Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily Gallagher, PhD Candidate, School of History, Australian National University

Most Australians know something about “folklore”. Every year crowds converge on Canberra for the National Folk Festival. But, folklore encompasses far more than song and dance. The term refers to a rich intangible heritage of games, yarns, legends, stories, crafts, jokes, tricks, taboos, poems, recipes, birthday customs and even graffiti.

It exists in the playground, in the kitchen, at the bar and even on the walls of the Australian War Memorial, stitched into the beautiful Changi quilts. Folklore is everywhere.

Australia has often undervalued its folklife. There was a time, however, when one government department took a special interest in the study and preservation of Australian folklore. In 1986, Barry Cohen, then Minister of Arts Heritage and Environment, commissioned a Committee of Inquiry into Folklife in Australia.

Folklife: Our Living Heritage (1987)

The resulting report Folklife: Our Living Heritage, was published in 1987. It concluded that despite the valiant efforts of individuals, local and community organisations, Australia was by “international standards […] poorly equipped” to ensure the protection of its folklore. Of the 51 recommendations, many depended on the success of the first: the establishment of an Australian Folklife Centre.

As part of this bold but much-needed initiative, the Centre would “provide national focus for action to record, safeguard and promote awareness of Australia’s heritage of folklife”. It was estimated that its establishment would cost $1.25 million (equivalent of $3.7 million today), with a further $1.5 million to support activities in its early years.

Several recommendations were concerned with folklife in schools, particularly important as the primary school playground is today a major location for children’s folkloric play. The committee decided not to report on traditional Aboriginal ceremony, lore and belief, but it did include Aboriginal craft and contemporary urban and rural folklife.

Read more: ‘Bang, bang, bang!’: the shock of a boy playing with a gun on a suburban street

The inquiry made it clear that the government was, and still is, responsible for the protection of the nation’s tangible and intangible heritage. This was apparently not the news that the government and its new environment and arts minister, Graham Richardson, wanted to hear: none of the recommendations of the folklife inquiry were ever implemented by the Government.

Still, Australian folklorists were not so easily deterred. Inspired by initiatives like the American Folklife Center and the Ontario Folklife Centre, Gwenda Davey, Jennifer Gall and Pamela Rosenberg went ahead and declared the establishment of an Australian Folklife Centre in Canberra in December 1990.

Girls Playing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ Game, Melbourne, 1954. Courtesy of Museums Victoria and Dr June Factor, Item MM 104103.

Australia’s major coordinating body for national folk arts, the Australian Folk Trust, courageously took up responsibility for the Centre. The National Library, National Museum and National Film and Sound Archive were all on side. The Centre also had international support, even from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, which invited Australia to be the featured nation at the 1993 Festival of American Folklife. Only one country, Sweden, had declined the offer in 48 years. Much to the dismay of the folklore community, Australia was to be the second.

The Australian Folklife Centre should have been an early victory in Australia’s culture wars: a moment when the Federal Government made an important commitment to protecting the nation’s living culture. The Centre itself would have been an initiative not only of collection and preservation, but of research, advocacy, training and public policy. In the end, it could not continue its work without government funding and it wound up its affairs in 1994-5 after four years of hard work.

Timing appears to have been a major obstacle to gaining momentum. Established under the first Hawke government, but published under the second, the Folklife Inquiry suffered under changing government priorities after the 1987 federal election as well as a wave of post-Bicentenary fatigue. As the historian Frank Bongiorno has observed, Australia had just finished celebrating “the biggest party [it had] ever seen”.

A ‘national disgrace’

Folklorists did their best to maintain pressure on governments, but they were met with little success. In 1992, Gwenda Davey, a major proponent of the Centre and later the director of the promising Victorian Folklife Association in Melbourne, considered it a “national disgrace” that “Australia is one of the very few nations in the world which has no Ministries of Culture and no national institutions [primarily] dedicated to its traditional cultures”.

While the Labor government of the day might be an easy target of blame for the Centre’s demise, the story is far more complex (notably, no Coalition government has rushed to the rescue either).

Photograph of Roland Griffin and Barry Skipsey at the Gold Rush Folk Festival, Tennant Creek, 1981. Courtesy of NT Library, PH0662/0087.

The Australia Council, the government’s arts funding and advisory body, was focusing its efforts on supporting professional and contemporary arts rather than traditional amateur arts. And while folklorists have always prided themselves on their local and regional influence, they struggled to mobilise with one voice. Internal disagreements, especially about the definition of folklore, did not help.

Folklorists also struggled to weigh in on the big issues of the nation. As Richard Kurin, then director for Centre of Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies at the Smithsonian Institution noted in 1992, folklorists “should be at the forefront of national and international debates on fundamental cultural issues”.

One can’t help but wonder what Australia’s cultural landscape would look like if the Australian Folklife Centre had been successful. Would bus-loads of school children, while making the annual pilgrimage to Canberra, visit to learn about the games, recipes, dances and rhymes of their ancestors? Might they even find the time to record their own lore for the next generation?

– ref. What the folk? Whatever happened to Australia’s national folklife centre? – http://theconversation.com/what-the-folk-whatever-happened-to-australias-national-folklife-centre-108678

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Dosseto, Associate Professor, University of Wollongong

At a fleeting glance, the study of life – biology – seems very separate from that of rocks, or geology.

But a look back through history shows that geological processes have been key to the evolution of life on Earth. Geology has shaped biology by creating favourable conditions, and indeed the basic “ingredients”, for life’s emergence and evolution.

And now there is growing evidence that this also works in reverse: life has shaped our planet’s atmosphere, oceans and landscapes in many ways.

Let’s take a walk back through time.

Read more: When Thailand and Australia were closer neighbours, tectonically speaking

Our planet is a living organism

Early in the 20th century, Russian scientists posited that living organisms shape their environment in a way that allows life to be sustained. In the 1970s, a similar idea known as the “Gaia hypothesis” emerged in the Western world, thanks to scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.

Life started shaping the planet as soon as it appeared, possibly as early as 3.7 billion years ago. Back then radiations from the Sun were not as strong as today and without a little help, the whole planet should have remained frozen.

That little help may have come from bacteria producing the heat-trapping gas methane, with significant amounts of this greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere.

Much later – some 200 million years ago – a similar relationship happened in reverse. At this time, more complex lifeforms may have prevented a runaway build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (as seen on Venus) by trapping CO₂ in the skeleton of marine organisms like plankton. These then later became buried at the bottom of oceans to form limestones.

If it wasn’t for plankton, Earth (right) could have looked much like Venus (left). Wikimedia commons

We are made of star dust

The chemical elements that compose our body were made in the explosion of a star – we are made of star dust! We share the origin of our atoms with everything around us, including rocks.

But forces deep within planet Earth also shape life.

Weathering of mountains, and continents in general, also delivers essential nutrients to marine lifeforms. One example is phosphorus, which is released into rivers and oceans by weathering of the mineral apatite found in continental rocks. Phosphorus is also a building element of DNA molecules, and of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the “rechargeable battery” responsible for energy transfers in our cells.

Read more: How Eurasia’s Tianshan mountains set a stage that changed the world

The first widespread emergence of continents could have been key to the first oxidation of the atmosphere (called the Great Oxidation Event, about 2.4 billion years ago). By providing essential nutrients like phosphorus, weathering of the first continents would have allowed photosynthetic cyanobacteria that make up stromatolites to thrive and release oxygen into the atmosphere.

Stromatolites from Shark Bay, Western Australia. The ancestors of these living colonies of cyanobacteria played a big role in shaping early Earth’s atmosphere. Wikimedia commons

The big beast needs the little one

In 2018 we learned that at the start of the Jurassic Period (about 200 million years ago), plankton began to mineralise at greater ocean depths. Plankton produces oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis – and so, as a result, oxygen began to accumulate in the shallow oceans and reach its present level in the atmosphere.

The increase in atmospheric oxygen to modern levels would have allowed larger organisms to flourish (including the dinosaurs), because they have higher requirements for this element.

So not only is plankton a key piece of the ecological puzzle – because so many marine lifeforms depend on it – but it also gave the right conditions for the evolution of large marine reptiles.

Aristonectes (meaning ‘best swimmer’) is an extinct genus of plesiosaur, perhaps one of the many marine reptiles thankful for the role of plankton on ocean oxygenation. Wikimedia commons

Read more: A map that fills a 500-million year gap in Earth’s history

Closing the loop

So the next question is naturally: what allowed plankton to mineralise differently during the Jurassic Period? Perhaps moving tectonic plates.

Between about 300 and 175 million years ago, continental plates were clustered into the supercontinent called Pangea. Plate reconstructions show that large parts of this supercontinent drifted through the tropics between about 250 and 200 million years ago.

As a result, continents experienced more abundant rainfall and rocks weathered more extensively, releasing to the oceans the elements necessary for plankton to build a calcium carbonate skeleton.

Global plate reconstruction between 330 and 150 million years ago, showing the distribution of major ocean basins and continental plates at 1 million year intervals. An approximation for the extent of the continents is shaded brown, and present-day coastlines are shaded green. Black lines with triangles indicate subduction zones, and black lines denote mid-ocean ridges and transform faults. The tropics, between 23.45 N and 23.45 S, are highlighted by the red band.

These processes close the loop between biology and geology. Tectonic plates moving into the tropics resulted in large supply of elements, allowing for the emergence of calcareous plankton, and this plankton in turn was responsible for the last major rise in atmospheric oxygen.

Read more: Curious Kids: How was the ocean formed? Where did all the water come from?

Humans are increasingly aware that they have shaped the planet to an unprecedented extent due to the emission of greenhouse gases linked to the Industrial Revolution, 200 years ago, and to the advent of the Agricultural Revolution some 8,000 years ago.

Cyanobacteria, vascular plants and plankton have also modified the whole chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere well before humankind, over much longer time scales.

However, there are striking differences between Homo sapiens on the one hand, and plankton and plants on the other. Humans are shaping the planet in a way that may eventually send the species itself into oblivion (and many others with them).

Our species is most likely the first to have the abilities to recognise and mitigate its impact on the environment on which it depends.

– ref. Unpacking the history of how Earth feeds life, and life changes Earth – http://theconversation.com/unpacking-the-history-of-how-earth-feeds-life-and-life-changes-earth-103162

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Martin, Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology & Eye Health, Central Clinical School, Save Sight Institute, University of Sydney

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.

My name is Abhilasa. I am 10 years old and I live in Melbourne. My question is: Why are people colour blind? – Abhilasa, age 10, Melbourne.

Hi Abhilasa. Thank you for your great question.

Let’s say you have three tubs of paint: blue, green and red. You have a paintbrush and a piece of paper. You can use the three paints to make lots of different things. A green tree, a blue car, or a red apple. And if you want to paint a purple shirt, you can mix red and blue paint to make purple.

How do we see those different colours? In your eye you have special kinds of cells that pick up the light rays bouncing off each splotch of paint. These cells are called cone cells.

In the microscope, they look like ice-cream cones. But they are much smaller. The cone cells help you see the different colours.

Read more: Curious Kids: How do moths eat our clothes?

There are three kinds of cone cell in most people’s eyes. They are called long wave cones, medium wave cones, and short wave cones, because they pick up different kinds of light waves (or rays).

The cone cells tell the brain how much of each type of light wave is bouncing off each splotch of paint.

Your brain puts those messages back together again.

So let’s say you mix red and blue paint to make a purple splotch. Lots of long and short wave light will bounce off that splotch, but not much medium wave light will (the reason this happens is hard to explain, but you just have to trust me that this is how light works). Then the long and short cones in your eyes get activated, and will send their message to the brain. The brain interprets the message and voilà! The splotch will look purple to you.

Colour blind people can still can see colours, but not as many as most people do. That’s because the cone cells in their eyes may be different.

There are three kinds of cone cells in most people’s eyes. Shutterstock

Some colour blind people only have two kinds of cone cell in their eye. Others have three kinds, but the cones do not pick up the same light waves as the cone cells in most people’s eyes do. So their brain does not get three different messages like most people’s brains do.

Being colour blind is a bit like what would happen if I took away one of your tubs of paint, so you only have two tubs. You could still make some different-coloured splotches, but not as many as when you had three tubs. That would not be so much fun. Being colour blind is sometimes not much fun either. Some kids laugh in school when colour blind kids get their coloured pencils mixed up. That’s mean.

But being colour blind can be good, too. Colour blind people are really good at spotting things that are far away, and they are better than most people at telling things apart by their shape.

Read more: Curious Kids: What plants could grow in the Goldilocks zone of space?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. They can:

* Email your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
* Tell us on Twitter

CC BY-ND

Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

– ref. Curious Kids: why are people colour blind? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-why-are-people-colour-blind-107599

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caitlin Curtis, Research fellow, Centre for Policy Futures (Genomics), The University of Queensland

Many people first became familiar with DNA testing through its use in the OJ Simpson murder trial in 1994. Now, 24 years later, there have been two dramatic advances in the capability of forensic genetics that mark the start of a new era.

The first is the amount of information we can predict about a person from DNA found at a crime scene, and the second is the way police can use open genealogy databases to identify people.

But we need to be careful how we use these new tools. If people lose trust in how DNA data is used and shared by police, it could have an adverse impact on other applications – such as medical care.

That’s why we’re calling for a Genetic Data Protection Act to ensure people have confidence in the way their DNA is accessed and used.

Read more: DNA facial prediction could make protecting your privacy more difficult

We can learn a lot more from DNA now

Predicting traits from DNA, known as “DNA phenotyping”, is improving. Facial prediction, health traits, predisposition to disease, even personality traits and things about our mental health can be predicted from genetic data. Some researchers are even considering predicting propensity to drink or smoke.

We’re getting better at predicting physical traits, like faces, from DNA data. Composite from PNAS

Law enforcement agencies around the world are using these traits to create predictive DNA “mugshots”, but in many countries there is no specific regulation on how and when they should be incorporated into policing.

And some types of predictions raise considerable ethical issues.

For example, should it be OK for law enforcement to predict the mental health or disease risk of a suspect? If so, should that information be used in a trial? If law enforcement predicts a high risk of a particular disease, should they be compelled to tell a suspect or their family?

Separation between databases is breaking down

You may be familiar with “CODIS” from CSI, this is the database that law enforcement has traditionally used to identify DNA collected at a crime scene. CODIS has around 17.7 million DNA profiles. There are strict rules around who can be included in these databases, and the vast majority of profiles are from convicted offenders.

According to best estimates, the number of people who have taken genetic ancestry tests is slightly higher than this, and police have started using this data as well. The type of data in CODIS only allows close family matches, but the type of data in open ancestry databases allows much deeper relations to be found.

Even if you haven’t participated in genetic testing or made your genetic data public, you may have a relative who has. Currently, law enforcement is able to identify people based on matches as distant as third cousins.

On average, people have around 190 third cousins. One estimate indicates that over 90% of Americans of European descent already have a third cousin or higher in the open genealogy database GEDmatch. It may take as little as 2% of the population uploading their DNA data in a genealogy database for the entire population to be identified this way.

The 238 relatives in your generation that might be affected if you share your genetic data. image designed by James Hereward and Caitlin Curtis

New statistical methods mean separations between previously distinct genetic databases are disappearing. Traditional forensic markers can now be cross referenced to ancestry data, even though they are completely different types of genetic data. This means close family members could be identified across different databases. These methods can also be used to re-identify subjects in medical genetics research projects.

There has been a lot of public support for the use of genetic genealogy to catch serial killers and rapists. In some cases, people are voluntarily uploading their data to help these efforts.

But where should we draw the line? Should genetic data only be used in serious crimes, or are we happy to have a comprehensive system of genetic surveillance that covers the entire population?

Private companies are aiding law enforcement

Both DNA phenotyping and forensic genealogy – which relies on amateur genealogists – are now being offered to law enforcement by private companies.

Parabon, a US-based pharmaceutical company, has partnered with armchair genealogist Cece Moore. She started using genetic genealogy to find the parents of adoptees and children born through sperm donation, but now uses it to catch criminals.

Parabon also offers facial prediction services. While the science of facial prediction from DNA is getting better, it is still contentious, and several prominent scientists have cast doubt on whether Parabon can really do what it is promising.

Nevertheless, this move out of government labs and into private ones raises questions about oversight – and what exactly is happening to the data generated.

Genetic data is different from other kinds of data

Genetic data is highly unique and can be thought of as a personal 15 million letter pin-code. Since the code doesn’t just identify us, it also contains important information about our disease risk, personality traits and even our physical features like our face, it is very difficult to keep anonymous.

Genetic data is different from other kinds of data. Edited from Shutterstock image

Unlike a credit card we can’t request a new genome if our data is compromised. And a stolen credit card won’t tell a perpetrator anything about the finances of our family members.

We understand what happens if we lose a credit card, but our understanding of genetic data is still developing. And we’re likely to see it put to unexpected uses in the future.

Read more: It’s time to talk about who can access your digital genomic data

We need a ‘Genetic Data Protection Act’

Technological advances in genomics are outpacing public awareness, and existing legislation doesn’t fit genetic data well. Under current laws, the lab that produces the genetic data has ownership of the record. But if our genetic data represents a deep part of the essence of us, it shouldn’t be this easy for us to give up ownership of it.

We need new ways to protect genetic data to maintain trust in medical genomics. Sometimes people need their genome sequenced for medical purposes, but they might be reluctant to consent if trust has broken down around how genetic data could be used. That could result in poorer medical outcomes.

One solution to prevent this is a specific “Genetic Data Protection Act”, which would grant people ownership of their own data. However, it must be different from standard property rights: ownership should be immutable and nontransferable.

The issues around use of our genetic data are complex, individuals (and their descendants) must be protected. Under no circumstances should it be possible for an individual to unwittingly sign an agreement that results in a loss of control of their genetic data. Legislation is part of the solution, but education and new technological solutions will also be important.

The recent introduction of the digital My Health Record shows thatAustralians care about who is accessing their sensitive information. And people are already expressing unease about the confidentiality of their genetic data.

We must establish clear boundaries about how genetic data generated for medical purposes is used – whether by police or by any other interested parties. Giving genetic data the protection it needs, and making sure that medical genetic data doesn’t become a forensic resource will be crucial to ensure public trust in medical genetics.

– ref. Dramatic advances in forensics expose the need for genetic data legislation – http://theconversation.com/dramatic-advances-in-forensics-expose-the-need-for-genetic-data-legislation-105397

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andy Kaladelfos, Lecturer in Criminology, School of Social Sciences, UNSW

Lessons learnt from a NSW parliamentary inquiry into hate crimes against Australia’s LGBTIQ community could change the way police and communities respond to complaints, and acknowledge the continued impact of past injustices.

The inquiry is the first of its kind in Australia to investigate both the scale of hate crimes against the LGBTIQ community and inadequate police responses. It was held because a growing body of research and community-driven activism pointed out the toll violence had taken, and continues to take, on LGBTIQ Australians.

Hearings into the handling of past hate crimes (between 1970 and 2010) concluded last month, with the inquiry due to report in 2019.

As well as the handling of these past cases, the inquiry is investigating matters including the impact of the now defunct “gay panic” defence. This provided an alleged “homosexual advance” was a partial defence to murder; South Australia is now the only state to maintain this defence.

This broad remit could lead to far-reaching and significant recommendations that acknowledge the problematic past policing of LGBTIQ communities. A consideration of responses to past violence against LGBTIQ people will provide a basic level of acknowledgement of past harms. It will also clarify the legacies of those experiences in relationships with police today.

Read more: Trans, transgender, cisgender: we are what we name ourselves

Experiences of violence

The NSW inquiry defines hate crimes as LGBTIQ-related murder, physical and verbal violence, or institutional violence.

Contemporary surveys of Australian LGBTIQ people show unacceptably high rates of violent victimisation, with reports at alarming levels for transgender people.

The largest Australian study found 72% of LGBTIQ people had experienced verbal abuse, 41% threats of physical violence and 23% physical assault.

For transgender participants, 92% of trans women and 55% of trans men had experienced verbal abuse; 46% of trans women and 36% of trans men had experienced physical assault.

Read more: Despite recent victories, plights of many LGBT people remain ignored

Historic hate crimes

The most well-known hate crime is the case of 27-year-old Scott Johnson, an American PhD student whose body was found naked at the bottom of North Head in Manly, Sydney, in 1988.

After 30 years of waiting and three coronial inquests, Johnson’s death, originally deemed a suicide, was finally recognised as a gay hate crime. The coroner found that Johnson was either pushed off the cliff or died trying to escape attackers.

NSW police have now offered a one million dollar reward for clues leading to the resolution of this cold case.

This year, the report In Pursuit of Truth and Justice, by health organisation ACON, drew together decades of research and community advocacy in investigating 88 historical hate crimes in NSW.

Like Johnson’s case, many of these crimes had been written off as accidental deaths or suicides. Months later, NSW police released the final report of Strike Force Parrabell, the internal investigation of police handling of these cases. Controversially, this reduced the number of deaths deemed hate crimes (it used different criteria).

Due to a history of problematic policing, the most effective means of obtaining a fuller picture of the past scale of hate crimes against the LGBTIQ community would be to call a Royal Commission, which would have the powers to conduct a full and independent investigation.

Policing homosexual offences

The police approach to LGBTIQ hate crimes is rooted in the historic criminalisation of male homosexual behaviours.

In the 1950s, as public awareness of homosexuality increased, NSW police intensified their policing of male homosexuality, especially at public meeting places and beats.

Then Police Commissioner Colin Delaney described homosexuality as:

Australia’s greatest menace

and a

cancer in the community.

Delaney ramped up the use of the vice squad to target homosexuals, with tactics that were often alleged to include entrapment, falsifications of statements, blackmail and threats of violence.

It was not until 1984 that sex between males in NSW was decriminalised.

Decriminalisation

But decriminalisation did not immediately shift perceptions of all police officers or members of the public. Many people continued to be victims of homophobic and transphobic violence, and reporting offences brought stigma and vilification.

The establishment of the community reporting mechanism the Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project in the 1990s was one way that advocacy groups tried to tackle distrust of police and the ongoing threat of violence. This project provided a safe place for gay and lesbian people to report offences and have them recorded without fear of encountering homophobia.

Since decriminalisation, NSW police have worked to re-build relationships with LGBTIQ communities through outreach programs, community visibility and participation, and the creation of the Gay and Lesbian Liaison Officer program.

Trust in police

Yet, continued distrust of police in LGBTIQ communities shows the long-standing effects of past practices and injustices, and their ongoing impact.

National research shows LGBTIQ people are reluctant to report offences to police. Earlier negative experiences often influence perceptions of how officers might treat their complaint.

Most worryingly, Victorian research shows young LGBTIQ people are the least likely to report offences to police. More than half would not report a hate crime, fearing a homophobic or transphobic response. More said they would report to a LGBTI Liaison Officer.

Achieving justice

The Australian community needs to work towards social and cultural change that will reduce violence against LGBTIQ people. Policing is an important part of this change.

The road ahead for achieving justice involves looking back to recognise and redress past wrongs and looking forward to create systems of safe reporting that work for marginalised communities.

One type of response in improving contemporary policing is unlikely to work for all, given the diversity of LGBTIQ communities. A variety of responses might focus on improving access to formal systems, including strengthening and better resourcing LGBTI police liaison programs to develop trust between police and LGBTIQ communities. It would also be helpful to implement third-party reporting mechanisms through which victims could report crimes in safe spaces, such as community organisations, instead of to police.

However, many people may prefer mechanisms for redress that do not involve the formal criminal justice system, such as restorative and transformative justice. These approaches are a process of victim and community restitution that involves perpetrators taking responsibility for their actions, recognising the harms done by violence, and changing their attitudes.

Finally, we need to aim for active interventions, including educational initiatives aimed at both the police and the broader public, that reduce the occurrence of homophobic and transphobic violence.

Ultimately, transforming the broader conditions that underpin and propel this violence will be the most significant way to achieve justice.

– ref. Inquiry into LGBTIQ hate crime could improve how police and communities respond – http://theconversation.com/inquiry-into-lgbtiq-hate-crime-could-improve-how-police-and-communities-respond-108493

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karen Anderson, Practitioner Scholar, Edith Cowan University

Dying doesn’t disappear at Christmas. For those who know death will come soon but don’t know exactly when, the festive season, when the air is thick with “joy”, can be particularly unsettling.

As a psychotherapist working in palliative care, I often see distressed patients in the lead up to Christmas. Patients can find decorations and carols being played in shopping centres particularly triggering, reminding them this may be their last Christmas.

The dying person may often face an inner struggle. They may want to be involved in activities but may not have the physical and emotional capacity to deal with the heightened stress and stimulation. Some may prefer to sit quietly and watch proceedings without necessarily being amongst the action, but still feeling like they are a part of things.

Regardless of the the type of life-threatening illness, and whether an infant, child, adolescent, young, middle or older aged person is dying, both the patient and their family members may experience deep distress. You may feel the impending death, and your family the anticipated loss. These gloomy or morbid feelings might clash with the celebrations of Christmas.

Read more: Palliative care for children often involves treating the whole family

Whether it’s you or a loved one facing dying at this time of year, there are some practical tips available that draw from a wealth of research and experience.

If you are the one dying

Where possible, plan ahead how you want to spend your Christmas festive period so you don’t place additional pressure on yourself. Think about the most comfortable arrangements for you. Where and with whom do you want to spend Christmas Day? Which is the best time of day for you to manage different activities? Let people close to you know your thoughts.

The process of dying is unique to each individual. It may be quick or slow, spread over weeks or days. Palliative care specialist at Stanford University, Dr James Hallenbeck wrote:

For those who do die gradually, there’s often a final, rapid slide that happens in roughly the last few days of life — a phase known as ‘active dying’. A person may begin to lose their senses and desires. First hunger and then thirst are lost. Speech is lost next, followed by vision. The last senses to go are usually hearing and touch.

We have an ideal perception around death, that a dying person wants to be surrounded by family in their final hours. But some people in the active phase of dying may actually prefer to be alone. And while this may be difficult for family members to hear, you can give yourself permission to ask for whatever you would like.

Studies indicate some dying people may feel they’re a burden to their family. Other people have difficulty saying “no” because they don’t want to disappoint or hurt others, or they may fear conflict. Know your limitations and don’t push beyond these to simply please others.

Many dying people feel they may be a burden to their families. from shutterstock.com

Have kind consideration for yourself. Remember you are a person before you’re a patient. And remember it’s OK to say “no” and forgo invitations.

If you’re caring for a loved one who is dying

Essential care demands such as helping the person you are caring for to feed, go to the toilet, and clean themselves, will not disappear at Christmas. If your loved one is dying at home, they may require unrelenting attention.

Be realistic with your expectations. This can be a different and simpler Christmas than others. Allow for spontaneity. Try not to be a martyr and delegate and ask others to help. Doing so enables others to feel they’re included and contributing in special ways.

Read more: Looking after a dying loved one at home? Here’s what you need to know

Listen to the person who is dying. Let them speak if and when they can. Gauge their mood and be guided by them. There is value in being present with the dying person without talking.

Heightened noise and activity, which often go hand in hand with the holiday season, can create distress for a terminally ill person. Ask family and friends to roster their visits over the different days of Christmas so as not to tire, overwhelm or stress the dying person.

People can think children don’t understand death and wouldn’t be able to cope with the concept, so often they may protect them by hiding it. But children are attuned to the family emotional dynamics. They know something is happening and they need their feelings validated. It can be helpful to get children involved in taking care of someone who is dying.

Research shows children do manage themselves well in the face of dying, when adults support them to deal with their responses.

Read more: Adults can help children cope with death by understanding how they process it

Expect things can change quite suddenly. Have a backup plan ready. Keep emergency contact details readily on hand always.

When dying is happening at Christmas, it’s best to allow all feelings to be expressed rather than simply putting on a brave or smiling face. Feelings are a natural response to suffering and what may be a stressful situation.

It’s mostly important to remember not to hide your needs and feelings but to speak and communicate with your loved ones. Especially when dying may be imminent.

– ref. Not a season to be jolly: how to deal with dying during the holidays – http://theconversation.com/not-a-season-to-be-jolly-how-to-deal-with-dying-during-the-holidays-106063

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nic Bax, Director, NERP Marine Biodiversity Hub, CSIRO

Off southern Tasmania, at depths between 700 and 1,500 metres, more than 100 undersea mountains provide rocky pedestals for deep-sea coral reefs.

Unlike shallow tropical corals, deep-sea corals live in a cold environment without sunlight or symbiotic algae. They feed on tiny organisms filtered from passing currents, and protect an assortment of other animals in their intricate structures.

Deep-sea corals are fragile and slow-growing, and vulnerable to human activities such as fishing, mining and climate-related changes in ocean temperatures and acidity.

This week we returned from a month-long research voyage on CSIRO vessel Investigator, part of Australia’s Marine National Facility. We criss-crossed many seamounts in and near the Huon and Tasman Fracture marine parks, which are home to both pristine and previously fished coral reefs. These two parks are part of a larger network of Australian Marine Parks that surround Australia’s coastline and protect our offshore marine environment.

The RV Investigator criss-crossed the Huon and Tasman Fracture marine parks. CSIRO

The data we collected will answer our two key research questions: what grows where in these environments, and are corals regrowing after more than 20 years of protection?

Read more: Explainer: the RV Investigator’s role in marine science

Our eyes on the seafloor

Conducting research in rugged, remote deep-sea environments is expensive and technically challenging. It’s been a test of patience and ingenuity for the 40 ecologists, technicians and marine park managers on board, and the crew who provide electronics, computing and mechanical support.

But now, after four weeks of working around-the-clock shifts, we’re back in the port of Hobart. We have completed 147 transects covering more 200 kilometres in length and amassed more than 60,000 stereo images and some 300 hours of video for analysis.

The deep tow camera system weighs 350 kilos and has four cameras, four lights and a control unit encased in high-strength aluminium housings. CSIRO

A deep-tow camera system designed and built by CSIRO was our eye on the seafloor. This 350 kilogram system has four cameras, four lights and a control unit encased in high-strength aluminium housings.

An operations planner plots “flight-paths” down the seamounts, adding a one-kilometre run up for the vessel skipper to land the camera on each peak. The skipper navigates swell, wind and current to ensure a steady course for each one-hour transect.

An armoured fibre optic tow cable relays high-quality, real-time video back to the ship. This enables the camera “pilot” in the operations room to manoeuvre the camera system using a small joystick, and keep the view in focus, a mere two metres off the seafloor.

This is an often challenging job, as obstacles like large boulders or sheer rock walls loom out of the darkness with little warning. The greatest rapid ascent, a near-vertical cliff 45m in height, resulted in highly elevated blood pressure and one broken camera light!

Reaching into their world

Live imagery from the camera system was compelling. As well as the main reef-building stony coral Solenosmilia variabilis, we saw hundreds of other animals including feathery solitary soft corals, tulip-shaped glass sponges and crinoids. Their colours ranged from delicate creams and pinks to striking purples, bright yellows and golds.

To understand the make-up of coral communities glimpsed by our cameras, we also used a small net to sample the seafloor animals for identification. For several of the museum taxonomists onboard, this was their first contact with coral and mollusc species they had known, and even named, only from preserved specimens.

A deepwater hippolytid shrimp with large hooked claw, which it uses to clean coral and get food. CSIRO

We found a raft of undescribed species, as expected in such remote environments. In many cases this is likely to be the only time these species are ever collected. We also found animals living among the corals, hinting at their complex interdependencies. This included brittlestars curled around corals, polychaete worms tunnelling inside corals, and corals growing on shells.

We used an oceanographic profiler to sample the chemical properties of the water to 2,000m. Although further analysis is required, our aim here is to see whether long-term climate change is impacting the living conditions at these depths.

A curious feature of one of the southern seamounts is that it hosts the world’s only known aggregation of deep-water eels. We have sampled these eels twice before and were keen to learn more about this rare phenomenon.

Using an electric big-game fishing rig we landed two egg-laden female eels from a depth of 1,100 metres: a possible first for the record books.

Dave Logan of Parks Australia with an eel landed from more than a kilometre under the sea. Fraser Johnston/CSIRO

In a side-project, a team of observers recorded 42 seabird species and eight whale and dolphin species. They have one more set of data towards completing the first circum-Australia survey of marine birds and mammals.

More coral pedestals than we realise

An important finding was that living S. variabilis reefs extended between the seamounts on raised ridges down to about 1,450m. This means there is more of this important coral matrix in the Huon and Tasman Fracture marine parks than we previously realised.

In areas that were revisited to assess the regrowth of corals after two decades of protection from fishing, we saw no evidence that the coral communities are recovering. But there were signs that some individual species of corals, featherstars and urchins have re-established a foothold.

Read more: Sludge, snags, and surreal animals: life aboard a voyage to study the abyss

In coming months we will work through a sub-sample of our deep-sea image library to identify the number and type of organisms in certain areas. This will give us a clear, quantitative picture of where and at what depth different species and communities live in these marine parks, and a foundation for predicting their likely occurrence both in Australia and around the world.

The seamount corals survey involved 10 organisations: CSIRO, the National Environmental Science Program Marine Biodiversity Hub, Australian Museum, Museums Victoria, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, NIWA (NZ), three Australian universities and Parks Australia.

– ref. Exploring Australia’s ‘other reefs’ south of Tasmania – http://theconversation.com/exploring-australias-other-reefs-south-of-tasmania-108986

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ross Garnaut, Professorial Research Fellow in Economics, University of Melbourne

Rather than waiting for the world to reach an agreement to act against multinational corporations that shift profits to tax havens, Australia should consider adopting our proposal for a cashflow tax, which would increase both investment and government revenue.

Many market-dominating multinational corporations have been aggressively reducing their global tax burdens by shifting their profits to tax havens.

BHP and Rio have been setting up so-called marketing hubs in low-tax Singapore.

Google bills Australians for advertisements on Australian websites in lower-tax Ireland, which itself pays fees to another subsidiary in even lower-tax Bermuda.

Read more: Budget policy check: do we need company tax cuts?

So big has the apparent flow of money into low-tax Ireland become that its national accounts data for 2015 showed a 26.3% real increase in gross domestic product.

Few think the Irish economy really improved by 26.3%.

What if we taxed cashflow instead of income?

In a new paper for the Melbourne Economic Forum, we propose replacing the conventional corporate income tax with what we are calling a “cashflow tax” to mitigate these problems while encouraging new private capital investment in Australia.

It wouldn’t tax profit as it is normally defined, but money coming in minus money going out – or “cashflow” – with the exception of money going out to repay loans, to pay dividends to shareholders, and to make payments to related parties that aren’t at arm’s length.

It could be easily done, because we already have all the information we need to tax onshore what happens onshore.

Read more: The full story on company tax cuts and your hip pocket

It would eliminate the messy distinction between capital expenditures, which can’t be deducted straight away, and other expenditures which can be. Everything that went out, for any purpose not exempt, would be immediately subtracted from what came in, and what was left would be taxed at 30%, or 25% if that’s what the government of the day wanted.

It would encourage investment…

It would make new investment – on things such as buildings, equipment, mines and the like – much more attractive. By immediately creating a negative cash flow, it would usually cut the investor’s tax bill to zero straight away.

We would allow companies to trade tax losses with companies making taxable profits, perhaps on the Australian Securities Exchange. Or they could carry forward their losses at the long-term government bond rate to offset against future profits.

…while levelling the financing playing field

Financial institutions would be taxed slightly differently, but at the same rate. Their taxable income would be interest and fees received minus interest and fees paid and costs including capital expenditure. Like other firms, they would be able to deduct capital expenditure immediately, but unlike other firms, they could also deduct the cost of borrowing.

For non-financial firms, because neither interest payments nor dividends would be tax deductible, the tax system would no longer favour debt over equity. They would no longer face a tax incentive to borrow instead of seeking out shareholders.

Reduced indebtedness would have advantages for financial efficiency and stability. It might reduce total profits of banks, but by immediately writing off capital expenditures banks could make higher profits per dollar lent.

It could be phased in over 10 years…

We propose phasing in the cashflow tax over 10 years – cutting company tax and lifting the cash flow tax by 3% per year.

Businesses that wanted to could make an irrevocable choice at any time to switch earlier.

Companies with big new capital investment plans would be likely to take the option of an early switch in order to immediately write off their expenses, while those paying interest on large accumulated debts would be likely to switch later.

…eventually raising an extra A$24 billion per year

Our modelling suggests that if the switch was phased in, the government would take in an extra A$24 billion per year when the transition was complete.

Most of the extra income would come from firms finding there were no longer tax advantages in shifting profits offshore.

If irrevocable switches were allowed, the government could take in up to an extra A$39 billion per year.

These estimates are likely to be conservative: they take no account of the additional capital expenditure that a cashflow tax would stimulate, or of the efficiency gains from replacing the heavily distorting corporate income tax with a non-distorting cashflow tax.

And securing the revenue base

While the Tax Office has been more active recently in clamping down on corporate tax avoidance, Australia’s anti-avoidance measures been ad hoc rather than systemic.

Global digital corporations are adept at using technology fees, management fees and puffed up interest rates for loans to inflate the tax-deductible expenses of their affiliates while declaring the income from those payments in tax havens.

Our proposal would disallow those deductions while allowing immediate total deductions for spending in Australia. Tax obligations wouldn’t be avoided, merely transferred to the Australian entity that provided the goods or services.

Early feedback

Our proposal was presented to a group of economists for feedback and reactions at the Melbourne Economic Forum on December 10.

They discussed the risk that multinational corporations such as digital companies and global fast-food chains would pull out of Australia if their opportunities for profit shifting to tax havens were closed down.

The general view was that they would stay in Australia because they could still earn rents (profits in excess of those necessary to encourage investment) from their Australian operations. The difference is that these rents would no longer be sheltered from Australian taxation. The Tax Office is already challenging the use of marketing hubs used by resource companies, which the cashflow tax would do in a more systematic way.

Read more: These private companies pay less tax than we do – but reasons remain unclear

The Forum also discussed the need to draw clear boundaries between financial institutions and other companies, to prevent those companies claiming interest deductions as if they were financial institutions.

Further design features requiring consideration include the treatment of unincorporated businesses and dividend imputation.

We prepared the cashflow tax proposal with Stephen Anthony, chief economist, Industry Super Australia.

– ref. Here’s a long-term budget fix that would boost investment: replace company tax with cashflow tax – http://theconversation.com/heres-a-long-term-budget-fix-that-would-boost-investment-replace-company-tax-with-cashflow-tax-108347

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julie Shiels, Lecturer – School of Art, RMIT University

Review: Theatre is Lying, ACCA, Melbourne.

In an era where local and international politics risks being less believable than a long-form TV series like House of Cards, it is apposite that the latest exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Arts (ACCA) in Melbourne focuses on ideas about artifice and illusion, truth and fiction and sleight of hand.

While not expressly political, Theatre is Lying exposes how visual art, performance and theatrical devices can interrogate what is real and what is not.

The artworks by Sol Calero, Consuelo Cavaniglia, Matthew Griffin, Daniel Jenatsch and artistic collaborators Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, employ digital montage, animation, video, light and sound and theatrical installations. Commissioned specifically for ACCA, these screen-based works and installations are a welcome response to a year bloated with fake news and alternative facts, offering critique, humour and escape rather than despair and cynicism.

Theatre is Lying not only offers conceptual and abstract means to engage with the truths and fictions of the contemporary world, but also presents alternative narratives and other way of reflecting on theatrics of politics against the backdrop of the 24/7 news cycle.

Recently the largesse of visual arts patrons has seen private collectors build new public museums, but the legacy of the McFarlane Biennial Commission, which supports this exhibition, goes beyond bricks and mortar to directly support current artists. For the next six years, the fund will fund the creation of ambitious and possibly career-defining works, forming keynote projects in ACCA’s exhibition program.

This, the first in the series, is characterised by artistic director Max Delany and senior curator Annika Kristensen, as an exhibition in five acts.

Matthew Griffin, The outernet 2018, two channel, high definition digital video, 33:34 mins. Courtesy of the artist, Photo: Andrew Curtis

Act One lampoons and hijacks TV current affairs. Utilising spilt screen formats, found footage and montage, artist Mathew Griffin inserts himself into absurdist panel discussions that replicate the everyday conventions of current affairs TV. At first glance the interviewee (Griffin) resembles another gormless commentator or politician who has not learnt to pause for breath. Only with close scrutiny is the artifice revealed.

One can’t help wondering initially if Randall and Breckon’s Rear View (2018) employs green screen to simulate a car travelling along the highway. Shot continuously with no edits, the 90-minute video operates at the intersection of cinema and performance art, referencing classic road movies.

Daniel Jenatsch, The Sheraton Hotel Incident 2018, two channel, high definition digital video, 5.1 surround sound, 15:00 mins. Courtesy of the artist, Photo: Andrew Curtis

The banality of the real time action and inaction becomes a feat of endurance coupled with forced voyeurism. Throughout the movie, the two women (Randall and Linda Chen) talk intermittently over the hum of the car while staring ahead and rarely making eye contact. The narrative is unclear; the reason for the journey and the relationship between the women is never explained.

Yet the boredom is fractured by the sound of wriggling, a bit of singing, a clinch that goes wrong and the pitiful crying that ensues when that advance has been rebuffed. In the end, the rear view of the road is the only certainty that can be believed.

‘Sir, we have missed our target’

The Sheraton Hotel Incident is an artistic interpretation of a stranger-than-truth event involving an inexplicably bungled training exercise by Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) agents in 1983. The purpose of the exercise was to rescue hostages from fictional foreign captors but ASIS failed to inform either hotel management or the police. Jenatsch employs the clichés of film noir and spy movies to recreate the event and subsequent enquiry.

The screen is often split and the action is realised through archival images, reports and animated action overlayed with written dialogue like “Sir, we have missed our target”. It is the simplicity of the animation that is most striking about this work. The action is presented in single frame images and the odd crumbly surfaces of the bodies and objects suggest a “Mummy movie” and a new surrealist weird.

In stark contrast to the fast pace and cliches of The Sheraton Hotel Incident, Colero’s La Puerta relies on the audience to produce the action. There are no performers here, instead the artwork is populated with spectators who encounter the constructed space.

Sol Calero, La puerta 2018 (detail), Site-specific installation: synthetic polymer paint and paper on plywood and composition board, cotton, pine. Courtesy of the artist, Barbara Gross Galerie, Munich, and Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris, Photo: Andrew Curtis

Easily recognised as a set for live theatre, the artist performs an elaborate transformation employing painted arches, screens and blinds to create the illusion of depth. Redolent with colour and patterning drawn from Colero’s Venezuelan heritage, the effect is disrupted by the exposure of raw timber framing in order to emphasise the things that are seen and the things that are not. In this case it is Colero’s ongoing engagement with issues about colonisation and identity.

Consuelo Cavaniglia, present distant 2018 (detail), powder coated steel, laminated glass, float glass, two-way mirror, rubber spacers, bolts, castors, lighting, 7 panels, each 225 x 220 x 90 cm; installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, STATION, Melbourne, and Kronenberg Wright Artist Projects, Sydney, Photo: Andrew Curtis

By contrast Cavaniglia’s installation is pure theatre and illusion, comprising spotlights and search lights that are reflected and refracted through moveable glass screens. The theatrical is realised via an interplay of the coloured light that penetrates the screens, landing on the wall and floors and bathing the space and the audience with colour. Chance encounters between lights, screens and viewers are at the core of this work.

The gallery spaces at ACCA have no designated beginning or end point. Nor do the individual acts provide a conclusion. Rather, they offer an open-ended means to consider allusion, illusion, truth, lies and transparency.

Over summer, Theatre is Lying is an invitation to pause and unpick the way narrative and artifice are created and perceived and so sharpen the critical senses in anticipation of the performances that will be presented to us in the year to come.

Theatre is Lying can be seen at ACCA until 24 March 2019.

– ref. Theatre is Lying is a welcome response to fake news and alternative facts – http://theconversation.com/theatre-is-lying-is-a-welcome-response-to-fake-news-and-alternative-facts-108981

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

It took disgraced Nationals MP Andrew Broad 24 hours after the “sugar baby” story broke to announce the inevitable – that he won’t recontest his Victorian seat of Mallee. They do things slowly in the Nationals.

In Michael McCormack’s case, at glacial pace. The Nationals leader’s handling of the Broad scandal has been appalling. His failure to instantly inform Scott Morrison of a potentially explosive situation – the prime minister only learned of it on Monday – is inexplicable, and must severely strain the relationship between the two men at the top of the government.

McCormack on Monday muddled his account, saying he had only been told “a couple of weeks ago”, when he urged Broad to go to the police over the actions of a woman he met on a “seeking arrangement” website.

McCormack’s timetable was blown out of the water within hours by an Australian Federal Police statement that said Broad had referred the matter to it on November 8.

On Tuesday, McCormack’s performance was extraordinary.

He explained his confusion over timing by saying, “I don’t carry around the dates and times of what people tell me”.

He hadn’t informed Morrison at the start because “I don’t tell the prime minister everything about every member of parliament. He’s got enough on his mind at the moment.

“And quite frankly I thought it was a matter for Andrew to sort out with his family. Obviously, I wasn’t aware of the entire extent of what had taken place. I wasn’t made aware of that until yesterday.”

Asked whether he wanted Broad to run for Parliament again, McCormack blathered rather than just saying no.

Any diligent leader would have got to the bottom of the matter at once, extracting the full picture from Broad. Any prudent leader would have briefed the prime minister without delay. Any savvy leader would have known the scandal was likely to leak and that, anyway, Broad’s behaviour showed he was in an untenable position.

McCormack must live in some parallel universe if he ever thought his assistant minister’s account of flying off on an overseas date, followed by an apparent move to blackmail him, was just “a personal matter between him and his family”.

Nationals deputy leader Bridget McKenzie said in a statement late Tuesday “The Nationals are not a party where this standard of behaviour is acceptable”.

Yet McCormack kept Broad on as his assistant minister for weeks. And in his Monday morning statement announcing Broad had resigned from the frontbench, the Nationals leader said Broad “will continue as an effective and hardworking Member for Mallee”.

McCormack’s leadership is only secure because we are so close to an election. He was already under criticism from within his party and his conduct over Broad might have brought on a challenge in other circumstances.

The Nationals, supposed to be a party of family values, have bookended the year with two personal scandals. Barnaby Joyce’s affair with his former staffer, now mother of his son, distracted the Coalition in the early months.

How the Morrison government’s grand tactical plan to overshadow Labor’s national conference went awry! The big story about a surging budget position, promising dollars for tax cuts was expected to dominate the news.

As things turned out, the government did squeeze out the Labor coverage – but for the worst of reasons.

Labor’s management plans, in contrast, went as smoothly as clockwork.

Tricky issues, notably border security, were stitched up. Potentially controversial polices, including how broadly a Labor government would allow industry-wide bargaining have been left for decisions by the leadership later.

Even what seemed the risky course of having Kevin Rudd address the conference – as a gesture of reconciliation and party unity – played out without a hitch.

A raid on New South Wales ALP headquarters in Sydney in pursuit of an ICAC investigation was embarrassingly timed but didn’t threaten the narrative at the conference in Adelaide.

The conference was used as a platform for announcements – on housing affordability, the protection of superannuation, the environment, reconciliation, refugees, the pursuit of gender pay equality. There were few votes and only one of them, on a left proposal for a human rights charter, involved a count – the left narrowly lost.

Controversy over signing up to a nuclear weapons ban treaty, on which Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong have different views, was defused by wording that leaves plenty of latitude.

One significant proposal that was passed calls for a Labor government to recognise Palestine, something that various state conferences have been urging strongly.

The role of the unions was proudly acknowledged.

The ACTU secretary Sally McManus told the conference: “The trade union movement is the early warning system for this nation. We are the earthquake sensors in the ocean that feel the tremors before they reach the shores. We are the smoke alarm trying to wake you from your deepest sleep. The siren that makes you look up before it is too late.

“And we are sounding the alarm now. We see the unfairness, we see the fair go being crushed with growing inequality. It is time to listen and to act. And Australian Labor, Bill Shorten, is doing just that.”

It’s notable that in the election for the ALP national executive, the CFMMEU has gone from one representative to two. Its national secretary, Michael O’Connor, is now a member of it. The conference has left open how much the unions will get as Labor unveils more detail of its industrial policy over the coming months.

– ref. View from The Hill: Michael McCormack fails leadership test in handling of Broad scandal – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-michael-mccormack-fails-leadership-test-in-handling-of-broad-scandal-109008

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

The Labor party has emerged from its three day national conference in Adelaide looking united and projecting itself as “ready to govern”.

Labor deputy leader Tanya Plibersek told The Conversation the ALP wants voters to see the party as “responsible and progressive”.

She says a Labor government would “work cooperatively with the trade union movement cause we share the same objective”.

“The union movement hasn’t got everything they wanted from the Labor party in this instance, but a lot of the changes we have made have been made better by the discussions that we’ve had over many months leading up to this conference,” she said.

On border security, Plibersek dismisses the use of three word slogans on both sides of the debate and argues “a more activist aid policy and more activist foreign policy” are needed to help asylum seekers.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Tanya Plibersek on a united Labor – http://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-tanya-plibersek-on-a-united-labor-109005

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

This week’s Fairfax Ipsos poll, conducted December 12-15 from a sample of 1,200, gave Labor a 54-46 lead, a two-point gain for Labor since November. Primary votes were 37% Labor (up three), 36% Coalition (down one), 13% Greens (steady) and 6% One Nation (up one). As usual in Ipsos, the Greens are too high.

Respondent-allocated preferences were also 54-46 to Labor. While Malcolm Turnbull was PM, respondent preferences skewed to the Coalition relative to preferences derived from using 2016 election preference flows. However, Ipsos’ four polls since Scott Morrison became PM have shown no difference on average between respondent and previous election methods.

47% approved of Morrison (down one), and 39% disapproved (up three), for a net approval of +8. Bill Shorten’s net approval was down two points to -9. Morrison led by 46-37 as better PM (47-35 in November). Ipsos gives incumbent PMs higher ratings than Newspoll.

By 44-43, voters opposed Labor’s proposed changes that would restrict negative gearing tax deductions. By 48-43, voters opposed Labor’s proposal to halve the concession on capital gains tax. These questions highlight the potential for a Coalition scare campaign based on Labor’s proposed changes.

Four weeks ago, Ipsos and Essential both gave Labor just a 52-48 lead. The next week, Newspoll gave Labor a 55-45 lead, and now Ipsos is more in line with Newspoll.

Read more: Poll wrap: Labor’s worst polls since Turnbull; chaos likely in Victorian upper house

Essential: 53-47 to Labor

This week’s Essential poll, conducted December 13-16 from a sample of 1,026, gave Labor a 53-47 lead, a one-point gain for the Coalition since last fortnight. Primary votes were 37% Coalition (down one), 36% Labor (down three), 11% Greens (up one) and 7% One Nation (up one).

Since Morrison became PM, Essential has been consistently better for the Coalition than Newspoll. Last week’s Newspoll gave Labor a 41-35 primary vote lead, while Essential gives the Coalition a 37-36 primary lead.

A net +6 thought 2018 had been good for the Australian economy, but a net zero thought it had been good for their personal financial situation. Australian politics scored a net -50 and the Australian government a net -41. In voters’ predictions about next year, their personal financial situation was at a net +13 and the Australian economy at a net +2.

Since September, Morrison’s attribute scores have declined in positive attributes and gone up in negative attributes, with the largest change a seven-point increase in “erratic”. Morrison leads Shorten on most positive attributes and trails him on most negative ones, but differences are under eight points. An exception is that Morrison leads Shorten by four on being “out of touch”.

ReachTEL seat polls: huge swing to Labor in Kooyong, little swing in Boothby

ReachTEL has recently conducted federal seat polls of Kooyong in Victoria and Boothby in South Australia. In Kooyong, held by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, Labor led by 52-48, a 15-point swing to Labor since the 2016 election. In Boothby, the Liberals led by 51-49, a two-point swing to Labor.

Seat polls are unreliable, but the Victorian state election had large swings to Labor in blue-ribbon Liberal seats in inner Melbourne. Kooyong and Higgins are located in the same territory. As I wrote last week, ReachTEL also had a massive swing to Labor in Higgins.

Victorian election statewide two party vote: 57.6-42.4 to Labor

At the November 24 Victorian state election, the Liberals did not contest Richmond. The electoral commission has conducted a two party Labor vs Coalition count in all seats except Richmond. According to analyst Kevin Bonham, Labor’s share of the two party vote ranges from 57.4% to 57.9% depending on how Richmond is treated.

The measure I prefer is to assign Richmond the same swing as the rest of the state, giving a two party result of 57.6-42.4 to Labor, a 5.6% swing to Labor since the 2014 election. That is only 0.2% less for Labor than at their 2002 landslide under Steve Bracks.

Labor won 55 of the 88 lower house seats, seven fewer than in 2002. This was mainly because the Greens won three seats where Labor won the two party vote, and so did independent Russell Northe in Morwell.

Read more: Historical fall of Liberal seats in Victoria; micros likely to win ten seats in upper house; Labor leads in NSW

In the upper house, the Greens won just one of 40 seats despite winning 9.3% of the vote. Bonham says the Greens were disadvantaged by being too big for micro parties to benefit from swapping preferences with them. However, they were also too small to win seats on raw quotas, as the major parties do.

Read more: Victorian upper house greatly distorted by group voting tickets; federal Labor still dominant in Newspoll

While the Greens were the biggest victims of the group voting ticket system, they almost cost Fiona Patten her seat. In North Metro, Green Samantha Ratnam made quota before Socialist preferences were distributed, allowing Patten to win.

According to Bonham, had Ratnam been under quota before Socialist preferences, she would have gone well over quota on their preferences, but her surplus would have gone mainly to Derryn Hinch Justice, and that party would have won the final North Metro seat instead of Patten.

Democrats gained 40 House seats at US midterms

All 435 US House seats are up for election every two years. At the November 6 US midterm elections, Democrats won the House by a 235-199 seat margin, with one seat undecided due to a dispute over alleged fraud by Republican campaigners in North Carolina’s ninth district. Since the pre-election Congress, this is a 40-seat gain for Democrats. Since the 2016 House results, it is a 41-seat gain.

According to Cook Political Report analyst Dave Wasserman, Democrats won the overall House popular vote by 8.6%. In 2016, Republicans won the House popular vote by 1.1%, and Donald Trump won the presidency despite losing to Hillary Clinton by 2.1% in the national popular vote.

Democrats’ gains mainly occurred in suburbs, where there was a high level of educational attainment. Republicans held up much better in rural America. While Democrats will have 54% of the new House, their seats will represent just 20% of US land area.

CNN analyst Harry Enten says this was Democrats’ largest seat gain in a House election since 1974, and the best performance in popular votes by a pre-election minority House party since records began in 1942. Although turnout was low by Australian standards at 50.3%, this was the highest turnout at a US midterm election in the last 100 years.

Republicans held the Senate by a 53-47 margin, a two-seat gain for Republicans since the last Congress. However, the 33 regular Senate races were last contested in 2012, when Democrats had a great year. Democrats lost North Dakota, Indiana, Missouri and Florida, but gained Nevada and Arizona. They won the 33 regular elections by 23-10. Including byelections in Minnesota and Mississippi, Democrats won the 35 Senate races by 24-11.

Read more: Poll wrap: Coalition, Morrison slip further in Newspoll; US Democrats gain in late counting

The new US Congress will be sworn in on January 3. Democrat House leader Nancy Pelosi is very likely to be elected Speaker of the new House.

In November 2020, the US presidency and all of the House are up. Of the 34 Senate seats that will be up for election, 22 are Republican-held and just 12 Democrat-held. This will be a big opportunity for Democrats to take back the Senate.

Theresa May wins Conservative confidence vote, 200-117

To trigger a Conservative motion of confidence in the leader, 15% (48 members in this case) of Conservative MPs must submit letters expressing no-confidence in the leader. This threshold was reached on December 12, but UK Prime Minister Theresa May won a confidence vote of all Conservative MPs by a 200-117 margin. May now cannot be challenged for a year.

If anywhere near 117 Conservatives reject May’s Brexit deal, it is very difficult to see it passing the House of Commons. The confidence vote in May does not make a “no deal” Brexit less likely. As I wrote on my personal website, unless the Commons acts in some way, Britain will crash out of the European Union on March 29, 2019.

– ref. Poll wrap: Labor widens lead in Ipsos; US Democrats gained 40 House seats at midterms – http://theconversation.com/poll-wrap-labor-widens-lead-in-ipsos-us-democrats-gained-40-house-seats-at-midterms-108907

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julie Lawson, Honorary Associate Professor, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University

Despite recent falls in the housing market, housing costs and indebtedness bite deeply into household budgets, especially at Christmas time. Just over 433,000 households confront housing stress and homelessness every day across Australia. They represent the current shortfall of social housing.

If Christmas offers a moment for reflection, ask yourself what should our resolutions be for the housing market? What should we expect our governments to do about it?

In this article, we look at this week’s major statement on housing policy from a key contender to lead Australia’s next government – made by Bill Shorten at the ALP national conference.

We applaud the principle of fairness and the ambition of the ALP policy. We are less supportive of the reliance on for-profit investors, market rent mechanisms and land grabs. Our research shows direct government investment in social housing is ultimately far more efficient and effective than subsidising investors in the long term.

Read more: Australia needs to triple its social housing by 2036. This is the best way to do it

So what is Labor’s policy?

Shorten’s announcement also pledges reform of tax concessions that are driving inequality between households and investors. However, Labor recognises that this might not be enough to tilt the balance in favour of low-income households, and directing the savings from these changes into housing programs is a welcome move.

Labor proposes to subsidise investors in affordable rental housing, much like the Rudd government’s National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS). Labor would offer an $8,500-a-year subsidy over 15 years to investors who build new homes for low-income and middle-income households to rent at an “affordable” rate – 20% below market rent.

Starting modestly, the program aims to produce 20,000 affordable units over three years, building to a much larger target of 250,000 dwellings over ten years.

Read more: Shorten’s subsidy plan to boost affordable housing

State governments would also be required to get on board through partnership agreements, as they have done in the past, providing land and other forms of co-investment. Hefty stamp duty revenues in recent years should make this easier for the states.

While Labor’s targets appear high by recent standards, Commonwealth and state governments directly funded the building of 9,000 public housing dwellings each year for the better half of the 20th century – until 1996. Annual production is now down to 3,000 dwellings. That’s not even enough to maintain the existing public share of housing.

Since the mid-1990s, a preference for outsourcing social responsibility through private rental providers and indirect rental support payments has dominated public policy. The ALP’s subsidy-based policy continues this trend.

The proposal centres on maintaining returns to investors at levels that encourage investment. As our previous research has shown, over the longer term this increases cost per dwelling. The question remains, as it did under the NRAS: who are we trying to subsidise here, the investors or the tenants, and is it really equitable and effective?

What are the alternatives?

Previous work has shown that NRAS-type schemes offer most benefit to new affordable housing developments when the funds are directed to not for profit organisations, rather than “leaking” out to the for-profit private sector. The advantages of this approach include:

• subsidies are retained within the affordable housing system
• benefits are directed to regulated not-for-profit developers with a social purpose
• the benefit is stretched out over a longer time, meaning government investment does not expire after a set time.

In the UK, a lack of direct conditional investment and weak definitions of affordability led to an 80% decline in social housing production. Without public equity, recurrent operating subsidies have no influence on design quality or ongoing impact after the expiry of providers’ obligations – or their cancellation. Yes, they can be switched on and off like a tap – as happened in 2014 with the NRAS.

With good design, a new scheme could overcome some of these deficiencies. Labor promises to provide lower annual subsidies than NRAS but for longer – 15 rather than 10 years – adding up to at least $127,500 from the Commonwealth for a tenancy to be offered at below market rents. It’s a substantial commitment.

Yet if this level of support was invested up front to build dwellings, rather than provided as an annual operating subsidy, it would make a substantial and enduring contribution to Australia’s housing needs. This is not only socially responsible, it can drive green innovation and is also more financially responsible too.

The only thing that stands in the way is the narrow public accounting doctrine that privileges day-to-day expenditure over long-term investments. This is something that, in the UK, even the Treasury and the National Audit Office are learning to overcome after the painful experience of the Private Finance Initiative.

Read more: Homeless numbers will keep rising until governments change course on housing

How much more cost-effective is direct investment?

If equity and fairness are to be the yardsticks of policy, age pensioners, people with disabilities and low-paid workers should be the focus of our deepest support. Our AHURI research has established the level, type and location of investment required to meet the needs of 433,000 low-income households in housing stress or homeless across Australia. The current market offers no affordable or secure options for them.

Our research also compared the cost of subsidising investors versus direct investment by government. Our modelling of costs and review of international experience provide evidence that direct investment is far more efficient and effective in the medium and long term.

Capital funding model. Lawson et al, 2018, Author provided Operating subsidy funding model. Lawson et al, 2018, Author provided

Thus, we argue for more direct investment in social housing, strategic use of efficient mission-driven financing and retained investment via public equity and public land leases.

Recognition of the need for national leadership and policy reform is growing. After backpedalling, the Coalition government moved forward in 2018 to establish, with cross-party support, the National Housing Finance Corporation. This mission focused public corporation will soon channel lower-cost financing towards regulated not-for-profit housing. Of course, financing is debt and not quite the same as funding.

Read more: Government guarantee opens investment highway to affordable housing

The Australian Greens have yet to announce their policy but an outline suggests a commitment to invest in social housing and establish a federal housing trust.

The ALP’s proposals are framed in line with the laudable principle of fairness and are a work in progress – rather than mission accomplished. Overcoming the shortfall of affordable and secure housing will require purposeful Commonwealth and state government funding, mission driven financing as well as land policies to make housing markets fairer for all.

– ref. Labor’s housing pledge is welcome, but direct investment in social housing would improve it – http://theconversation.com/labors-housing-pledge-is-welcome-but-direct-investment-in-social-housing-would-improve-it-108909

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Turner, PhD student, University of Newcastle

Review: Tidelands, Netflix

The first original Netflix series filmed in Australia, Tidelands, is a speculative story about half-human/half-siren beings who live in the coastal Queensland town of Orphelin Bay. The story follows the return to the bay of Calliope (Cal), after she has spent time in jail for alleged arson. Tidelands has a lot of expectations to live up to. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always meet them.

Poster for Netflix original series Tidelands. IMDb

The initial episodes offer a strong, if not overly creative, premise. Supernatural beings are meddling in the world of humanity. It is an idea previously encountered in Interview with a Vampire and TV series such as Being Human, Teen Wolf and the Canadian series Bitten.

In Tidelands, the offspring of sirens and a mortal man, known as “tidelanders”, have various supernatural abilities. They can control the flow of water (and by extension blood), breathe underwater, are inhumanly fast and strong, and can influence people using their voices. (The latter ability is attributed to the sirens of Greek myth.)

But aside from the inhuman strength – which is routinely demonstrated- these abilities are left largely unexplored.

The cast is divided in two primary groups, the titular tidelanders and their queen Adrielle (Elsa Pataky), and the humans. The town, seemingly based on fishing, is actually the centre of a drug cartel, the drugs supplied by the tidelanders and sold by the humans.

Successive plots revolve around keeping the cartel running, the discovery of ancient artefacts, tensions between the town people, the tidelanders’ adultery, and several murders. Calliope’s brother runs the drug operation, and the town’s people suspect the tidelanders of the murders. There’s also a rebellion amongst the tidelanders, which draws in almost the entire cast.

Elsa Pataky as Adrielle and Madeleine Madden as Violca in Tidelands (2018) IMDb

The tidelanders themselves present an attractive, sexually diverse cast. The series includes lesbian and bisexual women (but not gay men), and has a notable variety in ethnicity. The townspeople, in contrast, are mostly white Australian actors. The tidelanders also live in a settlement outside of Orphelin Bay, perhaps referencing Romani camps of today.

Plotwise, the series contains many narratives – too many really. Many are left unresolved by the end of the season. There are multiple murders and romances, mysterious prophecies, and ancient artefacts.

The show has something of an identity crisis. It is not a procedural drama, nor an extended murder investigation, or supernatural romance. The result is a tangled confusion of storylines, all enjoyable to watch, but in need of greater exposition.

The cast members do deliver excellent performances but their characters aren’t explored deeply enough. This is, in part, because of the number of story lines but also because a lot of the time, nudity and sex are used as temporary resolutions to sub-plots, distracting from more major plotlines.

Trailer to Netflix original series Tidelands.

Elsa Pataky’s performance as the aloof, enigmatic queen of the tidelanders, Adrielle, is spectacular. She is graceful and charming, despite the character’s vicious tendencies. Alongside Charlotte Best’s performance as the rebellious outcast Calliope, the two actresses create a superb tension, which drives the first season.

The series is very well filmed, showcasing Australia’s beaches, oceans and small town life. The sets are beautifully made, particularly Adrielle’s manor, which is both austere and fitting for the queen of mysterious supernatural people. This focus on detail and capturing the cast’s expression and movements makes it watchable – but it could use more focus and clarity.

– ref. Tidelands struggles to stay afloat in its first series – http://theconversation.com/tidelands-struggles-to-stay-afloat-in-its-first-series-108751

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Dooley, Researcher, Australian German Climate and Energy College, University of Melbourne

Three years after the Paris Agreement was struck, we now finally know the rules – or most of them, at least – for its implementation.

The Paris Rulebook, agreed at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland, gives countries a common framework for reporting and reviewing progress towards their climate targets.

Yet the new rules fall short in one crucial area. While the world will now be able to see how much we are lagging behind on the necessary climate action, the rulebook offers little to compel countries to up their game to the level required.

Read more: COP24 shows global warming treaties can survive the era of the anti-climate ‘strongman’

The national pledges adopted in Paris are still woefully inadequate to meet the 1.5℃ or 2℃ global warming goals of the Paris Agreement. In the run-up to the Katowice talks, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report detailing the urgent need to accelerate climate policy. Yet the summit ran into trouble in its efforts to formally welcome the report, with delegates eventually agreeing to welcome its “timely completion”.

Rather than directly asking for national climate targets to be increased, the Katowice text simply reiterates the existing request in the Paris Agreement for countries to communicate and update their contributions by 2020.

Much now hinges on the UN General Assembly summit in September 2019, to bring the much-needed political momentum towards a new raft of pledges in 2020 that are actually in line with the scientific reality.

Ratcheting up ambition

A key element of the Paris Agreement is the Global Stocktake – a five-yearly assessment of whether countries are collectively on track to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals to limit global warming.

The new rulebook affirms that this process will consider “equity and best available science”. But it does not elaborate specifically on how these inputs will be used, and how the outcomes of the stocktake will increase ambition.

This raises concerns that the rulebook will ensure we know if we are falling behind on climate action, but will offer no prescription for fixing things. This risks failing to address one of the biggest issues with the Paris Agreement so far: that countries are under no obligation to ensure their climate pledges are in line with the overall goals. A successful, ambitious and prescriptive five-yearly review process will be essential to get the world on track.

Transparency and accounting

One of the aims of the Katowice talks was to develop a common set of formats and schedules for countries to report their climate policy progress.

The new rules allow a degree of flexibility for the most vulnerable countries, who are not compelled to submit quantified climate pledges or regular transparency reports. All other countries will be bound to report on their climate action every two years, starting in 2024.

However, given the “bottom-up” nature of the Paris Agreement, countries are largely able to determine their own accounting rules, with guidelines agreed on what information they should provide. But a future international carbon trading market will obviously require a standardised set of rules. The newly agreed rulebook carries a substantial risk of double-counting where countries could potentially count overseas emissions reductions towards their own target, even if another country has also claimed this reduction for itself.

This issue became a major stumbling block in the negotiations, with Brazil and others refusing to agree to rules that would close this loophole, and so discussions will continue next year. In the meantime, the UN has no official agreement on how to implement international carbon trading.

Accounting rules for action in the land sector have also been difficult to agree. Countries such as Brazil and some African nations sought to avoid an agreement on this issue, while others, such as Australia, New Zealand and the European Union, prefer to continue existing rules that have delivered windfall credits to these countries.

Finance

The new rulebook defines what will constitute “climate finance”, and how it will be reported and reviewed.

Developed countries are now obliged to report every two years on what climate finance they plan to provide, while other countries in a position to provide climate finance are encouraged to follow the same schedule.

But with a plethora of eligible financial instruments – concessional and non-concessional loans, guarantees, equity, and investments from public and private sources – the situation is very complex. In some cases, vulnerable countries could be left worse off, such as if loans have to be repaid with interest, or if financial risk instruments fail.

Countries can voluntarily choose to report the grant equivalent value of these financial instruments. Such reporting will be crucial for understanding the scale of climate finance mobilised.

Read more: We can’t know the future cost of climate change. Let’s focus on the cost of avoiding it instead

The Paris Agreement delivered the blueprint for a global response to climate change. Now, the Paris Rulebook lays out a structure for reporting and understanding the climate action of all countries.

But the world is far from on track to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. The latest report from the UN Environment Programme suggests existing climate targets would need to be increased “around fivefold” for a chance of limiting warming to 1.5℃. The newly agreed rules don’t offer a way to put us on this trajectory.

Multilateral climate policy has perhaps taken us as far as it can – it is now time for action at the national level. Australia, as a country with very high per-capita emissions, needs to step up to a leadership position and take on our fair share of the global response. This means making a 60% emissions cut by 2030, as outlined by the Climate Change Authority in 2015.

Such an ambitious pledge from Australia and other leading nations would galvanise the international climate talks in 2020. What the world urgently needs is a race to the top, rather than the current jockeying for position.

– ref. We finally have the rulebook for the Paris Agreement, but global climate action is still inadequate – http://theconversation.com/we-finally-have-the-rulebook-for-the-paris-agreement-but-global-climate-action-is-still-inadequate-108918

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Henry, Adjunct Lecturer, UNSW

Debates about cyber security in Australia over the past few weeks have largely centred around the passing of the government’s controversial Assistance and Access bill. But while government access to encrypted messages is an important subject, protecting Australia from threat could depend more on the task of developing a solid and robust cyber security response plan.

Australia released its first Cyber Incident Management Arrangements (CIMA) for state, territory and federal governments on December 12. It’s a commendable move towards a comprehensive national civil defence strategy for cyber space.

Coming at least a decade after the need was first foreshadowed by the government, this is just the initial step on a path that demands much more development. Beyond CIMA, the government needs to better explain to the public the unique threats posed by large scale cyber incidents and, on that basis, engage the private sector and a wider community of experts on addressing those unique threats.

Read more: What skills does a cybersecurity professional need?

Australia is poorly prepared

The aim of the new cyber incident arrangements is to reduce the scope, impact and severity of a “national cyber incident”.

A national cyber incident is defined as being of potential national importance, but less severe than a “crisis” that would trigger the government’s Australian Government Crisis Management Framework (AGCMF).

Australia is currently ill-prepared to respond to a major cyber incident, such as the Wannacry or NotPetya attacks in 2017.

Wannacry severely disrupted the UK’s National Health Service, at a cost of A$160 million. NotPetya shut down the world’s largest shipping container company, Maersk, for several weeks, costing it A$500 million.

When costs for random cyber attacks are so high, it’s vital that all Australian governments have coordinated response plans to high-threat incidents. The CIMA sets out inter-jurisdictional coordination arrangements, roles and responsibilities, and principles for cooperation.

A higher-level cyber crisis that would trigger the AGCMF (a process that itself looks somewhat under-prepared) is one that:

… results in sustained disruption to essential services, severe economic damage, a threat to national security or loss of life.

More cyber experts and cyber incident exercises

At just seven pages in length, in glossy brochure format, the CIMA does not outline specific operational incident management protocols.

This will be up to state and territory governments to negotiate with the Commonwealth. That means the protocols developed may be subject to competing budget priorities, political appetite, divergent levels of cyber maturity, and, most importantly, staffing requirements.

Australia has a serious crisis in the availability of skilled cyber personnel in general. This is particularly the case in specialist areas required for the management of complex cyber incidents.

Government agencies struggle to compete with major corporations, such as the major banks, for the top-level recruits.

Australia needs people with expertise in cybersecurity.

The skills crisis is exacerbated by the lack of high quality education and training programs in Australia for this specialist task. Our universities, for the most part, do not teach – or even research – complex cyber incidents on a scale that could begin to service the national need.

Read more: It’s time for governments to help their citizens deal with cybersecurity

The federal government must move quickly to strengthen and formalise arrangements for collaboration with key non-governmental partners – particularly the business sector, but also researchers and large non-profit entities.

Critical infrastructure providers, such as electricity companies, should be among the first businesses targeted for collaboration due to the scale of potential fallout if they came under attack.

To help achieve this, CIMA outlines plans to institutionalise, for the first time, regular cyber incident exercises that address nationwide needs.

Better long-term planning is needed

While these moves are a good start, there are three longer term tasks that need attention.

First, the government needs to construct a consistent, credible and durable public narrative around the purpose of its cyber incident policies, and associated exercise programs.

Former Cyber Security Minister Dan Tehan has spoken of a single cyber storm, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull spoke of a perfect cyber storm (several storms together), and Cyber Coordinator Alastair McGibbon spoke of a cyber catastrophe as the only existential threat Australia faced.

But there is little articulation in the public domain of what these ideas actually mean.

The new cyber incident management arrangements are meant to operate below the level of national cyber crisis. But the country is in dire need of a civil defence strategy for cyber space that addresses both levels of attack. There is no significant mention of cyber threats in the website of the Australian Disaster Resilience Knowledge Hub.

This is a completely new form of civil defence, and it may need a new form of organisation to carry it forward. A new, dedicated arm of a distant agency, such as the State Emergency Services (SES), is another potential solution.

One of us (Greg Austin) proposed in 2016 the creation of a new “cyber civil corps”. This would be a disciplined service relying on part-time commitments from the people best trained to respond to national cyber emergencies. A cyber civil corps could also help to define training needs and contribute to national training packages.

The second task falls to private business, who face potentially crippling costs in random cyber attacks.

They will need to build their own body of expertise in cyber simulations and exercise. Contracting out such responsibilities to consulting companies, or one-off reports, would produce scattershot results. Any “lessons learnt” within firms about contingency management could fail to be consolidated and shared with the wider business community.

Read more: The difference between cybersecurity and cybercrime, and why it matters

The third task of all stakeholders is to mobilise an expanding knowledge community led by researchers from academia, government and the private sector.

What exists at the moment is minimalist, and appears hostage to the preferences of a handful of senior officials in Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) and the Department of Home Affairs who may not be in post within several years.

Cyber civil defence is the responsibility of the entire community. Australia needs a national standing committee for cyber security emergency management and resilience that is an equal partnership between government, business, and academic specialists.

– ref. New guidelines for responding to cyber attacks don’t go far enough – http://theconversation.com/new-guidelines-for-responding-to-cyber-attacks-dont-go-far-enough-108908

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Campbell Pryor, PhD Student in Psychology, University of Melbourne

Why do people tend to do what others do, prefer what others prefer, and choose what others choose?

Our study, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, shows that people tend to copy other people’s choices, even when they know that those people did not make their choices freely, and when the decision does not reflect their own actual preferences.

It is well established that people tend to conform to behaviours that are common among other people. These are known as social norms.

Yet our finding that people conform to other’s choices that they know are completely arbitrary cannot be explained by most theories of this social norm effect. As such, it sheds new light on why people conform to social norms.

Read more: Digital assistants like Alexa and Siri might not be offering you the best deals

Would you do as others do?

Imagine you have witnessed a man rob a bank but then he gives the stolen money to an orphanage. Do you call the police or leave the robber be, so the orphanage can keep the money?

We posed this moral dilemma to 150 participants recruited online in our first experiment. Before they made their choice, we also presented information about how similar participants in a previous experiment had imagined acting during this dilemma.

Half of our participants were told that most other people had imagined reporting the robber. The remaining half were told that most other people had imagined not calling the police.

Crucially, however, we made it clear to our participants that these norms did not reflect people’s preferences. Instead, the norm was said to have occurred due to some faulty code in the experiment that randomly allocated the previous participants to imagining reporting or not reporting the robber.

This made it clear that the norms were arbitrary and did not actually reflect anybody’s preferred choice.

Whom did they follow?

We found that participants followed the social norms of the previous people, even though they knew they were entirely arbitrary and did not reflect anyone’s actual choices.

Simply telling people that many other people had been randomly allocated to imagine reporting the robber increased their tendency to favour reporting the robber.

A series of subsequent experiments, involving 631 new participants recruited online, showed that this result was robust. It held over different participants and different moral dilemmas. It was not caused by our participants not understanding that the norm was entirely arbitrary.

Why would people behave in such a seemingly irrational manner? Our participants knew that the norms were arbitrary, so why would they conform to them?

Is it the right thing to do?

One common explanation for norm conformity is that, if everyone else is choosing to do one thing, it is probably a good thing to do.

The other common explanation is that failing to follow a norm may elicit negative social sanctions, and so we conform to norms in an effort to avoid these negative responses.

Neither of these can explain our finding that people conform to arbitrary norms. Such norms offer no useful information about the value of different options or potential social sanctions.

Instead, our results support an alternative theory, termed self-categorisation theory. The basic idea is that people conform to the norms of certain social groups whenever they have a personal desire to feel like they belong to that group.

Importantly, for self-categorisation theory it does not matter whether a norm reflects people’s preference, as long as the behaviour is simply associated with the group. Thus, our results suggest that self-categorisation may play a role in norm adherence.

The cascade effect

But are we ever really presented with arbitrary norms that offer no rational reason for us to conform to them? If you see a packed restaurant next to an empty one, the packed restaurant must be better, right?

It’s a busy restaurant so it must be good, right? Shutterstock/EmmepiPhoto

Well, if everyone before you followed the same thought process, it is perfectly possible that an initial arbitrary decision by some early restaurant-goers cascaded into one restaurant being popular and the other remaining empty.

Termed information cascade, this phenomenon emphasises how norms can snowball from potentially irrelevant starting conditions whenever we are influenced by people’s earlier decisions.

Defaults may also lead to social norms that do not reflect people’s preferences but instead are driven by our tendency towards inaction.

For example, registered organ donors remain a minority in Australia, despite most Australians supporting organ donation. This is frequently attributed to our use of an opt-in registration system.

In fact, defaults may lead to norms occurring for reasons that run counter to the decision-maker’s interests, such as a company choosing the cheapest healthcare plan as a default. Our results suggest that people will still tend to follow such norms.

Conform to good behaviour

Increasingly, social norms are being used to encourage pro-social behaviour.

They have been successfully used to encourage healthy eating, increase attendance at doctor appointments, reduce tax evasion, increase towel reuse at hotels, decrease long-term energy use, and increase organ donor registrations.

Read more: Sexual subcultures are collateral damage in Tumblr’s ban on adult content

The better we can understand why people conform to social norms, the able we will be to design behavioural change interventions to address the problems facing our society.

The fact that the social norm effect works even for arbitrary norms opens up new and exciting avenues to facilitate behavioural change that were not previously possible.

– ref. Conform to the social norm: why people follow what other people do – http://theconversation.com/conform-to-the-social-norm-why-people-follow-what-other-people-do-107446

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vera L. te Velde, Lecturer in Economics, The University of Queensland

’Tis the season for gift-giving and for the scrooges among us to complain about the wastefulness of gift-giving. Why give gifts, they say, when people know what they want better than anyone else? Others grudgingly admit that, since gift-giving is customary, they will go along with it to avoid being a contrarian.

Many more of us are generous with our close friends and family, so we happily play along even if we question whether the custom makes anyone better off. Is every one of us a little bit of a Grinch?

Thankfully, new research suggests the answer is no. In a recent study, I found that human altruism extends beyond the material realm. That is, many of us experience “beliefs-based altruism”, which is concern for other people’s emotions and other psychological experiences beyond any material measure of well-being.

Beliefs-based altruism means we don’t give gifts only because we want people to have something that they want; we also give gifts because we want them to feel cared about, experience joy or a pleasant surprise when receiving it, or to prevent them from feeling disappointed if we fail to give anything.

Read more: How to have yourself a plastic-free Christmas

This kind of altruism can apply in many other situations. When girl guides come to our doors to sell cookies, we buy them not only to support the group and because we like cookies, but also because we want the girls to feel successful and valued.

When we go Christmas carolling, it’s more important to build a warm holiday spirit than to wow the audience with our amateur singing. And when child welfare charities send us information about our particular sponsored child, it’s because they know we care about the personal impact we’re having, not just the financial bottom line.

These examples may seem obvious but, more impressively, beliefs-based altruism can trump material concerns altogether. Often when we’re asked for feedback – for example, by a friend with a screenplay – we sugarcoat our response to protect their ego, even though they would benefit in the long run from harsher criticism. Or we may fail to let our dinner date know that they have spinach in their teeth to spare them embarrassment, even if they might want to know.

A little good news to end the year: we’re not as Grinchy as we might fear. IMDB

But how can we be sure that a pure concern for others’ feelings is the motivation for these behaviours, instead of (or at least in addition to) our own reputations? After all, I don’t only want girl guides to feel good, I also want to be known as someone who supports them. And I don’t only want to spare my date embarrassment, I also don’t want them to think I’m mean-spirited or superficial.

It’s hard to tell beliefs-based altruism from concern for reputation, and this was the key challenge in my research. To shed light on true motivations, I asked people what would make others happy in a simple sharing game.

In this game, one person (Alice) can share part of $10 with another person (Bob). But the bank handling the transfer occasionally makes a mistake and transfers exactly $1 to Bob. So if Bob receives $1, he does not know if the $1 came from Alice or from a bank mistake. Alice can use this to hide her intentions by choosing to share $1 herself.

Participants in the study were asked whether they thought Bob would prefer to be kept in the dark about Alice’s intentions – that is, if she were either particularly generous or ungenerous. For example, if Alice is selfish and only wants to share $1.10 with Bob, would Bob be happier receiving $1 instead and staying ignorant of her intentions? Many people thought Bob would be unhappy about Alice’s selfishness and happy about her generosity.

Amazingly enough, when they played this game themselves, these people were also more likely to give either exactly $1 (thereby hiding selfishness) or exactly $5 (thereby revealing maximal generosity). Some people share $1 to hide their selfishness, but these results show that Bob’s emotions were also a genuine concern.

Read more: Hate Christmas? A psychologist’s survival guide for Grinches

Economists have grown cynical about human altruism due to studies like this one that show people avoid supermarket entrances where people collecting donations for the Salvation Army are stationed. Certainly, we often avoid pressure to be altruistic, especially when it lets us maintain a reputation for kindness. But, at the same time, using a different entrance does at least save the solicitor from feeling rejected. And the same concern makes us especially generous when we do choose to be altruistic. It’s time to take a more charitable view of charitable actions.

In the meantime, give the nearest scrooge a hug. Maybe this simple act of beliefs-based altruism will remind him that when it comes to holiday gift-giving, it’s the thought that counts.

– ref. We’re not as Grinchy as we think: how gift-giving is inspired by beliefs-based altruism – http://theconversation.com/were-not-as-grinchy-as-we-think-how-gift-giving-is-inspired-by-beliefs-based-altruism-108739

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bryan Lessard, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CSIRO

Notorious for spreading diseases like malaria and Zika virus overseas, mosquitoes contribute to thousands of cases of human disease in Australia each year. But only half of Australia’s approximately 400 different species of mosquitoes have been scientifically named and described. So how are scientists able to tell the unnamed species apart?

Climate change means population change

Mosquito populations and our ability to predict disease outbreaks are likely to change in the future. As climates change, disease-carrying mozzies who love the heat may spread further south into populated cities.

As human populations continue to grow in Australia, they will interact with different communities of wild animals that act as disease reservoirs, as well as different mosquito species that may be capable of carrying these diseases. The expansion of agricultural and urban water storages will also create new homes for mosquito larvae to mature, allowing mosquitoes to spread further throughout the country.

Read more: How we kept disease-spreading Asian Tiger mozzies away from the Australian mainland

Mosquito larvae need a body of water to mature in. James Gathany, CDC

Agents of disease

Mosquitoes like the native Common Banded Mosquito (Culex annulirostris) are known to spread human diseases such as Ross River virus, Barmah Forest virus, Dengue fever and Murray Valley encephalitis.

It’s not the adult mosquito itself that causes the disease, but the viruses and other microbes that accumulate in the mosquito’s saliva and are injected into the bloodstream of the unsuspecting victim during feeding.

The mosquitoes that bite humans are female, requiring the proteins in blood to ripen their eggs and reach sexual maturity. Male mosquitoes, and females of some species, are completely vegetarian, opting to drink nectar from flowers, and are useful pollinators.

The life cycle of a mosquito. from www.shutterstock.com

Read more: Common Australian mosquitoes can’t spread Zika

The name game

Mosquitoes belong to the fly family Culicidae and are an important part of our biodiversity. There are more than 3,680 known species of mosquitoes in the world. Taxonomists, scientists who classify organisms, have been able to formally name more than 230 species in Australia.

The classification of Australian mosquitoes tapered off in the 1980s with the publication of the last volume of The Culicidae of the Australasian Region and passing of Dr Elizabeth Marks who was the most important contributor to our understanding of Australian mosquitoes.

She left behind 171 unique species with code numbers like “Culex sp No. 32”, but unfortunately these new species were never formally described and remained unnamed after her death. This isn’t uncommon in biodiversity research, as biologists estimate that we’ve only named 25% of life on earth during a time when there is an alarming decline in the taxonomic workforce.

Dr Marks’ unnamed species are still held in Australian entomology collections, like CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection, Museum Victoria and the Queensland Museum. Although all the major disease-carrying species of mosquitoes are known in the world, several of Marks’ undescribed Australian species are blood feeding and may have the capacity to transmit diseases.

How do we tell mozzies apart?

Naming, describing and establishing the correct classification of Australia’s mosquitoes is the first step to understanding their role in disease transmission. This is difficult work as adults are small and fragile, and important diagnostic features that are used to tell species apart, like antennae, legs and even tiny scales, are easily lost or damaged.

CSIRO scientists, with support from the Australian Biological Resources Study, Government of Western Australia Department of Health, and University of Queensland, have been tasked with naming Australia’s undescribed mosquitoes. New species will be named and described based on the appearance of the adults and infant larval stages which are commonly intercepted by mozzie surveillance officers. New identification tools will also be created so others can quickly and reliably identify the Australian species.

A 100 year old specimen of the native Common Banded Mosquito Culex annulirostris, capable of spreading Murray Valley encephalitis virus, one of 12 million specimens held in CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection in Canberra. CSIRO/Dr Bryan Lessard

Read more: How the new mozzie emoji can create buzz to battle mosquito-borne disease

Scientists are now able to extract DNA and sequence the entire mitochondrial genome from very old museum specimens. CSIRO are using these next generation techniques to generate a reliable DNA reference database of Australian mosquitoes to be used by other researchers and mozzie surveillance officers to accurately identify specimens and diagnose new species. CSIRO are also digitising museum specimens to unlock distribution data and establish the geographical boundaries for the Australian species.

By naming and describing new species, we will gain a more complete picture of our mosquito fauna, and its role in disease transmission. This will make us better prepared to manage our mosquitoes and human health in the future as the climate changes and our growing human population moves into new areas of Australia.

– ref. Why naming all our mozzies is important for fighting disease – http://theconversation.com/why-naming-all-our-mozzies-is-important-for-fighting-disease-92379

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian R. Camilleri, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Technology Sydney

What did you have for dinner last night? Might you have made a different choice if you had a simple way to compare the environmental impacts of different foods?

Most people do not recognise the environmental impact of their food choices. Our research, published in Nature Climate Change, shows that even when consumers do stop to think about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their food, they tend to underestimate it.

Fortunately, our study also points to a potential solution. We found that a simple “carbon label” can nudge consumers in the right direction, just as nutrition information helps to highlight healthier options.

Read more: How to reduce your kitchen’s impact on global warming

Most food production is highly industrialised, and has environmental impacts that most people do not consider. In many parts of the world, conversion of land for beef and agricultural production is a major cause of deforestation. Natural gas is a key input in the manufacture of fertiliser. Refrigeration and transportation also depend heavily on fossil fuels.

Overall, food production contributes 19-29% of global greenhouse emissions. The biggest contributor is meat, particularly red meat. Cattle raised for beef and dairy products are major sources of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Meat production is inherently inefficient: fertiliser is used to grow feedstock, but only a small portion of this feed becomes animal protein. It takes about 38 kilograms of plant-based protein to produce 1kg of beef – an efficiency of just 3%. For comparison, pork has 9% efficiency and poultry has 13%.

We could therefore cut greenhouse emissions from food significantly by opting for more vegetarian or vegan meals.

Food for thought

To find out whether consumers appreciate the environmental impact of their food choices, we asked 512 US volunteers to estimate the greenhouse emissions of 19 common foods and 18 typical household appliances.

We told the respondents that a 100-watt incandescent light bulb turned on for 1 hour produces 100 “greenhouse gas emission units”, and asked them to make estimates about the other items using this reference unit. In these terms, a serving of beef produces 2,481 emission units.

As shown below, participants underestimated the true greenhouse gas emissions of foods and appliances in almost every case. For example, the average estimate for a serving of beef was around 130 emission units – more than an order of magnitude less than the true amount. Crucially, foods were much more underestimated than appliances.

Consumers consistently underestimate the greenhouse emissions of food. Camilleri et al. Nature Climate Change 2018

Improving consumers’ knowledge

People often overestimate their understanding of common everyday objects and processes. You might think you have a pretty solid idea of how a toilet works, until you are asked to describe it in exact detail.

Food is a similarly familiar but complex phenomenon. We eat it every day, but its production and distribution processes are largely hidden. Unlike appliances, which have energy labels, are plugged into an electrical outlet, emit heat, and generally have clear indications of when they are using electricity, the release of greenhouse gases in the production and transportation of food is invisible.

One way to influence food choice is through labelling. We designed a new carbon label to communicate information about the total amount of greenhouse emissions involved in the production and transport of food.

Drawing on knowledge from the design of existing labels for nutrition, fuel economy and energy efficiency, we came up with the label shown below. It has two key features.

First, it translates greenhouse emissions into a concrete, familiar unit: equivalent number of light bulb minutes. A serving of beef and vegetable soup, for example, is roughly equivalent to a light bulb turned on for 2,127 minutes – or almost 36 hours.

Second, it displays the food’s relative environmental impact compared with other food, on an 11-point scale from green (low impact) to red (high impact). Our serving of beef and vegetable soup rates at 10 on the scale – deep into the red zone – because beef production is so emissions-intensive.

In the can – a carbon label for beef and vegetable soup reveals its high environmental impact.

To test the label, we asked 120 US volunteers to buy cans of soup from a selection of six. Half of the soups contained beef and the other half were vegetarian. Everyone was presented with price and standard nutritional information. Half of the group was also presented with our new carbon labels.

Volunteers who were shown the carbon labels chose significantly fewer beef soup options. Importantly, they also had more accurate perceptions of the relative carbon footprints of the different soups on offer.

Read more: You’ve heard of a carbon footprint – now it’s time to take steps to cut your nitrogen footprint

Figuring out the carbon footprint of every food item is difficult, expensive, and fraught with uncertainty. But we believe a simplified carbon label – perhaps using a traffic light system or showing relative scores for different foods – can help inform and empower consumers to reduce the environmental impact of their food choices.

– ref. What’s your beef? How ‘carbon labels’ can steer us towards environmentally friendly food choices – http://theconversation.com/whats-your-beef-how-carbon-labels-can-steer-us-towards-environmentally-friendly-food-choices-108424

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Margaret Gardner, President and Vice Chancellor, Monash University

Yesterday morning, the mid-year budget update unveiled research funding cuts of A$328.5 million over the next four years. This budget raid on research was more than double the size expected by the university research community.

This new freeze on growth in research funding and PhD scholarships follows last year’s freeze on funding for student places.

Read more: Universities get an unsustainable policy for Christmas

The effect will be felt immediately by the nation’s researchers and their research projects in positions lost and projects slowed, limited or not started. But the damage done will be felt for much longer – in inventions, ideas and opportunities missed.

Why has it been done?

As yet, there has been no adequate public explanation from government, save for two paragraphs in Education Minister Dan Tehan’s media release yesterday:

The decision to pause indexation of research block grant programs for 12 months, along with adjusting growth for RSP (the Research Support Program), will allow the government to prioritise education spending, including on regional higher education.

And this further par:

We have invested over A$350 million since the 2018-19 Budget to support students in regional and remote Australia.

In truth, most of Australia’s regional universities will lose millions of dollars more under the 2017 funding freeze than will be redistributed to them via this latest research cut. And under this new research freeze, they, too, will lose scholarships for PhD students – our next generation of brilliant research talent.

Research funding also goes towards keeping the lights on in libraries and labs so researchers can complete their work. from www.shutterstock.com

Nationwide, the government will fund up to 500 fewer of these scholarships for PhD candidates next year due to the research funding freeze. That’s 500 fewer people who will dedicate their talent to the creation of new knowledge in the national interest.

The education minister has tried to repair the damage inflicted by the 2017 decision of his predecessor – Simon Birmingham – only to compound the damage with this second freeze. That’s throwing bad policy after bad.

Regional universities were among those hardest hit by the 2017 MYEFO decision to cut funding for student places. And that decision continues to cut deeper each year – it will be felt more in 2019 than 2018, and more in 2020 than 2019.

How this will affect Australian research

The harm this will inflict is manifold.

First, it will cut the research funding program. This scheme enables universities to pay the salaries of researchers and technicians whose work enables ground-breaking discoveries. It also funds keeping the lights on in labs and libraries.

Read more: Educational researchers, show us your evidence but don’t expect us to fund it

These overheads of research are not funded by competitive grants. For every A$100,000 an Australian university secures in competitive research grants, it must find an extra A$85,000 to be able to deliver that research. Where will universities find these funds?

Second, it will cut the research training program. This funds scholarships for PhD students to enable them to complete their higher degrees – a necessary first step on the way to a career in research. This is a cut into their brilliant careers, and Australia’s future research capacity.

Third, it damages Australia’s standing as a global research leader. Why would a great researcher come to or stay in Australia, when the government has sent a message that, in a time of budget surplus, it’s prepared to cut into research?

Research funding is critical to Australia’s status as a global research leader. from www.shutterstock.com

Fourth, it will further undermine Australia’s position in research and development investment relative to our economic competitors. China now invests 2.1% of its GDP in research and development – while Australia’s total investment from all sectors in research and development (government, business and research institutions) is now just 1.88% of GDP. China’s economy is ten times bigger than Australia’s, but they’re investing 30 times more than we are.

Our government only spends A$10 billion on research and development each year. Only last Friday, it was revealed Australia’s government spending on research and development was already forecast to fall this year to its lowest level in four decades as a percentage of GDP – to 0.5%. This new research funding cut only worsens this situation.

With the budget in surplus, it makes no sense

University leaders knew research funding was at risk, and so jobs for researchers, technicians and researchers were at risk. But beyond these jobs are the projects they support and the Australians from all walks of life whose lives have or will be transformed by Australian research.

Read more: Margaret Gardner: freezing university funding is out of step with the views of most Australians

Universities Australia has stories of survivors of stroke, cervical cancer and family violence speaking about how crucial university research has been in the lives of people like them at #UniResearchChangesLives.

With a government budget surplus in sight, it makes no sense to cut the research capacity that will create jobs, income and new industries for Australia.

– ref. MYEFO rips A$130 million per year from research funding despite budget surplus – http://theconversation.com/myefo-rips-a-130-million-per-year-from-research-funding-despite-budget-surplus-108919

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Pryke, Lecturer, Languages and Literature of Ancient Israel, Macquarie University

There are many sides to the beloved figure of Santa Claus – a giant of pop culture, he also has “miraculous” powers and ties to the celebration of the birth of Jesus. Santa’s blend of religion and popular culture is, however, not modern at all. Several of Santa’s modern features, such as his generosity, miracle-working, and focus on morality (being “naughty or nice”), were part of his image from the very beginning. Others, like the reindeer, came later.

The original Santa, Saint Nicholas, was a fourth century CE bishop of Myra (in modern Turkey) with a reputation for generosity and wonder-working. St Nicholas became an important figure in eighth century Byzantium before hitting pan-European stardom around the 11th century.

He became a focus not just for religious devotion, but Medieval dramas and popular festivals – some popular enough to be suppressed during the Reformation

The naughty list

St Nicholas had his own version of the naughty list, including the fourth century “arch-heretic” Arius, whose views annoyed the saint so much he supposedly smacked Arius in the face in front of Emperor Constantine and assembled bishops at Nicaea.

Portrait of Saint Nicholas of Myra. First half of the 13th century. Wikimedia

An even more surprising listee is the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis. In popular Byzantine stories, Nicholas acted like a one-man wrecking crew, personally pulling down her temples, and even demolishing the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It’s almost a shame, as they probably would have agreed about the importance of reindeer.

The idea of St Nicholas’ conflict with Artemis probably relates to religious change in Anatolia, where the goddess was hugely popular. Historically, the temple was sacked earlier, by a band of Gothic raiders in the 260s CE, but hagiographers had other ideas. Perhaps these furious northmen even count as Santa’s earliest “helpers”. He was after all (as part of his extensive saintly portfolio) the patron of the Varangians, the Viking bodyguard of the Byzantine Emperors.

Fast travelling

Santa’s greatest miracle is intrinsic to modern Christmases: his ability to reach all the children on Earth in one night. NORAD, the US and Canadian air defence force, has tracked Santa’s sleigh since the 1950s, presumably trying to figure out the secret of his super speed. But really, they just need to check their ancient sources.

St Nicholas had a history of teleporting about on his own — often showing up in the nick of time when people ask for his help. As the patron saint of sailors, he often did this out at sea.

In one story, sailors in a wild storm in the eastern Mediterranean cried out for the already-famous wonderworker’s help. With the mast cracking and sails coming loose, a white-bearded man suddenly appeared and helped them haul the ropes, steady the tiller, and brought them safe to shore. Rushing up the hill to the local church to give thanks, the sailors were astonished to see Nicholas was already there, in the middle of saying mass.

Saint Nicholas saves a ship. Circa 1425. Wikimedia

Suddenly appearing to save people became a favourite trick in accounts of the saint’s life and in folklore. He once saved three innocents from execution, teleporting behind the executioner and grabbing his sword, before upbraiding the judges for taking bribes.

There’s also the tale of Adeodatus, a young boy kidnapped by raiders and made the cupbearer of an eastern potentate. Soon after, St Nicholas appeared out of nowhere, grabbed the cupbearer in front of his startled master, and zipped him back home.

Artists depicting this story stage the rescue differently, but the Italian artists who have St Nicholas swoop in from the sky, in full episcopal regalia, and grab the boy by the hair are worth special mention.

The flying reindeer

None of the old tales have Saint Nicholas carrying around stacks of gifts when teleporting, which brings us to the reindeer, who can pull the sleigh full of millions of presents. The popular link between Santa Claus and gifting came through the influence of stores advertising their Christmas shopping in the early 19th century. This advertising drew on the old elf’s increasing popularity, with the use of “live” Santa visits in department stores for children from the late 1800s.

Santa Claus became connected to reindeer largely through the influence of the 1823 anonymous poem, A visit from St Nicholas.. In this poem, “Saint Nicholas” arrives with eight tiny reindeer pulling a sleigh full of toys. The reindeer have the miraculous ability to fly.

The fly agaric, a mushroom which produces toxins that can cause humans to hallucinate. Flickr/Björn, CC BY-SA

The origins of the animals’ flight may link back to the Saami reindeer herders of northern Scandinavia. Here, the herders were said to feed their reindeer a type of red-and-white mushroom with psychedelic properties, known as fly agaric fungi (Amanita muscaria). The mushrooms made the reindeer leap about, giving the impression of flying.

The herders would then collect and consume the reindeer’s urine, with its toxins made safe by the reindeer’s metabolism. The reindeer herders could then possibly imagine the miraculous flight through the psychedelic properties of the mushroom.

The ninth reindeer, Rudolph, was created as part of a promotional campaign for the department store Montgomery Ward by Robert Lewis May in 1939. May himself was a small, frail child, who empathised with underdogs. In May’s story, Rudolph Shines Again (1954), the little reindeer is helped by an angel to save some lost baby rabbits, once again blending Santa’s religious and popular sides.

Reindeer in Lapland. Flickr/Steve K, CC BY

And … invisible polar bears

A number of modern depictions have connected Santa with polar bears, such as the 1994 film The Santa Clause. It seems likely the association grew as Santa’s home became accepted as the North Pole — though in one of the oldest stories, St Nicholas saves three Roman soldiers, one of whom is named Ursus (“Bear” in Latin).

Polar bears are undoubtedly useful companions for secretive Santa, and don’t even need his powers to move about unseen – the special properties of their fur mean they are hidden even from night-vision goggles.

Polar bears have fur that is invisible to night vision goggles. Shutterstock

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters From Father Christmas (1976), written by the Lord of the Rings’ author to his children, features the (mis)adventures of the North Polar Bear. Like St. Nick, the North Polar Bear isn’t shy about getting physical with those he perceives as wrong-doers. In one letter, the North Polar Bear saves Santa, his elves, and Christmas from a murderous group of goblins.

So with Santa Claus once again coming to town, remember — ancient or modern – it’s better to be on the “nice” side of this teleporting saint and his motley crew of miracle-workers.

– ref. Teleporting and psychedelic mushrooms: a history of St Nicholas, Santa and his helpers – http://theconversation.com/teleporting-and-psychedelic-mushrooms-a-history-of-st-nicholas-santa-and-his-helpers-107884

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Miriam Bankovsky, Senior Lecturer in Politics, La Trobe University

Last week, the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA) published their third annual Free Speech on Campus Audit. It found all but one Australian university (the University of New England) stifles diversity of ideas and academic freedom.

The problem isn’t just that the IPA’s analysis has been criticised for its substandard quality by many academics. Nor that it conflates academic freedom with freedom of expression, and neglects to mention academic autonomy – a fundamental university obligation.

Read more: Special pleading: free speech and Australian universities

The major problem is it polarises debate into clear factions. You’re either for universities or against them. This polarisation prevents us from discussing threats to academic freedom that really do exist, some of which universities perpetuate themselves.

Genuine threats

The ANU’s recent summit on academic freedom and academic autonomy offered a rare opportunity to explore this issue. The event began, predictably, with speakers defending universities against a fabricated crisis. Speakers clarified the relationship between a university’s obligations to uphold:

• academic autonomy (institutional self-governance)

• academic freedom (academics’ right to choose what to research, publish, and comment on)

• freedom of expression (citizens’ rights to express their views).

It became clear that many cases the IPA’s audit identified are actually examples of universities upholding commitment to good scholarship and the dissemination of knowledge in formal teaching and research spaces.

It may be necessary, for example, to reject philanthropic donors who disregard academic autonomy. Or to refuse to host speakers who reject scholarly norms which underpin academic freedom, while also permitting student protest in the university square as free expression.

The Summit’s most important contribution, though, was its determination to discuss an array of genuine and seldom-discussed threats to academic freedom and autonomy. A major threat is policing from within academic orthodoxies, particularly in public health. This can suppress unpalatable findings and ostracise those not toeing the party line.

Researchers working in fields such as obesity, sugar, mammography, smoking and addiction report various attempts from academic colleagues to silence findings that challenge public health orthodoxies. These silencing attempts include threats of violence, legal action and misconduct allegations, among many others because the work is “dangerous” or risks “confusing people”.

For example, professor Wayne Hall recounted he was told to “shut up” by fellow tobacco control researchers because he was critical of the government’s e-cigarette ban. His position was that the potential benefits of e-cigarettes as a harm minimisation strategy had been overlooked.

A related threat is the influence of vested interests, including authoritarian regimes such as China. When Australian universities collaborate with Chinese universities in research, they compromise the intellectual freedom of their own academics.

They also undermine their Chinese colleagues, whose work is seriously limited by government demands. A party communiqué from the Chinese government in 2013 prohibits Chinese academics from researching or teaching in seven areas:

1. constitutional democracy
2. civil society
3. economic liberalisation
4. freedom of the press
5. historical critiques of the Communist Party
6. challenges to socialism with Chinese characteristics
7. discussion of universal values (such as human rights and freedoms, academic freedom included).

Another threat to academic freedom is misinformation from outside universities, including character assassination of academics in major media outlets and on social media. These pile-ons can be personally traumatic, but also create a broader chilling effect around politically charged issues, leading researchers to self-censor.

The university’s role

Further threats come from universities themselves. Precarious employment and funding prevents the security required for real academic freedom.

Universities also threaten academic freedom when they grant their own managers and councils unilateral power to control the reputational risks of academic work. Academic freedom policies and enterprise bargaining clauses often limit public comment to the academic’s area of expertise. But university managers can narrowly define these areas. Very few permit public critique of university matters. The ANU’s Statement on Academic Freedom provides a fine exception.

Read more: University changes to academic contracts are threatening freedom of speech

Codes of conduct increasingly require researchers to uphold their employer’s “good reputation”. One Australian university prevented an ethics committee review of research on the clinical use of psychadelics to treat PTSD. This was due to concerns the research would damage the university’s reputation.

Undermining academic involvement in university self-governance is a further barrier to academics having input into issues that affect their freedom.

Finally, ARC grants in certain disciplines are harder to come by. Universities are also forced by government to prioritise research that attracts external stakeholders. If scholars in certain disciplines (such as humanities and creative arts) are consistently denied research resources, their academic freedom is only theoretical.

Solutions

The move beyond polarisation allows us to proactively consider how universities might limit these threats. It’s important for universities themselves to model the kind of discourse they value. One idea involves cultivating better research training to allow more nuanced responses in dealing with sensitive research topics.

Nuance and rigour would also be improved by removing conduct clauses around upholding a university’s “good reputation”. Academics should be expressly permitted to comment on university-related matters, as per the ANU’s Statement.

Public health researchers have reported receiving threats of violence, legal action and misconduct allegations. Michael Ramsey/AAP

Getting more academic staff onto university councils would allow academics to better scrutinise the impact university business dealings have on academic freedom.

Whether and how to resource non-profitable research needs frank consideration. There is the option of setting aside a portion of university research block grant funding for quality humanities projects and research where practical, real-world applications aren’t immediately obvious.

As for authoritarian regimes, Australian universities should take a blanket approach to embedding academic freedom clauses in all external funding contracts. They should also lobby to include academic freedom as an indicator in global rankings. This would provide incentives for authoritarian regimes to improve.

Read more: Four fundamental principles for upholding freedom of speech on campus

Finally, it’s essential to promote greater cultures of protection within universities both through proactive legal and complaint-handling processes. There should also be a greater willingness to make a commitment to academic freedom through statements, policy changes and events like the Summit.

Getting beyond the IPA’s polarised terms is essential if we are to realistically address threats to academic freedom.

– ref. We need to talk about the actual threats to academic freedom on Australian campuses – http://theconversation.com/we-need-to-talk-about-the-actual-threats-to-academic-freedom-on-australian-campuses-108596

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danielle Wood, Program Director, Budget Policy and Institutional Reform, Grattan Institute

The Morrison government wants next year’s election to be about economic management.

So understandably, it’s using the improved bottom line in the Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) to talk up its economic credentials.

But the numbers in MYEFO show it has failed to hit many of its own targets.

Target 1: Surpluses on average over the cycle

The government’s overarching fiscal objective is to deliver budget surpluses: not just in one year but on average over the economic cycle.

MYEFO indicates the government is expecting a $5.2 billion deficit in 2018-19 (0.3% of GDP).

It will be the 11th consecutive deficit for the Commonwealth budget.

Deficits have averaged $33.2 billion (2.1% of GDP) over those 11 years.

Yes, a $4.1 billion surplus is forecast for next year, with surpluses projected to reach $19 billion (0.9% of GDP) by 2021-22.

But so big have the recent deficits been, that even if everything goes well and the fiscal position continues to improve, the budget would need to be in surplus for decades to produce a surplus on average over each year, far longer than what most economists consider a typical economic cycle.

Read more: MYEFO reveals billions more in revenue, $9 billion in fresh election tax cuts

A related fiscal target is that budget surpluses will build to at least 1% of GDP as soon as possible.

Despite revenue windfalls from income and company taxes (discussed below), the government is still forecasting it won’t reach that 1% of GDP surplus target until 2025-26.

Policy decisions in this year’s budget and MYEFO – including income and company tax cuts, additional funding for independent and Catholic schools, and changes to the GST formula to placate Western Australia – have weakened the bottom line in 2021-22 by $10.5 billion.

Hardly the actions of a government in a hurry to deliver a sizeable surplus.

Verdict: Fail.

Target 2: Reduce the payments-to-GDP ratio

The government’s policy is also to maintain strong fiscal discipline by controlling expenditure, with a falling payments-to-GDP ratio its measure of success.

Whether it has met the target depends on the starting year. Governments payments are forecast to reach 24.9% of GDP in 2018-19, up from 23.9% in 2012-13 before the Coalition took office.

The government prefers the starting point of its first year in office 2013-14 where payments were 25.5% of GDP.

Either way, payments in 2018-19 remain above the 30-year historical average of 24.7% of GDP.

Read more: Morrison’s return to surplus built on the back of higher tax – Parliamentary Budget Office

While the government projects that spending will fall slightly further to 24.6% of GDP by 2021-22, this relies on spending growth across the government’s major programs falling substantially compared to the previous four years – without major policy changes to help facilitate the fall.

Verdict: Debateable pass.

Target 3: Tax-to-GDP ratio below 23.9% of GDP

In last year’s budget, the government introduced a new target of capping tax collections at 23.9% of GDP.

Why 23.9%? That was the average level of tax during the final two terms of the Howard/Costello government.

While the Coalition is understandably keen to follow the lead of one of its most electorally successful governments, that was also a period where tax collections were historically high.

Tax collections are projected to reach 23.8% of GDP in 2022, on the back of stronger than forecast personal income tax and company tax receipts.

Verdict: Pass.

MYEFO Chart.

Target 4: New spending measures more than offset by reductions in spending elsewhere

Since becoming prime minister, Scott Morrison has sent mixed signals about whether his government will adhere to the longstanding budget rule that all new spending proposals be matched with budget savings.

At the MYEFO press conference, Finance Minister Matthias Cormann said it was a “matter of balancing competition priorities”.

Here’s the straight answer – the net effect of policy changes announced in MYEFO are an additional $12.2 billion in spending over four years.

In other words, the government has not offset new spending with cuts to other spending programs. The Turnbull government similarly failed to offset its new spending in 2017-18 (although it succeeded in prior years).

Read more: Monday’s MYEFO will look good, but it will set the budget up for awful trouble down the track

There have been some reductions in spending because of improvements in the economy. The government claims these reductions offset its recent spending announcements. But genuine offsets come from policy changes, not economic good luck.

Verdict: Fail.

Target 5: Shifts due to changes in the economy banked as an improvement in budget bottom line

This objective is key to the government’s fiscal conservative credentials.

If it has some economic good luck, it commits to use the proceeds for budget repair rather than new spending or tax cuts.

This rule has been irrelevant for most of the past decade, because almost every budget had revenue collections falling short of forecast.

But the Morrison government is in the middle of a mini revenue boom – revenue collections were higher than forecast in both the 2018-19 budget and MYEFO.

Company tax collections are higher largely due to strong commodity prices. Income tax collections are up and government spending is down because of improvements in the economy.

Read more: Labor would deliver bigger surpluses than the Coalition: Bowen

So has the government used this chance to show off its fiscal prudence?

Not exactly. It will spend around $11.8 billion of this windfall, give away another $19.3 billion in tax cuts and bank just over half of it ($35.2 billion) to the bottom line.

And in the shadow of an election, we can almost certainly expect further spending. The $9 billion in decisions taken but not announced – potentially a pre-election warchest – suggests that more tax cuts could also be on the way.

Verdict: Fail.

Our final verdict

The challenge in assessing budget management is separating good luck from good management. Governments will always seek to take credit for economic upswings that boost the bottom line.

Fiscal targets are there to keep them on the straight and narrow.

An objective assessment of the government’s performance against its own key targets suggests its good news budget is more mirage than magnificent management.

– ref. More mirage than good management, MYEFO fails to hit its own targets – http://theconversation.com/more-mirage-than-good-management-myefo-fails-to-hit-its-own-targets-108830

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danielle Wood, Program Director, Budget Policy and Institutional Reform, Grattan Institute

The Morrison government wants next year’s election to be about economic management.

So understandably, it’s using the improved bottom line in the Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) to talk up its economic credentials.

But the numbers in MYEFO show it has failed to hit many of its own targets.

Target 1: Surpluses on average over the cycle

The government’s overarching fiscal objective is to deliver budget surpluses: not just in one year but on average over the economic cycle.

MYEFO indicates the government is expecting a $5.2 billion deficit in 2018-19 (0.3% of GDP).

It will be the 11th consecutive deficit for the Commonwealth budget.

Deficits have averaged $33.2 billion (2.1% of GDP) over those 11 years.

Yes, a $4.1 billion surplus is forecast for next year, with surpluses projected to reach $19 billion (0.9% of GDP) by 2021-22.

But so big have the recent deficits been, that even if everything goes well and the fiscal position continues to improve, the budget would need to be in surplus for decades to produce a surplus on average over each year, far longer than what most economists consider a typical economic cycle.

Read more: MYEFO reveals billions more in revenue, $9 billion in fresh election tax cuts

A related fiscal target is that budget surpluses will build to at least 1% of GDP as soon as possible.

Despite revenue windfalls from income and company taxes (discussed below), the government is still forecasting it won’t reach that 1% of GDP surplus target until 2025-26.

Policy decisions in this year’s budget and MYEFO – including income and company tax cuts, additional funding for independent and Catholic schools, and changes to the GST formula to placate Western Australia – have weakened the bottom line in 2021-22 by $10.5 billion.

Hardly the actions of a government in a hurry to deliver a sizeable surplus.

Verdict: Fail.

Target 2: Reduce the payments-to-GDP ratio

The government’s policy is also to maintain strong fiscal discipline by controlling expenditure, with a falling payments-to-GDP ratio its measure of success.

Whether it has met the target depends on the starting year. Governments payments are forecast to reach 24.9% of GDP in 2018-19, up from 23.9% in 2012-13 before the Coalition took office.

The government prefers the starting point of its first year in office 2013-14 where payments were 25.5% of GDP.

Either way, payments in 2018-19 remain above the 30-year historical average of 24.7% of GDP.

Read more: Morrison’s return to surplus built on the back of higher tax – Parliamentary Budget Office

While the government projects that spending will fall slightly further to 24.6% of GDP by 2021-22, this relies on spending growth across the government’s major programs falling substantially compared to the previous four years – without major policy changes to help facilitate the fall.

Verdict: Debateable pass.

Target 3: Tax-to-GDP ratio below 23.9% of GDP

In last year’s budget, the government introduced a new target of capping tax collections at 23.9% of GDP.

Why 23.9%? That was the average level of tax during the final two terms of the Howard/Costello government.

While the Coalition is understandably keen to follow the lead of one of its most electorally successful governments, that was also a period where tax collections were historically high.

Tax collections are projected to reach 23.8% of GDP in 2022, on the back of stronger than forecast personal income tax and company tax receipts.

Verdict: Pass.

MYEFO Chart.

Target 4: New spending measures more than offset by reductions in spending elsewhere

Since becoming prime minister, Scott Morrison has sent mixed signals about whether his government will adhere to the longstanding budget rule that all new spending proposals be matched with budget savings.

At the MYEFO press conference, Finance Minister Matthias Cormann said it was a “matter of balancing competition priorities”.

Here’s the straight answer – the net effect of policy changes announced in MYEFO are an additional $12.2 billion in spending over four years.

In other words, the government has not offset new spending with cuts to other spending programs. The Turnbull government similarly failed to offset its new spending in 2017-18 (although it succeeded in prior years).

Read more: Monday’s MYEFO will look good, but it will set the budget up for awful trouble down the track

There have been some reductions in spending because of improvements in the economy. The government claims these reductions offset its recent spending announcements. But genuine offsets come from policy changes, not economic good luck.

Verdict: Fail.

Target 5: Shifts due to changes in the economy banked as an improvement in budget bottom line

This objective is key to the government’s fiscal conservative credentials.

If it has some economic good luck, it commits to use the proceeds for budget repair rather than new spending or tax cuts.

This rule has been irrelevant for most of the past decade, because almost every budget had revenue collections falling short of forecast.

But the Morrison government is in the middle of a mini revenue boom – revenue collections were higher than forecast in both the 2018-19 budget and MYEFO.

Company tax collections are higher largely due to strong commodity prices. Income tax collections are up and government spending is down because of improvements in the economy.

Read more: Labor would deliver bigger surpluses than the Coalition: Bowen

So has the government used this chance to show off its fiscal prudence?

Not exactly. It will spend around $11.8 billion of this windfall, give away another $19.3 billion in tax cuts and bank just over half of it ($35.2 billion) to the bottom line.

And in the shadow of an election, we can almost certainly expect further spending. The $9 billion in decisions taken but not announced – potentially a pre-election warchest – suggests that more tax cuts could also be on the way.

Verdict: Fail.

Our final verdict

The challenge in assessing budget management is separating good luck from good management. Governments will always seek to take credit for economic upswings that boost the bottom line.

Fiscal targets are there to keep them on the straight and narrow.

An objective assessment of the government’s performance against its own key targets suggests its good news budget is more mirage than magnificent management.

– ref. More mirage than good management, MYEFO fails to meet its own targets – http://theconversation.com/more-mirage-than-good-management-myefo-fails-to-meet-its-own-targets-108830

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Morgan, Senior Meteorologist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology

This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky! You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

How do people know what the weather is? – Liam, age 5.

The weather affects all of us every day and it’s very important for people like pilots, sailors and firefighters to know what weather they should expect. But how do we know what the weather will be like tomorrow or next week?

That’s the job of meteorologists. They’re not experts on meteors, they’re experts on weather!

The name meteorologist comes from a very, very old Greek word, which means “studying things that are high in the air”.

They use three main things to help them decide what weather is on the way: weather observations, computer weather models, and their own experience.

Weather observations

That means what the weather is doing now. So they need lots of measurements of things like air pressure, temperature and rainfall, not just from on the ground, but high in the sky and even from up in space as well. For those measurements they rely on weather balloons and aeroplanes, as well as radars and satellites.

Computer weather models

Really powerful computers use information about what the weather is doing now and how it has behaved in the past to help predict how it will behave in the future. They do lots and lots of calculations to tell us what is most likely to happen.

Experience

The final thing meteorologists need is their own experience. That helps them decide whether the computer’s prediction is likely to be right, or perhaps needs to be changed a little bit. Usually the meteorologists have spent a long time studying the weather so they have a really good knowledge of how it behaves.

Read more: Curious Kids: What existed before the Big Bang? Did something have to be there to go boom?

Twice every day the Bureau of Meteorology (which is sometimes called the Weather Bureau) sends out the official weather forecasts for towns and cities across Australia.

These forecasts look at only the next seven days, because the further ahead they try to predict the harder it is to get it right. That also means the forecast for tomorrow or the day after is likely to be more accurate than the one for this time next week.

You should also remember that sometimes weather is very local. That means it can be raining in one place but dry and sunny just a few kilometres away. So next time you see a forecast for a “shower or two” but you see mostly blue sky where you are, give your friend on the other side of town a call. They might be wearing a raincoat and hiding under an umbrella!

So, we don’t always know exactly what the weather is going to be like at your place, but thanks to the Bureau of Meteorology we can give you a very good idea of what to expect.

Read more: Curious Kids: where do clouds come from and why do they have different shapes?

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

CC BY-ND

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

– ref. Curious Kids: how do people know what the weather will be? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-do-people-know-what-the-weather-will-be-108295

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University

Prime Minister Scott Morrison will have learned a valuable foreign policy lesson in the past day or so as it relates to the Holy Land.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap (Galatians 6:7).

When Morrison allowed a thought bubble to become a political ploy in the Liberal party’s desperation to cling on to a safe seat in the Wentworth byelection, he miscalculated the damage it would cause to his own credibility and the country’s foreign policy settings.

An inexperienced prime minister blundered into the thicket of Middle East politics by announcing Australia would both consider moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and would also review its support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

This latter is the 159-page document negotiated by the permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany. In it, Iran agreed to freeze its nuclear program.

Read more: Shifting the Australian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would be a big, cynical mistake

In any event, Morrison indicated Canberra would continue to adhere to JCPOA, thus putting itself at odds with Washington. The United States announced it would abandon the JCPOA, pending the negotiation of better terms.

In his efforts to purloin the Jewish vote in Wentworth, Morrison’s shallow marketing impulses got the better of policy prudence.

He proceeded with haste in the first instance, and now he can repent at leisure after having sought – unsuccessfully it seems – to thread the needle in his policy pronouncements at the weekend.

If we stretch the biblical allusions further, we might say that when it comes to the Middle East, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a political ingénue to shift the status quo in Australia’s position on the vexed Arab-Israel issue.

What has now happened – as it inevitably would – after Morrison announced that Australia would recognise West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and establish a branch office there, is a negative reaction not only from the Muslim world, but from Israel itself.

So an Australian prime minister goes out on a limb for the Jewish state, only to have it sawn off by critics in Israel who did not like the distinction he made between Jerusalem’s Jewish west and Arab east.

Under Israel’s Basic Law, the constitution, an undivided Jerusalem is deemed to be the country’s capital in perpetuity. This position was bolstered in a Knesset vote as recently as this year.

Israel’s official reaction to the Morrison announcement was to describe it as a “step in the right direction”. However, as its implications sunk in, Israeli public figures began to take strong exception to Australia’s “acknowledgement” of Palestinian claims to Jerusalem in a final status peace settlement.

Typical of the reaction was this, via Twitter, from Tzachi Hanegbi, a prominent Knesset member of the nationalist Likud party and confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yuli Edelstein, the speaker of the Knesset, went further.

We expected more from a friendly country like Australia […] I am hoping that our cool response will make it clear to the Australians that this is not what we were wishing for.

Pointedly, Netanyahu had not commented publicly at time of writing.

In his announcement on Saturday at a Sydney Institute event, Morrison set out his stall on the Jerusalem issue. In the process, apart from infuriating the Israeli nationalist right, he exposed himself to withering criticism at home and in the region.

This was the nub of Morrison’s statement:

Australia now recognises West Jerusalem, being the seat of the Knesset and many of the institutions of government, is the capital of Israel […] Furthermore, recognising our commitment to a two-state solution, the Australian Government has also resolved to acknowledge the aspirations of the Palestinian people for a future state with its capital in East Jerusalem.

While Morrison’s use of the word “acknowledge” falls a long way short of “recognising” Palestinian aspirations, his “acknowledgement”, in the context of final status peace negotiations, trespasses on an Israeli article of faith.

Israel’s insistence on an undivided Jerusalem in perpetuity under its control contradicts an international consensus that East Jerusalem remains occupied territory since the 1967 Six-Day War.

Australia has supported numerous United Nations resolutions to this effect, including Security Council resolutions 242 of 1967 and 338 of 1973 that called on Israel to withdraw from territories occupied in war.

In his efforts to find favour with Israel’s supporters, Morrison crossed that divide, thereby infuriating an Israeli government and discomforting Israel’s backers in Australia, notwithstanding their professed delight at the latest turn of events.

Read more: Moving the Australian embassy to Jerusalem makes sense: here’s why

Australia’s position, it might be noted, contrasts with that of the United States. Washington recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital earlier this year without making a distinction between “west” and “east”.

In his Sydney Institute speech, Morrison indicated he and his public service advisers had conferred widely in their efforts to come up with a form of words that would be consistent with his pledge to review Australia’s position on Jerusalem.

This review included consultations with:

…some eminent Australian policymakers: former heads of various agencies and departments whether in Defence, Foreign Affairs or Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Advice to Morrison from what was known as a “reference group” of “eminent Australian policymakers” was overwhelmingly, it not unanimously, resistant to changing the status quo.

In other words, Australia should adhere to settled policy.

Morrison chose to ignore this advice after having committed himself to a review. In the process, and unnecessarily, he has risked negative reactions from Australia’s important neighbours, Indonesia and Malaysia, and from the Arab world. At home, he has exposed himself to criticism he has jeopardised Australia’s international standing for no conspicuous benefit.

This has been a mess, and one entirely of Morrison’s own making, driven by short-term political calculations.

– ref. Morrison’s decision to recognise West Jerusalem the latest bad move in a mess of his own making – http://theconversation.com/morrisons-decision-to-recognise-west-jerusalem-the-latest-bad-move-in-a-mess-of-his-own-making-108892

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marcus Carter, Lecturer in Digital Cultures, SOAR Fellow., University of Sydney

2018 has been a big year for video games – and not just because of the games that were released.

We’ve seen broken revenue records, burgeoning discussions about the labour that goes into producing games, and a crack-down on predatory practices that squeeze more dollars out of players.

Meanwhile, eSports and livestreaming showed bumper growth. Progressively updated games, and the “early access” trend continued to both delight and frustrate.

In the games themselves, we got a heavy dose of nostalgia with new twists on the classics.

Read more: Could playing Fortnite lead to video game addiction? The World Health Organisation says yes, but others disagree

Bumper revenues

The “battle royale” game Fortnite was the most outstanding and unexpected success of the year, hitting 78.3 million players in August 2018 and bumping developer Epic Games to a US$15 billion dollar valuation.

Cementing the economic scale of video-games, Rockstar Games’s Red Dead Redemption 2 had the second highest opening weekend for any media release ever, grossing US$725 million – and outstripping any of the latest Marvel movies .

Red Dead Redemption 2 grossed USD$750 million in its opening weekend. instacodex/flickr

Scrutiny of practices

Accompanying these dizzying numbers were reports of “crunch” – excessive and extensive periods of overtime – to get games released on time.

This has led to louder conversations about the labour that goes into making games, and a growing unionisation movement.

Attention also focused on the gambling-like transactions that now pervade “freemium” games. These games are free to play, but include many premium features that can be accessed with an unlimited number of small, in-game purchases (or “microtransactions”).

In June, the Australian Senate referred some of these practices to a senate inquiry, which concluded with a recommendation for a more comprehensive review.

The classics re-imagined

Many of 2018’s most anticipated and celebrated games drew heavily from the past. Games like Enhance Games’s acclaimed Tetris Effect, and Nintendo’s Pokémon: Let’s Go are both re-imaginings of classic games from well-established franchises.

It may be that the biggest MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) lauch for 2019 will be the re-release of the 2004 “classic” version of World of Warcraft.

Gaming hardware manufacturers are tapping into this too, with devices like Nintendo Classic Mini selling out at launch.

Read more: Facebook punts on gaming to lure millennials back to the platform

Increased longevity of games

Digital games are incredibly time-consuming and costly to produce. As such, games are taking on longer life cycles, with increased focus on online multiplayer game modes.

A good example is 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V, which had an initial development budget over US$250 million. Thanks to the enduring popularity of its online mode, the game is now the most profitable media product of all time.

Bethesda has followed this with a (so far poorly received) foray into the online space with Fallout 76, an online version of its popular singleplayer Fallout series.

With the life cycle of game development stretching across multiple years, it’s likely that future game releases will focus on longer life cycles for games and to support online play, where players can continually make regular microtransactions while they play (as is the case of Grand Theft Auto V).

eSports and livestreaming

eSports and livestreaming have continued to prove immensely popular in 2018.

Valve’s Dota 2 amassed its largest prize-pool to date, over US$25 million. And new eSports promise to emerge, with Valve releasing Artifact this month – its take on the popular digital card game genre (competing with Blizzard’s Hearthstone).

Further blowing up this space, Epic Games announced over US$100 million in prize money for Fortnite’s eSport in 2019.

Much of the success of games like Fornite can be attributed to the recent and rapid growth of video game livestreaming on platforms like Twitch, where you can watch other people play games.

Fortnite streamer ‘Ninja’ on Ellen.

Fortnite streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins exemplifies this as a now global phenomenon transcending Twitch; he even played with TV host Ellen. Ninja amassed a viewership of over 600,000 concurrent viewers when he broadcast his gameplay session with popular celebrities like Drake.

Given the immense popularity of watching games, it is likely we will continue to see games designed to be watched, and not just played.

Early access and the ongoing evolution of games

It’s no coincidence that many of the games mentioned so far didn’t actually launch this year, with various trends changing what it means to talk about a “year in videogames”.

Games like Hello Games’s No Mans Sky have been updated significantly in 2018, following the game’s rocky 2016 launch. These updates have been very positively received – but because it is an online game, the 2016 version people paid for no longer exists.

Read more: Gaming or gambling: study shows almost half of loot boxes in video games constitute gambling

Another persistent model is to release unfinished games in “early access” mode while development is ongoing. Digital distribution platforms like Steam are a popular venue for early access games. The digital storefront dedicates an entire section to early access games, inviting gamers to:

Discover, play, and get involved with games as they evolve.

Some games have now been in early access for more than five years.

So when is a game really released? The Australian space-trading game Objects in Space was nominated for a 2018 Australian Game Award, but subsequently removed (at the request of the developer) as it is still in early access.

As we see it, iteratively updated games and the “early access” trend represent a mixed blessing. This business model has allowed the invention of entirely new genres of games that can succeed when supported by early access and improved via player feedback.

Coupled with this there is also an increasing trend of “abandonware”, or unfinished games abandoned by their developer despite being sold to players with the promise of future updates and improvements.

In any case, forecasting what games will have the biggest impact in the next 12 months has become close to impossible. Perhaps it is a case for the Frog Detective?

– ref. Broken records, ‘crunch’ and freemium that’s not free: 2018 was a huge year in gaming – http://theconversation.com/broken-records-crunch-and-freemium-thats-not-free-2018-was-a-huge-year-in-gaming-105736

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leah Ruppanner, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Melbourne

Children are a wonderful gift, bringing joy, laughter, and love. But, then there are the toys, the sleepless nights, the constant barrage of “why?” questions and the plethora of sticky handprints.

For many parents, the decision to have a second child is made with the expectation that two can’t be more work than one. But our research on Australian parents shows this logic is flawed: second children increase time pressure and deteriorate parents’ mental health.

Read more: If we’re serious about supporting working families, here are three policies we need to enact now

Our study used data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, following roughly 20,000 Australians for up to 16 years. The goal was to see what happens to parents’ time pressure and mental health as first children are born, age and new siblings arrive.

We weighed two main questions that many parents ask themselves when making the decision to have a second child: Do things get better as children grow older, sleep more and gradually become a bit more independent and robust? Or does a second child add to what may already be a highly stressed and time-poor household?

The most ambitious discussions about having second children occur during a date night, in between the first and second bottle of wine – where the short and long-term impacts of children peer out from the distant future.

These tensions between the short- and long-term impacts of children tap into what social scientists call the stress process model. In this perspective, major life events can increase stress either in the short-term, as an eventful experience, or as a chronic strain, with effects that linger over time.

Health researchers show that chronic stress is the most detrimental to health and well-being, contributing to cardiovascular disease, obesity and other major diseases. We are not arguing that children lead to heart disease – we have our Western diets to thank for that – but rather pose the question of whether the birth of first and second children has short or long-term effects on Australian parents’ time pressure and, because of that, mental health.

The birth of a first child introduces adults to a new role – that of parent – that comes with expectations about how to allocate time to work or family. Following childbirth, many Australian mothers take a year of parental leave. Some return to work, but others do not.

Most Australian fathers maintain full-time work after children are born, in part to make up for mothers’ employment reductions, but also because Australian parents become more traditional in their gender roles following childbirth.

Mothers and fathers are more likely to believe that women should stay home to care for children once they become parents than when they were childless. As a result, the bulk of the childcare falls to mothers.

Second (and third) children do not introduce a new role into parents’ lives, but rather increase the demands of the parent role. In theory, parents of second children have developed parenting skills – including how to clean a bottle while rocking a baby, and to never buy expensive dry-clean-only clothes again. These parenting skills may mean that second children bring less time pressure and stress than first children.

Our results, however, do not support this claim.

Prior to childbirth, mothers and fathers report similar levels of time pressure. Once the first child is born, time pressure increases for both parents. Yet this effect is substantially larger for mothers than fathers. Second children double parents’ time pressure, further widening the gap between mothers and fathers.

Although we hoped parents’ time pressure would diminish over time – as they gained more skills or kids entered school years, we found that time pressure lingered. We also thought that parents working full-time or those doing most of the housework would be the ones experiencing increased time pressure.

Instead, we found that time pressure increased with first and second children for all parents, whether they were working or not. Thus, reducing work to part-time is not a solution to this time-pressure problem. Parents of third children fare no better, indicating that children are not economies of scale.

To better understand the health implications of parents’ increased time pressure, we also looked at their mental health. We found that mothers’ mental health improves with first children immediately following birth and remains steady over the next few years. But, with the second child, mothers’ mental health sharply declines and remains low.

The reason: second children intensify mothers’ feelings of time pressure. We showed that if mothers did not have such intense time pressures following second children, their mental health would actually improve with motherhood. Fathers get a mental health boost with their first child, but also see their mental health decline with the second child. But, unlike mothers, fathers’ mental health plateaus over time. Clearly, fathers aren’t facing the same chronic time pressure as mothers over the long-term.

Read more: Sorry, men, there’s no such thing as ‘dirt blindness’ – you just need to do more housework

So, what does this mean for Australian families and the institutional environment in which they are embedded? First, mothers cannot shoulder the time demands of children alone. Even when they reduce their work time to accommodate children’s demands, their time pressures do not ease. This has important consequences for their mental health.

Further, the effects of children on mothers’ time pressure is not short-lived, but rather is a chronic stress that slowly deteriorates their health. As such, maternal time pressure must become a top health priority for practitioners and policymakers.

Second, mothers need institutions to share in the care. Collectivising childcare – for example, through school buses, lunch programs and flexible work policies that allow fathers’ involvement – may help improve maternal mental health. Since poor post-partum mental health can lead to poor outcomes for children, it is in the national interest to reduce stressors so that mothers, children and families can thrive.

– ref. Having a second child worsens parents’ mental health: new research – http://theconversation.com/having-a-second-child-worsens-parents-mental-health-new-research-107806

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julia Stafford, Research Fellow in Health Sciences, Curtin University

Australia is kicking off another summer of cricket. And if watching the series is a family affair, you may be concerned with the alcohol advertisements your children are being exposed to.

An extensive body of research shows exposure to alcohol advertising negatively impacts the drinking behaviours and attitudes of young people. Those who have greater exposure to alcohol marketing are more likely to start drinking earlier, and binge drink.

We assessed the potential impact of rules introduced by the alcohol industry in November 2017 to regulate the placement of alcohol advertising. We found these rules have so far been unlikely to protect young people, while most complaints directed to the regulator have been dismissed.

In 2012, the now-defunct Australian National Preventive Health Agency (ANPHA) reviewed the effectiveness of alcohol advertising regulation. The final report was released under Freedom of Information laws in 2015.

Read more: Alcohol advertising has no place on our kids’ screens

Unfortunately, the review had little impact. The Australian government never formally released the final report nor responded to it.

Some state and territory governments, such as WA, have taken notice of the evidence and removed alcohol ads from public transport. But the Australian government must take action to protect children and young people’s health.

How is the placement of alcohol advertising regulated?

Before 2017, the industry-managed Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code (ABAC) Scheme did not cover the placement of alcohol ads. The only restrictions came from the Outdoor Media Association (OMA) to limit alcohol ads on billboards or fixed signs to outside a 150 metre sight line of a school gate, and the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice (CTICP).

The CTICP places some restrictions on when alcohol can be advertised on TV, but allows ads to be broadcast during sports on weekends and public holidays.

Previous research found high levels of exposure to alcohol advertising during televised sport in Australia. In 2012, children under 18 years received 51 million exposures via sport on TV.

In November 2017, the ABAC Scheme introduced what it called “placement rules”. They require alcohol marketers:

• comply with existing industry codes (such as the CTICP) regulating placement
• use available age restriction controls to exclude minors from the audience
• place alcohol ads only where the audience is reasonably expected to comprise at least 75% adults
• do not place alcohol ads with programs or content primarily aimed at minors
• do not send alcohol ads to a minor by email.

Children see many alcohol ads on television during sports coverage. from shutterstock.com

Where do these rules fall short?

The objective to “avoid the direction of alcohol marketing towards minors” is too narrow to be effective. It ignores the fact children are exposed to many alcohol ads that aren’t directed at them. Nor does it reflect recommendations from the World Health Organisation for “comprehensive restrictions” on exposure to alcohol advertising.

The rules don’t cover key forms of marketing, including sponsorship, and they rely on weak existing industry codes. They do nothing to address the exemption in the CTICP, meaning alcohol ads are still allowed during sports broadcasts.

Our research found the panel dismissed complaints about children seeing alcohol ads during test cricket and one-day matches, and the Australian Open tennis. The panel decided the placement complied with the CTICP, the adult audience was over 75%, and the sports were not aimed at minors.

All but one of the 24 placement-related determinations published in the first six months of the rules were either dismissed or found to be “no fault” breaches.

Age restriction controls and an audience threshold of at least 75% adults do little to prevent alcohol ads from being placed where children will see them. Only 22% of the Australian population are aged 0-17 years, so programs with broad appeal easily attract over 75% adults.

Further, there is a lack of transparency and independence in the system. There was no public consultation to inform the development of the placement rules and the alcohol industry is heavily involved in administering the scheme. There is no monitoring of alcohol marketing in Australia, and no penalties when companies breach the rules.

Our findings are in line with recent research from the University of Sydney that found significant weaknesses and limitations in the ABAC scheme system as a whole.

What we need to do

Self-regulation by industries such as alcohol or tobacco does little to reduce children’s exposure to marketing. We need government intervention if we want Australian kids to be protected from alcohol advertising.

Read more: Junk food advertisers put profits before children’s health – and we let them

For starters, the federal government needs to remove the exemption in the CTICP and alcohol sponsorship of sport. This is the focus of End Alcohol Advertising in Sport, a campaign of sporting and community champions encouraging alcohol advertising to be phased out of professional sports.

The alcohol industry has demonstrated that they are unable to effectively control alcohol marketing. Statutory regulation by governments is the necessary step to ensure children’s exposure to alcohol advertising is minimised.

– ref. Children’s health hit for six as industry fails to regulate alcohol ads – http://theconversation.com/childrens-health-hit-for-six-as-industry-fails-to-regulate-alcohol-ads-108494

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Manuela Taboada, Senior Lecturer, Visual Design, Queensland University of Technology

Research shows that waste can double during the Christmas period, and most of it is plastic from gift wrapping and packaging. The British, for example, go through more than 40 million rolls of (mostly plastic) sticky tape every year, and use enough wrapping paper to go around the Equator nine times.

We love plastic. It is an amazing material, so ubiquitous in our lives we barely notice it. Unfortunately, plastic waste has become a serious worldwide environmental and health issue. If we don’t love the idea of a planet covered in plastic waste, we urgently need to reduce our plastic consumption.

Yet old habits die hard, especially over the holiday season, when we tend to let go and indulge ourselves. Typically, people hold off until the new year to make positive changes. But you don’t have to wait – it’s easier than you might think to make small changes now that will reduce your holiday plastic waste, and maybe even start some enjoyable new traditions in your family or household.

Read more: Five ways to spend with more social purpose this Christmas

Here is our list of suggestions to help you transform this indulgent time into a great opportunity to kickstart your plastic-free new year.

Gifts

The best option is to avoid or minimise gifts, or at least reduce them to a manageable level by suggesting a secret Santa, or a “kids-only” gift arrangement. Of course it’s hard to justify giving no gifts at all, so if you must give…

• Make a list of presents assigned to each person before you hit the shops. This will help you avoid impulse buys, and instead make thoughtful choices.

• Look for gifts that will help the recipient eliminate plastic waste: keep-cups, stainless steel water bottles, worm-farm kits, and so on.

• Gift an experience, event tickets, massage, or a donation to a charity the recipient believes in.

• Consider making gifts for the natural environment: bee hotels, possum and bird boxes, and native plants are all enjoyable ways to encourage nature.

• Where possible, avoid buying online so as to avoid wasteful packaging.

• Consider whether the recipient will treasure their gift or end up throwing it away. Here’s a handy flowchart, which you can also use for your own (non-Christmas) purchases.

Decisions, decisions. Manuela Taboada, Author provided

Gift wrapping

Not only do we buy gifts, we wrap them in paper and decorate them with ribbons often made of synthetic materials. It might look fantastic, but it generates a fantastically tall mound of waste afterwards. Here’s how to wrap plastic-free in style.

• Ditch the sticky tape and synthetic ribbons. Instead, use recycled or repurposed paper and tie up with fabric ribbons, cotton, or hemp twine.

• Try Japanese fabric wrapping (Furoshiki). The big advantage: two gifts in one!

• Choose gifts that do not need wrapping at all, such as the experiences, event tickets or charity donations mentioned above.

Furoshiki: sustainable and stylish. Katorisi/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Tableware

Disposable tableware is convenient – perhaps too convenient. Plastic plates, cutlery and cups are handy if you’re hosting dozens of friends and relatives, but they are used for a minimal amount of time and are often non-recyclable. So, when setting up your table:

• Use “real” tableware. You can easily find funky second-hand options. Mixed tableware is a trend!

• If your dishwasher (human or mechanical) can’t handle the strain, consider a washing-up game instead. Line up the guests, time their washing, and give them a prize at the end.

• If disposables are essential, opt for biodegradable tableware such as paper-based uncoated plates and cups, or wooden or bamboo plates and cutlery.

• Beware of plastic options labelled as “biodegradable”. Often they are only degradable in industrial composting facilities, which are not available across most of Australia. Check your local recycling options.

Toys

Last year, tonnes of plastic waste were found on Henderson Island, one of the most remote places in the world. Among the items were Monopoly houses and squeaky ducks. Toy items are usually non-recyclable, and eventually end up in landfill or scattered throughout the environment.

• Choose wooden or fabric-based toys. Alternatively, look for toys or games that teach children about the environment.

• Many board games have dozens of plastic accessories, but not all. Look at the list of contents, and choose ones with less plastic.

• It might be hard to stay away from Lego or other iconic plastic toy brands. In this case, consider buying second-hand or joining a toy library.

Henderson Island: where the Monopoly real estate boom ends. Jennifer Lavers/AAP Image

Packaging

This is by far the hardest item to avoid. Lots of non-plastic items come packed in plastic, including most of our food. So, simply…

• Refuse it: find alternatives that don’t come wrapped in plastic. This might mean changing how and where you buy your food.

• If there are no other options, choose plastic that can be recycled locally and avoid styrofoam, also called expanded polystyrene, which is not recyclable at most facilities.

• If you are buying online, you can often ask for your items to be packed with no plastic.

• For party food leftovers, use beeswax wraps or glass containers, or ask guests to bring their own reusable containers.

Read more: ‘I am not buying things’: why some people see ‘dumpster diving’ as the ethical way to eat

There’s a lot going on at Christmas, and it can be easier simply to follow the path of least resistance, and resolve to clean up your act in the new year. But you can avoid getting caught in consumption rituals created by the retail industry.

Make some changes now, and you can have a reduced-plastic Christmas with the same amount of (or even more) style and fun!

– ref. How to have yourself a plastic-free Christmas – http://theconversation.com/how-to-have-yourself-a-plastic-free-christmas-108828

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natalie Gately, Criminology Courses Coordinator, Edith Cowan University

Many working parents battle with school holidays, especially the long period between Christmas and the start of the new school year. Most people receive four weeks’ leave a year, but school holidays take up about 12 weeks of the year.

The maths clearly doesn’t add up. Even if both parents take their leave at different times, they’ll still need to find alternative care arrangements for younger children. Older kids will spend days at home unsupervised.

Leaving young people at home raises questions and concerns for parents. How long can they be at home alone? How can I ensure their safety? How will they occupy their time? What if someone comes to the house? Should I let them leave the house during the day to visit a friend? How secure will the house be?

Based on our soon-to-be-published findings on young offenders and previous research into home security (particularly burglaries), the following advice may provide guidance for concerned working parents during school holidays.

Read more: Should we shorten the long summer break from school? Maybe not

Most burglars reported they are motivated by opportunity and convenience. They look for unoccupied homes with open doors and windows in daylight hours. Teach your children how to operate door locks, ensuring front and back doors stay locked. But keep keys in locked doors in case they need to exit quickly.

Most burglars won’t try to break in if they think someone is home.

Most burglars avoid homes if they detect someone is present. So there is a fine line between making the house occupied, while ensuring children do not open doors to strangers. Ensure your children know your rules on letting someone in the home without your permission or answering the door to anyone they don’t know. Have a plan on how to respond to this.

It’s also worth ensuring that you:

• ensure your children know how to phone triple 0 in the event of an emergency. Write down your full name, address and telephone number and keep it by the phone. Kids (and adults!) can panic in emergencies and forget basic details

• write down a responsible available person’s number if you are at a job that cannot take phone calls

• create a family “phone book” with each family member’s particular friends. Make sure you know the names and phone numbers of their closest mates. That way if you ever lose your child or they do not return you have a starting point to phone their friends

• limit time online and install security software that allows you to monitor online activity and avoid online predators.

Read more: If we’re serious about supporting working families, here are three policies we need to enact now

Keeping children out of trouble during holidays

While most parents believe their child would never engage in antisocial behaviour, the lack of supervision, structure and boundaries during school holidays can lead some children to push boundaries or even break the law, especially when encouraged by peers.

Our interviews, soon to be released, with children who had been charged with an offence indicated they committed the burglary during daylight hours in the company of friends and for consumable items.

Very few actually “planned” their offences. Most just saw the opportunity (goods left on display, doors and windows left open) while they were roaming the streets looking for something to do. And often they were responding to dares by friends. The most common tactic to determine whether to burgle a property was simply to knock on the door to see if someone was in.

So, if your child is allowed to go out while on school holidays, here are some parameters you can consider for their safety:

• agree on times they can be outside while you are not home (and limit extended periods of time)

• agree on where they are allowed to go – locations that provide pseudo-supervision (such as shopping centres) are preferable to long periods of street-wandering

• make sure they know not to go near people in cars who stop to talk to them (do not approach the car even if the person is speaking quietly). Explain that most adults do not ask young people for help – they usually ask other adults – so children must be wary of assisting adults when they are alone

• instead of telling children never talk to strangers, tell them if they need help to look for a mother with children or go into a public place (like a shopping centre) and ask for help

• notice if your child seems to have excess funds or new items in the house. Investigate further if they tell you they have been “given” or “loaned” something from a friend

• notice if they seem quiet or reluctant to tell you how they have spent their day.

Don’t do this. Storing a spare key in a lock box is far smarter and safer. Shutterstock

Read more: Yes, you can adopt a pet as a Christmas gift – so long as you do it correctly

If you’ve allowed your child to leave the home when you’re not there, there are still things to consider when they return to an empty house:

• have a lockbox for spare keys so they can re-enter the home (10% of burglars reportedly entered a home with keys left in easily detected locations)

• given burglaries are often committed during daylight hours, teach children to have a quick “sweep” of doors and not to enter if something looks out of place (such as a door that is now open or a damaged fly screen)

• ensure they phone you or another responsible adult when they return.

By following these tips you can help keep your child safe and out of trouble when leaving them alone during the holidays.

– ref. Home alone: how to keep your kids safe (and out of trouble) when you’re at work these holidays – http://theconversation.com/home-alone-how-to-keep-your-kids-safe-and-out-of-trouble-when-youre-at-work-these-holidays-105581

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Harper, Lecturer in Architecture, Monash University

The question of what to do with abandoned mine sites confronts both regional communities and mining companies in the wake of Australia’s recent mining boom. The companies are increasingly required to consider site remediation and reuse. Ex-mining sites do present challenges, but also hold opportunities for regional areas.

Read more: No to rehab? The mining downturn risks making mine clean-ups even more of an afterthought

Old mine sites can provide a foundation for unique urban patterns, functions and transformations, as they have done in the past. It is useful to look at historical gold-mining regions, such as the Victorian goldfields, to understand how these sites have shaped the organisation and character of their towns.

Research by The University of Queensland’s Centre for Mined Land Rehabilitation suggests Australia has more than 50,000 abandoned mine sites. Some are in isolated places. But many others are close to or embedded within regional settlements that developed specifically to support and enable mining activity.

Abandoned mines present unique challenges for remediation:

Read more: Soil arsenic from mining waste poses long-term health threats

These characteristics exclude mining sites from reuse for activities such as residential development. The sites are often considered fundamentally problematic. At times former mining sites have been reused opportunistically, accommodating functions and uses that could co-exist with the compromised physical landscape.

How have old mines shaped our towns?

The industrial patterns established during the Victorian gold-mining boom are traceable through observing the street layout and the location of civic buildings, public functions and open spaces of former gold-mining towns.

For example, in the gold-mining town of Stawell, a pattern of informal and winding tracks was established between mining functions. These tracks later provided the basis for the town’s street organisation and land division, including the meandering Main Street, which forms the central spine of the town.

Left: Cascading dams in Stawell are remnants of the industrial crushing processes that were linked together along naturally occurring gullies. Right: Looking from Cato Lake towards Stawell Town Hall. Harper, Laura, Author provided

Cato Lake, behind Main Street, was transformed from the tailings dam of the Victoria Crushing Mill. St Georges Crushing Mill and its associated dams became the Stawell Wetlands.

Current residential allotments in Stawell overlaid with the geographical survey of 1887. The gaps correspond to mining claims, crushing mills, tailings dams and other industrial processes associated with mining. Harper, Laura/Map underlay from Mining Department of Melbourne, Author provided

Other mining sites were transformed into the car park for Stawell Regional Health, the track for Stawell Harness Racing Club and the ovals for the local secondary college. A survey of public open spaces in Stawell shows that over time former mining sites accommodated most of the town’s public functions.

Open space in Stawell showing the correlation of past mining sites with public function: 1. Central Park – public reserve est. 1860s. 2. Cato Park and Bowls Club – was Victoria Co. Crushing Mill 3. Stawell Regional Health – built over a mullock heap associated with the St George Co. Crushing Mill. 4. Wetland Precinct – was part of St George Co. Crushing Mill 5. Stawell Harness Racing Club – was part of Wimmera Co. Crushing Mill 6. Stawell Secondary College and grounds – was part of Wimmera Co. Crushing Mill 7. Borough of Stawell reservoir (disused) – was part of Wimmera Co. Crushing Mill 8. Federation University (Stawell Campus) – was School of Mines and prior, St George Lead (surface diggings) 9. Stawell State School – public reserve established in 1865 10. North Park Recreation Reserve – was part of Galatea Co. Mine / Grants Crushing Mill 11. Stawell Leisure Complex – was part of Galatea Co. Mine / Grants Crushing Mill 12. Oriental Co. Mine Historic Area – was Oriental Co. Mine 13. Moonlight-cum-Magdala Mine Historic Area – was Magdala Mine / Moonlight Co. Mine 14. Big Hill reserve, lookout and arboretum – site of multiple claims including Sloan and Scotchman, Cross Reef Consolidated and Federal Claim Harper, Laura, Author provided

Many other Victorian goldfields towns developed in similar ways to Stawell. These towns have lakes or other water bodies in and around their central urban areas that were born out of mines.

Calembeen Park and St Georges Lake in Creswick and Lake Daylesford in Daylesford were all formed through the planned collapsing of multiple underground mines to create urban outdoor swimming spots.

Calembeen Park in Creswick is a swimming hole with a diving board that takes advantage of the extreme depth of the lake formed through collapsing several underground mines. Author provided

In Bendigo, the ornamental Lake Weeroona was formed on the site of the alluvial diggings. Other sites in these towns became parks, ovals, rubbish tips and public functions that could be accommodated on the degraded land.

Abandoned mine sites outside towns have also been used for unique purposes. Deemed unsuitable for use by the farming and forestry industries, these sites have developed into havens for flora and fauna, including endangered species. A 2015 article in Wildlife Australia magazine details instances of the Eastern Bentwing-bat and the Australian Ghost Bat adopting abandoned gold mines as replacement habitat for breeding and raising their young.

The neglect of other gold-mining sites has preserved historical remnants by default. The Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park in Victoria is one example. Here, water races, puddling machines and crushing batteries are hidden amid dense bushland.

The town of Gwalia in Western Australia, abandoned after its mine closed, has been transformed into a town-sized open-air museum.

And what uses are possible in future?

Historical gold-mining sites in or near towns continue to be adapted for unusual uses. The Stawell Goldmine on Big Hill in Stawell is being converted to accommodate the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL), a research laboratory one kilometre below the surface. Cosmic waves are unable to infiltrate the abandoned mining tunnels, so the conditions are ideal for exploring the theorised existence of dark matter.

Working on the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory deep underground in an old mine tunnel. Swinburne University

Read more: Digging for cosmic gold: the hunt for dark matter at the bottom of a gold mine

In Bendigo it is proposed to use the extensive historical mine shafts under the town to generate and store pumped hydroelectricity. This scheme, recently explored as a feasibility study by Bendigo Sustainability Group, would use solar panels to create power to pump underground water up through the mining shafts to be stored at the surface. When power is required the water would be released through turbines to generate electricity.

The lack of demand for remediating sites for market-led uses (such as urban development, farming or forestry) broadens their potential for uses that might otherwise seem marginal or improbable, such as new forms of public space.

Read more: From mine to wine: creative uses for old holes in the ground

The scale and remoteness of many post-industrial mining sites in Australia – such as Western Australia’s Super Pit gold mine, which is 3.5 kilometres long and 600 metres deep – might mean that approaches to reuse different from those taken with historical goldmines are required. We don’t have to wait until a mine’s closure to think about how it might be used in the future.

The Conversation is co-publishing articles with Future West (Australian Urbanism), produced by the University of Western Australia’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts. These articles look towards the future of urbanism, taking Perth and Western Australia as its reference point, with the latest series focusing on the regions. You can read other articles here.

– ref. Afterlife of the mine: lessons in how towns remake challenging sites – http://theconversation.com/afterlife-of-the-mine-lessons-in-how-towns-remake-challenging-sites-106073

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bruce Isaacs, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Sydney

What makes a film a classic? In this video series, film scholar Bruce Isaacs looks at a classic film and analyses its brilliance.

Back to the Future (1985)

Read more: It’s Back to the Future Day today – so what are the next future predictions?

Back to the Future is that rare Hollywood film that is both a blockbuster and a cult classic, and was easily the highest grossing film that year. In this episode of Close-Up, we look at the politics underpinning Back to the Future in the era of Reagan’s America.

See also:

Hitchcock’s Vertigo
Antonioni’s The Passenger
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws
Hitchcock’s Psycho
The Godfather
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette
Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream
The great movie scenes: The Matrix and bullet-time

– ref. The great movie scenes: Back to the Future – http://theconversation.com/the-great-movie-scenes-back-to-the-future-108345

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

The Morrison government is going over the top in trying to outsmart and smother Bill Shorten and the Labor national conference.

Leaving aside the holding of the July Super Saturday byelections when the ALP meeting was originally due, the government is attempting to outdo the rescheduled conference at every turn.

Some time ago the budget update was set for Monday, to overshadow the second day of the conference.

Read more: Monday’s MYEFO will look good, but it will set the budget up for awful trouble down the track

Not content with that, Scott Morrison decided to announce Australia’s new Governor-General, David Hurley, on Sunday morning at the exact same time as Shorten’s opening address in Adelaide.

The prime minister rang Shorten at 7:30am to tell him about the 10 o’clock announcement.

Labor has a legitimate point in complaining about Morrison’s failure to consult on the appointment. He was under no formal obligation to do so, but given that Hurley will not be sworn in until after the election, it would have been the proper course to take.

Regardless of any argument about that, the timing of the announcement was absolutely the wrong course. When Morrison was asked about it he could provide no convincing justification. It was indeed rather disrespectful to Hurley, because the obvious attempted one-upmanship would inevitably be controversial.

Read more: NSW Governor David Hurley will be Australia’s new Governor-General

Less provocative but also designed as a distraction from the attention on Labor was Sunday night’s announcement for the 7pm news of a $552.9 million increase in aged care funding, including the release of 10,000 high level home care places within weeks.

In other years, the Coalition would have wanted all attention on the Labor shindig, expecting fiery debates. But this time the government is worried about a conference which is a highly managed affair where divisions are being contained and participants have their eyes firmly on the prize of Labor winning power next year.

It is all about showcasing Shorten as fit to lead the nation.

Not that there weren’t some fracas on the first day. But they came from demonstrators rather than delegates. Anti-Adani and pro-refugee protesters invaded the stage as Shorten prepared to speak, and there were noisy scenes outside the Adelaide convention centre.

Read more: Labor promises a comprehensive overhaul of federal environmental framework

Shorten in his speech unveiled initiatives on housing affordability, the protection of superannuation and the creation of new national environmental architecture.

Read more: Shorten’s subsidy plan to boost affordable housing

His address was workmanlike – comprehensive rather than a rhetorical rallying cry. His approach at this conference is cautious and careful, designed to avoid false steps – although in policy terms Labor is bold and willing to be a big target.

The ALP’s new national president Wayne Swan told the conference that “the focus now shifts to us”.

In these three days Labor is committed to presenting itself as a convincing alternative government. Its message is that it’s ready for office.

There are two days to go for Labor in Adelaide. But at the end of day one the government was looking desperate while the opposition was looking determined.

– ref. View from The Hill: Morrison goes a bridge too far to outsmart Shorten – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-morrison-goes-a-bridge-too-far-to-outsmart-shorten-108890