The words are a little different, but the requirements are as good as unchanged. The new Australian Securities Exchange corporate governance principles adopted last week have shuffled more words than they have altered.
When the ASX first published its governance principles in 2003 it was a decade late to the global governance party and playing catch up after the A$5.3 billion collapse of HIH Insurance.
While his “restoring trust” strategy worked, it was never a rigorous, evidence-driven exercise. It was instead a cobbling together of “best practice” ideas with the aim of warding off tougher legislation.
Some 25 years on, that self regulatory approach remains deeply flawed.
Australia’s 2003 code didn’t stop the company collapses during the global financial crisis or the systemic misconduct revealed in the royal commission.
The tweaks focus on the composition of the board, the role of the board in instilling a culture of acting lawfully and ethically and responsibly, and integrity of corporate reports.
Royal Commissioner Kenneth Hayne wanted boards to take responsibility for their role in establishing culture.
The ASX is signalling that it has listened to him, saying “a listed entity should articulate and disclose its values”, but it is also signalling that it doesn’t want to go as far as incorporating corporate social responsibility via a “social license to operate”, a phrase AMP chair David Murray labelled politically correct nonsense.
Other changes re-emphasise having the right people on boards (dovetailing into debates about diversity and gender equality) and safeguarding the integrity of corporate reports in light of scandals such as the collapse of Carillion in the UK, and the Gupta corruption scandal in South Africa which engulfed international heavyweights KPMG, McKinsey and Bell Pottinger.
Of most concern was the heavy onus placed on the banks themselves to resolve their problems – to self-regulate.
It creates the opportunity for the Australian Securities Exchange working with the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the Business Council of Australia to claim the field for themselves.
Hayne wants the codes to be enforceable. But the principles are written using loose “if not, why not” language. They are anything but enforceable.
What’s the way forward?
The current ASX code should be abandoned. If Australia is to have a corporate governance code it should be written by a government-convened commission of experts and community representatives – as has happened in Germany – rather than by and for industry insiders.
Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.
How much does a brain weigh? – Question from the students of Ms Young’s Grade 5/6 class, Baden Powell College, Victoria.
A newborn baby’s brain weighs about 400 grams – a bit lighter than half a litre of milk, or about the same as four medium-sized rainbow lorikeets. By the time that baby reaches her teens, her brain now weighs about 1.4 – 1.5 kilograms: one whole extra litre of milk or a whopping nine or 10 extra lorikeets!
And while a teenager’s brain is still learning and developing, it won’t get much bigger in size – an adult brain is about 1.4 – 1.5kg too.
That 1.5 kilograms takes up about 1300 millilitres, and is about 70% water. The remaining 30% is made up of fat and protein with a little bit of sugar and a little bit of salt.
This makes the brain sound quite similar to pancakes but the brain is much more useful for thinking and (as you might imagine) far less delicious than pancakes.
I don’t have to imagine how delicious brains are because I once tried eating some at a Teppanyaki restaurant in Japan. At least, I think that it was brain: it was listed on the menu as “meat of the head” and I think that it was chicken brain. At least, I hope that it was chicken brain. At the time, I wished that it was pancakes.
Delicious or not, these ingredients make up the 86 billion thinking cells (called “neurons”) and 80 billion or so supporting cells that, together, make up your brain.
This is a whole lot of cells; it is similar to the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy!
Your brain has lots of different parts that all take care of different things, like memory, movement, feelings, imagination.Shutterstock
One of the smallest “brains” belongs to a microscopic worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. It only has 302 brain cells, each one with its own name.
The sperm whale, on the other hand, has a whopping big brain. The biggest brain on Earth, in fact. It is 8 litres: about the size of a small school backpack, or considerably more lorikeet parrots than you could fit into a small school backpack. But please, do not try this at home. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
The biggest brain on Earth belongs to the sperm whale.Shutterstock
“But wait!” I hear you cry. “The blue whale is the biggest whale on Earth. Why doesn’t it have the biggest brain?!”.
Blue whales might be the biggest whales, but they don’t have the biggest brains. Unlike blue whales, sperm whales need to do complicated things like herding and hunting in order to survive.
These tricky tasks require more brain power than simple filter-feeding (which is what blue whales do), and that may be why sperm whales have bigger brains.
As for your brain, you can keep it healthy by eating healthy food (so, not pancakes… OK some pancakes), drinking lots of water, getting some exercise, thinking and using your imagination.
You can use your imagination to wonder what brains taste like or imagine how big your school bag would have to be to comfortably accommodate 64 lorikeets.
Above all, keep thinking up excellent questions about the world around you.
David Farmer is the brains (pun absolutely intended) behind the Melbourne Comedy Festival show “Why You’re Not Dead Yet” which is all about brain function.
There are many reasons for a dance choreographer to revisit a work from their back catalogue. With Two Feet, an exhilarating two-hour work that brought audiences to their feet for the opening weekend of the Adelaide Festival, acclaimed Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard has added another.
When Two Feet premiered in 1988, Tankard herself played one of the early 20th century’s greatest ballerinas, Russian Olga Spessivtzeva. She has recreated the work for one of the most brilliant ballet dancers of the current generation, Russian Natalia Osipova.
Tankard has a long association with Adelaide, and it was during her tenure as Artistic Director of the Australian Dance Theatre (1993-1999) that the company developed a solid international reputation. Local audiences would recognise aspects of her quirky, homespun style in this work, while it also bears the traces of her six years as a featured dancer with Pina Bausch’s famed Wuppertaler Tanztheatre.
Spessivtzeva was a dancer known for her work with the Ballet Russes and Paris Opera Ballet from 1916-1934, and perhaps more famously, for a series of mental breakdowns. In 1934, following a successful Australian tour, she was found wandering down a deserted road outside of Sydney.
Natalia Osipova plays fellow Russian ballerina Olga Spessivtzeva. Both dancers are renowned for their interpretations of Giselle.Regis Lansac
The dancer’s most famous role was that of the title character in Giselle, one of the great 19th century romantic operas. And like Giselle, whose madness is expressed by the compulsion to dance to the point of being consumed by it, Spessivtzeva was known for her fanaticism and a perfectionism that ultimately proved too onerous for her body.
She famously identified with the character, and her interpretation of the role, which includes a tragic scene in which she literally dances herself to death, has remained a fixed reference point for all future Giselles.
Enter Osipova, who like Spessivtzeva, has been critically acclaimed for her Giselle. She has been lauded both for her raw, emotional approach to the character, but also for her high leaps, which make it appear as though she is flying across the stage in the ballet’s key dance scenes. In an interview late last year Tankard observed of Osipova, “she’s like a modern day Olga”.
Yet this is no autobiography of Spessivtzeva – we know little of her actual inner emotional life. Instead, with new sequences developed with Osipova, Tankard offers up a rich piece of dance theatre which riffs on what would today be recognised as Olga’s struggle with depression. Known for her obsessive repetition of dance exercises along the barre prior to performing, Olga’s mental illness is linked to the rigorous demands of dance training.
The internal logic of the work weaves a twisted but uncannily connected web connecting Osipova and her mental state with the extreme, cruel, and sometimes comic ways in which dance is taught and learned.
Spessivtzeva was known for her obsessive dance training along the barre.Regis Lansac
One of the comic sequences is drawn from a 1957 primer, Every Child’s Book of Dance and Ballet, which sets out with diagrams and writing how a young girl is to perform the absurdly over-mimed “Shrimp” dance. Osipova attempts to master the steps as they are authoritatively delivered via voice-over in English and Russian.
The instructions are frequently ridiculous, as the girl, net in hand, is instructed how to dance out the capture and eventual release of a large shrimp while acting cute for the audience. In its silliness, it is also vaguely menacing.
So too are some of Osipova’s own revelations, as when she reveals in one sequence that her mother frequently found her with her legs strapped behind her head to the bed post. As she demonstrates the pose, she tells us, “I never felt anything because I’m used to pain”.
Adding further depth to this richly layered show were the projections of Tankard’s long-time collaborator Regis Lansac. His photographic and video images created the physical world that commented on, shaped, encased, and made the dance possible.
Regis Lansac’s photographic and video projections added a rich layer to Tankard’s production.Regis Lansac
Nowhere were Lansac’s projections more magical and necessary than in the work’s final scene. Mirroring Giselle’s breakdown, Olga finds herself in a forest, where she dances herself into an emotional and physical breakdown. We feel the chill of the air as a forest of trees is revealed in the mist, then reflected in the light pool of water that floods the stage.
When Osipova, as Olga playing both Giselle and herself enters this world in a calf-length tutu, the juxtaposition of the elegant, Romantic world, and a menacing natural one elevate the drama. Osipova’s Olga is now a body that is contained, restrained, confined. Her movements are jerky, defeated, those of someone struggling in vain to discipline an uncooperative body.
As she falls, repeatedly, we are witnessing an excruciating beauty unfolding in front of us. There is no happy ending here, only the dancer and the audience alone together, in the dark.
Two Feet is playing as part of the Adelaide Festival until March 5.
This article is in the series This is research, where we ask academics to share and discuss open access articles that reveal important aspects of science.
Today’s piece explains the term “number needed to treat” or NNT. It’s a way to get a sense of whether the treatment you’re considering is likely to have an impact or not.
Whether it’s quitting smoking, reducing alcohol intake or making healthier dietary choices, many of us have habits we’d like to change. But it’s really hard to know which treatment path to take.
To advise their patients on the best of course of action, doctors sometimes compare treatments using something called the “number needed to treat” (NNT).
In deciding whether to embark on a course of treatment, NNT can help. But the term is easily misunderstood by patients, and doctors as well.
The NNT is a measure used to compare the benefits and harms of treatments. It was developed by three epidemiologists about 30 years ago.
Doctors like it for a couple of reasons:
it’s easy to calculate
it allows doctors to describe the effect of a treatment in terms of the number of patients that need to be treated in order to help one additional patient.
To understand how, let’s imagine we are running a randomised controlled trial to compare the effect of two different treatments intended to help smokers quit. Quitting smoking is notoriously hard, even with good intentions.
Study participants are randomly assigned to a prescribed treatment (for example, a drug, let’s call it “NoSmoke”) or some minimal behavioural support (such as counselling).
Suppose we find that 16.5% of the smokers who received NoSmoke stopped smoking, while only 7.5% of those who received counselling quit.
It would seem obvious to compare these treatments by looking at the difference between these two percentages. Since 16.5% is greater than 7.5% (by 9%!), we could conclude that NoSmoke is more beneficial than counselling in helping people to stop smoking.
Looking at the percentages of smokers that quit, NoSmoke seems to be more effective than counselling.Karen Lamb and Sabine Braat, Author provided
Although the difference in percentages is a useful way to compare the effect of treatments it can be tricky to interpret because it is abstract: it involves a probability. In our example, the probability for a person to stop smoking increases from 7.5% with counselling to 16.5% with NoSmoke.
The NNT gives us an alternative way to understand the impact of a treatment.
Real outcomes for patients
In this smoking example, the NNT helps you see how many patients need to receive a stop smoking treatment (compared to another treatment) for one more patient to stop smoking.
The NNT is obtained by dividing 100% by the difference in percentages of patients with the outcome. In our example above, the NNT is about 11 (100 divided by 9 – since 16.5 minus 7.5 is 9). This means that to have one additional smoker quitting, on average 11 smokers need to use NoSmoke (rather than receive minimal behavioural support).
A higher NNT means that more patients need to receive the new treatment in order for one additional patient to reach the outcome compared to the reference treatment.
Nicotine replacement therapy
Let’s look at some real data. In a large review paper published in 2016, the NNT for all types of nicotine replacement therapy was reported to be 23. This means that on average 23 smokers need to receive nicotine replacement therapy – such as a patch, gum, or lozenge – for one additional smoker to quit (compared to behavioural support only).
Comparing this value with our hypothetical clinical trial NoSmoke data presented above, we can quickly see that the use of NoSmoke (which had an NNT of 11) is about 2 times more likely to result in quitting than use of nicotine replacement therapy.
NNT values show how many people need to be treated in order for a treatment to be effective for one person.Karen Lamb and Sabine Braat, Author provided
The ideal NNT for treatment benefit is 1, in which case every single patient on the new treatment should benefit from receiving this new treatment.
The NNT can express both benefits and harms. For instance, the NNT for heart palpitations or chest pains with nicotine replacement therapy is 94: this means on average 94 persons would have to use nicotine replacement therapy to observe one additional person with a harmful outcome (heart palpitations or chest pains).
Understanding the NNT
While the use of NNT is widespread, it has been reported that the NNT is actually frequently misunderstood by patients and doctors alike.
In addition, shortcomings of the NNT are well described in the scientific literature. The NNT varies with the risk of the outcome under the reference treatment (in our example this is the “risk” of stopping smoking for those that received counselling) and depends on duration of treatment and follow-up. These factors should be similar between studies when comparing NNTs.
The NNT may claim to be a helpful way to compare treatments quickly, however measures such as the difference in percentages may actually be easier to grasp and less likely to mislead both patient and doctor.
Values such as care, compassion and safety are more important to us now than they were in the 1980s. The importance of respecting authority has fallen since the beginning of the 20th century, while judging right and wrong based on loyalty to country and family has steadily risen.
Our analysis, using the Google Books database and published in Plos One, showed distinctive trends in our moral priorities between 1900 to 2007.
How we should understand these changes in moral sensibility is a fascinating problem. Morality is not rigid or monolithic. Moral Foundations Theory, for instance, puts forward five moral grammars, each with its own set of associated virtues and vices.
These are:
purity-based morality, which is rooted in ideas of sanctity and piety. When standards of purity are violated, the reaction is disgust, and violators are seen as unclean and tarnished
authority-based morality, which prizes duty, deference, and social order. It abhors those who show disrespect and disobedience
fairness-based morality, which stands in opposition to authority-based morality. It judges right and wrong using values of equality, impartiality and tolerance, and disdains bias and prejudice
ingroup-based morality, which esteems loyalty to family, community or nation, and judges those who threaten or undermine them as immoral
harm-based morality, which values care, compassion and safety, and views wrongness in terms of suffering, mistreatment and cruelty.
People of different ages, genders, personalities, and political beliefs employ these moralities to different degrees. People on the political right, for instance, are more likely to endorse the moralities of purity, authority and ingroup loyalty. Those on the left rely more on the morality of harm and fairness. Women tend to endorse harm-based morality more than men.
We used these five moral foundations in our analysis. Put simply, our culture, at least as revealed through moral language in the books we read and write, is increasing the emphasis it places on some moral foundations and decreasing its emphasis on others.
Moral psychologists know a lot about how people today vary in their moral thinking, but they have largely ignored how moral thinking has changed historically. As cultures evolve and societies develop, people’s ways of thinking about good and evil also transform. The nature of that transformation is a matter of speculation.
One narrative suggests our recent history is one of de-moralisation. On this view, our societies have become progressively less prudish and judgemental. We have become more accepting of others, rational, irreligious, and scientific in how we approach matters of right and wrong.
A contrary narrative implies re-moralisation. By this account, our culture is increasingly censorious. More things offend and outrage us, and the growing polarisation of political debate reveals excesses of righteousness and self-righteousness.
We wanted to find which of these stories best captured how morals have changed over time, and we used an emerging field of inquiry to do so – culturomics. Culturomics uses very large text databases to track changes in cultural beliefs and values. Changing patterns of language use over time may reveal alterations in how people have made sense of their world and themselves.
Patterns of language is one of way to see how people make sense of themselves and the world.Annie Spratt/unsplash
The most common platform for examining such cultural shifts is the Google Books database. Containing more than 500 billion words from 5 million scanned and digitised books, the database is a rich source of information on the rising and falling popularity of words.
Studies using English-language books, for example, have shown increases in individualist values, revealed through decreases in “us” and increases in “me”. Studies in Chinese-language books have shown similar declines in words associated with collectivist values in recent decades.
To date, there has only been one culturomic study of moral language. The researchers examined changes in the frequency of a set of virtue words such as “conscience”, “honesty” and “kindness” over the 20th century. As the de-moralisation narrative would predict, most of these words showed a significant decline in popularity, suggesting ideas of moral virtue became less culturally salient.
In our study, we explored changes in 20th century morality in greater depth. Each of the five foundations was represented by large, well-validated sets of virtue and vice words. We also examined changes in a set of basic moral terms such as “good”, “moral”, “righteous”; and “bad”, “evil”, and “wrong”.
We extracted the relative frequency of each word in a set for every year, standardised it so that the year in which this frequency peaked scored 100, and then averaged the words in the set. The trajectory of these averaged values over time reflects broad changes in the prominence of each form of morality.
Differently moral
We found basic moral terms (see the black line below) became dramatically scarcer in English-language books as the 20th century unfolded – which fits the de-moralisation narrative. But an equally dramatic rebound began in about 1980, implying a striking re-moralisation.
The five moral foundations, on the other hand, show a vastly changing trajectory. The purity foundation (green line) shows the same plunge and rebound as the basic moral terms. Ideas of sacredness, piety and purity, and of sin, desecration and indecency, fell until about 1980, and rose afterwards.
The other moralities show very different pathways. Perhaps surprisingly, the egalitarian morality of fairness (blue) showed no consistent rise or fall.
In contrast, the hierarchy-based morality of authority (grey) underwent a gentle decline for the first half of the century. It then sharply rose as the gathering crisis of authority shook the Western world in the late 1960s. This morality of obedience and conformity, insubordination and rebellion, then receded equally sharply through the 1970s.
Ingroup morality (orange), reflected in the communal language of loyalty and unity, insiders and outsiders, displays the clearest upward trend through the 20th century. Discernible bumps around the two world wars point to passing elevations in the “us and them” morality of threatened communities.
Finally, harm-based morality (red) presents a complex but intriguing trend. Its prominence falls from 1900 to the 1970s, interrupted by similar wartime bumps when themes of suffering and destruction became understandably urgent. But harm rises steeply from about 1980 in the absence of a single dominating global conflict.
What can we say about this?
The decades since 1980 can be seen as a period when moral concerns experienced a revival. What has driven this revival is open to speculation. Some might see the election of conservative governments in the US, UK and Australia at the start of this period as a pivotal change.
That might explain the rise of the typically conservative purity-based morality but not the even steeper increase in the typically liberal harm foundation.
Others might point to the rise of social justice concerns – or “political correctness” to critics – as the basis for the upswing in harm-based morality. The surge of harm language during early- and mid-century wartime may point to the late century rise being linked to the so called “culture wars”. Certainly, the simultaneous rise in conservative (purity) and left-liberal (harm) moralities since that time is a recipe for moral conflict and polarisation.
Our research has its limitations. Books are windows into only some aspects of culture. The population of English-language books is dominated by American and to a lesser extent British volumes, and we cannot isolate patterns specific to different English-speaking nations. The Google Books database does not allow us to examine changes in morality over the past decade.
Even so, this research points to some important cultural transformations. How we tend to think about matters of right and wrong is different now from how we once did and, if the trends are to be believed, how we will in the future.
You might think raw meat pet food is good for your dog. But a new study, published today in Vet Record, has found it can have high levels of bacteria that may pose health risks for your pet.
The researchers also warn that such food could present a health risk to you, or someone else in your house if his or her immune system is compromised. That includes children, the elderly or anyone taking any immune system suppressant medication for a health condition.
The latest study looked at samples from 60 commercially available raw pet meat products in Europe. The Swedish researchers tested these samples in the laboratory for pathogens such as E. coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter, which can cause disease in both pets and people.
All 60 samples were found to be contaminated with Enterobacteriaceae bacteria (the family to which E. coli belongs).
The finding of E. coli on a meat product suggests faecal contamination, as the bacteria are found in the gastrointestinal tracts of animals. It is also an indicator of poor hygiene during processing of the meat.
The contamination levels were found to vary among manufacturers but more than half the samples – 31 (52%) – exceeded the maximum threshold set by European Union regulations.
Other bacteria found in some of the samples, such as Salmonella, Clostridium perfringens and Campylobacter, are considered potentially pathogenic, which means they can cause serious illness in both animals and humans.
Would you eat that? The standards are different for meat for pets compared to meat for human consumption.Shutterstock/Dvorakova Veronika
What is pet meat?
In Australia, raw meat pet foods, or pet meat, is defined as “meat in a raw state that is intended as food for pets”. This differentiates it from human-grade meat.
Essentially, human-grade meat products are swabbed for E. coli and Salmonella just as they leave the abattoir. These swabs indicate the cleanliness of the meat processing and if there has been any faecal contamination.
Pet meat isn’t legally required to undergo bacterial testing in Australia, so it is unknown if pet meat here is contaminated like the samples in this Swedish study.
There are laws on how pet meat is manufactured and handled. But these laws are mainly concerned with protecting human safety from contamination and exposure to the pet meat, rather than ensuring it’s safe and wholesome for pets.
Laws for pet meat in Australia differ between states, which has been identified as an issue. The regulation of pet food (including pet meat) in Australia might soon be changing.
Handling raw pet meat in your kitchen can also present a very real risk. The liquids from the meat can easily contaminate kitchen surfaces. Your dog’s mouth can also harbour these bacteria and spread them to you via licks and kisses.
That’s why anyone whose immune system may be compromised should not be exposed to raw pet meat.
It’s also for this reason, as well as the risks to the dogs themselves, that the US Food and Drug Administration does not support feeding dogs raw food.
Dogs can eat raw meat
We know that dogs have evolved to be able to eat raw meat. Dogs have stomachs and intestinal tracts that are slightly different from ours, which allows them to eat food that humans can’t eat.
But dogs can still get sick from bacteria in their food. We also know that dogs with gastrointestinal illness shed bacteria species, like those mentioned in the Swedish study, in their faeces to a much greater extent than healthy dogs.
Stressful environments such as kennels and veterinary hospitals can dampen the immune system. Dogs on medications like steroids or chemotherapy will also have reduced immunity to bacteria, including those in their diet.
How to keep yourself safe
The authors of this new study offer some great practical tips on how to keep yourself safe when handling raw pet meat.
keep raw pet meat frozen until use
handle raw pet meat separately from all other human food, and either use dedicated pet meat utensils or wash equipment thoroughly after use
avoid kisses and licks from dogs that have just eaten raw pet meat
do not feed raw pet meat in households with immunocompromised people.
You can further reduce the risk by only feeding human-grade meat to your dog, rather than pet meat, as the bacterial load and presence of other contaminants should be minimal.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Reilly, Director of the Public Law and Policy Research Unit, Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide
This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.
With a rapidly changing climate and increased instability in the world order, patterns of people movement are likely to change dramatically in the future. It is not a tenable response to isolate Australia from the shocks of these changes.
Sadly, the politicisation of refugee policy since the Tampa crisis of 2001 indicates that our major political parties are incapable of the kind of honest and open decision-making that is required in this complex and vexed policy space. However, the passing of the Kerryn Phelps-led amendments to the Migration Act to facilitate medical evacuations from Manus Island and Nauru may point to a shift in the nation’s mood on the issue.
In the second half of the 20th century, Australia transformed the idea of itself into a multicultural nation. An important part of this story has been Australia’s contribution to the resettlement of refugees.
Australia was the first country outside Europe to accede to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Australia was also an early adopter of the 1967 protocol that extended the convention beyond Europe. Australia’s generous resettlement of refugees under the convention has reinforced its identity as a nation built on migrants.
Australia’s acceptance of refugees remained uncontroversial while the numbers of refugees could be strictly controlled through its immigration program. The first serious challenge to control was the arrival of boatloads of Vietnamese refugees in 1976. However, the Fraser Coalition government maintained control through an arrangement with South East Asian countries that Australia would resettle a high number of Vietnamese refugees if those countries stopped redirecting boats that arrived on their shores back out to sea.
How the Tampa changed Australian asylum-seeker policy
When boats began arriving in larger numbers from 1999 to 2001, the struggling Howard Coalition government used the rescue of 438 asylum seekers by the MV Tampa as an opportunity to implement a more restrictive policy. This included boat turn-backs, offshore processing and detention, and issuing temporary protection visas for people arriving by boat whose applications for asylum were accepted. The boats stopped arriving within months.
In 2007, the Labor government dismantled these policy settings. Asylum seekers arriving by boat were rescued at sea and processed on the Australian territory of Christmas Island. If they were found to be refugees, they were granted permanent protection visas. This policy was premised on boat arrivals being at similar levels to those experienced previously. But this proved mistaken.
The Norwegian cargo ship Tampa collected 438 stranded asylum seekers and changed Australian policy on the issue.AAP/Wallenius Wilhelmsen
By 2013, refugee policy was in disarray. In 2012, 17,204 people arrived by boat, rising to 20,587 in 2013. This far outnumbered the planned refugee intake of 13,750 and reinforced the fear that Australia was in danger of being “swamped” by asylum seekers.
Prior to this rapid rise in boat arrivals, the Labor government had attempted to introduce a novel policy response, the Australia-Malaysia asylum-seeker transfer agreement. The Malaysian government agreed to the return to Malaysia of asylum seekers who tried to reach Australia by boat via Indonesia. Malaysia guaranteed housing, education and work rights for these asylum seekers, but also that they would receive no advantage in resolving their application for refugee resettlement.
This arrangement removed the incentive to take a risky boat journey to Australia. We will never know if it would have stopped the boats, as the High Court held the government did not have the power to implement the arrangement, and the Coalition and the Greens blocked an attempt by the government to amend the Migration Act to provide it with the requisite power.
In mid-2013, the Labor government changed direction radically. It committed to offshore processing for the first time, stating categorically that no asylum seeker reaching Australia by boat would ever be resettled here.
When it was returned to government in 2013, the Abbott Coalition government readily adopted Labor’s policy and added a policy of aggressive boat turn-backs covered in a veil of operational secrecy. It also reintroduced temporary protection visas for the 30,000 asylum seekers who had entered Australia during the six years of Labor government. Within a few months, boat arrivals had ceased completely.
Asylum-seeker policy becomes a national security issue
The current Coalition government has successfully cast refugee policy as an issue of border security. The ministers for immigration, first Scott Morrison and then Peter Dutton, have spun a narrative that any softening of the government’s stance on resettlement would risk relaunching a flotilla of boats.
The line they have drawn is breathtaking in its strictness. The government has been unwilling even to accept New Zealand’s offer to resettle 150 refugees a year from offshore detention for fear they will then have backdoor entry to Australia. It has also made it very difficult for asylum seekers to get emergency medical treatment in Australia.
The government’s narrative of border protection does not acknowledge the human cost of long-term offshore detention. Since detention centres on Nauru and Manus were opened in 2014, 3,127 people have been transferred there. As of early February 2019, as a result of third-country resettlements and voluntary returns, about 1,000 remain. The last children on Nauru were resettled in the US in February 2019.
Despite strictly controlling access to information from Nauru and Manus, the government has not been able to prevent courageous medical officials bearing witness to the human suffering of refugees. This includes suicides and self-harm, and children simply giving up. It has not been able to prevent Behrouz Boochani using mobile phone messages to write an award-winning book bearing witness to the official strategies used to break the spirit of refugees on Manus Island.
Asylum seeker and journalist Behrouz Boochani wrote the award-winning book No Friend but the Mountains.Amnesty International handout
Finding a more humane way forward
As on so many policy issues facing Australia, we need an honest discussion on refugees. On the one hand, it needs to be acknowledged that refugees are victims of regimes intent on persecuting them and are deserving (and entitled) to our protection.
As a nation, we continue to have a policy of high levels of immigration, and refugees can be a significant part of our strategy for future prosperity. We have a responsibility not to contribute further to people’s suffering, and thus long-term detention of refugees is untenable.
On the other hand, Australians believe they are entitled to determine who is provided access to the benefit of membership in the Australian state. This being the case, refugee policy must be able to control the number of people who are accepted for resettlement. The most effective mechanism of control is to prevent onshore arrivals by boat and plane, and to use planned resettlement from refugee camps in consultation with the UNHCR.
The unprecedented number of boat arrivals in 2012-13 tilted the equation towards control over compassion. However, there is a sensible middle ground more in line with Australian values.
First, it is possible to resettle all the asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus in Australia expeditiously, without triggering large numbers of boat arrivals. This resettlement must be the immediate priority of a new government. It was never envisaged that refugees would spend up to six years in offshore detention.
Retaining the architecture of offshore detention and processing for the future and the possibility of boat turn-backs is more than adequate deterrent to prevent people risking the perilous journey to Australia by boat. The Coalition governments in 2001 and 2013 demonstrated that if this proves to be wrong, introducing a hard-line policy can stop the boats very quickly.
Second, all those refugees on Temporary Protection Visas and Safe Haven Enterprise Visas in Australia need to be offered permanent protection. Temporary visas create a huge psychological and social burden on refugees in Australia, with no benefits.
Third, the movement of refugees, particularly from the Middle East, through South East Asia to Australia is a regional problem. The Australian government needs to resume discussions with Indonesia and Malaysia about a more nuanced solution.
With the Coalition cutting through with its narrative of fear of invasion and Labor still spooked by policy failure during its previous term in government, it has taken independent MPs to begin to push Australian refugee policy to a sensible middle ground.
Kerryn Phelps’ amendment to the Migration Act, supported by Labor and the Greens, provides for the evacuation of asylum seekers and refugees to Australia if two doctors assess that they require medical treatment not available on Nauru or Manus Island. The minister for home affairs retains the power to reject a transfer on security grounds. The law is also limited in its application to refugees already on Nauru and Manus Island.
In parliament, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten framed their positions on the “Medivac” law as a test of character. Morrison focused on the importance of “mettle” and “holding the line”. Shorten focused on “compassion” and “balance”.
The passing of the law ensures refugee policy will be a key election issue once again. The Australian people will determine what version of character prevails.
Most people picture Antarctica as a frozen continent of wilderness, but people have been living – and building – there for decades. Now, for the first time, we can reveal the human footprint across the entire continent.
Our research, published today in the journal Nature Sustainability, found that while buildings and disturbance cover a small portion of the whole continent, it has an outsized impact on Antartica’s ecosystem.
Our data show 76% of buildings in Antarctica are within just 0.06% of the continent: the ice-free areas within 5km of the coast. This coastal fringe is particularly important as it provides access to the Southern Ocean for penguins and seals, as well as providing a typically wetter climate suitable for plant life.
A hard question to answer
How much land we collectively impact with infrastructure in Antarctica has been a question raised for decades, but until now has been difficult to answer. The good news is it’s a relatively small area. The bigger issue is where it is. Together with our colleagues Dana Bergstrom and John van den Hoff, we have made the first measurement of the “footprint” of buildings and disturbed ice-free ground across Antarctica.
This equates to more than 390,000 square metres of buildings on the icy continent, with a further 5,200,000m² of disturbance just to ice-free land. To put it another way, there is more than 1,100m² of disturbed ground per person in Antarctica at its most populated in summer. This is caused primarily by the 30 nations with infrastructure in Antarctica, along with some presence from the tourism industry.
Figure Building footprint density.Nature Sustainability
It has taken until now to find the extent of our impact because of difficulty in gathering the data. Because so many countries are active in Antarctica, getting them to provide data on their infrastructure has been very slow. As two-thirds of research stations were built before the adoption of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, they did not require environmental impact assessments or monitoring, so it is quite likely many of the operators do not have accessible data on their footprints. In addition, due to the inherent difficulty in accessing Antarctica, and the vast distances between each station, it is not possible to conduct field measurements on a continental scale.
To address these problems, our team took an established approach to measuring a single station’s footprint, and applied it to 158 locations across the continent using satellite imagery. The majority of images used were freely sourced from Google Earth, enabled by continually increasing improvements in resolution and coverage.
This process took hours of painstaking “digitisation” – where the spatially accurate images of buildings and disturbed ground were manually mapped within a computer program to create the data.
Davis Station, one of Australia’s three permanent research outposts in Antartica. Researchers used Google Earth images to map the footprint of human infrastructure across the continent.Shaun Brooks, Author provided
Interestingly, one of the most difficult sites was the United States’ Amundsen-Scott Station. As this station is located on the geographic South Pole, very few satellites pass overhead. This problem was eventually solved by trawling through thousands of aerial images produced by NASA’s Operation IceBridge, where we found their aircraft had flown over the station in 2010. After capturing these data, we then compared our measurements against existing known building sizes and found our accuracy was within 2%.
Unlike buildings, we didn’t have measurements to compare for disturbed ground such as roadways, airstrips, quarries and the like. We believe we have produced a significant underestimate, due to factors including snow cover and insufficient image resolution obscuring smaller features such as walking tracks.
After mapping the footprint of buildings and ground disturbance our data has yielded some interesting results. For practical reasons, most stations in Antarctica are located within the small ice-free areas spread across the continent, particularly around the coast. In addition to being attractive to us, these areas are essential for much of Antarctica’s biodiversity by providing nesting sites for seabirds and penguins, substrate for mosses, lichens, and two vascular plants, and habitat for the continent’s invertebrate species.
Adelie penguins need ice-free areas to access the ocean.Shaun Brooks, Author provided
Another interesting finding from these data is what they tell us about wilderness on the continent. Although the current footprint covers a very small fraction of the more than 12 million square kilometres of Antarctica, we found disturbance is present in more than half of all large ice-free areas along the coast. Furthermore, by using the building data we captured, along with existing work by Rupert Summerson, we were also able to estimate the visual footprint, which amounts to an area similar in size to the total ice-free land across the whole continent.
The release of this research is timely, with significant increases in infrastructure proposed for Antarctica. Currently there are new stations proposed by several nations, major rebuilding projects of existing stations underway (including the US’s McMurdo and New Zealand’s Scott Base), and Italy is building a new runway in ice-free areas.
Australia has proposed Antarctica’s first concrete runway, which if built would be the continent’s largest.
Until now, decisions on expanding infrastructure have been without the context of how much is already present. We hope informed decisions can now be made by the international community about how much building in Antarctica is appropriate, where it should occur, and how to manage the future of the last great wilderness.
In the midst of a raging heatwave, most people think of the ocean as a nice place to cool down. But heatwaves can strike in the ocean as well as on land. And when they do, marine organisms of all kinds – plankton, seaweed, corals, snails, fish, birds and mammals – also feel the wrath of soaring temperatures.
Our new research, published today in Nature Climate Change, makes abundantly clear the destructive force of marine heatwaves. We compared the effects on ecosystems of eight marine heatwaves from around the world, including four El Niño events (1982-83, 1986-87, 1991-92, 1997-98), three extreme heat events in the Mediterranean Sea (1999, 2003, 2006) and one in Western Australia in 2011. We found that these events can significantly damage the health of corals, kelps and seagrasses.
This is concerning, because these species form the foundation of many ecosystems, from the tropics to polar waters. Thousands of other species – not to mention a wealth of human activities – depend on them.
We identified southeastern Australia, southeast Asia, northwestern Africa, Europe and eastern Canada as the places where marine species are most at risk of extreme heat in the future.
Marine heatwaves are defined as periods of five days or more during which ocean temperatures are unusually high, compared with the long-term average for any given place. Just like their counterparts on land, marine heatwaves have been getting more frequent, hotter and longer in recent decades. Globally, there were 54% more heatwave days per year between 1987 and 2016 than in 1925–54.
Although the heatwaves we studied varied widely in their maximum intensity and duration, we found that all of them had negative impacts on a broad range of different types of marine species.
Marine heatwaves in tropical regions have caused widespread coral bleaching.
Humans also depend on these species, either directly or indirectly, because they underpin a wealth of ecological goods and services. For example, many marine ecosystems support commercial and recreational fisheries, contribute to carbon storage and nutrient cycling, offer venues for tourism and recreation, or are culturally or scientifically significant.
Marine heatwaves have had negative impacts on virtually all these “ecosystem services”. For example, seagrass meadows in the Mediterranean Sea, which store significant amounts of carbon, are harmed by extreme temperatures recorded during marine heatwaves. In the summers of both 2003 and 2006, marine heatwaves led to widespread seagrass deaths.
The marine heatwaves off the west coast of Australia in 2011 and northeast America in 2012 led to dramatic changes in the regionally important abalone and lobster fisheries, respectively. Several marine heatwaves associated with El Niño events caused widespread coral bleaching with consequences for biodiversity, fisheries, coastal erosion and tourism.
Mass die-offs of finfish and shellfish have been recorded during marine heatwaves, with major consequences for regional fishing industries.
All evidence suggests that marine heatwaves are linked to human mediated climate change and will continue to intensify with ongoing global warming. The impacts can only be minimised by combining rapid, meaningful reductions in greenhouse emissions with a more adaptable and pragmatic approach to the management of marine ecosystems.
On the last day of summer for 2019, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) delivered a burst of sunshine to apartment owners at the high-rise Lacrosse building in the Melbourne Docklands precinct. Lacrosse suffered a serious cladding fire on November 24 2014, started by a single cigarette on a balcony. Last Thursday, Judge Ted Woodward ordered the owners be immediately paid A$5.7 million in damages.
The judge also indicated that the owners would receive most of the balance of their A$12.7 million claim – including nearly A$6 million in calculated costs of compliance with building codes.
However, in our adversarial legal system, there are losers as well as winners. The losers in this case are the fire engineer, the certifier and the architects.
The builder, LU Simon, was ordered to pay more than A$5.7 million to apartment owners. However, the architect, fire engineer and building certifier who worked on the project would pay most of that to LU Simon after Judge Woodward found they had breached contractual obligations.
Fire engineer Thomas Nicholas was ordered to pay 39% of the damages, certifier Gardner Group 35% and architects Elenberg Fraser 25%. Incredibly, the builder, LU Simon, is a winner, assessed to pay only 3% of the damages.
So shocking is the VCAT decision to architects that the national president of the Australian Institute of Architects suggested in an email to members last Friday that they might need to seek counselling.
The decision reminds architects and other consultants that abiding by common practice is no defence if that practice is inadequate. Even though an architect may work for the builder and be employed on a limited commission during construction, they still bear primary responsibility for the safety of the building as the “lead consultant”. According to the decision, architects and consultants are required to exercise high standards of professional judgement and skill even if their commissioning arrangements and fees militate this.
So is this a win for all owners?
It looks like a cause for celebration by the owners. But is it?
Well, for a start, this decision has taken over four years to emerge. It may yet be the subject of an appeal. In the meantime, owners and residents have had to live in a building that is not safe, although work to replace the cladding should be complete by May.
Judge Woodward said the decision applies to the specific circumstances of Lacrosse only, so the owners of other buildings, including Neo200, which was evacuated on February 4 after a similar fire, might not also be in the winner’s circle.
The Lacrosse case ran for 22 days, involved five QCs, five juniors and an army of instructing solicitors, paralegals and expert witnesses. There were 91 volumes of documents tendered as evidence. Legal costs almost certainly exceeded A$2 million, or more than 15% of the damages sought.
Around the country, based on state audits, I estimate around 1,000 buildings have combustible aluminium composite panels on their facades. If they all generate a court case half as complex as Lacrosse, the legal bills alone could total over A$1 billion.
Government must also answer for deregulation
Those who eased the regulatory framework in place in Australia since the late 1980s share culpability with the consultants for the fires at Lacrosse and Neo200. Until the early 1990s, Australian building codes prohibited the use of combustible elements on the facades of tall buildings. Throughout the 1990s, the then Building Code of Australia (now the National Construction Code or NCC) was relaxed to a “performance standard”, which allowed builders and consultants to believe aluminium composite panels and timber were permissible.
By 2000, despite plenty of evidence that these panels were combustible and therefore not suitable as facade material on tall buildings, the market for them continued to grow. The Australian Building Codes Board did nothing about this, encouraging a potentially fatal error.
The ABC reports on the hidden potential killer in Australian buildings following the Lacrosse fire.
So far, on the regulatory side, no one has actually owned up to a mistake. However, the Building Ministers’ Forum is considering the 24 recommendations of a report it commissioned from Peter Shergold and Bronwyn Weir. New South Wales’ minister for innovation and better regulation, Matt Kean, has promised to crack down on dodgy certifiers. In the light of the cladding panel fiasco, he probably should be reviewing his own remit, which is based on the premise that less regulation is better.
The NCC has a goal to encourage innovation in building by allowing alternative solutions to “deemed to satisfy” provisions. Unfortunately, in the case of the cladding panels and other “innovations”, the cost savings may be only a tiny proportion of the costs of rectifying the problems.
Penitent governments should ensure flammable cladding is replaced now, not next year and certainly not in five or six years’ time when another round of court cases are finally decided after appeal. Unless governments act to fix this mistake, one that they are substantially responsible for, someone is going to be killed in a cladding fire in Australia.
Since their original discovery in 1963, the Tongatapu artefacts have been in storage at the Australian National University awaiting further examination. In 2016, we took the first really good look at these artefacts using the modern methods and techniques now available to archaeologists.
Through directly dating a sample from one of the combs (the blades that drove the ink into the dermis layer of skin), we determined that the four artefacts were 2,700-years-old – much older than originally thought.
Careful examination also discovered that while two of the combs were made of sea bird bone (such as albatross), the other two were made from the bones of a large land mammal – probably human.
Why human bone? No large mammals were present on Tonga apart from people at that time and early burials from the Pacific show that bones were often taken from burials. We also know that human bone was a favoured material used to make tattooing combs in more recent times.
Ink staining on one of the human bone combs.Author provided
Tattoo combs made from human bone could mean that people were permanently marked by tools made from the bones of their relatives – a way of combining memory and identity in their artwork.
Originally found alongside the combs was a small pot likely containing tattooing ink. Together, these artefacts made up a tattoist’s toolkit – something exceedingly rare in the archaeological record – and the oldest set of its kind found.
Evidence rarely survives
There is little evidence for early tattooing because tattooed human skin rarely survives intact enough for us to be able to see an inked design.
Thus far, the earliest evidence for tattooing reaches back to 5,300 years – the oldest known case being two ancient Egyptian mummies with small motifs inked into their upper arms.
Other early examples include the famous “Ice man” of the Italian Alps and the Siberian “princess” found with extraordinarily complex designs across her body.
The discovery of implements used in tattooing is even rarer. This is because identifying tools used to ink one’s skin is exceptionally difficult – any sharp object could potentially be utilised. Also, the kind of evidence needed to positively identify a tattooing blade (such as ink) often doesn’t survive.
The oldest surviving tattooing tools found so far are sharp flakes made of obsidian (volcanic glass) used 3,500 years ago in New Guinea for piercing or puncturing the skin, and in Egypt, single metal or stone points that might be tattooing equipment dating back to 3,200 BC.
In Oceania, we don’t have mummies to help us figure out when tattooing first appeared because skin doesn’t survive our harsh tropical conditions. So, instead we must look for less direct clues – such as tools.
Technology still used today
While the Tongatapu bone combs are younger than the metal and stone points previously found, they are part of a far more complex technology – one which is still used in present day traditional tattooing.
In the Pacific, tattooing has a long history. The unique and powerful designs made an impact on early European explorers to the region, and the return of tattooed sailors, beachcombers, and Indigenous peoples to Europe created lasting interest in the practice.
Ultimately, it was this contact between European and Pacific cultures that led to the vibrant modern tattooing traditions and the spread of Polynesian inspired tattoos all over the world today. (Ironically, in the 19th century missionaries suppressed tattooing in parts of the Pacific and in Tonga itself, people had to travel to Samoa to be tattooed.)
Hear about the importance of tattooing in the Pacific from those using tools near identical to the Tongatapu artefacts.
Despite the importance of tattooing to past and current Pacific peoples, we don’t actually know if it was something that arrived with the first human colonists to the islands around 3,500 years ago – or if it was invented at some point afterwards.
With this discovery, however, we now know that the complex inline tattooing combs were already present in Tonga almost 3,000 years ago and that they may very well have been invented there.
Back in 2001, an acquaintance who worked for Lonely Planet told me about a surprise discovery. The travel guide business had an audience of people who would buy their travel books, but never travel. Lonely Planet dubbed them “virtual tourists”.
Now Lonely Planet, and others, have become excited by tourism powered by virtual reality (VR) – both on this planet and, thanks to NASA, on others.
VR films are also being developed by travel companies, such as Thomas Cook. And Tourism Australia has partnered with Google to understand the marketing potential of VR (well, 360 degree panoramic videos).
But VR tourism isn’t only about recreating a virtual version of reality that renders travel to the destination unnecessary. It can enhance tourism in other ways – by allowing tourists to handle precious historical artefacts in virtual form, or by retelling contested histories from previously unexplored perspectives.
In contrast to Lonely Planet’s definition, let’s consider virtual tourism to be the application of virtual reality – including augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) – to tourism.
The term virtual reality is most commonly used to describe what happens when you are completely immersed in a virtual environment you can see through a headset. Enhanced forms of virtual reality allow you to interact with that environment using extra equipment, such as gloves fitted with sensors.
Virtual reality is also used as a catch-all term to describe the overall spectrum of digitally mediated reality, which includes virtual reality, as well as mixed reality and augmented reality.
Augmented reality and mixed reality are computer-generated visualisations that augment our sense of the real world around us or merge the real and virtual together. You still wear a headset, but rather than blocking out the world, an AR or MR headset enables you to see visualisations within your real world surroundings.
PhD student Mafkereseb Bekele demonstrates a digital underwater landscape augmented over the real world as it would appear through a Microsoft Hololens headset.Author provided
Augmented reality and mixed reality is usually visual, but you can now get audio augmented reality, that will play audio recordings through special glasses about sites you’re looking at. There is even olfactory-augmented reality that can enhance your experience with smell.
Virtual reality can be more than a mirror that gives you a realistic interactive simulation of the current world: it can bring the past into the present.
The one thing that really frustrates you in a museum is when you see something really fascinating, you don’t want to be separated from it by glass. You want to be able to look at it and see the back of it and turn it around and so on.
The London Natural History Museum’s app Hold the World gives users a chance to move and manipulate virtual objects that are fragile, expensive or remote.
Virtual tourism is also breathing new life into mythology and folklore. In Denmark, there are plans to turn a virtual reality exhibition exploring Viking history and Norse mythology into a permanent theme park. Visitors will be able to fight giants and dragons, and explore a complete “Nordic” landscape.
Virtual tourism can allow people to hear fresh interpretations of history. For example, the augmented reality app Dilly Bag connects users with the stories of Indigenous Australian servicemen via a smartphone.
Given the expense and complexity of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality arguably have more potential for virtual tourism.
Wi-Fi, which is required for many virtual tourism experiences, is now commonplace, and many people do have their own devices. But content must be tailored to specific devices – smartphones can overheat from processing so much data, and the size of tablets can make them unwieldy.
The number of exciting technological showcases is matched by the number of failed or broken equipment and deserted VR centres. Hyped promises proliferate – apparently every year is the year that VR, AR and MR will break though.
Yet any VR software and hardware currently full of promise seems to get old very, very, quickly. If we are to move past one-hit AR wonders such as Pokémon Go, we need scalable yet engaging content, stable tools, appropriate evaluation research and robust infrastructure.
Formats such as WebVR and Web XR promise to supply content across both desktops and head mounted displays, without having to download plugins.
But before we see virtual tourism become widespread, we need to change our preconceptions about what virtual reality is. Let’s not limit VR experiences to recreations of the real world, instead let’s open our minds to history, mythology and fresh perspectives from real people.
In December 2018, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) resolved to “work collaboratively and in genuine, formal partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”. This commitment was in response to issues arising from the national review of Indigenous affairs policy.
COAG noted in its Closing the Gap statement that it was responding to a “Special Gathering of prominent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians”. It was this group that called for “the next phase of Closing the Gap to be guided by the principles of empowerment and self-determination”.
This unfinished business is an important challenge for all Australians, regardless of the outcome of this year’s federal election.
Labor and the Greens have committed to reforms called for by the Uluru Statement from the Heart. These reforms would enable Indigenous empowerment and self-determination. However, the Coalition government, yet to respond to the Joint Select Committee Report on Constitutional Recognition, has demurred on a First Nations Voice in favour of “practical” concerns.
The relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is a responsibility beyond political divisions. It extends beyond policy concerns to the presumptions that inform them.
The continued interpretation of Indigenous concerns about Australia Day as simple demands to “change the date” exemplifies this issue. It is not the case that Indigenous people protesting Australia Day don’t care about “practical” issues. They live with these issues every day. They know all too well the challenges they face.
Rather, the issue remains the deeply ingrained and negative attitude toward Indigenous people and their experiences within Australian society. This includes:
the denial of Indigenous history and experience
the failure to establish legitimate mechanisms for the recognition of this history and agreement making
the continued denial of legitimate Indigenous rights and demands.
The problems with Indigenous affairs policy
Closing the Gap guides Indigenous affairs policy along with the Indigenous Advancement Strategy. This policy apparatus has focused on areas such as employment, education, health, economic development and community safety.
However, Australian governments have failed to achieve their policy goals. Some policies – such as the Community Development Program and the Basics Card – have been heavily criticised for further entrenching Indigenous inequality and disadvantage.
Indigenous affairs decisions are too often reactionary and crisis-focused. Significant resources are distributed without evidence and without Indigenous oversight and evaluation.
Moving from crisis to crisis, non-Indigenous actors make key policy decisions. These actors fail to appropriately understand issues at hand and force ineffective policy solutions onto Indigenous communities as the only solution. The approach to Indigenous youth suicide is a key example of this.
These policymakers fail to address the ineffective policy decisions and maintain the impoverished position of Indigenous people. They also fail to respect and recognise Indigenous people as First Nations, and the rights that inhere as a result.
Hearing Indigenous Australians
Indigenous people have raised many concerns with these policies. These include being ignored by decision-makers, the denial of Indigenous experience and the failure of policies to enable effective outcomes. The Commonwealth government’s own review of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy and Closing the Gap confirmed these issues.
In response, COAG has offered support to “discuss” the co-design process that would explore a First Nations voice to parliament. However, there has been no mention of specific targets for Indigenous empowerment and self-determination. Rather, COAG’s communique emphasises “strengthening mechanisms to ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have an integral role in decision-making and accountability processes”.
This approach aims at incorporation within a structure that has failed Indigenous people. COAG has uncritically repeated a form of rights ritualism: it appears to support Indigenous rights, without actually implementing them.
Even when provided with some semblance of recognition, those rights are only ever minimal and subject to restrictive arrangements. These continue to hold Indigenous people at the whim of government priorities and decision-makers, rather than being led and informed by Indigenous community needs and processes themselves.
Realising a better Australia
These issues reflect the entrenched position of Indigenous Australians and the past inability of “Australia” to recognise their place as First Nations. These practices have real implications for policy development, which are reflected in the wider Indigenous affairs debate. Examples include attitudes that dismiss Australia Day concerns as mere symbolism while emphasising practical matters such as youth suicide, sexual and domestic violence, and getting kids into school.
The challenge ahead is to achieve reform that goes beyond limited understandings of these issues as being symbolic or practical. This requires a transformative approach to the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians that will realise a better future for all Australians. The call from many Indigenous Australians following the Uluru Statement from the Heart for a progressive process forward toward Voice, Treaty and Truth provides an authoritative pathway toward achieving this change.
Indigenous Australians have provided important leadership by issuing the Uluru Statement from the Heart. It is up to all Australians, regardless of political persuasion, to accept the invitation and “to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future”.
They recommended a massive expansion of the $1.5 billion Better Access program, which enables Medicare-subsidised visits to psychologists and other health professionals.
But simply striving to get more people into face-to-face care with health professionals is a limited and expensive strategy.
If we’re serious about improving access to mental health care, we need to look to online therapies. The evidence says they can be effective instead of, or as well as, seeing someone face-to-face.
Some studies have found online therapy to be as effective in reducing symptoms as therapy delivered face-to-face by a clinician. This evidence is strongest in relation to depression, stress and anxiety.
One meta-analysis of data from 3,876 adults found those who underwent internet-based cognitive behavioural therapy to treat symptoms of depression had better outcomes than those who didn’t use online therapies. They were also more likely to stick to their treatment.
So self-guided internet-based cognitive behavioural therapy is a viable alternative to current first-step treatment approaches for symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Online approaches vary, but they commonly present a course of psychological therapy structured so the participant can track their progress over time and seek further assistance if their situation deteriorates.
As an example, Mindspot offers a three step online process of therapy, beginning with information, followed by assessment, and finally, treatment.
Treatment consists of online courses across several areas, depending on the user’s needs. These courses might cover mood issues, obsessive compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
People can elect to do a course independently, or could be referred by a health care professional, such as their GP. When health practitioners refer their patients into Mindspot they receive patient progress reports.
Mindspot takes users through a three step process which starts with learning about mental health.Screenshot, Author provided
These online therapies can be critical for reaching traditionally under-serviced groups, such as young people and people living in rural areas.
Other key advantages of these stand-alone digital approaches include 24/7 availability of care, and the absence of the fees that would otherwise be paid out-of-pocket for a face-to-face consultation.
The range of online mental health tools available has expanded enormously over recent years. This has spawned review sites that help users navigate to online mental health therapies that best meet their needs.
And new research is looking at how digital technologies can be used for the prevention of mental illness as well as its treatment. The Black Dog Institute’s Future Proofing Study will engage 20,000 year 8 students to see how they can use their smartphones to prevent anxiety and depression.
We can facilitate team-based care online
Perhaps the greatest opportunity for enhanced mental health service delivery is to start to use digital technologies to drive new models of care specifically designed to meet the needs of each individual.
For people with more complex, disabling and persisting conditions, the international evidence clearly indicates bringing together a team of professionals is best practice.
For example, a person with an eating disorder is likely to benefit from integrated, multidisciplinary care provided by a GP, a nurse, a dietitian, a psychologist, a peer worker, and so on.
There are already some efforts to foster this online. An example of this can be found in the InnoWell platform, which service providers can use to bring together different professionals and resources tailored to suit each patient’s needs.
As well as online therapies, there are a variety of mobile apps that target mental health and well-being.From shutterstock.com
Using online assessment tools at the point of service request, those with milder needs are connected to a range of evidence-based apps and e-tools matched to their needs. Meanwhile, those with more complex needs are connected to care which will benefit them, including face-to-face services.
As a proportion of the total, new clients into Better Access were 68% in 2008, 57% in 2009, and just 32.6% in 2016-17. This increase in repeat customers suggests two things. First, perhaps people did not get the help they needed or had problems too complex to be managed within the program. And second, there may be limits on the extent to which the program can continue to meet its stated goal of increasing access to mental health services.
While the Medicare review relegated online therapies to “longer-term” reform, new digital and team-based approaches are key to driving improved models of increased access, at relatively low individual cost, to high quality mental health care.
Australia’s e-Mental health strategy needs action. The Medicare review into mental health represents a significant opportunity to get future investments right.
This means shifting from a focus just on access to instead considering how best to provide high quality, individualised services at scale – particularly to those who are disadvantaged economically, socially or geographically.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steve Hatfield-Dodds, Executive Director, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES)
This is an edited version of Steve Hatfield-Dodds’ opening address to the Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics National Outlook Conference to be delivered on 5 March 2019.
The National Farmers Federation wants to lift the value of Australian agricultural production to $100 billion by 2030.
While that might be possible – on the current trajectory it is forecast to reach $84 billion by 2030 – we should be mindful of the substantial, and sometimes painful, reforms that have been needed to achieve the growth we have in recent decades; and that price increases accounted for 90% of that past growth.
Furthermore, the rate of productivity growth has been slowing. Key reasons include adverse shifts in climate and seasonal conditions, reduced investment in research relative to the value of production, and that fact that the easiest productivity gains have already been made.
This suggests nothing can be taken for granted.
Instead, we should recognise that achieving the best for agriculture, our rural communities and the national economy will require tough choices.
Making farming attractive to workers and investors
The sector is well aware of the need to attract workers with the right mix of skills, and is taking steps to do it. The 2018 Budget provided funds to improve our evidence base about labour force issues.
It is encouraging to see sector leaders acknowledging the need to eliminate exploitation of workers, particularly seasonal workers and other vulnerable groups, but actions are always going to speak louder than words in ensuring a positive experience for farm workers.
Investment is crucial to lifting productivity and strengthening supply chains. Unfortunately agriculture faces some headwinds in attracting investment, including high seasonal variability relative to other nations and some persistent policy uncertainty.
This makes it crucial that Australia’s foreign investment rules are applied transparently and predictably, respecting community caution that investment should deliver social and economic benefits, while maintaining Australia’s reputation as a stable and attractive investment destination.
Harnessing innovation
Australia is not immune to global shifts in research and development.
This includes slower growth in public R&D, which in the past has provided the foundation for growth in private R&D.
Our distinctive use of government and levy funded Research and Development Corporations has served us well in the past, but needs some adjustment to ensure that the resources available deliver the best possible outcomes for agriculture and the nation as a whole.
Priorities should include reducing fragmentation and improving collaboration on “whole of sector” challenges, greater clarity and consistency around contributions and benefit sharing, and achieving faster adoption and commercialisation of successful research.
Promoting resilience
Australian farmers manage very significant variability, including variability in climate and prices. Climate variability is increasing and extreme events, such as droughts and floods, are becoming more frequent and severe, impacting on output and incomes. Increased variability is also likely to contribute to more volatile global prices.
It is a good bet in these circumstances that future droughts and weather events will continue to trigger calls for government to do more to help famers. But policy makers should continue to be careful in how they respond, as poorly designed polices have the potential to slow farm adaption and structural adjustment, hurting productivity.
Australia’s national drought policy rightly establishes a clear separation between promoting proper risk management by farm businesses and providing support to farm households and communities in need.
Eligibility criteria for the Farm Household Allowance are more generous than those that apply to income support available to other groups.
Programs such as the Farm Household Allowance, the Farm Management Deposit Scheme and tax concessions provide important relief for farm households and are consistent with Australian community values.
Overall, their current settings are unlikely to undermine resilience and drought preparedness or to have substantial adverse impact on agricultural productivity.
This is an achievement worth defending against well meaning – or occasionally self-interested – calls to blur the lines between household support and business assistance.
And we should always seek further improvements. Here the remaining policies that provide business assistance, such as concessional finance, need careful assessment.
Over time, the perceived need for such policies could be reduced by further development and uptake of market-based risk management tools, such as multi-peril crop insurance, and index-based insurance for cropping and livestock.
Persisting with water reforms
The Murray-Darling Basin Plan was inspired, in part, by the 2003 Living Murray Initiative and its vision of a “healthy working river” and in part by a reaction to the realities graphically exposed by the Millennium drought.
It was predicated on the conviction that healthy communities and regional economies required a healthy river, and that achieving it required substantial changes to water management.
These changes were twofold: promoting water trading across the basin, which allows water to move to higher value uses and altering the balance between consumptive and environmental uses to achieve healthy river ecosystems.
This view that healthy industries require healthy catchments has not always been visible in recent debate and finger pointing, which is often framed in terms of trade-offs between “industry” or “development” versus the “environment”.
It is self evident that achieving the National Farmers Federation aspiration for agriculture will require sustainable management of scarce water resources.
Irrigated crops are one of the strongest growing agricultural sectors, with excellent future prospects. Realising the full potential of the irrigation sector will require clear and confident water policy settings which support the sector’s social licence, and avoid the uncertainty associated with acrimonious ongoing debate.
Respecting evolving consumer expectations
Staying ahead of the curve on consumer expectations sits at the heart of agriculture’s value proposition, reputation, and future growth – and can only be effectively led by industry.
Shifts in social expectations may well be both the greatest opportunity, and the greatest threat, facing Australian agriculture.
Rising real incomes allow consumers and citizens to care about issues they have previously ignored, and to express this care through their purchasing decisions and networks. These issues might be personal – such as health – or more general – such as concern for the environment or animal welfare.
But capitalising on consumer concerns over the long term involves risks and hard work.
Back in 2003, Perth-based Austral Fisheries caused some waves when it set out to secure independent Marine Stewardship Council sustainability certification for Patagonian toothfish, as a first step in a sophisticated customer engagement strategy.
Their persistence paid off: today more than half the global catch is certified, its premium market position has been restored and prices increased by around 300%.
Some shifts will involve more threats than opportunities, at least in the absence of stronger engagement by industry. Producers are particularly exposed on environmental and animal welfare issues, where real or perceived poor behaviour by a few players can tarnish the reputation or market access of an entire sector.
Assessing these risks and opportunities requires industry to understand how consumers think and feel, even when this is confronting.
As an example, debates about land clearing can be polarising, generating more heat than light. To be hard nosed about this, however, it is in industry’s interest to consider how the economic rewards of land clearing for some graziers stack-up against the potential risks to the reputation, social licence and market position of the industry nationally, and the various ways these risks could be managed.
Focusing on the main game
Australian agriculture has many advantages, and a track record of good performance, underpinned by tough choices.
If we continue in this tradition Australian agriculture will prosper, enhancing the well-being of producers, consumers, regions, and the nation.
The Australian Election Study, conducted by the Australian National University, has been running since 1987.
Its director Ian McAllister says one thing voters will want at this poll is stability.
McAllister says that for the first time in a long while, one of the major parties – Labor – has put forward some “very constructive policies”. But, he told The Conversation, Bill Shorten is very unpopular: he “ranks below any leader we’ve ever recorded across virtually every personal quality including things like trust, competence, integrity”.
McAllister says the Coalition’s challenge is that the Liberals haven’t been looking after their base.
He expects the election to highlight a “generational gap in voting” and probably a much higher level of “split-ticket voting” – people voting differently for the two houses.
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For most infections, the long-standing advice is to take a full course of antibiotics.
The rationale for not simply stopping antibiotics as soon as you start to feel better is that antibiotics don’t kill the bacteria instantly. If stopped too early, the remaining bacteria, which are exposed to low concentrations of antibiotics, tend to be more resistant. These can then re-grow, causing recurrent infection, or spread to other people.
The recommended length of the course depends on the type of infection, the likely cause, and how effective the antibiotics are at killing the bacterium and penetrating to the site of infection.
For infections commonly seen in general practice, most recommended courses last between three and seven days. For more serious infections requiring hospitalisation, the recommendations are generally a little longer.
A recent study from the United Kingdom found a substantial proportion of antibiotic prescriptions in general practice were for longer than these recommendations. While for each prescription this may have only been a few days longer, for the UK as a whole this amounted to about 1.3 million days of antibiotics more that would have been necessary.
There’s little evidence to suggest longer courses of antibiotics benefit patients. In fact, even the recommended lengths could be too long for many infections.
Why are courses longer than recommended?
The most important determinant of duration in primary care is probably the size of the pack the antibiotics come in.
But the number of tablets in a pack is rarely the same as the length of a course. One Australian study looked at 32 common prescribing scenarios and found that the pack size only matched the recommended duration of antibiotics in four cases.
Other reasons antibiotics may be prescribed for longer than recommended is when patients are given “repeats” and taking a second course of antibiotics. Often, the doctor isn’t actively prescribing a second course, but their medical prescribing software is printing a “repeat” on their prescription by default.
In hospitals, clinical uncertainty plays a large role. It is sometimes suggested that antibiotics are used for the benefit of the patient, but at other times to allay the treating doctor’s anxiety.
While the motivation to make sure infections are properly treated is understandable and well-intentioned, particularly in patients who might still be critically unwell for other reasons, continuing antibiotics for too long increases the risk of side effects and antibiotic resistance.
Do we even need a full course?
We may be able to stop antibiotics before we reach the end of our course. The body has the capacity of “mop up” small numbers of bacteria, so at least for milder infections, it may not be necessary to kill them all.
This is important because using antibiotics for too long can be a problem in causing antibiotic resistance. This can occur within individual patients by exposing bacteria elsewhere in the body to antibiotics, but also because antibiotics are eliminated from the body and can contaminate the environment.
We didn’t always standardise the duration of antibiotics. Harry Dowling, one of the pioneers of early antibiotic use, once said
The duration of treatment just evolved. There was no rationale for any single length of time. We saw how long it took for the temperature to come down and gave antibiotics until it did, and then some.
The durations recommended in guidelines often come from arbitrary decisions made in early studies, which have translated into some odd “rules” about antibiotics:
prime numbers for durations of up to a week (three, five or seven days)
even numbers for more serious infections that take weeks to eradicate (two, four or six weeks)
multiples of three for really tenacious infections such as bone infections (three months) or TB (six months).
In writing guidelines for doctors, we often wrestle with whether to set a fixed duration (such as seven days), a range (five to ten days), a minimum (at least five days), a maximum (up to ten days) or wordy qualifications (usually five days, or ten days for severe illness or where there is a slow response).
For deep or severe infections, we want to be sure the infection won’t return. Recent research has focused on defining the shortest effective duration of treatments.
A recent trial compared whether seven days or 14 days of antibiotics were required for some types of bloodstream infection, and found outcomes to be similar.
Researchers have also been testing the use of oral antibiotics for two of the most difficult infections to treat – endocarditis (infection of the heart valves) and ostemyelitis (infection of bone) – which have needed intravenous antibiotics for six weeks or longer. These trials have shown a shorter course of intravenous antibiotics with an early switch to oral antibiotics may be adequate.
Shortening the duration of antibiotics is one important way to reduce antibiotic use, the key driver of antibiotic resistance.
The crimson cloaks and white bonnets of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist classic The Handmaid’s Tale have become a distinctive feature of Trump’s America. They’ve been worn by protestors outside state legislatures across the country, as elected officials attempt to enact laws limiting women’s reproductive rights.
Let’s face it, there are few costumes in classic or contemporary literature that will immediately tell everybody exactly why you’re there. But for the unfamiliar, the cloaks are invariably accompanied by posters with slogans like “The Handmaid’s Tale is not an instruction manual” and “Make Margaret Atwood fiction again”.
Atwood’s dystopia was undoubtedly on the minds of the hundreds of people – nearly all of them women – who filled the concert hall at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday to listen to her speak. So eager were they to hear that the tickets to the talk hosted by UNSW’s Centre for Ideas sold out in a record 45 minutes.
The Handmaid’s Tale describes a toxic world in which misogyny and environmental degradation has turned the US into a totalitarian theocracy. The fictional republic of Gilead has enforced a system of gender-based violence, enslaving the few women capable of bearing children to serve as “handmaidens” to the ruling class.
In Gilead, lesbians and “gender traitors” are hanged. Citizens are tracked, watched, and spied upon. Women are not permitted to read. Children are torn from the arms of their birth mothers. There are deadly skirmishes at the borders, as refugees attempt to flee.
Activists in the US have donned the red cloaks imagined by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale.Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/AAP
Little wonder so many critics have remarked on the unexpected parallels with the present – in a US in which a resurgence of threats to rollback women’s rights are accompanied by wider attacks on media freedom. News from the US border with Mexico – and from Australia’s detention centres – reads like something out of Atwood’s darkest imaginings.
It is tempting to stretch this looking-glass analogy to suggest the only substantive difference between The Handmaid’s Tale and our present moment is that environmental degradation is a pressing concern for the rulers of Gilead.
Atwood’s mind seldom runs in a straight line. It dances around what she wants to say – before skewering her point with a flash of dark humour. She recounted with affection some fashion advice from Dame Edna Everage about her hairstyle and – to the delight of her audience – actually sung. Then acknowledging the audience had possibly gathered to hear more about the “end of the human race”, said she would not delay them.
Control of women and children has been a feature of every repressive political regime on the planet and throughout history, Atwood told her audience. And oppression comes in many forms.
The power of words?
Writers write about the things that worry them. And Atwood’s work spans the major concerns of the century – climate change, species extinction, designer humans, the control and subjugation of women. Her work has been astonishingly adept at incorporating “each fresh hell” – as she calls them – as it arises.
And it was clear from the anxious laughter in the auditorium that the audience believed Gilead was already here – or at least, “there” in Trump’s America.
Atwood’s books paint a speculative or parallel reality. But she is careful to point out that they are also of their own historic moment. They contain nothing that has not already become part of what James Joyce once called the “nightmare of history” – no technology, no atrocity, “nothing goes on that has not already gone on”, she says.
She is also quick to insist that she is not a “prophet”. Atwood says – looking back on the Pollyanna decades of the 1990s – it could have gone the other way. She wished it had. We could have “all gone shopping” in Francis Fukuyama’s consumer capitalist utopia, she jokes. It would have been preferable.
Atwood is well known for her belief in the power of language to change things – something of an occupational hazard for writers. But she is also clear that words can obscure. They can damage. And they are often manipulated. “Who is going to decide how fake a piece of fake news is before it’s fake?”
One member of the audience claimed that she felt her whole life – from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump – had been an experience of living through a series of “high literary dystopias”, lurching from atomic threat to species extinction.
Atwood had an answer for that, too. The solutions, says Atwood, will not come to you as novels.
They will also not be hers to find. She is – she claims – already an old lady who is arranging her own “environmentally friendly funeral”, without plastics.
Perhaps the reality is that in these dark times words are simply not enough. Words can be sharp instruments. They often seem to cut through a maelstrom to catch at the truth. But what we need is not just words, but also actions on a global scale. And so perhaps it’s time to don the cloaks and bonnets.
Giving children an instrumental music education can be expensive. In addition to purchasing an instrument and paying the cost of music lessons, parents invest their time by encouraging practice, attending recitals and driving their child to and from lessons. Parents rightly want value-for-money and confidence that their child’s teacher employs an evidenced-based, proven teaching method.
There are numerous approaches to teaching music, each with its own philosophy and history. To a parent looking to make an informed choice about music lessons, the options can be befuddling. But given the research highlights parental involvement as an important component for a successful music-learning experience, developing an understanding of the teaching method is vital.
One method that polarises the music education community is Shinichi Suzuki’s (1898-1998) “talent education” (saino kyoiku), commonly known as the Suzuki method. It was first conceived as a system for teaching the violin. The Suzuki method arrived in Australia in the early 1970s and was quickly applied to a variety of instruments.
Research highlights a range of positive outcomes for children learning how to play an instrument via the Suzuki method. It also shows Suzuki is not the only method that works. While the degree of parental involvement may mean Suzuki is not right for every family, the caring learning environment it encourages is one worth emulating.
What is the Suzuki method?
Shinichi Suzuki playing the violin.
1. Talent is no accident of birth
The Japanese word saino has no direct English translation and can, in context, mean “talent” or “ability”. Shinichi Suzuki believed talent is not inherited, and any child could excel musically, given the right learning environment.
Today, advocates of the method continue to echo Suzuki’s idea that “the potential of every child is unlimited”, and caring learning environments help children unlock that potential.
2. All Japanese children speak Japanese
Suzuki credited the development of saino kyoiku to the realisation the vast majority of young children naturally and easily develop language skills. By examining the experiences that facilitate language development (including listening, imitation, memory and play), Suzuki devised the “mother-tongue” method for early childhood music education. Children can begin their music education from birth through listening, and can start learning an instrument from as young as three years old.
In contrast to some Western approaches to music teaching, reading music notation is not prioritised and is delayed until a child’s practical music ability is well established. In the same way a child generally learns to talk before learning to read, students of the Suzuki method start by listening to and imitating music rather than sight reading sheet music.
Taken from the motto of the high school Suzuki attended until 1916, “character first, ability second” is the overriding aim of the Suzuki method. In saino kyoiku, music learning is a means to an end: students are taught an instrument to facilitate them becoming noble human beings.
Some students of the Suzuki method have undoubtedly progressed on to a career in music. But creating professional musicians and celebrating child prodigies or virtuosos is not a priority of the method.
4. The destiny of children lies in the hands of their parents
The Suzuki method requires a major contribution from a parent and a home environment that wholeheartedly embraces the child’s music-making. A parent needs to participate in formal lessons, record instructions from the teacher and regularly guide and monitor practice at home.
The learning process is a three-way relationship between the child, the parent and the teacher. The parent becomes a “home teacher” who helps their child develop new skills, provide positive feedback and guide the content and pacing of practice sessions. The benefit of having a parent-mentor at home is the feature that sets Suzuki apart from other teaching methods. The parent can greatly regulate time spent practising and what they do during practice.
Some music teachers have criticised the Suzuki method for teaching children to a high level at an earlier age than usual, for an over-reliance on rote learning, for robotic playing, for a focus on classical music, and for a lack of engagement with music notation and improvisation.
Some aspects of the Suzuki method can work for teaching children music, other aspects are less evidence-based.Rogelio A. Galaviz C./flickr, CC BY-NC
What does the research say?
The research into music education supports many aspects of the Suzuki method. For example, one study that sought to compare different modes of parental involvement in music lessons found a clear benefit from parental involvement. This benefit was not limited only to the Suzuki method. The message from this study is: the more interested the parent, the better the learning for the child.
Another study compared Suzuki’s approach to teaching rhythm with the BAPNE method (Body Percussion: Biomechanics, Anatomy, Psychology, Neuroscience and Ethnomusicology). The study concluded both methods had merit and should be integrated.
A recent thesis from the University of Southern Mississippi compared the Suzuki method with the method of its fiercest critic, the O’Connor method.
The O’Connor method is an American system where a set of music books are sold to teachers and students, and training to accredit teachers. These books are tailored to different levels of ability.
This method is less focused on parental involvement in teaching and the selection of music is more geared towards American music. The study found the two approaches could both be effective and shared common aspects related to technique, expression and the mechanics of learning the violin.
The thesis does claim the O’Connor method embraces a more diverse musical repertoire. But the modern Suzuki organisation says its teachers have more flexibility in incorporating different styles of music.
Finally, a study out of South Africa highlights ways the Suzuki method can be adapted for use in different cultural contexts. The authors examined the challenges associated with Suzuki’s requirement for high levels of parental involvement for orphans and children from low-income and single-parent families.
These challenges could be overcome by a community approach to music education. In a group learning setting, older and more advanced students mentored younger, less advanced students and provided the encouragement and guidance otherwise provided by a parent.
Some aspects of the Suzuki method remain steeped in controversy. There is no reliable evidence to support the idea that musical training improves character and a sizeable body of research contradicts the notion that genetics has no role in musical aptitude.
This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.
Long before the Turnbull government failed to land its climate-energy policy, the new Liberal prime minister had signalled his reluctance to pursue progressive causes, voluntarily garaging the republican campaign bus he had so famously driven.
Reasonably or not, the hopes of millions of Australian republicans had spiked when Malcolm Turnbull replaced the conservative monarchist Tony Abbott in September 2015.
Yet those hopes would quickly be dashed, as the erstwhile face of the Australian Republican Movement turned Liberal prime minister would relegate constitutional self-determination to third-order status. In the process, he depicted himself – only half tongue-in-cheek – as a modern “Elizabethan”.
In the blink of an eye (or was it a royal wave?), republican ambitions returned to Labor’s Bill Shorten. They were no doubt sobered by the thought of further delays and the grim reality that the fleeting alignment of a republican prime minister and a republican opposition leader had still produced nothing.
But if Shorten becomes prime minister in 2019, will he drive the case for an Australian head of state forward? More fundamentally, can the feted republic even come to pass in the absence of muscular support from both hemispheres of politics?
A history of disappointments
Self-evidently, it is a difficult project burdened with overblown hopes, largely intangible benefits and commensurate disappointments. Reversals have been costly.
Well might Turnbull have described John Howard as the “prime minister who broke this nation’s heart” after the 1999 referendum defeat, because it would be a hardness in his own heart that would lead him to dismiss a republic while Queen Elizabeth II remained on the throne.
And Turnbull would go further, essentially telling voters it no longer mattered anyway. In January 2016, just months into his prime ministership, he said:
There are many more urgent issues confronting Australia, and indeed confronting the government, than the momentum or the desire for Australia to become a republic.
No politician, no prime minister or opposition leader or premier, can make Australia a republic – only the Australian people can do that through a referendum.
Presumably, this statement of the obvious served to remind proponents that, in matters of constitutional change, even starting with majority public support is merely that – a start.
It’s no revelation that constitutional reform is supremely difficult in Australia, given the need to secure a so-called “double majority”. This means a majority of votes nationwide plus a majority in at least four of the six states.
But withdraw the crucial ingredient of governmental leadership and that degree of difficulty switches to impossible.
Shorten’s two-step strategy
This is why Shorten wants to build support in stages. He has pledged to put the case to Australians “in principle” first via an indicative first-term plebiscite. The would be followed by a formal referendum, probably held over to a second term.
Typically reserved, Abbott branded this “completely toxic”. He argued it would “delegitimise the constitution we have without putting anything in its place”.
Some republicans had favoured this in 1999, but Howard saw the danger to the Crown’s authority arising from any popular republican mandate and the reform momentum it might generate.
So he determined to make an ally of the higher bar for success required by referendum, along with the divisions emerging in the republican camp between minimalists and direct electionists.
Perversely, Shorten’s two-stage approach has a more contemporaneous justification in the form of the calamitous 2016 Brexit referendum in Britain.
For all that country’s post-ballot dysfunction, Brexit graphically demonstrates the power of an initial yes or no choice when clearly expressed as an abstract principle. That is, when it is separated from the thornier and potentially deal-breaking details to be faced subsequently.
Few doubt that had Britons been fully apprised of the extraordinary extent of the changes and the enormous economic costs of withdrawing from the European Union, many more would have voted to remain.
However, a simple yes or no question is not the position of the Australian Republican Movement. Its national director, Michael Cooney, told a Museum of Australian Democracy forum in February 2019 that it favours a double-barrelled approach first up.
This would ask voters if they want an Australian head of state, and then how they would like that person to be chosen.
This is based on the group’s social research, which shows support for a directly elected president is as high as 75% among republicans. But that support trails away quickly if the head of state is to be chosen by the parliament – a model pilloried by many as a so-called “politician’s republic”.
That division, with its echoes of the unsuccessful push in 1999, underlines just how fragile the support for a republic is, and just how easily it can crumble when the details are considered.
A question of constitutional priorities
In any event, there are concerns that even a Labor government could delay the plebiscite, for fear of compromising a separate push for constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians.
Few republicans would begrudge First Australians that priority, notwithstanding that agreement is yet to be reached on the precise form so-called “Con-Rec” would take.
Labor insiders say Shorten remains committed to the republic plebiscite in his first term, if elected, but will ensure that Con-Rec is prioritised. As one put it:
The republic’s an open question because we don’t even know who would be leading the opposition and whether they’d be a supporter or not at this stage.
Speechless is the new opera by award-winning composer Cat Hope, co-commissioned by the Perth Festival and Tura New Music. This is Hope’s powerful response to the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2014 report into children in immigration detention.
Hope created what she describes as a “graphic score” derived from drawings and graphics extracted from the Report. This system of “animated graphic notation” is explained by Tura as “the representation of music through the use of visual symbols in place of traditional music notation”.
This graphic score serves as both the text and music of the opera. Rather than singing arias as in a conventional opera, the singers make sounds, not words, in response to the notation. The score is read during performance by the musicians through the Decibel New Music Ensemble iPad app.
The result proved to be an absorbing and visceral experience.
Speechless is the result of a ‘graphic score’ created by Cat Hope.Toni Wilkinson
The opera took place in the community hall at the Sunset Heritage Precinct, on the banks of the Swan River in Dalkeith. As the performers were miked it is difficult to gauge the acoustics of the hall, but it has a wooden floor and I could feel the vibrations of sound through my feet.
Seating was arranged around a central oval space, with vertical tube lighting and hanging swathes of strongly hued material.
These were later transformed from hanging curtains and wrapped by the performers into what appeared like backpacks, or baggage, weighing down and inhibiting to some degree the movement of some of the soloists, giving them a certain stateliness in their movements.
The featured soloists in the Thursday night performance were soprano Judith Dodsworth, heavy metal band vocalist Karina Utomo, throat singing specialist Sage Pbbbt and Perth soprano Caitlin Cassidy, who substituted for the Iranian singer Tara Tiba who could not be present. All performed with clarity and strength.
The soloists’ voices were ably complemented by a combined community choir of some 30 voices. Their range of ages and physicality provided a rich comment on the diversity of peoples affected by political upheavals and natural catastrophes.
The expressiveness and variations of the sounds served to create empathic emotive resonances. This was even more evident when the soloists could improvise sections based on their own particular vocal practices.
In particular, the guttural roaring of Karina Utomo into a microphone, and the anguished sounds emitted by Sage Pbbbt were evocative of the grief, outrage, fear, and anger that could well be expressed by children in peril.
The choir provided often subtle harmonies and backing sounds to the soloists and the orchestra, composed of the Decibel New Music Ensemble and the Australian Bass Orchestra. As the name implies, only the lower register of the musical scale is utilised – bass notes below middle C. The orchestra was superbly conducted by musical director, Aaron Wyatt.
Aaron Wyatt conducted the orchestra for Speechless, who used only bass notes.Toni Wilkinson
This use of these lower registers created sometimes haunting, sometimes cacophonous, visceral waves of sound. At times, these built from a gentle hum into great crescendos of percussion and brass, sending vibrations through one’s body.
In creating such physical resonances on and through the body, this seemed to work more effectively, at least for me, than much of the orchestral music of the Romantic era. However, that was admittedly playing to very different contexts.
Many of the sounds conveyed particular emotions, and towards the end of the performance, the mingling of the voices of the four lead vocalists plus the choir evoked the crying of children.
The performance certainly creates an emotional connection and visceral response to the issue of children in detention, that is arguably far more effective than words on a page, or even dialogue on a stage.
Hope speaks of the power of music being in its abstractness. She states that it is not her intention to speak on behalf of others, rather this work constitutes her personal response to the issue.
This was an excellent opera-theatre experience, creating a nuanced commentary on an emotive issue without the need to preach to the audience. The visceral quality of the sound and the power of the emotions expressed through voice and instruments amply made a point about children in immigration detention. Speechless allows their plight to be heard. Words were superfluous.
Speechless was performed as part of the Perth Festival from February 26 to March 3.
Debate about the role of corporate lobbying in New Zealand’s political process continues in 2019. Political commentator and newly-declared lobbyist Mike Williams was at the centre of a minor dispute over the influence of lobbyists in New Zealand last week.
The debate arose out of story on RNZ’s Checkpoint about the battle over Lime scooters on the streets of Auckland, in which it was revealed that Williams, who is a former Labour Party president, now mostly known as a political commentator, had been hired by the US-scooter company to help negotiate with the New Zealand politicians and officials regulating transport issues in this country. You can see this here: Lime told to prove safety of e-scooters, or remove them.
According to RNZ, “former Labour Party president and lobbyist Mike Williams had smoothed the way for the Lime roll out. Mr Williams confirmed to Checkpoint that he was paid by Lime to introduce their representatives to Auckland Transport staff and another key contact – Transport Minister Phil Twyford.” The chair of the Auckland Transport Agency, Lester Levy, is interviewed about this, responding that “I’m quite uncomfortable with many aspects of this”.
Subsequently, the Herald’s Chris Keall asked for comment on Williams lobbying role, and I responded that it should “alarm anyone with an interest in defending democracy and good political processes in New Zealand” – see: Mike Williams’ lobbying work for Lime alarming: academic.
My argument is this: “It seems that Williams has many different roles in New Zealand politics, and we now know that one of these roles involves working for corporate interests – and that company has clearly benefitted from Williams’ insider knowledge and contacts, which it now appears he is using to make money out of”.
I outline how this type of activity is seriously frowned upon in other parts of the world, as unfair and bad for the political process: “In many democracies, they call this the ‘revolving door’ of influence – whereby political insiders shift easily between government jobs or positions and lobbying work in the private sector. It’s seen to cause serious inequalities of power – because lobbyists and their clients are able to get more influence and power due to their connections and backgrounds. They can easily get ‘behind the scenes’ in ways that ordinary people can’t.”
On Thursday Newstalk ZB broadcaster Mike Hosking responded in one of his “Mike’s minute” videos, colourfully suggesting that I was over-reacting: “settle down Bryce, you sound like you have a sieve on your head, and you think the aliens are coming” – see: Supposed conflicts of interest in the limelight.
Hosking argues that New Zealand is “one of the most clean, clear, and uncorrupted economies in the world” and that “What we really need to be worried about is the quality of decision-making. No matter who rings who, who sets up meetings with whoever, the real issue is: are the decisions good, honest and sensible?”
For Hosking, arguments over conflicts of interest are too esoteric, and we must accept there will always be powerful political players shifting between roles: “Bryce has been reading too many conspiracy theories, he’s too wrapped up in the cloistered world of academia, and its many weird and wonder fantastical theories about how life is supposed to be operating versus how it really operates. There are Mike Williams type figures all over business and politics – and always have been. Politicians who go to the private sector, do they have a conflict of interest? Former prime ministers on boards, from Jim Bolger, to Sir Michael Cullen, to Dame Jenny Shipley, to Sir John Key – do they have a conflict of interest? Former government press secretaries who move into the corporate world with their contacts and knowledge – do they have a conflict of interest?”
One of the main points of these columns is how conflicts of interest are not fleeting, but enduring – just because an individual leaves one position of influence before going onto another doesn’t mean that conflicts of interest suddenly dissolve. And, furthermore, the lobbying problems can be worse when they involve opinion leaders in the media, and especially if these aren’t thoroughly declared.
Of course, Hosking is no stranger to complaints about conflicts of interest, and it’s likely this has influenced his view on lobbying. Back in 2012 Hosking was revealed to have received $48,000 from Auckland’s SkyCity Casino, during which time he wrote articles defending the company. And in 2013 he was the master of ceremonies for Prime Minister John Key’s state of the nation speech, which he strongly endorsed.
Hosking’s 2019 views on lobbying are reminiscent of those expressed last year by the Herald’s John Roughan in the wake of the controversy over then-Broadcasting Minister Clare Curran holding an undeclared and inappropriate meeting with RNZ’s Carol Hirschfeld, both of whom lost their jobs over the matter because of concerns about political process. Roughan responded to the controversy by declaring this an example of “intimate democracy” working well – see: Lobbying today oils the wheels of power for the better.
Roughan argues that politicians “in this country they are not corrupt” and the intimate working relationship of business, politicians and lobbyists “means people in powerful or influential roles get to know each other and can work with those whose professionalism, skills and judgment they respect”.
He argues that such an intimate and efficient democracy “could be undermined by” those arguing for “monastic purity”, especially “political academics who work in just such a rarefied environment, dealing with written research and theoretical propositions rather than people outside their bubble”. He worries that this “feeds the crude suspicion that any confidential meeting with a minister must be a conspiracy against the public interest.”
Roughan and Hosking’s worries about the public becoming suspicious of lobbyists is probably far too late. There is clearly a public discomfort building about inequality of power in politics, and about insiders having their fingers in too many pies.
Many countries (Australia, Canada, France, US, Denmark, Austria, France, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Macedonia, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Taiwan and Hungary) have compulsory registers of lobbyists, while others (UK, Germany and the EU) have voluntary registers and are under pressure to make them compulsory. New Zealand simply has no formal mechanisms for transparency.
It doesn’t mean that the likes of Mike Williams can’t be both paid lobbyists and political commentators, but unless they declare these roles or are outed by other media, the public simply never knows. Do listeners know when they listen to Williams on RNZ’s Nine-to-Noon programme that he is also a corporate lobbyist? Would they benefit from knowing this and who he is lobbying on behalf of?
It’s the conflicts of interests we don’t find out about that are the bigger problem, and if he and RNZ won’t declare these sorts of interests, then New Zealand, like many other countries, needs to make sure that information is available.
Of course, there will always be political insiders who have crucial positions inside the democratic establishment, who then leverage their former positions, knowledge and contacts in the future as lobbyists. This shouldn’t necessarily be prevented. But some transparency wouldn’t go amiss. Knowing more about how central some lobbyist-commentators are to the political process is useful to understanding how modern democracy works.
It also worth noting that the politician who is responsible for providing lobbyists with free access to Parliament, Speaker Trevor Mallard, also climbed into the Mike Williams controversy a few days ago. Mallard, who is a former colleague of Williams, published a number of aggressive tweets defending Williams and strongly admonishing my position.
This earned a rebuke from Tau Henare that in his role as Speaker Mallard ought to stand above the fray. And the Herald’s Chris Keall, who wrote the original piece covering the controversy said: “Our of order, Mr Speaker. More transparency is always better. @bryce_edwards’ reference to a register of lobbying activity (as in the US and many other countries) will appeal to anyone who wants to know who’s greasing govt wheels for Lime, big pharma, Fonterra etc etc”.
Continued doubts about the role of lobby groups and corporates in the public process have been raised in a number of recent media articles. On Friday, for example, it was revealed that the New Zealand China Council, which is mostly funded by government departments, also receives resources from the national airline: “A lobby group focused on keeping New Zealand onside with China has received more than $1.5 million in taxpayer funding since 2016 and gets ‘travel funding’ from Air New Zealand to fly regularly to China” – see: John Anthony’s Air New Zealand gives handouts to taxpayer funded lobby group New Zealand China Council.
In terms of the current debate over capital gains tax proposals, there is also a suspicion that wealthy lobby groups have an unfair advantage in defeating the ideas – see Damien Venuto’s How lobby groups stole the capital gains tax debate.
In this article, Massey University public relations specialist Chris Galloway is quoted: “A problem with public relations more generally is that the people who can afford to pay for its services tend to be the business elite… Your average community group might use PR techniques but doesn’t have the money to pay for expert advice. The danger of it is that the people with the deepest pockets get the most say.”
There are ongoing suspicions, too, about the influence of “film heavyweight Sir Peter Jackson” on the political process. Last year Jackson managed to get the Government “to reject official advice recommending surging taxpayer support for the sector be curbed” – see Matt Nippert’s recent article: PM Jacinda Ardern canned film subsidy curbs after meeting Peter Jackson.
And a prominent lobby group has also been in the news because it’s partially funded by British American Tobacco: “A right-wing lobbying group which has railed against cigarette tax increases and plain packaging laws in New Zealand counts a tobacco giant among its corporate funders. The NZ Taxpayers’ Union has not disclosed its financial support from tobacco companies in its reports or press releases, with one public health academic calling on it to be more transparent about its donors” – see Sam Sachdeva’s Taxpayers’ Union backed by tobacco giant.
Sachdeva labels it an “egregious lack of transparency”, especially for an organisation whose motto is “lower taxes, less waste, more transparency” – see: Tobacco ties undermine Taxpayers’ Union. But he believes that the revelation will damage the organisation: “With the Taxpayers’ Union digging in over the secrecy of its donors, media and the public will struggle to take its work at face value when there could be industry money funding (at least in part) any piece of research. While only time will tell, its credibility may have suffered fatal damage.”
Earlier this year, the NBR ran a three-part series on lobbyists by journalist Nathan Smith, involving interviews with three leading participants in the industry. The most interesting was former Labour Party Chief of Staff, Neale Jones who now works as a lobbyist helping business deal with the Labour-led Government – see: Lobbying is a key ingredient in democracy, Hawker Britton says (paywalled). See my Political Roundup outlining the problems with Jones working at a very senior level in Labour one week and for a lobbying firm the next here: The rise of the hyper-partisan lobbyists in Wellington.
As to the “revolving door” issue of whether there needs to be a “cooling down” period for politicians and senior officials like Jones before they take up lobbying jobs in the private sector, Jones isn’t keen, because “people need to make a living and have jobs and, when you’ve worked in Parliament, there are only so many places you can work afterward.” The article comments that this is “because the status quo seems to be working for him”.
Overall, Jones speaks very favourably about the role of the lobbying business in democracy, and points out: “lobbying represents a crucial gear in the machinery of democracy as it improves access to lawmakers for those hoping to both keep them honest and offer their opinion on proposed regulations or legislation. The government doesn’t always understand business and business doesn’t always understand the government”. And the role is crucial, because “Often, a small change in legislation will have millions of dollars of impact on a business.”
According to another new lobbyist, Holly Bennett, who has shifted from working under the previous National Government to advising business interests, the power of her contacts are vital, and business shouldn’t “under-rate personal contact” with politicians. The article reports: “Bennett says without her time spent working in the Ministry of Justice and other ministerial services, she wouldn’t have the access to MPs her clients need” – see: Lobbying is about navigating a ‘vast bureaucracy,’ says Holly Bennett (paywalled).
Finally, for the latest academic research into lobbying and its regulation in New Zealand, see: Grease or sand in the wheels of democracy? The market for lobbying in New Zealand by Thomas Anderson and Simon Chapple of Victoria University of Wellington. They examine who currently is doing the lobbying, and conclude that there is a need “to shine a brighter light on a currently shadowy industry which has significant long-term potential to corrode the integrity of the democratic process.”
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation; Co-Director, Australian Intervention Support Hub, Deakin University
This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.
No-one wants to feel insecure. The foundational element of the social contract between people and government is security. National security, then, must reasonably be one of the central concerns of both government and opposition.
Scott Morrison understood this well when he used an address to the National Press Club in February 2019 to launch his government’s program on national security.
This comes at a time when national security has been defined all too narrowly in Australian political discourse. The prime minister’s linking of multiple domains of security alongside concerns about violent extremism and terrorism should be welcomed. This moves national security beyond the current narrow focus of government to a more holistic framing, in line with global practice and as used by leading institutions such as the ANU’s National Security College.
It’s an important refocusing. And it’s timely when women are dying every week in domestic violence attacks, and cybercrime and cyber espionage loom as increasing threats to nation, society and business. It is not only reasonable but necessary to weigh up spending on countering terrorism and violent extremism alongside other pressing matters of national security.
But, after a promising start, the prime minister’s vision statement quickly deteriorated into point scoring designed to wedge the opposition on medical evacuations from Manus Island and Nauru.
Morrison’s bold assertion that Operation Sovereign Borders represents Australia’s greatest national security achievement overlooks all that’s been achieved in responding to the insidious and resilient threat of terrorism. It also offers no accounting of the real price of the indefinite detention of asylum seekers arriving by boat.
In a summer of unprecedented heat, bushfires in rainforests in Tasmania and catastrophic floods in Queensland, the PM’s vision statement talked only of “natural disasters”. He avoided all reference to climate change until pressed by a final questioner.
Even then, this unprecedented threat to national security was treated dismissively, with glib lines about “smashing goals” and meeting the Paris targets “in a canter”.
Moving national security beyond the cynicism of everyday politics
Morrison’s address served as a reminder of why Australians are so sceptical of politicians talking about national security. Little wonder, then, that the important work of counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism is saddled with so much baggage. A lack of trust, and a sense of being scapegoated on the part of migrant and Muslim communities in particular, threatens to unravel the good work done by community groups and police alike.
But it is not simply the politics of fear that drives scepticism about responses to terrorism. The reality of more than 17 years of the misnamed “global war on terror” provides good grounds for being critical about how resources are used and threats are framed.
In an important report last November, the Watson Institute at Brown University calculated that the financial cost to the US federal government alone of the so-called war on terror exceeded US$5.9 trillion.
Far worse, it estimated that around half-a-million lives had been lost in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan as a direct result of the fight against al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Half of them were civilians. And the conflict had driven at least 21 million people from their homes. But to what end?
Another report last November by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University found that, despite the tremendous price paid in dollars and lives, there were almost three times as many Salafi jihadi terrorists in 2018 as there were at the time of the September 11 attacks in 2001. The number of Salafi jihadi terror groups around the world had almost doubled.
Studies such as this make it clear that victory in the “war on terror” is no more likely than it is in “the war on drugs”.
A large element in all of this is the reality, now almost universally acknowledged, that the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a colossal mistake. Engagement in Iraq came at the cost of military operations in Afghanistan. The latter mission was altogether more rational in the wake of the September 11 attacks, especially in combination with nation-building efforts.
Despite investments equivalent to the post-second world war Marshall Plan in Europe, continuous operations in Afghanistan since 2001 have failed to achieve what the Marshall Plan was able to do. Incredibly, in Afghanistan, there has been no strategic plan guiding this longest of all modern wars.
Despite being the longest modern war, there has never been a strategic plan guiding operations in Afghanistan.AAP/EPA/Hedayatullah Amid
This is why many would insist that talk of terrorism and counter-terrorism at home and military engagement abroad is a mistake and a waste of resources: that it all contributes little to national security. The truth is much more complex. Certainly, one lesson of the past two decades is that military engagement should only be used sparingly and to a clear political end.
Expecting a decisive victory in Afghanistan is unrealistic. But withdrawing international forces now would render hopes of achieving a lasting peace through negotiation with the Taliban lost in capitulation to powerful militias by removing checks and balances.
And although many mistakes have also been made in counter-terrorism closer to home, it would be wrong to deny that much has been achieved.
Today, lone-actor attacks are a pressing concern because terrorists have been stopped from carrying out more ambitious plans. Al-Qaeda was never able to repeat the large-scale attacks of 2001 in New York and Washington, 2004 in Madrid and 2005 in London. The return of larger attacks in 2015 and 2016 came only because of the strength of IS in Syria and Iraq.
Acknowledging counter-terrorism successes
Police and government agencies today face a workload that is an order of magnitude larger than it was before the rise of IS. But through effective intelligence work they have managed to contain the threat of large-scale terror attacks outside of conflict zones.
In Australia, the efforts of many to counter violent extremism are seldom recognised or properly understood. But the level of security that has been achieved in the face of the resilient threat of terrorism is a substantial achievement.
Much good has come out of all these efforts, not least the cooperation of the Australian Federal Police with counterparts around the world, particularly Indonesia in the wake of the Bali bombings of October 2002.
Similarly, Australian government-backed initiatives in working with civil society groups to counter violent extremism have achieved a great deal in terms of responding to threats and building understanding across communities.
The conflation of national security with strong borders, and a fetish with arrivals by sea, leads to disproportionate and wasteful spending. It plays into the demonising of those fleeing persecution and seeking asylum.
The simplistic, dehumanising focus on “keeping bad people out” not only justifies cruelty, but contributes to unhealthy lack of transparency in the work of agencies and contractors.
Everyone deserves to live in a society as secure as can reasonably be achieved. National security is too important to be used as a mere political instrument. The cynical politics of fear threatens both to undo the good work being done by so many for so long and to turn Australian society against itself.
Vegetarianism is on the rise in Australia, as many vegetarians will gladly tell you. While many people who eschew meat products do so for the sake of animals and the environment, we’re starting to learn more about the negative health effects of meat and the benefits from eating a plant-based diet.
We asked five experts if a vegetarian diet is healthier.
Four out of five experts said yes
Here are their detailed responses:
If you have a “yes or no” health question you’d like posed to Five Experts, email your suggestion to: alexandra.hansen@theconversation.edu.au
None of the authors have any interests or affiliations to declare.
This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.
Strong action on climate change is vital if Australia is to thrive in the future. Lack of consensus on climate policy over the past two decades has cost us dearly. It has harmed our natural environment, our international reputation and our economic prospects in a future low-carbon world.
The next two years will be crucial if Australia is to meet its commitment, along with the rest of the world, to limit greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the worst ravages of global warming.
In 2015, nearly all nations signed the Paris climate agreement. They pledged to limit global warming to well below 2℃ and to reach net zero emissions. By our calculations, Australia needs to reach net zero before 2050 to do its part.
As a first step, Australia has committed to reduce its total emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030. Under the Paris Agreement it will have to submit progressively stronger targets every five years. Unfortunately, Australia is not yet on track to meet even its comparatively modest 2030 goal.
Analysis by ClimateWorks Australia found that although Australia’s emissions have fallen by around 11% economy-wide since 2005, emissions have been steadily climbing again since 2013. In 2013 Australia emitted the equivalent of 520 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. By 2016 that had bounced back up to 533 million tonnes.
While some parts of the economy cut emissions at certain times, no sector improved consistently at the rate needed to hit the overall 2030 target.
Emissions are still above 2005 levels in the building, industrial and transport sectors, and only 3% below in the electricity sector, based on 2016 figures, the latest available. The overall fall was mainly delivered by the land sector, thanks to a combination of reduced land clearing and increased forestation. Increased energy efficiency and the growth of renewable energy also made modest contributions.
Unfortunately, progress in reducing emissions has now stalled in most sectors and reversed overall.
How fast should we be cutting emissions?
We calculate that Australia needs to double its emissions reduction progress to deliver on the 2030 target. We will have to triple it to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
Hitting net zero by 2050 means going much further than the Coalition government’s 2030 target of 26-28%, or the 45% proposed by federal Labor. Australia would need to cut total emissions by 55% below 2005 levels by 2030 (the middle of the range recommended by the Climate Change Authority) to get there without undue economic disruption.
Fortunately, there are enough opportunities for further emission reductions in all sectors to meet our Paris targets. We can probably do better than that, given the falling costs of many key technologies.
The gap to the 2030 target could be more than covered by further activity in the land sector alone, or by the electricity sector alone, or by the combined potential of the building, industrial and transport sectors. Emission reductions from energy efficiency – through better buildings, vehicles and white goods – can even save money in the long term.
Clearly, not all sectors have the same potential to reduce emissions based on current technological progress, but all have significant room for improvement.
We calculated that:
the electricity sector was on track to cut its emissions by 21% by 2030, but could cut them by nearly 70%
transport sector emissions are set to be 29% above 2005 levels by 2030, but with projected technology improvements could be 4% below
the land sector is set to hit 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, but with more support for planting could be 103% below – well into “negative emissions” territory. The land sector would then be sucking up carbon and making up for emissions from other sectors.
How do we get there?
To ensure a smooth, cost-effective transition to a net-zero-emissions economy by 2050, some sectors will need to do more sooner, to avoid putting too much onus on other sectors where emissions savings are harder and more expensive.
This will require major upgrades to Australia’s current policy settings. Since 2013 Australia’s efforts to cut emissions have focused largely on the land sector via the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) and the electricity sector through the Renewable Energy Target. With the ERF due to run out of funds soon and no clear energy policy even as our ageing power stations shut down, policy certainty is urgently needed in both these areas to encourage investors.
Renewable energy is powering ahead and starting to tap into Australia’s huge potential in clean energy resources. However, ongoing policy support is needed to ensure our energy remains affordable and reliable through the transition.
Despite the importance of the electricity and land sectors, we need emission reductions throughout the economy. Fortunately, there is plenty that Australia can do to cut emissions further, in many different ways:
in the land sector through revegetation and forestation
in electricity by increasing renewables and phasing out coal
in industry by bolstering energy efficiency, fuel switching and reducing non-energy emissions
in transport by introducing vehicle emission standards and shifting to electric vehicles and low-carbon fuels
in construction by increasing standards for buildings and appliances.
With well-targeted policies across all sectors of the economy, we can get back on track and meet our Paris targets.
Australia’s states and businesses are recognising how much they can and should do. For instance, 80% of Australia’s emissions are in states and territories with goals to reach net zero emissions by 2050, while many large companies and universities are pledging to be carbon-neutral or use 100% renewable energy.
There is more than enough opportunity, but we have to act now.
Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.
How do shells get made? – Ida, age 6.
Thank you, Ida, for this excellent question. It is good that you are noticing the world around you and asking questions about how it came to be that way.
Common types of shells include seashells, land snail shells, turtle shells or even crab shells. All those animals make their shells in different ways, but my research is all about the sea so today we will focus on seashells.
All those seashells you find on the beach were actually once home to small, soft-bodied creatures called molluscs. Clams, pipis, scallops, mussels and oysters are all different types of molluscs.
Not all molluscs have shells. For example, an octopus is also a mollusc and it doesn’t have a shell.
Some molluscs have shells, and others do not.Shutterstock
But the molluscs who do have shells have to build their own shell from scratch. And they keep building it their whole life.
A few days after baby molluscs come out from tiny eggs, they start building their shell, layer after layer.
They use salt and chemicals from the sea (such as calcium and carbonate). They also use other ingredients from their own bodies (such as special chemicals called proteins that help them build the shell).
The part of the mollusc’s body that is in charge of building the shell is called the “mantle”. The mantle builds a kind of frame first, using proteins to make it very strong. It then fills it in with calcium and carbonate. These are some of the same chemicals your body uses to make your bones.
To make space for their growing body, molluscs have to gradually enlarge and extend their shells by adding new layers of those building blocks – calcium, carbonate and proteins.
The newest part of the sea snail’s shell, for example, is around the opening where the animal pokes out.
The newest part of the shell is at the edge where the snail’s body pokes out.Shutterstock
Seashells are important for the planet
If damaged, the mollusc’s body can produce more proteins, calcium and carbonate to repair the broken part of the shell.
When a mollusc dies, the soft body disappears but its shell remains and eventually washes up on the shore. This is how seashells end up on the beach.
As you know, there are many types of seashells out there and lots of different shapes, sizes and colours of shell.
Over time, molluscs have grown to have the type of shell that helps it best survive in its environment. For example, some shells help protect the mollusc against animals that want to eat it, while others are designed to make it easier for the mollusc to dig down fast to get away. The colour of the shell depends mainly on what the mollusc has eaten.
It is a good idea to take pictures of shells and then leave them on the beach.Shutterstock.
Before you collect seashells from the beach, think about how important they are to the planet.
Seashells may not be home to molluscs anymore, but they can still be used as homes by hermit crabs or young fish. Birds also use shells to build their nests. So you can see, some animals need the shells more than we do.
A good choice is to take pictures of them instead of taking them home!
A flood-ravaged Townsville has captured public attention, highlighting the vulnerability of many of our cities to flooding. The extraordinary amount of rain is just one aspect of the disaster in Queensland’s third-biggest city. The flooding, increasing urban density, the management of the Ross River Dam, and the difficulties of dealing with byzantine insurance regulations have left the community with many questions about their future.
These questions won’t be resolved until we enhance the resilience of cities and communities against flooding. Adaptation needs to become an integral part of living with the extremes of the Australian environment. I discuss how to design and create resilient urban landscapes later in this article.
Generally, insurance companies establish the 1-in-100-year flood event as the standard risk that their policies will cover. It’s not just the insurance companies that adopt this criterion; many councils use the same parameter in their urban planning and land-use strategies.
However, in extraordinary circumstances, when the flooded land is actually larger than the area marked by the flood overlay map, complications emerge. In fact, that part of the community living outside the map’s boundaries is considered flood-free. Thus, those pockets of the community may not have flood insurance and not have emergency plans, which leaves them even worse off after floods. This is happening in Townsville.
Yet this is nothing new. Many people experienced very similar circumstances in 2011 after Cyclone Yasi. Flood waters covered as much land as Germany and France combined. Several communities were left on their knees.
Cyclone Yasi also left parts of Townsville flooded in 2011.Stewart Mclean/AAP
Notwithstanding the prompt and vast response of the federal government and Queensland’s state authorities, a few years later Townsville is going through something alarmingly similar.
Adaptation to create resilient cities
To find a solution, we need to rethink how to implement the Queensland Emergency Risk Management Framework. That is no easy task. However, it starts with shifting the perspective on what is considered a risk – in this case, a flooding event.
Floods, per se, are not a natural disaster. Floods are part of the natural context of Queensland as can be seen below, for instance, in the Channel Country.
Floods are part of the Australian landscape. Here trees mark the seasonal riverbeds in the Queensland outback between Cloncurry and Mount Isa.Cecilia Bischeri, Author provided
The concept of adaptation as a built-in requirement of living in this environment then becomes pivotal. In designing and developing future-ready cities, we must aim to build resilient communities.
This is the ambitious project I am working on. It involves different figures and expertise with a shared vision and the support of government administrations that are willing to invest in a future beyond their elected term of office.
Ideas for Gold Coast Resilientscape
I live and work in the City of Gold Coast. Water is a fundamental part of the city’s character and beauty. In addition to the ocean, a complex system of waterways shapes a unique urban environment. However, this also exposes the city to a series of challenges, including flooding.
Last September, an updated flood overlay map was made available to the community. The map takes into account the projections of a 0.8 metre increase in the sea level and 10% increases in storm tide intensity and rainfall intensity.
These factors are reflected in the 1-in-100-year flood overlay. It shows undoubtedly that the boundaries between land and water are changeable.
Building walls between the city and water as the primary flood protection strategy is not a solution. A rigid border can actually intensify the catastrophe. New Orleans and the levee failures during the passage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 provide a stark illustration of this.
Instead, what would happen and what would our cities look like if we designed green and public infrastructures that embody flooding as part of the natural context of our cities and territory?
The current project, titled RESILIENTSCAPE: A Landscape for Gold Coast Urban Resilience, considers the role of architecture in enhancing the resilience of cities and communities against flooding. The proposal, in a nutshell, explores the possibilities that urban landscape design and implementation provide for resilience.
RESILIENTSCAPE focuses on the Nerang River catchment and the Gold Coast Regional Botanic Gardens, in the suburb of Benowa. The river and gardens were adopted as a case study for a broader strategy that aims to promote architectural solutions for a resilient City of Gold Coast. The project investigates the possibility of using existing green pockets along the Nerang River to store and retain excess water during floods.
Gold Coast Regional Botanic Gardens is one of the green areas along the Nerang River that could be used to store and retain flood water.Batsv/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
These green spaces, however, will not just serve as “water tanks”. If mindfully planned, the green spaces can double up as public parks and facilities. This would enrich the community’s social realm and maximise their use and return on investment.
The design of a landscape responsive to flooding can, by improving local urban resilience, dramatically change the impact of these events.
After months of debate, the Australian Securities Exchange last week dumped a proposal to include reference to a “social licence to operate” in its updated Corporate Governance Guidelines.
It was wrong to do so.
The new guidelines, released on Wednesday, replace “social licence to operate” with terms such as “reputation” and “standing in the community”.
Markup of revisions to consultation version of Fourth Edition of ASX Corporate Governance Principles.ASX
According to the Australian Financial Review the Council came to the view that the phrase was “contentious” and that it would “create problems for companies in the gaming, alcohol, tobacco, fast food and mining sectors” – the very sectors where corporate responsibility is at constant risk, and governance is most needed.
David Murray, chair of troubled investment firm AMP, had labelled the phrase “politically correct nonsense” – which raises the question as to whether the phrase is indeed left-wing nonsense and why the Council felt the need to dumb it down.
The AMP chair’s comment suggests the financial sector has still a long way to go in understanding that businesses are not only responsible to their owners but also to a wide array of stakeholders who have legitimate claims; among them governments, communities, customers, and citizens. As a consequence, as the AMP ought to well know, businesses operate in an environment of contested values.
“Politically correct” or not, the phrase is an accurate metaphor for the reality that companies that disregard the values of the societies in which they operate run the risk of boycotts and legal and legislative action that will put them out of business.
It raises the question why the Council felt the need to shy away from such an accurate depiction of what is necessarily a key governance objective: maintenance of the social licence to operate.
There are probably two reasons:
guidelines such as the ASX Corporate Governance Principles are outcomes of extensive debate and consultation and so tend to reflect the values of the lowest common denominator
commercial interests have long dominated ethical considerations in many industries, especially those in which the Council fears the phrase may “create problems” – the gaming, alcohol, tobacco, fast food and mining industries.
Other industries have long avoided such a debate and have instead engaged in reputation management through campaigns around responsible gambling, responsible drinking and healthy eating – all of which are paradoxical attempts to soften the edges of a problematic core of their operations rather than to align them with what society wants.
Continuing to do so, by pretending there is no such thing as a social licence, is not in their long term interests.
By surrendering, the Australian Securities Exchange has served neither them nor the cause of corporate governance well.
Kangaroos are the most visible of Australia’s unique animals, but despite their charm and national icon status, Australian writers perpetually kill them off.
A kangaroo appears struggling in a rabbit trap, doomed and dying in Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, while Tim Winton has one killed on the road, dissected and fed to dogs in Breath. These are just two of many Australian authors who have represented the kangaroo as a victim.
Kangaroos were a creature of wonder for early European explorers such as Dampier and Banks, but it didn’t take long for their public image to descend to that of a pest. Early settlers considered them competition, nibbling all the best pasture quicker than their sheep and cows, and they soon took up arms against the bounding menace.
The wild kangaroo population of Australia is still commercially slaughtered for dog food. In New South Wales, landholders and volunteers can be simply licensed to kill them for reasons of damage control, and some parts of Western Australia have an open permit system for non-commercial shooting. On any given day, there are usually several being mashed into the blue metal of highways, surrounded by crows and in various states of decomposition.
The expendable nature of the kangaroo may be a widely held view in Australia, but it’s a bitter irony that the creature which defines us to the rest of the world is perpetually under siege, in life and in literature.
In Stephen Daisley’s 2016 novel Coming Rain, the author kills off a kangaroo with “a great thump” against the side of a truck, giving a gruesome description of the sweetening of the tail for stew.
The live joey almost has its head smashed against a tree but, owing to its “cuteness” it becomes a pet, wearing a straw hat. The stereotype of the cute joey is alive and well in children’s fiction too, but in adult fiction the kangaroo is dead.
In Tim Winton’s Breath, narrator Pikelet comes across surf guru, Sando, who has hit a kangaroo with his Kombi ute. Sando finishes it off with the jack handle from the car, pounded a couple of times into its head. His response to this act is very matter-of-fact: “This is what happens. And it isn’t lovely.”
Sando drags the “roadkill” into the tray of his ute and takes it home to butcher it. He is prepared for this, with a meat hook hanging from a tree, and he skins and guts the kangaroo. Pikelet observes this with some emotional discomfort, “shrinking from him a little” but accepts the flourbag of meat to take home to his parents who “wouldn’t eat roo meat in a million years”. He “hoiks” the meat into the bushes on the ride home.
Charlotte Wood considers the horror of roadkill in The Children, where Australian animals are killed by passing traffic and compared to contaminated “cushions”. Wood also kills a kangaroo (and a lot of rabbits) in The Natural Way of Things. Central character Yolanda snares a “large grey kangaroo” in a rabbit trap and finds it still alive:
Vainly, the kangaroo shifts and scuffles again. Then it lowers its head and lengthens its mighty neck, black eyes fixed on them, and lets out three long, hoarse snarls. Its snout fattens, nostrils flared.
Fearful of the sharp claws on its “delicate forefeet” they sit beside it, wondering how to set it free and instead bring it water and leave it to die slowly.
The image of the kangaroo is linked to death through earlier works from Australian authors too. The iconic 1940 poem, Native-Born by Eve Langley presents a detailed account of a dead kangaroo, while Randolph Stow’s 1958 novel To the Islands features kangaroos and wallabies being shot and eaten.
Australian fiction is, so often, deeply entangled with nature. Anxiety around the bush, as described in D.H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo back in the 1920s, is a feature of settler Australian fiction, tied together with violence, trauma and a sense of the uncanny.
Docile and violent all at once, the watchful gaze and twitching ears of kangaroos are, perhaps, reminders of that uneasiness the settlers felt.
The fact that Australian literature seems intent on killing off this national icon is deeply disturbing – but it is also deeply ingrained.
In contrast with kangaroos, thylacines are well and truly alive in Australian literature despite being extinct since 1936. They appear in over 250 works listed in the AustLit database of Australian literature, including 18 novels since 1988.
Among these are Julia Leigh’s The Hunter, Sonya Hartnett’s Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf and Louis Nowra’s Into That Forest, as well as children’s fiction, drama, film, short fiction and poetry. These thylacines often meet with violent ends, but their aliveness in fiction is astounding compared to the kangaroo.
Contemporary Australia is sentimental about the thylacine as a strange creature lost because of “ignorance”. They are now a thing of wonder, destroyed by misguided colonial settlers who are long gone. But if they weren’t extinct, would we treat them any better? Would we protect them? Often that is the point writers are trying to make by invoking the extinct “tiger” in the first place.
Our relationship with kangaroos (and thylacines), both in fiction and in reality, is symptomatic of what Stow called our “bitter heritage”. So perhaps it is unsurprising, given the violence of colonisation, that it has had (and is still having) an impact on the way writers represent the Australian landscape and all who inhabit it.
This article is based on research published in a forthcoming article for Antipodes.
Firewood banksia is rugged and yet stunning. Short, stout and gnarled, it is often ignored by tree lovers. Indeed, it was commonly cut down and used as firewood in the early days of the Swan River Colony in modern-day Western Australia.
However, the flower spikes are stunning – showy and vibrant, dark pink-red in colour that becomes mixed with yellow as they open – and set against a backdrop of elegant twisted grey-green leaves. Each spike is composed of up to 6,000 individual flowers, and yet only a few become filled with seeds.
The “cones” (these are not true cones like pine cones) are magnificent too – velvety chocolate brown, impressive in their woodiness, and expressive as the mouth-like follicles open to release their seeds. Symmetrical by turn and then messy by another turn, no other banksia species looks quite like it.
The Conversation
We admire firewood banksia for functional reasons too. Life on Western Australia’s sandplains is tough, especially in the heat of the summer. One of us (Lauren) knows this all too well, having spent hours on her hands and knees counting banksia seedlings for her PhD research.
Large seeds provide the seedlings with resources to grow exceptionally long roots to reach water deep in the sandy, nutrient-poor soils. It’s an adventure race for survival because roots need to tap the ground water before the arrival of the long, hot Perth summer.
Seedlings of a neighbouring banksia species, the slender banksia, can grow roots at a rate of up to 3.5cm per day!
The flower spikes begin as a dark pink-red and become red-yellow as they mature.Photo by Lauren Svejcar
Uniquely Aussie
Banksia is a plant genus unique to Australia, named after the great botanical explorer Sir Joseph Banks. Banks travelled on the HMS Endeavour with James Cook on his first great voyage to the “unknown southern land”. The specimens Banks and his team collected formed the first scientific collections of Australian flora, now held at the Natural History Museum in London and the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney.
According to fossil records of pollen, leaves and cones, banksia species have grown in Australia for at least 60 million years making their lineage one of the oldest in Australia. Banksia have persisted through major climate shifts from wet to dry climates that occurred about 25 million years ago. Even the first banksia species were able to survive recurrent wildfire, owing to what botanist Alex George refers to as the “ruggedness” of their features. Banksia epitomise what it means to be Australian.
A woody ‘cone’ (infructescence) with seeds maturing inside swollen follicles. It is cheap for plants to produce wood in Australia because there’s plenty of sunlight, so why not offer your seeds total protection?Photo Lauren Svejcar.
Some 20 years after Cook’s first voyage of the east coast came the discovery of the rich banksia flora on the south-west coast of Australia. Banksia grow in non-arid regions all over Australia, but most species grow only in Western Australia.
Surgeon-naturalist Archibald Menzies was the first explorer to see and sample the diversity of banksia species growing in the south-west near Albany. Our favourite banksia, the firewood banksia is named in his honour: Banksia menziesii.
Facing danger
While their experience of historic climate change and ruggedness may protect firewood banksia from Perth’s drying climate, ongoing habitat clearing makes them vulnerable to decline and has contributed to the banksia woodlands of the Swan Coastal Plain being listed as an endangered ecological community.
One of us (Rachel) played in banksia woodlands as a child, climbing the gnarly trucks of firewood banksia and collecting spent cones. Long before that, the Whadjuk Noongar collected flower spikes to make bush medicine. Having nature nearby is so important for people and for conservation. It is overwhelmingly sad that future generations of Perth may not be afforded this unique opportunity.
Birds and insects love firewood banksia too. Birds are the primary pollinators of firewood banksia, no doubt attracted to the beautiful pollen-rich flowers. Interestingly, insects visit flowers more often than birds, but they are less effective pollinators.
Carnaby’s cockatoos feeding on firewood banksia.Photo by Lauren Svejcar
The seeds are an important food source for the critically endangered Carnaby’s cockatoo. Hungry cockatoos often visit the firewood banksias that grow on our university campus in Perth’s southern suburbs. We count our lucky stars we get to watch while they squawk and feast, leaving when their tummies are so full that take-off is comical and there’s a mess of woody litter under the trees. It’s a blissful moment before the snarl of commuting traffic or the pull of work, connecting us to nature and to things bigger than ourselves.
University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini speaks with Michelle Grattan about the week in politics. They discuss Scott Morrison’s attempt to burnish the Coalition’s climate change credentials; focus group research into the independent push in Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah; the appointment of the new chair of the ABC, Ita Buttrose; and the conviction of Cardinal George Pell.
University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini speaks with Michelle Grattan about the week in politics. They discuss Scott Morrison’s attempt to burnish the Coalition’s climate change credentials; focus group research into the independent push in Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah; the appointment of the new chair of the ABC, Ita Buttrose; and the conviction of Cardinal George Pell.
To reimagine a classic and present it as a story relevant for our times takes more than fiddling around the edges. It requires a courageous retelling, and that is just what South African dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo has done with her Giselle.
This ballet, based on a Slavic legend, was first performed in 1841 and set in the Middle Ages.
In the original story, Giselle is courted by the nobleman, Albrecht. But they cannot be together, as he is already betrothed. Giselle suffers deeply when he is forced to leave her and she dies of a broken heart. Soon her spirit is roused from her grave by spirits known as the Wilis and their queen, Myrtha.
These avenging ghosts force any man they encounter to dance until he dies of exhaustion. When Albrecht faces this terrible fate, Giselle rescues him. Through this act of forgiveness she is released from the hold of the Wilis and her spirit can rest.
Dada Masilo is having none of this. She follows the original story outline but changes it in significant ways, making the story cleverly contemporary.
Dada Masilo’s retelling of Giselle is unconventional.Stella Olivier
This is apparent from the start. The original medieval peasants bringing in the grape harvest are now farmers toiling in the field under a hot sun. The work is back-breaking and the local “nobles” are cruel and arrogant.
When Albrecht courts Giselle we are swept up in the romance through their beautiful pas de deux. But in this version, when he reunites with Bathilde, his equal and his betrothed, he does so with relish and without any thought of Giselle.
This makes his actions towards her all the more terrible: it is deliberate abuse, not an impossible love between two people from different social classes as in the original.
The most emphatic change in this retelling, though, is the role of the Wilis. They become avenging spirits who are powerful and have agency. The men they meet are tormented and beaten to death, rather than dying from exhaustion. Their queen, Myrtha, is a sangoma, a shaman-like figure from South Africa who communicates with ancestors but is also a traditional healer.
The set for Masilo’s production is sparse, with projections and lighting creating the settings. The opening image of an idyllic landscape is ironic, presented in black and white like a pen and ink drawing. Other images of clouds which slowly change colour create a range of atmospheres, from warm autumn days to ominous sunsets.
The most emphatic change in this retelling is to the role of the Wilis.John Hogg
The effect is to keep our focus firmly on the dancers, who are all sensational. There is no corps de ballet here to provide crowd scenes or spectacle, only a company of 12 dancers. But they are also actors, using voice, song, chant and expression to convey the story.
As Giselle, Masilo is brilliant, with an impressive emotional range. We journey with her as she transforms from being a carefree, cheeky, young woman, through her humiliation, anger and then revenge.
Xola Willie as Albrecht is charismatic and seductive, the perfect portrayal of the narcissist we cannot help but like, even though we know Giselle will suffer at his hands.
When he finally rejects her for Bathilde, danced by an impressive Liyabuya Gongo, Giselle disintegrates before our eyes. Her solo dance before her death is filled with pain and equally painful to watch.
The slow funeral procession across the stage that follows is accompanied by a recording of a traditional hymn, Hamba Nhliziyo Yami. The lyrics translate as “Go to heaven my heart, for there is no peace on earth”, and the scene ends with one moving moment as Giselle’s mother (Sinazo Bokolo) picks up her child and carries her away.
Llewellyn Mnguni’s Queen Myrtha is portrayed as androgynous. The power and intensity of this performance pulls us into the mystical world of the Wilis as they wreak their revenge.
The choreography throughout is sensational. It blends classical ballet with contemporary dance, but is rooted firmly in the energy and movements seen in South Africa, such as traditional Zulu dance.
The sparse set for Masilo’s Giselle allows the dancers to shine.Stella Olivier
The contemporary soundtrack has echoes of the original orchestral arrangement but is mixed with drums, electronica and pumping bass lines. Like the choreography, it blended many musical styles and was a fitting accompaniment. However, even though the recorded music was excellent, it lacked the vibrancy of a live performance.
The final scene after the Wilis have killed Albrecht is both magical and sinister. It reflects the funeral procession across the stage that ended Act One, but this time the dancers walk in the opposite direction. One by one they throw a white powder into the air. This hangs like clouds above as each of them exits, symbolising their release from the spirit world to eternal rest.
Giselle is the last to leave. She approaches Albrecht’s prone body, throws her powder, then walks over him as if he did not exist. This Giselle’s innocence has turned to revenge, and she does not forgive.
Giselle is being performed as part of the 2019 Perth Festival until March 2.
Despite the Sydney site’s notoriety as home to Australia’s only nuclear reactor, the ANSTO said the spill involved “approx 250mL of sodium hydroxide”, a substance that does not contain radioactive material.
Most people will have used sodium hydroxide (NaOH – commonly known as caustic soda or lye) at some point in their life, either in chemistry classes at school or as a strong cleaning agent in the home.
The chemical also has many other uses as varied as cleaning drains, making soap, and producing rocket fuel.
Even though the chemical is easily available, it can still be dangerous.
Don’t try this at home
At room temperature, NaOH is a white solid that looks something like its close relative table salt (NaCl – sodium chloride).
It dissolves readily in water, in a process that causes the mixture to heat up. In many industrial uses, such as the one in the incident at Lucas Heights, the NaOH is dissolved in water and used as such.
Solid NaOH should not be handled with bare skin. Any water on the skin (such as sweat), will dissolve some of the solid NaOH, creating a very concentrated solution directly in contact with the skin.
The chemistry of what happens when NaOH comes into contact with the skin is not dependent upon the concentration of material. The only thing that happens if there is more NaOH is that the reactions happen faster, thus causing more damage, more quickly.
Not just chemical burns
The main danger from skin contact is that the sodium hydroxide reacts with the fats (and proteins) that make up the outside of the cells in skin.
This reaction has two effects. One is the obvious fact that if the cell membranes break down, the cells die. The other is, just like dissolving in water, the reaction with the membranes gives out heat.
This reaction is known as saponification – a process for making soap. If you’ve ever spilled a dilute solution of sodium hydroxide on your skin, and then washed it off with water, you’ve probably been surprised by the soapy sensation of the process.
The reaction of the NaOH with your skin literally produces soap.
In small quantities on the outer layer of skin, this is not particularly dangerous, but in concentrated form, the reaction can very quickly burn a hole through the skin and into the tissue beneath.
But this process of dissolving otherwise insoluble fats is the main household use for sodium hydroxide. When mixed with the fats that sometimes deposit in drains, the sodium hydroxide reacts to turn them into water soluble soap, which can then be washed away.
Treat like any other burn
The treatment for almost all burns is the same. Remove the source of the burn (in this case the sodium hydroxide) and then flush the affected area for 20 minutes with cold running water.
In the case of a chemical burn, using copious amounts of running water will quickly dilute and wash away the cause of the burn.
If the victim has the burning chemical on their clothing, try to cut off the clothing rather than pull it off over the head, risking spreading the chemical to unaffected parts of the patient.
Accidents do happen
We are often surrounded by chemicals that pose potential serious dangers if incorrectly handled. This is doubly true for many industrial sites.
For this reason we should be aware of their presence in our environment, the hazards that they pose, how to handle them safely, and how to respond correctly in the event of a spillage or contact with the body.
The three staff members at Lucas Heights were reportedly taken to the nearby Sutherland Hospital and were said to be in a stable condition.
Put simply, individuals often pay online, consciously or unintentionally, with their data and privacy. As a result, companies hold a vast amount of information on consumers, and consumers allegedly agree to that practice. But as our research shows, online privacy agreements are largely incomprehensible.
Privacy issues are becoming more and more salient, in part due to enormous privacy scandals. Perhaps most conspicuously, a massive public protest erupted in response to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. In this case, the data of millions of people’s Facebook profiles was harvested. Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified before two US senate committees about the company’s privacy practices.
Privacy is now also at the forefront of policy making. The most systematic legislative attempt to make more order in the messy world of privacy is the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It comes as no surprise that European legislature was breaking the ground in this realm. The EU is known to have a strong focus on citizens’ rights. It is committed to data protection, and to consumer protection more generally.
The GDPR came into force in May 2018. Its primary objective is to level the playing field and give individuals more control over their personal data. The GDPR also aspires to force companies to be more transparent around data collection and more cautious about its usage.
Clear and plain language
Another interesting aspect of the GDPR is its requirement to clearly communicate privacy terms to end users. In this respect, the GDPR requires companies to use “clear and plain language” in their privacy agreements.
Making privacy policies readable may bring about a few notable benefits. For starters, drafting readable policies better respects users’ autonomy. Beyond that, readability can contribute to better comprehension of legal texts. This, in turn, can make such texts more salient, leading companies to draft more balanced terms.
But does this indeed materialise? In our study (with Professor Uri Benoliel from Israel), we examined whether, half a year post-GDPR, companies present users with online privacy agreements that are readable. We applied two well-established linguistic tools: the Flesch Reading Ease test and the Flesch-Kincaid test. Both tests are based on the average sentence length and the average number of syllables per word.
We measured the readability of more than 200 privacy policies. We gathered these policies from the most popular English websites in the UK and Ireland. Our sample included policies used by companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, Youtube, and the BBC.
We had good reasons to be optimistic. The GDPR receives a lot of attention. It employs harsh penalties, which can presumably serve as effective deterrence. Additionally, the cultural convention is that Europeans generally tend to be compliant and law abiding.
But we were disappointed. Instead of the recommended Flesch-Kincaid score of 8th grade for consumer-related materials, understanding the average policy in our sample requires almost 13 years of education. Almost all the privacy policies in our sample, about 97%, received a higher than recommended score.
Readability remains a challenge
The European legislature thought that using plain language in privacy agreements can be part of a better, holistic approach to users’ privacy. We believe this is an idea worth exploring.
While not a magic bullet, readability can prove to be important for users’ privacy. But despite the GDPR’s requirement, European citizens still encounter privacy policies that are largely unreadable.
Does the GDPR just bark, but not bite? While it is perhaps too early to say, we located 24 websites in our sample that included their privacy policies as drafted pre-GDPR. We then measured their readability. The results show that current privacy policies are only slightly more readable than the older ones.
This may offer some lessons. Most notably perhaps, good intentions and extensive legislation may not suffice. Merely having a general, vague law is not likely to yield the anticipated change.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Hall, Professor of Health Economics and Director, Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation, University of Technology Sydney
This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.
Over the last 35 years, Medicare has given Australians access to high-quality health care at a reasonable cost. But, despite our justifiable pride in Medicare, it’s time to reconsider the way we pay for health care.
Australia’s Medicare system is a A$20 billion-a-year program. It subsidises most of our out-of-hospital doctor consultations, blood tests, X-rays and scans, physio appointments, eye tests and many other health services. It’s based on a long list of items and each time an item is provided, Medicare pays a benefit.
But paying doctors and other health providers a set fee for each service they deliver is not delivering optimal value for the health dollar. There are two reasons for this.
First, it encourages a higher volume of services, but not necessarily better-value services.
Second, it constrains doctors into delivering the care based on the items in the schedule, which often don’t meet the needs of complex patients.
One promising alternative is “bundled payments”. Rather than paying doctors a “fee for service”, they would be paid a prospective lump sum to care for the patient’s medical problem, over a specified period.
The lump sum would be a pooled payment for all services provided to treat the condition. The provider’s role would be to coordinate the patient’s care across different parts of the health system and work with a range of health professionals to deliver high-quality care.
This would give doctors greater flexibility to manage the care patients need. At the same time, doctors would be held accountable via measurements of the quality of their care.
Importantly, this would give patients greater access to a broader range of services and make it easier to navigate our complicated health system.
Why health costs are rising
Between 1984 and 2018, Australian government spending on services outside of hospitals has increased from A$426 to A$818 per person, after adjusting for inflation.
This increase is almost entirely due to service volume. Back in 1984, the average Australian made 7.25 out-of-hospital Medicare claims a year. By 2018, this had escalated to 15.34; a doubling in the average number of claims.
The biggest growth has been in the number of pathology claims for blood and tissue tests (1.4 in 1984 to 5.2 in 2018), followed by GP consultations (4.2 compared to 6.3) and diagnostic imaging, including X-rays and other types of scans (0.3 versus 1.0).
This is not just the result of population ageing. At every age, we are making more Medicare claims. In 1985, people aged between 75 and 84 made 16.1 Medicare claims per year. In 2018, this number had grown to 44.6 claims per person per year.
Australians are making many more Medicare claims than they used to.Dave Hunt/AAP
Medicare prices have been very steady. For GP consultations, for example, the benefit paid per service has increased by 72% over the 35-year period, and mostly as a direct result of policy initiatives such as the Strengthening Medicare reforms introduced in 2004-05.
In fact, since 2005, the benefit per service has declined by 6% in real terms. This is a result, in part, of the Medicare freeze imposed by government between 2012 and 2018.
So price control is only one part of constraining expenditure growth. The other is the volume of services.
The medical care market has undergone considerable corporatisation. Corporate entities now own around 10% to 15% of all GP practices in Australia.
Corporate entities can own and run primary care practices as well as pathology laboratories, diagnostic imaging services and even pharmacies. This creates more incentive to refer patients to their own businesses for blood tests and imaging to increase the volume of claims, and therefore increase profits.
Greater spending doesn’t mean better care
The second critique of Medicare is that current funding arrangements create disincentives for delivering optimum care over a longer period, particularly for complex patients who require multiple services from multiple providers. They might have cancer, for instance, or multiple chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes or dementia.
Currently, Medicare makes a payment for every claim made within what we call an “episode of care” – a set of services to treat a condition, or a procedure. Each provider in that episode has an incentive to increase their own volume of care, but there are virtually no incentives to coordinate or deliver an optimum pathway of care for the patient.
Further, there are too few opportunities and rewards in this system to give doctors flexibility to offer different types of care for patients. This includes care provided by nurses, physiotherapists or dietitians; email or telephone consultations; patient education; and coordination services.
Instead, pay doctors a lump sum
The main feature of a good payment system is that it creates the right incentives for providers and patients to use health care resources effectively, efficiently and equitably.
Bundling payment involves working out the best care pathways for each condition. Cancer, for example, is a complex disease that requires ongoing care from primary, specialist and hospital services.
Under a bundled payment, the patient’s GP clinic would be paid a lump sum to ensure the patient receives all the services they need. This includes consultations, health checks, blood tests, physiotherapy, dietetics, patient education, and so on. The GP would have more control over how each of those services is delivered.
If viable, the GP could bring some of these services into their practice, or they could subcontract them to other organisations.
The practice would be held accountable for providing high-quality care through various performance measures. These could range from patient satisfaction measures to objective measures such as timeliness of care or fewer avoidable complications. Payments could, in part, be made conditional on meeting performance targets.
Ultimately, because we are giving the provider more say over how care is delivered, the model of care can be more easily adapted to the needs of the patient.
Health reform must be based on evidence
In the small number of countries where bundled payments have been piloted, they are associated with improved quality, financial savings and increased patient satisfaction.
Although these studies show promise, the evidence base is still in its infancy.
Successful reform in this area will require careful design of the bundles, the payment levels and patient selection process, as well as how best to monitor quality care. In particular it requires robust evidence to determine:
what constitutes an optimal bundle of care for a particular condition
the cost of delivering those services
how the payment should be adjusted for the specific characteristics of a patient
the role performance targets may play in motivating health providers to deliver high-quality care.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claudia Baldwin, Associate Professor, Urban Design and Town Planning, Sustainability Research Centre, University of the Sunshine Coast
The risk of extreme heat events and the adverse impacts on older people has been extensively discussed in research. Remarkably, very little attention has been paid to the role of urban greenery in reducing heat stress for seniors.
Older people are particularly at risk of heat stress. Pre-existing medical conditions and limited mobility increase their vulnerability. Deaths of older people increase during extreme heat events.
The physical features of urban areas shape the capacity of older adults to engage in many activities when it’s hot. These include vegetation volume and coverage, thermal design, and the extent of shading in public areas and walkways. Increasing urban greenery may offer a way to improve older people’s comfort and social experience.
It is expected 20% of the global population will be older than 60 by 2050. The figure for Australia is even higher, at 23%. This means that by 2050 around one in four Australians will be more vulnerable to extreme heat.
Planning our urban centres to meet the needs of a rapidly ageing population is a matter of urgency. Urban greening to reduce their vulnerability to heat stress should be central to this agenda. It can also improve people’s quality of life, reduce social isolation and loneliness, and ease the burden on health systems.
An important task is matching the design of communities with the needs of an ageing population. Where older adults live and the quality of their local areas strongly influence their lived experiences. Yet recent research found the experiences of seniors were often not accounted for in research on neighbourhood design.
If one in ten Australian seniors live in aged-care facilities, it is clear these should be designed to minimise heat stress. This isn’t just good for residents; it may also benefit operators by lowering health-care and electricity costs.
While these facilities are purpose-built for older people, many in Australia were built well over a decade ago, when heat stress was not such a large concern. Many more facilities are being built now and will be into the future. Yet it is uncertain whether they are being actively designed to reduce the impacts of heat.
We recently conducted a focus group to investigate this issue. Participants were senior managers from four large corporate providers of aged care in Australia. We investigated if and how providers try to minimise heat stress through design. We also sought to understand the rationales used to support these design approaches.
Several participants reported on refurbishments that they expect will have cooling effects. Cited design approaches included green roofs and walls, as well as sensory gardens. Other expected benefits included reducing anxiety and improving the mental health of residents.
The fact that single design interventions could produce multiple benefits improved the potential for corporate buy-in. Participants expected that increasing green space and green cover would give their facilities a competitive advantage by attracting more clients and providing a better working environment for staff.
Participants also reported on challenges of including greening in their projects. For example, the benefits of trees were weighed against concerns about roots disrupting footpaths and becoming trip hazards. Species selection was another concern, with fears that inappropriate plants could die and undermine support for greening programs.
Our research suggests that more can be done to make cities hospitable for older people, especially during extreme heat. Urban greening is a start. Encouraging aged-care providers to adopt green infrastructure will have benefits. But we should also consider reforms to planning systems and urban design to better protect older people who choose to age in place.
According to the latest GLOBOCAN cancer database, New Zealand’s breast cancer incidence rate is among the highest in the world. It affects one in nine women in their lifetime and accounts for almost half of all cancers for women in New Zealand.
Worldwide, about 2.1 million women develop breast cancer every year, and despite better treatment options, more than 627,000 die from the disease.
More than 75% of all breast cancers are oestrogen-dependent, and endocrine therapy (also known as hormonal therapy) is currently the most effective form of treatment. But a significant proportion of patients relapse and their tumours seem to develop resistance to the drugs used in endocrine therapy.
In our latest research, published today, we have developed a new breast cancer test that predicts a patient’s response to endocrine therapy and their risk of relapse – allowing patients and their doctors to make better treatment decisions.
Breast cancer is not a single disease but a complex group of diseases. Each tumour responds to treatment differently.
A subtype of breast cancer is called oestrogen receptor positive if it has receptors for the hormone oestrogen. This suggests the cancer cells, like normal breast cells, receive signals from oestrogen that could promote their growth. Clinicians currently rely on the number of oestrogen receptors in tumours as a biomarker to predict a patient’s response to endocrine therapies. Unfortunately, the accuracy of this test is not satisfactory because oestrogen-dependent tumours can develop drug resistance.
The response rate to endocrine therapy is only 30-40%. Up to 40-50% of patients don’t benefit from endocrine therapy and will relapse. There is no clear method to predict which breast tumours will become resistant to endocrine therapy drugs, such as tamoxifen.
Accurate prediction of a patient’s response to therapy is essential for them to receive correct and timely treatments. Non-responders do not benefit from endocrine therapy while potentially suffering from treatment-associated adverse effects. Ineffective treatments also delay access to other options for non-responders, which can cost lives.
Our research has shown a cancer-related protein, named SHON (secreted hominoid-specific oncogene), is associated with breast cancer’s response to treatment. It accurately predicts if a patient will benefit from five-year anti-oestrogen therapy and how they will respond to chemotherapy, which is often used to shrink a tumour before surgery.
We have demonstrated that if the genes responsible for oestrogen receptors are active but those for the SHON protein are inactive in the nucleus of a cancer tumour cell, treatment with tamoxifen had no impact on a patient’s survival. If a tumour has both oestrogen receptor and SHON expression, tamoxifen reduces a patient’s risk of dying from breast cancer by 79%.
In addition, we have also shown that if the SHON protein is present inside cells in oestrogen receptor negative tumours, it predicts clinical outcomes for patients receiving chemotherapy based on the drug anthracycline. Given resistance to tamoxifen and chemotherapy limits successful management of breast cancer, SHON may serve as a biomarker for the selection of patients for endocrine therapy.
Future implementation
Breast cancer is curable if treated early and with correct therapy. We might have found a way to improve the efficacy of endocrine therapy, which is the most widely used treatment for more than three quarters of all breast cancer patients. If we can predict those patients who will not respond to the therapy, they can get other treatments, such as more toxic chemotherapy drugs, sooner. This would improve their chance of survival and quality of life after cancer.
We have identified the SHON biomarker by analysing a large number of breast cancer tumours at the Nottingham University Hospital’s (NUH) early-stage breast cancer collection. We have validated the findings using the NUH’s collection of oestrogen receptor negative early-stage and locally advanced breast cancer cells. These tissue collections have been used in the development of the Nottingham Prognostic Index and the Plus version, widely used decision-making tools in breast cancer treatment.
Our study has clearly demonstrated that SHON expression in tumours is a potential biomarker for tamoxifen and chemotherapy responses. This would give doctors and their patients a reliable prognostic tool to use as they make decisions about the most effective treatment options.
But the exact mechanism is still unclear. Identification of a potential SHON receptor, and determining the role of SHON in oestrogen receptor negative breast cancer will be the next priority in identifying its mechanisms of action. More studies are required before this test is implemented in clinics.
St George Illawarra and NSW State of Origin player Jack de Belin has become the first player to be banned under a new “no fault stand down” policy introduced by the National Rugby League (NRL).
In December 2018, the NRL was urged to take “urgent action” after a spate of allegations of domestic violence and assault by players. The sport’s governing body was accused of failing to adequately condemn these acts of violence against women.
Could it be that finally rugby league is listening to the criticism?
Just a few weeks ago, Ben Barba was sacked by his NRL club following allegations he physically assaulted his partner and mother of his four children. After a history of off-field incidents, he was deregistered by the NRL. Despite one former player speaking out in support of Barba, he has been widely condemned by the NRL community.
Violence on the field too often translates to violence off the field. Barba’s sacking should herald a culture shift in the NRL away from versions of masculinity that are exclusive and threatening to women. The sport must move towards a culture that is better aligned with the values of society.
Rugby League – a bastion of masculinity
For many years, rugby league has provided an outlet for violence that allows masculinity to be performed.
Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, league epitomised orthodox masculine characteristics such as aggressive competition and toughness. Fighting, confrontation and belligerence has been revered in media coverage and by the wider public. For example, The Footy Show valorised versions of masculinity that portrayed men as hyper-heterosexual, stoic and aggressive. The hosts repeatedly demonstrated disrespect for women.
But in recent years, social customs, gender relations and the expectations of even hyper-masculine warrior athletes began to change. The Footy Show has been cancelled; and evidence from America’s most similar sport, American football (NFL), suggests that since 2006, there has been a slight decrease in players arrested for domestic violence.
Barba’s sacking appears to provide evidence of an emerging social contract with masculinity. No longer is men’s violence acceptable to the public. Rugby League — finally now — is taking action.
While player welfare is important, so is the welfare of women. The “boys will be boys” excuse no longer stands. NRL endorsed campaigns, such as Power For Change, an initiative described as “empowering young people to be leaders of change against domestic violence”, appeared hypocritical in the face of five sexual assault charges in the most recent off-season. On the sixth, the NRL took action.
It appeared the Australian sporting community had had enough. NRL fans, particularly, were fed up with misbehaving players and seeking significant change. Sanctioning players with bans and fines has proven ineffective.
In addition to introducing their “no fault stand down policy”, NRL chief executive Todd Greenberg has called on other codes to honour the NRL-imposed ban. The Northern Hemisphere Super League has closed the door on Barba and Rugby Australia boss, Raelene Castle, said they would also respect the NRL’s wishes.
Inclusive masculinities
The NRL is today at a crossroads.
There has been a highly visible, and extensively documented phenomenon that millennial men reject orthodox notions of masculinity. They instead value intimacy among friends, tactility, respect for women, and disregard for violence. Much of the reason for this is considered to be related to changing mores surrounding male homosexuality. When this changes, so does everything about masculinity.
The sociological work on this suggests that when heterosexual men exist in a culture that maintains high antipathy toward gay men (as existed in the 1980s), they will try to distance themselves from anything associated with gay men. Thus, men revere violence and stoicism, and hyper-sexualise women. They are thought weak for showing emotions concerning care for other men, or fear of confrontation.
However, as cultural attitudes have shifted, making homophobia and not homosexuality stigmatised, heterosexual men have more social freedom to express gender in ways that were once taboo. So it becomes permissible to talk your way through a problem with another male instead of fighting.
Scholars call this inclusive masculinity, but more colloquially it might be understood as a highly revered, feminised masculinity. In the last few decades, we have seen wholesale shifts to adolescent masculinities, something epitomised by the burgeoning of the “bromance”.
The NRL has divided fans with its recent rule change. Although the rule change sends a strong message to players and clubs that violence will not be tolerated within the code, until the wider culture of Rugby League begins embracing alternative forms of masculinity, the cause of the problem will still remain.
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