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

Australia’s “coup culture” has become so entrenched that it now holds serious dangers for our democracy. Not that the politicians seem to give a damn. For all the talk of “listening” and being “on your side” the voters have once again been treated as little more than a gullible audience for a low-grade reality show.

A decade or two ago, many commentators advocated four-year federal parliamentary terms, to encourage better policy-making. Now we can’t even count on a prime minister lasting through the three-year parliamentary term after the election they win.

In less than a decade, we’ve had four prime ministerial coups: from Rudd to Gillard (2010); from Gillard to Rudd (2013); from Abbott to Turnbull (2015); and, last week, from Turnbull to Morrison.

A couple of these seemed politically savvy. I admit to thinking them so. In 2013, Kevin Rudd was reinstated to “save the furniture”, and he did. In 2015, Tony Abbott’s government appeared headed for certain oblivion. Malcolm Turnbull was installed as a better prospect; in the event, he won in 2016 only by the skin of his teeth.

The Gillard coup, driven by a panic attack and colleagues’ frustration with Rudd’s style, was ill-conceived. The botched assault by Peter Dutton, that elevated Scott Morrison, was fuelled by a cocktail of revenge against Turnbull and a policy push to the right. We’ll see how it ends, but likely it won’t be well.

While a particular coup may have its justifications, when you look at a clutch of them, they’re bad for the country and for the political system.

Some will point to history for precedent – Paul Keating overthrew Bob Hawke in 1991. But we didn’t in those days have a “coup culture”.

We may chuckle on hearing Australia referred to abroad as the “coup capital” of the world. But it’s not a joke. Although this country will continue to be seen as a safe place to invest, a rolling prime ministership must eventually test the faith of outsiders.

The coup culture works against the sort of decision-making that requires serious policy bravery. Timeframes shorten – ironically, just when governments fancifully cast programs as stretching over 10 years.

Thinking for the future is difficult enough with continuous polling and the shrill media cycle. But if a prime minister can’t rely on their troops guaranteeing their leadership through tough patches, or standing up against guerrilla insurgencies, public policy is reduced to the lowest common denominator or falls victim to the worst of internal power struggles.

Ditching opposition leaders is different from tossing out prime ministers. It has its own problems, but doesn’t undermine the system the way assassinating a PM does. Voters feel (and are entitled to feel) they elect the prime minister; it’s not technically true but it is effectively so, as campaigns are so leader-focused.

Fundamental in this revolving door is the cost to trust. As in other democracies, Australians’ trust in their system and its players has been eroding over decades.

Research from the University of Canberra’s Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis found fewer than 41% of Australians are currently satisfied with the way our democracy works. This compared with 78% in 1996.

Generation X is least satisfied (31%); the baby boomers most satisfied (50%). Women are generally less satisfied with democracy and more distrustful of politicians and political institutions.

According to this data – which preceded the leadership crisis – politicians are trusted by only 21%, and journalists by 28%.

The yet-to-be-released research concluded that “politicians, government ministers and political parties are deeply distrusted and media of all kinds and how they report Canberra politics is viewed as a key part of the problem.” It also found strong public support for reforms to ensure greater political accountability of MPs and to stimulate more public participation.

The coup culture further alienates an already disillusioned public, unable to comprehend the appalling behaviour they often witness from their politicians.

Recently I spoke to members of a community leadership program who’d come to Canberra for a couple of days of briefings from politicians and others. They’d been to Question Time a few hours before I met them.

To journalists, it was a pretty standard QT. For these people, what they witnessed was shocking. They had trouble getting their heads around how the goings on – the shouting, the insults – could be so dreadful. They’d looked over at the school children in another part of the public gallery and wondered what those youngsters were thinking.

They asked: why do our politicians act like this and what can be done? All 72 decided to write to their MPs to say this wasn’t the type of conduct they wanted to see from them.

My hunch is that this group of ordinary, well-educated, interested citizens would probably be even more put off by subsequent events.

One thing I suspect would have particularly disturbed them is the way the players in last week’s coup expect the public to just move right on. Everyone was back to work, they said.

Gillard in 2010 tried to explain and justify her deposing of Rudd by saying “I believed that a good government was losing its way”. It didn’t wash.

We know for ourselves the reasons for the latest coup – hatred of Turnbull and a desire to force a sharp turn to the right. But have the main coup-makers and their allies (as distinct from their noisy backers in the media), and the windfall beneficiaries felt the need to properly account for their actions?

This hit-and-run attitude is contemptuous of the public.

The coup culture, especially in this instance, is also accompanied by an “anything goes” view of tactics. Again, it is a matter of degree – the extent to which the hardball, which we always see at such times, crosses a line.

For some of the Liberal women, it undoubtedly did last week.

Julia Banks, announcing on Wednesday that she’ll resign her Melbourne seat of Chisholm at the election, has cited bullying. Liberal senator Linda Reynolds went to the lengths of telling the Senate: “I just hope that … the behaviours we have seen and the bullying and intimidation, which I do not recognise as Liberal in any way, shape or form, are brought to account.”

But Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger saw it as par for the course, saying, in response to Banks: “This is politics. People do speak strongly to each other. You just need to look at Question Time. If you think Question Time is not full of bullying and intimidation then you’ve got another think coming.”

Well, anyone who bullied or was fine with such conduct should do this: go to your local high school and explain to the kids why bullying shouldn’t be in their tool kit but was needed in yours.

Some Liberals flirt with the idea of rules to curb the coup culture, a path Labor has gone down.

It depends on the model: as with so much in politics, what looks good at first sight may hold dangers. Giving a party’s rank and file a say in electing the leader, as the ALP does, might eventually give an advantage to those harder to sell to voters, given party memberships are small and unrepresentative.

A higher than 50% threshold for a spill, which Labor also has embraced and Reynolds suggests, holds some merit. But when Anthony Albanese was stalking Bill Shorten before Super Saturday, Albanese’s supporters insisted the rule could be circumvented.

What’s really critical is the culture – in a party and in the political system generally. And once that’s been corroded, it’s a devil of a job to scrape the rust off.

There are no easy ways to rid ourselves of the coup culture, or to force tin-eared politicians to lift their game. But it wouldn’t hurt for more people to follow the example of those in the community leadership program and remind their MPs of their KPIs.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jana Perkovic, Sessional lecturer and researcher, University of Melbourne

Review: Blasted, Malthouse Theatre.

Playwright Sarah Kane was an “honorary lad” in in-yer-face drama that dominated the 1990s in Britain. Hers was one of few female voices in the testosterone-heavy genre, as well as one of its most prominent, even though her oeuvre was slight: five plays written over five years, and one short film, Skin (1997). The plays were: Blasted (1995), Phaedra`s Love (1996), Cleansed and Crave (1998), and finally 4.48 Psychosis, which premiered in 2000, not long after Kane’s life ended in suicide.

Today considered one of the luminaries of British dramatic writing, her work was hotly debated during her life, none more so than Blasted, a play that met such a furious response on opening night that an entire mythology has sprung around it. Some of the outraged review headlines – most famously Jack Tinker’s “This Disgusting Feast of Filth” – were picked up by the media and amplified into a nation-wide frenzy. The director Stephen Daldry defended it on national television. The first run sold out, with queues around the block for returns.

What incensed the critics in 1995 was the violence, both physical and psychological, that permeates the play in ways that then seemed gratuitous, overblown, and dramaturgically incongruous. Blasted spliced together forms of abuse that until then rarely appeared side by side on stage. The play opens with a chamber piece, a man and a woman in an expensive hotel room in Leeds, “so expensive it could be anywhere in the world.”

Ian, a middle-aged journalist who rants about the wogs and Pakis taking over Britain, has brought in a much younger and vulnerable Cate, whom he verbally puts down, cajoles, and – it is implied – coerces into sex. The interaction between them is a series of discomforting, not-enthusiastically-consented-to steps towards sexual intercourse. With today’s eyes, it reads like one of those accounts of what Harvey Weinstein allegedly did with his hotel room guests; but even in 1995, the intimidation, power struggle and joylessness were apparent.

However, roughly halfway through the play, as Cate locks herself in the bathroom to have a bath, a soldier erupts into the room. From this moment on, another play entirely seems to take place, one no longer set in Leeds, but in a country for which Ian needs a passport. The intimate violence between a man and a woman suddenly explodes into the panoramic violence of bombs, guns, mass rapes. The soldier rapes Ian, after telling him about the atrocities committed outside, to his own girlfriend. A bomb blasts through the room.

And then it all grows bigger, operatic almost. The soldier gouges Ian’s eyes out. Cate returns with a baby, which dies and is buried under the floorboards of the room. We are in Tarantino territory by this point: grotesque violence, theatrical, all plot dissolving into a series of disconnected, visually pregnant scenes as Ian descends into despair.

Interestingly, even though Kane’s later works, plotless and poetic, are considered to be the “hard” ones, they all seem to get staged more often than Blasted. The cynic in me thinks that, as hard as it may be to stage a prose poem, it may not be as hard as staging a bomb going off in a hotel room. Anne-Louise Sarks’ production of Blasted for the Malthouse is the first stage version I have ever seen – and it offers an opportunity to observe how this defining play of the 1990s has aged.

In 1995, Blasted was a play that connected the ordinary, everyday life in the UK, marked by hooliganism, lad culture and post-Thatcherism, to the atrocities of war in former Yugoslavia, a war which was schizophrenically experienced in Western Europe as both geographically close and unfathomably distant.

The collapse of contexts and genres that marks the play (and that so infuriated the critics) is a gesture that would later repeat in Michael Haneke’s films (particularly Hidden), as well as in Lars von Trier’s: by the 2000s, the slip from middle-class banality to splatter horror would become common. It would also become more legible, as an expression of anxiety: that the prosperous peace here and the civic collapse there are somehow linked, perhaps even causally.

In 2018, Sarks’ production is a Blasted of the #MeToo era, and of the Syrian refugee crisis. The notion that terrorism and domestic violence are intimately linked by underlying diseased masculinity is no longer just a poetic metaphor: it is discussed in policy papers and newspaper articles around the world.

2018 makes Blasted look prescient, prophetic. Sarks, who is an exceptionally imaginative and courageous director, but has never been one for unnecessary statements, deliberately pares back directorial gestures to let the play speak. It is not a showy production.

Marg Horwell’s normcore set (very similar to her work on Revolt, She said. Revolt Again in 2017) is a box of grey hotelness, later explodes to reveal the walls and utilities of the Malthouse building. The actors are exceptional, but none draw attention to themselves at the expense of the ensemble. The production takes a while to find its rhythm, but once Fayssal Bazzi’s Soldier enters and the war gets going, it grips and holds us breathless until the very last words of the play. It is the work of a director who has come into her full powers and has nothing left to prove.

It is hard to know how the contemporary audience will receive a stage work where so much of the effect hinges on being genuinely terrified by simulated rape, or theatrical cannibalism. The 1990s were, in some ways, a simpler and more naïve time.

But even if some of the mechanics of Blasted have aged, its central emotional core stands solid. Kane often said that all her works are really about love. The central journey in Blasted is not a tourist trip through extreme violence. It’s the emotional journey of a bully who learns to be grateful for small acts of kindness.

Blasted is being staged at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, until September 16.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling

You probably heard your first strains of music when you were in utero. From then on it’s helped you learn, helped you relax, hyped you up, helped you work, helped you exercise, helped you celebrate and helped you grieve.

Music is ingrained in so many aspect of our lives, but it’s also the subject of a significant body of academic work.

Today’s episode of Trust Me, I’m An Expert is all about research on music. We’ll be hearing from Dr Ben Swift, a digital artist and computer science lecturer from the Australian National University on how technology is changing the way we interact with music. Could it one day be something we experience through augmented reality, responding to the way we move through the world? Sound supplemented with colours and shapes?

And Conversation intern Juliana Yu spoke with Dr Clint Bracknell, a researcher at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music about how he’s investigating the power of song to help address the national and global crisis of Indigenous language-loss. He’s working on this research with Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Inc.

And we’ll hear from researcher Dr Hollis Taylor, most recently at Macquarie University, who has been studying, recording, and transcribing pied butcherbird song for 12 years. Taylor produces what she calls “re(compositions)” – musical arrangements that mimic and complement pied butcherbird song.

Trust Me I’m An Expert is a podcast from The Conversation, where we bring you stories, ideas and insights from the world of academic research. Special thanks today to Shelley Hepworth and Juliana Yu, as well as academics Hollis Taylor, Ben Swift and Clint Bracknell.

You can download previous episodes of Trust Me here. And please do check out other podcasts from The Conversation – including The Conversation US’ Heat and Light, about 1968 in the US, and The Anthill from The Conversation UK, as well as Media Files, a brand new podcast all about the media. You can find all our podcasts over here.

Additional audio

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks

Svefn-g-englar by Sigur Ros

Green Lake, Victoria for soprano recorder and field recording by Hollis Taylor, Genevieve Lacey, recorder

Owen Springs Reserve 2014 for vibraphone and field recording by Hollis Taylor/Jon Rose, Claire Edwardes, vibraphone

Field recordings by Hollis Taylor

2 Adagio (Fantasia in C minor K 475 by W. A. Mozart) by NoLogic, from Free Music Archive

Procession by The Marian Circle Drum Brigade, from Free Music Archive

Svela Tal by Blue Dot Sessions, from Free Music Archive

Critters creeping Lee Rosevere Shimmering Still Water – Free Sound Archive

Asmodeus Redux by Ben Swift

Elder Brother by Ben Swift

The Illiac Suite by Hiller and Isaacson

Wirlomin members practicing old Noongar songs with the guidance of Henry Dabb, Gaye Roberts and the Wirlomin Elders Reference Group

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mandy Shircore, Associate Professor, James Cook University, James Cook University

This week the Victorian Supreme Court refused an application by the State of Victoria to strike out a claim by Tara Smith and her three children. Smith claims Victoria Police officers were negligent because they failed to prevent numerous breaches of protection orders by her ex-partner, the father of the children. As a result, Smith and the children have suffered ongoing psychological harm.

In refusing to strike out Smith’s claim, the court has accepted that it is arguable police could owe a common law duty of care to specific victims of domestic violence to protect them from preventable harm. This is an important decision, because no Australian case has determined the question of whether police owe a duty of care to victims of domestic violence. Finding a duty of care is the first step in a civil action for damages in negligence. Without a duty of care there can be no liability in negligence, no matter how careless the defendant is.

Every year in Australia, more than 100,000 victims of domestic violence take out a protection order. Protection orders impose conditions on the perpetrator’s behaviour and victims rely on police to act when perpetrators breach those conditions. Domestic violence legislation and police policies and procedures are focused on victim safety – police failure to follow them can have tragic results. In Victoria, police now have strong powers to respond to domestic violence.

Read more: How Victoria’s family violence system fails some victims – by assuming they’re perpetrators

For Tara Smith and her children, the consequences of the alleged failures by the police resulted in years of continued violence perpetrated by her ex-partner, despite four intervention orders being taken out against him. She claims police knew or should have known about the orders.

In Smith’s case, the State of Victoria argued that Australian law does not, and should not, recognise that police owe a duty of care to individual members of the public to investigate violence or prevent certain conduct occurring, unless there are exceptional circumstances. The state also argued that imposing a duty of care on police would result in police owing conflicting duties to individuals versus the general public, it would divert police resources from their public duties and could result in “defensive” police practices.

These arguments reflect recent UK Supreme Court decisions and some earlier Australian legal cases. Some commentators and judges have criticised these policy arguments as unproven, questioning why police should be protected from negligence actions when other professionals and public officers are not.

When the case is finally heard, the court will need to consider the nature of the relationship between the police and Smith and her children, in deciding if the police owe a duty of care. The court will also consider the nature of the harm. So far, no Australian cases have found that police can’t be sued for negligence.

However, like the UK, Australian courts have been reluctant to impose a duty of care on police in cases where the allegation is that the police failed to protect a plaintiff from third party harm – in Smith’s case, her ex-partner. In similar cases, the courts have considered the degree of control the police had over the perpetrator of the harm.

Read more: Victorian government should be wary of introducing a stand-alone offence of non-fatal strangulation

Smith argued that domestic violence legislation and policies give police significant powers to exercise control over a perpetrator of violence. They require proactive policing to protect victims. Smith’s ex-partner was a known re-offender of family violence and the police had the power and responsibility to enforce the protection orders. Smith alleged that the police failed to follow their own training and procedures when they failed to enforce the protection orders.

Had the Victorian Supreme Court decided to strike out Smith’s claim, the allegations of police negligence in this case could not be tested and given a full hearing in court. However, the court has allowed the important question of whether the police could owe a duty of care to a victim of domestic violence to be examined in light of all the facts and evidence of the case.

Police officers have a difficult task in tackling domestic violence. They require specialised and ongoing training to deal with the complex issues involved.

Yet, like other professionals, it should be possible to hold them accountable for their failure to do so. Denying that they owe a duty of care to victims of domestic violence in circumstances of serious failures sends a message to victims that they cannot rely on police for protection.

Note: Tara Smith is a pseudonym.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fabrizio Carmignani, Professor, Griffith Business School, Griffith University

Graph: GetUp! Australia Instagram post, July 2018. Graph: GetUp! Australia, Instagram

Graph shared by GetUp! Australia on Facebook and Instagram, July 2018

Debate continues over the Turnbull government’s proposal to cut the corporate tax rate from 30% to 25% for businesses with turnover of more than A$50 million.

One major point of contention is the possible effect of the tax cuts on Australian wages.

A social media post shared by lobby group GetUp! Australia argued against the tax cuts, suggesting that US real wages fell after the Trump administration cut corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%.

Let’s take a closer look.

Checking the source

The Conversation requested sources and comment from GetUp! to support the data used in the graph, and the suggestion that there had been a causal relationship between the enactment of corporate tax cuts in the US and a reduction in real wages.

We first found the graph in Bloomberg in this article by economics blogger and former Assistant Professor of Finance at Stony Brook University, Noah Smith.

The underlying data comes from the Payscale Real Wage Index – adjusted for inflation. We noted that percentage change since 2006 is an unorthodox Y axis for a wages graph, but that’s what the Payscale Index tracks.

We added the marker of the corporate tax rate being cut in the United States, which while passed in Q4 [the fourth quarter] of 2017, came into effect in Q1 [the first quarter] of 2018.

Note that in the Instagram image, we attributed Payrole.com as the source, instead of Payscale.com. This was a drafting error on our part.

Proponents of corporate tax cuts both in the US and Australia have asserted that there is a causal relationship between a lower corporate tax rate and higher wages (see US example and Australian example). The graph we posted in Instagram demonstrates that, in the US experience, that has not been the case.

This suggests that there is no causal relationship between a lower corporate tax rate and higher wages, and that cutting the corporate tax rate based on an expected flow on effect to wages would be a mistake.

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Verdict

The social media post shared by GetUp! Australia, which could be read by many as suggesting that US corporate tax cuts caused wages to fall, is problematic and potentially misleading for two reasons.

Firstly: charts constructed with data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest that the chart used by GetUp! overestimates the drop in wage growth in the US between the first and second quarters of 2018.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, wage growth over that period declined slightly (rather than significantly), or was moderately positive, depending on the measure used.

Secondly, and most importantly: the chart used by GetUp! can’t conclusively establish any causal relationship between the enactment of US corporate tax cuts in January 2018 and any drop in wage growth.

While the chart does not support the argument that corporate tax cuts cause higher wages, it also cannot conclusively reject it.

What does the GetUp! chart show and suggest?

The social media post shared by GetUp! has the title: “This is what happened to wages when Donald Trump cut corporate tax in America.”

It shows a line chart with the heading: “United States real wages.” The reference to “real wages” means the index has been adjusted for inflation. A note below the chart says the wage changes are relative to 2006 levels.

The line chart depicts US real wages rising from minus 8.50% of 2006 levels in Q2 2016, to minus 7.70% in Q1 2018. A vertical line marks the point in Q1 2018 when the tax cuts were enacted. The line then shows a drop to minus 9.30% of 2006 levels in Q2 2018.

A reader could quite easily interpret the chart as meaning the enactment of corporate tax cuts in the US had an immediate and negative effect on real wage growth.

The subtitle reads: “Let’s not make the same mistake here.”

Are the data used in the chart appropriate?

As noted by GetUp! in their response to The Conversation, the source for the data used in the chart is Payscale, not payrole.com, as stated in the post.

Payscale is a US commercial company that provides information about salaries. The company publishes a quarterly wage index based on its own data, which it says is based on more than 300,000 employee profiles in each quarter, capturing the total cash compensation of full time employees in private industry and education professionals in the US.

Given the commercial nature of Payscale data, I don’t have access to their primary dataset, and can only rely on the description of the methodology reported on their website. I have no reason to doubt the validity of the data and/or the methodology.

I do, however, suggest that presenting the data in the form of percentage changes from 2006 is not ideal for an assessment of wage dynamics around the time of the enactment of corporate tax cuts.

In their response to The Conversation, GetUp! did acknowledge that “percentage change since 2006 is an unorthodox Y axis for a wages graph”.

It would be more informative to present the data as percentage changes between one quarter and the same quarter of the previous year, or between two consecutive quarters. I have done this in the two charts below, using the data publicly available from Payscale.

The story is qualitatively similar to that shown in the chart presented by GetUp!. Therefore, we can say that – based on the Payscale data – real wages seem to have dropped between the first and second quarters of 2018.

Is Payscale the best source for this kind of analysis?

While there is no reason to believe that the Payscale data are incorrect, it is worth considering a more standard statistical source.

Earnings data for the US are available from a variety of institutions. The difficulty, in this case, is that there are many different statistical definitions of earnings and wages depending on which sectors, geographical areas, and types of employees are observed.

One of the most commonly used definitions is the “average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory employees on private payrolls”, with monthly data supplied by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Using these data, I have recomputed changes in real wages (adjusted for inflation) between one quarter to the same quarter of the previous year and between two consecutive quarters.

These two charts based on US Bureau of Labor Statistics data tell a different story from the charts based on the Payscale data.

In particular, the change in wages between the first and second quarters of 2018 is moderately positive (+0.4%) rather than significantly negative (minus 1.7% based on the Payscale data).

The drop in wages between the second quarter of 2017 and the second quarter of 2018 is also less sharp (minus 0.11%, compared to minus 1.4% from the Payscale data).

These differences may be determined by the different coverage and/or statistical definitions used by Payscale and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to measure wages and compensation.

The story the GetUp! chart suggests: is it correct?

The combination of the words and the image could suggest to some that there was a causal relationship between the enactment of corporate tax cuts and a drop in real wages in the US.

But the chart used in the post isn’t suited to provide any evidence on causality.

That’s because changes in real wages can be determined by a variety of economic factors, such as changes in the makeup of the labour force and business cycle fluctuations. A chart like the one published by GetUp! can’t possibly isolate the impact of just one factor.

The observation that wage growth dropped around the time of the enactment of the corporate tax cuts doesn’t automatically imply that this drop was caused by the tax cuts. At best, a correlation between the two events can be established, not a causal effect.

We also need to keep in mind that the relationship between tax cuts and wages is likely to involve time lags. The effect of corporate tax cuts on wages, or any other economic variable, takes time to feed through the economic system and to show up in the data. This reinforces the argument that the chart demonstrates correlation, rather than causality.

Having said that, while the data used cannot provide evidence for the argument that corporate tax cuts lead to lower wages, it cannot conclusively reject the argument, either. – Fabrizio Carmignani

Blind review

The GetUp! chart is captioned: “This is what happened when Donald Trump cut corporate tax in America.” Strictly speaking, GetUp! don’t actually claim that the corporate tax cut caused the wage to fall, but it is certainly what the reader is led to believe.

The author has identified the key problem with the GetUp! chart, which is that there is no evidence that the fall in real wages was caused by the enactment of corporate tax cuts. In fact, the chart provides no evidence to either support or reject the premise that a corporate tax cut would have any effect on wages.

The alternative data sourced by the author from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics cast some doubt on the accuracy of the data used by GetUp!, yet this is a distraction from the main argument that neither chart proves causality between corporate tax cuts and wage growth.

As the author says, there are many factors that influence real wage growth. Some examples include changes in the skills and experience of the working population, changes in government expenditure, and of course, changes to tax policy. It would be a mistake to attribute the recent decline in US wages to any single factor, such as the cut to the corporate tax rate.

This is why economic modelling is so powerful. In a “laboratory”, economic modellers can build two versions of the world: one with a tax cut and one without. With all other things held equal, the only differences between these two worlds must be a consequence of the tax cut.

Economic modelling produced by Victoria University’s Centre of Policy Studies (and of which I was an author) finds that despite stimulating growth in pre-tax real wages, a company tax cut would cause a fall in the average incomes of the Australian population.

So while this FactCheck shows that the wage chart from GetUp! is inconclusive, my view (based on the Victoria University modelling) is that company tax cuts here would be a “mistake” because of the negative impact on the incomes of Australians. – Janine Dixon

The Conversation’s FactCheck unit was the first fact-checking team in Australia and one of the first worldwide to be accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network, an alliance of fact-checkers hosted at the Poynter Institute in the US. Read more here.

Have you seen a “fact” worth checking? The Conversation’s FactCheck asks academic experts to test claims and see how true they are. We then ask a second academic to review an anonymous copy of the article. You can request a check at checkit@theconversation.edu.au. Please include the statement you would like us to check, the date it was made, and a link if possible.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jake Whitehead, Research Fellow, The University of Queensland

Road congestion is costing Australia more than an avoidable A$16 billion every year. This is set to almost double to A$30 billion by 2030. That’s why we have a new minister for cities and urban infrastructure, Alan Tudge, who says he’s looking forward to “congestion busting”.

It’s also why state election campaigns repeatedly focus on reducing congestion. The Victorian Labor government’s recent announcement of a plan to build “the biggest public transport project in Australian history” is a good example.

The proposed A$50 billion underground rail link will allow commuters to travel between suburbs without having to go into the city. And transport minister Jacinta Allan said it will take 200,000 cars off major roads.

While the project’s 2050 timeline is disappointing, this is a step in the right direction. If federal, state and local governments are serious about congestion, the discussion must continue to move beyond our obsession with more roads.

Building more roads is not a long-term solution to solving congestion. Most new roads, and the temporary de-congestion they may bring, simply lure more people into their cars. Eventually congestion increases, except now with more cars on the road, further exacerbating the original problem.

Here are four alternative measures to “bust” congestion and improve our overall quality of life.

Read more: Traffic congestion: is there a miracle cure? (Hint: it’s not roads)

1. Invest in mass, rapid, zero-emissions public transport

This type of transport includes electric bus rapid transit, where buses have dedicated roads and priority at intersections, and high-speed, electric underground systems, such as where passengers are transported in autonomous so-called “electric skates” that travel at over 200km/h.

Australia has been sorely lacking investment in mass, rapid public transport over recent decades. But this is slowly changing with the announcements of future projects, including: Sydney Metro, Melbourne Metro, Brisbane Metro, the recent Melbourne Suburban Rail Loop, and Brisbane Cross River Rail

But much more effort is needed to ensure these projects are implemented quickly and expanded beyond inner-city suburbs. Peak-hour bus lanes should be introduced to provide congestion-free bus rapid transit routes to and from metro stations.

And these new projects must move towards zero-emission vehicles to reduce the 1,700 premature deaths caused every year in Australia due to vehicle pollution – 40% more than in motor vehicle accidents.

2. Enable public transport subscriptions

The difference between public and private transport pricing in Australia is perverse. Those who own a car mainly pay a fixed upfront fee every year, no matter when or where they travel.

Ironically, the exact opposite is true for public transport users who are often charged more to travel during peak-hour traffic (see fares in Queensland, New South Wales, and South Australia), and have to pay for each individual trip, at a higher cost, the further they travel. This pricing structure effectively penalises commuters.

Read more: How many people make a good city? It’s not the size that matters, but how you use it

Enabling monthly and annual public transport tickets, with unlimited trips, would encourage commuters to use public transport more often, to get the best bang for their buck from their subscription ticket.

Governments should also support integrating other transport services into these subscription tickets, including taxis, bike-sharing and even car hire. Such schemes have already been introduced overseas, including in the UK and Finland, given their potential to reduce car ownership and congestion under the right policy settings.

3. Invest more in active transport

Investment in dedicated active transport infrastructure, such as separated lanes, is paramount for encouraging active transport. It will also ensure the safety of pedestrians and cyclists, while minimising motor vehicle conflicts.

Additionally, the arrival of electric bikes, scooters, and skateboards, has opened up other modes of transport as a viable option for more Australians. These devices are particularly important for addressing the “first and last mile transport problem”, where commuters do not use public transport because stations are too far to walk to and/or from.

While there are challenges with regulating some of these devices, and ensuring they are safe to use, it is important governments invest in infrastructure – such as electric bike charging at public transport stations – to support their use in addressing the first and last mile problem.

4. Introduce dynamic road pricing

Finally, while public and active transport is crucial for reducing congestion, infrastructure to support these services comes at a cost. Most road taxes, such as annual registration fees, do not accurately reflect how and when car owners drive.

Is it fair for a pensioner who drives to the shops a couple of times a week, outside peak-hour, to pay the same fees as someone who drives to and from the city, every day, during peak-hour traffic? We need to progressively introduce cost-reflective road pricing, which is not simply focused on how far car owners drive, but on when, where and what they drive.

Road pricing should be used to disincentivise peak-hour, urban commuting to minimise congestion, while raising revenue to fund both public and active transport alternatives, as well as reduce tolls on roads that bypass city centres.

Read more: City-wide trial shows how road use charges can reduce traffic jams

One pathway forward could be a voluntary (low-fee) road pricing scheme for electric vehicle owners. This would be in exchange for waiving existing road taxes, such as registration, stamp duty, import duty and fuel excise. Such a scheme could initially act as an incentive to encourage the uptake of this technology.

As electric vehicles become more affordable, the pricing scheme could be increased and expanded to the entire vehicle fleet, reducing emissions and travel costs, at the same time as minimising congestion.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Evelyn Parr, Research Fellow in Exercise Metabolism and Nutrition, Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research, Australian Catholic University

Excess storage of fat is linked to many different chronic diseases. But some areas of fat storage on the body are worse than others.

In general, women have greater absolute body fat percentages than men. Typically, women carry more fat around the legs, hip and buttocks, as well as the chest and upper arms. Women have more subcutaneous fat – the fat you can pinch under your skin – while men typically have more visceral fat, which is stored in and around the abdominal organs.

People who have greater fat stores around their butt and thigh (glutealfemoral) regions are at lower risk of chronic diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease, than those with greater fat stores around their middle.

Read more: Explainer: overweight, obese, BMI – what does it all mean?

Why is belly fat more dangerous?

Excess fat around the tummy is subcutaneous fat – which you can pinch – as well as visceral fat, which is in and around the organs in the abdominal cavity and only visible using medical scans. Researchers have found excess visceral fat storage is a significant risk factor for metabolic health complications of obesity such as type 2 diabetes, fatty liver and heart disease.

Fat cells in a healthy person are able to grow, recruit inflammatory cells to help reduce inflammation, and remodel themselves in order to allow for healthy body growth. But if there is excess fat tissue, these mechanisms don’t function as well. And with excess fat, the body can become resistant to the hormone insulin – which maintains our blood sugar levels.

Visceral (belly) fat secretes greater levels of adipokines – chemicals that trigger inflammation – and releases more fatty acids into the bloodstream. Whereas the fat cells in the leg region, and the pinchable, subcutaneous layers of fat around the middle, store fatty acids within themselves, rather than pushing them into the circulation.

The fat around the hips and legs is more passive, meaning it releases fewer chemicals into the body.

Read more: Coffee companion: how that muffin or banana bread adds to your waistline

Just try to lose fat, anywhere

A recent weight-loss study that looked at where fat mass was lost found the area of fat loss didn’t change the risk factors for heart disease and stroke. The important thing was losing fat from anywhere. While diet and exercise are unable to specifically target regions of fat depots, fat mass loss from anywhere can improve risk factors.

Online ads might tell you a magic workout machine will reduce fat in one particular area, but adipose tissue is unable to be targeted in the same way that we can target a specific muscle group.

Total loss of fat mass, through a healthy diet and exercise, is the best outcome for overall health and reducing either the symptoms of chronic disease (such as diabetes) or the risk of developing disease such as diabetes or heart disease.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lucy Taksa, Professor and Associate Dean, Macquarie University

Efforts to address discrimination and lack of diversity in the workplace often focus on unconscious bias and unconscious bias training.

While this sounds fine, it can be problematic in offering the perpetrators an out.

Unconscious bias is bias we are unaware of. It is said to be outside of our control. Training to recognise it has become widespread. Starbucks recently closed 8,000 stores in North America for unconscious bias training after one of its managers called police to arrest two African-American men who had been sitting at a table but not ordering while waiting for a friend.

But training to recognise something can also normalise it. Unconscious bias training, in effect, side-steps accusations and blame, by creating the impression that everyone is biased, making it possible for people to avoid being accountable for their biases and biased behaviour.

Read more: Why short ‘unconscious bias’ programs aren’t enough to end racial harassment and discrimination

Equating discrimination with mental states

The concept of unconscious bias emerged from the field of social psychology during the 1990s. It is commonly associated with an Implicit Association Test that asks people to assign an adjective such as “pleasant” or “unpleasant” to an entire group, such as males or females or blacks or whites. The speed with which people assign the adjective is said to measure the strength of the association.

The test had reportedly been taken over 17 million times by 2015. It has helped legitimise a link between unconscious bias and discriminatory behaviour, even while scholars question its assumptions and the reliability.

Of more serious concern is that it legitimises bias by spreading the idea that most people are biased.

Read more: What’s unconscious bias training, and does it work?

The concept made its way to American employment discrimination lawsuits in the 1990s. The idea that it was possible to unconsciously discriminate removed the need to prove an intention to discriminate and increased the possibility of successful claims.

But Australian discrimination law has never required proof of intention. Here, it is illegal for employers to discriminate or allow harassment, regardless of what they intended.

Australian workplace health and safety laws operate on the same principle. It is illegal for someone with a duty of care to be reckless without a reasonable excuse.

Yet despite the workings of our law, Australian organisations have embraced the concept of unconscious bias with almost as much fervour as the Americans, and are spending immense amounts of money on training to recognise it.

The goal of reducing discrimination is, of course, laudable. But attributing bad behaviour to unconscious causes deflects blame away from the perpetrators, and also away from the organisations themselves.

They can market themselves as “valuing diversity” while blaming discrimination on employees and managers who ‘fail to learn’.

The alternative would be to actively use performance management and disciplinary systems to ensure discrimination didn’t take place. And to make sure the law didn’t permit it.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Pollock, Climatologist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology

So far, 2018 has been very warm and exceptionally dry over large parts of mainland Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology’s climate outlook for spring, released today, shows that significant widespread relief is unlikely.

The chance of a spring El Niño, along with other climate drivers, is likely to mean below-average rainfall for large parts of the country in the coming months.

A dry winter for most of Australia

Winter rainfall has been below average over most of Australia’s eastern mainland. Large parts of New South Wales are on track to have winter rainfall in the lowest 10% of records. This has compounded drought conditions in the east after mixed rainfall last year and a dry start to 2018 for much of the country.

But it’s not just the lack of rainfall that has made the impact of drought severe. Another factor was the warmer than average daytime temperatures.

Read more: Winter is coming, and it’s looking mighty mild

Warmest January-August on record for some

The 2017-18 summer average temperature was Australia’s second-warmest in 108 years of records, while autumn was Australia’s fourth-warmest on record. Winter 2018 is likely to be among the five warmest winters on record in terms of maximum temperatures.

Many of the above-average daytime temperatures have been focused over the country’s southeast. In fact, South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria are all on track for their warmest maximum temperatures for the January to August period.

The below-average rainfall combined with above-average maximum temperatures resulted in a rapid and intense drying of the landscape. This has led to unusually severe fire weather conditions in July and August – conditions more typically seen at the end of spring than the end of winter.

Read more: Drought, wind and heat: when fire seasons start earlier and last longer

In contrast, low rainfall, cloud-free skies and dry soils mean it has been colder than usual overnight across most of the country during winter.

Climate conditions favour low rainfall

Will spring see a break in the warmer days and below average rainfall? Probably not. Both the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), can be major influences on Australia’s seasonal rainfall and temperature patterns.

During winter, both ENSO and the IOD were neutral, meaning that neither of them provided a large influence on winter’s weather (so we can’t blame them this time).

Read more: The BOM outlook for the weather over the next three months is ‘neutral’ – here’s what that really means

However, most international climate models have been forecasting a spring El Niño since June. Sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific have been gradually warming since autumn and are rising towards El Niño thresholds. At the beginning of June the Bureau went on El Niño watch, which indicates a roughly 50% chance of El Niño forming in 2018 – double the usual likelihood. El Niño during spring typically means below-average rainfall across eastern and northern Australia.

Three out of five international models are forecasting that a positive Indian Ocean Dipole event is also possible this spring. A positive IOD during spring typically means below-average rainfall in central and southern Australia. When El Niño and a positive IOD coincide, their drying influences can be exacerbated.

So, what’s the outlook for spring?

With a reasonable chance of both El Niño developing and a positive Indian Ocean Dipole, the outlook for spring shows below-average rainfall is likely over much of the southeast and parts of the northeast and southwest. The rest of the country has a neutral outlook, showing no strong push towards a wetter or drier than average three months.

Inland areas are typically dry at this time of year, so the neutral outlook in the arid interior typically implies that low rainfall is likely. No part of the country favours above-average rainfall in the spring outlook.

Spring days are likely to be warmer than average across Australia, with the highest chances (greater than 80%) over northern and western Australia. Most of the country is likely to have warmer than average nights this spring, except for areas around the Great Australian Bight which have roughly equal chances of warmer or cooler than average minimum temperatures.

What does this mean for the drought and bushfires?

Like the rest of the country, the Bureau is hoping that farmers in drought-affected areas get the rainfall they need soon. But this outlook isn’t the news many want to hear.

Last weekend’s rainfall over northeastern New South Wales and southeastern Queensland was welcomed by most, but unfortunately it was well short of what was required for a recovery from the longer-term rainfall deficits. Many locations on the east coast are well below their average year-to-date rainfall totals.

Rainfall deficiencies for the first seven months of 2018 in areas of western NSW, northwest Victoria and eastern South Australia widely show rainfall totals in the lowest 5% of the 118 years of record. It would take many months of above-average rainfall to return to average levels.

Read more: How to prepare your home for a bushfire – and when to leave

The above average temperatures in 2018 so far, combined with below average rainfall and dry vegetation, mean a higher likelihood of fire activity in parts of southern Australia. The warm and dry outlook for spring means the drought in parts of the country’s east is likely to continue.

Learn how climate outlooks are made.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kumuda Simpson, Lecturer in International Relations, La Trobe University

The rise of the radical right-wing movement in the US has become closely linked to Donald Trump’s presidency and the mainstreaming of ideas about race that were not so long ago found only on the furthest fringes of society.

David Neiwert’s new book, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, charts the key political and social moments that have shaped these movements. He has spent more than two decades immersing himself in the strange, disturbing world of radical right-wing groups in the US, which are characterised by conspiracy theories unhinged from reality and a growing tendency to espouse violence against liberals as a solution to the world’s problems.

While many of the ideas championed by these groups are similar those propagated by the Ku Klux Klan of the past, the new radical right-wing groups have benefited from the internet and social media. This allows them to easily communicate their perceived grievances to a new generation of followers, predominantly young men.

In some ways, this provides for a degree of anonymity, as well. Some of the more violent, racist and often misogynist views are promulgated by these groups online with little personal social cost.

What is most concerning, and what Neiwert demonstrates in detail throughout the book, is the way in which the mainstream news media, in particular Fox News, has become a forum for mainstreaming some of these ideas about racial superiority, fuelling political division and partisanship.

With the election of Trump, these once marginalised groups now have a clear figurehead – one who promotes their wild, and sometimes dangerous, conspiracy theories to the world.

Neiwert’s book delves deep into the anxieties these people feel about their status in a changing and complex world. Issues like immigration, changing race relations, women’s rights and economic stagnation have all fuelled a desire to find someone to blame. When this is mixed with a pervasive gun culture, the result is a highly volatile mix of anger, paranoia and violence.

The consequences have been deeply disturbing. Political rallies that end in frenzied screams of “lock her up”, alt-right rallies that result in death, and the growing toll of mass shootings that are disproportionately carried out by offenders influenced by the alt-right are a sign that something fundamentally twisted and nasty is colonising mainstream American politics.

David Neiwert is appearing at the Word Christchurch Festival on Thursday, 30 August; the Antitode Festival in Sydney on Sunday, 2 September; and the Brisbane Writers Festival on Saturday, 8 September.

Subscribe to The Conversation’s Speaking With podcasts on iTunes, or follow on Tunein Radio.

See also:

Trump’s First Year in Office: Bizarre and Sometimes Alarming

Booksellers, the alt-right and Milos Yiannopolous

The seeds of the alt-right, America’s emergent, right-wing populist movement

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phillippa Carnemolla, Senior Research Fellow, School of the Built Environment, University of Technology Sydney

People living with disability are largely excluded from conversations about sexuality, and face overlapping barriers to sexual expression that are both social and physical.

Media portrayals of sexuality often focus on a visual and verbal vocabulary that is young, white, cisgender, heterosexual and … not disabled.

My research into inclusive design explores how design can – intentionally or unintentionally – exclude marginalised or vulnerable people, as well as how design can ensure that everyone is included. That might mean design of the built environment, everyday products, or even how information is presented.

Read more: Sexual desires of people with learning disabilities are taboo – it’s why we mishandle their pregnancies

UTS has been collaborating for over a year with Northcott Innovation, a nonprofit organisation based in NSW that focuses on solutions for people with disability, to understand the barriers people face, and how inclusive design can help break them down.

When it comes to sexuality, new technologies have a role to play – but we need to look at both the opportunities and risks that these developments bring.

Starting the conversation

David* is a young man living with cerebral palsy who expresses a deep frustration about being unable to have his sexual desires met. He revealed his thoughts during facilitated discussions around sex and disability.

I can’t get into a lot clubs in my wheelchair – or restaurant or cafés for that matter. So where do I go to meet someone? Or go on a date? Let alone if we wanted to be intimate!

Northcott Innovation’s executive director Sam Frain isn’t surprised by what these conversations are revealing:

People with disability want to date, fall in love, or even fall out of love. They want to be recognised as the adults they are. In acknowledging their capacity for meaningful relationships, we must also acknowledge their sexuality – in whatever form that takes.

David faces complex social barriers too. Because it’s hard to for him to discuss his sexuality at all, coming out to his mother feels particularly fraught:

My mum doesn’t really know that I want to meet a future husband, not wife. I want to go on more dates. I don’t just want to meet other men with disability either. I want to meet lots of guys – but where can I go and how do I do this?

Inclusive sex toys

People living with disability have diverse physical and social support needs when it comes to expressing their sexuality. That means there isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all solution. Rather we need a design approach that allows for customisation.

A new research project at RMIT, led by industrial design lecturer Judith Glover, is investigating the design of customised, inclusive sex toys.

Read more: Pleasure, porn and power: rethinking sex and disability

Aside from some engineering research undertaken earlier this year at the University of São Paulo into the neurodildo – a sex toy operated remotely by brain waves – inclusive sex toys are an under-explored area of design research.

Glover feels strongly that designing sexual health products or services – whether for therapy or for recreation – should be treated as any other area of design. She acknowledges that the sex toy industry has barely started to address sex toys for an ageing population, let alone solutions for people with various disabilities:

Some of the people I meet, who are physically incapable of holding and moving objects, may have trouble communicating verbally – yet who really yearn to be able to develop their own sexual practice. Plus who doesn’t need to just get off every once in a while?

David agrees:

I really want to explore the option of sex toys more, but I don’t know what to try, or how to use it.

Social media and intellectual disability

Connecting communities together is an important strategy to overcome marginalisation and amplify the voices of people with disability.

Social media is a space where technology brings like-minded people together. But creating safe online spaces for people to express their sexuality can create unforeseen challenges – particularly for people with intellectual disability.

Deakin University and the Intellectual Disability Rights Service (IDRS) set up a closed Facebook support group earlier this year for people with intellectual disability who identify as LGBTQI. Jonathon Kellaher, an educator with IDRS, says:

Group administrators quickly realised that people who were not “out” and did not understand that group members can be viewed publicly were at risk of accidentally “outing” themselves when requesting to join the group.

To address this issue, the group privacy setting was set to “secret”. But this meant new members had to wait to be added, so it became a barrier to the group’s potential as a social connector. Deakin is now working on a project with GALFA to learn more about how people connect in this space.

Technology must promote inclusion

Then there is the elephant in the room: sex robots.

Manufacturers claim sex robots provide health and social benefits for people with disability, but researchers have been quick to point out that there’s no evidence to support the range of claims that have been made.

While it’s possible to see the introduction of sex robots as a form of assistive technology – a new way to experience pleasure, or to explore preferences and body capabilities – there’s another, more tragic, side.

Viewing sex robots as a solution to the loneliness of people with disability (or anyone for that matter), or as a remedy for a lack of available dates, risks perpetuating and exacerbating the social and sexual exclusion of people with disability.

Read more: Disabled LGBT+ young people face a battle just to be taken seriously

Technology can’t replace human connection, so it’s critical that new technologies support greater inclusion for people living with disability. It’s a human right to be able to safely express and enjoy sexuality, and have the choice to live a life with pleasure.

For David, that fits in to his ideal world very clearly:

One day I really want a husband to love me, two children, and to own my own restaurant.

* David’s name has been changed to protect his identity.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Wallace, ARC DECRA Fellow, Australian National University

Politics isn’t rational. Prejudice trumps performance. Politics is run by thugs. These are three reasonable conclusions from the snubbing of electorally popular Julie Bishop in last week’s Liberal leadership ballot, and Bishop-ally Julia Banks’ decision not to stand at the next election to protest bullying during the leadership campaign.

Why did it happen? Does politics have to work this way?

There are four facets to why Bishop, far away the most likely to maximise the Liberal vote at the next federal election, is not now prime minister.

Read more: The Turnbull government is all but finished, and the Liberals will now need to work out who they are

Firstly, there is not so much a “woman problem” as a “man problem” on the conservative side of politics in Australia. The Liberal Party room is dominated – and increasingly so over the past generation – by male MPs who anoint leaders in their own image.

Last week they looked at Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison and Bishop and chose the one who is, if you average out the demographics of current Liberal MPs, their identikit picture. This reinforces the collective power of men in the Liberal party room, maximises their comfort level and is, until exposed to political reality in the form of a general election, an approach easily sold on the inside as “common sense”.

Secondly, the reluctance of Liberal women to name and organise around the liberal feminism they actually practice, psychologically undercuts their power and keeps them in a prone position.

They need to name and unashamedly organise around the set of ideas that can end the present male Liberal monoculture in a way consistent with their political philosophy: that is, liberal feminism. Every time Bishop and those like her shy from declaring themselves liberal feminists, they pull the rug from under not only their own feet, but also from under the feet of every other Liberal woman around them. It’s time they staked out their philosophical ground.

Thirdly, Liberal women have to stake out their organisational ground too. They have yet to apply obvious lessons from overseas examples of how to organise and achieve change. As a British Conservative Party opposition frontbencher in 2005, the now British prime minister Theresa May established “Women2Win” to get more Tory women into parliament: the number of female Conservative Party MPs in Britain has since nearly quadrupled. Where is the Australian equivalent? Only Liberal women can make it happen.

And fourthly, in Australia, because of its particularly brutal gender politics, quotas have to be part of the answer. The long-held, empirically unarguable view of experts like ANU political scientist Marian Sawer is that the Liberals’ refusal to adopt Labor-style minimum quotas for women’s pre-selection in winnable seats is dragging women’s parliamentary representation here backwards.

Australia has moved from 15th place in the world in terms of women’s overall parliamentary representation in 1999 to 50th place in 2018 – an astonishing regression entirely down to the fall in female conservative MPs. Liberal women should accept the findings of sustained research in this area and make quotas central to their bargaining agenda.

Globally, the most successful conservative politician of the 21st century, by a very long margin, is a woman: German Chancellor Angela Merkel. If you want to see someone dispatch a thug, watch Merkel deal with US President Donald Trump. The British Conservative Party has already had two women prime ministers: Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. There won’t be a female Liberal prime minister here until Liberal women themselves organise with moderate allies to boost their numbers and normalise their presence in the party room.

Nor is this just an internal Liberal Party problem. It’s in the interests of all Australian voters for the Liberals’ “man problem” to be fixed since the consequences of being hostage to it, as we are now seeing, are so bad.

Like a river dying from lack of water, increased party political involvement overall has to underpin change like this. More “occasional politicians”, as Max Weber described them, are needed and fewer political apparatchiks. More doing your civic duty by joining a political party and voting in preselections rather than leaving these crucial choices to the sad, mad and self-seeking. It means reasonable people not folding and leaving in the face of pressure from the thugs, but rather binding together and seeing the thugs off.

Politics can, and has been, more rational. Prejudice doesn’t have to, and hasn’t always, trumped performance. Politics doesn’t have to be run by thugs.

Read more: ‘Balmain basket weavers’ strike again, tearing the Liberal Party apart

When the histories are written, the Liberal “moderates” appeasement of the party’s thuggish right-wing, both in policy and personnel, will be revealed as central to former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s downfall and the party room’s failure to elect Bishop his successor.

Early this year, the numbers were there for moderate NSW Liberals to defeat the preselections of key right-wingers Tony Abbott in Warringah, Craig Kelly in Hughes and Angus Taylor in Hume. Internal discussions occurred over whether to do so. Turnbull and every key moderate squibbed the chance.

You can’t beat thugs through appeasement. You’ve got to get rid of them. Cleaning up the Liberals right-wing is the challenge for a future leader – a real leader.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Humphery-Jenner, Associate Professor of Finance, UNSW

Australia received a new prime minister last week. Much ink has been spilled on the desirability, or otherwise, of this leadership change. But, how did the market respond?

Considerations when examining reaction

Looking at the market’s reaction to a leadership turnover is often fraught for several reasons. First, leadership changes are often anticipated, so it is not clear exactly when the market starts reacting to the leadership change. Second, other events can take over to drive returns.

For example, the market’s views on leaders could be dwarfed by concerns over trade with China, and Australia’s dealings with Huawei and ZTE. Third, sometimes leaders’ policies and cabinets take time to form and the market might need sometime to digest all this information.

But this time it is possible to examine the reaction. That’s because the market seemed to expect Peter Dutton to win, or at least expect the contest to be close. There was still some “surprise” when Scott Morrison won.

It is possible to examine the market’s reaction to Morrison’s selection, and to Morrision’s selection alone, in the hours immediately after the vote. All other events (such as Australia’s interactions with ZTE and Huawei) were already public knowledge and incorporated into prices.

The reaction

With this in mind, we can look at how the market responded immediately after Morrison’s selection, and around the selection timeline on the day of the selection.

Before the spill: Leading up to his selection, the sharemarket was sliding, as indicated in line A in the above graph. This might have reflected the uncertainty surrounding the party’s leadership. It could also reflect the consensus view up until the challenge that Dutton would win. That would suggest that the market was apprehensive about a shift from Malcolm Turnbull and his policies.

Immediately after Morrison’s selection, the market climbed significantly (as indicated in line B in the graph). For example, the S&P 200 increased from 6238 to 6263 (a 0.4% increase) in the course of 30 minutes. This implies at least an initial positive reaction to Morrison.

By the end of trade on Friday, August 24, this was pared back to 6255, representing a 0.27% increase over the low immediately before the results were announced. Importantly, on the following Monday the All Ordinaries Index increased another 0.36%, suggesting that the market did not renege on its initial positive reaction.

What does it mean?

Well, it means several things. First, given that (a) the sharemarket was trending downwards before the spill when Dutton was expected to prevail, and (b) the market increased when Morrison prevailed, there is some (albeit weak) evidence that the market prefers Morrison to Dutton. Second, the overall market reaction has been reasonably muted around this leadership spill. This implies that the market expects economic policies to remain relatively steady. This is unsurprising given that Morrison was treasurer under Turnbull.

Put together, we can see that while there has been some disquiet about yet another leadership change, the market has not tanked, and business as usual is likely to continue.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Pyke, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES), Victoria University

Recently, the University of Adelaide used a special exemption under the Equal Opportunity Act to advertise eight academic positions in the faculty of engineering, computer and mathematical sciences for women only. This raises questions about why a university might take this approach.

While Australia has had gender equality legislation for 30 years, there has been very slow progress towards addressing the gender equity issues plaguing the sector. To illustrate, women are still under-represented at senior levels. Only 27% of full professors (the main recruitment pool for top jobs) are women, and only 32% of Vice-Chancellors in public universities.

One of the principal reasons women don’t reach leadership roles is women are concentrated in fewer disciplines. Women’s academic employment in the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) disciplines is particularly low at 17%. This under-representation of women in STEM and higher education leadership is a result of multiple barriers to women’s career progression.

Posting job openings in male-dominated fields to specifically target women is one of the most direct and immediate measures to bring about change.

Does selective recruitment work against the merit principle?

One of the concerns raised when employment targets are implemented is that women will be appointed unfairly over more qualified male candidates. But the intention of selective recruitment is to address the problem that qualified women are discouraged and excluded from academic employment.

The corporatisation of higher education has led to the growth of contract and casual positions in academia. This often results in little prospect of career progression. While these conditions impact all academics, women work in academia under different conditions to men.

For example, women are more likely to be employed as sessional workers, at lower pay levels and have interrupted career development. Women are effectively held back or slowed down in many ways men are not, making the long-term goal of academic tenure and progression illusive.

Read more: Rate my professor’s gender?

So, despite being over-represented overall at undergraduate and entry level in academia, women are still underrepresented in STEM disciplines and at senior academic levels. The disciplinary culture of STEM favours men who have an uninterrupted focus on research for decades. It also doesn’t make these careers attractive to younger men, and particularly to younger women, who value work-life balance.

The implementation of targets is designed to address these barriers and expand the potential academic talent pool.

Barriers to women getting into and staying in academia

Women in academic leadership roles have often successfully negotiated with and navigated gendered leadership cultures at the cost of expending considerable energy to fit in to this masculinist culture. Not surprisingly, a study found younger academic women examined then dismissed leadership careers in higher education.

Two studies examined the careers of women in middle management in universities. The first study, conducted in Canada, questioned if these positions were a ladder to leadership or a revolving door taking women back to the ranks from whence they came.

Read more: Why do female academics give up on becoming professors?

The other study, conducted in Australia, found the managers and colleagues of mid-career women academics were commonly unsupportive or even actively discriminatory or hostile. A 2004 Australian case study found these women were subject to bullying from senior managers.

This has made academic careers, particularly in STEM, either unattractive or unsustainable for many of the next generation of women leaders.

Do quotas work?

Evidence suggests quotas in higher education do work.

For example, in Austria national legislation was introduced to require university bodies such as the senate and all commissions appointed by the senate to meet a quota of 40% female members. By 2016 all but one of the university councils had fulfilled this quota. The quota was raised to 50% in 2014.

Do anti-discrimination laws support or prevent this?

Cross-national structures such as the OECD and EU, driven by market logic, are concerned about the loss to society when highly educated women are excluded or marginalised.

This concern is shared by the professions. For example, the engineering profession notes women’s higher attrition in engineering is a cost that should be addressed.

Linking commitment on getting more women into leadership roles to funding appears to be one of the most effective ways of increasing women’s representation in academia. This has been demonstrated by Athena SWAN Charter in the UK. This aligns science funding with an institution’s performance in improving gender representation, especially at senior levels. The program has become a catalyst for institutional change, and is now being implemented in some Australian universities.

Read more: Sexism in science: one step back, two steps forward

Similarly, the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) introduced a gender equity policy requiring institutions to submit gender equity policies that include a strategy to address the under-representation of women in senior positions.

These strategies take time to yield results, but the implementation of targets and affirmative action in recruitment will directly speed up progress on gender equity. The alternative is to allow the same inequalities to prevail for another 30 years. This will cost us economically, and means we would only be using half of Australia’s potential pool of talent.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Keith Booker, Professor of English, University of Arkansas

In our series, Guide to the classics, experts explain key works of literature.

A year-and-a-half into the presidency of Donald Trump, some see this administration as the stuff of dystopian nightmares. Trump’s apparent disrespect for truth is suspiciously similar to the manipulation of history in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. The crass, three-ring-circus texture of the current crowd in Washington recalls the degraded America depicted in Mike Judge’s 2006 cinematic farce Idiocracy. However, the English writer Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic Brave New World might provide the best dystopian gloss on our contemporary predicament.

Like most good dystopian fiction, Brave New World is not a prediction but rather a diagnosis of dangerous tendencies in Huxley’s present. One of the most striking elements of Huxley’s vision of the future involves factories in which infants are designed to perform specific social functions.

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These Stepford babies are later conditioned through standardised educational practices. This motif is not primarily a cautionary tale about the potential abuse of genetic engineering. Rather, it is a commentary on existing class inequalities and the use of education to reinforce social obedience. It exemplifies the fundamental tendency of capitalism to convert humans into commodities, interchangeable and bereft of genuine individualism.

Certain aspects of Huxley’s dystopian society strikingly resemble our current situation. A lack of respect for history, a population conditioned to consume goods at breakneck pace, a tendency toward globalisation, and the pacification of individuals via an entertainment culture curated to squelch any inchoate rumblings of critical thought: all of these are hallmarks of Huxley’s and our worlds.

An illustrious family

Born in Surrey, England, in 1894, Aldous Leonard Huxley was a member of one of England’s most illustrious intellectual families. He also went on to become one of the most important English writers of the 20th century, though he was also important as a social and philosophical commentator — and spent the last 26 years of his life living in the United States.

His brother, Julian, was a prominent biologist knighted by the queen. Aldous and Julian were the grandsons of well-known naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley, a leading 19th-century advocate for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Aldous himself considered a career in biology or medicine, though he eventually turned to literature instead.

By the time Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, he was well established as a British novelist; works such as Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), and Point Counter Point (1928) arguably made him the most important English novelist of the 1920s, while also prefiguring Brave New World in important ways with their satirical treatment of British society.

A trip to the US shortly before the writing of Brave New World also contributed to Huxley’s formulation of his thoughts for the novel. (He moved there in 1937, where he would write more dystopian and utopian novels such as Ape and Essence (1948), Brave New World Revisited (1958) and Island (1962).)

History is bunk

In Brave New World, Huxley’s World State has arisen in the wake of a global war that nearly destroyed humanity. Its policies are officially driven by a desire to prevent a recurrence of this war at all costs. Stability and placidity in every aspect of life are of paramount concern. The public is protected from anything that might upset them and rock the social boat. However, the underlying goal is to ensure the smooth operation of the consumer capitalist economy and to remove any historical reminders that things might be other than they are.

Huxley presents us with the basic characteristics of his dystopian society through a loosely constructed narrative told largely from the point of view of Bernard Marx. An “alpha” who has been engineered and conditioned to be among the society’s intellectual elite, Bernard finds that his own individualist tendencies make him unable to function comfortably in this conformist society.

We are also introduced to Mustapha Mond, a “world controller” who attempts to explain to Bernard the rationale for the State’s policies, including its rejection of literature and history as sources of wisdom.

Also important to the narrative is “John the Savage.” Born biologically on a “Savage Reservation” and brought up reading the works of Shakespeare, John grows to adulthood outside the controls of the World State. He is eventually brought to London, where he finds himself so unable to fit in that he is driven to suicide.

The lack of respect for history in Huxley’s world is encapsulated in the slogan “history is bunk”. The phrase is but one of many slogan-like modules of prepackaged “wisdom” that pass for public discourse. This particular phrase is attributed in the novel to Henry Ford – the central cultural hero of the society – who was at the height of his influence at the time Brave New World was written. A true forerunner of Donald Trump (but a much better businessman), Ford is an honoured icon of American capitalism even today. Yet, he was also an admirer of Adolf Hitler and a philistine with no respect for culture.

It should thus come as no surprise that the devaluation of genuine understanding in Huxley’s imagined world includes the suppression of most of the great works of world literature. This is ostensibly done because they might trigger strong emotions. The true reason is that such works are not easily reduced to consumer commodities.

The World State is the ultimate consumer society, even if it cannot match the marketing sophistication of today’s global capitalism. Designed along “Fordist” lines, this society is devoted to economic efficiency, but only in the narrow consumerist sense of boosting sales.

Not only are individuals treated like commodities, but they live in a world that is saturated with the ethos of marketing. They are constantly bombarded by jingle-like slogans that encourage as much consumption as possible. Individuals are urged to replace rather than repair, because “ending is better than mending”.

Read more: Guide to the classics: The Tale of Genji, a 1,000-year-old Japanese masterpiece

Disturbing resonances

Huxley’s vision of a World State underestimates the staying power of nationalist rhetoric, of which Trump’s “America First” agenda is but one example. Yet, amid the mad scramble to exploit all potential sources of cheap labour, we have established trade networks that extend into all the nooks and crannies of the global market.

These networks involve individuals and institutions from a wide variety of cultures. When combined with the current trend toward the globalisation of world culture, these networks are so effective that a World State seems redundant, if only in terms of capitalist business practices.

Culture is key to the functioning of Huxley’s entertainment-oriented society. The populace is numbed by happy-making drugs that have “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects”.

Huxley’s future humans are fed a nonstop dose of popular culture. Designed to amuse and stupefy, this breed of pop culture neither challenges nor inspires. Content is delivered via high-tech mechanisms which foreshadow our own world wide web. Artefacts such as virtual reality “feelies” (echoing the then-new “talkies”) seem highly familiar to a modern audience. As does their effect on the general population.

In Huxley’s world, even human relationships have been made an arm of pop culture. Sexual promiscuity is encouraged and emotional attachments forbidden. Relations between the sexes are just another form of entertainment. Sexual reproduction has become obsolete. Motherhood is an unthinkable obscenity and the parent-child bond has been eliminated. These details differ from Donald Trump’s recent proposed changes to abortion regulations, but they are equally misogynistic.

Frighteningly, although the characteristics of Trump’s America differ from the World State, the differences almost all make 21st-century America seem worse than Huxley’s nightmare consumerist world, from racial hatred to a looming climate crisis.

We are not just in danger of achieving a Huxleyesque dystopia. We are in danger of blowing past it to something Huxley couldn’t possibly have imagined.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Dastoor, Professor, School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University of Newcastle

Australia’s first commercial installation of printed solar cells, made using specialised semiconducting inks and printed using a conventional reel-to-reel printer, has been installed on a factory roof in Newcastle.

The 200 square metre array was installed in just one day by a team of five people. No other energy solution is as lightweight, as quick to manufacture, or as easy to install on this scale.

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Our research team manufactured the solar modules using standard printing techniques; in fact, the machine that we use typically makes wine labels. Each solar cell consists of several individual layers printed on top of each other, which are then connected in series to form a bank of cells. These cells are then connected in parallel to form a solar module.

Since 1996, we have progressed from making tiny, millimetre-sized solar cells to the first commercial installation. In the latest installation each module is ten metres long and sandwiched between two layers of recyclable plastic.

At the core of the technology are the specialised semiconducting polymer-based inks that we have developed. This group of materials has fundamentally altered our ability to build electronic devices; replacing hard, rigid, glass-like materials such as silicon with flexible inks and paints that can be printed or coated over vast areas at extremely low cost.

As a result, these modules cost less than A$10 per square metre when manufactured at scale. This means it would take only 2-3 years to become cost-competitive with other technologies, even at efficiencies of only 2-3%.

These printed solar modules could conceivably be installed onto any roof or structure using simple adhesive tape and connected to wires using simple press-studs. The new installation at Newcastle is an important milestone on the path towards commercialisation of the technology – we will spend the next six months testing its performance and durability before removing and recycling the materials.

We think this technology has enormous potential. Obviously our technology is still at the trial stage, but our vision is a world in which every building in every city in every country has printed solar cells generating low-cost sustainable energy for everyone. This latest installation has brought the goal of solar roofs, walls and windows a step closer.

Read more: WA bathes in sunshine but the poorest households lack solar panels – that needs to change

Ultimately, we imagine that these solar cells could even benefit those people who don’t own or have access to roof space. People who live in apartment complexes, for example, could potentially sign up to a plan that lets them pay to access the power generated by cells installed by the building’s owner or body corporate, and need never necessarily “own” the infrastructure outright.

But in a fractured and uncertain energy policy landscape, this new technology is a clear illustration of the value of taking power into one’s own hands.