Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Phillips, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current, or ACC, is the strongest ocean current on our planet. It extends from the sea surface to the bottom of the ocean, and encircles Antarctica.

It is vital for Earth’s health because it keeps Antarctica cool and frozen. It is also changing as the world’s climate warms. Scientists like us are studying the current to find out how it might affect the future of Antarctica’s ice sheets, and the world’s sea levels.

The ACC carries an estimated 165 million to 182 million cubic metres of water every second (a unit also called a “Sverdrup”) from west to east, more than 100 times the flow of all the rivers on Earth. It provides the main connection between the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

The tightest geographical constriction through which the current flows is Drake Passage, where only 800 km separates South America from Antarctica. While elsewhere the ACC appears to have a broad domain, it must also navigate steep undersea mountains that constrain its path and steer it north and south across the Southern Ocean.

Read more: Antarctica has lost 3 trillion tonnes of ice in 25 years. Time is running out for the frozen continent

What is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current?

A satellite view over Antarctica reveals a frozen continent surrounded by icy waters. Moving northward, away from Antarctica, the water temperatures rise slowly at first and then rapidly across a sharp gradient. It is the ACC that maintains this boundary.

The ACC is created by the combined effects of strong westerly winds across the Southern Ocean, and the big change in surface temperatures between the Equator and the poles.

Ocean density increases as water gets colder and as it gets more salty. The warm, salty surface waters of the subtropics are much lighter than the cold, fresher waters close to Antarctica. We can imagine that the depth of constant density levels slopes up towards Antarctica.

The westerly winds make this slope steeper, and the ACC rides eastward along it, faster where the slope is steeper, and weaker where it’s flatter.

Fronts and bottom water

In the ACC there are sharp changes in water density known as fronts. The Subantarctic Front to the north and Polar Front further south are the two main fronts of the ACC (the black lines in the images). Both are known to split into two or three branches in some parts of the Southern Ocean, and merge together in other parts.

Scientists can figure out the density and speed of the current by measuring the ocean’s height, using altimeters. For instance, denser waters sit lower and lighter waters stand taller, and differences between the height of the sea surface give the speed of the current.

The path of the ACC is a meandering one, because of the steering effect of the sea floor, and also because of instabilities in the current.

The ACC also plays a part in the meridional (or global) overturning circulation, which brings deep waters formed in the North Atlantic southward into the Southern Ocean. Once there it becomes known as Circumpolar Deep Water, and is carried around Antarctica by the ACC. It slowly rises toward the surface south of the Polar Front.

Once it surfaces, some of the water flows northward again and sinks north of the Subarctic Front. The remaining part flows toward Antarctica where it is transformed into the densest water in the ocean, sinking to the sea floor and flowing northward in the abyss as Antarctic Bottom Water. These pathways are the main way that the oceans absorb heat and carbon dioxide and sequester it in the deep ocean.

Changing current

The ACC is not immune to climate change. The Southern Ocean has warmed and freshened in the upper 2,000 m. Rapid warming and freshening has also been found in the Antarctic Bottom Water, the deepest layer of the ocean.

Waters south of the Polar Front are becoming fresher due to increased rainfall there, and waters to the north of the Polar Front are becoming saltier due to increased evaporation. These changes are caused by human activity, primarily through adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and depletion of the ozone layer. The ozone hole is now recovering but greenhouse gases continue to rise globally.

Winds have strengthened by about 40% over the Southern Ocean over the past 40 years. Surprisingly, this has not translated into an increase in the strength of the ACC. Instead there has been an increase in eddies that move heat towards the pole, particularly in hotspots such as Drake Passage, Kerguelen Plateau, and between Tasmania and New Zealand.

We have observed much change already. The question now is how this increased transfer of heat across the ACC will impact the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet, and consequently the rate of global sea-level rise.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daniel Liang-Dar Hwang, Postdoctoral Researcher, The University of Queensland

Do you drink freshly brewed coffee to start off your day? Or is a cup of English breakfast tea a better option for you?

Your choice could be a result of your genes, and how they affect your experience of bitter flavours.

Published today, our new study shows that the liklihood of a person being a coffee drinker or a tea drinker is linked with the presence or absence of key genes that shape how bitter flavours taste.

Read more: Health Check: why do I get a headache when I haven’t had my coffee?

Mmmmm tastes bitter

Tea and coffee generally taste bitter because they contain bitter-tasting substances such as caffeine. Quinine is another substance that contributes to the bitterness of coffee, and is also found in tonic water.

A recent study by my colleagues and I revealed bitter taste receptor genes that are responsible for the perception of caffeine, quinine and a man-made bitter substance propylthiouracil (PROP). This latter molecule has the same bitterness as Brussels sprouts (for those of us who can taste it).

We knew from previous research that inherited factors play a role in the amount of coffee and tea a person drinks a day, and that the ability to digest caffeine plays an important role in the people’s consumption of caffeinated beverages.

But we didn’t know whether genes for bitter taste perception were involved in determining consumption of bitter-tasting beverages. Previous studies with small sample sizes reported no or inconsistent relationships.

In this new study, we examined the consumption of coffee and tea in a large Biobank cohort of more than 400,000 men and women aged 37 to 73 in the UK for whom we also had data about their bitter receptor genes.

We employed a method commonly used in epidemiology called “Mendelian randomisation” to compare coffee and tea intake between people who did or did not carry particular bitter taste receptor genes.

Caffeine ‘super-tasters’

Compared to an average person, we showed that people who carried the bitter taste receptor for caffeine were more likely to be heavy coffee drinkers, meaning they drank more than four cups of coffee a day. Every extra copy of the bitter taste receptor gene lead to a 20% higher chance of being a heavy coffee drinker. These “super-tasters” of caffeine also drank less tea.

As caffeine contributes to not only the bitterness of coffee but also its perceived strength and texture, people who are better at detecting caffeine may find coffee more enjoyable and flavourful.

In contrast, people who carried the bitter taste receptors for quinine or PROP drank less coffee and more tea. Compared to an average person, every extra copy of the quinine or PROP receptor gene was linked with a 9% or 4% higher chance of being a heavy tea drinker (meaning they drank more than 5 cups of tea a day).

Read more: I’ve always wondered: why does lemon juice lighten the colour of tea?

When there is a need for caffeine, “super-tasters” of quinine and PROP could choose tea over coffee because they tend to be more sensitive to overall bitterness.

Don’t blame your genes

In this study we demonstrated that genes for bitter taste perception are linked with the amount of coffee and tea we drink.

We’re interested to see if this finding could lead to future studies investigating whether “super-tasters” of bitter molecules are more or less prone to drink high and perhaps even unhealthy amounts of coffee and tea, or other drinks containing bitter molecules.

But we can’t blame everything on your genes. Even if as a child or right now you dislike the bitterness of coffee or tea, you may have noticed that your taste and dietary behaviour change over time as you grow.

So, even if you carried the “wrong” genes in terms of tasting bitter flavours, you could still learn to enjoy deliciously bitter-tasting foods and beverages.

Read more: Want to eat better? You might be able to train yourself to change your tastes

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By George Rennie, Lecturer in Politics, University of Melbourne

One of the more noticeable ad campaigns in the upcoming Victoria state election comes from a seemingly unlikely source. The Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia (SIFA) seeks to unwind Australia’s gun regulations, and knows that state governments are as good a place as any to start.

SIFA is a key part of Australia’s gun lobby, and uses the same tactics as its American equivalent, the National Rifle Association (NRA). Like the NRA, SIFA seeks to co-opt democratic norms to force change, even when it is directly at odds with overwhelming public opinion.

The NRA playbook

A common misconception about the NRA is that it’s a “grass-roots” organisation. This implies that policy comes from its many paid members, and then works its way up to the leaders, who dutifully implement the will of their constituents.

Not so: the NRA’s policies are set by America’s gun industry, which has a vested (financial) interest in lax gun laws. The gun industry controls the NRA’s board and appoints its directors (they are not democratically elected by NRA members), and also dictates policy. This is why the NRA resists almost any calls for stricter gun control, even though NRA members themselves favour some restrictions (such as tougher background checks), not to mention the wider American electorate.

Meanwhile, along with its prevalence of guns, America suffers a mass shooting nine out of every 10 days on average and a shocking number of school massacres.

Read more: Oversimplifying gun control issues can pose a real threat to community safety

So, how can the NRA get its way, in spite of so many problems, and being so widely disliked?

It succeeds because it uses America’s representative political system to get its way. The NRA knows that policy is made through leverage: financially supported groups of elected officials can promote its policies, even when the wider public favours tighter gun control laws and Democrats make efforts to try to pass them.

It also uses sophisticated advertisements, and “education” campaigns to muddy the waters and spread misinformation on the efficacy of gun control. (Needless to say, the NRA suggests gun control doesn’t work, despite significant evidence that it does.)

SIFA and the Australian gun lobby

There are some similarities between the NRA and SIFA – and some key differences.

Like the NRA, SIFA is also backed by the gun industry, such as the Beretta family (who are adamant that guns are inextricably linked to freedom) and NIOA (a major gun importer in Australia that was featured in a recent 4 Corners special on the gun industry).

As with the NRA, SIFA is also willing to use a range of tools to get its way. And, as with America, the power to make gun control laws in Australia rests with the states, as well as the federal government.

Yet, SIFA knows there is little support in Australia for weak gun control laws and adopting the NRA’s more aggressive stances would backfire. Australians would react very negatively to an overt push to relax gun laws.

So, the group instead claims it wants to “simplify, not weaken” gun laws (though its principle sources of funding do indeed want to “weaken” rather than merely “simplify” these statutes).

And, when SIFA launched advertisements ahead of the Victoria election, they were not designed to change people’s minds on gun control. Instead, the ad blitz has relied on the catchy, if derivative, slogan “Not Happy Dan”, made famous by the “Not Happy Jan” Yellow Pages ads. And its focus is not on gun control, but rather the performance and competency of the Labor Government.

Read more: What the NRA can teach us about the art of public persuasion

The campaign is designed to weaken Labor, which favours tighter gun control, perhaps with the hope that any newly elected independents in the state will be pro-gun. SIFA knows that if the balance of power rests with a handful of independents after the election, especially those from parties like the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, then there is a possibility that Australia’s highly effective gun control laws can be slowly unwound.

Given SIFA had the same strategy last year in the Queensland election, it seems clear it has a strategy to try to influence Australian politics wherever it can. And with its financial backers continuing to win government contracts in Australia, it is also likely SIFA will have no shortage of funding in the future.

Undoing hard-won change

On the eve of the Victoria election, Melbourne was shocked by an attack by a madman with a knife on Bourke Street in the CDB. But the city also remembers what happened when a madman went on a rampage with a gun 30 years ago, not far away on Hoddle Street. Seven people were killed and 19 wounded.

This memory, along with many others, sits in stark contrast to the conspicuous lack of gun deaths following the introduction of tighter gun laws in Australia in 1996. This fundamentally underpins much of the country’s resistance to weaker gun laws, and the gun lobby knows it.

Read more: The arguments that carried Australia’s 1996 gun law reforms

America’s guns laws were weakened through a gradual process. This involved the patient undermining of the popular will through the passage of favourable laws in state legislatures – the blocking of others – and a continuing narrative that linked guns with freedom and gun control with an evil or “nanny” state.

The Australian gun lobby has learnt from this American example, and its methods emulate it. Expect to see more from SIFA in the lead-up to other elections in the future – Australia’s very own NRA.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philippa Middleton, Associate Professor, South Australian Health & Medical Research Institute

Pregnant women who increase their intake of omega-3 long-chain fatty acids are less likely to have a premature birth, according to a Cochrane Review published today.

Most pregnancies last between 38 and 42 weeks, but if a baby arrives before 37 weeks, the chances of poorer health for that baby increase. One in 12 babies in Australia are born prematurely – before 37 weeks.

The earlier a baby is born, the higher the risk of poor health, and a small number of babies don’t survive.

Read more: Mums and dads of very preterm babies more likely to be depressed

Some premature babies have to spend the first weeks or months of life in special intensive care units in hospital. Premature babies can develop conditions that last a lifetime, including problems with their lungs, gut, and immune system, and vision and hearing loss.

Problems with behaviour and learning are also more common in children born too early. These consequences result in substantial costs to health care systems and to families of premature babies.

What did we find?

The Cochrane Review, led by our research team at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, included 70 randomised trials with nearly 20,000 women.

It found increasing the daily intake of omega-3 long-chain fatty acids during pregnancy:

• lowers the risk of having a premature baby (birth before 37 weeks) by 11%, from 134 per 1,000 to 119 per 1,000 births

• lowers the risk of having an early premature baby (birth before 34 weeks) by 42%, from 46 per 1,000 to 27 per 1,000 births.

Most of the trials were conducted in high-income countries (Australia, the United States, England, The Netherlands and Denmark) and included women who were both at normal and high risk for poor pregnancy outcomes. Most women studied were pregnant with one baby.

The trials generally used supplements containing the omega-3 long-chain fatty acids docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA).

Risk of premature birth

The causes of premature birth are still not well understood. But we know that when a pregnant woman’s labour starts, powerful hormones called prostaglandins take hold.

Sometimes women produce high amounts of prostaglandins, and those produced from omega-6 fats can make birth come too early.

Read more: Despite new findings, the jury is still out on whether omega-3 supplements reduce heart attacks

So where does omega-3 come in?

In the 1980s, researchers noticed women in Denmark had shorter pregnancies and more premature babies than their neighbours in the Faroe Islands who eat much more fish. The omega-3 long-chain fatty acids in fish seemed to be responsible – they are thought to help prevent premature birth by reducing the potency of prostaglandins that can trigger early birth.

Our review shows supplementation with omega-3 long-chain fatty acids during pregnancy is one of the few safe and effective strategies capable of preventing early labour and premature birth.

Fish or supplements?

Most of the trials included in this Cochrane review that reported on premature birth used omega-3 supplements, rather than dietary changes.

It is difficult to get the amount of the omega-3 long-chain fatty acids used in the many trials from food alone, unless you regularly eat fatty fish such as salmon, sardines or mackerel. To get the recommended amount of DHA that was used in many trials, you would need to eat at least two to three 150g serves of salmon every week.

The advice for pregnant women expecting a single baby is to consume daily fish oil supplements containing at least 500mg of DHA, starting at 12 weeks of pregnancy. The supplement does not need to contain more than 1000mg DHA+EPA. There appears to be no extra benefit of higher doses.

This advice is currently being integrated into national clinical practice pregnancy guidelines.

Read more: You can’t rely on fish oil supplements in pregnancy to make your children smarter

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Phillips, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current, or ACC, is the strongest ocean current on our planet. It extends from the sea surface to the bottom of the ocean, and encircles Antarctica.

It is vital for Earth’s health because it keeps Antarctica cool and frozen. It is also changing as the world’s climate warms. Scientists like us are studying the current to find out how it might affect the future of Antarctica’s ice sheets, and the world’s sea levels.

The ACC carries an estimated 165 million to 182 million cubic metres of water every second (a unit also called a “Sverdrup”) from west to east, more than 100 times the flow of all the rivers on Earth. It provides the main connection between the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

The tightest geographical constriction through which the current flows is Drake Passage, where only 800 km separates South America from Antarctica. While elsewhere the ACC appears to have a broad domain, it must also navigate steep undersea mountains that constrain its path and steer it north and south across the Southern Ocean.

Read more: Antarctica has lost 3 trillion tonnes of ice in 25 years. Time is running out for the frozen continent

What is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current?

A satellite view over Antarctica reveals a frozen continent surrounded by icy waters. Moving northward, away from Antarctica, the water temperatures rise slowly at first and then rapidly across a sharp gradient. It is the ACC that maintains this boundary.

The ACC is created by the combined effects of strong westerly winds across the Southern Ocean, and the big change in surface temperatures between the Equator and the poles.

Ocean density increases as water gets colder and as it gets more salty. The warm, salty surface waters of the subtropics are much lighter than the cold, fresher waters close to Antarctica. We can imagine that the depth of constant density levels slopes up towards Antarctica.

The westerly winds make this slope steeper, and the ACC rides eastward along it, faster where the slope is steeper, and weaker where it’s flatter.

Fronts and bottom water

In the ACC there are sharp changes in water density known as fronts. The Subantarctic Front to the north and Polar Front further south are the two main fronts of the ACC (the black lines in the images). Both are known to split into two or three branches in some parts of the Southern Ocean, and merge together in other parts.

Scientists can figure out the density and speed of the current by measuring the ocean’s height, using altimeters. For instance, denser waters sit lower and lighter waters stand taller, and differences between the height of the sea surface give the speed of the current.

The path of the ACC is a meandering one, because of the steering effect of the sea floor, and also because of instabilities in the current.

The ACC also plays a part in the meridional (or global) overturning circulation, which brings deep waters formed in the North Atlantic southward into the Southern Ocean. Once there it becomes known as Circumpolar Deep Water, and is carried around Antarctica by the ACC. It slowly rises toward the surface south of the Polar Front.

Once it surfaces, some of the water flows northward again and sinks north of the Subarctic Front. The remaining part flows toward Antarctica where it is transformed into the densest water in the ocean, sinking to the sea floor and flowing northward in the abyss as Antarctic Bottom Water. These pathways are the main way that the oceans absorb heat and carbon dioxide and sequester it in the deep ocean.

Changing current

The ACC is not immune to climate change. The Southern Ocean has warmed and freshened in the upper 2,000 m. Rapid warming and freshening has also been found in the Antarctic Bottom Water, the deepest layer of the ocean.

Waters south of the Polar Front are becoming fresher due to increased rainfall there, and waters to the north of the Polar Front are becoming saltier due to increased evaporation. These changes are caused by human activity, primarily through adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and depletion of the ozone layer. The ozone hole is now recovering but greenhouse gases continue to rise globally.

Winds have strengthened by about 40% over the Southern Ocean over the past 40 years. Surprisingly, this has not translated into an increase in the strength of the ACC. Instead there has been an increase in eddies that move heat towards the pole, particularly in hotspots such as Drake Passage, Kerguelen Plateau, and between Tasmania and New Zealand.

We have observed much change already. The question now is how this increased transfer of heat across the ACC will impact the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet, and consequently the rate of global sea-level rise.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hulya Gilbert, PhD Candidate, University of South Australia

Children today spend more time in cars than previous generations. They also spend less time playing on the streets and in unstructured and unsupervised activity outdoors. The lack of opportunities for physical activity and the loss of freedom to explore their local neighbourhood is bad news for children’s physical, social and mental well-being.

Read more: City-by-city analysis shows our capitals aren’t liveable for many residents

Though equally important, the environmental cost of these trends is not well understood. As rapid urbanisation extends across the globe, transport planning continues to be challenging. Transport is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. And 46% of transport-related emissions come from private vehicles.

We know surprisingly little, however, about the detailed reasons for individual private car use. An international study highlights that households with children have higher rates of car ownership and use. In Australia, official statistics on transport pay a great deal of attention to the “journey to work”, but car travel that can be attributed to child-related activities has not been fully explored.

Research on children’s travel patterns tends to focus on the “journey to school”. While school trips are important, this provides only a narrow image of children’s actual travel patterns. They also make many trips to non-school destinations and extracurricular activities such as sport, music and dance classes.

We recently reviewed local government policies related to sustainable mobility and child-and-youth-friendly cities. Our review found little consideration of children and young people in transport planning policies across Australia. This is despite the fact that the decline in their walking and cycling rates was widely recognised.

Read more: Australian cities are far from being meccas for walking and cycling

Why are walking and cycling rates decreasing?

Several factors contribute to lower rates of walking and cycling among children and their limited use of public transport. These range from urban form to social and economic conditions.

Australian suburbs typically have low density and segregated land uses, which privilege the car over other travel modes. This situation is worse in outer suburbs which have limited public transport and poor provision for walking and cycling. These outer suburbs are also more likely to have lower socio-economic status and a larger proportion of families with children.

All together, these suburban conditions add to the social disadvantage resulting from limited access to services and activities that are critical for families with children. This further encourages private car use.

Read more: Designing suburbs to cut car use closes gaps in health and wealth

Changing social structures mean families usually are on tight schedules. These changes include increases in employment for women and in the number of both single-parent families and families where both parents are in paid work. Because the car is relatively cheap and easy to use for individual mobility in Australian cities, it is generally the uncontested way to manage these schedules.

In addition, the increased individualisation as a common characteristic of Western societies usually means parents are expected to provide strict supervision of children’s movements. In the conditions described above, the most practical way to do this is usually to drive them in a car.

Of course this increases the number of cars on our streets, particularly around schools and other common destinations for children. This then perpetuates parents’ concerns about traffic safety, leading in turn to even more private car use.

Read more: Young people want walkable neighbourhoods, but safety is a worry

Child-centred sustainable mobility

What is perhaps most striking about the trend towards chauffeuring children is that these facts are seemingly becoming accepted as unavoidable outcomes of modern society. They are largely ignored in transport planning.

We have argued that children have a pivotal role in sustainable mobility. Greater attention to the mobility needs of families with children will produce many social and environmental benefits.

The importance of children’s role in sustainable mobility can be grouped under two themes.

First, children’s needs in today’s lifestyles mean they have an active role in contributing to increased private car use. The daily lives of families with children offer a good example of the context in which carbon-intensive travel patterns occur. If their mobility needs can be met more sustainably (even partially) we are likely to achieve significant carbon savings.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, children have a role as catalysts for behavioural change towards sustainable cities. This is because childhood is a key stage for establishing sustainable travel habits as opposed to “trying to modify already ingrained habits later in life”.

A better understanding of children’s travel patterns would provide a solid foundation for sustainable mobility policies. Planning and transport policies that are responsive to children’s specific needs are likely to have more effective and longer-lasting outcomes, with many related benefits for social sustainability and public health.

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

The financial services royal commission resumes for its final round of hearings on Monday, and reappearing before Justice Hayne will be the chief executives each of the big six institutions he has in his sights: the Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, AMP, Macquarie, ANZ, and the National Australia Bank.

At issue are shocking abuses of trust, and when the government responds after receiving the report in February it will be under pressure to introduce tighter rules that more closely regulate bankers’ behaviour.

There’s another, better, path it could follow. It could loosen the rules and treat bankers more like doctors.

Crude attempts to regulate behaviour fail

We trust doctors, not because their behaviour is tightly regulated but because it is self-regulated. As professionals they strive to be trustworthy, in the same way as citizens who don’t cheat on their social security claims, or restaurant customers who don’t eat without paying.

A regulation imposed on top of a relationship of trust can ruin it.

In a famous study titled A Fine Is A Price, economists Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini examined what happened when an Israeli daycare centre attempted to impose fines on parents who picked up their children late.

Read more: Five steps business can take to ensure aggressive performance targets don’t drive bad behaviour

Surprisingly, the trial of the fine resulted in more, rather than fewer, late pickups.

In the eyes of the late parents, the fine changed late pickups from bad behaviour into an acceptable outcome of cost-benefit analysis. They simply interpreted the fine as a babysitting cost, and weighed it against the benefit of arriving when it suited them. Moral motivations were crowded out.

Doctors take vows

Professionals with ethics take vows to honour their duty to their clients, even where the costs of doing so are greater than the benefits of not doing so.

Service providers who don’t take ethics seriously weigh the costs and benefits of acting in the interests of their clients versus acting in their own interests. This ‘moral optimization’ may take account of ethics, but only if it pays.

Many financial services workers don’t take ethics seriously partly because they have been trained in economics or finance – disciplines which teach that cost-benefit analysis applies to everything.

A start would be to train them better. Their teachers could listen to the words of the creator of much of the theory used to justify performance pay, Michael Jensen of Harvard:

We teach our students the importance of conducting a cost-benefit analysis in everything they do. In most cases, this is useful – but not when it comes to behaving with integrity.

When integrity is at stake it is better to replace moral optimization with moral prioritization, by giving priority to moral principles like telling the truth or looking after vulnerable clients.

Money changes things

Recent research on the psychological power of money suggests that financial market participants are at risk of negative ethical tendencies when money is used as an incentive, or even when they are just reminded of its importance, so-called money priming.

Money is used as an incentive to in order overcome the so-called principal-agent problem in which agents, (workers or chief executives) are tempted to put they own interests ahead of those of the firm they work for.

It can work, but if high-powered financial incentives communicate that the recipient’s only goal should be to maximise profit, then a culture of material self-interest takes hold, constrained at best by the letter of the law. And this crowds out other interests, such as those of their customers.

This means high-powered financial incentives can solve one kind of untrustworthiness, but only by creating another.

Professionals such as doctors and teachers solve the principal agent problem in another way: through ethics.

Banking could be a profession

Rather than further regulation, we propose a greater focus on ethics through a program of professionalisation, including:

1. Establishing an interim professional body run by outsiders who come with a proven ethic of serving the public in fields such as education or health. After five years the finance industry can apply to the government to staff and run the body itself, subject to performance.

2. A winding back of regulation in order to signal that “you are professionals who have to take responsibility for ethical judgements”. The professional body could stand down senior managers deemed to be showing commitment to the new culture.

3. A fundamental change of bonuses so that they become incentives for ethical behaviour. We suggest an automatic bonus payment of 10-20% of total pay. It could be withheld for two reasons: either poor financial performance of the firm, or an ethical breach. In effect, it would be a negative bonus. Multiple ethical breaches would result in the loss of professional status and employment.

Regulation hasn’t worked

Automatic bonuses remove the extreme money priming of the finance industry, and they can be helpful in maintaining employment in the event of a downturn. They can simply be reduced instead of laying off staff, as happened during the global financial crisis.

Boosting regulation and boosting the capability of regulators, as many say they want, could work against developing the ethics and the trust that makes other professions work.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julianne Schultz, Founding Editor of Griffith REVIEW; Professor, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University

In October 2005 Stephen Colbert was just starting his eponymous show. It is somewhat chilling to realise that this was when he came up with the word truthiness: it seems so now.

It has taken a while to reach maturity and morphed into the even more menacing trumpiness. Truthiness captures the slippery world inhabited by those unencumbered by books, or facts, context or complexity – for those who just know with their heart rather than their heads – where things can just feel truthful.

Who would have thought that a little more than a decade later, the White House would be occupied by a man who makes the Colbert character seem almost reasonable. Quaintly charming. Trumpiness captures something even more sinister, statements that don’t even have to feel truthful, apparently ignorant rough-hewn words, weaponised for effect. Whatever comes out – alarmingly frequently words that sound as though they emanated from the crib sheet of a propaganda handbook.

In defining these words, Colbert provided a helpful predictor for a president who according to the Washington Post last week, had made 6,420 false or misleading comments in 649 days. That is industrial scale deception – small lies told over and over, medium sized lies that have become a new global lingua franca and big lies that take even his most ardent supporters by surprise and sometimes force a sort of retraction or denial – sort of, but only after they have already infiltrated the virtual world and got a life of their own.

This is not normal. It is not the way we have come to expect even a tainted public sphere, distorted by the commercialisation of public attention, to operate. The president’s mantra of fake news is, as he has admitted, a deliberate and determined effort to undermine confidence in what remains of a rigorous public sphere and professional journalism that takes itself seriously. In the unregulated, “more insidious” domain of the internet this is particularly dangerous.

Such industrial scale deception is at odds with the norms that characterise any flourishing civilisation. If truth is irrelevant to discourse, trust is not merely dented it is destroyed. Other norms of acceptable behaviour cannot be far away. What is happening now, goes well beyond spin or hollow speech. The New York Times correspondent Roger Cohen describes it as “corrosive, corrupting and contagious”.

In the shrunken global village this has dangerous implications everywhere, for public and personal behaviour. If the so called, “leader of the free world” can talk the way he does, without regard to fact or feeling, the level of civilisation is turned down everywhere he is heard.

What we are witnessing is behaviour contrary to the long-established moral core of a civilised society, arguably giving succour to evil, and deliberately destroying trust.

Democracy in retreat

So how did it come to this?

It is easy to feel that the world is going to hell in a handbasket – the news of catastrophe and disaster, the inflammatory US president, the distortion of social media, the global instability of superpower realignment, the palpable threat of climate change, the rise of authoritarian leaders – and that is for starters.

Freedom House, the Washington-based NGO, has been monitoring global freedom since 1941, when a very different US President articulated an expansive ethic that has since prevailed in “kin countries” and beyond. With the second world war in full, murderous, destructive fury, President Roosevelt declared that as human beings, all people were entitled to freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship their god in their own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear. At the time it was ambitious rhetoric, demonstrably at odds with the wartime experience. But it provided guiding principles for a different future.

Last month in a very different context, Freedom House reported that around the world, political and civil rights sunk to their lowest level for a decade.

For the twelfth year in a row, democratic setbacks outnumbered gains. Democracy is in crisis. Values are under assault and in retreat in country after country. Young people are losing faith in politics. Trust has been eroded by commerce and the calcification of institutions. Millions of people are living without the rights we take for granted as a measure of civil, liberal, democratic society. Even nations that like to pride themselves on a deep democratic history are slipping on the scale, as trust in institutions is eroded and checks and balances slip out of equilibrium and technology remakes the way things are done.

This is most notable in the United States, which fell to 86 out of 100 on a scale measuring a wide range of political and individual rights and the rule of law, and the United Kingdom, which slipped to 94. Australia and NZ scored 98, with the virtuous Scandinavians topping with perfect scores.

This trend line is a matter of real concern, because it is contrary to the previous trajectory.

Until relatively recently, enhanced civil and political rights were what was expected, giving comfort to those of us who “hope the arc of history bends towards greater emancipation, equality and freedom”.

Taking a wider view of the state of the globe provides a slightly more reassuring message, that that arc may still be bending the right way. But the tension between individual rights and popular will is fertile territory for authoritarian leaders and their shadow puppets.

Survival is deep in our make up, means we dwell on the negative, alert to threats and dangers, ready to respond to fear. But as Stephen Pinker and Kishore Mahbubani loudly proclaim, the bigger picture is not as bad as we might be inclined to think with one ear cocked to the latest news bulletin and an eye on the real Donald Trump’s twitter feed.

The Human Development Index shows that as a species we are living longer and better. Life expectancy at birth worldwide is now 71 years, and 80 in the developed world; for most of human existence most people died around 30. Global extreme poverty has declined to 9.6% of the world’s population; still limiting the lives of too many, but 200 years ago, 90% lived in extreme poverty. In just the last 30 years, the proportion of the global population living with such deprivation has declined by 75%. Equally unappreciated is the fact that 90% of the world’s population under the age of 25 can read and write, including girls. For most of the history of Europe, no more than 15% of the people could read and write, mostly men.

So despite the truthiness feeling that things are going wrong, a lot is going right, for a lot of people, in a lot of countries. But this is a moment at risk of being squandered.

‘Reason sweeteened by values’

Which invites the question of what is at stake, how might the level of civilisation here be turned up, by whom, and to what end?

This was a question addressed by Robert Menzies when in 1959, as Prime Minister, he approved the formation of the Humanities Council, the precursor of the Australian Academy of Humanities. At the time, with the Cold War in full swing, and the memory of the hot war still smoking, Menzies declared the Humanities Council would provide,

Wisdom, a sense of proportion, sanity of judgement, a faith in the capacity of man to rise to higher mental and spiritual levels. We live dangerously in the world of ideas, just as we do in the world of international conflict. If we are to escape this modern barbarism, humane studies must come back into their own, not as the enemies of science, but as its guides and philosophic friends.

Now we are more often likely to hear prominent politicians pillorying the humanities as esoteric and truth-defying, and humanities scholars as ideologues in cahoots with self-aggrandizing scientists who are addressing the existential crisis of climate change for personal gain.

To attack the university system at precisely the moment when it reaches more people, when its impact on the social, cultural and economic wellbeing of the nation has never been higher, seems perverse. Based on medium-sized lies, madness even, from the zone of truthiness.

As the debate triggered by the Ramsay proposal has shown there is a lot at stake. For all the noise in the press, the very fact that there are lots of different ways of approaching the study of civilisations, has not been addressed except by snide, often ill-informed or defensive comments about “relativism”.

I am not a scholar of civilisations or a philosopher, but I am aware of some of the complexity of these debates. The need to define civilisation, and to allow the notion of civilisations, has preoccupied fine minds, and lead to different conclusions. Are there six civilisations, as Samuel Huntington suggested remained when he wrote his most famous essay The Clash of Civilisations? Or the 26, not including the civilisation of the first Australians, which Arnold Toynbee had identified a few decades earlier in his monumental work A Study of History.

Some maintain that civilisations are shaped by religion, others by culture, cities, language, ideology, identity or as a response by human beings to nature.

Civilisations flower and die. Some leave artefacts, buildings and monuments that endure. Others leave stories, philosophies, language, knowledge and ways of being that echo and resonate long after. Some just disappear, some suicide. Others grow and respond to interaction, adapting and changing as they go. And we now know, many leave a measurable trail in the polar ice, as the recent discovery of the traces of lead from Ancient Rome from 1100 BCE revealed.

As Kenneth Clark reputedly said after devoting his life to popularising the study of civilisation, “I don’t know what it is, but I recognise it when I see it.”

I like to think of it as a shorthand for the way human beings coexist with each other, the world they have created and the natural environment which makes it possible. While recognising the contestability of values, I like the positive humanity of Clive Bell’s notion of “reason sweetened by values” and RG Collingwood’s, “mental process toward ideal social relationships of civility”.

For me, civilisation is pluralist, contestable, open, polite, robust; buttressed by law, culture and institutions and maintained by sustainable economic conditions across time and place.

The need for a bill of rights

The barbarism of the second world war galvanised the creation of civilising mechanisms and institutions. They varied from country to country, with different impacts , but the intention was generally to expand rights and enhance democracy.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which will turn 70 on the 10th of December, was the most singular global response: its 30 rights recognise and spell out “the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family”. Its symbolic power exceeds its legal effect, as George Williams has written. It forms part of customary international law and is seen as binding on all nations. It been translated into 500 languages. Australia has ratified two of the most important subsequent conventions which grew under its umbrella to define political and civil; social, economic and cultural rights – so it is not without effect here.

Read more: Ten photos that changed how we see human rights

The Universal Declaration may well have faults and limits. Some regard it as “human rights imperialism” used by the West to run the world in ways that will protect and promote its interests. But when expansively applied, rather than as an embodiment of Western hegemony, it remains the best organising principle for civility that humanity has yet been devised. Ask women in Asia, India and the Middle East, democrats in Turkey, Hungary and Poland, activists in China or journalists in Russia.

“Without it”, as a Turkish-born scholar recently wrote, “we have few conceptual tools to oppose populism, nationalism, chauvinism and isolationism”.

Australians played an important role in the creation of the Declaration, but we have been tardy about its application. Ours is the only democratic nation which does not have a bill of rights – the only one. This is something that demands pause for thought. It is something we need to address if we are to foster an ethic for a distinctive, hybrid Australian civilisation.

It is probably worth noting in passing that some of the most strident opponents of an Australian bill of rights are also amongst the most vociferous promoters of a narrowly defined agenda to study western civilisation. It is easy in this environment to forget that the demographics are with those of us who see the arc of history bending up. Surveys show most Australians would welcome a formalisation of rights.

Surely a clear statement of rights and responsibilities is central to any attempt to define a civilisation and the way we co-exist, respectfully, sustainably, creatively.

More than a pale shadow

“Person by person the world does change,” Tony Abbott wrote in his essay for Quadrant that marked the beginning of the end of the Ramsay program at ANU. In his final paragraph, the former prime minister suggested that the “hundred bright young Australians” who received the proposed scholarships “might change the world”, and begin “a much more invigorating long march through our institutions!”

That makes me a little nervous. It sounds a bit like a fifth column, though I doubt that the students would be willing fodder for such a scheme. I suspect that if they were to embark on such a long march, they, like me, would prefer an open, inclusive, contested, respectful, non-ideological journey, grounded in the unique nature of this place as home to the oldest living civilisations, a product of British colonialism, the creation of people from every continent and our own imagining.

This country has a lot going for it, but we seem stuck in neutral. We need to regain ambition. To foster a remarkable country, one which learns from the mistakes of past and displaces complacent caution to imagine and create a robust, inclusive, generous, rights-based democratic order that will work well in the very different world of the 21st century.

It won’t come from politicians. It will, if history is a guide, be something that is worked up on the ground, in our universities, in our institutions, in our justice system, in business, community groups and on social media. As it takes shape, the politicians will follow and carry it forward.

There is a lot at stake. Person by person, we can help to turn the level of civilisation up in this place, so that it becomes much more than a pale shadow of the worst of the rest of the world.

This article is an excerpt of the 49th Academy Lecture delivered by Professor Julianne Schultz AM FAHA as part of the Australian Academy of the Humanities Symposium, ‘Clash of Civilisations: Where are we now?’ held at the State Library of NSW on 15 November 2018. The full lecture will be published in the 2019 edition of the Academy’s journal, Humanities Australia.

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

As the Morrison government thrashes around trying to stave off defeat or just save the furniture, it reminds one historian of the ill-fated McMahon administration.

The run up to the Coalition’s 1972 ousting is detailed in a just-released life of Billy McMahon, titled Tiberius with a Telephone. McMahon, often rated at or near the bottom in rankings of modern Australian PMs, has been long overdue for a biography – now he has a 776-page tome.

Author Patrick Mullins, of the University of Canberra, says the “similarities between now and then are too conspicuous to ignore”. These include a history of leadership instability, party disunity, depleted Liberal finances, confused, reactive and inconsistent policy directions, a credible opposition and a feeling for change in the electorate.

Admittedly, as Mullins says, there are differences. Morrison has a benign economic environment, support in important sections of the media, and a much better image than the widely-ridiculed McMahon.

But the fundamental point is that those were desperate days for the Coalition and so are these. “McMahon was in survival mode,” says Mullins, and the same could be said of Morrison.

Mullins’ observation of the McMahon government – “For every achievement and move towards new policy there was another fight, another muddle, another problem that should never have been cause for concern” – resonates when assessing the present one.

A government on the ropes acts impulsively, looking to the moment, compromising sound policy-making and broader, longer-term interests.

So it has been with Morrison’s suggestion Australia would consider moving its embassy to Jerusalem, a proposal born out of political expediency that’s brought him grief this week.

The Indonesian displeasure was felt as soon as the announcement was made before the Wentworth byelection. Subsequently, things have just got worse.

The free trade agreement with Indonesia, which Australia originally hoped would be signed this week when Morrison was in Singapore for the start of the summit season, has become hostage to the embassy decision.

Earlier the government tried to fudge the signing delay by a faux nonchalance about timing. Nobody was fooled. Now in public and private comments, Indonesia has made its position clear in the past few days, to Morrison’s embarrassment.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad also piled on, saying he’d pointed out to Morrison that “adding to the cause for terrorism is not going to be helpful”.

Rather than having an easy ride on his international round, the embassy issue has put Morrison on the back foot.

There was no immediate way out. The government still has to declare what it will do. Morrison says a “process” is underway – presumably bureaucrats’ advice is being sought and examined, after they were initially bypassed. There’s to be a decision before Christmas.

This can’t end happily. Morrison is caught between, on the one hand, the right of the Liberal party and the Jewish lobby, and on the other, the strongly-held view of our biggest neighbour in particular.

And the angst has been all for nothing – Wentworth was lost.

The Jerusalem question isn’t the government’s only looming no-win decision. It has yet to provide a response to the religious freedom report, a time bomb left by Malcolm Turnbull, who set the inquiry up to placate the right.

In the meantime negotiations with Labor remain unfinished over legislation announced by Morrison (pre-Wentworth) to prevent discrimination against gay students.

The still-suppressed report has brought little but controversy for the government, and backfired on the right, even before we have a policy from it.

Yet this week we have a new inquiry that reflects ideology more than need, with Education Minister Dan Tehan’s announcement of a review of freedom of speech in universities.

The right has been agitated about the unwelcome receptions some conservative speakers have received from demonstrators on campuses.

Adding to the right’s broader anger with universities was the conservative Ramsay Centre’s failure to persuade the prestigious Australian National University to accept funding for a proposed course on western civilisation, which came with conditions the ANU felt would compromise its academic autonomy.

The freedom-of-speech inquiry seems little more than another manifestation of the culture wars, symptomatic of the anti-intellectual stance of some of the Liberal hardliners, who see tertiary institutions as seeding grounds for the left.

Tehan said the inquiry, undertaken by former chief justice Robert French, would “outline realistic and practical options that could be considered to better promote and protect freedom of expression and freedom of intellectual inquiry”.

It will “review existing material regarding free speech, including codes of conduct, enterprise agreements, policy statements and strategic plans”. French is to report in four months, so before a May election.

Catriona Jackson, chief executive of Universities Australia, says vice-chancellors “are questioning of the rationale for the review” – they “do not see there is an issue to address. Every day on university campuses across the country there is vigorous debate across a wide range of issues,” she says.

This inquiry could end up producing fresh pinch points for the government, like the freedom of religion one has. At the least, it seems an odd priority – the issue wouldn’t engage too many ordinary voters.

That’s in contrast to energy policy, undisputed core business for government and public. But this remains ad hoc and fraught, as the government goes about strong-arming companies on price and searching for opportunities to support new investment in so-called “fair dinkum” power.

The highly interventionist approach is problematic on two fronts: it is contrary to Liberal philosophy, and it’s unlikely to be effective.

The Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood says: “In the absence of a stable climate policy and good management of the electricity market we seem to be left with nothing more than threats, which are easy to make but hard to implement, and subsidies, which may be popular but make no sense from a policy perspective”.

A politically-inspired thought-bubble with serious fallout, an unnecessary bow to the right, a core policy that’s unfit for purpose. Taken together the embassy issue, the free speech review, and the energy shemozzle point to a survival strategy that’s not cutting it. Just as McMahon’s didn’t.