The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Thwaites, Chair, Monash Sustainable Development Institute & ClimateWorks Australia, Monash University

Visiting drought-affected farmland in NSW last week, new PM Scott Morrison said he was not interested in considering the role of climate change on the drought because he was “practically interested in the policies that will address what is going on here, right now.”

A narrow focus on the short term is common in politics, but it won’t make the long-term problems go away. Drought and other issues like inequality, housing affordability, obesity and the loss of Australia’s rich natural heritage will only get worse.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals adopted by Australia and all nations in 2015 are a way to help countries focus on these longer-term challenges. They are a set of goals and targets for economic prosperity, social justice and environmental sustainability to be met by 2030.

In addition to governments, more and more businesses are now reporting on their progress towards these global goals, too.

How is Australia going?

This week, the National Sustainable Development Council with the Monash Sustainable Development Institute published the Transforming Australia: SDG Progress Report. It examines trends between 2000 and 2015 to assess whether Australia is on track to meet the 2030 targets.

The report highlights strong progress in health and education, but poor performance in addressing inequality, climate change and housing affordability. Of 144 indicators assessed across the 17 goals, 35% were on track, 41% needed improvement and 24% were off-track or deteriorating.

Read more: Australia falls further in rankings on progress towards UN Sustainable Development Goals

Despite some progress, the report found almost every goal has at least one target where an important indicator is off-track or will require a breakthrough to be achieved.

For example, income poverty in Australia has decreased since 2000. But a person on Newstart, who would have been near the poverty line in 2000, is now 25% below the poverty line due to the lower indexation rate for Newstart payments.

Life expectancy in Australia is among the highest in the world and has increased from 79.3 to 82.5 years between 2000 and 2015. Smoking rates and road traffic deaths have fallen dramatically, as well. However, Australia still has a high prevalence of lifestyle-related risks, such as obesity, and deaths due to road accidents in remote areas remain five times higher than in cities.

On the positive side, Australia is an increasingly educated society. The proportion of the working age (25-64) population holding tertiary qualifications increased markedly from 27.5% to 43.7% between 2000 and 2015, one of the highest percentage of tertiary qualifications in the world.

While Australian student performance on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) benchmark has been declining across science, maths and reading, Australian students perform very well as collaborative problem solvers – an increasingly important indicator for the jobs of the future. On the downside, investment in early childhood education and care remains low.

The report also highlights key challenges in achieving Australia’s economic goals, with relatively low investment in research and innovation, increasing underemployment and high levels of household debt.

While Australia has enjoyed a record period of economic growth and disposable incomes per capita grew strongly from 2000-2012, wage growth has stalled since then and cost of living pressures are now putting a strain on families.

Not there yet

Two persistent challenges identified in the report are continuing inequality and Australia’s poor performance on climate action and the environment.

Despite strong economic growth since 2000, Australia’s income inequality did not improve and wealth inequality got worse.

The glass ceiling remains firmly in place and structural inequalities continue to prevent women from reaching their potential. In 2017, just 11 women led ASX200 companies, while only 30% of Australian parliamentarians are female .

Read more: UN delivers strong rebuke to Australian government on women’s rights

Meanwhile, the gender pay gap has barely narrowed in 20 years and women’s superannuation balances at retirement remain 42% below those of men. And the Closing the Gap report illustrates the vast inequality gulf between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Of all the UN Sustainable Development Goals goals, taking urgent action to combat climate change is the area where Australia is most off track.

Greenhouse gas emissions, the highest per capita in the OECD, are roughly the same now as in 2000 and are projected to be even higher in 2030. We are nowhere near meeting even Australia’s modest Paris target of a 26% emissions reduction by 2030.

Are we ready for the future?

It is clear that Australia has a considerable way to go to achieve most of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and it will require a major change from business as usual.

Despite our history of strong economic growth, our children and grandchildren face the prospect of being worse off than we are unless we address inequality, climate change and cost of living pressures.

In an increasingly polarised political and media landscape, we should be looking to strengthen collaboration between government, business, social enterprise and society. To achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, we need to overcome the short-term focus that currently dominates our political landscape and work collectively if we are to achieve a “fair go” for the next generation.

This article is the first in a series looking at Australia’s progress toward meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals, based on a report published by the Monash University Sustainable Development Institute.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Hansen, Health + Medicine Section Editor/Chief of Staff, The Conversation

Some days you might find yourself in and out of the toilet, and some days might go by without a single visit for a Number Two. Should this be a cause for concern?

We asked five experts if we have to poo every day.

Five out of five experts said no

Here are their detailed responses:

If you have a “yes or no” health question you’d like posed to Five Experts, email your suggestion to: alexandra.hansen@theconversation.edu.au

Disclosures: Damien Belobrajdic has worked on projects commissioned by food companies manufacturing cereal, dairy and oil products.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karen Thorpe, Professor, Deputy Director, Institute for Social Science Research, The University of Queensland

Today, across the nation, educators who work in long day care centres are walking off the job for the fourth time in 18 months. In February this year, an attempt to bring a pay equity case through the Fair Work Commission was dismissed.

Read more: Low-paid ‘women’s work’: why early childhood educators are walking out

Early childhood educators are seeking improved wages and recognition of the value of their work in early childhood education and care. Without a liveable wage many of these educators will be compelled to walk out the door of these centres – not just today, but forever.

This comes at a high cost to Australia’s aspiration for world-class, high quality education for its youngest children.

Educators frequently leave their centre

Many of those working in the early childhood education and care sector earn little above the minimum wage. Yet all are required to hold a vocational qualification and work to regulated professional standards to promote the learning, development and wellbeing of Australia’s youngest citizens. Even those with a four-year teaching degree are paid on average A$10,000 less per year than those working in the schools sector – without the long holiday breaks.

Additionally, they have few opportunities for non-contact time to undertake the significant demands of planning each child’s education program and recording their learning. Caring for multiple young children is physically and emotionally demanding, but not recognised in liveable rates of pay. A liveable rate of pay would enable them to afford the basic costs of housing, food, health and transport.

While most educators say they love their work, continued participation in the workforce often comes at a significant personal cost. Low wages restrict workers’ abilities to live self-sufficient lives.

For example, younger educators discuss their inability to leave home. Partnered educators remain dependent on the income of their spouse or even a former spouse, to cover basic living expenses. Those who don’t have additional financial support live precariously under persistent financial stress which impacts on their emotional well-being.

Under these circumstances it’s not surprising staff frequently leave their centre, or the sector entirely. Our recent study of early childhood education and care centres in metropolitan, regional and remote Australia found a turnover rate of 37% a year, with rates in remote areas at 45%. International comparisons suggest these turnover rates are high.

Where do the educators go?

Our study suggests educators pursue a range of options. The degree-qualified move up to the few better paid administrative roles within the sector or move out to the schooling sector where pay, conditions and status are higher.

Diploma and Certificate trained educators may move around within the sector looking for marginal gains in pay or conditions. Such “churn” is enabled by significant under-supply of qualified early childhood educators. Others move to less demanding work outside the sector.

Read more: Early childhood educators rely on families to prop up low income, research finds

In our study, about half of those leaving the sector expressed a high level of dissatisfaction with their pay and conditions.

Losing skilled, experienced educators takes its toll

High turnover represents unnecessary loss and significant personal and economic cost. Most noticeable is the loss of skilled and experienced educators in the sector.

In our study, 40% were Certificate trained, 26% held a Diploma and 16% held a degree. Many were undertaking further study and all participated in ongoing professional development.

The loss of educators also takes its toll on children’s development, well-being and learning experiences. Turnover causes significant disruptions to attachment relationships with children and partnerships with parents.

Even more concerning is that turnover is highest in areas of greater socioeconomic disadvantage where the role of early childhood education and care is especially important in supporting school readiness and ongoing educational progress.

Turnover has a societal cost

There is compelling evidence for the value of high quality early childhood education and care in supporting positive life outcomes for children, enabling parents to participate in the workforce, and yielding long-term economic growth for the nation. Yet, Australia has largely taken the significant contributions of the people who design and deliver early education programs for the 1.57 million Australian children who attend long day care in Australia each week for granted.

Three decades of neuroscience, developmental science and economic modelling tells us this work is not merely unskilled or instinctive. Rather, it’s crucial to the opportunities and life course outcomes of each child.

Read more: What outcomes parents should expect from early childhood education and care

Valuing the skills and contributions of our skilled educators and reversing the high rates of turnover is critical and can only be achieved through fair pay and rewards.

As educators walk out today, they’re supported by the many families who use early childhood education and care. Politicians who focus on the cost of early childhood education and care rather than its quality should take heed of this support. Compared with many OECD nations Australian parents foot a higher proportion of the child care bill.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Donovan, Urban Designer and Sessional Lecturer, La Trobe University

The poorer you are, the harder it is to participate in and contribute to society. My experience as a practising urban designer and my research in the area have led me to conclude that the way people’s surroundings are designed reflects and amplifies this profound injustice.

Busy and fast roads, for instance, encourage driving while at the same time deterring walking and other forms of street life, isolating people from their neighbours.

Physical activity, interacting with others, setting and meeting challenges, and experiencing nature are all essential to our well-being. But humans aren’t good at prioritising our needs. We often make decisions that deny us these and other essential experiences.

This is particularly the case in poorer communities where shared and public spaces – the settings for many of these essential activities – tend to be poorly maintained, mundane and utilitarian.

Read more: Designing the compassionate city to overcome built-in biases and help us live better

Indifference without invitation

In such generic or inappropriately designed places, indifference or avoidance becomes more likely. Faced with the lukewarm appeal of these places, and sometimes active deterrence, people are more likely to be seduced by “easier”, but not needs-fulfilling, ways to spend their time. They may choose to drive rather than walk, or play on screens rather than in the open with others.

If these people are to escape the call of the TV and computer, the “heavy lifting” will need to come from personal motivation to fill the gap left by the paucity of invitation from their surroundings.

In such places, if someone does choose to walk, cycle or play or participate in any of the activities that support health and well-being, they are doing so because they are determined to, rather than because their surroundings offer the pulling power to motivate them.

Many people do somehow overcome even the most difficult circumstances and thrive. But many others find this prohibitively difficult or are unaware of the need to make different choices. Their surroundings lead them to inadequate physical activity, isolate them from others, limit potential to find like-minded people around which community can coalesce, offer little enjoyment of nature and few opportunities to set and meet self-determined challenges.

We can see the effects of these issues through increased rates of obesity, loneliness and many diseases that diminish people’s quality of life.

Repeated over a neighbourhood or a city and concentrated in poorer areas, this can create arbitrary barriers that make winners and losers of their inhabitants. Extended over many years, these effects create huge social and health costs and can lock people into disadvantage.

Read more: Want to improve the nation’s health? Start by reducing inequalities and improving living conditions

These places deny people the inspiration of the crowd. If you rarely see someone else play on the street, run or cycle, you are less likely to consider it among the choices open to you.

Beyond the suburb

Disadvantaged communities lack the ability to influence the design process, make positive change happen themselves or protect what they value. Research has found people in communities with low socioeconomic status get left out of the decision-making process. When they do receive attention it is not as wholehearted or appropriately applied as it would be for wealthier communities.

We wear our surroundings like a cloak. Poor physical and social conditions often reflect poorly on their inhabitants, contributing to lower expectations of those people. This soft prejudice even means they are less likely to be considered for jobs that don’t match perceptions of what people from that postcode are like.

People with less buying power end up in less supportive environments, priced out of more nurturing places. Poorer people are getting pushed out of former working-class inner-city neighbourhoods that attract people and investment. This leaves less attractive places as the realm of concentrated poverty.

Read more: Look up #happycity and here’s what you’ll find

So, what can we do about it?

The obvious answer is to invest in design and the design process. But this is only part of the solution.

We need to reassess what good urban design is. Good design will need to be inexpensive to avoid lumbering communities with debt and ensure it can be spread widely. It needs to be tailored to provide the right invitations to those who most need it. It gives greater weight to designing for the social landscape of the community, and less to the aesthetic values of the designer and client.

Good design enables those who are being designed-for to participate in the design and creation of their surroundings wherever possible. This allows them the experience of developing and realising change, taking responsibility and exercising self-determination.

This takes time. The emotional capital this process demands of the designer and the community are immensely powerful but volatile resources. The designs that arise may not immediately be recognised by many designers as good design.

But if our present approach leaves people isolated and uninspired to do the things they need to do to thrive, we must reassess what good design really is and see it not as a luxury but as a right.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steve Worthington, Adjunct Professor, Swinburne University of Technology

Most credit card fraud takes place online or over the phone. It’s not the cards that are stolen, but the details. The Australian Payments Network finds they are used to amass 85% of the money stolen using Australian credit cards, without the need to steal the cards themselves.

Usually, we are not liable for the money lost. It is reimbursed through our card provider if we have quickly reported the breach and taken due care.

The launch this February of the New Payments Platform owned by both the banks and Reserve Bank will make payments instant. It isn’t yet fully adopted, but when it is it’ll allow any financial institution to transfer money from any of its accounts to any other account near instantaneously.

Those transfers will be impossible to reverse.

While each institution will be able to impose limits on the upper value of transfers, the designers of the system expect them to be higher than credit card limits – more like the very high limits at present in place for transfers using BSB numbers.

It will makes them magnets for fraud, as they have become in Britain. The UK Faster Payments System was launched ten years ago. In 2010, the transaction limit was lifted to £100,000. In 2015, it it was lifted to £250,000.

Among the most lucrative frauds involves conveyancing, known as “Friday afternoon fraud”, as in the UK this is the day that many property sales are due for settlement and funds are transferred from payer to payee.

Fraudsters hack into emails between solicitors and their home-buying clients and then on the day the money is about to be moved, impersonate the solicitor and send the client an email saying the bank account details have changed and the payments should be made to a different account, created by the fraudster.

The Faster Payments system ensures the money is transferred immediately. The victim usually doesn’t know about it until the following week when they look for confirmation, and find they’ve sent the money to the wrong account.

In the UK, financial institutions have until now avoided paying compensation to the victims, because they themselves authorised the payments. However in August the UK Financial Ombudsman Service told the institutions to stop automatically blaming victims and take a fairer approach.

It said:

We often hear from banks that their customers have acted with ‘gross negligence’ and that this means that they are not liable for the money that their customers have lost. However gross negligence is more than just being careless or negligent. The evolution of criminal methods – in particular their sophisticated use of technology, means that gross negligence is an increasingly difficult case to make.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority is considering requiring financial institutions to handle payments fraud complaints in line with other complaints and to publish data about the extent of complaints.

Banks are introducing round-the-clock fraud detection help lines and fast response teams. Defrauded customers will in future only have to deal with their own bank and not the bank into which their funds have been paid.

In Australia, as in Britain, the best advice is to be extremely vigilant about checking emails that ask for payments. Often it will be worth ringing to check that the demands are real.

Extreme vigilance is easy to prescribe and hard to practice. But with payments under the new system impossible to reverse, and with our banks likely to be be initially reluctant to help out, as they were in the UK, we’re going to have to become more suspicious.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lynley Wallis, Senior research fellow, University of Notre Dame Australia

In 19th century Queensland, the Native Mounted Police were responsible for “dispersing” (a euphemism for systematic killing) Aboriginal people.

This government-funded paramilitary force operated from 1849 (prior to Queensland’s separation from New South Wales) until 1904. It grew to have an expansive reach throughout the state, with camps established in strategic locations along the ever-expanding frontier, first in the southeast and then west and north. While staffed with non-Indigenous senior officers, the bulk of the force was made up of Aboriginal men and, sometimes, boys.

We have been exploring the remote Queensland outback for traces of the base camps of the Native Mounted Police. There were nearly 200 such camps. So far we have visited more than 45 of them.

Our archaeological work is revealing the day-to-day livelihoods that underpinned the chilling work of these police. This is an important part of reckoning with Australia’s colonial violence, given the difficulties in identifying physical evidence of massacres in the archaeological record, despite recent efforts to map massacre sites from oral and written sources.

Rather than maintaining order among the European population, the Native Mounted Police’s role was to protect squatters, miners and settlers on the frontier, by whatever means necessary. Their well documented method of “protection” was to mount patrols and kill Aboriginal people who were trying to protect their land, lives and loved ones. There were literally hundreds of such events.

On February 10 1861, for instance, a detachment led by Sub-Inspector Rudolph Morisset shot at least four, possibly more, Aboriginal men on Manumbar Station (about 160 km northwest of Brisbane). This was in reprisal for Aboriginal people killing cattle on the run. We know about these particular deaths because John Mortimer, one of the station owners, complained in the local press about the police’s behaviour. He also gave evidence to an 1861 inquiry into the activities of the Native Mounted Police.

Around Christmas 1878 meanwhile, on the banks of a waterhole near Boulia, some Aboriginal people killed one or more Europeans looking after stock. The reprisal massacres of Aboriginal men, women and children that followed — with one, possibly two, survivors — are known from a written account, and from various oral accounts documented in the months and years after. The Burke River Native Mounted Police, stationed just outside Boulia, commanded by Sub-Inspector Ernest Eglinton, and assisted by at least one prominent pastoralist, Alexander Kennedy, were responsible for the Aboriginal murders.

Excavating the past

Similar to the forts built on the plains of North America during the “Indian” Wars, or the offices of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany, Native Mounted Police camps formed the force’s administrative backbone. More than 450 non-Indigenous officers lived on these bases, along with at least 700 Aboriginal men, through the force’s 50-year history.

Like other bureaucratic systems, their very domestic ordinariness — providing insights into what the police ate, drank and how they lived — belies the conflict that took place beyond their boundaries.

Many camps were short-lived, sometimes being occupied for only a few months; in such cases their physical imprint is limited. In other situations — particularly where the terrain was rugged and higher population densities meant Aboriginal people were able to mount more effective campaigns of resistance — camps were occupied for longer periods, sometimes several decades. These left a clearer impression on the landscape.

Even so, what is left is not what you might normally associate with a frontier war. There are no battlefields, in the traditional sense of the word, to be seen. No victims with bullet wounds, no mass graves, and no large fortified buildings. Instead, the Native Mounted Police camps are ordinary, banal even, revealing the detritus of everyday life: stone fireplaces, segments of post and rail fences, sections of pathways, clearings and the occasional rubbish dump strewn with broken bottles.

Perhaps more telling, are the large numbers of bullets and spent cartridges from government-issue Snider rifles. These were rarely owned by private citizens but were issued to the Native Mounted Police for decades.

At each of the Burke River, Cluney and Boralga camps we have catalogued more than 100 bullets and cartridges, an unexpected situation given that most killings of Aboriginal people by the Native Mounted Police occurred outside the confines of the camps. Perhaps the abundance of these objects in the camps is the result of regular target practice by troopers, or maybe the result of having to hunt kangaroos at the local waterhole to supplement their meagre rations. Military-style buttons from uniforms – with ornate monograms, sometimes including a royal cipher and crown – serve as a bleak reminder that the violence associated with the Native Mounted Police was endorsed by the state.

The Burke River camp

Burke River near Boulia in southwest Queensland – the base for Sub Inspector Eglinton and his detachment – was described in 1882 by a visitor as

the most respectable looking native police camp I have seen in Queensland, there seems to be a place for everything and everything in its place.

This camp sits beside a waterhole that is associated with Dreaming stories – an Aboriginal stone arrangement and the thousands of flaked stone artefacts along the edge of the watercourse are testament to it being an important living and ceremonial place. The establishment of a police camp on the site was likely to have been viewed by local Aboriginal people as both inappropriate and insulting – but of course their views were not a concern.

There are two stone buildings, likely built to house equipment, guns, ammunition and dry foodstuffs, and possibly the officer’s quarters. Further away again is a series of small mounds – so slight that unless you know what to look for you would not even see them. These mounds are a treasure trove of discarded rubbish. The fish hooks, flaked glass artefacts and animal remains we have recovered from them indicate they are likely the remains of the troopers’ huts. They serve to remind us that, despite the job they were hired to carry out, they too were just men trying to survive.

Read more: Friday essay: the ‘great Australian silence’ 50 years on

Sites of colonial violence are difficult to locate exactly. As such, there is ongoing debate about its scale and nature. Aboriginal people have always referred to these events as a war. Such statements are often dismissed by critics as unreliable. Yet 19th century European authors also described the frontier killings as a war. The archaeology of Native Mounted Police camps is the closest material indication we have of the scale of suppression of Aboriginal people through the 19th century.

While some of these camps are recognised on Queensland’s Aboriginal heritage list, none can be found on the broader State Heritage Register – despite 200 sites that refer to the regular Queensland Police Force in some manner. We believe this should change to give more formal recognition to the dark past of the State’s foundations.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Hamylton, Senior Lecturer, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong

Harassed on fieldtrips. Excluded from projects. On the receiving end of micro-aggressions. A lack of female role models.

These are some of our collective experiences as women working in science and engineering.

Such experiences erode research opportunities and career progression, leading to the loss of many brilliant women from our disciplinary field – along similar lines as we’ve recently seen exposed in Australian federal parliament.

Today we published a global snapshot of the status of women in coastal science and engineering. The results show that gender inequity is still a major problem in the daily work lives of women globally.

And since gender inequalities in science won’t self-correct, we’ve developed some solutions based on our findings.

Working at the water’s edge

We work in coastal geoscience and engineering, a broad discipline focused on physical processes at the interface of land and sea. Here’s one of our experiences:

For twenty years people had been telling me how lucky I was to be in our field of research because “things” were changing for young women.

This didn’t resonate with my experiences. Twenty years later “things” had not changed and I was no longer a young woman. I started talking to other women and found that they had faced similar challenges, and wanted to see change. – Ana Vila-Concejo

To catalyse change, we founded the Women in Coastal Geoscience and Engineering (WICGE) network in 2016. Our first project was a study to understand the main issues faced by women who work in our field.

Global snapshot

We surveyed 314 members of the coastal science and engineering community and analysed the gender representation in 9 societies, 25 journals, and 10 conferences.

We found that while women represent 30% of the international coastal science community, they are consistently underrepresented in leadership positions (such as being on journal editorial boards and as conference organisers). This situation was clearly acknowledged by the coastal sciences community, with 82% of females and 79% of males believing that there are not enough female role models.

Female representation in prestige roles was the highest (reaching the expected 30%) only when there was a clear entry pathway that gave women an opportunity to volunteer for a role.

Female representation was the lowest for the traditional “invite-only” prestige roles.

A significantly larger proportion of females felt held back in their careers due to gender than their male counterparts (46% of females in comparison to 9% of males).

Reasons for this include:

• a “glass ceiling” of informal workplace cultures and customs that reduce womens’ chances of promotion
• gender stereotyping of women not being competent in STEM disciplines
• a “boys’ club” tendency to favour men in recruitment and collaboration, and
• widely held assumptions that a woman’s job performance will be impacted by her having children (the “maternal wall”).

Fieldwork emerged as a key area of inequity, with female respondents being excluded or outright banned from research ships. For those respondents who made it to the field, many of them reported experiencing gender stereotyping and/or sexual harassment.

We used our survey to ask some forthright, open-ended questions about peoples’ experiences and observations of gender equality.

As a study author, the day I went over the responses was one that I will never forget. Stories of bullying, abortion and sexual harassment had me in tears at my desk. Inequality was consistent, pervasive and, in many cases, traumatic. – Sarah Hamylton.

So, what can be done?

Seven steps toward improving gender equity

Gender imbalances in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) are not a self-correcting phenomenon – so here are some ways to make science more inclusive for women.

1. Advocate for more women in prestige roles: Ensure fair representation of women as keynote speakers at conferences, on society boards and journal editorial boards. Have clear pathways to prestige roles giving women an opportunity to apply if they wish to do so.

2. Promote high-achieving females: Recognise the achievements of females, and select them for roles that increase their visibility as role models.

3. Be aware of gender bias: Consciously reflect on personal biases when hiring, promoting and mentoring staff.

4. Speak up, call it out: Point out to conference organisers all-male panels and keynote programs and, where they are underrepresented, write to chief editors suggesting women for editorial boards.

5. Provide better support for returning to work after maternity leave: Higher levels of support and more flexible conditions for women returning from maternity leave encourage women to stay in their employment after having children, thereby increasing their prospects of reaching more senior posts.

6. Redefine success: Recognise the diverse range of definitions of what it means to be a successful researcher.

7. Encourage women to enter the discipline at a young age: Many school-age girls are put off the idea of entering STEM disciplines as they are socially and culturally deemed to be “male” pursuits. This needs to be addressed.

The Women in Coastal Geoscience and Engineering network is already successfully implementing some of these steps.

By choosing to ignore inequity for women, you become accountable for allowing it to continue. Speak up, promote the work of your female colleagues and give them voice and visibility.

This problem transcends STEM disciplines. It is crucial that the wider community becomes aware of the extent of inequity so that, where necessary, everyone can take action to improve the governance and culture of their work place.

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

Former Victorian Liberal senator Judith Troeth is no stranger to speaking out forthrightly on issues, even when that goes against her party’s position.

In this podcast, Troeth says the party should adopt quotas to rectify the “abysmally low numbers” of Liberal women in parliament. “We should have quotas, but not forever … to get the numbers up”.

One of the group of moderates when she was in parliament (1993- 2011), Troeth is concerned about the party’s drift to the right. “Sometimes i feel as though i am standing on the extreme left … when everyone who knows me knows I’m certainly not”. She partly attributes the present situation to newer MPs being reluctant to rock the boat. Troeth’s advice to them? “Be brave and let your conscience be your mouth piece.”

On asylum seekers – an issue over which she confronted then prime minister John Howard – Troeth believes “quite strongly” that on humanitarian grounds people who have been processed and found to be refugees on Manus and Nauru should be allowed to come to Australia and stay.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo Jung, Lecturer, Edith Cowan University

The World Wide Web was invented almost 30 years ago by Tim Berners Lee to help people easily share information around the world. Over the following decades, it has changed significantly – both in terms of design and functionality, as well its deeper role in modern society.

Just as the architectural style of a building reflects the society from which it emerges, so the evolution of web design reflects the changing fashions, beliefs and technologies of the time.

Web design styles have changed with remarkable speed compared with their bricks and mortar cousins. The first website contained only text with hyperlinks explaining what the web was, how to use it, and basic set-up instructions. From those early days to the present, web design has taken a long and winding journey.

Read more: Poor design means terrible websites still haunt the web

In the beginning

In the early 1990s, we welcomed the first publishing language of the Web: Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML.

But the language – used to share text-only pages via a simple browser – was limiting. Many early web sites were basic, using vertically structured, text-heavy pages with few graphics. People quickly adapted to vertically scrolling text and eye-catching blue underlined hypertext to navigate the virtual Web space.

Tables!

In the mid- to late-1990s, designers became more involved in the development of websites, and along came the Graphical User Interface (GUI), which allowed designers to incorporate images and graphical icons into websites.

When the Web started to gain popularity as a means of communicating information, designers saw an opportunity to use tables for arranging text and graphics.

Before the introduction of tables as a web page structure, there were few design components in websites, and there was no way to emulate the layouts of conventional printed documents.

But while tables allowed designers to arrange text and graphics easily, the code required to build them was more complex than methods that came later.

Flashy design

In the late 1990s, a new technology appeared on the scene: Flash.

Flash was a software platform that allowed designers to incorporate music, video and animation into websites, making for a more dynamic audio-visual experience. Flash also gave designers more freedom to make websites interactive. This was indeed the era of a creative and technological breakthrough in web design. Interactive menus, splash pages, decorative animations, and beautifully rendered bubble buttons dominated the web design trend to wow people.

The concept of the Web was still new to many people, and these visually exciting designs had a double purpose. They were not only bright and attention-grabbing, but they also introduced unfamiliar technology to novice users: “Look at me”, they screamed. “I look like a real button. Press me!”

But the popularity of Flash was short-lived. It required users to have the latest Flash plugin installed on their computers, limiting the usability and accessibility of websites.

Read more: A new way to fix those frustrating websites

Everyone is a web designer

Although Flash didn’t live up to expectations, it changed the way websites were designed and used.

People became sophisticated at browsing the Web, and the design elements no longer had to educate in a way that visually articulates the functionality, such as blue underlined hyperlinks.

Then social media emerged and demanded even greater flexibility. This led to the birth of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

CSS were used to define particular styles – such as larger font sizes for sub-headings – across multiple pages of a single website without having to code each element individually. The idea behind CSS was to separate the content (HTML) of websites from the presentation (CSS).

Web design templates began to surface, allowing everyday people to create and publish their own websites. Unfortunately this was often at the expense of usable, accessible and aesthetically pleasing design.

Flat design

Fast forward to 2010 when a new web design approach called responsive web design was created by Ethan Marcotte. This introduced a different way of using HTML and CSS.

The main idea underpinning responsive design was that a single website could respond and adapt to different display environments, facilitating use on different devices. People would have the same experience on their mobile device as on their desktop computer, meaning increased efficiency in web development and maintenance.

This led to another wave of web design trend: flat design. This trend embraced an efficient and visually pleasing minimalist two-dimensional style. It emphasises functionality over ornamental design elements.

Today, flat design is still going strong. Web design has made a full circle back to the beginning of the Web, prioritising the content and the communication of information. Buttons and icons have taken a back seat, gracefully bowing to the content as the forefront of websites, and reduced complexity in design.

Read more: Google wants more mobile-friendly websites in its mobile searches

The future…

The history of Web is relatively short, yet it has gone through a succession of renaissances in a short period of time.

Previously, technology drove advances in web design. But I believe we are at a point where web design is no longer limited by technology. Virtually, we can do pretty much everything we might want to do on the Web.

The future of web design is no longer about what we can do, but rather about what we should do. That means being considerate about how design can affect the people who use it, and designing websites that result in positive experiences for users.

You can look up previous incarnations of your favourite website using the Wayback Machine.