibrium (the optimum combined action of both parties) exists in the lower left quadrant where the pedestrian has a small incentive to “stay” to avoid being injured by the manually driven car, and the driver has a strong incentive to “go”.

However, in the scenario on the right, the autonomous vehicles has a desire to act flawlessly and pose no threat to the pedestrian at all. While this might be great for safety, the pedestrian can now adopt a strategy of “go” at all times, forcing the AV to stay put.

A simple ‘normal game’ comparison of pedestrians versus manually operated and autonomous cars negotiating intersections. Author provided

Can this potential problem be overcome?

One solution might be to ⁠p⁠r⁠o⁠g⁠r⁠a⁠m⁠ ⁠⁠a⁠l⁠g⁠o⁠r⁠i⁠t⁠h⁠m⁠s⁠ into vehicles ⁠t⁠h⁠a⁠t⁠ make them ⁠o⁠c⁠c⁠a⁠s⁠i⁠o⁠n⁠a⁠l⁠l⁠y⁠,⁠ ⁠p⁠u⁠r⁠p⁠o⁠s⁠e⁠f⁠u⁠l⁠l⁠y⁠,⁠ ⁠r⁠u⁠n into⁠ ⁠people, animals or other vehicles⁠⁠. Although this would maintain a level of fear and caution in the population, l⁠e⁠g⁠a⁠l⁠l⁠y⁠ ⁠a⁠n⁠d⁠ ⁠m⁠o⁠r⁠a⁠l⁠l⁠y⁠⁠ ⁠it is hard to see how this would be ⁠a⁠c⁠c⁠e⁠p⁠t⁠a⁠b⁠l⁠e⁠.

Another option could be infrastructure separating autonomous vehicles from vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists. But the cost and reduction in amenity this would create would be enormous. Further, this type of solution could be applied now, negating much of the need for AV software and technology development in the first place.

A final, duplicitous idea is to simply turn off the safety systems that cause so-called “erratic vehicle behaviour” (i.e., slowing down to avoid hitting people). This is reported to have occurred when a self-driving Uber struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona last year. However, if this is the solution, you then have to ask, “What is the transport problem autonomous vehicles are actually trying to solve?”

It won’t happen overnight

In the scenarios above most of the fleet are autonomous vehicles, and humans adapt to their consistently safe behaviour. However, the complete transition to autonomous vehicles will not occur overnight and might create new crash situations that are, so far, poorly understood.

For example, we are developing simulations of interactions between vulnerable road users and a mixed fleet of autonomous vehicles and human-driven cars. These models show how inconsistencies between the behaviour of manual and autonomous vehicle types could even lead to more crashes during the transition.

The future for AVs under threat?

As AV technology rolls on, and the marketing hype surrounding them continues to draw attention and burn up investment dollars, it should be remembered that humans and animals are still going to behave how we always have by continually adapting and exploiting weaknesses in our environment.

Part of the promise of autonomous vehicles is their proposed safety through deference to human life. But, if the point of transport systems is to enable efficient movement of people and goods for the benefit of society, this strength of AVs might prove to be their ultimate weakness as a viable mass transport mode.

– ref. Nothing to fear? How humans (and other intelligent animals) might ruin the autonomous vehicle utopia – http://theconversation.com/nothing-to-fear-how-humans-and-other-intelligent-animals-might-ruin-the-autonomous-vehicle-utopia-114504

Election tip: 23.9% is a meaningless figure, ignore the tax-to-GDP ratio

By The Conversation -

April 29, 2019

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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Expect to hear a lot about tax during the coming leaders’ debates.

Which is why it’s important to get two things straight.

The first is that you can’t argue against a tax by pointing out that it will take money from people.

By all means, use that as an argument against taxes in general. It’s true – taxes take money from people. But to oppose better taxing capital gains or tightening up on dividend imputation refunds because they will take money from people is to leave unexplored the more important question of whether those particular tax measures are better or worse than the alternatives.

You can’t escape that question by just saying that all taxes are bad – that we ought to collect less. For any amount of tax collected, the next most important question is the way in which it is collected.

Low tax and high spending can be the same thing

And the second thing we ought to get straight is that talk about one side of politics being “low tax” and the other being “high tax” tells us next to nothing.

To see this, consider Bill Shorten’s childcare policy announced on Sunday. Labor has promised to spend A$1 billion a year in subsidies to cut the cost of childcare for every family with a combined income of up to $175,000 and to make it free for working families earning up to $69,000.

But what if, instead of subsidies, it had promised to deliver the $1 billion via tax rebates, to be paid to parents on proof of their use of childcare?

The effect would be same, although the method of payment would be more complicated.

Childcare would be just as supported, and just as supported from the public purse, but one policy would be called “big spending”, while the other would be called “low tax”.

Take the quiz

Here’s a quiz: is the Private Health Insurance Rebate a tax break (and counted in the budget as a contribution toward lower taxes and smaller government) or is it a spending measure (and counted in the budget as boosting the size of government)?

What about the Family Tax Benefit? Or the film industry tax rebate or the seniors And Pensioners Tax Offset or the Low Income Tax Offset or the existing Child Care Rebate?

It’s okay. You’re not expected to know. The answer varies from case to case. The point is that it is silly to claim that tax cuts are good and government spending is bad when in many cases each could be easily classified as the other.

The signature measure in the April budget is a case in point. It’s a tax offset of up to $1,080 per person to be paid out with tax returns after July 1. It’ll push billions into the economy, just as the Rudd government’s cash bonuses during the global financial crisis did. But Rudd’s payments were categorised as spending; these payments will be categorised as tax cuts, which means they will keep down the tax-to-GDP ratio.

Which means it is silly to talk about the tax-to-GDP ratio, as the government insists on doing.

That speed limit, where did it come from?

Labor was keen enough to do it while it was in office, boasting in its final budget in 2013 that its tax-to-GDP ratio was lower than in the Howard years, and lower than it had been before the global financial crisis, as if that was an achievement to be proud of. It wasn’t. The ratio was lower than during the mining booms because fewer tax dollars were rolling in, and it was lower than before the financial crisis because the economy was weaker.

The Coalition has hardened the tax-to-GDP ratio into a target. As treasurer, Scott Morrison spoke last year of “a speed limit on taxes in our budgets, that requires that taxes do not grow beyond 23.9% of our economy”.

Why 23.9%? Well, in the Coalition’s first budgets it wasn’t a target at all, merely an operating assumption used by the treasury for long-term forecasting. As it explained in the 2017 budget papers:

A tax-to-GDP “cap” assumption is adopted for technical purposes and does not represent a government policy or target. It is based on the average tax-to-GDP ratio over the period from the introduction of the GST and to just prior to the global financial crisis.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann have begun talking about 23.9% as if it’s a commitment, a pledge, even though even though it would be hard to keep if the economy picked up (and probably unwise to keep), and even though it is fairly meaningless given the ease with which changes in spending can be classified as changes in tax and the other way around.

Treasury makes pretty clear what it thinks about the measure in the back of Budget Paper 1. That’s where it sets out the history of the important budget measures and its forecasts for the future. You won’t find the tax-to-GDP ratio in the first two tables. Instead, it details “revenue to GDP”, which is a much more relevant measure because it includes income from all sources – fees as well as taxes, and income from Future Fund earnings which are revenue too.

Think like treasury

Early in his time as time as shadow treasurer, Labor’s Chris Bowen bought into tax-to-GDP debate, challenging the Coalition to keep the ratio below such and such per cent. He isn’t doing so now.

It’d be wise to ignore talk of the tax-to-GDP ratio in the coming leaders’ debates

Focus instead on what they’re planning to do and how they are planning to pay for it. You’ll get a handle on how to vote.

– ref. Election tip: 23.9% is a meaningless figure, ignore the tax-to-GDP ratio – http://theconversation.com/election-tip-23-9-is-a-meaningless-figure-ignore-the-tax-to-gdp-ratio-115432

Thirty-five voices, one movement: a new book examines #MeToo in Australia

By The Conversation -

April 29, 2019

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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

Women have been sharing personal stories of sexual assault, abuse and harassment for – well – centuries. But in October 2017, when #MeToo went viral, there was a shift in the way these stories were received.

Suddenly, women were listened to with respect – that is, without the usual accompaniment of blame, insult, judgment and scepticism, followed by an unseemly rush to defend #NotAllMen.

#MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement is an anthology of Australian writing that explores this moment. Edited by Natalie Kon-yu, Christie Nieman, Maggie Scott and Miriam Sved, it includes the voices of 35 Australian women through essays, personal stories, pictures and even poetry.

#MeToo: a new anthology. Picador

It attempts to redraw the lines, in the words of the book’s editors, between sexual assault and other forms of behaviour: “The line between ‘a bit of fun’ and harassment.” It does so by refracting these behaviours through the “prism of women’s experiences”.

This is a brave book. It wades into all the difficult areas – veering between bad sex, humiliating youthful experiences, and things that are clearly wrong and criminal.

It tackles the toxic cultural practices that foster an environment in which gendered violence is more likely to occur – the dense web of attitudes that entrench unequal power relations, the treatment of women as objects, the rise of “rape culture”.

As Sarah Firth artfully points out in “Start Where You Are”, a gem of a graphic essay included in this anthology: the cry “smash the patriarchy” carries the unhelpful connotation that “patriarchy” is something that is easily identified and taken down. The accompanying illustration ironically features a character dreaming about taking an axe to a statue of a 17th century Cavalier, with a plaque helpfully labelled “MEN R #1”. Of course, it’s not that easy. This is why change is hard.

The problem of speaking out

In a standout opening essay, Kath Kenny writes about the difficulties faced by women who “choose” to speak out about sexual harassment. She deftly critiques the media’s requirement that each woman speak individually as a victim – and only as a victim.

As Kenny points out, in a world in which women make up less than a quarter of media subjects interviewed or reported on, often featuring as victims when they do, being positioned as a victim means that you’ll never be consulted as an “expert”. And that carries a real cost.

Individualised stories can be dismissed as anomalies, extremes and aberrations. They fail to threaten the social structures that allow abuse to continue. These stories, Kenny argues, “only get us so far”.

Even where women choose not to speak publicly, they can still be made to “pay”. Take, for example, journalist Ashleigh Raper, who alleged that then-NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley put his hands inside her underpants at a function in 2016. Raper chose not to make a complaint, but when the matter was raised in NSW parliament, the story became subject to intense media scrutiny – it was no longer her own.

Actress Eryn Jean Norvill made a private complaint against Geoffrey Rush to the Sydney Theatre Company, but allegations of his inappropriate behaviour were published by the Daily Telegraph without her involvement. Kenny writes that both women were “outed, mercilessly vilified and accused of inventing malicious lies”.

What many well-publicised #MeToo cases in Australia have in common is that the men involved have sued or threatened to sue for defamation. It’s not much of a leap to conclude that the reputational interests of the cashed up and powerful are better protected by law than those alleging harassment.

This is the problem addressed by Alison Croggon in her “Backgrounder” on the Geoffrey Rush case, which focuses on the ways in which the legal action failed to expose the true nature of power relations in the already highly insecure theatrical profession.

These include, Croggon writes, “disempowering mechanisms of denial, such as the suggestion that harassment isn’t harassment … the notion that it wasn’t serious or that the victim invited it”. And, she adds, “We’ve seen all of these claims at work in the trial”.

The ‘double-bind’

This anthology includes outstanding contributions from women of colour. Shakira Hussein writes powerfully about the double-bind that confronts all women of colour who “campaign against sexism in our communities, only to find our words used to stigmatise our collective identity”.

Eugenia Flynn confronts the multiple oppressions that face Indigenous women. She writes, “misogyny and predatory sexual behaviour are all part of the intergenerational trauma passed down and cycled around Indigenous communities”. But when exposed to the “blinding whiteness of Australian media” the pain is made worse, endowed with what Flynn calls an “almost pornographic” quality.

What Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women need, writes Flynn, is “self-determined solutions to the violence created by colonisation”.

Elsewhere, Fleur McDonald paints a horrifying portrait of domestic violence in rural communities, Kerri Sackville takes a despairing look at mid-life dating, Ginger Gorman wades into the world of online misogyny, and Nicole Hayes writes about carving out space in the male dominated world of AFL.

In yet another standout contribution, Greta Parry questions the way wives of men who are “outed” for sexual misconduct are asked to “somehow make amends” for the behaviour of their partners, and come to be defined by that conduct, in ways that men are not.

There’s an uncomfortable sense throughout the book that women will face repercussions for speaking out. Comments sections will undoubtedly fill with people who opine on why it’s difficult to distinguish rape from sex, who allege that a footballer’s career is more important than a young woman’s right to safety, or worry that feminists are trying to stamp out sex, flirting and lacy underwear.

But as “the backlash begins in earnest” speaking out remains necessary because, in the editors’ words, “We can’t rely on men to change the world”.

– ref. Thirty-five voices, one movement: a new book examines #MeToo in Australia – http://theconversation.com/thirty-five-voices-one-movement-a-new-book-examines-metoo-in-australia-116053

Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup: Simon Bridges’ destabilised leadership

By Bryce Edwards -

April 28, 2019

Simon Bridges’ hold on the National Party leadership is still in trouble, with destabilising factors making his continued survival unlikely. I wrote about this several weeks ago, reporting that a series of gaffes and leadership mis-steps had set off a fresh round of questioning about whether Bridges can continue in the role – see: Simon Bridges’ beleaguered leadership.

Since then there’s been nothing to suggest he will recover from a narrative that is turning against him. In fact, the narrative is only picking up steam. Politik’s Richard Harman has written about how “It is almost inevitable that Bridges will face a challenge; perhaps an informal backroom one first, then if that fails a full caucus spill” – see: Pressure increasing on Bridges leadership.

According to Harman, multiple sources have told him that Judith Collins “has the support of just over half the caucus to take the leadership. Politik has spoken to a range of National MPs and party officials on a non-attributable basis and heard pretty much the same story from most of them; something has gone wrong. There are questions about Bridges’ political judgement”.

In addition, “there is a list of charges against him which centre on his relationships with the rest of the caucus; his abrasive manner and his practice of confining decision making to a tight inner circle of MPs and advisors.”

Other political journalists have since confirmed National MPs are being flagrantly disloyal to Bridges and destabilising his leadership. According to Newshub’s Jenna Lynch and Tova O’Brien, “National MPs are speaking out against their leader and Newshub has been told of agitation behind the scenes. The National Party Caucus is now proactively coming to Newshub with concerns about Simon Bridges’ leadership, and Newshub has been told people are doing the numbers for Judith Collins. There are mixed views, but a number of MPs have told Newshub that Bridges’ handling of recent problems hasn’t been up to scratch, with one MP even describing it as ‘incompetent’.” – see: National MPs speaking out against leader Simon Bridges.

They say it goes further than just gossip: “As for any signs of a coup, on Tuesday MPs anonymously told Newshub: ‘It’s happening.’ One MP said: ‘For some time, MPs have been concerned about the direction of the leadership.’ Another described the caucus as ‘unsettled’, while another said ‘numbers are firming for Judith’.”

So when could a leadership coup occur? They say, “Newshub has been told if it does happen, it could move quickly or in the next three to four months. Newshub has also been told it could happen at caucus, or it could just be executed by a group of MPs behind closed doors.”

Then, to make matters worse, yet another bad opinion poll result was published. The 1News Colmar Brunton survey put National eight points behind Labour. Some commentators felt National’s 40 per cent rating was enough to keep Bridges safe. According to Henry Cooke, “It is the “4” before the poll number which is magic. The difference between 40 per cent and 39.5 per cent in a regular poll is a handful of people, but it is a hugely important distinction, psychologically. If National is above 40, even well behind Labour, it is still in serious running for the next election” – see: The magic number keeping Simon Bridges safe, for now.

Cooke also argues that Bridges’ position is bolstered by few contenders wanting to take over in the leadup to what could be a looming defeat in next year’s election: “the helpful fact that National were probably always doomed to lose the 2020 election, meaning plenty of contenders might be happy to watch him do so.”

1News’ political editor Jessica Mutch McKay supports the theory that the poll ratings mean survival for Bridges: “What I’m hearing when I’m speaking to MPs is that if he’s got a four in front of the party vote, he’s doing OK and can breathe a small sigh of relief”. She also says that while she “has noticed a language change regarding Mr Bridges” amongst National MPs, “we don’t get the sense there is a big move at the moment” – see: Desire among National MPs for stability may save Simon Bridges after latest poll dip.

Similarly, reflecting on National’s latest poll result, the Herald’s political editor Audrey Young says: “it has not sunk so low that it would force a leadership change yet. And no one would launch a coup on the back of a national tragedy which undoubtedly has had an impact on the polls” – see: Poll relief for Simon Bridges may only be temporary. Young does, however, suggest that the growing polling gap between Labour and National is a problem, and “it is easy to see that trend continuing.”

For Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva, the problems go beyond poll numbers: “Bridges is simply not passing the sniff test; he has begun to resemble a clumsy, Clouseau-esque waiter stumbling from one disaster to the next” – see: Bridges looks for small mercies as slide continues.

Sachdeva mulls over whether Bridges is now capable of turning things around: “the Easter and Anzac break is a chance for him to step away from Parliament’s pressure cooker, reset his strategy and figure out how to best damage the Government rather than his own party. Unfortunately for him, there’s been little this year to suggest he’s capable of doing that – and once an Opposition leader starts to spiral (think Andrew Little) it’s difficult to pull out of that nosedive.”

Although National’s poor poll ratings are much better than what Labour normally received in opposition, the crucial problem is that the gap between the collective polling of the parties of Government and Opposition is now huge. This is the point made by Matthew Hooton on Friday, who says that the latest poll actually spells a disaster that National MPs don’t seem to be fully aware of: “Bizarrely, some on the centre-right seem to take comfort from the most recent 1 News Colmar Brunton poll — completed before Ardern took the CGT off the table — putting National and Act on 41 per cent. They seem to overlook the fact that this puts them a full 17 points behind Labour, NZ First and the Greens, who were on a combined 58 per cent. To put this in perspective, gaps of more than 15 points between opposition and governing blocs are exceptionally rare in New Zealand” – see: Jacinda Ardern on track for triumph in 2020.

The decision by the Government to abandon the CGT proposals also makes life particularly difficult for Bridges and National, and likely that the current administration will be easily re-elected next year. According to Hooton, “By and large, National MPs remain in denial about how hopeless their position is” and, “Sadly for centre-right voters, it looks as if National will need to repeat its trauma of 2002 and Labour’s of 2014 before it wakes up to the magnitude of the task and difficulty of the decisions required to become a viable alternative government again.”

If that column wasn’t bad enough, especially coming from someone who was previously supportive of Bridges, then Hooton’s column from the week before is even more important to the debate. In this, Hooton essentially calls time on the current leader in his devastating assessment of Bridges’ achievements so far – see: Simon Bridges runs out of mates.

Hooton, who is a National Party insider, paints a picture of National MPs plotting and openly discussing Bridges’ terminal leadership, and reports that “dissatisfaction with Simon Bridges has reached a critical point.”

It’s not only the poor poll ratings, the failure to foster any new policy stances, and the continued leadership mishaps, but a fundamental issue of personality and trust: “Bridges’ real problem is that, like the population at large, too many National MPs just don’t like him that much. When Bridges was revealed to have called National MP Maureen Pugh ‘f***ing useless’, the suspicion was that this was not an uncharacteristic lapse, but typical of how he speaks privately about too many of them. Publicly calling a long-serving National press secretary, who had even survived working in Nick Smith’s challenging ministerial office, ‘an emotional junior staffer’ further suggested Bridges doesn’t proffer the same loyalty to his team that he expects to be afforded.”

Bridges’ temperament is also under the microscope in Graham Adams’ column, Lack of humility is Simon Bridges’ fatal flaw. According to this analysis, “Bridges’ bullishness was mostly an asset for him when he first became leader in February last year.” But since then “his aggressively confident and self-assertive style” has failed to charm the public, and instead only landed the leader in more difficulties.

Looking back, Adams pinpoints when this should have been apparent: “his high-handed approach to those beneath him in the pecking order was clearly evident at his first press conference as leader when he indicated to his deputy, Paula Bennett, that he needed a glass of water. He pointed at a jug on a low table and uttered the immortal command — ‘Give us some water will you, love?’ Bennett — who just a few months earlier had been deputy prime minister and Bridges’ superior — looked flustered but she bent down and poured him a drink while he continued to hold court in front of the cameras.”

That bullishness was only display again recently when combating questions about his leadership – see Zane Small’s report, I’ll ‘absolutely’ be staying as National leader – Simon Bridges.

The media is certainly now putting the pressure on Bridges over his leadership. Broadcaster, Eric Young, pressured him last week about the apparent lack of public support that Judith Collins was giving to him, pointing out to Bridges: “She came on The AM Show just last week and refused to use you by name. She pledged her support to the leader of the National Party without once using your name” – see Michael Daly’s Simon Bridges pressed on his relationship with Judith Collins.

Attention is also now increasingly focused on the likelihood of Judith Collins taking over as leader. For the best report on the internal National caucus machinations around Collins, see Tova O’Brien’s Anti-Judith Collins camp within National Party may stop her becoming leader. She says: “Caucus is supposed to be a kind of hermetically cone of silence, so the fact that the caucus is leaking, the fact that MPs are proactively coming to us and agitating against Simon Bridges and the fact the people are doing the numbers for Judith Collins is a real problem for Simon Bridges”.

However, it is not clear that Collins has any claim on the leadership in the bag yet, and O’Brien reports the existence of a growing Anyone But Collins grouping: “There are a lot of people in that caucus that just do not like her and do not want her to be the next leader of the National Party.”

In the latest Listener, Bill Ralston writes about the destabilisation of Simon Bridges, and appears to hope that he can hold on: “The prospect of Judith Collins rising to the top of National does not fill me with joy. To date, she has had a chequered career and there’s no reason to suppose that dark pattern will not continue should she become leader and, God forbid, prime minister.”

For Ralston, Collins is too reminiscent of Robert Muldoon: “both combative political personalities, both conservative, both ruthless. Dear Lord, no. I’ve lived through that once before.”

According to RNZ’s Guyon Espiner, the fear of Collins could be what saves Bridges: “If National is feeling cautious, that will help him. If they feel like taking a risk, that removes another reason for Bridges to stay. I have a liking for cricket analogies and I’ll end with one. Judith Collins is the next batter up. She has the pads on. She is a big hitter. She could crush, crash or burn. National needs to decide if it’s going to keep going with the night watchman or send in The Crusher” – see: Simon Bridges ‘entering the danger zone’ following popularity drop in polls.

And Matthew Hooton has an entirely similar cricket analogy: “What may save Bridges are continued worries about his only credible successor, Judith Collins. If National MPs fret that Bridges is a Blair Pocock, they worry that Collins is a Brendon McCullum. Give her the top job and there is a very good chance she’ll smash her opponents all around the park. But there is nearly as good a chance she’ll be out for a duck.”

Finally, how would Judith Collins go as National leader? For the pros and cons, see Toby Manhire’s Why Judith Collins should be made National leader (And why she shouldn’t), as well as my earlier column for RNZ, on The case for and against Judith Collins leading National.

Newsletter: New Zealand Politics Daily – April 26 2019

By Bryce Edwards -

April 28, 2019

Newsletter: New Zealand Politics Daily – April 26 2019

Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.

New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.

Today’s content

Tax, budget, inequality
Listener Editorial: Wasn’t the capital gains tax part of the ‘transformational’ Labour Government?
Pattrick Smellie (Stuff): Cutting capital gains tax adrift was master stroke by Jacinda Ardern
Matthew Hooton (Herald): Jacinda Ardern on track for triumph in 2020
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Stuff): Jacinda Ardern keeps window on tax changes open, after locking door to CGT
Susan St John (Newsroom): CGT is dead – time to act on alternatives
Brian Fallow (Herald): Taking aim at the land bankers
Jamie Ensor (Newshub): Jacinda Ardern canned capital gains tax to protect her political future – Simon Bridges
1News: Simon Bridges questions ‘the point of this Government’ after capital gains tax failure
Peter Dunne (Newsroom): Roots of Wellbeing Budget reach back to National
Bryce Edwards (Herald): Political Roundup: A capital gains tax is dead, so what will Labour do about inequality now?
Bryan Bruce (Daily Blog): NZ Labour and the gap between the haves and the have nots

Social media, “Christchurch Call” campaign, media
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Stuff): The devil will be in the detail of the ‘Christchurch Call’
Claire Trevett (Herald): PM Jacinda Ardern gathers allies to wrestle the social-media Hydra
Barry Soper (Newstalk ZB): Irony to New Zealand and France’s terrorism summit next month
Richare Harman (Politik): The NZ diplomatic offensive against social media
Damien Venuto (Herald): The country that could derail Jacinda Ardern’s social media efforts
Jordan Carter (Spinoff): How to stop the ‘Christchurch Call’ on social media and terrorism falling flat
Joanna Norris (Press): Christchurch is calling the world to action
Henry Cooke (Stuff): Simon Bridges ‘sceptical’ of PM’s social media push, raises concerns about erosion of freedom
Dominion Post Editorial: Sri Lanka’s suppression of social media cause for concern
RNZ: Christchurch terror attacks: Videos still on social media – expert
Tom Pullar-Strecker & Anuja Nadkarni (Stuff): Social media summit hosted by NZ and France gets thumbs up from Facebook
RNZ: ‘We all need to act’ – PM says NZ and France will try to end use of social media for acts of terrorism
Jason Walls (Herald): Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to lead global attempt to shutdown social media terrorism
1News: PM Jacinda Ardern leads global campaign to rid terrorism from social media
Jamie Ensor (Newshub): New Zealand, France to lead world on ending social media use for terrorism
Eleanor Ainge Roy (Guardian): ‘No right to livestream murder’: Ardern leads push against online terror content
Jason Walls (Herald): PM Jacinda Ardern has been in contact with Mark Zuckerberg over Christchurch Call summit
1News: ‘Condolences were shared’ over Christchurch terrorist attack during conversation between Ardern and Mark Zuckerberg
Nate Lanxon (Bloomberg): Facebook says head-cam Christchurch video foiled its AI system
Oliver Lewis (Stuff): Christchurch Call pledge backed by city’s mayor to stop ‘spread of hate’
—————
Pete Geroge: Louisa Wall: “The Media have a responsibility to do no harm”
David Farrar: Labour MP calls for Government control of the media
Helen Harvey (Stuff): Avoid offence by not reading this

Anzac Day, Defence Force
Bryce Edwards (Herald): Political Roundup: A different sort of Anzac Day
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): Anzac Day should be a time of reflection, not celebration or patriotism
ODT Editorial: Honouring our past, present and future
RNZ: Thousands fewer attended Auckland Anzac Day services this year
Tommy Livingston (Stuff): Actual number of surviving World War II veterans unknown by NZDF
Talisa Kupenga (Māori TV): Veterans at Anzac Day services welcome wellbeing funds from govt
RNZ: Veterans praise government funds earmarked to provide better support
RNZ: Veterans and families to get an extra $4m funding for well-being support
Luke Kirkness (Herald): Digging in their heels: Australian Defence Force preventing New Zealanders from serving
RNZ: Australian Defence Force’s tighter security vetting prevents New Zealanders from joining
Māori TV: The state of the NZDF today
Marty Sharpe (Stuff): The obscure foreign fields that are forever Kiwi
Yvonne Tahana (1News): Eight-metre-tall carving made from kauri installed in Passchendaele to honour Māori WWI soldiers
Māori TV: Did you know Waikato Māori refused to fight in WWI?
Jessica Tyson (Māori TV): Stories of Māori Battalion must be retold – Ardern
D’Angelo Martin (Māori TV): Author sought for proposed A Company book
Tema Hemi (Māori TV): C Company’s Epineha ‘Pine’ Ratapu reflects on his full life
Te Kuru o te Marama Dewes (Māori TV):“There is a debt from my country to the Māori community” – Italian ambassador
1News: ‘We really felt it was important’ – Police security out in full force for Anzac Day commemorations
Katie Fitzgerald: Anzac Day 2019: Jacinda Ardern calls for peace
Anna Whyte (1News): Governor-General reflects on ‘devastating terrorist attack against our Muslim community’ during Anzac Day speech
1News: Prince William attends Auckland Anzac Day service as New Zealand honours those who gave their lives in war
Julie Iles and Jesssica Long (Stuff): Anzac Day services become a symbol of unity in the wake of all conflicts
Katie Fitzgerald and Ella Prendergast (Newshub): Muslim communities volunteer at Dawn Services
Don Franks: Anzac Day tricks: from Bill Massey to Jacinda Ardern
Point of Order: Anzac Day – how local body leaders initiated a half-day holiday in NZ
—————
RNZ: Anzac service at Gallipoli held despite terrorism threat
News au: Anzac terror plot: Kiwis targeted in alleged Isis Gallipoli threat, man arrested
Reuters, Dan Satherley (Newshub): Chilling details emerge of IS terrorist’s plan to attack Gallipoli services
Reuters, Dan Satherley (Newshub): Turkish police arrest Islamic State member accused of planning attack
1News: Turkish police arrest man allegedly planning to carry out attack on Anzac Day commemorations at Gallipoli

Sri Lankan bombings
Paul Buchanan: Beware the false narrative.
Alexander Gillespie (Herald): Why Sri Lankan bombings could be linked to Christchurch, and why it’s not relevant
Laura Walters (Newsroom): International media drops the ball on Sri Lanka terror coverage
Newstalk ZB: Sri Lanka attack ‘probably coincidental’ and no evidence to Christchurch shootings: Expert
RNZ: Authorities wary over linking attacks to Christchurch and ISIS
RNZ: Simon Bridges urges caution over retaliation claims
Brittney Deguara (Stuff): Sri Lanka attacks: ‘Ardent follower’ of terror leader spread ‘hate speech against non-Muslims’ following Christchurch attacks
Adam Taylor (Washington Post): The hazy link between the attacks in Sri Lanka and New Zealand
Jamie Ensor (Newshub): New Zealand at the centre of global crisis if Sri Lanka bombings retaliation for Christchurch shootings – expert
Herald: Sri Lanka suicide bomber Abdul Lathief Jameel Mohamed’s family link to Auckland

Health
Ruby Macandrew (Stuff): Hope fading fast that ‘life-changing’ breast cancer drug will be funded by Pharmac
Lucy Bennett (Herald): No outcomes on breast cancer drugs Kadcyla and Ibrance yet, says Pharmac
Libby Wilson (Stuff): All but two Waikato DHB members offer to leave before sacking: member
Karen Brown (RNZ): Junior doctors to go on longest strike yet over rosters
RNZ: Junior doctors, DHBs in urgent mediation ahead of strike
RNZ: Junior doctors reject call to stop five-day strike
Natalie Akoorie (Herlad): ‘Systemic bias’ failing the elderly, alleges rest home complainant
Ruby Macandrew (Stuff): Potential new role for NZ Blood Service proposed to increase organ donation
Phil Pennington (RNZ): Greenlane hospital falls short on firestopping standards
Karen Brown (RNZ):Middlemore Hospital seeks to stop rising violence in emergency department
1News: Children under two should have no screen time at all, new report says
Dan Satherley (Newshub): WHO says kids under two shouldn’t have any screen time at all
Laura Walters (Newsroom): Cultural shift needed to tackle Pacific nutrition issues
RNZ: Anti-vaccination message spreads to Pacific
Kirsty Lawrence (Stuff): Taking the issue of youth suicide to the top

Disability
Chris Ford (Spinoff): Disability Support Services cuts ‘cancelled’? They’re already happening
Isaac Davison (Herald): Disability Rights Commissioner seeks answers on whether disabled funding is being quietly cut

Euthanasia
Jannah Dennison (Newsroom): A brave new world of euthanasia?
Claire Freeman (Stuff): As a tetraplegic I once supported assisted suicide – but I was wrong

Housing
ODT Editorial :Is it time of a KiwiBuild switch?
Michael Reddell: Reforming housing/land, and compensating some losers
Brendon Harre (Interest): The housing productivity story
RNZ:Auckland’s North Shore gets 23 new state houses to ease ‘crisis’
Jo McKenzie-McLean (Stuff): Queenstown holiday park tenants face homelessness to make way for development
Cira Olivier (Rotorua Daily Post): ‘For every house that sells, you make a family homeless’

Banks
RNZ: Banks pushing unwanted financial products, survey finds
1News: One in five bank customers offered financial products they don’t need – Consumer NZ
David Hargreaves (Interest): Banks still pushing unwanted products
Jenny Ruth (BusinessDesk): Fewer than half of Kiwi customers say banks can be trusted
Gareth Vaughan (Interest): RBNZ capital proposals ‘not going to be a difficult task’ for big 4 banks
Kirk Hope (Stuff): Changes to how much back-up banks need could leave vulnerable borrowers out of the loop

Justice, corrections
Chester Borrows (Herald): Caught in a cycle of abuse
Jody O’Callaghan (Stuff): Court mocking symptomatic of racism within government ‘safe spaces’, victim says
Collette Devlin (Stuff): Prison population increases past 10,000 inmates

CTV’s series on sexual abuse of boys
CTV: ‘I don’t know what love is’: Sexually abused at 3, then again in state care
CTV: The secret locals knew: ‘Do you want to bring some friends along
CTV: A 50-year secret: ‘He ripped all my innocence away’

Environment and conservation
Don Abel (Stuff): New Zealand, and the world, needs ethical leadership on global warming
University of Auckland: Q+A: How are our diets damaging the planet?
Paul Gorman (Stuff): Farming group walks away from Environment Canterbury water consultation
RNZ: Shipping industry warns of uncertainty if fuel change comes in
Taroi Black (Māori TV): Māori land saved and nurtured for future generations
Matthew Littlewood (Stuff): Gary Rooney cleared in audit of Central South Island Fish and Game
Tim Newman (Stuff): Rising sea levels to shape growth of Nelson Tasman region
Imran Ali (Northern Advocate):A lack of knowledge of Māori culture blamed for breach of rāhui at Mermaid Pools
Jennifer Eder (Stuff): Ospri to test deer-repellent 1080 bait in south Marlborough
Dan Satherley, Miriam Harris (Newshub): Kauri protester doesn’t want to spend another night in a tree
Tina Law (Stuff): Corona’s yellow-eyed penguin photo ‘disappointing and disturbing’
ODT: Beer brand slammed over yellow-eyed snap
Michael Hayward (Stuff): Lyttelton residents frustrated over lack of information on proposed harbour float plane tours

Local government
Chris Morris (ODT): Plans for local body Labour candidates
Rosemary McLeod (Dominion Post): Thank you, Peter Jackson, for asking awkward questions
Newshub: Stop Stealing Our Harbour spokesperson Michael Goldwater talks to The AM Show following Queen’s Wharf extension announcement (interview)
Jordan Bond (RNZ): Widow takes on council over partner’s death after tree-hole fall

Transport
Herald Editorial: Caught in political power play
Bridget Grace (Newshub): Auckland Transport collecting an extra $4m in bus lane fines per year
Nicholas Boyack (Stuff): Transmission Gully motorway could be bad news for SH2 motorists in wake of project delays
Hamish McNeilly (Stuff): Dunedin councillor describes Lime scooters as a ‘curse down on our beloved residents’
Michael Cropp (RNZ): Wellington residents want parking fee hike dialled back
RNZ: Wellington residents’ parking price spike ‘not unreasonable’ – councillor
Amanda Cropp (Stuff): Fear of fire sparks call for stricter policing of dangerous goods on inter island ferries

Primary industries
Jamie Gray (Herald): Farmers shocked as MPI steps up M. bovis programme
Katy Jones (Stuff): Growers hope Nelson’s Wai-iti dam will fill in time for next season
Eric Frykberg (RNZ): Slow start to plans to track fruit and vegetables from farm to table
Jamie Mackay (Herald): The 10 biggest stories in farming over the past 25 years

PIke River
Alex Baird (Newshub): Final countdown as team prepares to drill into Pike River Mine
RNZ: Pike River mine re-entry set for next week

Israel Folau
Hamish Bidwell (RNZ): Has the Folau saga shown rugby has a race problem?
Anendra Singh (Hawke’s Bay Today): Gospel, according to Israel Folau, goes all the way back to Pacific Island Christianity

Building industry
Stephen Forbes (Interest): Insurance Council wary of building industry guarantees
Stephen Forbes (Interest): New Zealand Certified Builders says the Government should take a harder line on building industry over guarantee and insurance
Paul McBeth (BusinessDesk): Soft compulsion favoured for homeowners to get building work cover

Cannabis
Michael Reddell: Polling marijuana
Steph Rangi (Stuff): New medicinal cannabis company to create 100 jobs in Taupō

Foreign affairs and trade
Fran O’Sullivan (Herald): Parker seeks urgency for China free trade agreement upgrade
RNZ: NZ High Commission’s new chancery building opens in Niue
1News: Winston Peters pays his respects to victims of the 2011 mass shooting in Norway

Other
Thomas Coughlan (Newsroom): Provincial fund nearly spent $30m on airlines
Pattrick Smellie (BusinessDesk): Spark cautiously optimistic as UK allows Huawei into 5G
Leigh-Marama McLachlan (RNZ): Aotearoa called out for hate and bullying toward LGBTIQ people
RNZ: Fears rescue missions could be delayed by gap in helicopter coverage
Te Karere: Māori language revitalised throughout print media in recent years – study
Andrew Beach (Stuff): Saudi woman granted refugee status in NZ because of persecution
George Heagney (Mnaawatū Standard): Teacher training numbers up at Massey University and around the country
Isobel Ewing (Newhsub): Families who rely on au pairs say requirement for qualification will penalise them
Tim Newman (Stuff): Gun buyback scheme delays Nelson forest fire relief funding
Zane Small and Taylor Sincock (Newshub): New Zealand’s most Facebook-savvy MPs revealed

Thousands join women’s march in Jakarta for justice, gender equality

By Asia Pacific Report -

April 28, 2019

By Gemma Holliani Cahya in Jakarta

Thousands of Indonesians marched from Jl. Sudirman to the National Monument (Monas) in Jakarta on Saturday for the 2019 Women’s March to support women’s rights and commemorate the birthday of Kartini, the country’s national heroine and women empowerment icon.

People of different genders, occupations and religions gathered to show their support for better protection and empowerment of women amid rampant violence perpetrated against them.

“This is an everyday struggle for all of us, to fight for justice and gender equality. Many problems that we are facing are because the political elite is trying stop us from seeking justice and equality. Don’t let them silence us,” the march’s field coordinator, Ririn Sefsani, told the crowd.

Kartini … established a school for girls in the early 1900s and inspired Indonesia’s emancipation struggle for women. Image: Wikipedia

This year is the third celebration of the annual march and the crowd is getting bigger each year.

Women’s March Jakarta recorded that in 2017, when it was first held, only 800 people took part. The number increased to 2000 participants last year and 4000 today.

-Partners-

The Women’s March committee said it did not expect such a massive crowd to show up this year. For safety reasons, it changed the march’s schedule — which is usually held in the first week of March — because of the general election this year.

“This is a political year and we just had legislative and presidential elections a week ago, so at first we thought that some people might be afraid to speak up about these issues, but apparently it didn’t affect the,” spokesperson Skolastika Lupitawina said.

“The crowd is really great today, we saw so many new faces.”

Protection laws
The march was held under the theme of the global women’s march movement, which is Women in Politics.

Activists gave the government 10 demands that cover various topics, including the long-awaited sexual violence and domestic worker protection bills, the elimination or revision of discriminative laws and bylaws as well as social protection for every gender and social group.

The march was also held in celebration of Kartini’s birthday on April 21.

Coming from a noble family in the 19th century, she was forced into an arranged marriage to a regent in Java. Her concerns about the poor living conditions of women around her drove her to open a school for them.

She also spoke out against gender injustice at the time through letters to her friends in the Netherlands.

Her letters, which were later disclosed to the public, reflected an early awakening of Indonesian women amid a patriarchal society in pre-independence Indonesia.

Gemma Holliani Cahya is a reporter for The Jakarta Post.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Sri Lanka Easter bombings: Social media shutdown blocks out ‘truth’

By Asia Pacific Report -

April 28, 2019

Al Jazeera’s Listening Post analysis of the social media fallout after Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday bombings.

Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk

After the Easter Sunday bombings, social media was blocked in Sri Lanka. Was it needed? Did it work? These are the questions put by Al Jazeera’s Listening Post presenter Richard Gizbert yesterday.

Plus, yellow vest protesters tussle with French media was also highlighted.

The multiple church and hotel bombings in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, which killed an estimated 253 people, represented the worst violence the country has seen since the end of the civil war a decade ago.

READ AND VIEW MORE: Al Jazeera’s Listening Post

In the immediate aftermath, the government shut off access to social media – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Viber. The rationale? To stem the spread of hate speech and misinformation.

-Partners-

There’s a complex debate to be had, however, on the benefits of a social media shutdown versus the costs.

Millions of Sri Lankans couldn’t contact friends and family, while evidence suggests that shutting off social media does little to monitor the spread of false rumours.

And, in a country where politicians and the mainstream media often deal in misinformation themselves, an internet shutdown makes it harder to separate truth from fiction.

Lead contributors:
Nalaka Gunawardene – author and media analyst
Sanjana Hattotuwa – founder, Groundviews
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne – author and researcher
Dharsha Jegatheeswaran – research director, Adayaalam Centre

On our radar
Richard Gizbert speaks to producer Meenakshi Ravi about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pre-election interview by a Bollywood star, and US President Donald Trump’s tete-a-tete with Twitter’s CEO.

Yellow fever: The ‘gilets jaunes’ and the mainstream media
This past week, President Emmanuel Macron announced a tax cut of $5.6 billion. It was one of several policy changes that amount to a victory of sorts for “les gilets jaunes”, or the yellow vest protesters, who first hit the streets almost six months ago over the price of fuel, the cost of living and tax inequality.

The media are more than a sub-plot in this story. Protesters complain about the under-reporting of police violence and sensationalising of the demonstrations.

Reporters have, for their part, been restricted, manhandled by both demonstrators and police, and subjected to arrest. And in their suspicion of the mainstream media, the yellow vests have taken to producing their own coverage – live-streaming across social networks.

The Listening Post’s Marcela Pizarro reports on the tussle between the media, the state, and the yellow vest protestors.

Featured contributors:
Edwy Plenel – editor-in-chief, Mediapart
Anne Saurat Dubois – political correspondent, BFM TV
Fabrice Epelboin – media scholar, Sciences Po Paris
Xenia Fedorova – editor-in-chief, RT France
Jean-Jerome Bertolus – political editor, France Info

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Bill Shorten promises $4 billion for child care, benefitting 887,000 families

By The Conversation -

April 28, 2019

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

In a big hit announcement before the start of pre-polling, Bill Shorten on Sunday will pledge a A$4 billion boost for child care, making it cheaper for every family earning up to $174,000.

From July 2020, 887,000 families would benefit from the ALP plan, with some being up to $2,100 better off.

Under the initiative:

families with children under five on incomes up to $174,000 would be better off on average by $26 a week – $1,200 a year – per child
the majority of families earning up to $69,000 would get their child care free. This would save them up to $2,100 annually per child.

Families on incomes above $174,000 would continue to receive the same level of support as under current arrangements.

The plan is central to Labor’s campaign on cost of living, with Shorten describing it as “massive cost of living relief for nearly one million families struggling with the costs of child care”.

“Under the Liberals, the costs of child care has gone up 28%, costing families using long day care $3,000 more a year.

“Labor will increase the subsidy families receive, we will kick start the process to limit out-of-control child care price increases, and we will review the impact of the system on vulnerable and very low-income families,” Shorten says.

“This is a $4 billion investment in early education, in working parents and in helping families with the rising cost of living. Labor can pay for cheaper child care for working families because unlike Scott Morrison and the Liberals, we aren’t giving bigger handouts to the top end of town,” Shorten says. The $4 billion cost is over three years.

Source: ALP

The main elements of Labor’s plan include:

More child care fee support

The subsidy rate would be increased from 85% to 100% up to the hourly fee cap (currently $11.77 per hour for long day care) for families earning up to $69,000 who meet the activity test. This would make child care free, or almost free, for up to 372,000 families.

The present tapered reduction would be updated to reflect the higher subsidy rate.

Families earning between $69,000 and $100,000 would receive a subsidy rate between 100% and 85%, up to the hourly fee cap.

Families earning between $100,000 and $174,000 would receive a subsidy rate between 85% and 60% up to the cap – an effective increase of 10%.

Families accessing approved Centre Based Child Care, Family Day Care and Outside School Hours Care, including holiday care, would all benefit from the higher subsidy.

Cracking down on excessive fee increases

Labor would give the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission a new role of investigating excessive fee increases and unscrupulous child care providers. Findings would be made public through mychildcarefinder.

The ACCC would also look at mechanisms to ensure greater controls on child care fee increases to keep child care affordable.

Reviewing the system for vulnerable children

Labor says that in the nine months of the current subsidy system, the number of vulnerable and very low-income families using it has fallen.

“Reports suggest the numbers accessing the Childcare Safety Net have fallen by almost half, from 35,000 to 21,000.

“Labor will urgently review the new system to make sure that vulnerable and low-income families and children aren’t falling through the cracks,” Shorten says.

Labor has already committed to every three-year-old child being able to receive 15 hours of subsidised preschool. It has also said it would extend the current arrangement for four-year olds.

Shorten says this would create “a two-year program to support the most important years of a child’s development and ensuring our kids don’t fall behind the rest of the world”. For many children this would be free or nearly free.

Labor is also set to make an announcement on boosting the wages of child care workers, who are among the low paid.

The first votes will be cast at pre-polling stations on Monday, as the campaign ramps up in its final three weeks. Scott Morrison and Shorten will meet in Perth late Monday for their first face-to-face debate.

– ref. Bill Shorten promises $4 billion for child care, benefitting 887,000 families – http://theconversation.com/bill-shorten-promises-4-billion-for-child-care-benefitting-887-000-families-116128

Morrison brings immigration centre stage with freeze on refugee intake

By The Conversation -

April 28, 2019

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

Scott Morrison will seek to bring the debate over immigration and refugees to the centre of the election campaign, with an announcement that a Coalition government would freeze the humanitarian intake.

He will contrast this with Labor plans for an increase in the humanitarian component, claiming this would cost many billions of dollars and challenging Bill Shorten to produce more detail about the consequences.

So far immigration has not had a prominent place in the campaign. The border security issue went quiet when the expected large number of applications for transfer from Nauru and Manus after the medevac legislation failed to materialise.

Morrison on Sunday will announce that the number of migrants coming to Australia as refugees will be frozen at 18,750.

He will appear at a rally with John Howard, who as prime minister was strongly associated with a tough border policy.

The government has already announced a cap on the migration program of 160,000. The previous cap was 190,000, although the actual intake had fallen to about 160,000.

It will contrast its freeze on the humanitarian intake with Labor’s plan to increase it to 32,000 by 2025-26.

Morrison will also outline the proposed makeup of the humanitarian program for the first time. This will include an overall target of 60% of the offshore component allocated to women. Women made up 50.8% in 2017-18.

The Coalition’s Women at Risk program, as a proportion of the offshore component, would be increased from 14% in 2017-18 to 20% (3,500) in 2019-20.

The government also plans to try to boost the number of refugees and humanitarian entrants settled in regional areas from a target of 30% to 40% in 2019-20. But it stresses that people would not be forced to areas that did not want them.

Some 27% of the humanitarian program will be reserved for Women at Risk and the Community Support Program, which is private sponsorship from church and community groups.

In comments ahead of the Sunday announcement, Morrision said: “We’ve got our borders and the budget under control. We make decisions about who comes here based on what’s in Australia’s interests.

“Australia isn’t just about growing our population – it’s about quality of life. We’re capping and freezing our immigration growth so our government’s record A$100 billion congestion busting program for roads and rail can catch up and take the pressure off our cities.”

Morrison said the government had been upfront that it was reducing the migration intake cap and capping the number Australia let in under its humanitarian program – that was one of the most generous in the world.

“We are telling where we’ll be taking migrants from, who they will be, the skills we want them to have, and working with regions to settle people in towns that want and need more workers, skills and students.

“It’s time for Bill Shorten and Labor to front up and tell Australians about their $6 billion plan to massively increase immigration and where they’re going to house thousands of extra people.

“Labor’s immigration bill is going to go through the roof and the only way they can pay for it is taking $387 billion in higher taxes from Australians.”

The government some time ago put a costing of $6 billion over the medium term on increasing the government-funded humanitarian intake from 17,750 to 27,000 by 2025-26.

– ref. Morrison brings immigration centre stage with freeze on refugee intake – http://theconversation.com/morrison-brings-immigration-centre-stage-with-freeze-on-refugee-intake-116129

‘We’ll deal to you’ Namah threat to PNG daily newspapers

By Asia Pacific Report -

April 27, 2019

Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk

An opposition party leader who believes there will soon be a change in government in Papua New Guinea has warned the country’s two foreign-owned daily newspapers that the new regime will “deal” to them.

Vanimo-Green MP Belden Namah, leader of the PNG party, one of the two major parties in the opposition, has put the Australian-owned Post-Courier and Malaysian-owned National newspapers on notice.

Angered by the two dailies for not running his news conference stories, he threatened to regulate the print media when a new government is installed in a likely vote of no-confidence next month, reports the Post-Courier.

Opposition politician Belden Namah … threatened PNG daily newspapers. Image: NBC TV

“One thing I also want to say, especially to the print media, the Post-Courier and The National you have to report what’s coming out from the Opposition as it is healthy for the country,” he said.

“You know I held a media conference two days ago, the Post-Courier and The National never printed it.

-Partners-

“I congratulated the two ministers who resigned and the Post-Courier, you only printed about the OTC land at Five-Mile [land designated for a controversial K2 billion Chinatown development],” he said, with three Highlands provincial governors and two other MPs also resigning yesterday from Prime Minister Peter O’Neill’s divided government.

O’Neill is in China this week to attend a “Belt and Road” initiative conference.

Newspapers ‘on notice’
“I am putting the Post-Courier and The National on notice, tomorrow when government changes it will be a totally different story and we will regulate to ensure that you do the right thing for the people of this country.”

Namah has a controversial background being both a former Opposition Leader and part of the O’Neill government.

Before entering politics he was a PNG Defence Force captain and jailed for sedition in the Sandline mercenary affair in 1997. The scandal surrounding the ill-fated mercenary operation, planned to crush Bougainville rebels, forced the resignation of Sir Julius Chan as prime minister.

In 2014, a former police chief issued an arrest warrant for Namah, accusing the politician of having threatened him.

Although Papua New Guinea has risen 15 places to 38th in the latest RSF World Press Freedom Index this month, Reporters Without Borders warned that the country’s media independence was “at risk”.

Pacific Media Watch is a regional media freedom project of the Pacific Media Centre.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

View from The Hill: Palmer flypaper sticky for both sides

By The Conversation -

April 27, 2019

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

Ahead of the first pre-pollers voting on Monday – and then switching off from the campaign noise – Labor will dangle more big bait, this time on child care.

Bill Shorten flagged the initiative on Friday, saying that “in the very near future, we’ll be announcing new plans to cut the cost of long day child care. And we will announce … a new national push for pay equity, starting with early childhood educators”.

The policy is both pitching to parents, and forming part of the ALP commitment to finding ways to lift wages, especially for the low paid.

Labor mapped out its early campaign weeks to focus on issues of very specific concern to voters. It started with health, featuring its big cancer package, and moved to wages. It will broaden into cost of living, and building for the future on various policy fronts.

While the ALP has handled the presentation of its issues in a very ordered fashion, the same can’t be said of its approach to one of the campaign’s formalities – the leaders’ debates.

The debate over debates

Shorten gave the impression of being dragged to the two now bedded down – in Perth on Monday (sponsored by the West Australian) and Brisbane on Friday (sponsored by News Corp outlets).

Morrison agitated for more; with Shorten pushed on Friday, Labor proposed a third be hosted by the National Press Club.

Morrison is confident on his feet and feels he has nothing to lose by multiple encounters. Shorten should have set out a debates’ proposal early on, rather than appearing to be on the defensive.

One might have expected the Labor leader to be enthusiastic for debates – he prides himself on all those town hall meetings. But he’s now risk averse and, as election favourite, knows debates potentially hold more pain than gain for him.

More broadly, in recent years leaders’ debates have lost a lot of their significance, falling victim to competitive pressure between media outlets. As has been often argued, we should have a “debates commission” to ensure at least two face offs are run as major set piece occasions, not owned by any media organisation.

The deal that’s “no deal”

Apart from the debate about debates, Friday’s campaign argy bargy centred on the Liberals’ preference deal with Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, due to be announced by Palmer on Monday.

Morrison displays his usual chutzpah over this rather tawdry trade.

On the murky matter of preferences, the Prime Minister would prefer to hide behind the party organisation, an unconvincing line blown apart when he issued his edict about the Liberals putting One Nation behind Labor.

In particularly awkward timing, Morrison was in Townsville – where Palmer’s nickel workers were dudded in 2016 – when he had to field questions about the preference deal.

As one questioner succinctly put it: “Nowhere in the country knows better than Townsville the devastation and how that can be wrought by Clive Palmer. How can you look voters in this city in the eye and say they should direct their preferences to him, especially in the Senate?”

That is a question to which there is no answer that can sound half way good.

Morrison’s message for the locals was “Vote for Phil Thompson, the LNP candidate. That’s where you should put your vote and that’s the vote I’m interested in.”

Never mind that this ignores the point that voters must allocate preferences and the Liberals are saying allocate them in Palmer’s direction.

Morrison insisted there were “no policy deals that were being done with minor parties” in preference talks.

It was really all a matter of Palmer believing “Labor’s tax policy would be devastating for the Australian economy.”

As far as Morrison was concerned, “ I’m interested in forming a government on the other side of this election. I’m going make sure I do everything I possibly can to ensure that we’re able to form that government”.

He was dismissive of a warning from former Western Australian premier Colin Barnett (still stung by his preference deal with One Nation) that preferencing a discredited Palmer could alienate soft voters, as well as the Chinese.

Both sides now

The preference issue seemed easy pickings for Labor – except it had had a dalliance itself with the big man.

Shorten said there had been “no formal negotiations”, but Anthony Albanese unwisely went further.“Not once have we been talking to Clive Palmer about preferences because we understand it’s a recipe for chaos”.

Palmer immediately blew the whistle on that, revealing Queensland senator Anthony Chisholm had put out feelers. Chisholm, as a former Queensland ALP state secretary, would know quite a lot about such things.

It took the gloss off Labor’s attack on a deal it wanted to cast, in the colourful wording of Penny Wong, as “a marriage of convenience between an ad man and a con man”.

– ref. View from The Hill: Palmer flypaper sticky for both sides – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-palmer-flypaper-sticky-for-both-sides-116096

Five PNC rebels break away from O’Neill’s cabinet in shock move

By Asia Pacific Report -

April 26, 2019

By Jack Lapauve Jnr in Port Moresby

Three Papua New Guinean provincial governors and two other MPs have resigned from Prime Minister Peter O’Neill’s People’s National Congress Party in what appears to be a significant power shift.

Enga’s Sir Peter Ipatas, Southern Highlands Governor William Powi and Hela’s Phillip Undialu resigned from the PNC. They were joined by the Member for Komo-Magarima, Manasseh Makiba, and Member for Esala, Steven Davis

The move is a major development in the PNC. Sir Peter, Undialu and Powi have been the PNC’s strongest allies and key links between the party and other Highlands MPs.

The three governors made the announcement at a news conference in Port Moresby today. They were accompanied by Jiwaka Governor, Dr William Tongamp.

In announcing his resignation, the Enga Governor Sir Peter said his move follows close consultation with his people. He thanked the Prime Minister for the opportunity to serve in the PNC government.

-Partners-

Hela Governor Phillip Undialu was less diplomatic.

In a statement, he outlined his reasons for exiting the party which included the loss of confidence in the Prime Minister’s leadership, the delay in distributing earthquake disaster funds and a general dissatisfaction among other MPs.

The resignation follows the exit of high ranking ministers, long-standing Finance Minister James Marape and Davis.

In a Facebook posting, opposition Member for Madang Bryan Kramer warned more government members were likely to resign.

As the calm breaks and the storm sets in, it is surely the beginning of the end of Peter O’Neill’s reign,” he said.

“Loyalty to God and country and not a corrupt Prime Minister.”

O’Neill is visiting China this week as part of the Belt and Road initiative.

Jack Lapauve is an EMTV News reporter. This story is published under the Pacific Media Centre’s partnership with EMTV.

We are live from Parliament house.Five Governors announcing their resignation from PNC.

Posted by Loop PNG on Thursday, 25 April 2019

Loop PNG video of the PNC breakaway MPs media conference today.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

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

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gavin Mudd, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering, RMIT University

One day before calling the election, the government approved the controversial Yeelirrie uranium mine in the remote wilderness of Western Australia, about 500km north of Kalgoorlie.

The Tjiwarl Traditional Owners have fought any uranium mining on their land for the last 40 years, and the decision by the government wasn’t made public until the day before Anzac Day.

This region is home to several of Australia’s deposits of uranium and not only holds cultural significance as part of the Seven Sisters Dreaming Songline, but also environmental significance.

If the mine goes ahead, groundwater levels would drop by 50cm and wouldn’t fully recover for 200 years. And 2,422 hectares of native vegetation would be cleared.

I visited the site 16 years ago and, like the rest of the Western Australian outback, there’s a wonderful paradox where the land appears barren, but is, in fact, rich with biodiversity.

The former pilot open cut at Yeelirrie, February 2003 – unrehabilitated from the early 1980s. Photo G M Mudd

Native animals living in underground water, called stygofauna, are one such example of remarkable Australian fauna that aren’t obvious at first glance. These animals are under threat of extinction if the Yeelirrie uranium mine goes ahead.

Stygofauna are ecologically fragile

Most stygofauna are very tiny invertebrates, making up species of crustaceans, worms, snails and diving beetles. Some species are well adapted to underground life – they are typically blind, pale white and with long appendages to help them find their way in total darkness.

Yeelirrie stygofauna. Photograph by Giulia Perina, Subterranean Ecology Pty Ltd

In 2016, the Western Australian Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) advised against building the Yeelirrie uranium mine because it would threaten the stygofauna species there, despite the proposed management strategies of Cameco Australia, the mine owner.

Stygofauna are extremely local, having evolved in the site they’re found in. This means individual species aren’t found anywhere else in the world.

EPA chairman Tom Hatton said:

Despite the proponent’s well-considered management strategies, based on current scientific understanding, the EPA concluded that there was too great a chance of a loss of species that are restricted to the impact area.

Yeelirrie has a rich stygofauna habitat, with 73 difference species recorded.

A species of stygofauna in Yeelirrie. Photograph by Giulia Perina, Subterranean Ecology Pty Ltd

And to get to the uranium deposit, the miners need to dig through the groundwater, a little like pulling the plug in the middle of the bathtub. Stygofauna have adapted to living at different levels of the water, so pulling out the plug could dry out important parts of their habitat.

Stygofauna are also susceptible to any changes in the chemistry of the groundwater. We simply do not know with confidence what mining will do to the groundwater chemistry at Yeelirrie in the long term. Various wastes will be backfilled into former pits, causing uncertainty for the welfare of surrounding stygofauna.

The approval conditions suggest that the mine should not be allowed to cause extinction – but if this does happen, nothing can be done to reverse it. And there would be no penalty to Cameco either – which has said it can’t guarantee such a condition can be met.

So are the economic benefits worth wiping out a species?

Short answer: no. But let’s, for a moment, ignore these subterranean animals and look at whether the mine would be beneficial.

Yeelirrie is one of Australia’s largest uranium deposits – and yet it has a low grade of 0.15% (as uranium oxide). This refers to the amount of uranium found in rock. For comparison, the average grade of uranium mines globally is normally 0.1 to 0.4% of uranium oxide (with some higher and others lower).

And Cameco’s Cigar Lake and McArthur River mines in Canada have typically been 15-20% of uranium oxide. Despite such rich ore, McArthur River was uneconomic and closed indefinitely in early 2018.

What’s more, the future of nuclear power is not bright. According to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, the number of nuclear reactors under construction around the world is at its lowest point in a decade, as renewable energy increases. The amount of nuclear electricity produced each year is flat. And nuclear’s share of global electricity is constantly falling behind renewables.

But, in any case, we don’t yet know enough about these stygofauna to warrant their extinction. They could, for instance, have untold benefits to medical science, or perhaps have wider environmental and cultural significance.

And, ethically, what right do we have to wipe out a species? They have evolved and survived just like us. At the end of the day, there are much safer, cheaper, more ethical and cleaner ways to generate electricity to boil a kettle.

– ref. It’s not worth wiping out a species for the Yeelirrie uranium mine – http://theconversation.com/its-not-worth-wiping-out-a-species-for-the-yeelirrie-uranium-mine-116059

VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on week two of the campaign #AusVotes

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

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

University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini speaks with Michelle Grattan about the week in politics. They discuss the messaging and tactics of the leaders on the campaign trail, the resurrection of the issue of water buybacks, and the impact of Clive Palmer’s political advertising on his election chances and what his popularity means for preference deals.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on week two of the campaign #AusVotes – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-week-two-of-the-campaign-ausvotes-116068

State of the states: Palmer’s preference deal and watergate woes

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Aulich, Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra, University of Canberra

Our “state of the states” series takes stock of the key issues, seats and policies affecting the vote in each of Australia’s states.

We’ll check in with our expert political analysts around the country every week of the campaign for updates on how it is playing out.

New South Wales

Chris Aulich, Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra

There is a clear fault line in the Coalition between conservatives and moderates, reflected in the number of centre-right women challenging more conservative members.

Some sitting moderates have chosen not to renominate – Ann Sudmalis in NSW won’t recontest, while Julia Banks in Victoria has resigned from the Coalition to challenge Greg Hunt in Flinders. Other moderate women are standing as independents (Kerryn Phelps and Zali Steggall in NSW, and Helen Haines in Victoria) or as candidates for other centre-right parties (Rebekha Sharkie in SA).

What typically unites these women is a rejection of conservative social policies – and perhaps also a rejection of the alleged culture of bullying within the Coalition parties. These candidates are modernists in that they support progressive policy issues. As independents they can also sidestep the Coalition’s internal fracas about quotas and targets for women.

In NSW, independent Zali Steggall is challenging Tony Abbott in Warringah. Front and centre of her campaign is action on climate change, refugee policy and foreign aid. Her views on marriage equality contrast dramatically with Abbott’s in an electorate that overwhelmingly voted “yes” in the marriage equality postal vote.

Similarly, independent MP Kerryn Phelps, contesting Wentworth, was a significant player in the marriage equality debates and has argued forcibly for a more humane treatment of asylum seekers.

Both Steggall and Phelps have complained about “dirty tricks” and the negative campaigns being mounted against them. Billboards linking Steggall to Labor, allegations that she is receiving funds from GetUp! (she is not), the renting of premises next to her office that were then plastered with anti-Steggall advertising, and the sexualising of Steggall posters all appear to be an attempt to intimidate and demean her.

A number of articles critical of Steggall have been published by the Daily Telegraph, with free copies delivered to residents who are not subscribers to the paper. This includes a front page story in which Steggall’s ex-husband and his current wife described her as “opportunistic” and “lacking the temperament of a leader”. The couple have since declared that the Telegraph article does not reflect how they feel about Steggall’s candidature.

Kerryn Phelps says dirty tricks were behind the removal of hundreds of her election posters in her campaign to retain the seat of Wentworth. Labor’s Tim Murray has also complained that his posters had been removed and replaced by Liberal posters. Liberal challenger, Dave Sharma, rejects any allegation that this activity has been sanctioned by him or the Liberal Party. Today it was reported that Sharma’s posters have also been defaced.

The seats of Wentworth and Warringah are critical to the reelection of the Morrison government and it’s clear that some supporters of the conservative wing of the Coalition have “taken off the gloves”. We can only speculate if it’s because the independents are women or because they are moderates.

Queensland

Maxine Newlands, Senior Lecturer in Political Science at James Cook University

Labor leader Bill Shorten’s first hustings in Herbert coincided with reports of a deal that the Coalition will preference Palmer’s United Australia Party (UAP) over other populist parties.

UAP’s candidate, former NRL player Greg Dowling, will run for the lower house, while Palmer has his sights on the Senate. Palmer’s big cash splash announcement may cause more of a ripple than a bounce, considering former Queensland Nickel workers will have to wait until after the election to get their money back.

With One Nation and Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party (FACN) also throwing their hats into the ring, there’s now four right-leaning minor parties vying for votes.

Herbert’s 2019 election is shaping up to be a rerun of 2013. Six years ago, preferences played a huge role in deciding 97 of the 150 seats nationally. 40% of Queensland seats were decided on preference votes in 2013.

The latest polling shows UAP at 14% – almost the same as 2013 after preferences (15.52%), but this was before Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (PHON) confirmed their candidate. In 2016, One Nation preferences helped push the incumbent, Labor’s Cathy O’Toole, over the line. With a preference deal between LNP and UAP, Palmer’s chance of a seat in the Senate is a good bet, but it’s now a four-way spilt for the lower house.

UAP and Katter’s Australian Party (KAP) will be the benefactors in the Herbert electorate, placed ahead of Liberals and Labor on the how-to-vote cards. In a battle between UAP, PHON and FACN, it’s the Greens that could benefit the most.

With UAP aligned with LNP, the Greens candidate Sam Blackadder has a chance of picking up protest votes against Labor. The Greens could also take votes from latecomers, the Animal Justice Party, thanks to its clear policy on climate change – something that has eluded the major parties.

There’s a similar picture in Dickson, with One Nation, Fraser Anning and the Animal Justice Party all putting up candidates. Plus there’s former Palmer United Party, now independent candidate, Thor Prohaska running on a democracy ticket.

Like Herbert, PHON and FACN will have to fight for votes from UAP in Dickson. In 2013, Palmer’s party polled 9.8% of the vote in Dickson. With UAP favouring LNP over ALP like it did in 2013, it could help Dutton to retain his marginal seat this time around.

Western Australia

Ian Cook, Senior Lecturer of Australian Politics at Murdoch University

Attention was on Bill Shorten and Clive Palmer in WA election news this week.

Bill Shorten came under scrutiny when it was revealed that three WA Labor candidates had been forced to include him in their election advertising after they were found distributing pamphlets that made no reference to the Labor leader.

Polls consistently show that Australian voters prefer Scott Morrison to Bill Shorten as prime minister. But Shorten is a bigger problem for Labor in WA than he is elsewhere – although it’s not clear by how much.

A poll last month by Crosby Textor showed that Shorten had a minus 26 favourability in the Perth seat of Cowan, which is held by Labor’s Anne Aly by a margin of just 0.7%. That makes Shorten more unpopular in Cowan than he is in other marginal seats across the country. And it’s the reason that candidates would rather put Premier Mark McGowan in their campaign material.

Like the rest of Australia, many West Australians will vote Labor even though they don’t particularly like or trust Bill Shorten. So, we can expect more ads attacking Shorten as the Liberals look to capitalise on one of the few positives (or should that be negatives) they have to work with in WA.

Clive Palmer was in WA news for the same reason he was in everyone’s news: the Newspoll that showed that his United Australia Party would change the result in some marginal seats. That includes one of one of ours: Pearce.

Pearce is held by Christian Porter and this election is a big moment for him. Porter was Attorney-General in Scott Morrison’s government, and he has a high profile in WA. He was also on the way to becoming premier when he took a detour into federal politics. Porter undoubtedly has ambitions and is one of the bright young(ish) things in the WA Liberal Party, so his future is important to his party’s fate in the West.

After One Nation’s disastrous campaign in the last state election, WA voters are obviously looking elsewhere and Palmer has spent a lot of money on the UAP campaign. Christian Porter and the WA Liberals will be hoping that it isn’t enough to make the difference in Pearce.

South Australia

Rob Manwaring, Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy at Flinders University

It would be ironic, to say the least, if former Labor state Premier Jay Weatherill’s legacy will be to have delivered the final nail in the coffin of the Turnbull-Morrison governments.

Last week, water policy dominated the political and campaign agenda, with the issue of water buybacks causing significant problems for the Coalition, and the Nationals in particular. Yet the groundwork for this poisonous issue was laid when the Weatherill government set up a state royal commission into alleged water theft by the upstream states.

Since then, the issue has been a lingering problem, exacerbated by the dead fish in the Menindee. Since the revelations of the water buybacks story, this has proved a problematic issue, culminating with a remarkable interview on the ABC with the former Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources Barnaby Joyce.

he Darling River and the Menindee Lakes are under pressure from low water flow as a result of the continuing drought affecting more than 98% of New South Wales. Dean Lewins/AAP

While elections are rarely ever decided in key marginal South Australian seats, this issue could be the exception. It’s striking how it has unified South Australians. When the original allegations of water fraud were revealed by the ABC, there was a press conference with all key South Australian senators, including Sarah Hanson-Young, Cory Bernadi, Nick Xenophon and Penny Wong. Commonwealth governments rarely benefit from this issue in the state where the Murray ends.

The Nationals have no presence in South Australia, and the electoral damage is likely to be limited to the Liberals in the seat of Mayo, where Centre Alliance MP Rebekah Sharkie has been strong on water policy. But this issue, so close to South Australian politics, could prove problematic on the national stage.

Tasmania

Michael Lester, researcher and PhD student at the Institute for the Study of Social Change

The Tasmanian North West Coast seat of Braddon is sitting on a knife-edge. Braddon is notoriously fickle, having changed hands five times since 1998, and margins are always tight.

Labor’s Justine Keay won the seat from the Liberal’s Brett Whitely in 2016. She retained the seat after having to resign and recontest it in the July 2018 citizenship byelections, but failed to make any electoral gains. She is now defending a very slim 1.7% margin.

In 2018, Keay had seven opponents. This election she is up against eight:

Karen Wendy Spaulding from the United Australia Party
independents Craig Brakey and Brett Michael Smith
Shane Allan from Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party
Liberal Gavin Pearce
The National’s Sally Milbourne
Phill Parsons from The Greens
Graham Gallaher from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

Braddon is hard to call. In the absence of polling, local commentators are looking to the betting odds which presently place Keay as clear favourite at $1.45, with Pearce at $2.65. Despite that, some see Braddon as Liberal Party’s best chance of winning a seat in Tasmania – especially since an electoral boundary redistribution in 2017 added the more affluent Port Sorell area.

There is no single electorate-wide issue here. Braddon is a diverse mix of regional centres and agricultural districts extending from Devonport and Latrobe in the east, through Ulverstone, Burnie, Wynyard, Stanley, Smithton and Waratah, then down the west coast to the mining towns of Rosebery, Zeehan, Queenstown and the tourism and fishing village of Strahan. It also includes King Island in Bass Strait.

Tasmania’s recent economic renaissance has been slow to reach many areas of this electorate. So, candidates are aiming their promises at people’s concerns over economic development, jobs, youth training, health services and education. And both major parties have been careful to match almost anything the other side offers up.

Labor’s commitment of a A$25 million grant to support a Tasmanian AFL team has emerged as one big point of difference in the strongly pro-football Braddon, while the Liberals run a campaign on what better uses that money could be put to.

Victoria

We’ll be back with an update on Victoria next week.

– ref. State of the states: Palmer’s preference deal and watergate woes – http://theconversation.com/state-of-the-states-palmers-preference-deal-and-watergate-woes-115910

Why New Zealand needs to translate its response to Christchurch attacks into foreign policy

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hanlie Booysen, Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington

During his two-day royal visit this week, Prince William has met with survivors of the Christchurch mosque shootings and has praised New Zealand’s response to the attacks.

To the people of New Zealand and the people of Christchurch, to our Muslim community and all those who have rallied by your side, I stand with you in gratitude to what you have taught the world in these past weeks.

Earlier, Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan described New Zealanders as “citizens of the future”.

Globally, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the attacks is seen as a new way of reacting to violent extremism. With an emphasis on what unites people, communities in different countries were motivated to express solidarity across religious and cultural divides.

In contrast, the opportunistic linking of the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks in Colombo, Sri Lanka, with Christchurch will once again serve to divide humanity.

Solidarity at home

Domestically, the terrorist attack on Muslim worshippers in Christchurch was met by a display of unity. A heartfelt exchange of respect between the country’s leadership and the minority Muslim community characterised the days and weeks following the attack.

A renewed rejection of racism in all its forms, including Islamophobia, led to a public discussion of the Crusaders rugby team’s name. The government took decisive action by tightening gun laws and instituting a royal commission of inquiry into New Zealand’s security and intelligence agencies.

But the question now is whether New Zealand can translate its new-found domestic cohesion and goodwill into foreign policy.

Support for Palestinian sovereignty

The Israel-Palestine conflict is a good place to start. If solidarity at home is to influence global understanding and cooperation across cultures, Palestinian sovereignty must be a foreign policy priority.

The international community’s failure over the past 72 years to find a just and sustainable solution to the “Palestine question” is an ongoing source of discord between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Shortly after its establishment, the UN Alliance of Civilisations (UNAOC) noted:

The Israeli military occupation of Palestine has been perceived in the Muslim world as a form of colonialism and has led many to believe, rightly or wrongly, that Israel is in collusion with the “West”.

Palestinian casualties, dispossession and suffering due to the occupation fuel resentment and radicalisation in the Muslim world. The impunity an American veto allows Israel further enhances the perception of Western hypocrisy. The US and Israel’s disregard for the legal status of Jerusalem as corpus separatum undermines both the potential for peace between Israelis and Palestinians and an international rules-based system.

New Zealand needs to be more vocal in international forums in criticising Israel’s occupation policies.

Challenging Islamophobia

Islamophobia, or an anti-Muslim bias that incorrectly presents Muslims as a dangerous monolithic group, is both a domestic and global concern. The real danger is that Islamophobia becomes the norm.

Politicians, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, promote the notion of a clash of civilisations when they present Muslims as a threat to Christian Europe. The United Kingdom’s security strategy in response to the terrorist attacks in London on July 7 2005, called Prevent, is an example of anti-radicalisation policies that target people based on their faith, specifically Muslims.

Islamophobia also finds expression in conflating radical and moderate Islamists. These groups may share the pursuit of an ideal state, based on Islamic teachings, but they differ drastically in their methods and interpretation of Islam. Autocratic governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region fuel Islamophobia when they dismiss these differences in order to demonise their moderate Islamist opposition.

This can be explained by the fact that moderate Islamism offers an authentic alternative to authoritarianism. For example, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and his late father, Hafez al-Assad, have a history of demonising and repressing the moderate Islamist Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) to ensure the regime’s political survival. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation in the wake of the 2010-11 Arab uprisings, which threatened autocrats across the MENA region.

A rules-based international system

The UAE and Saudi Arabia are key markets for New Zealand. They are also members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), our eighth-largest trading partner. In equating moderate Islamism with terrorism to contain domestic dissent, these states contribute to international disunity and hate.

New Zealand needs to resist pressure from these partners as well as from some other member countries in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance to view Islamists as monolithic. It also needs to enhance support for initiatives that strengthen global understanding and cooperation between non-Muslim and Muslim-majority countries such as the UNAOC.

At the UN General Assembly in September 2018, Ardern signalled a clear direction for foreign policy by calling for kindness, collectivism and an international rules-based system. This is in stark contrast to US President Donald Trump’s portentious rejection of globalism.

New Zealand’s response to the Christchurch terrorist attack showed the world values that, in Ardern’s words, “represent the very best of us”. The expectation remains that our foreign policy will follow through.

– ref. Why New Zealand needs to translate its response to Christchurch attacks into foreign policy – http://theconversation.com/why-new-zealand-needs-to-translate-its-response-to-christchurch-attacks-into-foreign-policy-115556

Labor’s crackdown on temporary visa requirements won’t much help Australian workers

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ross Guest, Professor of Economics and National Senior Teaching Fellow, Griffith University

Bill Shorten is holding out the prospect of protecting Australian workers from foreign ones.

He has pledged to tighten the visa system for short-term skilled migrants, ensuring they have to be paid more so that “it isn’t cheaper to pay an overseas worker than pay a local worker”.

But the evidence does not support his claim that his policy proposal will boost local jobs and wages. He said

There are more than 1 million underemployed Australians wanting more work and youth unemployment is at 11.7%

At the same time, there are almost 1.6 million temporary visa holders with work rights in Australia, with the top end of town turning to temporary work visas to undercut local jobs, wages and conditions

Requirements have already been toughened

The first point to note is that Shorten’s policy relates only to short-term visas for skilled migrants. Up until 2017, these were known as 457 visas. Their number peaked at 126,000 in 2012-13.

Parliamentary Library

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull replaced the 457 visa with the 482 visa, partly in response to evidence that some employers had exploited the 457 to employ foreign workers on low wages.

The new visa required

applicants to demonstrate work experience (minimum two years) and English language proficiency
the sponsoring employer to demonstrate lack of success in finding a local worker to do the job
the salary level to be at the market level for the role, and above what is known as the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold. This is now about A$54,000.

Since August 2018, employers of workers with 482 visas have also had to pay a fee to the Department of Education and Training to subsidise apprenticeships. Known as the Skilling Australians Fund Levy, it ranges from $2,400 to $7,200, depending on the length of the visa and the employer’s annual turnover.

The core of Labor’s policy is to increase the income threshold to $65,000, a figure that will be indexed annually. The skilling levy would be 3% of the income threshold, a level that for some businesses would be an increase of 63%.

Skilled migrants are not the problem

The most recent statistics published by the federal government (for 2017-18) show a total of 83,470 people on temporary skilled worker visas (both 482 visas and residual 457 visas).

This means Shorten’s reference to the almost 1.6 million temporary visa holders with work rights in Australia – such as backpackers and international students (who we know are often exploited by unscrupulous employers) – is something of a red herring. Labor’s proposal won’t make any difference to them.

Even if the 83,470 workers that the policy would affect were being employed to undercut local wage expectations, their number – less than 1% of Australia’s 10 million total employees – is simply not enough to influence market wages. In no occupation are visa holders more than 1% of total employees.

But there’s scant evidence to suggest the 482 visas are routinely used to employ cheaper workers. The average base nominated salary for visas in 2017-18 was $94,800, well above the average full-time wage (about $85,000) and even higher than the $54,000 or Labor’s proposed $65,000 minimum.

Admittedly, averages don’t tell the full story. But in only one sector – food and accommodation, accounting for 10.7% of visas granted – was the average wage lower than $65,000.

It suggests that raising the income threshold won’t have much impact.

Labor’s proposals would be felt in the regions

There is one possible exception to this: regional and remote Australia, which has benefited the most from temporary skilled worker visas. If the market wage for say, an early career chef, is below $65,000 (which it could be for some places in Australia), a restaurant or café employer in a small town would no longer be able to employ a migrant worker at the going rate, and it might also struggle to find would be be a $7,800 levy.

Labor’s proposal would impose higher relative costs on regional employers.

Claims about the impact of temporary work visas on employment and wages have been heard but seldom subject to rigorous analysis.

A significant inquiry into short-term migrant work visas in Australia was conducted by a Senate select committee in 2015-16. It noted an inverse relationship between 457 visas granted and the unemployment rate. In other words, the visas were associated with low, rather than high unemployment rates.

This suggests visas are meeting genuine skills shortages rather than displacing Australian workers.

Migrants create as well as fill jobs

Migrant workers are also consumers. They spend their income, contributing to demand for goods and services from local businesses, which adds to the demand for workers generally.

The same dynamics apply as those involving all migrants. As peer-reviewed research by researchers at the Australian National University has shown, migration has had “no detectable effect on employment or wages of all workers who have lived in Australia for more than five years”.

These findings are essentially supported by the Productivity Commission.

In sum, there’s little evidence that Australia’s current visa program for temporary skilled migrants has a negative effect on local jobs or wages.

Labor’s plans are unlikely to achieve anything positive. They might even hurt.

– ref. Labor’s crackdown on temporary visa requirements won’t much help Australian workers – http://theconversation.com/labors-crackdown-on-temporary-visa-requirements-wont-much-help-australian-workers-115844

New Zealand’s dismal record on child poverty and the government’s challenge to turn it around

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Fletcher, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Victoria University of Wellington

The latest statistics on childhood poverty in New Zealand suggest that, on some key measures, things are worse than previously estimated.

About one in six children (16% or 183,000) live below a before-housing-cost relative poverty measure, but that figure jumps to almost one in four (23% or 254,000) once housing costs are accounted for. And 13% (148,000) are living in households that experience material hardship – 6% in severe hardship. These children don’t have such basic things as two good pairs of shoes. Their families regularly have to cut back on fresh fruit and veggies, put up with feeling cold and postpone visits to the doctor.

The data show that the government will need to do much more to reach its targets for reducing childhood poverty.

Measuring child poverty

New Zealand introduced the Child Poverty Reduction Act at the end of last year. It was a bold move reflecting the Ardern government’s commitment to do something about New Zealand’s dismal child poverty statistics. Earlier this month, Stats NZ released the first set of baseline statistics required under the act.

Previous governments, both National and Labour, may have talked about child poverty but shied away from binding targets. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who has also made herself minister for child poverty reduction, has put through clear legislation, eventually winning cross-party support for it.

The act does two main things. First, it requires the government statistician to report annually on a set of four “primary” and six “supplementary” measures of child poverty. (One primary measure, poverty persistence, does not come into force until 2025.)

Second, it requires governments to set three-year and ten-year targets for each of the primary measures and to report on progress to parliament. Any failures to meet targets must be explained.

The three primary measures are:

Relative poverty, before housing costs: the proportion of children living in households whose equivalised disposable income before housing costs is less than 50% of the median. This measure compares a household’s income for the previous 12 months to the current median for all households. The median will move from year to year due to inflation and economic changes. A low-income household will improve its situation if its income moves by more than the median.
Constant value poverty after housing costs: the proportion of children living in households whose equivalised disposable income after housing costs is less than 50% of the base-year median. This measure gives an indication of the spending power households have after paying either rent or mortgage repayments, rates and insurance.
Material hardship: the proportion of children living in households that are experiencing material hardship, defined as having a score of six or more on the DEP-17 deprivation index.

The government’s targets

Well before the act was finalised, the prime minister had announced the government’s ten-year targets: 5% on the first measure, 10% on the second and 7% on the third.

These are ambitious targets, which would put New Zealand near the top of the OECD rankings. That said, they still imply a significant number of children in poverty.

During the evolution of the legislation, the government also decided to bring forward the starting year for measurement of the targets to 2018-19, therefore making the baseline year 2017-18. This has the advantage of ensuring the impact of its Families Package contributes to achieving the targets, but the disadvantage that targets had to be set before the official Stats NZ baseline measures were available.

The three-year targets were therefore expressed in percentage-point decreases, rather than in absolute terms (reductions of 6, 4 and 3 percentage points respectively).

Ironically, the worse-than-expected figures make the government’s short-term targets slightly easier to reach. Taking six percentage points off a larger number is easier to achieve than if the baseline had turned out lower than expected. Nonetheless, it must still lift 72,000 children over the first line, 42,000 over the after-housing-cost measure, and 37,000 out of the material hardship category.

How to reduce childhood poverty

The Families Package, announced before the 2017 election, will go part of the way. Its increases in the Working for Families tax credits and, to a lesser extent, the changes to the Accommodation Supplement will reduce child poverty, especially against the first before-housing-cost measure. Treasury has estimated that the Families Package will reduce the number of children below this measure by 64,000 by 2021.

The impact on the after-housing-cost measure is likely to be smaller because of rising rental costs, which grew by an average of 5.2% during 2018. The reduction in the number of children living under material hardship is also likely to be less substantial.

Other changes might have some effect. The government is committed to increasing the statutory minimum wage to $20 per hour by 2021. It was $15.75 for most of the baseline year, rising to $16.50 on April 1 2018. Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment analysis, however, suggests minimum wage increases will have a “relatively limited impact” on poverty among households with children because most poor kids are not living in households with a minimum-wage earner.

Housing initiatives, especially more state housing, will help eventually but will take too long to have any impact on the three-year poverty targets. The 2018 budget extensions to free and low-cost doctors’ visits for children and the broadening of access to the Community Services Card can be expected to help families experiencing material hardship, as will other changes such as the banning of tenancy letting fees. But these can only be expected to have marginal impacts.

Substantial further initiatives will be needed over the next two years. The size of the task is illustrated here.

Michael Fletcher, CC BY-ND

The after-housing-costs measure must come down the most but has been heading in the right direction following the global financial crisis. This reflects the fact that it is adjusted only for price inflation and the incomes of some poor households have been rising more quickly than prices. The material hardship measure has also been trending down, probably for similar reasons.

The most challenging target will be the relative poverty measure. Recent good economic growth and a strong labour market have done nothing to reduce this measure. Indeed, it has been more or less constant for over a decade.

Cutting poverty on this measure requires bringing poor households nearer to the median, reducing inequality between the poor and those in the middle. A rising tide that lifts all boats equally will do nothing to reduce relative poverty.

The government will also need to ensure its policies help the poorest of the poor. Reaching the three primary targets but not cutting the numbers below the lowest poverty line would be a hollow achievement. Most of these children are in families reliant on benefit incomes. Part of any successful strategy to reduce child poverty must involve increasing the level of assistance to families on benefits.

– ref. New Zealand’s dismal record on child poverty and the government’s challenge to turn it around – http://theconversation.com/new-zealands-dismal-record-on-child-poverty-and-the-governments-challenge-to-turn-it-around-115366

Solomon Islands police remain on high alert in the wake of political unrest

By Pacific Media Centre -

April 26, 2019

Evening Report

Solomon Islands police remain on high alert in the wake of political unrest

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A member of the Police Response Team in Solomon Islands on patrol during the election of the prime minister in Honiara. Image: Gino Oti/RNZ Pacific

By Koroi Hawkins in Honiara

Police in Solomon Islands remain on high alert after Wednesday’s riots which broke out across the capital Honiara shortly after Manasseh Sogavare was announced the country’s prime minister.

So far 50 people have been taken into custody in connection with the unrest which saw opportunists taking advantage of the chaos to continue to loot and destroy public and private property up until the early hours of Thursday morning.

The police commissioner Matthew Varley said the situation was now under control and he is urging residents of Honiara to go about their daily lives.

LISTEN: The full Koroi Hawkins interview with Police Commissioner Matthew Varley

Varley said he was disappointed in the individuals who decided to take part in the lawlessness and reassured the wider Solomon Islands community that police will be working around the clock to protect them and to keep the peace.

“Anyone who comes out tonight and continues with this sort of behaviour I say is being opportunistic, looking to cause trouble, looking to loot and steal and to get into a fight,” Commissioner Varley said.

-Partners-

“And police are trying to send a message out through chiefs and leaders in communities today that we don’t want to see a repeat of what occurred last night but at the same time we are taking precautions to make sure police officers are highly visible and ready to respond to anymore issues that might arise.”

This article is published under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.

Solomon Islands Police Commissioner Matthew Varley updates media on election security operations. Image: Koroi Hawkins/RNZ Pacific

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Bid to expel journalist from Yap puts spotlight on Micronesian ‘free’ media

By Asia Pacific Report -

April 26, 2019

By Michael Andrew

Traditional chiefs are trying to expel a US journalist from the Federated States of Micronesia island of Yap.

Last week the Pacific Island Times reported that the chiefs, member of the council of Pilung, had written a letter to the Yap Legislature requesting that Joyce McClure be made a “persona non grata”.

Signed by nine chiefs, the letter described McClure’s journalistic activates as “disruptive to the state environment and/or to the safety and security of the state” and labelled the news magazine and website she writes for, Pacific Islands Times, a “fake news agency”.

Pacific Island Times … “Fearless. Fair. Focused.” Image: Pacific Island Times

It also said McClure’s articles contained “biased strong opinions against Asian ethnicity”.

RNZ Pacific reported that the efforts to have her expelled were linked to her scrutiny of Chinese investment on the island.

-Partners-

“They have been what I call cautionary tales about what the Chinese government is doing in terms of their Belt and Road initiative,” she told RNZ in an interview.

Such stories have investigated pollution from a Chinese resort development and the operation of Chinese fisheries in local waters.

Mystery stories

Journalist Joyce McClure … under local fire for her investigative articles. Image: Twitter

However, McClure said she did know which story the chiefs had taken issue with.

“It’s a mystery what they are referring to,” she said.

“I do wish they would come forward with examples of what they’re talking about.”

Pacific Island Times publisher and editor-in-chief chief Mar-Vic Cagurangan told Pacific Media Watch the campaign against McClure was consistent with a publishing climate where “community connections influence what gets published.”

“It is not easy to be a journalist in a small community, where everyone knows everyone – everyone is related,” she said.

Based in nearby Guam, Cagurangan said that although the island benefits from the US First Amendment of the right to free speech, local media organisations may face “economic sanctions” for some content.

“Guam is a small market, where some elected officials are business owners or have a family that owns a business that deals with government.

Questionable contracts
“When I was the editor of the now-defunct Marianas Variety, I had encountered many occasions when a certain business owned by the family of the governor pulled out their ads following the publication of a series of stories about questionable contracts entered into by the administration.”

She said that despite the threats, the paper would continue to run important stories.

“Although we rely on advertising revenue to keep going, we refuse to compromise our journalistic integrity and independence.”

The Yap State Legislature … chiefs’ letter attacks journalist and “fake news” publication. Image: Yap twitter

However, she said in other jurisdictions of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), the risks of reporting were much greater. There has been at least one case of a journalist being expelled.

In 1997, the FSM government declared Canadian citizen Sherry O’Sullivan persona non grata in response to information about government corruption published in her publication, The FSM News, as reported by Pacific Journalism Review.

The Pacific Daily News took up her case, saying in an editorial that “actions to censor her are misdirected and, instead, end up posing a serious threat to the right of free speech and a free press in the Federated States of Micronesia”.

The following year, the US Department of State released a report criticising the FSM government for stifling investigation into its activities and figures.

Threat ‘unsurprising’
Associate professor of journalism at the University of Guam, Francis Dalisay, said it was not normal for media in the FSM to challenge local elites and power structures. He said it was not surprising that the chiefs in Yap viewed Joyce McClure as a threat.

“The local media in Yap may have a greater tendency to report on issues and matters that are meant to maintain the status quo and tradition.”

Dalisay has published research on the relationship between the mainstream media in Guam and the US military establishment. He found that the local papers often focused on the benefits while neglecting the risks of increased US activity.

Manny Cruz, an indigenous journalist from Guam who is also a doctoral research scholar attached to AUT’s Pacific Media Centre, said that such risks included the confiscation of indigenous land for military use.

He said that because of the islands’ strategic significance for US military operations, it should be at the forefront of global news.

“They’re currently going through a process of military build-up.

“They want to actually bring in more US marines, and they’re building up more federal facilities on indigenous, sacred land.

“This is something that really the entire world should be looking at.”

Michael Andrew is contributing editor of the Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Media Watch freedom project.

Manny Cruz talking to Michael Andrew on a recent PMC Southern Cross radio programme.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Why the idea of alien life now seems inevitable and possibly imminent

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cathal D. O’Connell, Researcher and Centre Manager, BioFab3D (St Vincent’s Hospital), University of Melbourne

This article is an edited extract from an essay, The search for ET, in The New Disruptors, the 64th edition of Griffith Review.

We’re publishing it as part of our occasional series Zoom Out, where authors explore key ideas in science and technology in the broader context of society and humanity.

Extraterrestrial life, that familiar science-fiction trope, that kitschy fantasy, that CGI nightmare, has become a matter of serious discussion, a “risk factor”, a “scenario”.

How has ET gone from sci-fi fairytale to a serious scientific endeavour modelled by macroeconomists, funded by fiscal conservatives and discussed by theologians?

Because, following a string of remarkable discoveries over the past two decades, the idea of alien life is not as far-fetched as it used to seem.

Discovery now seems inevitable and possibly imminent.

It’s just chemistry

While life is a special kind of complex chemistry, the elements involved are nothing special: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on are among the most abundant elements in the universe. Complex organic chemistry is surprisingly common.

Amino acids, just like those that make up every protein in our bodies, have been found in the tails of comets. There are other organic compounds in Martian soil.

And 6,500 light years away a giant cloud of space alcohol floats among the stars.

Habitable planets seem to be common too. The first planet beyond our Solar System was discovered in 1995. Since then astronomers have catalogued thousands.

Based on this catalogue, astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley worked out there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized exoplanets in the so-called “habitable zone” around their star, where temperatures are mild enough for liquid water to exist on the surface.

There’s even a potentially Earth-like world orbiting our nearest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri. At just four light years away, that system might be close enough for us to reach using current technology. With the Breakthrough Starshot project launched by Stephen Hawking in 2016, plans for this are already afoot.

Life is robust

It seems inevitable other life is out there, especially considering that life appeared on Earth so soon after the planet was formed.

The oldest fossils ever found here are 3.5 billion years old, while clues in our DNA suggest life could have started as far back as 4 billion years ago, just when giant asteroids stopped crashing into the surface.

Our planet was inhabited as soon as it was habitable – and the definition of “habitable” has proven to be a rather flexible concept too.

Life survives in all manner of environments that seem hellish to us:

Tantalisingly, some of these conditions seem to be duplicated elsewhere in the Solar System.

Snippets of promise

Mars was once warm and wet, and was probably a fertile ground for life before the Earth.

Today, Mars still has liquid water underground. One gas strongly associated with life on Earth, methane, has already been found in the Martian atmosphere, and at levels that mysteriously rise and fall with the seasons. (However, the methane result is under debate, with one Mars orbiter recently confirming the methane detection and another detecting nothing.)

Martian bugs might turn up as soon as 2021 when the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin will hunt for them with a two-metre drill.

Besides Earth and Mars, at least two other places in our Solar System might be inhabited. Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus are both frozen ice worlds, but the gravity of their colossal planets is enough to churn up their insides, melting water to create vast subglacial seas.

In 2017, specialists in sea ice from the University of Tasmania concluded that some Antarctic microbes could feasibly survive on these worlds. Both Europa and Enceladus have undersea hydrothermal vents, just like those on Earth where life may have originated.

When a NASA probe tasted the material geysered into space out of Enceladus last June it found large organic molecules. Possibly there was something living among the spray; the probe just didn’t have the right tools to detect it.

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has been so enthused by this prospect, he wants to help fund a return mission.

A second genesis?

A discovery, if it came, could turn the world of biology upside down.

All life on Earth is related, descended ultimately from the first living cell to emerge some 4 billion years ago.

Bacteria, fungus, cacti and cockroaches are all our cousins and we all share the same basic molecular machinery: DNA that makes RNA, and RNA that makes protein.

A second sample of life, though, might represent a “second genesis” – totally unrelated to us. Perhaps it would use a different coding system in its DNA. Or it might not have DNA at all, but some other method of passing on genetic information.

By studying a second example of life, we could begin to figure out which parts of the machinery of life are universal, and which are just the particular accidents of our primordial soup.

Perhaps amino acids are always used as essential building blocks, perhaps not.

We might even be able to work out some universal laws of biology, the same way we have for physics – not to mention new angles on the question of the origin of life itself.

A second independent “tree of life” would mean that the rapid appearance of life on Earth was no fluke; life must abound in the universe.

It would greatly increase the chances that, somewhere among those billions of habitable planets in our galaxy, there could be something we could talk to.

Perhaps life is infectious

If, on the other hand, the discovered microbes were indeed related to us that would be a bombshell of a different kind: it would mean life is infectious.

When a large meteorite hits a planet, the impact can splash pulverised rock right out into space, and this rock can then fall onto other planets as meteorites.

Life from Earth has probably already been taken to other planets – perhaps even to the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Microbes might well survive the trip.

In 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts retrieved an old probe that had sat on the Moon for three years in extreme cold and vacuum – there were viable bacteria still inside.

As Mars was probably habitable before Earth, it’s possible life originated there before hitchhiking on a space rock to here. Perhaps we’re all Martians.

Even if we never find other life in our Solar System, we might still detect it on any one of thousands of known exoplanets.

It is already possible to look at starlight filtered through an exoplanet and tell something about the composition of its atmosphere; an abundance of oxygen could be a telltale sign of life.

A testable hypothesis

The James Webb Space Telescope, planned for a 2021 launch, will be able to take these measurements for some of the Earth-like worlds already discovered.

Just a few years later will come space-based telescopes that will take pictures of these planets directly.

Using a trick a bit like the sun visor in your car, planet-snapping telescopes will be paired with giant parasols called starshades that will fly in tandem 50,000 kilometres away in just the right spot to block the blinding light of the star, allowing the faint speck of a planet to be captured.

The colour and the variability of that point of light could tell us the length of the planet’s day, whether it has seasons, whether it has clouds, whether it has oceans, possibly even the colour of its plants.

The ancient question “Are we alone?” has graduated from being a philosophical musing to a testable hypothesis. We should be prepared for an answer.

– ref. Why the idea of alien life now seems inevitable and possibly imminent – http://theconversation.com/why-the-idea-of-alien-life-now-seems-inevitable-and-possibly-imminent-115643

Lies, obfuscation and fake news make for a dispiriting – and dangerous – election campaign

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

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

The integrity of Australia’s electoral processes is under unprecedented challenge in this federal election.

The campaign has already been marred by fake news, political exploitation of social media falsehoods and amplification by mainstream media of crude slurs made on Facebook under the cover of anonymity.

We have seen our first recorded instance of Facebook running Australian fake news.

It was a false post about the Labor Party’s tax policies, wrongly saying Labor intended to introduce a 40% inheritance tax.

It was interesting to trace how this fakery was created.

The false post had a link to a press release issued in January by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

It said Labor’s assistant treasury spokesman, Andrew Leigh, had written an article 13 years ago – when he was an academic – that favoured introducing an inheritance tax. Thirteen years ago – before he was even in politics.

Then to add to the fakery, and seemingly by coincidence, the Liberal Party had a black van driving around city streets with large signs saying “Labor will tax you to death”.

The Liberals have denied being involved in the duplicity and there is no evidence to suggest they were. But the false post had just enough of an impressionistic link to the Liberal attack to make its message plausible: a tincture of “truthiness”.

Then the Coalition made mischief with it.

George Christensen, Nationals MP for the Queensland seat of Dawson, put up a Facebook post three days after the original, saying:

Labor does the bidding of their union bosses [and] the union bosses have demanded Bill Shorten introduce a death tax.

The original post also generated memes from far-right political groups, piling new lies on top of the old.

Labor has demanded Facebook take down the original, but there is no sign it has done so.

The delay is not only unconscionable, but has given the likes of Christensen and others the opportunity to cloak the original falsehood in political commentary, creating the basis for a specious circular argument. It goes like this:

Facebook posts a lie. It generates political reaction. The political reaction absorbs the lie into political speech. Political speech should not be censored. Therefore taking down the original lie would be censorship.

This is yet one more way in which Facebook’s irresponsibility taints the democratic process.

So much for the fine promises made by Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, last year on what became known as his “apology tour” of Washington and Brussels.

He told officials he would stop the spread of fake news and voter manipulation on Facebook.

He told a US Senate committee that every advertiser who wanted to run political ads would need to be authorised, and that would mean confirming their identity and location.

Yet the ABC is reporting that just months after Zuckerberg’s “apology tour”, Facebook was playing ducks and drakes with the Australian Electoral Commission over precisely this question of authorisation.

The ABC reports that it has obtained documents under freedom-of-information that show a prolonged battle last year between the commission and Facebook over unauthorised political ads from a mysterious outfit called Hands Off Our Democracy, which was paying for sponsored posts attacking left-wing groups and political parties.

The posts eventually disappeared, but only after Facebook tried to give the commission the brush-off.

The ABC is also reporting that almost a year after Zuckerberg made his promises to clean up Facebook’s act, and with Australia’s federal election only three weeks away, Facebook still has not brought its new authorisation rules to Australia.

Meanwhile, the Electoral Commission is on the front foot about fake news.

A Google search for “Facebook carries fake news about Labor’s tax policy” brings up as its top item an ad from the commission warning people not to be misled by disinformation.

The commission has set up a special electoral integrity taskforce, which includes the Australian Signals Directorate and ASIO, to try to head off potential threats to the democratic process.

A further threat to the integrity of Australia’s electoral process is the interplay between Facebook and elements of the mainstream media.

A few days ago, the convoy protesting against the Adani coal mine arrived in Queensland, led by environmental activist and former Greens leader Bob Brown.

Simultaneously, a private Facebook group called Stop Adani Convoy posted a number of repugnant messages, including a reference to gas chambers.

The post was anonymous, but it was picked up and amplified by Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper under the heading: “Bob Brown’s mob of revolting protesters liken coal mines to gas chambers”.

Well down in the story, the newspaper said it was not suggesting Brown had anything to do with this statement, an inclusion that was all about avoiding a writ for libel.

Brown said: “Some of the headlines in the Murdoch media are simply disgraceful. They’re a disgrace to journalism”.

This interaction of social media and elements of the mainstream media, in which extremist language and feverish controversy are exploited as a means of dividing the community and of promoting a reactionary political worldview, was a potent feature of the 2016 US presidential campaign and the Brexit referendum the same year.

Where the issue is highly controversial and emotive – as with climate change, immigration or Brexit – the extremism expressed on social media makes headlines in the mainstream media, raising the political temperature and fuelling further partisanship.

There is a lot of research that shows how these effects are damaging democracies around the world. The findings are laid out in books such as those by Cass Sunstein (#republic), Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) and A.C. Grayling (Democracy and Its Crisis).

An important long-term issue in the 2019 federal election is how robust Australia’s democratic institutional arrangements turn out to be in the face of these pressures.

– ref. Lies, obfuscation and fake news make for a dispiriting – and dangerous – election campaign – http://theconversation.com/lies-obfuscation-and-fake-news-make-for-a-dispiriting-and-dangerous-election-campaign-115845

Think you’re allergic to penicillin? There’s a good chance you’re wrong

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greg Kyle, Professor of Pharmacy, Queensland University of Technology

Are you allergic to penicillin? Perhaps you have a friend or relative who is? With about one in ten people reporting a penicillin allergy, that’s not altogether surprising.

Penicillin is the most commonly reported drug allergy. But the key word here is “reported”. Only about 20% of this 10% have a true penicillin allergy – so the figure would be one in 50 rather than one in ten.

People may experience symptoms they think are a result of taking penicillin, but are actually unrelated. If these symptoms are not investigated, they continue with the belief that they should steer clear of penicillin.

This can become a problem if a person is sick and needs to be treated with penicillin. Penicillin and related antibiotics are the most common group of drugs used to treat a broad range of infections, from chest or throat, to urinary tract, to skin and soft tissue infections.

The overestimation of penicillin allergies is also not ideal because it means people are being treated with a broader range of antibiotics than necessary, which contributes to the problem of antibiotic resistance.

Yes, penicillin comes from mould

To understand more about why so many people think they’re allergic to penicillin, we need to look at a brief history of the drug.

Penicillin (benzylpenicillin or Penicillin G) was first discovered in 1928 and first used in 1941.

It was grown from a mould, as it is today. The liquid nutrient broth the mould grew in was drained, and the penicillin purified from it.

In the 1930s and 40s, and even through the 1960s and 70s, purification techniques were not as efficient as they are today. So, many early allergic reactions are thought to be due to impurities in the early penicillin products – especially injections.

Penicillin is now more versatile and can kill a wider range of bacteria than in its earlier days. From shutterstock.com

Penicillin and the range of antibiotic compounds that followed it revolutionised how we treat bacterial infections.

This led to widespread, and sometimes inappropriate, use of these medicines. Antibiotics do not work against viruses, but are sometimes prescribed for bacterial infections that occur while people have viral infections such as glandular fever.

We know using penicillin while a person has glandular fever can cause a rash that looks like penicillin allergy but is not related.

People may report symptoms to their health professionals that seem like a reaction to penicillin. Perhaps these symptoms are not fully investigated because it takes time and can be expensive – they’re just put down to the common penicillin allergy.

Further, some people perceive other side effects of a penicillin antibiotic such as nausea or diarrhoea as an allergy, when these are not, in fact, allergy symptoms.

From this point, the penicillin family will not be used to treat these patients.

The problem of antibiotic resistance

An allergy to penicillin can also limit the use of some other antibiotics which may cross-react with the allergy.

Cross reaction occurs when the chemical structure of another antibiotic is so similar to the structure of penicillin that the immune system gets confused and recognises it as the same thing.

To avoid this, doctors need to look to antibiotics from other medication classes when prescribing patients with a documented penicillin allergy.

But we need to be careful when drawing on a wider range of antibiotics. This is because the more bacteria are exposed to antibiotics, the more likely they are to develop resistance to these antibiotics.

The range of penicillins we have today came from experimenting with the chemistry of the original penicillin molecule and changing its properties. From shutterstock.com

To address the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, we now try to restrict antibiotics as much as possible to the lowest level one that will kill the specific bacteria.

We don’t kill tiny ants in our gardens with a sledgehammer, so likewise, we use a narrow-spectrum antibiotic wherever possible to keep the broad-spectrum antibiotics for severe and complex infections.

The penicillin family contains both narrow and broad-spectrum antibiotics. Ruling out this family and its “cousins” when we don’t need to can limit the choice of antibiotics and increase the chance of making other antibiotics less useful.

Can I get tested?

Studies show penicillin allergy reduces over time. So even if you did have a true penicillin allergy, it may have gone away over several years.

Under the guidance of your doctor, it is possible to be tested to see if you’re allergic – or still allergic – to penicillin.

A skin “scratch” test involves injecting a small amount of penicillin and monitoring for a reaction. Rescue medications will be on hand in case you do have a severe reaction. Your GP will probably refer you to an allergy specialist to get this done.

If you have been told you’re allergic, you should first try to find out when the reaction occurred and what happened in as much detail as possible.

Let your GP know all this information and he or she can then decide whether a skin test might be appropriate.

Do not try a test dose at home – the risk of a life-threatening reaction is not worth it.

And if you believe you are allergic to penicillin, the most important thing to do is tell each health professional (doctor, pharmacist, nurse, dentist, etc.) you come into contact with.

– ref. Think you’re allergic to penicillin? There’s a good chance you’re wrong – http://theconversation.com/think-youre-allergic-to-penicillin-theres-a-good-chance-youre-wrong-112687

Bizarrely distributed and verging on extinction, this ‘mystic’ tree went unidentified for 17 years

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory John Leach, Honorary Fellow at Menzies School of Health Research, Charles Darwin University

Sign up to the Beating Around the Bush newsletter here, and suggest a plant we should cover at batb@theconversation.edu.au.

Almost 30 years ago, the specimen of a weird tree collected in the southern part of Kakadu National Park was packed in my luggage. It was on its way to the mecca of botanical knowledge in London, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

But what was it?

With unusual inflated winged fruits, it flummoxed local botanists who had not seen anything like it before. To crack the trees identity, it needed more than the limited resources of the Darwin Herbarium.

Later, we discovered a fragmentary specimen hidden in a small box at the end of a little-visited collection vault in the Darwin Herbarium. And it had been sitting there quietly since 1974.

Most of the specimens inside this box just irritate botanists as being somewhat intractable to identify. This is what’s known as the “GOK” box, standing for “God Only Knows”.

Together with the resources of Kew Gardens, the species was finally connected with a genus and recognised as a new species.

A year later, it was named Hildegardia australiensis.

The Conversation

Mysterious global distribution

The species is the only Australian representative for an international genus, Hildegardia. Under Northern Territory legislation, it’s listed as “near threatened”, due to its small numbers and limited distribution.

The genus Hildegardia was named in 1832 by Austrian botanists Schott and Endlicher. They named it after Hildegard, the eleventh-century German abbess and mystic, the “Sybil of the Rhine”.

The genus retains some of this mystical and elusive nature. It’s rare with small isolated populations, traits that seem to dominate for all bar one of the species in the genus.

Twelve species of Hildegardia are recognised: one from Cuba, three from Africa, four from Madagascar and one each from India, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia.

This bizarre global distribution is even more unusual in that almost the entire generic lineage seems to be verging on extinction.

The Australian species fits this pattern of small fragmented populations and, despite being a reasonably sized tree at up to 10 metres tall, remained unknown until 1991.

God only knows what unidentified specimens are in this box. I.D. Cowie, NT Herbarium, Author provided (No reuse)

Rarely seen and hard to find

Generally, Hildegardia species are tall, deciduous trees of well-drained areas, often growing on rocky hills.

Their trunks have a smooth, thin bark which smells unpleasant and exudes a gum when wounded. Most species have heart-shaped leaves and bear a profusion of orange-red flowers when leafless. These are followed by strange, winged fruits with one or two seeds.

Hildegardia australiensis would have to be one of the most rarely seen trees in Australia in its natural habitat. It is native to the margins of the western Arnhem Land Plateau with scattered populations on limestone and sandstone scree slopes.

These are all difficult locations to visit, so if you really want to see it, a helicopter is recommended. Fortunately it is easy to grow and has found its way into limited cultivation.

Several trees have been in the Darwin Botanic Gardens since the early nineties and a few are known to have been planted in some of the urban parks in greater Darwin. The plantings have been more to showcase a rare and odd-looking tree rather than any great ornamental value.

Growing on ‘sickness country’

In the NT the tree is so poorly known that it has no common name other than the default generic name of Hildegardia.

It appears to have no recorded Indigenous uses, which is perhaps not surprising as much of its distribution is in “sickness country”.

Hildegardia australiensis often grows in rocky fields. I.D. Cowie, NT Herbarium, Author provided (No reuse)

This is country with uranium deposits, and was avoided by the traditional owners. Rock art showing figures with swollen joints has been interpreted as showing radiation poisoning.

But it does have one claim to fame. A heated debate between conservationists and miners was sparked during a proposed development of the Coronation Hill gold, platinum and palladium mine in Kakadu National Park.

The main population of H. australiensis is only a stone’s throw from Coronation Hill and the species became one of the key identified biodiversity assets that could have been threatened by development of the mine.

The area around Coronation Hill, or Guratba in the local Jawoyn language, is also of considerable spiritual significance to the Jawoyn traditional landowners and forms part of the identified “sickness country”. A creation deity, Bula, rests and lays dormant under the sickness country and should not be disturbed.

Eventually, these concerns culminated in the Hawke government on June 17, 1991 to no longer allow the mine development.

So are the seeds edible?

While there appears to be no known uses of the Australian species, the tree may have hidden potential.

The closely related trees Sterculia and Brachychiton are well known as bush tucker plants and good sources of fibre. The local Top End species Sterculia quadrifida, for instance, is commonly known as the Peanut Tree and is a highly favoured bush tucker plant.

The fibre potential of H. australiensis is being explored by internationally acclaimed Darwin-based papermaker, Winsome Jobling. Cyclone Marcus whipped through Darwin in 2018 and one of the casualties was a planted tree of H. australiensis in the Darwin Botanic Gardens.

The strange winged fruit of Hildegardia australiensis. I.D. Cowie, NT Herbarium, Author provided (No reuse)

Thankfully, material was salvaged. Winsome has material stored in her freezer awaiting extraction and processing to see what the fibre potential is.

H. barteri, an African species in the Hildegardia genus, has a broad distribution through half a dozen African countries. And the West African locals have a number of uses for it, from eating the seeds to using the bark as fibre for ropes. But we don’t know just yet if the flesh or seed in the Australian species is edible.

Whether the Australian species might also harbour such useful properties still awaits some testing and research. Fortunately, with the creation deity Bula watching over the natural populations the species, unlike many of its close relatives, appears secure in the wild.

Sign up to Beating Around the Bush, a series that profiles native plants: part gardening column, part dispatches from country, entirely Australian.

– ref. Bizarrely distributed and verging on extinction, this ‘mystic’ tree went unidentified for 17 years – http://theconversation.com/bizarrely-distributed-and-verging-on-extinction-this-mystic-tree-went-unidentified-for-17-years-115239

What’s the school cleaner’s name? How kids, not just cleaners, are paying the price of outsourcing

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frances Flanagan, Researcher, Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies, University of Sydney

This is an edited extract from The New Disruptors, the 64th edition of Griffith Review. It is a little longer than most published on The Conversation.

It is supposed to be a test of character. An A+ student sits down to the final exam of his degree and is surprised to be presented with a piece of paper with a single question: what is the name of the person who cleans this building?

Walter W. Bettinger II, CEO of a finance giant, the Charles Schwab Corporation, told a version of this story to The New York Times last year, describing the test as “the only one I ever failed” and “a great reminder of what really matters in life”.

I recently tried it out on my eight-year-old, a New South Wales public school student, and she flunked too. This result, though, is less to do with her moral qualities, I suspect, than her state of residence. For NSW, it turns out, is one of the harder states for a kid to pass the “what’s the cleaner’s name?” test.

Kath Haddon, a school cleaner in NSW since 1981, remembers when cleaners’ names started to drop from use in her workplace. It was in early 1994, following the Greiner Coalition government’s decision to dissolve the Government Cleaning Service and tender the work to private companies.

“We went from being employees of the school to being employees of the contractors overnight, and you could physically feel the change,” she says.

She stopped being invited to meetings about school health and safety – that was now the contractors’ job – and face-to-face conversations with the school principal ceased. Instructions were now delivered via a bureaucratic maze of faxes, phone calls, logbook entries and area manager site visits.

Only in some states do children know their cleaner’s name. from shutterstock.com

Passing the “name the cleaner” test is far easier for kids in Tasmania, where cleaners have remained direct employees of the school. In fact, when I spoke to Tasmanian school cleaner Robert Terry about what his job was like, the theme of name-remembering was one of the first subjects to come up.

“I can barely step onto school grounds without hearing ‘Robbo this, Robbo that!’,” he laughs. He has been cleaning primary schools since the 1970s and sees remembering names as a crucial dimension to his work.

“At the start of the year I look at the whole group and pick out the really shy ones, the ones looking like they are left out or the ones who are in trouble,” he twinkles.

“I stand at the front and tell them, ‘I’m Robbo, I’m the cleaner here, don’t worry about what the teacher says, do what I say!’ ”

One kindergarten boy, Julian (not his real name), spent much of first term hiding under his desk, refusing to speak. Robert made great play of walking past him with his drill, an object of fascination to the boy.

He would carry the drill into Julian’s classroom, across his line of sight as he crouched beneath the desk and put a screw in the wall. The next day he did the same, taking the same screw out of the wall.

He repeated the pattern every day until the boy eventually came out from under the desk and allowed him to roll a ball up and down the corridor with him.

A week later, the teacher later got in touch to say that the boy had at last spoken. His first word? Robbo.

A neoliberal experiment

How did we get to be a nation where cleaners’ names ring out across a playground in some states and not others? This peculiar phenomenon is the outcome of an experiment in neoliberal design that was never planned: the privatisation of school cleaning in some states and territories (NSW, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia) and not in others (Tasmania and Queensland) in the 1990s.

Some states have since reversed, wholly or partially, the system (WA, ACT and Victoria), but at 20 years’ distance the story of Australia’s patchwork system of public and privately contracted school cleaning can tell us much about what happens in the long run when the maintenance of school space is transformed from a public service to a private for-profit affair.

Outsourcing cleaners has had the unlikely consequence of alienating children from the consequences of some of their actions. from shutterstock.com

The Victorian case was the first and most dramatic. In 1992, the Kennett government, acting on the professed urge to liberate Victorians from “sterile bureaucracy”, terminated every government-employed school cleaner overnight.

Every school principal was now expected to act like the director of a standalone business. At the same time, the total school cleaning budget was slashed to less than half. Leaflets about “how to get an ABN” were thrust into cleaners’ hands, from which they learnt that, as contractors, their minimum pay (then around A$9 an hour) would fall to precisely zero.

Paperwork proliferated as more than 700 new cleaning companies were established, each one required to bid for individual contracts with 1,750 schools.

School principals, most of whom had little business experience, became overwhelmed with a new set of obligations and tended to choose the cheapest tender for each contract. A system that entrenched the cutting of corners, underquoting, exploitation and spooling bureaucracy was born.

Schools that once had seven cleaners were suddenly cleaned by two. Principals unblocked toilets during the day while teachers cleaned schoolyards. Parents organised working bees to clean pavements and water troughs, which had been excised from the cleaning contracts.

Cleaners bought supplies with their own money, snipped sponges in half to make them go further and took dirty mops home to clean on their own time.

In 2017, the workers’ union United Voice found one cleaner working in a Victorian public school for just A$2.70 an hour.

In NSW, change was slower, with contracts created for just three large cleaning companies, rather than hundreds of small owner-operators, and cleaner numbers falling through attrition, rather than slashed budgets.

Who are the winners?

The losers from privatised school cleaning aren’t very visible.

They are the children, who miss out on the chance to confide in a trusted adult outside the disciplinary teaching hierarchy, someone who is looking out for them when things get difficult, whether that is in school or after hours.

These children do not get the chance to put a name and a face to the person who cleans up their mess, and so to think more carefully about the consequences of their actions.

Who is really paying the cost of outsourcing cleaners? from shutterstock.com

They are the teachers, who have one less resource to draw upon to de-escalate conflict in the classroom. Who do not have the option of sending a potentially disruptive student out to help the cleaner run errands, or to a groundsperson to do some planting, rather than straight to the principal’s office.

They are also the cleaners themselves, most of whom are forced to work in conditions that do not allow them the time and opportunity to do their jobs as well as they would wish to do them, or to know the students they serve.

Who receive wages that give them no possibility of living in, or even remotely close to, the communities they clean. Who must drive for two or more hours in the dark to get to work in the morning, and then sleep in the car between shifts. Who may miss out on the chance to buy a house or have a family of their own.

The winners from the system aren’t easy to spot either. They are the bureaucrats with careers staked to the implementation of a “hollowed out” vision of government. They are the fund managers and shareholders who benefit from adjustments to the balance sheets of multinationals.

They are the executives of the multinationals themselves, such as Rafael del Pino y Calvo Sotelo – executive director of the Spanish multinational Ferrovial, which holds the cleaning contract for a portion of NSW schools – whose annual remuneration in 2017 was more than A$8 million.

The question of how to employ school cleaners is fundamentally not an economic one. It cannot be answered without addressing the more foundational question of what, in essence, a public school is for.

Is it a site for the inculcation of literacy and numeracy skills on the cheapest possible basis? If so, why should marketisation stop with the cleaning staff? Why not tender out the services of teacher aides, administrative staff, teachers themselves?

Further cost savings could be made by incentivising students to stay home and teach themselves using Wikipedia, Siri and a handful of apps. Such “innovation” would surely generate enormous “savings” for the public purse.

We wince at such suggestions because at primary school we want our kids to learn more than reading and writing.

But when my daughter makes a mess at school and it is left to be cleaned up by a person in the early hours of the next morning, whose name she does not know, who are we letting down?

– ref. What’s the school cleaner’s name? How kids, not just cleaners, are paying the price of outsourcing – http://theconversation.com/whats-the-school-cleaners-name-how-kids-not-just-cleaners-are-paying-the-price-of-outsourcing-115443

Podcasts and cities: ‘you’re always commenting on power’

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dallas Rogers, Program Director, Master of Urbanism, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney

More and more podcasts about cities are being produced by journalists and academics. They’re being recorded in research labs, urban planning offices, on the streets and in the neighbourhoods of our cities.

Podcasting allows academics to share research across vast geographical distances. And, we argue, podcasters are creating new conversations about who and what the city is for.

Why are urban podcasts important?

Consider the 99 Percent Invisible episode, Structural Integrity. It starts with a seemingly technical discussion about the engineering challenges of the 279-metre Citicorp building in New York. It has a uniquely engineered stilt-style base and was the seventh-tallest building in the world when constructed in 1977.

The podcast opens with the chief structural engineer, William LeMessurier, recalling: “1978, I’m in my office, I get a call from a student. I do not know the school, I wish he would call me … I think he was an architectural student.”

The student who calculated that the 279-metre Citicorp building was at risk of being blown over turned out to be a woman. Felix Lipov/Shutterstock

According to this student’s research, the Citicorp building could blow over in the wind. LeMessurier re-ran his engineering calculations to find the student was right. There was about a 1-in-16 chance the building would collapse in the middle of New York.

“What I wanted to know,” says LeMessurier, “when is this building going to fall down?”

But this technical discussion is simply a storytelling device to get us to the question of gender. A little later, we hear the podcast host say: “OK, wait for it, wait for this moment, it’s a good one, here it comes.” Then we hear a female voice.

In a masterclass in radio storytelling, we find out the architectural student is Diane Hartley. “It turns out that she was the student in LeMessurier’s story.”

Learning from community radio

As a listener, you’re encouraged to reflect on LeMessurier’s assumption that the smart engineering student was a man, and to call LeMessurier out when it becomes evident the student is a woman.

We’re part of a group of academic community radio makers who want to tell these types of stories, and we’re drawing on the interviewing and storytelling skills of journalists.

2ser community radio in Sydney produces podcasts like City Road (our show) and HistoryLab. These shows combine the rigour of research with academic voices and journalistic storytelling.

In an environment where research papers are buried behind publisher paywalls, podcasting allows academics to communicate their research beyond the university.

Hear more: Trust Me, I’m An Expert

Community radio and university partnerships are blurring the line between academia and journalism to offer new ways of hearing about the latest research.

Podcasting is about power and representation

Podcasting is not just about audio recording equipment, production and distribution. When you tell a story with a podcast, as Chenjerai Kumanyika reminds us,

Power is always present; you’re always commenting on power.

For Kumanyika, podcasting is about shared commitments to social justice, media diversity, democracy and promoting rigorous public debate on issues of social importance.

In post-Ferguson America, for example, African American podcasters recreated “iconic spaces of Black sociality like the barber/beauty shop or the church” by “cocooning” themselves in conversations in their own vernaculars while walking through and experiencing the city.

In South Korea, podcasters engaged in democratic conversations to challenge state control. Black and/or radical voices are often absent in mainstream media in the US and Korea.

In Sydney, the two young Aboriginal radio makers of The Survival Guide provide a (post-)colonial reading of the urban planning process guiding the gentrification of their community in Redfern. The tagline for their Radio Skid Row show is:

There is a black history to your flat white.

We need new voices and stories

One reason podcasts like these matter is that the democratising power of the media is under threat globally. From liberal democracies to authoritarian states, mainstream media get their content from a shrinking number of large commercial media groups.

Australia sits 19th on the World Press Freedom Index, alongside the UK at 40 and the US at 45, as the threats to investigative and public interest journalism mount. Around the world, media organisations are scrambling to adjust as new digital platforms increasingly control the dissemination of news content.

As academic podcasting evolves, it could become an important research dissemination tool within a media environment defined by narrowing content and concentrating ownership.

Podcasts can allow for public discussions that bypass large, commercially driven media monopolies. But the danger is commercial podcasting distributors are stepping in to commercialise and control podcast distribution too.

Listen up!

Podcasting can expand the way we participate in cities. It allows those who are not regularly heard to have new (and old) conversations with listeners.

So next time you listen to a podcast, ask yourself: who is talking and who are they in conversation with? And what commercial and other interests are regulating and limiting these conversations?

The voices that have historically been excluded from traditional media are now speaking. Are you listening?

– ref. Podcasts and cities: ‘you’re always commenting on power’ – http://theconversation.com/podcasts-and-cities-youre-always-commenting-on-power-114176

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

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

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

What do US pizza executive Herman Cain, US conservative commentator Stephen Moore, US Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Australia’s Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe have in common?

More than you might think.

The immediate issue for Lowe is Wednesday’s inflation figures released by the Bureau of Statistics. Inflation for the first quarter of 2019 came in at 0.0%. Zero. Nada.

Taken together, the sum of consumer prices moved not at all between the last quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2019. The annual increase (all of it in the last three quarters of last year) was 1.3%.

However you cut the numbers, inflation is now incredibly low. The Reserve Bank’s measures of so-called underlying inflation (that mute the effects of sharp movements in things such as the prices of fruit and vegetables) are at the same level they were in 2016 when the Reserve Bank cut rates twice – in May and then August.

The Reserve Bank must cut

It has to do it again. The market expects it and is pricing in a cut.

Trading on the Australian Securities Exchange implies that 67% of those wagering real money expect the Reserve Bank to cut its cash rate from its present record low of 1.5% to another uncharted low of 1.25% when it next meets to consider rates on Tuesday May 7, a fortnight before the election.

A day earlier, before the release of Wednesday’s shockingly low inflation figure, only 13% expected a cut on Tuesday week.

ASX Target Rate Tracker

Three days after the Reserve Bank meeting, and just one week before the election, Lowe is due to release his quarterly report on the state of the economy and his stance on interest rates. He’ll find it easier to write if he justifies a cut.

Not only is inflation far lower than he is his aiming for, but economic growth has plummeted to levels that imply annual growth of closer to 1% than the present 2.3% or his forecast of 3% by December. Strong house price growth, that would have once been a reason for caution about cutting rates, is no longer a consideration.

A broad cross-section of market economists expect a cut on Tuesday week.

Westpac’s Bill Evans has long predicted 50 basis points of cuts this year, and on Wednesday ANZ economists Hayden Dimes and David Plank said

The downward surprise to core inflation in the first quarter leaves the RBA with little choice but to cut the cash rate by 25 points at its May meeting, with another basis points likely to follow in August

The Reserve Bank’s inflation target of 2-3% has become a joke. Inflation has rarely even entered that range the entire time Lowe has been governor.

Lowe keeps hoping for lower unemployment to spark wages growth, but despite unemployment being consistently at or near its long term low of 5%, nothing has much happened, for almost a decade.

Most observers think that unemployment would need to be much lower – closer to 4% than 5% – for wages to take off.

Politics makes it urgent

Then factor in the election. Labor is odds-on to win. If it does, then there is a chance of fairly radical industrial relations reform. Think about the wish list of Australian Council of Trade Unions Secretary Sally McManus. That seems unlikely to me because of Labor’s extremely sensible economic team, but it’s possible.

Whether it happens or not, until the industrial relations landscape becomes clear businesses are unlikely to do a lot of hiring. Why hire a bunch of folks if you don’t know what you might have to end up paying them or how easy it will be to let them go or change what they do?

That uncertainty is likely to put more downward pressure on wages than whatever upward pressure comes from Labor heavying the Fair Work Commission Labor into reversing its recent penalty-rates decision.

The Bank is losing credibility

All this suggests that the Reserve Bank has waited far too long for wages to tick up of their own accord.

We’ve had recent lessons from the US about the importance of credibility in central banking.

Donald Trump’s nomination of pizza executive Herman Cain to the board of the US Federal Reserve has been withdrawn after sexual harassment allegations, his nomination of Stephen Moore is in doubt after a series of derogatory public remarks he made about women.

They have political problems. Their nominations are in trouble because they are, to put it bluntly, grossly unqualified to govern the Federal Reserve.

The Reserve Bank’s problem is obviously different. It enjoys an impeccable reputation. But repeatedly seeming to ignore inflation numbers (and its own targets for inflation) is putting that reputation at risk.

Having resolve is important. The Reserve Bank isn’t supposed to just do exactly what the market expects or wants it to do.

But getting way out of whack with informed public sentiment without offering good reasons for doing so is very dangerous.

US Chief Justice Earl Warren – the great liberal reformer who desegregated education, ensured the right to a lawyer in criminal cases, and established the principle of one person one vote – was famously mindful of the Court not getting too far ahead of public opinion.

In Brown v Board of Education, which ruled racially segregated education unlawful, Warren worked hard to ensure a unanimous opinion of the Court. That opinion required desegregation “with all deliberate speeed” – a phrase that was justly criticised as allowed desegregation to proceed far too slowly, but ensured that the court wasn’t too far out ahead of the Southern states and allowed them to adapt rather than defy it.

The Reserve Bank’s problem is not getting too far ahead of public opinion, it is lagging too far behind.

The consequences can be similar, though. If the public and the markets lose faith in the Bank as an institution – if it seems radically out of touch – then it will lose it’s ability to persuade and it will risk forced change from the outside.

Forced change is a possibility. Each new government strikes a new agreement with the Reserve Bank governor setting out what it expects of him.

The present one specifies “inflation between 2% and 3%, on average, over time”. If it can be seen that the governor has paid scant regard to the agreement, the new one might make the target more binding, or replace it with a different target.

Treasurer and Reserve Bank Governor, Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy, September 19, 2016. Reserve Bank of Australia

It’s time to stop waiting

Governor Lowe waiting for wages to tick up without any underlying factor to cause it to happen is like Waiting for Godot. And it’s getting absurd.

He needs a better narrative than “something will turn up”, and he needs to cut rates. Not with all deliberate speed, but fast.

– ref. Vital signs. Zero inflation means the Reserve Bank should cut rates as soon as it can, on Tuesday week – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-zero-inflation-means-the-reserve-bank-should-cut-rates-as-soon-as-it-can-on-tuesday-week-115931

Friday essay: how Western attitudes towards Islam have changed

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip Almond, Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland

Less than a week after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001, US President George W. Bush gave a remarkable speech about America’s “Muslim Brothers and sisters”. “These acts of violence,” he declared, “violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith.” After quoting from the Quran, he continued, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.”

This speech is remarkable, not only for its compassion towards Muslims in the face of the attack on the US, but also because Bush was contradicting what has been, since the beginnings of Islam, the standard Western perception of this religion – namely that it is, at its core, a religion of violence.

Since its beginnings in the Arabia of the 7th century CE, the religion of Muhammad the prophet had pushed against the borders of Christendom. Within 100 years of the death of Muhammad in 632 CE, an Arabian empire extended from India and the borders of China to the south of France. Militarily, early Islam was undoubtedly successful.

Since that time, for the Christian West, regardless of the Islamic precept and practice of religious tolerance (at least as long as non-Muslims did not criticise the prophet), Islam has remained often threatening, sometimes enchanting, but ever-present. Indeed, the West created its own identity against an Islam that it saw as totally other, essentially alien, and ever likely to engulf it.

Thus, from the 8th century to the middle of the 19th, it was the virtually unanimous Western opinion that Islam was a violent religion whose success was due to the sword.

That Islam is, at its core, a violent religion is an attitude still present among some today. In the aftermath of the horrific murder of 50 Muslims in Christchurch by an Australian right wing nationalist, the conservative Australian politician Fraser Anning declared (straight out of the West’s medieval playbook), “The entire religion of Islam is simply the violent ideology of a sixth century despot masquerading as a religious leader, which justifies endless war against anyone who opposes it and calls for the murder of unbelievers and apostates.” Any violence against Muslims, he suggested, was therefore their own fault.

Anning has been roundly condemned for his statements by both sides of politics. He is clearly wildly out of step with mainstream public opinion in Australia. A change.org petition with more than 1.4 million signatures has been delivered to Senator Mehreen Faruqi, Australia’s first Muslim senator.

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young speaks during a censure motion against Independent Senator Fraser Anning (on right) as he walks out of the Senate chamber at Parliament House in Canberra on April 3. Mick Tsikas/AAP

Clearly, blaming innocent people at prayer for their deaths at the hands of a right wing zealot crossed all the boundaries. But Anning’s view of Islam does echo an historic Western emphasis on the use of force in Islam as an explanation for its success.

This was, of course, part of an argument about the relative truth of Christianity and Islam. According to this, the success of Islam was due solely to the sword. The success of Christianity, having renounced the sword, was due to divine favour. The one was godly, the other Satanic.

This Western image of a benign, peaceful Christianity against a malevolent, violent Islam was a mythical one. With few exceptions, its proponents ignored both the violence that often went along with the spread of Christianity and the religious tolerance that often accompanied the extension of Islam. But the myth did reflect the deep-seated Western horror, always potent in the collective imagination, of being literally overrun by the fanatical hordes.

A 14th century miniature depicting Crusaders at The Battle of Wadi al-Khazandar (Battle of Homs) of 1299. Wikimedia Commons

Ripe for colonialism

In the 19th century, however, attitudes did begin to change. Muhammad was, on occasion, imagined not as the ambitious, profligate impostor of old but as a “silent great soul”, a hero who spoke “from Nature’s own heart”, as Thomas Carlyle called him. The Dublin University Magazine described him in 1873 as “one of the greatest ever sent on earth”.

Grigory Gagarin. Muhammad’s Preaching (circa 1840-1850) Wikimedia Commons

Islam too now came to be seen more benevolently. The increasing cultural and global political power of the West rendered obsolete the traditional fear of being overwhelmed by Islam. The “religion of force” was now meeting a greater secular force, that of the imperial West. Islam no longer looked as threatening as it once had. The doctrine of Jihad (holy war), declared The Quarterly Review in 1877, “is not so dangerous or barbarous a one as is generally imagined”.

Islamic cultures now came to be seen as spheres of Western patronage, secular and religious. The image of a vibrant, active, progressive West against a passive, inert Islam was congenial to colonial enterprise. Ironically, the religion of aggressive action now came to be viewed as passively stagnant, decadent and degenerate, ripe for domination by an assertive West.

The inability of Western commentators in the 19th century to endorse a newly submissive Islam arose from a deep-seated Western incapacity to treat Islam on equal terms. Indeed, the greater value of the West over all those it variously characterised as backward, degenerate, or uncivilised was a central feature of most discussions of non-Western forms of life.

In short, Islam and progress were incompatible. And there was a strong tendency throughout the Victorian period to blame Islam for all the imagined ills of Oriental societies – the moral degradation of women, slavery, the physical and mental debilities of men, envy, violence and cruelty, the disquiet and misery of private life, the continual agitations, commotions, and revolutions of public life.

Contemporary times

Cut to the 21st century and a post-imperialist age, and Muslim nationalisms are again on the rise, not only in the Middle East and North Africa, but in Indonesia, India and Pakistan. The West once again feels under threat. The myth of Islam as essentially violent has re-surfaced. But, interestingly, it has done so in a different way.

On the one hand, the growth of terrorism has moved the imagined military threat of Islam from the borders of the West to its very centres – to London, Paris, New York.

On the other hand, Islam is now seen as a cultural threat as much as a military one. Even at its most benign, it is perceived as threatening Western values by virtue of the Muslims in its midst, stubbornly refusing to acquiesce to Western values. Thus the need to keep Muslims out. In December 2015, to the outrage of many Americans, then presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the US. Better the enemy kept outside the wall than the enemy within.

The refusal of the UK to allow Shamima Begum, the school girl who left London in 2015 to join ISIS, to return to England is the most recent example of the fear of home-grown terrorism and the enemy “within”. That she appears to endorse a violent Islam and is lacking in remorse has not helped her cause.

Shamima Begum leaving Gatwick Airport, southern England, 17 February 2015. London Metropolitan Police/EPA

In addition, a new discourse has emerged of Islam as having failed to have a Reformation and an Enlightenment as did the West. Thus, for example, former Prime Minister of Australia Tony Abbott declared in December 2015 that Islam has never had its own version of the Reformation and the Enlightenment – the two events that seem to symbolise for Abbott the transition from barbarism to civilisation.

“It’s not culturally insensitive,” he declared, “to demand loyalty to Australia and respect for Western civilisation. Cultures are not all equal. We should be ready to proclaim the clear superiority of our culture to one that justifies killing people in the name of God.”

Does Islam need an Enlightenment like Europe had in the 18th century? Well yes, in the sense that European governments finally legislated freedom of religion to stop Catholics and Protestants slaughtering each other. Like Christianity in Europe in the 17th century, Islam in the 21st is as much at war with itself (especially in the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites) as it is at war with the West.

So, in the light of this history of Western attitudes to Islam, what are we to make of President Bush’s claim that Islam really is a religion of peace and that Muslim terrorists are, as a consequence, not true Muslims?

Malcolm Turnbull in 2017: emphasised inclusivity. Lukas Coch/AAP

At its simplest, it is a recognition that there are vast numbers of Muslims, indeed the majority by far, both inside and outside the West, who endorse the virtues of tolerance, compassion, kindness and – simply put – just getting on with each other and with others.

It is also a recognition that multicultural and multi-religious societies thrive on unity and not divisiveness. As then Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull put it in March 2017, “What I must do, as a leader, and what all leaders should do in Australia, is emphasise our inclusivity, the fact that we are a multicultural society where all cultures, all faiths are respected and that is mutual. So, trying to demonise all Muslims is only confirming the lying, dangerous message of the terrorists.”

Many religions under one name

It is foolish to deny that there is a violent edge to Islam, as there is to Christianity and Judaism. In all these traditions, there is the tension between the idea of a God whose will is always good and a God whose will is always right.

And where God is seen as a being whose will can transcend the good (as he is in Islam, Christianity and Judaism), evil acts committed in his name can abound. Both peace and violence can equally find their justification in the Muslim, Christian and Jewish idea of God.

The willingness of the Islamic State group to accept reponsibility for the horrific bombings in Sri Lanka indicates their belief that such acts are in accord with the will of God.

That said, the question of whether Islam is essentially violent is not one that any longer makes much sense (if it ever did). The supposed fundamental oppositions between the West and Islam fail to map on to any reality.

“Islam” and “the West” are no longer helpful banners behind which any of us should enthusiastically rally. There really is no clash of civilisations here, not least because the notion of “civilisation”, Islamic or Western, really doesn’t have any purchase in a globalised world.

Moreover, we now know that it is difficult to identify the essence of any religion and futile to search for one. Any one religion is really many religions under the one name. So there are many Islams – Sunni and Shiite, but also Indonesian, Albanian, Malaysian, Moroccan, Pakistani, all culturally nuanced in quite different ways. This was evident in the many nationalities of those at prayer in the Christchurch mosques.

Worshippers pray at a makeshift memorial at the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on March 19. Mick Tsikas/AAP

So too, there are many Christianities, often so different as to be hardly recognisable as parts of the same tradition – think Pentecostal snake handlers in the American south, Catholic peasants in Sicily devoted to the Virgin Mary, or cool Lutherans in Scandinavia.

The fault line in modern religion doesn’t go to a clash between civilisations or even to a clash between religions so much as to a struggle within religions and within cultures, between theologies, ethics, political ideologies, ethnicities, exclusivism and inclusivism.

It is a struggle between liberals and conservatives, fundamentalists and moderates, reason and revelation. It is a battle within theologies between a God who is thought to be knowable through nature, man and history and a God who is thought to be only knowable through the revelations contained in the inerrant pages of the Torah, the New Testament or the Quran.

It is a struggle within all religions between those who believe there are “many paths to Heaven”, endorse freedom of religion, encourage tolerance and support mutual respect against those who believe there is only “one way to Paradise” and desire to impose this on everyone else, whatever it takes.

– ref. Friday essay: how Western attitudes towards Islam have changed – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-how-western-attitudes-towards-islam-have-changed-111989

Message to the EU: you have the chance to stop fuelling devastation in the Amazon

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire F.R. Wordley, Research Associate in Conservation Evidence, University of Cambridge

The effects of European consumption are being felt in Brazil, driving disastrous deforestation and violence.

But the destruction can end if the European Union demands higher environmental standards on Brazilian goods. Hundreds of scientists and Indigenous leaders agree: the time to act is now, before it’s too late.

In an open letter published today in the journal Science, more than 600 scientists from every country in the European Union (EU) and 300 Brazilian Indigenous groups asked the EU to demand tougher standards for Brazilian imports.

The letter calls on the EU to ensure a trade deal with Brazil respects human rights and the natural world.

Crucially, this can be done without harming Brazil’s agriculture, if already cleared land is used to its full potential. Indeed, in the long term, farming in the region depends on the rains brought by healthy forests.

Destruction of the Amazon under Bolsonaro

Brazil’s Indigenous people and the forests they protect are facing annihilation.

Controversial president Jair Bolsonaro is opening the Amazon rainforest to business and threatening Indigenous people who stand in the way. In his first hours in office, Bolsonaro gave power over Indigenous land to the Ministry of Agriculture, which is widely seen to be controlled by corporate lobbyists.

Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Antonio Lacerda/AAP

In the months since, he has axed environmental roles in the government and planned three major building projects in the Amazon, including a bridge over the river itself.

As Bolsonaro scraps environmental laws, forests are being cut down faster than they have been in years. And the EU is helping drive this carnage: more than a football field of Brazilian rainforest is cut down every hour to produce livestock feed and meat for Europe.

Although the situation may seem dire for the Amazon and its inhabitants, ongoing trade talks provide a chance to act.

Billions of euros flow to Brazil from business with the EU, its second-largest trade partner. Goods flowing in the other direction include environmentally and socially destructive livestock feed (usually soy grown on deforested land) which enters the EU on a tariff-free basis. Right now, European consumers have no way of knowing how much blood is actually in their hamburger. The ongoing EU-Brazil trade talks are therefore a powerful opportunity to curb Bolsonaro’s appetite for destruction.

With a side order of indigenous human rights abuse. Laura Kehoe and Sara Lucena, Author provided

It is hard to overstate the case for strong action from Europe. People in Brazil – especially Indigenous and local communities – are being violently repressed when trying to defend their land against agricultural and mining companies.

Brutal repression and environmental catastrophe

This violence has reached record levels under Bolsonaro, with at least nine people murdered so far in April 2019. And genocide is a real possibility if nothing is done to protect Indigenous people and their land.

Alarmingly, Bolsonaro has even said:

It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians.

On top of the horrifying assault on Brazil’s original inhabitants, demolishing the country’s forests, savannas and wetlands would have devastating consequences for the world.

If the Amazon rainforest alone is destroyed, the resulting carbon emissions could make it extremely difficult to limit global warming to less than two degrees. Burning fossil fuels is often seen as the only culprit in climate breakdown, but tropical deforestation is the second-largest source of carbon emissions in the world.

Brazil’s forest loss 2001-2013 shown in red. Indigenous lands outlined. Mike Clark/GlobalForestWatch.org, Author provided

Even losing part of the Amazon could cause a tipping point where the forests no longer create enough rain to sustain themselves. This would cause droughts that would drive many species to extinction, devastate farming in the region and likely cause further violence.

We must act now

We are not just at an ecological tipping point, but a social one, too. The world is waking up to the risks posed by destroying our climate and natural world. Climate change is considered the number one security threat by Brazilian people and by many European nations.

Deforestation could affect the Amazon’s diverse animal population, such as squirrel monkeys. Ryan Anderton/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Europeans believe neither their country nor the EU is doing enough to protect our planet’s life support systems. As protests flare up in Europe over environmental crises, climate change will be a key issue in the upcoming European elections.

As scientists, we use emotive words carefully. But our open letter calls on the EU to take urgent action because we are terrified of the consequences of Brazilian deforestation, both locally and globally.

We beg the EU to stand up for its citizens’ values and our shared future by making sure trade with Brazil protects, rather than destroys, the natural world on which we all depend.

Visit EUBrazilTrade.org for more information – including a list of parliamentary members standing in the European election who support this initiative. Register to vote in the EU elections here.

– ref. Message to the EU: you have the chance to stop fuelling devastation in the Amazon – http://theconversation.com/message-to-the-eu-you-have-the-chance-to-stop-fuelling-devastation-in-the-amazon-115465

Grattan on Friday: All is forgiven in the Liberal embrace of Palmer

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

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

This election is acquiring quite a few back-to-the-future touches.

There’s John Howard, in robust campaign mode. One of those he’s spruiking for is the embattled Tony Abbott, with a letter to Warringah voters, a video and a planned street walk.

Then there’s a prospect that independent Rob Oakeshot might be set for resurrection. Oakeshott, remembered for that 17-minute speech when he (finally) announced he’d support the Gillard government, could strip the Nationals of the northern NSW seat of Cowper.

And bizarrely, there’s Clive Palmer, becoming a player to be reckoned with.

Only last June Morrison said of Palmer’s renewed political push that he thought Australians would say “the circus doesn’t need another sideshow.”

Well, the sideshow’s here and the Liberals are grabbing a prize from its spinning wheel, with an in-principle preference deal with Palmer’s United Australia Party (still to be formally announced by the UAP on Monday).

With Morrison, preferences are a matter of cost-versus-benefit.

That assessment led him to declare recently the Liberals would place One Nation behind Labor. Given the expose of One Nation’s cavorting with the US gun lobby, and how vulnerable the Liberals are in Victoria, Morrison needed to make a gesture.

Anyway, the One Nation preference issue is most relevant to the Nationals, and the edict didn’t apply to them.

Indeed on Thursday, Nationals’ senator Steve Martin announced the Tasmanian Nationals Senate how-to-vote card will have One Nation third, behind the Liberals (and ahead of Labor) after an agreement between the two parties. “One Nation is less objectionable than the Labor/Greens cohort,” Martin said.

A cost-benefit analysis leads Morrison to turn a blind eye to the times Palmer stymied the Coalition government when he had the power to do so, let alone his business practices, including leaving his nickel refinery workers in the lurch. As is his style, Morrison simply throws a blanket over such inconvenient history.

Preference deals are all very well but if Palmer’s comeback takes more votes off the Coalition than from Labor it’s damaging for the government. They won’t all be returned via preferences. Of course Pauline Hanson also has a lot to worry about from any Palmer surge.

The Australia Institute, releasing its latest round of Senate polling in a report out on Friday, notes a “striking rise in support” for the UAP over its last four polls – from 0.8% in August last year to 3.1% earlier this month.

The current figures wouldn’t get the UAP a Senate seat, the report says. “But if the party’s vote continues to grow sharply, it will be an outside chance in Queensland and (surprisingly) Victoria.”

Victoria sounds far-fetched but in the Senate polling the UAP in that state was on 4.7%. Last week, Newspoll surveys in four marginal seats across the country had the UAP polling an average 8%, and 14% in the Queensland seat of Herbert.

With two weeks gone in the campaign, there’s a good deal of confusion about the state of play. The holidays have broken the flow, and while the parties have their data, we’re lacking public evidence about whether Labor’s 52-48% Newspoll lead of around a fortnight ago has been maintained.

But a couple of points seem clear. First, Morrison so far has more than held his own on the campaign trail; Bill Shorten has under-performed. Second, the Liberals’ relentlessly negative campaign looks dangerous for Labor. This is especially so as Shorten is facing the full weight of News Corps’ hostility.

Labor entered the campaign in a good position. Its challenge is to limit the extent to which its initial advantage is eroded by its opponents’ scare tactics.

Although Morrison is battling for the survival of the government, it can be argued Shorten has more at stake personally.

That sounds counter-intuitive, but think of it this way.

Morrison has been leader well short of a year. The government has been generally written off. If the Coalition’s loss was small, many Liberals would see Morrison as having done a good job.

It would be another matter with a big defeat, but the blame for a relatively narrow one would likely (and rightly) be rammed home less to him, and more to the disgraceful shambles of the whole Coalition outfit.

But a Shorten loss, against the odds and after years of polling in Labor’s favour, would see the blame heaped on him (and shadow treasurer Chris Bowen, a driver of much of Labor’s ambitious policy).

Shorten would be criticised not just for his campaign – more fundamentally, he’d be condemned for adopting the big target strategy, so open to scare attacks.

And he’d be blamed for being who he is, a leader with an X factor when X stands for some hard-to-identify (and seemingly impossible to rectify) political gene that makes voters wary of him.

For two terms, Shorten’s government enemies and critics on his own side have underestimated him.

The Liberals thought he could be slain at the royal commission into trade unions that Tony Abbott set up. Malcolm Turnbull did not grasp how tough an opponent he’d be in 2016. Anthony Albanese was ready for him to stumble at the Super Saturday byelections.

Once again, facing this ultimate test, watchers are wondering whether Shorten has the goods.

Nonetheless, he and others in Labor appear confident of the numbers, even if in the melee it’s not just Coalition seats up for change, but some held by Labor and independents too.

Labor is encouraged that health, its signature issue and at the centre of Shorten’s first-week campaigning, is coming through strongly in its research, and climate change has been climbing up the issues scale.

Now the holidays are over, the campaign will ramp up quickly, with a new Newspoll, increasing voter tune-in, and prepolling beginning on Monday.

Also on Monday, Morrison and Shorten meet in Perth for a debate sponsored by the West Australian newspaper, an encounter where body language might be as revealing as content.

On Friday next week, they’ll be at a “people’s forum” in Brisbane. By then, with only a fortnight left, the trajectory of the campaign may be clearer.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: All is forgiven in the Liberal embrace of Palmer – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-all-is-forgiven-in-the-liberal-embrace-of-palmer-116011

Grattan on Friday: All is forgiven in Liberal-Palmer embrace

By The Conversation -

April 26, 2019

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

This election is acquiring quite a few back-to-the-future touches.

There’s John Howard, in robust campaign mode. One of those he’s spruiking for is the embattled Tony Abbott, with a letter to Warringah voters, a video and a planned street walk.

And bizarrely, there’s Clive Palmer, becoming a player to be reckoned with.

Only last June Morrison said of Palmer’s renewed political push that he thought Australians would say “the circus doesn’t need another sideshow.”

With Morrison, preferences are a matter of cost-versus-benefit.

Anyway, the One Nation preference issue is most relevant to the Nationals, and the edict didn’t apply to them.

With two weeks gone in the campaign, there’s a good deal of confusion about the state of play. The public holidays have broken the flow, and while parties have their research, publicly we’re lacking evidence about whether Labor’s 52-48% Newspoll lead of around a fortnight ago has held.

Labor entered the campaign in a good position. Its challenge is to limit the extent to which its initial advantage is eroded by its opponents’ scare tactics.

Although Morrison is battling for the survival of the government, it can be argued Shorten has more at stake personally.

That sounds counter-intuitive, but think of it this way.

Morrison has been leader well short of a year. The government has been generally written off. If the Coalition’s loss was small, many Liberals would see Morrison as having done a good job.

Shorten would be criticised not just for his campaign – more fundamentally, he’d be condemned for adopting the big target strategy, so open to scare attacks.

And he’d be blamed for being who he is, a leader with an X factor when X stands for some hard-to-identify (and seemingly impossible to rectify) political gene that makes voters wary of him.

For two terms, Shorten’s government enemies and critics on his own side have underestimated him.

Once again, facing this ultimate test, watchers are wondering whether Shorten’s has the goods.

Nonetheless, he and others in Labor appear confident of the numbers, even if in the melee it’s not just Coalition seats up for change, but some held by Labor and independents too.

Now the holidays are over, the campaign will ramp up quickly, with a new Newspoll, increasing voter tune-in, and prepolling beginning on Monday.

Also on Monday, Morrison and Shorten meet in Perth for a debate sponsored by the West Australian newspaper, an encounter where body language might be as revealing as content.

On Friday next week, they’ll be at a “people’s forum” in Brisbane. By then, with only a fortnight left, the trajectory of the campaign may be clearer.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: All is forgiven in Liberal-Palmer embrace – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-all-is-forgiven-in-liberal-palmer-embrace-116011

Bat and bird poo can tell you a lot about ancient landscapes in Southeast Asia

By The Conversation -

April 25, 2019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Wurster, Senior Research Associate of Stable Isotope Geochemistry, James Cook University

The islands of Sumatra, Borneo and Java were once part of a much larger landmass connected to Asia called Sundaland.

But there are some species that are unique to each island today – such as the two species of orangutan – so in research, published today in Scientific Reports, we looked at what could have kept them apart.

And that involves looking at ancient poo samples.

Land exposed

Sundaland was largest during times of lowest sea level, when it was bigger than all of today’s Europe combined.

Most recently, this was about 20,000 years ago at the peak of the last ice age. Glacial (ice age) periods are much longer than interglacials (warm – like today).

This means Sundaland was exposed above sea level for about 90% of the time over the last few million years, and looked like it does today about 10% of that time.

Sundaland when sea level was at its lowest 20,000 years ago. Study sites are shown that support savanna (orange) or rainforest (green) during that time. Also shown are the Molengraf rivers, on the now-submerged shelf, originally identified from early bathymetric surveys in 1921.

But what did the ancient landscapes look like across this vast – now largely underwater – continent?

Drop what you eat

To find this out we looked at thick accumulations of bat and bird poo in caves across the region.

Bats flying out of an Indonesian cave for a nightly feed. Chris Wurster, Author provided

Insect-feeding bats and birds live in caves. Every night, millions leave their roosts to feed, eating insects from the landscapes surrounding the cave.

After returning to sleep, the bats and birds “do their business”, defecating on the cave floor. The piles of excrement are mostly made up of insect skeletons. So the bats effectively act as mini-scientists, “sampling” the insects that were around the cave during each feed.

Over time, droppings accumulate in deposits several metres thick, which contain insect skeletons many thousands of years old.

Although we can’t identify the insects, as they are too broken up, we can look at chemical fingerprints to figure out what kind of plants the insects were feeding on. This is because insects that feed on tropical grasses leave a very different chemical imprint to those that feed on trees.

Bats clumping on a cave wall: look out below. Chris Wurster, Author provided

So these deposits tell us what type of vegetation was around the cave, and how this changed over time. This is lucky for us, because many other types of records of past environments simply don’t exist in the region, or are now under the sea.

Rainforest refuges

Because there aren’t many other sources of information, there is no agreement on what the landscapes were like across Sundaland in the past.

Some argue, and many models support this idea, that tropical rainforests always covered the whole region, similar to what exists on the islands today.

But there is another idea: that a savanna cut through Sundaland from north to south. This was flanked east and west by wet tropical rainforest, which served as a refuge for rainforest animals and plants during ice ages.

The whole Indonesian region is a biodiversity hotspot with lots of species found only on specific islands and nowhere else. Why? Think of the two species of orangutan, one found only in Sumatra and another only in Borneo. Why are there two subspecies of the Sunda clouded leopard, each unique to Borneo and Sumatra? What about the small Indian civet, found on mainland Asia and Java, but mostly absent from Borneo and Sumatra?

This is curious considering that for most of the time these weren’t in fact islands. So how did these species evolve separately if, for most of the time, they should have been able to move freely from Borneo to Sumatra through rainforest?

The answer to this question has implications for the conservation of many species in the region.

Chris, in over his head in cave poo. Hamdi Rifai, Author provided

We need more caves

We scoured Malaysia and Indonesia for caves with deposits that can answer this question. So what does the cave poo say?

In our latest published study, we present results from a 3-metre pile of ancient excrement covering almost 40,000 years.

Saleh Cave is on the southeastern end of Borneo and at the southern equatorial end of a savanna corridor, if one existed. Today, lush tropical rainforest covers the region.

Being guided to Saleh Cave. Chris Wurster

The chemical fingerprint in the cave poo is clear. Tropical grasses were a dominant part of the landscape during the ice age until recently – geologically speaking.

Putting this in the context of our earlier work in Malaysia, we conclude that a savanna corridor north of the equator was likely. Or, to put it another way, tropical forests did retreat to refuges on Sumatra and Borneo and did not cover Sundaland during the ice age.

Other ocean records also show that tropical grasses expanded, but these records are well to the south and east, and not in the heart of the proposed savanna corridor.

A barrier landscape

The savanna corridor acted as a barrier for rainforest specialists that wanted to move across Sundaland. On the other hand, the savanna corridor served as a bridge for species adapted to the open non-forest environments north and south of the equator.

This neatly explains many of the odd patterns of animal, insect and bird distributions we see across a region of major significance as a biodiversity hotspot.

It might also partly explain how people managed to move through the region so rapidly and on into Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) – the companion ice age continent to Sundaland – more than 50,000 years ago.

– ref. Bat and bird poo can tell you a lot about ancient landscapes in Southeast Asia – http://theconversation.com/bat-and-bird-poo-can-tell-you-a-lot-about-ancient-landscapes-in-southeast-asia-115628

Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup: A different sort of Anzac Day

By Bryce Edwards -

April 25, 2019

Political Roundup: A different sort of Anzac Day

by Dr Bryce Edwards

It’s a very different Anzac Day this year. In recent years this remembrance day has been steadily transforming. Most notably, becoming more popular, with attendance at ceremonies up, and an apparently more interested population in general. Last year’s centenary also bolstered the importance of the day. But this year, due to the Christchurch terrorist attacks, it’s all changed again.

For the single best examination of how Anzac Day is transforming, it’s worth reading the Christchurch Press editorial, which explains some of the changes and calls for even more modernisation, to turn the day into a more liberal-progressive way of dealing with war and its victims – see: Anzac Day will never be the same.

The editorial explains that the form Anzac Day takes is always going to be a product of the politics of the time. And so, what has happened in Christchurch, and what’s occurring around the world – and in the Middle East, in particular – means that Anzac Day is changing. Essentially, it’s becoming more political, and New Zealand society is using the day to reflect on global conflict.

It concludes with the hope that those attending remembrance ceremonies today might think of victims of conflicts beyond the traditionally recognised ones: “it would be nice to imagine that they will be thinking about more than the thousands of Australians and New Zealanders who died over a century ago. Instead, they might also turn their minds to the many who have been killed in the decades since, sometimes very recently and very close to home.”

The growth and modernisation of Anzac Day is such that according to John Tamihere it has become more nationally important to New Zealanders than Waitangi Day – see: Of all our days Anzac Day is our real national day.

Tamihere sees the day as one of both diversity and unification: “The beauty about our Anzac Day is the way in which, regardless of the conflict, we can all stand together and own the memory of whānau who gave their lives selflessly in order to defend who and what we are today. It matters not if some stand there to remember ancestors who gave their lives in the New Zealand Land Wars, the Boer War, World War I or World War II, or indeed even newcomers to New Zealand — now New Zealand citizens — whose ancestors gave their lives for their lands fighting on opposite sides. The beauty about Anzac Day is it allows us to embrace as a nation all of these hurts and sufferings.”

However there seems to be a heightened awareness this year that war commemorations can sometimes spill into patriotism and nationalism, which is a bitter irony, given that the invasion of Gallipoli and World War I strongly represents the folly of such emotions and ideologies.

This point is well made by Glenn McConnell today in a column in which he says Gallipoli should be “a reminder governments can so easily disregard human lives” utilising their “propaganda machine” to foster nationalism and falsehoods – see: Anzac Day should be a time of reflection, not celebration or patriotism.

McConnell reflects on last year’s centenary, saying “As we commemorated a century since the war, many people conflated our coming together at ceremonies with national pride and cohesion.” The major problem, he argues, is that although we are commemorating the tragic invasion of a Muslim land, today the “one group that is not readily welcomed into this collective commemoration is the Muslim community.”

He’s referring in particular to the decision of RSAs not to include Muslim prayers in their services today. Here’s his wider point about this: “When our leaders stand at memorials to preach about our unity, remember that they are not giving us the full picture. We are not ‘one’. We are not yet united. People repeat those comforting myths to lull themselves into a false security. The ‘one’ which they speak of is a Pākehā assimilated ‘one’. It is one Christian god. It is the one group which wells up with national pride on Anzac Day. New Zealand, we have a lot to be proud of. But we shouldn’t be proud of everything We shouldn’t be proud that we’ve let a great opportunity to unite slip. We shouldn’t be proud that for more than a century and counting, we treat our Muslim friends more like enemies.”

Similarly, a Press editorial today disagrees with the exclusion of Muslim prayers: “The obvious subtext, that Anzac Day commemorations are only about Anzacs, and are somehow Christian, is interesting and flawed” – see: Commemorating Anzac Day in a ‘different’ country. Instead of exacerbating division, what the remembrance of war “should turn our minds to, even as we commemorate those of our number who made the ultimate sacrifice, is reconciliation and peace.”

Today’s Otago Daily Times editorial also carries this message of inclusion and tolerance, saying we need to be “employing kindness, respect and tolerance in the present” when dealing with past wars, and that Anzac Day “is not a day of exclusivity, intolerance or rigidity. That is not what this country stands for and is not what it has fought for” – see: Honouring our past, present and future.

In terms of the decision not to include Muslim prayers in the ceremonies, the paper reflects on New Zealand’s relationship with Islam and Turkey: “But Islam has never been the enemy of New Zealand. We have always strived to be an open and tolerant country. We have had Muslim members of our armed forces and we have fought alongside Muslim soldiers from other nations. We celebrate Anzac Day on the date our own soldiers stormed the beaches of Turkey, attacking and killing Turkish soldiers – many of them Muslim. No Muslim army has stormed our own shores. Nor does Turkey forbid us from remembering our fallen in their own country, year after year. Germans, Italians, Japanese and others we have fought also deserve our respect and empathy. We can honour our own soldiers while also empathising with the suffering experienced by our then-enemies.”

Of course, as with all “national days” there’s a strong element of “state building” and mythology. According to James Robins, at this time each year, “folklore and tradition overtake fact, and much of the nation seems to embrace a soft-lit consensus, or worse, outright delusion. The repetition of half-truths, misremembered legends, and popular fictions is elevated to high art”. He believes that the so-called “Special Relationship” between New Zealand, Australia and Turkey is rather overplayed – see: The repetition of Anzac half-truths.

The biggest falsehood of Anzac Day, according to Robins, is the whitewashing of the genocide that occurred at the same time as the invasion of Gallipoli, which was intrinsically linked – see his article in the Guardian: Anzacs witnessed the Armenian genocide – that shouldn’t be forgotten in our mythologising.

And back in New Zealand, the narrative around Anzac Day is strongly reinforced by two Peter Jackson-associated exhibitions in Wellington – Te Papa’s “Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War” and the old Dominion Museum’s “The Great War Exhibition”. But both of these are strongly critiqued by Massey University’s Nicholas Haig, who says they “nourish nationalistic and chauvinistic sentiment” – see: War remembrance: Acting out or working through?

On a lighter note, for another history lesson on how New Zealand has come to commemorate Anzac Day, see Bob Edlin’s Anzac Day – how local body leaders initiated a half-day holiday in NZ. In this, he looks back at what led to the national half-day holiday, noting “We have been checking the files and find a story akin to rival trans-Tasman claims about Phar Lap and pavlova cake.”

Controversy over cancellations and security

The various cancellations and increased security this year has also made today rather strange, with a lot of debate about whether authorities are doing the right thing. In Auckland, two-thirds of Anzac Day services were cancelled, and one was cancelled in Christchurch.

The New Zealand Herald is very unconvinced about the need for the cancellations, saying “Unless they know of a threat to Anzac Day, the police should let New Zealand honour its fallen as usual without fear” – see the editorial, Anzac Day is no time to give in to terror.

The newspaper argues that “Terrorism succeeds when a community is afraid to go about its normal life”, and “it becomes hard to deny the shooter in Christchurch has achieved a part of his destructive purpose. The police ought not to be giving him this satisfaction without good reason.”

This is also the view of John Tamihere: “Anzac Day celebrations are about honouring those lost in conflict and NOT the pointless ugly acts conducted in Christchurch. We cannot surrender what we are, who we are or where we are after this alleged lone ranger attack, or any other single act. But it feels to me, somewhere, someone has surrendered our identity as Kiwis.”

Former politician and soldier, Heather Roy also says she’s offended by the cancellations, saying they are a blow to the freedom that New Zealand soldiers have died for: “Thanks to their sacrifices we live in a free society. We’re free to go where we please, free to gather with others, enjoy freedom of speech and freedom of association. Yet this ANZAC Day the Police have told us we’re not free to gather with our local communities because they can’t protect us. They blame the government imposed heightened security threat” – see: Resist Anzac Day Restrictions. Attend and March.

They’re not the only ones dissatisfied. 1News reports that the backlash has been strong against the cancellations, with RSA leaders being blamed – see: RSA president called ‘coward’ and ‘disgrace’ following Anzac cancellations in Auckland.

There’s some dispute, however, over who actually made the cancellation decisions, with Police Minister Stuart Nash stating clearly that it was an RSA decision, causing some RSA officials to push back strongly. One official went on record to explain what he was told by Police: “The first thing we were told was you will have no parades and no marches anywhere, and after a bit of discussion on that we were then told you will have one civic parade and you will have one dawn parade… No arguments… it was an order, we were directed, it wasn’t would you please, it was you will have” – see Kim Baker Wilson’s RSA and police in standoff over who is responsible for cancelled Anzac Day events.

But for the best discussion of security arrangements for today, see the Herald’s Kiwi troops not designed for Anzac Day crowd control, police say they have the resources.

Finally, although the dawn services are already over today, there’s plenty of memorial coverage, war films and documentaries to watch on TV – see Fiona Rae’s What to watch on TV this Anzac Day. And if you want to make a stand for peace, there are also lots of anti-war events around the country – see: Anzac Day peace vigils and picnics.

‘Leave it up to Parliament,’ says USP academic in wake of Honiara riots

By Pacific Media Centre -

April 25, 2019

By Rosalie Nongebatu, editor of Wansolwara

A Solomon Islands academic says the only body that can find a legitimate solution to his country’s current crisis is the National Parliament.

Senior politics lecturer at the Suva-based University of the South Pacific, Dr Gordon Nanau, said this following the unrest and rioting in Honiara yesterday by a large group of people angry over the outcome of the prime ministerial election in Honiara.

Manasseh Sogavare was voted into power at Parliament House for the fourth time yesterday after polling 34 votes, ahead of rival Matthew Wale whose 14 supporters boycotted the 50-seat Parliament.

Solomon Islands police used tear gas to disperse crowds in Honiara’s China Town. Image: Wansolwara/SIBC

Angry mobs took to the streets yesterday afternoon, looting and causing damage to businesses, vehicles and both private and public properties, in protest against the election of Sogavare.

Videos and photos circulated on social media showed men and women, running, yelling, and throwing rocks at buildings and damaging vehicles in the Eastern part of town.

Dr Gordon Nanau … Solomon Islanders “must not allow lawlessness and criminal activities to dictate who becomes prime minister”. Image: Wansolwara

-Partners-

“The only body that can find a legitimate solution to the current situation is the National Parliament of Solomon Islands. If the Prime Minister decides to step down based on his own judgment or that of his colleagues in the House, it will be up to Parliament to determine the candidate with majority support to become prime minister,” Dr Nanau said.

“Again, the process for such a change must be through Parliament. Solomon Islanders must not allow lawlessness and criminal activities to dictate who becomes prime minister.

Convene Parliament
“Parliament must be allowed to convene soon and have a government formed to discuss the current situation.

“This also calls for the 14 MPs who walked out of Parliament to show leadership and allow parliamentary processes to be effected. This is the only way to find a legitimate solution to the current impasse.”

The Pacific Casino Hotel at Kukum, where Sogavare and his Democratic Coalition for Advancement stayed in the lead up to the election, was also looted and damaged by the angry mobs.

The burning and looting continued in the eastern part of the capital last night, which saw the burning of the Oceanic Marine Building at KGVI and the looting and rampage of a recently opened shopping complex.

Local police used tear gas to disperse crowds in China Town and again last night in East Honiara to control the crowds.

Reports also suggested that a few innocent people were tear gassed in their own homes as rioters randomly ran into their areas to get away from police.

Sogavare’s win caused an upset as people allegedly saw this as a continuation of the former government and took to the streets to call for a change in the government leadership. The protests after the announcement slowly developed into rioting and unrest, amidst heavy police presence.

USP students call for calm
Solomon Islands students at USP in Suva have called on fellow citizens in Honiara to stay calm and not to take the law into their own hands.

Solomon Islands final-year law student Eddie Babanisi, who is currently based at USP’s Laucala campus, said there were processes in place to address grievances relating to the election outcome.

“I call on the young people to stop what they are doing now. Please stand down and listen to the police and authorities’ call for calm,” he said.

“They have just elected respective leaders into Parliament and they should take this up with their leaders to take up through relevant channels, instead of staging riots.

“Whatever happened yesterday was a parliamentary procedure to choose our leaders and the public has no right over what the National Parliament has decided in electing the new prime minister.”

Bachelor of Commerce final-year student Sophie Kwaomae, who is also from Solomon Islands, said the protests and riots might not be staged just for political reasons.

“The reality is that these young people running around causing havoc don’t have anything better to do but to wait for opportunities to loot and damage the city,” she said.

“Majority of them seem to have horded from squatter settlements into town. The real reasons for this might not be political, but also social, such as unemployment and the poverty stricken conditions they live in every day, thus the motivation to stage such actions to vent their frustration. These are the very issues that the incoming government must prioritise.”

USP campus closes
In light of the unrest by recent political events, USP vice-chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia said all USP campuses on Solomon Islands would be closed until further notice.

He said students and staff were urged to remain at home and adhere to security advisories issued by national authorities.

“Our prayers are with you all and the nation at this time, for a peaceful and safe outcome to these events,” he said.

The prime ministerial election continued yesterday morning despite a High Court injunction for the election to be postponed.

The postponement was proposed to make way for the full hearing of the validity of the nomination of Sogavare for prime ministership last Friday.

However, Governor-General Sir Frank Kabui exercised his constitutional powers to ensure the election ensued.

Talking to the crowd outside the National Parliament soon after his election, Prime Minister Sogavare said they were listening to what people were saying.

Manasseh Sogavare speaks on the steps of Solomon Islands National Parliament shortly after winning the prime ministerial election yesterday. Image: Wansolwara

“I want to assure this nation that we are listening to what people are saying. We have heard from various squatters and various groups, who have made very important statements.

“These have not fallen on deaf ears. We will take them into consideration when we work on the government’s new policies.”

‘Rule of law’
In a short video released after the election, Matthew Wale, the Leader of the Grand Coalition whose 15 members abstained from voting yesterday and walked out during election proceedings, said the laws of the country must be upheld.

“While the Grand Coalition recognises the authority of the Governor-General to preside over the meeting, under the National Constitution of our country, the group felt that the decision of the High Court injunction orders directing the Governor-General to postpone the meeting of members that was convened at 9.30am, should have been adhered to,” he said in the clip.

“The Grand Coalition believes that our legal processes must be respected. We believe that the order and directions of the High Court were reasonable, given the significance of the submissions.

“The walkout, therefore, is for the sake of the rule of law. The Governor-General did not abide by the direction to differ the meeting, a direction of the High Court. No one is above the law including his excellency.”

Rosalie Nongebatu of the Solomon Islands is a final-year journalism student at USP’s Laucala campus. She is also editor of Wansolwara, the USP Journalism Programme’s student training print and online publications. This article is republished as part of USP and the Pacific Media Centre’s journalism education partnership.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

30 arrested in Honiara post-election riots as calm returns to capital

By Pacific Media Centre -

April 25, 2019

china-town-bridge-protest-honiara-25042019-680wide-jpg

Police say some people decided to take the law into their own hands and marched through some streets of the capital, fighting, causing public disturbances and property damage, reports the Solomon Star.

RNZ Pacific reports that an uneasy calm has returned to the capital while Sogavare rejected accusations his past governments have “failed” Malaita over project implementation.

More reports, pictures on ABC Pacific Beat

A police officer speaks to a youth during yesterday’s disturbances in Honiara. Image: Solomon Star

Significant damage was caused at the Pacific Casino Hotel and many vehicles were also damaged.

These crowd marches were illegal and investigating police are expected to arrest more suspects.

-Partners-

Five Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF) and four Correctional Services officers were injured and needed medical attention, the Star reports.

Commissioner Matthew Varley called on residents to stay home unless it was “extremely necessary” to avoid further trouble.

Police operation
“I have ordered a large police operation to conduct more high visibility patrols across Honiara tonight and police will stop anyone that is causing trouble around the city,” he said.

Manasseh Sogavare speaking to media yesterday after being elected prime minister again. Image: Solomon Star

“People engaged in disorderly conduct will be searched and dealt with.

“I have also ordered a number of road blocks and checkpoints to be put in place to reduce traffic in the city.”

Commissioner Varley said: “This is necessary to ensure we maintain security across Honiara tonight. The RSIPF will not take any chances when it comes to public safety.

“If you are a law abiding citizen, then you have nothing to fear.

“Police are in control and we are continuing to respond to any incidents of disturbance around the city.

“But anyone who is planning to carry out any illegal activity can expect police to deal with you sternly.”

Swift action
The Police Response Team (PRT) officers and riot squad officers have been ordered to take swift action against anyone using violence.

“I urge all law abiding citizens to stay at home tonight and stay off the streets,” Commissioner Varley said.

“We need peace in our families, our communities and in our nation.”

Reports from RNZ Pacific and the Solomon Star.

Solomon Islands police in riot gear during yesterday’s post-election disturbances in Honiara. Image: Melanesia News Network

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Sri Lanka terror attack. Here’s what that means

By The Conversation -

April 25, 2019

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University

In the wake of any tragedy, it should be enough to grieve and stand in solidarity with those who mourn. With a massive toll – at least 359 dead and around 500 injured – it feels disrespectful to the people of Sri Lanka to be dissecting what went wrong even as the dead are being buried.

But the reality is that most, if not all, of these lives need not have been taken. We owe it to them and their loved ones to make sense of what happened and work towards doing all that can be done to ensure it does not happen again.

The Easter attacks represent one of the most lethal and serious terrorist operations since the September 11 attacks in the US, outside of attacks within active conflict zones. And this in a now peaceful country, which for all its history of civil war and ethno-nationalist terrorism in decades past has never had a problem with jihadi radical Islamist terrorism.

The burials have begun for the more than 300 people killed in the attacks. M.A. Pushpa Kumara/EPA

A return to deadlier, more coordinated strikes

The long-anticipated claim of responsibility for the attacks was made by the Islamic State (IS) on Tuesday night. This could help explain how one local cell based around a single extended family circle of hateful extremists not previously known for terrorism could execute such a massive attack. It was larger even than IS’s previous truck-bomb attacks in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The attacks follow a familiar, if now rarely seen, IS operandi of coordinated suicide bombings. The targeting of Catholic churches, which made little sense initially in the context of the domestic social issues at the heart of the country’s recent civil war, fit an all-too-familiar pattern of IS attacks on Christians, along with fellow Muslims.

Read more: Who are Sri Lanka’s Christians?

The fact that 40 or more Sri Lankans travelled to Syria to fight with IS could help explain how the terror network was able to build vital personal links in the very small community of Sri Lankan Islamist extremists so it could subcontract its attack plans to them. At this point, the precise involvement of returnees from Syria and foreign IS supporters in the bombings remains under investigation.

The Easter weekend attacks more resemble the al-Qaeda attacks of the 2000s than they do recent attacks of IS. Like the 2000 attack of the USS Cole in Yemen, the September attacks in New York and Washington, the 2002 bombings in Bali, the 2003 truck bombs in Istanbul, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, the 2005 tube and bus bombings in London, the Sri Lanka bombings involved multiple attackers acting in concert. With the exception of September 11, all of these also involved improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

The Sri Lanka bombings exceeded all but the September 11 attacks in sophistication and deadliness, despite the fact the perpetrators were previously known only for acts of hateful vandalism.

Over the past decade, al-Qaeda has been unable to carry out significant attacks outside of conflict zones. It has also become increasingly focused on “reputation management” and has tended to avoid indiscriminate mass killings, all the whilst growing its global network of affiliates.

The emergence of IS saw the tempo and scale of terrorist attacks transformed. Most attacks took place in conflict zones (Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, southern Philippines).

A number of significant attacks were conducted well beyond the battlefield. There were at least four such attacks in 2014, 16 in 2015, 22 in 2016, 18 in 2017, and 10 in 2018. The vast majority of these attacks were conducted by lone actors.

Why was it that, outside of conflict zones, not just al-Qaeda but even IS at the height of its powers focused largely on lone-actor attacks?

It is probably not for want of trying. The reason is that most larger, more ambitious plots were tripped-up by intelligence intercepts. This is especially the case in stable democracies, including our neighbours Indonesia and Malaysia.

Why Sri Lanka?

The other big question is how one of the deadliest terrorist attacks ever was able to be executed in Sri Lanka?

Sri Lanka was a soft target. Having successfully defeated the Tamil Tiger rebel group a decade ago through military might, Sri Lanka has become complacent. It has not seen a pressing need to develop police and non-military intelligence capacity to counter terrorism.

At the same time, it has struggled with good governance and political stability. Just six months ago, it faced a major constitutional crisis when President Maithripala Sirisena sacked his deputy, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, and attempted to replace him with the former prime minister and president Mahinda Rajapaksa.

The attempt failed, but in the stand-off that ensued, Wickremesinghe, and ministers loyal to him, were excluded from intelligence briefings. In particular, they say that they were left unaware of the multiple warnings issued by the Indian intelligence service, RAW, to the authorities in Colombo about the extremist figures who played a key role in the Easter attacks.

Thus, despite several discoveries earlier this year of large amounts of explosives stored in remote rural locations on the island, and multiple warnings from the Indians, including final alerts just hours before Sunday’s attacks, the government and security community were left distracted and caught off-guard.

Between “fighting the last war” and fighting each other, they deluded themselves that there was no imminent terrorist threat.

A candlelight vigil to the Sri Lanka victims in Bangalore, India. Jagadeesh NV/EPA

What other countries are vulnerable?

If the massive attacks in Sri Lanka over Easter serve to remind us that IS is very far from being a spent force, the question is where this energetic and well-resourced network will strike next.

For all that it achieved in Sri Lanka, IS is unlikely to be able to build an enduring presence there. So long as the Sri Lankan government and people emerge from this trauma with renewed commitment to unity – and with elections at the end of the year, this is far from certain – the “perfect storm” conditions exploited by IS are unlikely to be repeated.

So where else is IS likely to find opportunity? India and Bangladesh continue to present opportunities, as does much of Central Asia. In our region, it is Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines that we should be most worried about.

Malaysia has emerged stronger and more stable from its swing-back to democracy but continues to be worryingly in denial about the extent to which it is vulnerable to terrorist attacks, downplaying the very good work done over many years by the Special Branch of the Royal National Malaysian Police.

Thailand and the Philippines remain less politically stable, and rather more brittle than they care too acknowledge. And both tend to delude themselves into thinking that the problems of their southern extremes will never manifest in a terror attack in Bangkok or Manila, respectively.

The people of Sri Lanka have paid far too high price for the lessons of the Easter weekend attacks to be ignored or forgotten.

– ref. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Sri Lanka terror attack. Here’s what that means – http://theconversation.com/islamic-state-has-claimed-responsibility-for-the-sri-lanka-terror-attack-heres-what-that-means-115915

Poll wrap: Palmer’s party has good support in Newspoll seat polls, but is it realistic?

By The Conversation -

April 25, 2019

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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

With 23 days to go until the May 18 election, Newspoll had seat polls of Herbert, Lindsay, Deakin and Pearce. All four polls were conducted April 20 from samples of 500-620. Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party (UAP) had the support of 5% in Deakin, 7% in Lindsay, 8% in Pearce and 14% in Herbert.

Seat polls are notoriously unreliable. In addition, the UAP has clearly been added to the party readout in these seats. Pollsters regularly ask for Labor, the Coalition, the Greens and One Nation. All other voters are grouped as “Others”, although a follow-up question can be asked – if Other, which other?

The strongest indication that UAP support is overstated in these seat polls is that the all Others vote is unrealistically low in three of the four seats polled. In Herbert, Pearce and Deakin, all Others are at just 2%, while they are 8% in Lindsay. It is likely that many of those who will vote for Others at the election said they would vote for the UAP as that party was in the readout.

Herbert was tied at 59-50, unchanged from the 2016 election. In Lindsay, Labor was ahead by 51-49, also unchanged. The Liberals led by 51-49 in Deakin, but this was a solid swing to Labor from 56.4-43.6 to the Liberals at the 2016 election. In Pearce, there was a 50-50 tie (53.6-46.4 to Liberals at the 2016 election).

Primary votes in Herbert were 31% LNP, 29% Labor, 14% UAP, 10% Katter’s Australian Party, 9% One Nation and 5% Greens. In Deakin, primary votes were 46% Liberals, 39% Labor, 8% Greens and 5% UAP. In Pearce, primary votes were 40% Liberals, 36% Labor, 8% Greens, 8% UAP and 6% One Nation. In Lindsay, primary votes were 41% Liberals, 40% Labor, 7% UAP and 4% Greens.

Relative to the national swing, Labor is expected to struggle in the Townsville-based seat of Herbert due to the Adani coal mine issue. In Lindsay, the retirement of Labor MP Emma Husar in controversial circumstances may have made it vulnerable.

Bad ReachTEL seat polls for Labor in Bass and Corangamite

There were two ReachTEL seat polls conducted last week from samples of 780-850. In the Labor-held Tasmanian seat of Bass, the Liberals had a 54-46 lead. In the Victorian seat of Corangamite, which is on no margin following a redistribution, the Liberals led by 52-48. The Bass poll was conducted for the Australian Forest Products Association, and the Corangamite poll for The Geelong Advertiser.

Bass and Tasmania have an older demographic than Australia overall. I wrote last week that, according to Newspoll data, those aged 50 or over are best for the Coalition. Corangamite also has an older demographic than the country overall.

Labor won Bass by 56.1-43.9 at the 2016 election, a 10.1% swing to Labor. But at the 2013 election, Bass was the best of the five Tasmanian seats for the Liberals, and this also occurred at the March 2018 state election. Labor’s big 2016 swing may have been caused by the unpopularity of hard-right Liberal MP Andrew Nikolic. In the July 2018 federal byelections, Labor had an underwhelming victory in Bass’s neigbouring seat, Braddon.

While seat polls are unreliable, the Corangamite and Bass polls are evidence that, as reported by The Poll Bludger originally from The Australian Financial Review, Scott Morrison appears to have a greater appeal to blue-collar and outer suburban voters than Malcolm Turnbull, and this has helped the Coalition in seats like Bass and Corangamite.

One Nation to contest 59 of the 151 House seats

Nominations for the election were declared this week. Labor, the Coalition, the Greens and the UAP will contest all 151 House seats. One Nation will contest 59 seats, with Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party running in 48 seats, Animal Justice in 46 and the Christian Democrats in 42.

Until now, national pollsters have assumed One Nation was running in all seats for their polls. With One Nation only running in 39% of seats, most pollsters will reduce their national vote. This reduction may assist the Coalition on primary votes.

In the Senate, a quota for election is one-seventh of the vote, or 14.3%. Labor, the Greens and the Coalition are likely to be in the mix for the final seats in every state. It is possible that the small right-wing parties, such as Anning’s party, the UAP, the Australian Conservatives and Christian Democrats, could cause seats that should go to the right to go to the left instead if they do not tightly preference each other, One Nation and the Coalition.

Voters are told to number six boxes above the line for a formal vote, though only one number is actually required. At the NSW state election, left-wing micro-party voters preferenced more than right-wing micro-party voters, resulting in Animal Justice easily winning the final upper house seat.

At the federal election, it will be clear that left-wing micro-party supporters need to preference Labor and the Greens in their top six. It will be clear for right-wing micro supporters to preference the Coalition in the top six, but it is not likely to be clear which other right-wing party to preference.

– ref. Poll wrap: Palmer’s party has good support in Newspoll seat polls, but is it realistic? – http://theconversation.com/poll-wrap-palmers-party-has-good-support-in-newspoll-seat-polls-but-is-it-realistic-115802