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

There is an interesting and notable point of detail about the “lifetime ban” legislation that remains a sticking point in the argument between the government and Labor over the resettling of offshore refugees in New Zealand.

The ban would not apply to the refugee children. The bill – which has so far failed the hurdle of the Senate – excludes anyone who was under 18 when transferred to a regional processing country.

So if the legislation were passed in its present form and people were sent to New Zealand, the parents could never travel to Australia but their offspring, if they later became NZ citizens, could eventually do so.

The row over the “lifetime ban” bill, which the government wants before a deal with NZ, is just one aspect in what is a complex set of manoeuvres to find an end to the limbo situation of the refugees on Nauru and Manus.

For years, their plight has been an international embarrassment. But now the government knows the issue is resonating domestically and Prime Minister Scott Morrison, pragmatic on this as on most else, accepts he has to do something about it and has already started to move quite decisively.

Admittedly the deal with the US under President Obama, which President Trump accepted under protest, is getting some people settled in America, but progress is slow and the number still modest.

Several Liberal backbenchers began to twist Morrison’s arm over the plight of the children some weeks ago. Morrison responded, with the sickest children quietly and fairly quickly removed to Australia.

Read more: Government raises glimmer of hope for New Zealand deal on refugees

Saturday’s Liberal disaster in the Wentworth byelection, in which refugee policy was an issue, underlined the political necessity of being seen to do more.

Then Cathy McGowan and Rebekha Sharkie, crossbenchers in the House of Representatives, with a view to their enhanced clout in the coming hung parliament, further turned the screws with public comments.

By Tuesday even the Wiggles had joined the push, in a video appealing to politicians to “work together and get all the kids off Nauru”.

Nauru is the focus, and the 52 children there. That was the number as of Tuesday, after 11 children arrived in Brisbane late Monday with their families – a contingent of 27 in all.

As part of the rapidly evolving policy, whole families are being transferred – there is apparently no attempt now to keep a parent in Nauru to try to get people to return after medical treatment.

The reality is that those coming here won’t be sent back.

Read more: As children are airlifted from Nauru, a cruel and inhumane policy may finally be ending

Morrison told a news conference on Tuesday: “I’m interested in getting children off Nauru. Over 200 children have already come off Nauru. More children have already come off in recent times under the quiet, effective management of these issues that the government is pursuing. We’re not here to grandstand on this. We’re just here to get the job done.”

But the government wants to keep its rhetoric tough – both to retain a debating distance with Labor over border policy (which has served it well as political weaponry in the past) and to send as loud a message as possible to people smugglers and their prospective clients not to try to reopen the pipeline.

Labor is under pressure to pass the “lifetime ban” legislation – if it doesn’t, it will be cast as frustrating a deal with New Zealand.

The ALP has softened its opposition to the legislation, putting forward a revised position. It wants to see a tangible deal with NZ. It also says the “lifetime ban” should apply only to those settled in NZ, and to the provision that allows open movement from NZ to Australia (thus these people would be allowed to make tourist visits here).

It’s not clear what Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton thinks about the present subtle but distinct policy shift. In Tuesday’s question time Dutton focused on 13 children on Nauru in families in which adults had been “the subject of adverse security assessments from the United States”.

If Dutton had been the victor in the August coup, very likely the policy movement now underway would not be happening.

Dutton, however, would contest the proposition there has been a shift, on the grounds that transfers happened before. But many of those were on court orders, or under the shadow of court action. And, as Morrison flagged, more are happening.

While the shift should be welcomed, it also should be kept in perspective. There is so far no deal with NZ – though there is great pressure to get one in place, through mutual compromise between government and Labor.

But even if the NZ deal comes to pass, on previous indications it would only involve a limited number – the offer was for 150 annually, and there are currently 635 people on Nauru including the children.

And in all the talk, the hundreds of single men on Manus hardly get a mention.

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

Some in the Nationals would like Barnaby Joyce back in the leadership before the election. Joyce speaking to The Conversation repeats that if the leadership were offered, he would be up for it – though he insists he is not canvassing.

But his critics think he would have a “woman problem” – and Joyce acknowledges that to win support back from rural women he “would certainly have a lot of work to do”.

The former deputy prime minister is the government’s special drought envoy, and ahead of Friday’s Drought Summit he says there’s still a lot to be done. While there’s been some recent rain, even for those farmers who have received it “the real relief does not become evident until such time as the money turns up at the bank”.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Reilly, Director of the Public Law and Policy Research Unit, Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide

Australia’s off-shore detention policy is unravelling. Predictably, after five years of detention, the mental health of adults and children who have been left in indefinite detention on Nauru is collapsing. On Monday, 11 children and their families were flown to Australia for urgent medical attention.

The New Zealand deal, under which some asylum seekers could be resettled in New Zealand as long as they are banned from ever coming to Australia, is now being seriously considered.

Good politics, bad policy

From the middle of 2013, when off-shore processing was re-started on Nauru and Manus Island, the Rudd government, and later the Abbott government, made bold and irresponsible claims that no asylum seeker attempting to enter Australia by boat would ever be resettled here.

This played well to an Australian public spooked by a dramatic rise in boat arrivals under the Rudd government between 2009 and 2013, and set the foundation for a policy that has systematically brutalised hundreds of innocent people.

Read more: Same old rhetoric cannot justify banning refugees from Australia

The claim, in the name of deterrence, relied on hopes Australian governments would find places to resettle the asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru and Manus Island in other countries. But there was no plan as to where they might go and, predictably, resettlement proved very difficult.

An agreement with the Cambodian government failed because Cambodia lacks the capacity to resettle people of such different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Malcolm Turnbull seemed to have stumbled upon a resolution when the Obama administration agreed to take sone refugees from Nauru and Manus.

The current US administration has resettled 276 people from Nauru and rejected a further 148. There may be more resettlements to come, but there is no clear timetable, and it will be a resolution for only some of the 652 people remaining on Nauru.

Inexplicably, the Australian Government has repeatedly rejected an offer from New Zealand to resettle 150 refugees there, fearing that people will take advantage of open migration between Australia and New Zealand and will end up resettling here.

Under renewed pressure from opposition parties, the government is reconsidering the New Zealand offer, but only if there is a travel ban preventing refugees ever coming to Australia. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has drawn, once again, on the tired justification that to allow asylum seekers any right of entry to Australia may encourage people smuggling.

Why the people smuggling argument does not stack up

The people smuggling narrative does not withstand reasonable scrutiny. How much cruelty to innocent people on Manus and Nauru is really needed to stop the boats?

A comparison with the Howard years is instructive. From 2001 to 2008, of the 1,153 refugees and asylum seekers resettled on Nauru and Manus Island, 705 went to Australia, 401 to New Zealand and 47 to other Western countries. Most were resettled between 2002 and 2004.

Read more: Resettling refugees in Australia would not resume the people-smuggling trade

These resettlements were not followed by a resumption of the people smuggling trade. From 2002 to 2007, 18 boats arrived with 288 asylum seekers. In addition, one boat was turned back with 14 passengers.

What remained important for deterrence was the possibility of being detained offshore with no guarantee of being settled in Australia and New Zealand. Only when this possibility was removed (when the new Rudd government dismantled the Howard government’s offshore processing and turn-back policies) was there a dramatic spike in asylum seekers arriving by boat.

The message of deterrence is clear

The systemic cruelty of detaining refugees in offshore detention centres indefinitely has sent an unequivocal message to any asylum seekers who might contemplate seeking asylum in Australia by boat. No person would countenance subjecting themselves to the mental and physical trauma suffered by detainees on Nauru and Manus Island for the chance of receiving protection in Australia. And no parent would risk subjecting their child to a lifetime of mental illness.

The Australian government has proved its mettle. It is prepared to subject innocent people to the cruellest of punishments, to disregard basic principles of human dignity, and to ignore its obligations under international law. This is deterrent enough for any prospective boat rider.

Time to end an inhumane policy

It is well past time to resettle every refugee and asylum seeker on Manus and Nauru in Australia. If this is done while the policies of boat turn backs and offshore detention remain in place, this will not lead to a resumption of people smuggling operations. And if I am wrong in this, we can be confident of stopping the boats again, as the government did with startling effectiveness in 2001 and 2013.

It seems that the government may finally be softening its untenable hard line. With no other resolutions on the table, most of the refugees on Nauru and Manus must end up in Australia or New Zealand.

Until this happens, the mental health of refugees stuck on Nauru and Manus will continue to deteriorate, and courageous whistleblowers will continue to risk their employment revealing the brutality and trauma of conditions in detention.

All this pain and suffering, and economic cost, for a deterrent that is not needed.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Frew, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Charles Sturt University

More than half the world’s plant-derived energy intake comes from just three crops: rice, wheat and maize. These crops, like most land plants, live in an evolutionarily ancient partnership with a certain type of fungus, called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.

These fungi penetrate plants’ roots, even entering the root cells themselves. In a win-win relationship, the fungi provide the plants with crucial nutrients and the plant provides the fungi with sugar.

By helping plants take up nutrients from the soil, these fungi can enhance crop yields, increase pest resistance, and reduce the need for fertiliser. So it’s hardly surprising that there has been a long-held interest in harnessing these soil-dwelling fungi for agriculture.

But our research shows that in some cases these fungi can harm crops instead of helping them. This means we need to proceed with caution in pursuing the benefits of using these fungi as fertilisers.

Biofertilisers

The idea of using arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi as “biofertilisers” is not new. Many companies already sell fungal products that boost crop growth and mineral uptake.

Yet the effects of these biofertilisers on crops are actually highly variable. And despite the growing market interest, there is little proof they are necessarily beneficial in every situation.

Biofertilisers can boost plant growth and pest resistance, but this effect often depends on the context. Different species of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi can provide different benefits, or sometimes no benefit at all.

Results can vary between crops too. One cultivar might get a significant boost from biofertiliser, whereas another one may not. Differences in soil type, nutrient availability, and even season can also affect the outcome.

To work properly, fungal biofertilisers also need to be compatible with local conditions, including the microbes that are already present in the soil. A crucial question is whether the inoculant fungi are superior competitors to the “native” fungi already established? What’s more, little is known of the long-term effects of introducing these fungi to the soil and surrounding ecosystem.

Fungal friends or foes?

Mycorrhizal fungi can also have negative effects on crops. In our research, my colleagues and I explored the effects of an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal community on the growth of wheat and its resistance to tiny worms that attack the roots. These pests, called plant-parasitic nematodes, cause an estimated US$80 billion per year in crop damage.

We found that fungal inoculation actually reduced plant growth and suppressed important defence-related compounds in the roots. We also observed an increase in nematode populations in the soil, potentially due to lowered plant defences.

Of course this is only one example. And this experiment was not done in the field. Yet it is not the only study to have identified potentially negative consequences of biofertilisers.

Read more: We need more carbon in our soil to help Australian farmers through the drought

Soil probiotics

Biofertilisers are similar to gut probiotics, in that both approaches aim to inject “good” microbes into places where they will prove beneficial. But just as the widely touted health benefits of gut probiotics don’t work for everyone, our results paint a similar picture for soil fungi.

Put simply, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all fungal biofertiliser that will boost every crop in every environment. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work towards improving our ability to use these fungi. In fact, this should be a priority – biofertilisers can be a powerful tool to help tackle the challenges posed by population growth and climate change.

In the right situation, biofertilisers can dramatically increase crop yields and pest resistance, potentially helping us grow more food, more sustainably. But we need to learn more before we can turn this ancient symbiosis between plants and fungi to our advantage.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Grimes, Lecturer in Law, Charles Darwin University

After Yingiya Guyula was elected as a member to the NT Legislative Assembly in 2016, he rose to give his inaugural speech and started speaking in his first language, Yolngu Matha.

Yolngu Matha is dominant language of Guyula’s electorate, and the third-most commonly spoken language in the NT. Nevertheless, he was interrupted by the speaker, Kezia Purick, because he wasn’t complying with recently enacted standing orders that placed barriers on speaking languages other than English in parliament.

A year earlier, another member, Bess Price, was repeatedly told she could not use the Warlpiri language when addressing the Legislative Assembly. The speaker told her:

should a member use a language other than English without the leave of the Assembly it will be ruled disorderly and the member will be required to withdraw the words.

The NT is the most linguistically rich state or territory in Australia, with 70% of Aboriginal residents speaking an Aboriginal language. Despite this, it is the only Australian jurisdiction where parliament has formally enacted standing orders limiting the use of non-English languages and interpreters.

The standing orders prohibit the use of interpreters in parliament and limit the use of non-English languages to pre-prepared remarks when a written English translation has been provided by MLAs in advance.

Read more: Reviving Indigenous languages – not as easy as it seems

As a result, the Legislative Assembly has become what is effectively an English-only body.

After his inaugural speech, Guyula formally requested changes to allow for extemporaneous bilingual speech and interpreters in the chamber. But the standing orders committee refused the request. The committee’s single concession was that it would allow further submissions in 2018, but it has given no indication it will reverse its decision.

How a monolingual approach stifles democracy

Australian politicians representing predominantly English-speaking electorates have used Aboriginal languages without restrictions in other parliaments for symbolic purposes. But in the NT, Aboriginal politicians who represent electorates where Aboriginal languages are predominantly spoken are prevented from using their first languages, even for communication purposes.

Purick has justified the English-only approach by saying it’s “fair” and that it doesn’t create inequality within the Legislative Assembly. The chair of the standing orders committee has also questioned whether parliament should have to “tolerate” members who can’t do business in English.

But this approach actually serves to weaken our representative democracy in several ways:

• Excluding potential candidates – This required English proficiency could exclude potential candidates. According to government statistics, 42% of NT residents speak a non-English language at home. We would not accept parliamentary practices that exclude candidates on the basis of gender, religion or race, so it is not acceptable to exclude candidates from full participation on the basis of language

• Full participation – Government accountability comes through robust scrutiny and debate. Under current practices, Aboriginal MLAs may not have the same access to information or ability to express themselves as their English-speaking counterparts. The NT needs more Aboriginal input into laws and policy, so we should not create barriers for those who are trying to contribute

• An informed electorate – Healthy democracies also rely on voters having equal access to information that affects their lives. English-speaking voters are able to understand parliamentary debate on issues, but those not fully fluent in English could be at a disadvantage.

Read more: Why more schools need to teach bilingual education to Indigenous children

• An engaged electorate – Only half of eligible Aboriginal residents in the NT are enrolled to vote, and voter participation is even lower. The Australian Electoral Commission has said the electoral system lacks relevance for Aboriginal people. If MLAs were permitted to speak their own languages in the Legislative Assembly, this could help engage Aboriginal electorates and boost voter turn-out.

• Recognition – Rejecting someone’s language means rejecting their identity. In the recent Barunga Agreement, the NT government acknowledged that:

there has been deep injustice done to the Aboriginal people of the NT, including … the repression of their languages and cultures … which have left a legacy of trauma, and loss that needs to be addressed and healed.

Rejecting the requests of elected Aboriginal MLAs to use the languages of their electorates seems to be another example of “repression of language”. Reconciliation is not just something parliamentarians should direct others to do, it’s something that needs to happen within parliament itself.

Multilingualism works in other parliaments

Dozens of countries around the world have bilingual and multilingual parliaments. In New Zealand, Maori interpreters have been provided in parliament since 1868 and legislation has been translated into Maori from 1881. Today, interpreters are available for all parliamentary sittings and parliamentarians have the absolute right to speak in Maori.

Although the European Commission uses English, French and German as its working languages, the European Parliament has hundreds of translators and interpreters on hand to translate all speeches and documents into the bloc’s 24 official languages. The parliament says:

it is a fundamental democratic principle that every EU citizen can become a Member of the European Parliament, even if he or she does not speak one of its working languages.

The way forward for the NT Legislative Assembly is not difficult. Each MLA could be given an allowance to use for interpreters in the languages and topics most relevant to their constituencies. Aboriginal-language speeches or questions in the assembly could also be sent to an interpreter service for translation into English and inclusion in the Hansard.

Non-Aboriginal MLAs representing large Aboriginal electorates would also benefit from this provision in order to better connect with their constituencies.

Read more: A new way to recognise an Indigenous nation in Australia

Providing interpreters in five Aboriginal languages for every day of parliamentary sittings would cost around A$110,000 per year (based on the set rate of A$70/hour paid by the Aboriginal Interpreter Service). Multilingual Aboriginal interpreters are already in use in far more challenging and complex situations, such as in NT courts and hospitals.

And allowing MLAs to give extemporaneous bilingual speeches and questions wouldn’t require interpreters and would therefore cost nothing other than time.

The NT is a rich, multilingual society. How can the Legislative Assembly claim to fully represent the breadth of NT society when it chooses to be monolingual? It’s time to recognise the rightful and beneficial place of Aboriginal languages in places of power.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Mulherin, Lecturer, Executive Director of ISCAST–Christians in Science, and Anglican minister, University of Melbourne

As an Anglican priest teaching in philosophy and in climate change at two universities, I am often asked about the difference between science and my own faith convictions.

“Isn’t science about objective proof and evidence and certainty,” they ask with a quizzical look. The question then trails off but the implication is obvious, “and isn’t your faith about subjective, personal belief and values?”

Their quizzical looks arise from a misunderstanding about the nature of scientific knowledge, and more generally about what it means to make a truth claim, that lies behind climate scepticism.

Read more: Where’s the proof in science? There is none

Any announcement on climate change opens the door to climate sceptics and deniers who doubt that human activities have a significant influence on global climate.

But the sceptics have a point: there is no proof. If that shakes your confidence as a true climate change believer, think again.

We have been led to believe that science offers proof and certainty, and anything less than that is just a theory or not even science at all.

But the problem isn’t with the science, it’s with our naïve and impossible expectations of science. And the climate change sceptic often has unrealistic standards of evidence that we simply do not accept in everyday life.

Forensic proof: ‘beyond reasonable doubt’

In most of life the unwritten rules for what counts as evidence are those of the law court: proof beyond reasonable doubt. What is considered beyond reasonable doubt is left for a juror to decide.

Even in mathematics – where proof has a more fixed meaning – some axioms need to be accepted to start raising the edifice of knowledge.

In natural science, just as in economics or sociology or history, theories are provisionally accepted because they seem to make the most sense of the evidence as it is understood.

What counts as evidence is determined according to the sort of truth claim being made. Particle physics seeks different evidence to historical claims; economics offers different sorts of evidence to moral philosophy. It’s horses for courses when it comes to evidence and truth claims.

In climate science, empirical observations blend with theories and modelling. Theories and models are tested as far as possible but in the end no amount of testing and confirmation can absolutely prove the case.

This is the nature of the inductive thinking that grounds science. “All swans are white” was accepted as true (because all the evidence pointed that way) until Europeans visited Australia and found black swans.

The latest special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is based on the scientific consensus of the experts in their respective fields.

One of the IPCC report’s authors is Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, head of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, and he said that it:

…strongly concludes that climate change is already affecting people, ecosystems and livelihood all around the world, and that it is beyond reasonable doubt that humans are responsible.

While we may have good reasons for believing in climate change and for taking action, that still does not constitute proof or absolute certainty – which brings us back to the sceptics.

The fallacious sceptical argument

Here’s one way the climate change sceptical argument works:

• Premise 1: Science gives us proof and certainty.

• Premise 2: Climate change is not proven or certain.

• Conclusion: Climate change is not science.

This argument is good in one sense: it is logically coherent. So if you want to challenge the conclusion you need to challenge one or other premise.

But it would be a (common) mistake to challenge Premise 2 by arguing the unwinnable case that climate science is proven to be true in some absolute sense. In fact, the problem is with Premise 1, as explained above: science does not offer the sort of proof or certainty that the sceptic demands.

This provisionality is recognised in the careful wording of the IPCC which does not speak of proof: just look at page 4 of the latest report where the word “likely” appears seven times and where “high” or “medium confidence” appear nine times. Careful science speaks of degrees of confidence.

Eminent scientist turned philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi, was one of the first to highlight the provisionality of scientific claims. His purpose in writing his main work, Personal Knowledge, was:

…to achieve a frame of mind in which I may hold firmly to what I believe to be true, even though I know that it might conceivably be false.

John Polkinghorne, former professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge University (and also an Anglican priest) observed in his book One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology that science results in:

…a tightening grasp of a never completely comprehended reality.

Read more: The UN’s 1.5°C special climate report at a glance

Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman said:

Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty, some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.

Despite the sceptics’ muddying of the waters, climate science is good science, the stakes are enormous, and we proceed with business as usual at our peril. While the evidence does not amount to certain proof, it is beyond reasonable doubt and leaves no room for delay.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Collins, Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle

Each year, new weight loss diets appear that promise to reveal the ultimate secret of success – if only you buy the book, pills or potions.

Fad diets might achieve short-term results but they are difficult to sustain in the long term.

They often eliminate entire food groups, which means they’re unlikely to provide adequate amounts of key nutrients that are essential for our health and well-being.

Fad diets and rapid weight loss can also increase the risk of serious health problems such as gall bladder disease and gallstones.

Read more: Health Check: six tips for losing weight without fad diets

When assessing whether a diet is a fad, ask yourself, does the diet:

1. contradict advice from qualified health professionals?
2. promote or ban specific foods or whole food groups?
3. promote a one-size-fits-all strategy?
4. promise quick, dramatic or miraculous results with minimal effort?
5. focus only on short-term results?
6. promote “miracle” pills, supplements or products touted to “burn fat”?
7. make claims based on personal testimonials or one random study?

If the answer to two or more of these questions is “yes”, it’s probably a fad.

So, how do today’s popular diets measure up? Here we road-test the blood type, Pioppi, gluten-free, and Mediterranean diets.

Blood type diet

The blood type diet has been around for some time. It’s based on the idea that your blood type is a key factor in predicting your body weight, nutritional requirements, risk of chronic disease, and overall well-being.

According to this diet, those with blood type A should follow what resembles a vegetarian diet. Type Os are supposed to limit carbohydrates and increase their protein intake. Type Bs should avoid chicken, corn, wheat, lentils, tomatoes, peanuts, and sesame seeds; while type ABs should avoid caffeine, alcohol, and cured meats.

But a comprehensive review of 16 studies found there is no scientific literature to back up this list of dos and don’ts.

Verdict: Fad diet. It’s highly restrictive and may increase the risk of nutrient deficiencies.

Pioppi diet

The Pioppi diet is promoted as resembling the food patterns of people living in the small village of Pioppi, southern Italy, who live long, healthy lives.

Read more: Low carb, Paleo or fasting – which diet is best?

The traditional eating habits of the people of Pioppi are in line with the Mediterranean diet, and include lots of vegetables, legumes, grains, fruit, fish, olive oil and nuts, as well as modest amounts of cheese, yoghurt, coffee and red wine, small amounts of meat, and very little sugar or highly processed foods.

But the 21-day Pioppi plan is very different to this. It forbids bread and other grains typically consumed in the Mediterranean. It promotes foods not usually consumed by the people of Pioppi, such as coconut fat.

People who follow the Pioppi diet might lose weight because they’re consuming less energy, having eliminated entire food groups. But consuming saturated fats (polyunsaturated fat) and cutting out grains goes against the current evidence for good heart health.

Verdict: Fad diet.

Gluten-free diet

Gluten is a protein naturally found in wheat, rye and barley, plus some food additives.

People with diagnosed coeliac disease must eliminate gluten from their diet to avoid serious damage to their gut, but many people choose to avoid gluten as a weight-loss strategy.

Read more: If you don’t have coeliac disease, avoiding gluten isn’t healthy

Eliminating gluten does not automatically reduce your kilojoule intake or induce weight loss. But some gluten-containing foods such as pizza, bread, pasta and cakes are energy-dense, so removing them completely will reduce your total energy intake, which may lead to weight loss.

Gluten-free alternatives can be just as high in kilojoules as the gluten containing version, and sometimes can be higher in kilojoules.

Removing gluten-containing without considering what foods will replace them can also reduce your intake of important nutrients such as fibre, folic acid and other B vitamins.

Recent studies discourage unnecessary gluten-free diets due to the reduced intake of beneficial whole grains, which are key to a healthy diet and are associated with lower heart disease and cancer risk.

Verdict: Fad diet when used for weight loss in people who don’t have coeliac disease.

Mediterranean diet

The Mediterranean diet has a strong focus on intake of core foods in addition to olive oil, coffee and wine, and low intake of meat, sugar and highly processed foods.

While the main focus of the Mediterranean diet is not weight loss, when combined with a kilojoule restriction, it can be effective for weight loss.

Among studies that did not prescribe an energy restriction, following the Mediterranean diet was not associated with gaining weight. The Mediterranean diet has also been shown to improve components of metabolic syndrome, even without weight loss.

Verdict: The Mediterranean diet isn’t a fad but it doesn’t guarantee weight loss unless you also restrict your total kilojoule intake.

Read more: Health Check: what’s the best diet for weight loss?

The best approach to weight loss is to follow a healthy, balanced eating plan and to be physically active. Try to make small changes to your usual eating habits that you can live with.

If you need help or to check whether you are meeting your nutrient needs, consult your GP or a dietitian.

If you would like to learn more about weight loss, you can enrol in our free online course The Science of Weight Loss – Dispelling Diet Myths.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lawrence Nield, Professor of Practice, School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle

On my way to work, I walk across the intersection of Knuckey and Wood streets. Most days a homeless man on his haunches is mouthing bureaucratic platitudes:

Let’s workshop this? We need to have meeting about this! Can you give me the heads-up on this? Do we have numbers on this? Has a C/B been done?

Is he an old bureaucrat? Or is he just a parable of planning – platitudes, words and little action? Wishes, words and workshops are not the currency of urban design; skilled drawings, urban history, science and continuous public dialogue are.

The concern in most Australian cities, and particularly in Darwin, should be with the public form of the city – with building frontage, with the streets, squares and parks, and with what is needed to make them safe, cool and enjoyable. Such street-form-based planning should replace “tidy town” zoning planning and code-based roads that ignore heat, landscape and the public.

July 2018 in Darwin was 2℃ hotter than any previous July and the record heat has continued in recent months. Surveys show that people are leaving Darwin because of the heat.

What has gone wrong?

In the city centre, every second shop is closed and dark. Shops, offices and apartments have a 50% vacancy rate. There is no appreciation of the urban history of the decline: the growth of outer urban shopping malls, the closing of Woolworths in Knuckey Street in 2010; the changing in 2012 of the key Smith Street Mall – removing trees, installing canopies and dark pavement, and thus increasing temperatures.

The decline has not happened overnight but has been accelerated by the completion of a vast LNG project, by new shopping malls and chain stores, and by the impact of internet shopping. The Waterfront (mixed uses with a crocodile-safe “plage”) finished in 2013 is subsidised at a cost of millions every year. It is cut off from the city centre.

Traffic is reducing while more roads are being built. Darwin is over-roaded with roundabouts, pedestrian “seagulls” and refuges.

I have calculated that over 35% of the city centre is unshaded blacktop bitumen, which lifts ambient and surface temperatures. There is only 14% green canopy compared to nearly 50% in tree-loving Singapore.

Every day the temperature rises above 30℃. The city centre can be up to 6℃ hotter. The bitumen surfaces reach temperatures of 66℃!

What can be done about this?

Professor Mat Santamouris of UNSW and the Northern Territory government has been studying heat in central Darwin for the past year using drones and 15 weather stations on light poles. Ambient heat, surface heat, humidity and wind have been mapped, eight heat islands (6℃ above ambient) and four heat sinks (cool areas below ambient) have been identified for the northerly (The Wet) and southerly (The Dry) weather regimes.

A predictive computer model has been built to evaluate proposed strategies to reduce heat impacts. Santamouris has recommended across the city centre:

• fountains and pools (very effective up to 50m away)
• white roofs, and green roofs and walls
• coating streets, footpaths and surface parking to make “cool pavement” (very effective)
• increases in green canopy shade (effective in the right location).

The government is using one block of Cavenagh Street as a heat mitigation trial. The 30m-wide street is the hottest street in the city centre. Due to lack of shading, surface temperatures in the afternoon exceed 60℃. The street also acts as a breezeway, “ducting” to the inner blocks hot, dry winds in the dry season and hot, humid winds in the wet season.

Black bitumen surface will be treated with more reflective cool pavement coatings and more trees will be planted. At the southern end a long cooling vine shade structure I have designed (with the structural engineer Max Irvine) is being constructed. Equivalent to 24 trees, it completely spans the roadway with a huge curved stringybark lattice prefabricated by the Gumatj in northeast Arnhem Land.

This large living shade structure has advantages over trees. It can be built in four months, does not interrupt underground services and resists cyclones. The vines will cover the roadway in 18 months. Trees take five years.

But Cavenagh Street is only one of 30 blocks in Darwin. If the proposed mitigation strategies were fully implemented across the city centre, ambient temperature could be reduced by 2.7℃. This would not only make the city more comfortable for commerce but save lives and energy.

Principles for a cool Darwin

Like most cities, there is no overall urban management and coordination at the street level. Darwin’s centre is formed by the NT Planning Scheme. But within the scheme, public servants can play by their own rules: Planning, Transport, Roads, the Waterfront Authority, the City of Darwin (the council) and PowerWater. The result: Darwin streets are series of accidents.

I propose these administrations be replaced in the city centre by a Cool Darwin Authority (small with highly qualified people, and with a Larrakia elder), to develop and implement, with genuine public dialogue and discourse (not so-called “consultation”), an urban design plan.

The first principle of this plan should be reducing the ambient temperature by 2.7℃. Heat stops walkability and wandering past shops.

This could be accompanied by a second principle – a “toolbox” for cool street design. This would including limiting bitumen area.

A “toolbox” for shop regeneration would be among other important principles. This would involve limits on chain stores, disincentives for landlord keeping shops empty, incentives for filling them (even with temporary uses) and support for historic businesses. Shop closure is contagious. Where shops are empty and streets deserted you find graffiti, sleeping rough and dilapidation.

Streets are central to urban cooling. There is over 300,000m² of black unshaded bitumen. Shading and street canopies (that do not trap heat) should be ubiquitous.

The urban order and scale from the 1869 Goyder Plan have been lost, as has the central square that would give an urban focus. Cities with closely spaced intersections seem to thrive more than cities with bigger grids. It seems the more corners the better; people bump into each other more often. There is “propinquity”.

Darwin has worked hard over many years closing its arcades and cross streets (Peel, McLachlan and Lindsay). The centre needs more effective interconnection: the high town (the mall/State Square) and low town (Waterfront) with a grand flight of stairs; the mall/State Square to Old Hospital Site/Myilly Point with a cooling lineal park, via a new (old) central square.

Streets are the music of the city. The buildings are the lyrics. Both should come together as a musical or an opera. The music can only begin if there is a network of shade, greenery, easy walking and buildings of all types interacting with the street.

Requiem or renewal? Darwin sees itself as a laid-back larrikin city with crocs and barra. Renewal and a new character can emerge by the implementation of principles. We cannot wish for a new character.

What might emerge? Perhaps a cool-in-both-senses city: a cosmopolitan tropical capital with tree canopy, vine shade structures and fountains. Perhaps a cool international waterfront city – an eight-hour voyage by fast ferry from Indonesia. Perhaps the full urban recognition of the Larrakia, the saltwater people, and their places: beaches, fish traps, middens, yarning circles, meeting places and cultural centres.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Neal Hughes, Senior Economist, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES)

Two years ago we were celebrating just about the best year for farmers ever. Now many farmers – particularly in New South Wales and southern Queensland – are in the grip of drought.

It underlines just how variable the Australian climate can be.

While attention is focused on responding to the current situation, it is important to also think long-term. In our rush to help, we need to make sure well-meaning responses don’t do more harm than good.

The drought policy debate

The recent drought has stimulated much empathy for farmers from the media, governments and the public. Federal and state governments have committed hundreds of millions of dollars in farmer support. Private citizens and companies have also given generously to the cause.

While there appears to be overwhelming public support for helping farmers through drought, concerns have been raised by economists as well as farmer representatives – including both the former and current head of the National Farmers’ Federation.

A central concern is that drought support could undermine farmer preparedness for future droughts and longer-term adaptation to climate change.

Another concern is that simplistic “farmer as a victim” narrative presented by parts of the media overstate the number of farmers suffering hardship and understates the truth that most prepare for and manage drought without assistance.

Sensationalist media coverage can also damage Australia’s reputation as a reliable food producer Images of barren landscapes, stressed livestock and desperate farmers send the wrong signals to customers and trading partners.

An acute policy dilemma

The tension in drought policy is real.

To remain internationally competitive Australian farmers need to increase their productivity.

Agricultural productivity depends on two main factors. First, innovation – adopting new technologies and management practices. Second, structural adjustment – shifting resources towards the most productive sectors and most efficient farmers.

Supporting drought-affected farms has the potential to slow both these processes, weakening productivity growth.

This gives rise to an acute dilemma: should we support farmers in distress, or support the industry to be the best it can be?

Read more: To help drought-affected farmers, we need to support them in good times as well as bad

Factoring in climate change

While it is difficult to attribute any specific event to climate change, it is clear Australia’s climate is changing, with significant consequences for agriculture.

Australian average temperatures have increased by about 1℃ since 1950. Extreme heat events have become more frequent and intense. Recent decades show a trend towards lower average winter rainfall in the southwest and southeast.

Research by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences shows climate change has negatively affected the productivity of cropping farms, particularly in southern Australia.

This research also shows evidence of farmers adapting to maintain productivity and reduce their sensitivity to climate.

There is still much uncertainty over what climate change will mean for agriculture in the future.

However, the evidence we do have points to more frequent and more severe droughts, if only because of higher temperatures and evaporation rates.

Farming isn’t like other industries

Although businesses in other industries are expected to manage risk without assistance, agriculture has some special aspects that help build a case for a government policy response.

First, risk in agriculture is generally greater than in other industries. Farmers are vulnerable to variation in international commodity prices as well as droughts and other extreme events.

Second, most farm businesses are also farm households.

While many other risky industries are made up of large corporate businesses (generally with diversified assets and ownership), agriculture is dominated by family farms.

Third, financial markets both in Australia and internationally struggle to provide viable risk management products for farmers – particularly drought insurance.

This means farming is an unusually risky business. Farmers must therefore be more conservative about financing and operating their businesses, which constrains investment, innovation and ultimately productivity.

Helping farms without making things worse

In 2008 a Productivity Commission review recommended a national farm income support scheme.

This led to the Farm Household Allowance program.

It provides a fortnightly payment, usually set at the rate of the Newstart unemployment allowance. There is also a financial assessment of the farm business and funding to help develop skills or get professional advice.

Those welfare programs provide an important safety net for farm households. Because they provide targeted support to households, rather than businesses, they result in fewer economic distortions than alternative approaches.

Past reviews have consistently recommended against subsidising farm business inputs or supporting output prices. This includes providing subsidies for livestock feed.

While these measures might provide short term relief, if they become routine they risk weakening the incentives to manage farms properly, by for instance destocking sheep and cattle ahead of likely droughts.

Read more: Drought is inevitable, Mr Joyce

Looking to the future, it is possible insurance could have an important role to play.

While drought insurance has failed to thrive in Australia to date, advances in data could allow more viable forms of insurance to emerge.

In particular, index-based insurance products where payouts are based on weather data rather than an assessment of farm damages.

Such insurance, if done well, could provide farmers with better protection from climate risk, while also supporting adaptation and productivity growth – effectively sidestepping our current drought policy dilemma.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael R. Griffiths, Lecturer in English and Writing, University of Wollongong

Non-Indigenous Australian writers face a dilemma. On the one hand, they can risk writing about Aboriginal people and culture and getting it wrong. On the other, they can avoid writing about Aboriginal culture and characters, but by doing so, erase Aboriginality from the story they tell.

What such writers are navigating is the risk of cultural appropriation: the often offensive taking of another’s culture. It is particularly problematic when the appropriator is in a dominant or colonising relationship with a culture’s custodians. Australian literature has a long history of appropriating and misrepresenting Aboriginal culture.

Take anthropologist A.P. Elkin and his associate W.E. Harney. These white men collaborated in the 1940s on a book translating Aboriginal songlines into anglophone ballads.

In “Our Dreaming”, a dedicatory poem to the resulting collection Songs of the Songmen, the pair open with a self-aggrandising appropriation. This opening text emphasises their ownership of works that they are merely translating.

Together now we chant the ‘old time’ lays,
Calling to mind camp-fires of bygone days.
We hear the ritual shouts, the stamping feet,
The droning didgeridoos, the waddies’ beat.

An unpublished 1943 revision by Harney, altered by Elkin, even more noticeably emphasises the two authors’ claim on these songlines. The poem is titled “To You My Friend” and the first line reads, “To you my friend I dedicate these lays,” as though Harney is bestowing this culture on Elkin directly.

The pair claim to write:

not of their huts, the bones, the dirt,
Nor the strange far look in a native’s eyes,
As he looks to his country ‘ere he dies.

Rather than this vision of the apparently doomed “native”, Songs of the Songmen would purport to extol the romantic figure of the noble savage. The poem continues:

Tis not of these we muse today:
For the ‘Dreaming’ comes, and we drift away
Into myth and legend where we’ve caught
The simple grandeur of their thought.

The pair’s poetry claims in this way to be able to salvage and recapture the “Dreaming”, represented as no longer accessible to Aboriginal people themselves.

This example shows how appropriation, far from innocent, is bound up with attitudes such as the idea of a “doomed race”. It can also be connected to such projects as assimilation and child removal; Elkin advocated both.

The Jindyworobak group

The most famous literary movement in Australia to be engaged in appropriation formed in the 1930s. They were the Jindyworobak group, their founder Rex Ingamells drawing the word from his friend James Devaney’s book The Vanished Tribes, which included a Woiwurung word list.

Jindyworobak means “to annex” or “to join” in Woiwurung. The practices of its writers were, however, more annexation of Aboriginal culture than any inclusive joining together.

Ingamells’ knowledge of Aboriginal culture came from white translators and not from Aboriginal people themselves. He visited Harney on several occasions. The Jindyworobaks both believed in the myth that Aboriginal people were doomed to extinction and advocated the appropriation of Aboriginal culture.

Another writer who found Harney to be a useful source was Xavier Herbert. Herbert drew on Harney’s notes on the Yanyuwa kinship system (Harney spelled the name Anula) and turned skin names into character names in his 1976 epic Poor Fellow My Country. He had Harney’s permission but not that of the Yanyuwa themselves. Herbert’s novel arguably offers a distorted view of Aboriginal kinship.

Contemporary currents

Some of Les Murray’s verse can be read as inheriting from Jindyworobak and its legacy of appropriation – notably his 1977 Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle, which presents a non-Indigenous family holiday as sacred to the equivalent of an Indigenous song cycle. Murray’s poetry is often innovative, but its progenitor is also famous for positing a near equivalence between non-Indigenous and Indigenous belonging

Murray has lent his name and ability to publications such as Quadrant, whose editors famously denied the existence of a Stolen Generation. Even where the poetry might be compelling for some, Murray’s reputation is nonetheless associated with Quadrant’s dismissal of Aboriginal perspectives on history and self-representation.

This history of appropriation is dispossession, using another’s culture for gain and without their permission. Yet some have been calling recently for Australian literature to return to and revive these legacies.

Read more: Read, listen, understand: why non-Indigenous Australians should read First Nations writing

Critic and poet R.D. Wood has rhetorically asked, in the context of a discussion about the translation of song-cycles, “what might a Jindyworobak project for the 21st century look like?”. Such a project augurs poorly as a means of engagement for non-Indigenous writers.

South African-born, Western Australian poet John Mateer has used Noongar words in poems such as In the Presence of a Severed Head. The Western Australian poet John Kinsella has contextualised Mateer’s poetry, by saying that it:

utilises borrowings and usages from a number of languages in order to reconstitute their original implications, while also building in the agency of new meaning in the language in which they are being deployed.

But I would argue this is exactly where we need to be careful. While such transnational borrowings can enrich the English they emerge in, what is the effect on the speakers of the original language who are still recovering their culture in the face of colonisation?

As Noongar writer Kim Scott suggests in relation to Mateer’s work:

… there are very few forums for Noongar people to come to terms with the ideas of their ancestors … so it can feel doubly wrong when recent arrivals use those representations for their own purposes.

Others, more globally, have taken umbrage with critiques of appropriation. Kwame Anthony Appiah, for instance, has recently suggested that the idea of cultural ownership is vested in the commodity and not useful for thinking about cultural borrowing. Yet, he does not consider the numerous ways in which Indigenous culture is non-transferable – because it is a form of property grounded in kinship and Country.

Some poets who engage ethically with Aboriginal ways of writing and using language include Phillip Hall and Stuart Cooke. Hall engages with the same Gulf of Carpentaria Indigenous people, the Yanyuwa, from whom Herbert stole, but he does it through a reciprocal and ethical engagement. Hall has permission to write about these relationships. Cooke’s work includes translations of song cycles from the West Kimberley, for instance one written with the permission of George Dyunjgayan.

Non-Indigenous writers, if they wish to engage ethically with Indigenous culture, must learn to respect it as a form of property grounded in kinship and Country.

Michael Griffiths is the author of The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture (UWAP).