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

In a Thursday video for the Wentworth byelection, Malcolm Turnbull’s son Alex has denounced “extremists on the hard right” who, he says, have taken over the Liberal Party.

The younger Turnbull called on voters in his dad’s old seat to register a protest about the party’s direction, and deliver a message on climate change. “If you want to pull the Liberal party back from the brink, there is one clear signal you can send,” he said, urging people not to vote Liberal.

Apart from the leadership coup Turnbull, a Singapore-based investment manager, highlighted energy policy to make his point about the hard right’s “crazy agenda”.

“As an investor in energy, I’ve seen that in particular there’s no way coal can compete anymore. Renewables have gotten too cheap, firming costs are reasonable, and really there’s no trade off any more between lowering your power bills and reducing emissions. And yet still some would like to prosecute a culture war over this issue”.

Kerry Schott, head of the Energy Security Board, is coming from a rather different place but at the Australian Financial Review’s energy summit this week she delivered an equally blunt message about the politics of energy, describing “the general state of affairs right now as anarchy”.

Schott spearheaded the development of the National Energy Guarantee, a plan that had widespread backing, only to be slain by the Liberal party’s right in the exercise that felled Turnbull. Schott likened her feelings to “going through the stages of grief”, saying “I haven’t left anger yet”.

Anyone with an eye for decent policy, for getting some order into an area that’s long been the plaything of chaotic hyper-partisanship, would be there with Schott. As for investors in the sector, they’re in despair.

Scott Morrison stepped into the prime ministership amid the smouldering ruins of the NEG – which he quickly declared dead – and the Liberal right wingers’ scepticism about emissions reduction targets and hostility to the Paris climate agreement.

His approach has been to load all the emphasis onto price, with Angus Taylor “the minister for getting electricity prices down”. As for emissions, the 26%-28% on 2005 levels by 2030 reduction target has stayed, but it is played down, with Morrison’s line being that it will be reached “in a canter”.

Morrison has, however, fended off the right’s persistent calls for Australia to get out of Paris. Tackled this week by shock jock Alan Jones, the Prime Minister gave his usual two reasons for declining to exit.

Read more: View from The Hill: The uncivil Mr Jones

Australia should stick with agreements it had made, he said, pointing out that the Abbott government (not a Labor one) had signed up. And climate change was an “enormously important issue” to the Pacific countries, which in turn were important to Australia strategically.

More broadly though, Morrison avoids dwelling on the significance of climate change.

To deal with energy in all its aspects – policy and politics – a government requires a linked, multi-pronged approach that manages, at the most efficient price, the inevitable transition to cleaner energy.

For business, the policy needs to set an investment framework providing predictability; for consumers it has to constrain prices; for the general citizenry, it should pay regard to their concerns about global warming.

The Morrison government isn’t doing much on the first or the third requirement, and is likely, when the election comes around, to have fallen short of significant progress on the second.

After the collapse of the NEG there is no certainty for investors. According to one independent source close to the industry, business has given up on this government. Another source says business is trying to work out its own way ahead.

Business is more tuned into, and willing to talk about, the emissions challenge and climate change than the government is. For the government, going there takes it down the alley of internal ideological conflict.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report came this week, the Coalition was unimpressed by its call for the international community to phase out coal by mid-century in order to contain the temperature rise. After all, the government is still under internal pressure to underpin investment in new coal-fired power, if investors can be found.

In contrast, Alex Turnbull said in his video the IPCC report “frankly was terrifying … and it’s seemingly insane to me that we could not be doing something about this and soon”.

Read more: IPCC 1.5℃ report: here’s what the climate science says

Obviously the government is correct when it judges voters are focused on power prices. But it errs in its apparent belief that the public don’t care much about emissions, and it under-estimates people’s commitment to renewables.

In this year’s Lowy poll, 59% agreed with the proposition: “Global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs”.

The survey found 84% agreed with the statement: “The government should focus on renewables even if this means we may need to invest more in infrastructure to make the system more reliable”.

Only 14% agreed: “The government should focus on traditional energy sources such as coal and gas, even if this means the environment may suffer to some extent”.

And yet the government refers to dispatchable power as “fair dinkum” power. It doesn’t just go to the problems that have to be addressed with renewables, but often in its rhetoric gives them something of a second-class status.

The government’s near-total focus on prices translates into what it characterises as a “big stick” approach towards companies – a degree of intervention it would roundly condemn if it were being pursued by a Labor government.

The biggest stick can only do so much, and prices will still be high when people vote.

Taylor told the AFR summit, “If the industry focuses on consumers, customers and their interests, government can return to the light touch regulations that we would always prefer”.

But while measures at the consumer end have an essential place, the core of the issue is further back in the chain – getting the proper settings to encourage investment.

That is what the government can’t achieve, because of its own divisions.

As on other fronts, the Coalition has handed an advantage to Labor on energy and climate policy.

The ALP has a controversially ambitious target for emissions reductions (45 per cent reduction on 2005 levels by 2030), but the government’s ability to run a scare campaign about the implications for price and reliability is diminished by its own gaping policy hole.

Labor is looking to pick up the discarded NEG. It is currently grappling with the question of how, if it brought in a NEG, it could maximise certainly for investors in a political situation where a Coalition opposition could play “the politics of repeal” – as Tony Abbott did when the then ALP government introduced its carbon policy.

After the government’s shambles, Labor has a reasonable story to tell investors. But the story those investors really wanted to hear was a bipartisan one, and that won’t be delivered.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nanthi Bolan, Professor of Enviornmental Science, University of Newcastle

Australia has never been a stranger to droughts, but climate change is now super-charging them.

Besides taking a toll on human health, droughts also bake the earth. This means the ground holds less water, creating a vicious cycle of dryness.

Our research has investigated ways to improve the health and structure of soil so it can hold more water, even during droughts. It’s vital to help farmers safeguard their soil as we adapt to an increasingly drought-prone climate.

Read more: Australia moves to El Niño alert and the drought is likely to continue

Soil moisture is key

The immediate effect of drought is complete loss of soil water. Low moisture reduces soil health and productivity, and increases the loss of fertile top soil through wind and water erosion.

To describe how we can improve soil health, we first need to explain some technical aspects of soil moisture.

Soil moisture is dictated by three factors: the ability of the soil to absorb water; its capacity to store that water; and the speed at which the water is lost through evaporation and runoff, or used by growing plants.

These three factors are primarily determined by the proportions of sand, silt and clay; together these create the “soil structure”. The right mixture means there are plenty of “pores” – small open spaces in the soil.

Read more: How to fight desertification and drought at home and away

Soils dominated by very small “micropores” (30-75 micrometres), such as clay soil, tend to store more water than those dominated by macropores (more than 75 micrometers), such as sandy soil.

If the balance is skewed, soil can actually repel water, increasing runoff. This is a major concern in Australia, especially in some areas of Western Australia and South Australia.

Improving soil structure

Good soil structure essentially means it can hold more water for longer (other factors include compaction and surface crust).

Farmers can improve soil structure by using minimum tillage, crop rotation and return of crop residues after harvest.

Another important part of the puzzle is the amount of organic matter in the soil –it breaks down into carbon and nutrients, which is essential for absorbing and storing water.

There are three basic ways to increase the amount of organic matter a given area:

• grow more plants in that spot, and leave the crop and root residue after harvest

• slow down decomposition by tilling less and generally not disturbing the soil more than absolutely necessary

• apply external organic matter through compost, mulch, biochar and biosolids (treated sewage sludge).

Typically, biosolids are used to give nutrients to the soil, but we researched its impact on carbon storage as well. When we visited a young farmer in Orange, NSW, he showed us two sites: one with biosolids, and one without. The site with biosolids grew a bumper crop of maize the farmer could use as fodder for his cattle; the field without it was stunted.

The farmer told us the extra carbon had captured more moisture, which meant strong seedling growth and a useful crop.

Read more: On dangerous ground: land degradation is turning soils into deserts

This illustrates the value of biowastes including compost, manure, crop residues and biosolids in capturing and retaining moisture for crop growth, reducing the impact of drought on soil health and productivity.

Improving soil health cannot happen overnight, and it’s difficult to achieve while in midst of a drought. But how farmers manage their soil in the good times can help prepare them for managing the impacts of the next drought when it invariably comes.

The author would like to thank Dr Michael Crawford, CEO of Soil CRC, for his substantial contribution to this article.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mihiri Silva, Paediatric dentist and PhD candidate, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

A quarter of children have dental decay by the time they start school. This occurs when bacteria in the mouth break down sugar to produce acid, which attacks and dissolves the teeth.

Avoiding sugary food and drinks and brushing regularly with an age-appropriate fluoridated toothpaste remain the best ways to ensure children have healthy teeth. But despite parents’ best efforts, some children’s teeth are inherently weak and decay more easily.

Historically this was thought only to affect a very small minority (0.1%) of people who had rare genetic conditions such as amelogenesis imperfecta (enamel malformation).

But more recent Australian studies have reported that up to 14% of pre-schoolers may have “hypomineralised second primary molars” (HSPM), where the enamel (outer layer) of the second baby molars doesn’t develop properly, making them weak and prone to damage.

What it means for kids

The teeth of children with hypomineralised second primary molars may have white or yellow patches with rough areas where the weak enamel has broken off.

The teeth can be so weak that they’re unable to cope with the demands of chewing and break down soon after they come through the gums.

These teeth are often highly sensitive and children may avoid brushing them because they hurt. Such sensitivity, combined with the weak enamel, means dental decay occurs more readily.

Read more: How to (gently) get your child to brush their teeth

Providing dental care for children with these teeth is challenging, as the usual anaesthetic agents to numb teeth are less effective, and teeth often hurt during treatment.

The usual filling materials, which work by sticking to the enamel, don’t last as long because of the poor enamel quality, so these children need to have dental treatment more often.

All of this has been shown to lead to higher rates of dental anxiety and phobia.

The bad news doesn’t end there. If the baby teeth are affected, the adult teeth are also more likely to be affected.

Causes

Tooth enamel is formed long before the teeth come through the gums. The baby molars start to form halfway through pregnancy, and are essentially completely formed by birth.

Unlike skin and bone, tooth enamel can’t naturally heal, so any damage would still be present when the second primary molars erupt, at around two years of age.

Despite the recommendation for children to have a dental checkup by the age of two, only one in three children has seen a dentist by age four. Defective teeth are sometimes not noticed until they break down and become infected. In such cases, they may need to be removed.

Read more: Child tooth decay is on the rise, but few are brushing their teeth enough or seeing the dentist

A recent study of twin children found that the causes may not be genetic, but rather due to something that happens during pregnancy or birth. Hypomineralisation of second primary molars has been linked to maternal illness, smoking and alcohol use in pregnancy, and research is ongoing to clarify these links.

Treatment

Conditions that weaken enamel mean that while a healthy diet and good brushing help, additional precautions are needed.

Dentists can help detect signs of weak teeth before they break down. They can help protect these teeth using seals or fillings that cover weak parts.

In badly affected teeth, this window of time is narrow, so it’s important to have regular dental visits, starting as early as 12 months of age, or when the teeth first come through.

Read more: Bad teeth? Here’s when you can and can’t blame your parents

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alice Gorman, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

The Apollo 11 lunar landing was the first time humans stepped on another celestial body, and the events leading up to that historic moment – which celebrates its 50th anniversary next year – are depicted in the new movie First Man, out in cinemas today.

Director Damien Chazelle has delivered an intense film about astronaut Neil Armstrong, who made those iconic first steps.

But this is no triumphant paean to the Cold War Space Race, and you’ll find no trite comparisons of Apollo technology to the computing power of today’s smart phones here.

Drawn from the official biography by James R Hansen, Armstrong is portrayed with muscular introversion by Ryan Gosling, grappling with Armstrong’s renowned discomfort with the public demands of the space program, his role of husband and father, the intellectual and physical challenges of the quest for the moon, and a series of deeply personal tragedies.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why can I sometimes see the Moon in the daytime?

In other words, the First Man on the Moon is shown to be a fallible and complex human being.

The man and the Moon

In a quiet opening scene, Armstrong sings a lullaby, I See the Moon, to his infant daughter, echoing the transcendental fascination with the Moon held by generations of sleepless parents and children over the course of our evolution.

Armstrong is haunted by the Moon and death throughout the film. His lunar quest is tied indelibly to his relationship with his daughter.

Shot often from Armstrong’s perspective, this film is an exploration of apparent emptiness – of space, the Moon, and a man in grief, accustomed to loss and most comfortable when cut off from those closest to him.

The Moon landing is the backdrop, the ultimate distraction from his world of pain, and Gosling plays it beautifully.

We’ve been there before, in film

For almost as long as there have been moving pictures, we have had movies imagining space flight. In 1902 Georges Méliès directed and starred in what is considered the first science fiction film, the influential A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage Dans La Lune).

Space films developed a few recurring themes since then. There’s the heroic manly astronaut addicted to risking life and limb. With the notable exception of Hidden Figures, women tend to be shown marooned at home, anguished and accommodating of their physically and emotionally distant husbands. Then there’s the passionate flight director, swearing to all who will listen that he’ll get the astronauts home safe.

It’s a real triumph that First Man (mostly) avoids these cliches and genuinely gives us something new, and somehow more real.

There are a respectful number of references to other movies such as The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, and 2001 A Space Odyssey that embed First Man within the well-established tradition of cinematic space flight.

These references highlight this film’s differences, drawn from the well-grounded depictions of Armstrong and his wife Janet, played by Claire Foy. The sequences between husband and wife are emotionally charged, rather than sentimentalised. The scenes where she listens to the radio feed from the landing are riveting. It is hard to imagine more Oscar-worthy contenders.

Flagging outrage

The film does not sanitise the space program. Embracing the politics of the day, Chazelle recreates the protests around the Apollo missions.

Many people are shown questioning its value. Journalists demand to know how much it is worth, in lives lost and in dollars.

But First Man refocuses the emphasis of the Apollo 11 mission from US nationalism to Armstrong’s personal journey, and this doesn’t sit well with the current far right in Trump’s America.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio is angry that the planting of the US flag – an action symbolising the colonisation of territory – is not shown (although the flag appears more than once).

Some are calling for a boycott over the flag issue. Armstrong’s colleague on the Apollo 11 mission, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, has also implied his dissatisfaction with the film in a tweet.

Chazelle, the Oscar-winning director of La La Land, said the omission was not political; instead he chose to focus on the “unfamous stuff” as well as Armstrong’s experience and character.

The flag was controversial even at the peak of the Cold War. The United Nations Outer Space Treaty, ratified by the US just two years before, forbids territorial claims in space. How could an American mission claim to represent humanity if it included a symbolic act of American colonialism?

Fortunately, the response of the international community was to celebrate the collective human achievement rather than the national one.

There were numerous international contributions made to the Apollo missions. Australia provided tracking stations – famously, Armstrong’s first footfalls on the Moon were transmitted through the Honeysuckle Creek station, outside Canberra.

Australian space scientist Professor Brian O’Brien, then at Rice University in Texas, designed a dust-detecting experiment that was left on the surface of the Moon.

When the Moon is not enough

There is an element of anti-climax about the film’s conclusion. As with Apollo 13, we know how it’s going to end.

Read more: I’ve Always Wondered: could someone take ownership of a planet or a moon?

But First Man does so on a carefully crafted note, a plausible hypothesis suggested by biographer Hansen that may have been designed to further humanise the inscrutable astronaut. The scene implies that the emotional distances he has to travel on Earth are greater than those which he crossed to the Moon.

Where we go from here is the question. Do we show the moral courage to take on the difficult tasks and solve the earthbound crises facing us today, or do we channel our energies and enterprise into becoming a multi-planet species?

Now that we have “conquered” the Moon, perhaps the only mission worthy of Armstrong’s legacy is to be humble, thoughtful and inspired about our place in the universe, while we still have one.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tom van Laer, Reader (Associate Professor) of Marketing, City, University of London

Whether you are booking a hotel room, choosing a restaurant, deciding on what movie to see or buying any number of things, it is likely you have read online reviews before making your decision.

What makes a consumer review persuasive, though? No matter how short, it tells a story in much the same way as a novel does. Yet, like a journalism report, it starts with its takeaway rather than saving that to the end.

These are among the key findings of research my colleagues and I have done into what gives consumer reviews their power to influence consumer choices.

In view of the influence reviews have, there is considerable interest among marketers, social media influencers and software developers in knowing the qualities that make them compelling and persuasive. So it’s smart for you as a consumer to understand them too.

Read more: Spot the fake: shoppers get help with online reviews

In a recent article in the Journal of Consumer Research, my colleagues Jennifer Escalas, Stephan Ludwig, Ellis van den Hende and I argue that persuasiveness lies in the experience of “transportation”. The level of this transportation depends on the degree and power of narrative offered.

Our theory was that the same elements that grip the reader of a novel might also exist in reviews, because reviews are essentially short stories too. To test that theory, we developed a new computerised technique for measuring a text’s degree of “narrativity”. We then conducted three studies.

Showing who, where, and when

In the first, we analysed almost 200,000 reviews from the “things to do in Las Vegas” category on the travel-related review site TripAdvisor. Our computerised technique showed the relationship between combinations of words used and the helpfulness of reviews, as measured by reader ratings.

We found the more a review offered insight into the writer’s state of mind, the greater its helpfulness. Take, for example, this extract from a review of Kà, a circus show in Las Vegas:

There was a lot of action. That I love in this show. I would totally go see it again.

Conveying a sense of place and a sequence of events were also elements that contributed to greater helpfulness. For example, this is a review of the musical Vegas! The Show:

The first half seemed to drag on until the bird trainer and his buddies came on. Because they were hilarious and their performance seemed to add life to the show and energise the crowd. The second half of the show was a lot of fun!

Emotional curves, not linear narratives

We also used our computerised technique to tally how many positive and negative words each review contained and where they featured. This analysis tested the effect of the emotional thread in the stories.

Reviews that exhibited emotional curves in their story line, moving from positive to negative and back for example, were rated as more helpful than those that provided a linear narrative. An example is the following review of Mystery Adventures, a live action role-playing game organised in Las Vegas:

This is definitely an unusual thing to do in Las Vegas, but can be a wonderful change of pace. Max seemed nervous at first with lots of ‘uhhh’s and ummmms, but warmed up quickly. Very exciting and worth the effort we put into it.

As mentioned above, reviews starting with their takeaway, or most dramatic revelation, tended to be more helpful too. The following opening of a Graceland Wedding Chapel review is an example:

I was so upset, I did not get married at Graceland Chapel! On our wedding night, there we were….

In the second study, panellists on Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform, were asked to rate the transportation and helpfulness of a selection of reviews. In the third study, we asked 156 students to read reviews about a trip to Agra, India. As before, the participants were asked to rate how transporting and helpful the reviews were, as well as how much they wanted to travel to Agra after reading them.

We confirmed in those two studies that the more narrative elements were present, the more the reviews were regarded as captivating and persuasive. We concluded that the most persuasive reviews tell who did what, where, when and why, and have their emotional transitions and climaxes at the beginning.

Read more: How to split the good from the bad in online reviews and ratings

Implications for you

Our results show that what story is being told as well as how it is being transferred affect you. If you are aware of this influence, you can make more conscious choices.

When reading online reviews, you should consider what the reviewers’ state of mind was, where and when their experience took place, how emotions flow across the review, and where the climax is. In that way, you consider who is writing the texts and what their helpfulness really is.

Reading critically is a practice we should all adopt, no matter the publication. Narrative qualities are among the hardest ones to fake – so looking out for them minimises the chance that fake reviews sway your opinion.

Read more: From dating profiles to Brexit – how to spot an online lie

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jarryd Bartle, Sessional Lecturer in Criminal Law, RMIT University

In the final episode of Exposed, the ABC documentary series on the conviction of Keli Lane, the fairness of her trial was called into question due to admitted flaws in the police investigation.

The Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative, a group dedicated to investigating claims of wrongful conviction in Australia, is examining whether those deficiencies also include a failure by police to disclose hours of recordings to Lane’s defence lawyers.

The failure of prosecutors and police to disclose material that was not used at criminal trials has emerged as a potential cause of wrongful convictions and other miscarriages of justice in cases across Australia.

Prosecutors are obliged under the common law to disclose any relevant evidence they possess to defence lawyers, even if that material hurts the prosecutor’s case.

These obligations are also laid out in the rules that govern the conduct of members of the bar, such as the Victorian Legal Profession Uniform Conduct (Barristers) Rules 2015, which provides that prosecutors must disclose to their opponents “as soon as practicable” all available material that could be relevant to the guilt or innocence of an accused person.

Despite these obligations, cases of non-disclosure continue to be brought to light, both in Australia and other countries.

Repeated cases of disclosure failures

In the Lane case, the apparent failure of police to disclose an estimated 2,000 potentially crucial recordings was only discovered following meticulous reviews of the case materials by our researchers.

Lane was convicted of the 1996 murder of her infant daughter, Tegan. The police had placed intercepts on her phone and a listening device in her house over several weeks in 2004 and 2008, but only a selection of those recordings was disclosed as part of the prosecution’s case.

We have made a freedom of information request to access to any undisclosed recordings and determine their exculpatory value. This application is currently under review by the Information and Privacy Commission NSW.

Read more: A criminal record: women and Australian true crime stories

The 1995 wrongful conviction of Andrew Mallard demonstrates the role of disclosure errors in miscarriages of justice. Mallard had been convicted of murdering a jeweller in her shop with a weapon that was never found. The prosecution case was based on a series of admissions alleged to have been made by Mallard in police interviews, including a drawing of a wrench that he said he had used in the murder.

However, only one interview was recorded by the police. After the trial, it was revealed the prosecution had not disclosed crucial evidence to the defence, including police enquiries that challenged the use of a wrench in the killing.

Mallard spent 12 years in prison before being exonerated when another man’s palm print was found during a cold-case review. He was later given an A$3.25 million compensation payment by the WA government.

In the UK, a recent report by a House of Commons Select Committee found that so-called “disclosure errors” were widespread in that country, too, and the Crown Prosecution Service had yet to recognise “the extent and seriousness of [these] failures”.

The report was sparked by the case of Liam Allan, who was accused of a number of sexual offences. Allan’s lawyers requested various pieces of evidence from the prosecution, including text messages they believed were potentially exculpatory. However, the prosecution failed to disclose this material, noting that the request was not “proportionate or necessary”. The evidence was only handed over following repeated requests and a change of barristers.

It was later revealed at trial that 40,000 text messages had not been disclosed. Once the text messages came to light, the prosecution concluded there was no longer sufficient evidence to support a conviction, and the case was dropped.

The police and Crown Prosecution Service later apologised to Allan.

Why the failure to disclose?

The UK Commons report found that failures to disclose evidence were at least partly due to perceptions by police and prosecutors that this is a common courtesy rather than a core obligation of their jobs.

Policing culture is often associated with a lack of transparency and resistance to external examination.

Read more: Truth or lies: overturning wrongful convictions

This was illustrated in a 2013 review of Queensland police led by former Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty. Keelty found that police in the state did not see themselves as public servants and actively resisted attempts at interaction from other government departments. He referred to it as the “blue iron curtain”, and raised issues about a lack of transparency and the service being too risk-averse.

Though there are no mechanisms currently in place to monitor and ensure disclosure of evidence in Australia, prosecutors are generally obliged to do this in the interest of justice. However, their role is often influenced by institutional and public pressure to act as partisan agents of the state. This in turn means they are wary of disclosing evidence that could hurt the prosecutor’s case.

What can be done to change things?

In Australia, one of the chief barriers to remedying the situation is a lack of understanding of the prevalence of the problem. The limitations of freedom of information laws also make it difficult for lawyers, journalists and advocates to establish the existence or extent of non-disclosure after trial.

The UK Commons report had three key recommendations that are worthy of consideration in Australia:

• a shift in culture towards viewing disclosure as a core justice duty, and not an administrative add-on

• the right skills and technology to review large volumes of material that are now routinely collected by the police

• clear guidelines on handling sensitive material for police and prosecutors

Ultimately, the criminal justice system needs to be oriented to a culture of full disclosure to ensure exculpatory material is not ignored, potentially leading to wrongful convictions. A fair defence requires an open investigation and prosecution.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Madeline Roycroft, PhD candidate and tutor in music history, University of Melbourne

Claude Debussy’s Pélleas and Mélisande holds a unique place in the repertoire of turn-of-the-century France. For his only completed opera, Debussy rejected the musical and dramatic conventions of the genre, crafting a work that is as captivating as it is perplexing.

For years, Debussy had searched for the perfect text upon which to set his first opera. In 1899, he described his ideal librettist (the person who writes the words for an opera) as “a poet who deals in hints”, and his ideal characters as those “whose story belongs to no time or place, who submit to life and fate, and who do not argue”. It was in Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play Pelleas and Melisande (1892) that he found his ideal libretto.

Pélleas and Mélisande was scheduled to premiere at the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique in April 1902. Despite his initial blessings, Maeterlinck boycotted the production, and reportedly challenged Debussy to a duel over the decision to not cast his lover, Georgette Leblanc, in the leading role. A week before the premiere, Maeterlinck published a note in the newspaper Le Figaro, in which he distanced himself from the production, and wished for “its immediate and resounding failure”.

Read more: Pistols at dawn: why there’s more to duelling than what’s seen on our screens

Pélleas and Mélisande tells a story of forbidden love between its title characters. Set in the fictitious kingdom of Allemonde, Prince Golaud discovers the lost and frightened Mélisande while hunting in the forest. Without learning anything about the mysterious young woman, he decides to make her his wife, and takes Mélisande back to his family’s castle. Here, she meets his half-brother, Pélleas.

Pélleas and Mélisande develop a special bond that causes Golaud to become increasingly jealous and suspicious. When the pair finally confess their love for one another, Golaud suddenly arrives and kills Pélleas with his sword.

Soon after, the seemingly uninjured Mélisande is struck with an unknown illness. Filled with remorse, Golaud begs his wife to tell him “the truth” about her affair with Pélleas, but Mélisande’s responses are meaningless, and she dies without answering him.

An ideal libretto

Debussy received permission to set Maeterlinck’s text to music in 1893, and he completed the vocal score within two years. Although opera libretti are generally adapted from existing texts, Pélleas and Mélisande fit the composer’s brief so well that he barely changed a word, cutting only four of Maeterlinck’s original 19 scenes.

Read more: Decoding the Music Masterpieces: Debussy’s Clair de Lune

Debussy also went further than a simple rejection of the conventional aria and recitative forms (where the singers alternate between sung speech and accompanied vocal pieces). In Pélleas and Mélisande, the rhythm and pitch of the vocal parts are aligned as closely as possible to Maeterlinck’s original French prose, leaving no room for the singers to interpret them with their own emotional inflections.

The result is a quintessentially French work that is impossible to translate accurately into any other language. For example, an eloquent English translation of Mélisande’s opening phrase “Ne me touchez pas ou je me jette à l’eau” (“Don’t touch me or I’ll throw myself into the water”) compromises the rhythmic integrity and intonation of Debussy’s original line.

On the other hand, G. Schirmer’s 1902 English translation is akin to spoken French, but the phrase “No, no touch me not or I shall throw me in” is both awkward and disruptive of the plain, child-like speech patterns that characterise the entire opera.

A Symbolist score

When the production company Opéra-Comique accepted Pélleas and Mélisande in 1898, Debussy finished the orchestration, adding several interludes to enable complex scene changes. While his score calls for an extended array of instruments, Debussy opts for colour rather than volume, and scarcely directs the ensemble to play in unison.

To mirror the suggestive hints and gestures of the original Symbolist text, Debussy weaves fleeting contributions from across the orchestra to create a subtle and allusive body of sound.

Pélleas and Mélisande also breaks from tradition in that it does not begin with an overture: the standard orchestral introduction. In fact, Debussy never directs the orchestra to accompany in the traditional sense. He envisioned that it would “take over what the voices are powerless to express”, and instead he tasks the instrumentalists with evoking the eerie, dream-like character of the Kingdom of Allemonde.

Debussy’s declaration that Pélleas was “an opera after Wagner, not inspired by Wagner” can be understood not only in the important role given to orchestra, but also in the musical motifs (particular phrases or sounds) used to represent Pélleas, Mélisande, and Golaud.

These frequently elicit critical comparison to Wagner’s recurring “leitmotifs”; however, Debussy’s themes are distinct in that they transform according to the emotional state of their corresponding characters, rather than simply announcing their entrance.

Read more: Explainer: Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen

The premiere

After a disastrous public dress rehearsal, during which loyal Opéra-Comique subscribers expressed their distaste for the work, Pélleas and Mélisande enjoyed a lukewarm reception on opening night.

Fortunately, a collective of forward-thinking Paris Conservatoire students attended the premiere and were able to counteract the hostility of Debussy’s many opponents. The opera’s director, André Messager, described the first performance as “certainly not a triumph, but no longer the disaster of two days before”.

With time, the opera developed a cult following, and within ten years it had become a staple of the Opéra-Comique repertoire. In an interview in 1908, Debussy reflected on the subject matter and length of Pélleas and Mélisande, and explained why it remained his only completed opera:

I am not quite sure that people want any more long works … In view of modern intellectual processes, operas in five acts are tedious. I don’t mind owning that I think my own Pélleas and Mélisande far too long. In which act? Oh, it is generally too diffuse. But that is the fault of the story.

Pélleas and Mélisande is being staged by Victorian Opera until October 13 2018.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Robinson, Lecturer of History, Edith Cowan University

This article is part of our series of explainers on key moments in the past 100 years of world political history. In it, our authors examine how and why an event unfolded, its impact at the time, and its relevance to politics today.

Racial divisions emerged in South Africa as early as the 1600s, due to Dutch settlement. It began with the Europeans maintaining segregation and hierarchy between themselves, their slaves (many from Asia), and local African populations.

Once the Cape of Good Hope was seized by the British during the Napoleonic period, race-based policies in the colony became increasingly formalised.

The 1806 Cape Articles of Capitulation, which secured the Dutch settlers’ surrender in exchange for the protection of their existing rights and privileges, bound the British to respect prior Dutch legislation and gave segregation an enduring place within the legal system of the South African colonies.

What happened?

Under British control during the 1800s, various laws were passed to limit the political, civil and economic rights of non-whites in South Africa.

This included denying them the right to vote, limiting their right to own land, and requiring the carrying of passes for movement within colonies.

Despite resistance to discriminatory laws in the first half of the 20th century by groups like the African National Congress (ANC), these laws persisted over the decades.

However, social change accelerated in South Africa during the second world war, with African labourers increasingly drawn to urban areas. This was due to industrial production increasing to service Europe’s wartime demands for minerals and local manufacturing replacing imports, empowering rebellious workers and ANC activists in the process.

The threat of social change was palpable, leading South Africa’s white population to elect the Afrikaner-dominated Herenigde Nasionale Party (National Party) in 1948, over the more progressive United Party.

The National Party, which then ruled South Africa until 1994, offered white South Africans a new programme of segregation called Apartheid – which translates to “separateness”, or “apart-hood”.

Apartheid was based on a series of laws and regulations that formalised identities, divisions, and differential rights within South Africa. The system classified all South Africans as “White”, “Coloured”, “Indian”, and “African” – with Africans classified into 10 tribal groups.

From 1950, the Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act assigned all South African citizens a racial status, and determined in which physical areas of South Africa different races could live.

Future legislation would embed these regional divisions, and provide a façade of self-government for the African regions.

The 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and 1950 Immorality Act outlawed interracial romantic relationships, and by 1953 the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act and Bantu Education Act segregated all kinds of public spaces, services and amenities.

Racial policies also intermingled with rhetoric against communism. The 1950 Suppression of Communism Act was central to banning any party advocating a subversive ideology. Virtually any progressive opponent of the National Party regime could be defined as communist, particularly if they disrupted “racial harmony”, which severely limited anti-Apartheid activists’ ability to organise.

More generally, the government also maintained very socially conservative laws for all citizens regarding sexuality, reproductive health, and vices like gambling and alcohol.

The impact of and response to apartheid policies

In this context, the ANC youth wing (including a young lawyer by the name of Nelson Mandela) came to dominate the party and adopt a confrontational black nationalist programme. This group advocated strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience.

In March 1960, police attacked a demonstration against Apartheid’s racial pass system in the Sharpeville township. They killed 69 people, arrested over 18,000 more, and implemented a ban of the ANC and the smaller Pan-Africanist Congress.

This pushed resistance towards more radical, underground tactics. Following authorities’ further brutal treatment of a 1961 labour strike, the ANC launched armed struggle against Apartheid through a military wing: Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). As a leader of MK, Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962 and subsequently sentenced to life in jail.

Anti-Apartheid resistance dimmed during the 1960s due to the harsh repression of activist activities and the arrests of many anti-Apartheid leaders. But in the 1970s, it was revitalised by a growing Black Consciousness Movement.

The independence of nearby Angola and Mozambique from Portugal, and discriminatory education policies that led to the 1976 Soweto Uprising, were hopeful examples of change. By the 1980s, township rebellions, boycotts, union militancy, and growing political organisations pushed South Africa’s Botha government into a state of emergency, forcing dramatic concessions that escalated to negotiations with Mandela.

Despite the British and American governments classifying the ANC as a terrorist organisation during the 1980s, the growing international criticism of Apartheid, spurred by disruptive resistance in South Africa, and the undermining of the anti-Communist imperative due to the end of the Cold War, also moved those states to finally implement trade sanctions against Apartheid.

In 1990, President Frederik de Klerk freed Mandela and unbanned anti-Apartheid political parties, to allow negotiations for a path to majority-rule democracy.

Despite right-wing backlash and outbreaks of violence, the white minority did overwhelmingly approve negotiations for democratic transition. Mandela sought peaceful racial reconciliation, through a negotiated process of transition to free, inclusive elections, and the post-Apartheid operations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Receiving the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize and then winning South Africa’s 1994 elections, Mandela was thus personally integral to the peaceful transition from Apartheid to multiracial democracy.

Contemporary relevance

What legacy has the end of Apartheid thus left?

Globally, Mandela became an icon, associated with resistance, justice, and Christ-like self-sacrifice. The popular perception of Mandela and the anti-Apartheid movement, though acknowledging some elements of the struggle’s history, generally demonstrates a shallow understanding of what actually occurred.

These narratives predominantly fail to engage with Mandela’s leadership of military struggle, and the widespread militant, and violent, action that forced the Apartheid regime to negotiate. They often highlight international campaigns against Apartheid, but are mute on the strong military and financial support for Apartheid South Africa by western states throughout the Cold War.

While leaving a general message that opposition to injustice can win, the anti-Apartheid movement’s history encapsulated by Mandela is probably as well understood as the iconic image of Che Guevara printed on t-shirts.

Regionally, the end of Apartheid ended much of Southern Africa’s conflict, and allowed black-ruled states to unite in far greater cooperation for social and economic development.

The intervention of South African troops (and mercenaries) throughout Africa was also greatly reduced. However, conflict has continued in many areas of Africa, as have operations of the African Union and increasingly the United States’ Africa Command.

Meanwhile, though still a regional hegemon, post-Apartheid South Africa failed to effectively support neighbouring democracies, allowing questionable regimes such as Mugabe’s ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe to persist without adequate intervention. Newly stable southern Africa was also increasingly open to trade and investment from China – their enhanced global reach and influence an unforeseen result of freedom in many developing countries.

Nationally, though entering power with principles seeking redistribution of wealth and a general raising of living standards, the ANC gradually embraced neoliberal policies that have only led to an increase in poverty and inequality in South Africa over the past two decades.

The ANC’s overwhelming dominance of government throughout this period – with an absolute majority – has stifled development of effective parliamentary democracy (though South African civil society remains vibrant and active). And corruption throughout the ANC and the South African state has become endemic. Though narratives of “white genocide” in South Africa are not supported by facts, although crime and racial enmity remain virulent in South African society. But, South Africa also persists as one of the world’s most multicultural and inclusive countries.

Despite its troubles, South Africa is a nation with an inspiring story of struggle – even though an accurate vision of the country’s past and present requires engagement with many complexities.

The South African example shines a light on sometimes unpleasant realities of history, as well as enduring aspects of human nature. For those who are willing to seek out the details and contemplate the contradictions, the end of Apartheid leaves a legacy of insight most valuable in our turbulent age.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Carson, Incoming Associate Professor at LaTrobe University. Former Lecturer, Political Science, School of Social and Political Sciences; Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne

Today on Media Files, a podcast about the major issues in the media, we’re taking a close look at the role of the news media in politics.

As the Wentworth by-election looms, we’re asking: is digital disruption changing the rules of journalism and politics in Australia?

It is easy to miss how disorienting it can be to work in the always-on-at-fire-hydrant-strength world of political journalism these days, as Guardian Australia’s political editor Katharine Murphy recounts in her recent essay-book On Disruption. Matthew Ricketson speaks with her to understand the media’s role (if any) in the political turmoil that cost Malcolm Turnbull the prime ministership, triggering this month’s hotly contested by-election.

Read more: Media Files: Spotlight’s Walter V. Robinson and the Newcastle Herald’s Chad Watson on covering clergy abuse – and the threats that followed

One person who’s seen up close the sometimes difficult relationship between reporters and politicians is former federal Labor MP David Feeney.

Speaking to Andrea Carson about falling media trust and increased political polarisation, he asks: “In today’s Australia, where do you have a public conversation? Because there are so many different filter bubbles, there are no agreed facts… we are losing the capacity to build a consensus.”

Read more: Media Files: What does the Nine Fairfax merger mean for diversity and quality journalism?

Media Files is produced by a team of journalists and academics who have spent decades working in and reporting on the media industry. They’re passionate about sharing their understanding of the media landscape, especially how journalists operate, how media policy is changing, and how commercial manoeuvres and digital disruption are affecting the kinds of media and journalism we consume.

Media Files will be out every month, with occasional off-schedule episodes released when we’ve got fresh analysis we can’t wait to share with you. To make sure you don’t miss an episode, find us and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, in Pocket Casts or wherever you find your podcasts. And while you’re there, please rate and review us – it really helps others to find us.

You can find more podcast episodes from The Conversation here.

Recorded at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism. Producer: Andy Hazel.

Additional audio

Theme music by Susie Wilkins.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ryan Shannon, Postdoctoral fellow, Swinburne University of Technology, Swinburne University of Technology

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the great astrophysical mysteries. They are brief, bright flashes of radio waves that last a few milliseconds. Despite happening frequently – thousands occur over the entire sky every day – only a couple dozen have ever been seen.

But we’ve found 20 more bursts, averaging one for every 14 days of observing, with the results published in Nature today.

There are two main reasons why astronomers like me are really excited by FRBs.

Read more: ASKAP telescope speeds up the hunt for new Fast Radio Bursts

First, they represent a new, very unusual, unexpected phenomenon. The bursts come from other galaxies, meaning incredible amounts of energy are required to produce them – some bursts contain more energy than our Sun produces in decades.

Second, FRBs have the potential to be a new tool that we can use to understand the structure of matter in the universe.

The key property of the bursts that could turn them into a valuable tool is their dispersion: shorter (bluer) wavelength radio waves arrive at the telescope before the longer (redder) ones.

This dispersion is the result the radio waves passing through hot gas (plasma), which slows down the radio waves by an amount that depends on the wavelength. The amount of dispersion tells us how much matter the bursts have travelled through, and until now it has been unclear where that matter is.

A fast radio burst leaves a distant galaxy (see the video above), travelling to Earth over billions of years and occasionally passing through clouds of gas in its path. Each time a cloud of gas is encountered, the different wavelengths that make up a burst are slowed by different amounts.

Timing the arrival of the different wavelengths at a radio telescope tells us how much material the burst has travelled through on its way to Earth and allows astronomers to to detect “missing” matter located in the space between galaxies.

Location, location, location

There are two places where this matter could be. It could be in the FRB host galaxy, in this case FRBs would be coming from relatively close galaxies.

The other, exciting possibility is that the dispersion is the result of matter in between galaxies. This matter, referred to as the cosmic web, is nearly impossible to study any other way.

Figuring out where it resides is another outstanding problem in astronomy. In this case, the FRBs would be coming from more distant objects.

Our collaboration decided the first step to solve the FRB mystery was to find more of them, and find them quickly.

To do this we decided to go wide and simultaneously stare at as much sky as possible. We used the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a radio telescope in regional Western Australia that consists of 36, 12-metre dish antennas.

Each antenna is equipped with phased array feeds – radio cameras that would enable searches 36 times wider than could be seen with older technology.

We further widened the searches by pointing the antennas in different directions like a fly’s eye. While these searches would be less sensitive than those that found bursts previously, mostly with the 64-metre Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, we were relatively confident bright ones existed in sufficient numbers that we should find more.

To conduct the searches, we used six to nine of the ASKAP antennas, while the rest were used for other observing projects. Our first discovery came after just over three days of observing, as mentioned earlier in The Conversation.

It turns out that we were a bit lucky to find the first one as soon as we did. I was responsible for scheduling the observing, which could run 24/7, and searching the data.

It was an exciting time, and I was very happy to be on the front line and be the first one to spot a new burst. Over the course of the next year, we found the 19 additional bursts reported.

Not the usual FRB

As the burst count started to rise, we noticed differences with the previously detected ones. The ASKAP bursts have less dispersion than the ones found at Parkes.

This, combined with the fact that the ASKAP bursts are much brighter, indicates that there is a correlation between burst brightness and dispersion. If all the dispersion was coming from within host galaxies, this would not be the case.

We were now able to confidently say that the bursts are experiencing the effects of the diffuse matter in the cosmic web. It also says that bursts are coming from vast distances – from galaxies half way across the universe.

A second key result of our survey is that none of the bursts repeated. As part of our searches, we observed the same regions of sky almost daily, and in total we had spent 12,000 hours (500 days) staring at the positions where we found FRBs.

This makes the bursts different than the best studied, known as FRB 121102 – aptly called “the repeater” – from which hundreds of pulses have been detected.

Are there two classes of FRBs? It can be scientifically fraught to subdivide phenomena such as FRBs into sub-classes when so few are known. But the differences between the repeater and the rest of the FRBs are starting to become too big to ignore.

On closer inspection

The next step for our project is to commission a mode for ASKAP that can be used to localise bursts.

Read more: How we found the source of the mystery signals at The Dish

Instead of using the fly’s eye approach, we’ll point all of the antennas in the same direction, search for bursts in real time, and then make an image of the sky for the millisecond the FRB emission was passing by Earth.

We’ll be able tie bursts to host galaxies and accurately measure their distances. By combining the distances with the dispersions we’ll be able to start making a 3D map of the cosmic web.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Usha M. Rodrigues, Senior Lecturer in Journalism, Deakin University

Australians from culturally diverse backgrounds often feel frustrated about media coverage of news events and issues that portray them in a negative light. A new study analysing media coverage of issues related to multicultural Australia found that more than a third of stories reflected a negative view of minority communities.

Traditionally, so-called “hard news” stories are straight reports of “what happened”. This means they are reported in an objective and balanced manner, taking in diverse views on the issue.

Our study analysed 1,366 media articles, examining the sentiment towards minority communities in them. We found that over a third of hard news stories contained negative sentiments towards minority communities, while more than half of the editorials and commentary pieces portrayed minority communities in a negative light.

The sample included about 80% news stories, 4% features and 16% editorials and commentaries on selected events and issues during a six-month period.

It focused on six news topics with some level of public controversy around the issue of multicultural Australia. These included Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act; a discussion of Islam as a religion; US President Donald Trump’s refugee ban in January 2017; the Bourke Street attack in Melbourne’s central business district; youth gang crime, particularly in Melbourne; and the London terror attack on March 22, 2017.

The study collected articles from five mainstream online news sites: the ABC, the SBS, The Age, the Herald Sun and The Australian.

Read more: Australians born overseas prefer the online world for their news

In our analysis, we found only a quarter of the stories about minority communities incorporated another point of view in the story. For example, this could be a member of the relevant minority community group, a scholar who may be able to provide an alternative view or comment on the bigger picture, or a shadow minister.

Most of the stories analysed between September 2016 and March 2017 were based either on a reporter’s observations (41%) or included a government source (31%). Only about 26% of stories had a second source (a non-government source, an individual or expert).

Issues such as Section 18C and the controversy surrounding the former president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs, received extensive coverage in The Australian (211 stories compared to the next highest coverage of 82 stories in The Age).

Similarly, youth crime received above average coverage in the Herald Sun (46 stories compared to the next highest coverage of 22 stories in The Australian).

The Age published the highest number of stories (82) on the issue of Islam as a religion, and 13 news stories on youth crime in Melbourne.

Social media spikes on minority issues

A recent audience survey has shown that culturally diverse Australians are twice as likely to use social media and Internet sources to access news of interest.

Our study also looked at the tone of Twitter conversations on the same six events and issues during these six months. We examined about 239,000 tweets from over 29,000 accounts featuring the hashtags #trumpban, #bourkestreet, #humanrights, #refugees, #immigration, #muslim, #racism, #islam and #reclaimaustralia.

Although there was a low hum of conversation about #muslim, #muslims and #racism during the six-month period, Twitter conversations peaked with breaking news around these events and issues.

For example, there was spike in tweets including #refugees around October 30, 2016, when the mainstream media reported then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull saying that refugees and asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru would never come to Australia.

Again, the #refugees hashtag was trending around January 30 when Trump’s refugee ban story gained currency. And when the news broke that Triggs’ term would not be extended beyond the end of her contract in mid-2017, #humanrights peaked.

The study used automated sentiment detection software to evaluate how “positive”, “negative” or “neutral” the social media conversations were. Overall, the tenor of conversations for the 11 hashtags we followed was more negative than positive. About 30% of the tweets were neutral.

Lack of minority viewpoints

The two content analyses provide insights into the mainstream news coverage and social media conversations circulating in the Australian public sphere.

Journalists may believe they are merely reporting or commenting on controversial news stories impacting on multicultural Australia. But our study showed there is a lack of balance in these news stories, as nearly three-quarters of them fail to provide a point of view other than that of the journalist’s own observations and government sources.

Read more: Australian media are playing a dangerous game using racism as currency

We believe newsrooms in Australia need more diversity in their workforce to provide better representation of views and perspectives in their coverage. Given that 26% of Australians were born overseas and over 49% have a parent born overseas, our newsrooms and the coverage of events and issues in Australia need to reflect this diversity.

Australia’s news coverage remains largely monolithic, with events often covered according to how the white population perceives it. Similarly, culturally diverse communities see news as creating an “us” and “them” chasm in the broader community.

The quick fix is what journalists should already be doing when covering events and issues pertaining to minority communities. They should strive to give news stories more context and balance by including a variety of views, such as non-government sources and minority voices.

There also needs to be a concerted effort to change the makeup of Australia’s newsrooms so that the leadership and journalists reflect the cultural diversity in Australia.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carol Newall, Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood, Macquarie University

The film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind pitched an interesting premise: what if we could erase unwanted memories that lead to sadness, despair, depression, or anxiety? Might this someday be possible, and do we know enough about how distressing memories are formed, stored, and retrieved to make such a therapy possible?

Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) is a common treatment for anxiety disorders. The basic idea of CBT is to change the fear-eliciting thoughts that underlie a client’s anxiety.

Read more: Explainer: what is cognitive behaviour therapy?

Imagine the instance where a person has a dog phobia. They are likely to believe that “all dogs are dangerous”. During CBT, the client is gradually exposed to friendly dogs to cognitively reframe their thoughts or memories into something more realistic – such as the belief “most dogs are friendly”.

CBT is one of the most scientifically supported treatments for anxiety disorders. But unfortunately, a recent US study indicates that in around 50% of patients, old fear memories resurface four years after CBT or drug treatment. Put another way, the old fear memories seem impermeable to erasure through gold-standard therapy or drug treatment.

Why distressing memories are difficult to ‘erase’

Fear memories are stored in an old part of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala developed early in our evolutionary history because having a healthy dose of fear keeps us safe from dangerous situations that might reduce our chances of survival.

Read more: We’re capable of infinite memory, but where in the brain is it stored, and what parts help retrieve it?

Permanent storage of dangerous information is adaptive. While we might learn some things are safe sometimes (encountering a lion in a zoo) we also need to be aware they not safe in many other circumstances (meeting a lion in the wild).

This permanent storage of a fear memory explains why relapse occurs. During therapy, a new memory – say, “most dogs are friendly” – is formed. But this new safe memory is bound to a specific context (friendly dog in the therapy room). In that context, the rational part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, puts a brake on the amygdala and tells it not to retrieve the old fear memory.

But what happens when a patient encounters a new context, such as a dog in a park? By default, the brain retrieves the fear memory that “all dogs are dangerous” in any context, except the one where the new safe memory occurred. That is, old fear memories can be renewed with any change in context.

This default has helped humans survive in dangerous environments throughout our evolutionary history. However, for anxious clients whose fear is unrealistic and excessive, this default to distressing memories is likely one important basis for the high rates of anxiety relapse.

So is it erasure ever possible?

There are a few instances that suggest “erasure” is sometimes possible. For example, relapse is not seen early in life with non-human animals. This may be because the brake signals from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala mature late in development. As there are no brakes, perhaps erasure of fear memories occurs instead.

By extension, this suggests early intervention for anxiety disorder is important as children may be more resilient to relapse. However, the jury is still out on whether erasure of fear memories occurs at all in children and, if so, at what age.

So, given the high rate of relapse, is there a point to pursuing treatment at all? Absolutely! Having some respite from anxiety allows for significant moments of sunshine and improves quality of life, even if it is not eternal. In these moments, the typically anxious person might attend parties and make new friends or handle a stressful job interview successfully – things they would not have done because of excessive fear.

Read more: Memories of trauma are unique because of how brains and bodies respond to threat

One way to reduce the chances of relapse is to confront irrational fear at every opportunity and create new safe memories in many different contexts. Anticipating contextual factors that are trigger points for relapse, such as changing jobs or relationship break-ups, can also be adaptive. Strategies can then be used to manage the re-emergence of distressing thoughts and memories.

While erasure of negative memories may be the goal of the characters in Eternal Sunshine, the film also emphasises the importance of these memories. When processed rationally, stressful memories motivate us to make better decisions and become resilient. Being able look back on unpleasant memories without excessive distress allows us to move forward with greater wisdom and this is the ultimate goal for all therapeutic frameworks.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Georgina Drew, Lecturer, University of Adelaide

Bangalore is home to some ten million people. It might also be the next city to experience “day zero”: when it runs out of ground water entirely.

But in settlements just outside the city centre, people already live without municipal water supplies. Our research found that families – largely women – must piece together drinking, cooking and washing water through a mixture of limited tap supply, communally bought canned water, and “water ATMs”.

It takes enormous time, energy and money to negotiate these water markets. Bangalore offers a glimpse of a possible future, as more cities around the world approach “day zero”.

Read more: ‘Day Zero’: From Cape Town to São Paulo, large cities are facing water shortages

Beyond municipal water

In settlements just outside the city centre, the reach of the official water board is limited. These areas are not serviced by the municipality’s supply of Kaveri River water. Low-income households, especially migrants, living in these neighbourhoods have to negotiate limited water sources that are available in a narrow window of time.

The Bangalore water board does supply a range of tanker water services. However, tanker water is typically used for washing, cleaning, and other household purposes, but not for cooking and drinking. Residents feel that this tanker water is “dirty” and complain that it causes sore throats and gastrointestinal problems when consumed directly.

To access drinkable water, some of the more fortunate areas have access to pipe connections where water flows once a week for an hour or so. However, the bore wells connected to these pipes are continually at risk of being depleted.

Read more: India’s colonial legacy almost caused Bangalore to run out of water

The “lineman” of a given neighbourhood is the one who decides which area will get water from these pipes, and at what hours. However, such decisions are limited by the availability of groundwater, which has to remain untouched periodically to create sufficient “recharge” of groundwater for adequate discharge. This limited supply forces the households to look for elsewhere for drinking and cooking water.

Some places have access to water kiosks or water “ATMs”. These water kiosks are also connected to groundwater sources and water filters. A household pays 5 Indian rupees (INR) for 20 litres of water.

If kiosk water is limited or absent, residents have to depend on “canned” water for drinking and cooking purposes. One such plastic can of 20 litres costs between 25 to 35 INR depending on locality and frequency of purchase.

The more reputable brands cost as much as 70 INR, which is far beyond the reach of the poor. An average household of five members needs about three to five cans a week.

If a “can” delivery service refuses to deliver to households in one of these remote neighbourhoods, entrepreneurs arise to fill in the supply gap. Geetamma*, who runs a small eatery in one such neighbourhood, buys 20-litre cans in bulk and resells these to households with a small profit margin of 2 INR per can.

When municipally supplied or purchased tanker water is insufficient, households purchase water from private tankers. It is priced at 300-500 INR per tanker for 4,000-5,000 litres. Households collect the water in underground concrete tanks or in 200 litre plastic drums. In some neighbourhoods, residents collectively buy tanker water by pooling resources. The poorest migrants often resort to the collective option, or even to buying in smaller per-bucket quantities of 15 litres for 2 INR.

The range of ways that people access water in peri-urban Bangalore demonstrates that some transactions are formal, some are informal, and that others are a peculiar combination of both.

A huge cost

To secure water supplies from all these varied sources, people must spend a huge proportion of their income. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the monthly spend on water for a low-income household is between 5-8% of total income. Despite this relatively high rate of expenditure, such households are still far below the minimum target supply of 70 litres per person per day.

This limited water supply also comes at the cost of time. Based on our sampling of experiences in seven neighbourhoods of southeast Bangalore, adult women such as Manjula* typically spend between 3 and 5 hours a week working to secure water supplies – time that could be used to supplement household income.

Read more: What can other cities learn about water shortages from ‘Day Zero’?

The water markets in Bangalore rely heavily on interpersonal relationships and collective action. These communities have so far been resilient and resourceful, but the formal and informal systems are in a delicate balance. One big supply-side shock can at any time distort this equilibrium.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason M Lodge, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, School of Education & Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation, The University of Queensland

Block subjects is a model of teaching students one subject at a time over two to four weeks, rather than several subjects at a time over ten to 13 weeks in a semester.

For some, like Victoria University, the model is a stunning success. There are already tangible improvements in pass rates in the first year of implementation.

What’s less clear is what the long term implications of these approaches are for student learning. It may seem, on the surface, that focusing on shorter subjects one at a time is better than the traditional semester model. But research on effective learning shows learning over a long period and studying multiple subjects at a time is more effective.

Massed vs. spaced learning

Research on learning shows “massed” learning is inferior to “spaced” learning. In other words, when learning is spread out over a longer time-frame, the retention of and capacity for using the knowledge is better than when it’s blocked together.

Read more: Revising for exams – why cramming the night before rarely works

The best example of massed learning is cramming – as in “cramming” for an exam. Information might be adequately stored for a short time – enough to complete an exam – but it doesn’t stick as well as it would if it had been studied over a longer period.

Research consistently shows cramming, bingeing or otherwise learning for a short, focused period isn’t the most effective way to remember new information.

In addition to spacing study out, there are also benefits to mixing up study across different topics. This process of switching is called “interleaving” and it might also point to a benefit provided by studying multiple subjects at the same time.

The advantages of spaced practice and interleaving are shown in robust findings in the psychology laboratory. But basic research on learning in the brain and mind is difficult to make sense of in the real world. There are many complexities in university education that cannot be tested or controlled for in laboratory studies.

The evidence about what constitutes quality learning is difficult to see in the university classroom.

This makes it difficult to know if studying subjects in short blocks will lead to the same problems as cramming or not. Students might pass, might report greater levels of satisfaction but might not be able to remember and use what they have learned as effectively long-term.

The evidence problem

It isn’t clear whether block subjects are a form of cramming or not. So it’s not certain there are any long-term negative effects of this approach.

The recent national discussion about effective delivery of higher education has been dominated by economists, consultants and accounting firms. Economic indicators provide a crude but easy proxy and have been prioritised over quality learning in policy and practice. In the process, the link between indicators such as completion rates or student satisfaction and learning is being lost.

This means universities are making substantial changes without necessarily knowing what they mean for student learning. University students might be satisfied, complete their degrees and get a job. But there is a real risk they may not have the necessary knowledge and skills to thrive and adapt in the 21st Century.

Testing innovations

The role played by the now disestablished Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) was critical for this kind of problem. The OLT provided a vital mechanism for testing out innovations such as the block model.

An OLT project could have examined under what conditions the model is most effective, for which students and how to get it to work best in different disciplines and year levels. While important, crude indicators such as pass rates and satisfaction are not enough to provide this kind of evidence base.

Sadly, the small investment in a mechanism for ensuring these kinds of questions could be answered was deemed too expensive for the federal government. It’s now difficult to systematically figure out whether approaches like the block model are good for learning in the long term and whether they’ll work elsewhere.

This lack of a mechanism for rigorously testing innovations also risks our global reputation for high quality higher education. Micro-credentials, artificial intelligence and other innovations are poised to have a substantial impact on higher education in the near future.

Read more: Six things Labor’s review of tertiary education should consider

There is currently no mechanism to fund rigorous, national studies into how Australian higher education can remain competitive in this rapidly evolving environment.

There is every likelihood the students who complete their studies in a block model are receiving quality instruction, leading to quality learning. The results at Victoria University certainly look promising. But it’s difficult to determine this until student learning and development are made the priorities over crude economic indicators.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cassandra Pybus, Adjunct Professor in History, University of Tasmania

Book Review: Island Story: Tasmania in Object and Text.

The island of Tasmania lies suspended beneath Australia like a heart-shaped pendant of sapphire, emerald and tourmaline. Here is where the world runs out, crumbling into the vast expanse of the Southern Ocean.

Island Story: Tasmania in Object and Text offers us a fresh perspective on this terrible and beautiful place. Editors Ralph Crane and Danielle Wood invite the reader to discover Tasmania anew with their inspired juxtaposition of objects from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery with texts as diverse as the objects. The pictures are arresting, the textual extracts are perfectly chosen and the design by Imogen Stubbs is gorgeous. Don’t be misled, this is no bland coffee table book.

As benefits such an ancient place, Island Story opens with the specimen of a hairy-legged cicada, an endemic species so ancient it was resident in the supercontinent of Pangea.

Read more: Friday essay: journey through the apocalypse

What follows is Thomas Bock’s 1837 portrait of Woureddy, cleverman and warrior of the original people of Tasmania, whose unbroken occupation of the island lasted 40,000 years until colonial invasion brought it to a dreadful end within the short span of Woureddy’s life.

Thomas Bock, Woureddy, Native of Bruny Island, Van Diemen’s Land. Watercolour, 1837 Courtesy Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

Paired with the portrait is the befuddled interpretation of Woureddy’s narrative of the beginning of the world by George Augustus Robinson, the self-proclaimed evangelical missionary primarily responsible for the removal of all the original owners of the land to distant Flinders Island in the Bass Strait.

Robinson’s grand achievement in “conciliating” the original people of Tasmania was celebrated in an 1840 painting by Benjamin Duterrau, reproduced with a paired text by Greg Lehmann that puts in words an implicit theme of Island Story that “the spectre of genocide must be confronted and its consequences owned”.

Connections

The organising principle for the book is “the human desire to see, make and enjoy connections between seemingly disparate things”. A travelling case from the 1920s belonging to the silent move actress Louise Lovely, paired with an extract from Marie Bjelke Petersen’s novel Jewelled Nights that became a movie in 1925 starring Ms Lovely, seems unexceptional, but turn the page and there is a news photograph of arrests at the gay law reform protests in 1988.

The apparent disparity is resolved with the paired biographic extract by the gay rights activist Rodney Croome recalling his bizarre quest to shake the hand of the abhorrent Sir Joh Bjelke Peterson, favourite nephew of Marie, because his was the last hand to touch this writer Croome so admired.

Read more: Churning the mud: Tasmania’s fertile ground for legal and social reform

In my desire to see and make connections I found the dominant trope of this book to be captivity: entirely apposite for a place that began its modern history as prison. Among the more mundane objects is a saw from the infamous prison at Macquarie Harbour paired with historian Hamish Maxwell Stewart’s account of the extreme misery that drove so many fatal escape attempts.

Most chilling is the simple cambric and cotton hood with narrow eye slit for prisoners in the dreadful separate prison at Port Arthur. They had to pull it over their heads whenever they left their cell.

In the paired extract from a travelogue by Anthony Trollope, a man who endured 40 years of frightful punishment at Port Arthur after being transported for mutiny, a boy tells Trollope: “I have tried to escape – always to escape – as a bird does out of a cage”.

A delicate watercolour of three young Hobart ladies by the gentleman painter and convicted forger Thomas Wainwright is paired with his 1844 petition begging he be released from “vice in her most revolting and sordid phase” that constituted his seven years in captivity.

The painter Thomas Bock also spent years as a convict. In addition to his portrait of Woureddy, the book reproduces his exquisite 1842 portrait of Mathinna, the young girl taken from captivity at Wybalenna on Flinders Island and sent to live at government house as a sort of household pet.

A recent photograph of the chapel at Wybalenna is paired with the 1846 petition to Queen Victoria from several young men protesting their unjust treatment at Wybalenna.

One year after the petition, four dozen survivors were transferred to another place of captivity at a disused convict station at Oyster Cove south of Hobart. All of those taken to Oyster Cove died, except for Fanny who had married an ex-convict named William Smith and went to live on land she was granted in the Huon Valley. She is represented here in the wax cylinders that captured her singing in her own language in 1899.

As one might expect, the extinct Tasmanian Tiger has several outings in this book: as a skeleton, a skin carriage rug and an exquisite jawbone pincushion that won second prize in the handicraft section of the Glamorgan Show in 1900. There is no still from the famous film of the last thylacine in his iron cage, but there is a poignant poem by Cliff Forshaw about the creature’s desolate pacing.

Read more: Friday essay: on the trail of the London thylacines

There are numerous other images from the Zoology section: a specimen drawer of impaled butterflies, stuffed wattlebirds imprisoned in a glass cabinet and a wombat taken from the wild around 1796 and kept in a cage at Government house in Sydney then preserved in spirits and sent to England where the taxidermist mistakenly set the animal standing upright.

Then there is John Burns, the fighting lion born in captivity in the Sydney Zoo and for many years displayed in a huge cage in a circus to be tamed by Captain Humphries and his whip.

Known for his morose moods and fits of rage, John Burns would thrill the audience with his fierce fight for supremacy over Humphries. His body was sent to the taxidermist and displayed in the museum diorama as a tableau with a lioness and two cubs in 1901.

The fighting lion was long gone by my childhood. What I remember of the diorama, which remained until quite recently, was a tableau of an Aboriginal warrior with his wife and two children sitting around a fire. This tableau was made of resin, you understand.

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

`The leak of part of the Ruddock report on religious freedom has come at a very bad time in the government’s battle to hold the crucial seat of Wentworth on October 20. But there are other, more serious concerns than the byelection in the debate that’s been opened.

Fairfax Media on Wednesday reported that religious schools would be guaranteed the right – under specified conditions – to decline to enrol gay students, in changes to anti-discrimination legislation recommended by the inquiry.

Wentworth had a very high vote for same-sex marriage in the plebiscite – almost 81% in favour compared with less than 58% for NSW as a whole. And the main threat to the Liberals’ grip on the seat is from Kerryn Phelps, a prominent (and gay) figure in the marriage equality campaign.

No wonder Liberal candidate Dave Sharma was quick to say he would be “opposed to any new measures that impose forms of discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, or anything else for that matter”.

Rightly or wrongly, sources sympathetic to, or close to, Malcolm Turnbull are copping blame for the leak – although second guessing the origins of leaks is a hazardous business and Turnbull is a fan of Sharma.

The government has been keeping the report under wraps since May, but now it can’t stop the argument from raging in the final days of Wentworth campaigning.

Scott Morrison immediately had the fire hose out. Asked “should religious schools be able to turn away students on the basis of their sexual orientation?” he said, “Well they already can. That is the existing law.” He kept hammering the point.

Attorney-General Christian Porter said there is no proposal for any new exemption. “The exemption that allows schools to make employment and student admission decisions in a way consistent with the tenets of their religion already exists for religious schools under the Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act,” Porter said.

The government points out that the thrust of the Ruddock report’s recommendation is to constrain and codify things. The school would have to give primary consideration to the child’s best interests, and spell out its policy.

The report says: “To the extent that some jurisdictions do not currently allow religious schools to discriminate against students on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender characteristics, the panel sees no need to introduce such provisions.

“To the extent however that certain jurisdictions including the commonwealth do allow this type of discrimination, the panel believes the exceptions should be limited by the requirement that the discrimination be in accordance with a published policy which is grounded in the religious doctrines of the school”.

In sum, the report has recommended tightening the federal Sex Discrimination Act and similar legislation in the ACT, NSW and Western Australia; the other states do not have such provisions and would be unaffected.

But while the committee sees itself as recommending less scope for discrimination by religious bodies, just opening a discussion about the right to reject gay students could give cover for a resurrection of homophobic attitudes that campaigners and legislators have spent decades working to stamp out.

The government argues that, given the existing legislation, there’s nothing to see. What there is to hear, however, is a new debate about the rights and wrongs of discrimination against certain kids. This will be distressing and unsettling for many young people.

Some on the right downplay the issue by saying the only students in the frame are those who would be campaigning on gay issues. They overlook that this seems to contradict the right’s general line that we need more protections for freedom of speech. Or do they think there shouldn’t be such freedom in a religious school?

Before people say these are not government schools and so should have free rein, remember that they get big dollops of taxpayers’ money.

While it may be reasonable to allow them some exemptions based on faith issues, they should also conform to core community values.

It certainly is not in line with those values to think a school should be able to accept one boy while refusing admittance to his brother on the ground the second boy is gay and is willing to strongly defend his sexuality.

This debate will divide and discredit the Liberals unless it can be shut down quickly. Within the party it will split the moderates from the right, and cause division within the right too.

And, beyond the Liberals, it is now causing critics to focus on the existing legislation and say the discrimination against students that it permits should be scrapped.

More generally on religious freedom, the government will be embroiled in a row that it didn’t have to have over an issue it had no need to address.

Turnbull set up the Ruddock inquiry to placate the rightwingers upset over same-sex marriage.

It was a sop in search of a problem. Despite the claims of some, religious freedom is not under threat, a point apparently confirmed by the report.

The right brought down Turnbull regardless of his various attempts to pacify them, but Morrison is left with the legacy. Morrison himself has built expectations of action, suggesting recently there could be threats to religious freedom in the future and he favoured “preventative regulation and legislation”.

The issue is likely to become a quagmire for him. As for the report – that should be put out immediately.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liam Elphick, Lecturer, Law School, University of Western Australia

Media outlets today reported on leaked extracts of the much-awaited religious freedom inquiry report, which has yet to be released by the federal government.

Read more: Christians in Australia are not persecuted, and it is insulting to argue they are

The leaked recommendations give us a clear snapshot into what the review means for religious freedom and LGBT+ rights in Australia.

Despite much commentary to the contrary, the recommendations actually constrain rather than expand federal religious exemptions to LGBT+ protections.

The background

In the wake of the same-sex marriage postal survey, the government announced that an expert panel would examine whether Australian law adequately protects freedom of religion.

Chaired by retired parliamentarian Philip Ruddock, the panel was required to consider the intersections between the enjoyment of the freedom of religion and other human rights. It received an extraordinary response of over 16,000 submissions.

Freedom from religious discrimination

The central recommendation of the now-leaked sections of the Ruddock report is the introduction of a federal prohibition on religious discrimination.

This would mean that, for instance, it would be unlawful to fire someone because they are Muslim, or require a sabbath-observant Christian student to attend classes on a Sunday. The protection extends to absence of belief, so that a person should not be discriminated on the basis that they are atheist or agnostic.

Currently, federal laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, age, sex and other attributes, but not religion. Though most states protect religious belief, this federal protection would add appropriate coverage across Australia and fill any existing gaps.

Read more: The ‘gay wedding cake’ dilemma: when religious freedom and LGBTI rights intersect

Freedom to religiously discriminate

The other side of the coin, and the bulk of the report, relates to the right of religious bodies and individuals to discriminate against others – in particular, LGBT+ people.

Across Australia, it is unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. However, religious bodies, and at times religious individuals, have certain exemptions that allow them to discriminate against LGBT+ people.

There are several different types of religious exemptions, but the focus in the Ruddock report is on religious schools.

The report recommends that religious schools have the right to turn away LGBT+ students and teachers on the basis of the school’s religious beliefs. Much of the immediate reaction to the leaks incorrectly claimed that the recommendations would grant such a right for the first time.

Under section 38 of the federal Sex Discrimination Act, religious schools are already permitted to discriminate against teachers and students on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity if this is “in accordance with the doctrines…of a particular religion”. Religious schools can already refuse to hire gay teachers or accept transgender students.

The Ruddock report instead seeks to constrain this existing right to discriminate, by adding three limitations:

1. The school must have a publicly available policy outlining its position in relation to the matter and explaining how the policy will be enforced

2. The school must provide a copy of the policy in writing to all employees, prospective employees, students, prospective students, and the parents of all current and prospective students

3. In relation to students, the school must have regard to the best interests of the child as the primary consideration in its conduct.

Though unconfirmed for now, it appears that the Ruddock report may further recommend that the exemption only apply in relation to new student enrolments or the hiring of teachers, rather than to existing students or teachers.

The report also suggests removing any state laws that allow teachers to be sacked if they enter into a same-sex marriage.

What about gay wedding cakes?

Much of the focus during last year’s same-sex marriage debate was on the “gay wedding cake” scenario, whereby a religious service provider wants to refuse service to a same-sex couple.

Currently, everyday business owners and individuals cannot discriminate against LGBT+ people on the basis of their religious faith, except under Victorian law. Many religious groups called for this right to be introduced in submissions to the Ruddock panel.

However, the Ruddock report rejects this idea, stating that allowing businesses to refuse service to LGBT+ people would “unnecessarily encroach on other human rights” and “may cause significant harm to vulnerable groups”.

The report also states that people who register as civil celebrants cannot opt out of solemnising a same-sex wedding.

These findings are important, as they affirm the indivisibility of human rights – religious freedom is not to be legally entrenched as superior to rights to equality and freedom from discrimination.

What about the states and territories?

It is important to note that the Ruddock recommendations mostly relate to federal discrimination law.

The states and territories each have their own discrimination laws that explicitly sit parallel and alongside, not under, the federal system.

Though some may argue otherwise, it is unlikely that any new federal laws would overrule existing state protections – unless the government goes beyond the Ruddock report and makes further changes.

As such, if a gay student wanted to bring a discrimination law claim against a religious school that refused them entry, they have two choices: go through the federal system, or go through the relevant state system.

Exemptions for religious schools exist in almost all states and territories, and are largely similar to the existing federal law. There are three jurisdictions where there are key differences.

In the Northern Territory and Queensland, the exemption only applies to teachers – not to students. The Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Act is distinctive, because it does not permit religious schools to discriminate against either students or teachers on the basis of their LGBT+ status.

While it would be open to the Morrison government to selectively adopt the Ruddock recommendations and seek to broaden religious exemptions, a leaked portion of the Ruddock report noted that:

to the extent that some jurisdictions do not currently allow religious schools to discriminate against students on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender characteristics, the panel sees no need to introduce such provisions.

Weighing rights in the balance

One of the key challenges for human rights and discrimination law is to balance competing or conflicting rights claims. This is a task for parliament, should it seek to amend existing legislation or pass new laws in response to the Ruddock review’s recommendations.

Read more: Why Australia does not need a Religious Discrimination Act

In this context, an important question is whether the best interests of a child could ever be said to be advanced by a policy that would exclude them from an educational institution on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Another question that many in the Australian community may raise is whether religious schools ought to be supported by public funding if they choose to discriminate against LGBT+ teachers or students.

We now wait to see how the government, and the parliament, respond to these questions.

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

The government’s majority is at stake in the October 20 Wentworth byelection, when the Liberals face voters still reeling from the loss of their member Malcolm Turnbull.

ABC election analyst Antony Green says there’s likely to be a 10 per cent swing “as a start” – the result of losing Turnbull’s personal vote and a generally more intense battle. He says “the only danger” to the Liberals not winning the seat is high profile independent Kerryn Phelps but she may have made it harder for herself by “mucking up her preference comments earlier”.

Liberal candidate Dave Sharma recognises the public’s disappointment and disillusionment with politicians and if elected is keen to “help improve the tone of the debate in Canberra”. He accepts “absolutely” the science of man-made or anthropogenic climate change and believes in Australia “keeping our international commitments” on Paris.

Labor’s Tim Murray is “quite confident” he will finish second on the primary vote (although the ALP’s best chance of ousting the Liberals is to run third and help elect Phelps with its preferences). On the issue of asylum seekers, which has dogged his party, Murray says a Labor government should press for New Zealand to take more than its original offer of an annual 150: “Taking 300 would go a long way to resolving the problem of children being held in detention”.

Phelps says she has received a lot of thanks for putting her hand up for Wentworth but has also been subject to “dirty tricks”. Despite her confusing messages on preferences, she’s confident she can come second if enough “disaffected Liberals and people who agree with my progressive policy agenda are prepared to put their support behind [me].”