Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Roy, Lecturer in Education, University of Newcastle

The 2022 election campaign has not exactly been a policy fest. And one critical area we have heard very little about is schools.

This is surprising and concerning. Not only have schools and students weathered two years of disruptions under COVID, but the sector faces serious issues, including a drop in student performance, teacher retention, inequity particularly for marginalised groups and ongoing funding issues dating back a decade.

There has been speculation the Coalition is hesitant to campaign on schools because education minister, Alan Tudge is currently in career limbo (and has been limiting his public appearances).

Meanwhile, Labor’s education spokesperson, Tanya Plibersek, appeared to be initially frozen out of the campaign, although in the past couple of weeks has been more visible.

Read more:
Here’s what the major parties need to do about higher education this election

Politics aside, what are the major parties offering?

The Coalition, ALP, and The Greens are all pledging a similar investment in mental health and well-being services, and support for respectful classrooms, particularly regarding violence against women. The largest difference between them is an (ongoing) ideological divide when it comes to the curriculum. Meanwhile, the big issues go ignored.

The Coalition

The Coalition is focusing its efforts on “raising school standards” and “improving the quality of teacher training”.

This includes creating a one-year diploma for initial teacher education. Given the current demands on accreditation bodies, this might create administrative burden. It would also need schools to shoulder a greater responsibility for “on-the-job” training.

The Coalition also has a focus on traditional skills such as literacy, numeracy and STEM, with a clear focus on what the LNP terms “traditional classrooms”, which one can assume to be of students seated in rows with a single classroom teacher. There is an emphasis on Christian and ANZAC content and phonics for reading.

It also includes specified teaching methods through explicit instruction, which is the teacher standing at the front providing information for students to learn rather than explore or discover.

They also have pledged A$61.4 million to continue the school chaplaincy program.

Read more:
If only politicians focused on the school issues that matter. This election is a chance to get them to do that

The Labor Party

Labor’s headline policy is to offer students with an ATAR score over 80 up to $12,000 a year to study education.

This is part of the party’s bid to improve teacher standards, although it has been criticised by experts who say it implies the current teacher workforce is not up to scratch, which could be interpreted as quite insulting.

Like the Coalition, it also offers no significant investment or policy to address current staffing shortages or teacher workloads – this is presumably being left to the states to “fix”.

Labor has promised $440 million for building upgrades, improving air quality and mental health support. The ALP also made a $6 million commitment to e-safety in schools. In terms of the curriculum, the ALP provide little detail – they do not detail teaching methods or content.

The Greens

The Greens have pledged $49 billion to fully fund public schools to the Gonski model. At the moment, public schools are funded to only 90% of their recommended school resource standard.

Read more:
Still ‘Waiting for Gonski’ – a great book about the sorry tale of school funding

Like Labor, they also promise $400 million for infrastructure, with an additional $224 million to improve air quality post COVID.

Uniquely, the Greens also have made a commitment to close segregated school settings, but have not costed this. Segregated settings are where particular groups of students are taught separate to mainstream students, such as schools for children with a disability. The United Nations and multiple research studies have highlighted significant issues with this segregated settings.

One Nation and the United Australia Party

One Nation have very little policy detail available on education. In one paragraph, they say they want to focus more on traditional values and teaching methods. Then they say they don’t want to see “Western, white, gender, guilt” shaming in the classroom but students should be taught the benefits of a “free-thinking” society.

Similar to One Nation, the United Australia Party has just a few sentences of education policy, which is to remove HECS debt and inject $20 billion into education, although how this money can be used is left unspecified.

The bigger picture

Overall, the critical issues facing education have been left to the states to deal with.

There is new funding available, but neither the Coalition nor Labor are offering significant change from what we are currently doing in schools.

Both are looking at initial teacher education and thus the quality of teachers to improve results (which is highly denigrating to current teachers and does not support the current system).

But much more change is required. It’s important to note that additional funding over the past decade has not changed Australia’s educational decline. Tinkering with the curriculum has also not changed the decline, and neither have previous attempts to so called improve “teacher quality”.

Genuine solutions would include an increase to teacher wages, relieve administrative workloads, and allow teacher to focus on planning and teaching within reasonable time requirements and greater support to disadvantaged students.

In other words, it needs a significant reappraisal of the schooling system and conditions for students and staff.

Read more:
Planning kids? You should know the major parties’ parental leave policies before you vote

David Roy has and continues to work with and consult politicians in Education across all parties, without prejudice.

– ref. Kids don’t vote but teachers and parents sure do – what are the parties offering on schools? – https://theconversation.com/kids-dont-vote-but-teachers-and-parents-sure-do-what-are-the-parties-offering-on-schools-182597

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sue Richardson, Adjunct professor, Flinders University

You would be forgiven for being unsure about whether the buying power of wages was rising or falling. On one hand, Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese says wages are going backwards.

On the other, Prime Minister Scott Morrison points to “better wages” over his government’s term in office.

To get at the truth, we need to appreciate that prices fluctuate more rapidly than wages do and that underlying economic forces drive the longer term growth in real wages.

These two factors have produced real growth in wages over the past 10 years, but a fall over the past year.

Buying power

The best way to measure changes in the buying power of wages is to examine changes in their “real” value, measured by changes in wages in relation to changes in prices, usually measured by the consumer price index.

The real value of the award rates of pay determined by the Fair Work Commission, including the minimum wage, climbed in all but but one of the ten years between 2011 and 2020, at an average of slightly more than 1% per year.

But the buying power of an award wage fell 2.5% during the last 12 months, because of the unexpected, large rise in consumer prices of 5.1%.

This increase in consumer prices easily eclipsed the most recent – July 2021 – increase in award wages of 2.6% increase in award wages.

The high inflation was caused in part by the impact on fuel prices of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which no one could have anticipated inflation fluctuates much more than wages do in the short run.

Read more:
Inflation hits 5.1%. How long until mortgage rates climb?

Most workers (about three-quarters) are paid at more than award wages.

One measure of what has happened to them is average weekly ordinary time earnings of adults who work full-time, excluding overtime.

This too has grown in real terms over the past decade, by about as much as award rates. And it too has fallen in real terms over the past year, because of the sharp rise in inflation.

Another measure is the Bureau of Statistics’ wage price index which measures the hourly pay for the job, regardless of who is doing it. This is the key cost measure for employers.

Many employees get pay rises through promotions or switching employers. By design, the wage price index does not capture that, and so has grown more slowly.

Even the wage price index has grown faster than inflation, by 4% over the past 10 years, until the last year, when the sudden jump in inflation pushed it behind.

Cost to employers

For employers, the labour cost of delivering a unit of output depends both on how much the worker produces in an hour (known as productivity), and how much the worker is paid for that hour (the wage).

Over the past decade, the Bureau of Statistics’ measure of labour productivity has climbed 12%, while real wages (as captured in the wage price index) have grown only modestly.

This has resulted in a 6% decline in the Bureau’s measure of real unit labour costs, and in the share of national income that goes to labour rather than to capital.

It’s not clear why this happened, but there are suspects.

One is that the total income per person, available to be shared between wages and profits, stagnated for much of the past decade, being no greater by the end of 2018 than it was in 2011.

The recent rise in export prices has boosted national income, but much of it has accrued to the mining sector in the form of profits. The wages share of mining income is only 14%, compared with 55% for the rest of the economy.

The result has been an increase in the share of national income going to profits and a slide in the proportion going to wages.

Other sources of downward pressure on wages growth include high rates of immigration, especially of temporary workers such as students, tight caps on wage increases for state and federal government employees, increased outsourcing to low-wage countries, and declining union membership.

Low union membership not only reduces the power of unions to bargain for higher wages, it also reduces their ability to ensure that the conditions set by the Fair Work Commission are met by employers.

Declining union power

This is of particular concern at a time when there is a large, new, vulnerable group in the workforce: temporary migrants dependent on employers to retain their visas.

As of May 2022, there are signs that wage growth is at last likely to increase, which will be quite an achievement in the midst of COVID.

Read more:
Despite record vacancies, Australians shouldn’t expect big pay rises soon

The signs include low unemployment and underemployment; a record high number of Australians employed, and employed full-time; record high vacancy rates; and robust household spending and profits.

The biggest immediate beneficiaries appear to be younger workers and older workers, and women. There is ground to make up.

Sue Richardson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Are real wages falling? Here’s the evidence – https://theconversation.com/are-real-wages-falling-heres-the-evidence-182171

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison Carroll, Senior Research Fellow, Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne

Almost all governments today support some funding towards promoting their international political and economic agendas through cultural activities overseas: commonly referred to as part of “cultural diplomacy” or “soft power”.

Cultural diplomacy is not new. Julius Caesar brought gladiatorial performance to Britain, not so subtly suggesting Rome’s power. James Cook presented gifts to the Pacific island chiefs – albeit insubstantial ones in return for the highly prized objects he received, now in European collections.

The British Council was established in 1934 to stem the force of Soviet cultural diplomatic success. The Japan Foundation was founded in 1972 to create a more sophisticated view of a Japan emerging from the second world war.

Australia’s efforts have always been paltry.

We have never had an international cultural agency, and the Federal government avenues we do have for supporting international artistic projects, the Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Australia Council, have shrinking funds.

In the 2000s, I was a member of DFAT’s Australia Indonesia Institute. Our small fund supported almost all the official cultural engagement between the two countries, and even it decreased before our eyes. It didn’t surprise me when leading curator Jim Supangkat asked me in Jakarta: “Where have all you Australians gone?”

Read more:
Cultural intelligence key to future of Australia-Indonesia relationship

‘Regionally inactive’

In 2021/22, in admittedly difficult COVID times, just one cultural project – the Ubud Writers Festival – was funded through the Australia Indonesia Institute’s tiny A$450,000 allocation for all people-to-people projects between us and our so-important neighbour.

It does not help that the Australia Indonesia Institute, like most of the DFAT bilateral agencies with these precious country colleagues, now has no specialist arts person on its board.

Most Commonwealth government funding and capacity in the area is allocated to individual applicants by the federal arts agency, the Australia Council.

The application forms for funding from DFAT, bilateral agencies like the Indonesia Institute, and the Australia Council are particularly onerous, as is the ensuing reporting of how funds are spent. There are smarter ways all round.

Read more:
Why is ‘values’ the new buzzword in Australian foreign policy? (Hint: it has something to do with China)

The diminishing role of Australia’s cultural diplomacy has been known for a long time, but there has been a change recently of senior arts and diplomatic figures speaking out.

Former Ambassador to China, Geoff Raby writes in his 2020 book on our general relations with China that:

over the last two decades, Australia has been seen to be regionally inactive. [To change that] active engagement with China in cultural diplomacy should be another essential element of Australia’s statecraft.

Carrillo Gantner’s 2022 book, eloquently titled Dismal Diplomacy, written from his 40 years working particularly in cultural projects with China, pleads for better and more sophisticated relations all round.

In 2018, John McCarthy, former Ambassador to Indonesia (and other places) wrote public diplomacy has “always been the poor relation in Australian foreign policy implementation”:

Canada spends more on public diplomacy than Australia spends on the whole of its foreign service. Excluding public broadcasting, France spends an estimated A$1.9 billion, Germany A$1.6 billion, the UK A$350 million, and the Netherlands A$100 million. Australia spends A$12 million, of which, in most years, our Indonesia program will receive about A$1 million.

Cultural diplomacy comes under the umbrella of the broader public diplomacy described by McCarthy.

The Australia Council’s International Engagement Strategy has had an annual budget over the last five years averaging $2.7 million, while DFAT’s Australian Cultural Diplomacy Grants program currently has an allocation of $400,000. There are other programs here and there that loosely come under the cultural diplomacy tag, so let us average up this figure to around $5 million.

Comparisons are hard for specific cultural activity because each country includes different areas, but Australia’s contrast with the specialist Goethe-Institut and British Council are stark. The Goethe-Institut has had fairly stable funding of A$400 million per annum over recent years, and the British Council A$320 million.

On these figures, they spend A$4-5 per capita on cultural engagement and diplomacy, and we spend 20 cents.

Another calculation is through activities. The Arts and Cultural Program described in the Japan Foundation’s recent annual report counts audiences of over five million attendances for 2,300 events it has “organised or supported”.

We are nowhere in that ballpark.

‘How to win friends’

As Jo Caust writes in her recent paper, “support for the arts is not primarily a question of economics. It is a question of values.”

Assessment of the importance of international activities is a bigger issue than straight numbers.

The appreciation of the British Council merited debate recently in the House of Commons, concluding the program provided the United Kingdom with

an object lesson in how to win friends and influence people. […] We intend to continue to ensure that global Britain is a world leader for soft power.

There is an argument Australia needs cultural diplomacy more than others.

We carry the stain of our settler founding, increasingly clearly articulated. The racist White Australia Policy rescinded relatively recently (in 1966) is well known by our neighbours. Our position in the region has always been debatable, something sensed by our neighbours as much as known. Are we in “in” or “out” of Asia? To many, we have a confused cultural identity: one that needs all the help it can get.

We can look to the German and Japanese examples, equally recognising their need to be proactive in their international imaging after events of the last 100 years. They have created serious, professional, cultural diplomatic agendas.

Australia’s cultural diplomacy should be done better, more effectively and with more confidence. The best way forward is to give the running to a central, nuanced, specialist body well equipped to tackle it.

We’d all be better served.

Read more:
Here’s how to reset New Zealand’s cultural diplomacy in the Pacific

Alison Carroll does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘Where have all you Australians gone?’ Australia’s shrinking role in cultural diplomacy – https://theconversation.com/where-have-all-you-australians-gone-australias-shrinking-role-in-cultural-diplomacy-181485

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Hall, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences and Public Policy, Auckland University of Technology

Until now, the government’s approach to climate action has largely been about getting the policy architecture right. This work is vital, but it’s more about rearranging possible futures, less about emissions reductions in the near term.

The newly released Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) was supposed to shift gears, to get real about urgent climate action – and it partially achieves this, but only partially.

Budget 2022 will reveal some extra expenditure, but most of the $2.9 billion of climate-relevant funding was confirmed alongside the ERP. It exhibits a sensitivity to the electoral constraints on transformation, less so a sense of realism about what decarbonisation actually demands.

There are significant steps forward. Resourcing for Māori involvement in climate policy is long overdue. Integration of education and social support measures is also helpful.

In this sense, the ERP process is itself a minor victory. For years, policy scholars and public sector mandarins have championed the ideal of joined-up government, without ever doing much in practice. Consequently, the ERP is unique, even unprecedented, by taking a whole-of-government approach, weaving together all core government departments in a 340-page report.

Time to be decisive

Some of the best bits of the ERP play to this interconnectedness. Nature-based solutions – that is, enhancing natural ecosystems to address multiple challenges – emerge as a strong connective theme, not only between various sectors, but also across the National Adaptation Plan and Biodiversity Strategy/Te Mana o te Taiao.

The same can be said for planning and infrastructure which is explicit about the overlapping opportunities to reduce emissions across multiple sectors.

Similarly, the rising theme of the “bioeconomy” sheds new light on the importance of forestry, not only as a supplier of timber and carbon removals, but also as feedstock for bioplastics and biofuels to substitute crude oil.

Read more:
Without a better plan, New Zealand risks sleepwalking into a biodiversity extinction crisis

But instead of investments to make this happen, the ERP promises a bioeconomy and circular economy strategy that won’t be complete until 2025. This is the overriding character of the document, where a large proportion of “actions” begin with the words “explore” or “investigate”, or lapse into research, baseline setting and elongated work programmes.

Even well-established ideas, such as congestion charging, are deferred. The government has investigated this policy for more than a decade, but the ERP only confirms it is “considering progressing legislative changes to enable congestion charging”.

The ERP was the moment to be decisive, one way or the other. The failure to do so leaves a lingering suspicion that the ERP’s new slew of pledges may face a similar fate.

Acceptability over ambition

So there are plans, and plans for plans, but still a shortfall of strategy. Energy sector policy, for example, takes a technology-neutral approach rather than narrowing down on priorities, such as geothermal energy, where Aotearoa is known to have natural advantages, expertise, and potential for global impact.

Such opportunities are already identifiable, even in the absence of a central energy strategy (due in 2024). Research, development and deployment take time, so strategic decisions need to be made now, rather than backloaded for later this decade.

The proposal of “climate innovation platforms” might provide the vehicle for strategic innovation, but only if properly resourced. The ERP gives an air of compromise, tending toward acceptability over ambition.

Fortunately, though, the proposed policy mix – along with an improved Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – will take us quite some way.

Emissions pricing in the ERP

The NZ$69 million Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry (GIDI) fund is being topped up with nearly $680 million, a ten-fold increase, to accelerate industrial decarbonisation.

In transport, this includes $350 million for cycleways and public transport, $40 million to decarbonise the bus fleet by 2035, $20 million to decarbonise freight transport, and $20 million for a vehicle social leasing scheme trial.

Agriculture is also the beneficiary of $710 million from ETS auctioning revenue for agri-tech and research – arguably unfairly, given that agriculture currently sits outside the ETS.

Read more:
With seas rising and storms surging, who will pay for New Zealand’s most vulnerable coastal properties?

Dependence on cars

Overshadowing these initiatives is the scrap-and-replace scheme, aimed at subsidising people into electric vehicles (EVs), and already a lightning rod for controversy. The empirical record for scrappage schemes elsewhere, such as the US Cash for Clunkers programme, tends to conclude that emissions reductions are minimal despite the high investment.

Given that replacement cars must be EVs and hybrids, the New Zealand scheme may produce more emissions reductions than previous schemes did. However, the high price of EVs may mean that, even with high subsidies, low-income households cannot easily cover the difference.

Read more:
Will the budget be another missed opportunity to get more New Zealanders out of their cars?

Also, the scheme risks perpetuating the dependence on cars that makes transport mode-shift so elusive. Indeed, the $569 million committed to scrap-and-replace is far larger than the $350 million committed to cycleways and public transport.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that a scrappage scheme – for all the flak it will receive from efficiency-minded economists – was perceived as more politically palatable than getting people out of cars.

Read more:
IPCC report: how New Zealand could reduce emissions faster and rely less on offsets to reach net zero

The political challenge

The ERP is projected to drive enough change to meet New Zealand’s 2030 Paris Agreement pledge. But part of this effort will involve the purchasing of emission reduction credits on international carbon markets, at potentially high prices.

A high reliance on paying for other countries to reduce their emissions reflects a hangover in the New Zealand government’s thinking, dating back to the Kyoto Protocol era. Deferring hard choices now by “planning more plans” might reduce the risk of backing the wrong technologies, but deferral is not without its risks either.

It speaks to the longstanding problem of treating climate change as merely a scientific, technical problem. This implies that, like any puzzle, climate action will benefit from further discovery, analysis and evaluation.

For elected and unelected officials alike, this is irresistible, because commissioning further research and strategy is a way of appearing serious, even prudent, while also avoiding vital decisions and associated responsibilities. The slow-moving quality of the climate crisis, in contrast to the fast-moving pandemic, increases the window for dawdling.

But climate action was always fundamentally about politics. The ERP practices the arts of acceptability but neglects the art of the possible – of making ambitious commitments and bringing the people along.

David Hall is affiliated with the Forestry Ministerial Advisory Group.

Melody Meng and Nina Ives do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Air of compromise: NZ’s Emissions Reduction Plan reveals a climate budget that’s long on planning, short on strategy – https://theconversation.com/air-of-compromise-nzs-emissions-reduction-plan-reveals-a-climate-budget-thats-long-on-planning-short-on-strategy-181478

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

As well as her interviews with politicians and experts, Politics with Michelle Grattan includes “Word from The Hill”, where she discusses the news with members of The Conversation politics team.

In this podcast Michelle and politics + society editor Amanda Dunn canvass the Coalition’s “super” housing pitch, five seats to eyeball on Saturday night, and what would happen if the parliamentary numbers were “hung”.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Word from The Hill: Five seats to watch on Saturday night, and getting the hang of a hung parliament – https://theconversation.com/word-from-the-hill-five-seats-to-watch-on-saturday-night-and-getting-the-hang-of-a-hung-parliament-183236

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Malcolm Mackerras, Distinguished Fellow, PM Glynn Institute, Australian Catholic University

As you head to your local polling place this Saturday, or cast your ballot in an early vote, it’s worth pondering: how does Australia’s voting system really work, anyway?

The fundamentals of our electoral system have been shaped by democratic values enshrined in Australia’s Constitution and pragmatic decisions made by federal politicians since 1901.

I’ve been studying elections and electoral systems for some 65 years.

Here’s what you need to know to understand how the vote you cast this election fits into the bigger picture.

How long are politicians’ terms?

For members of the House of Representatives – three years.

Section 28 of the Constitution says:

Every House of Representatives shall continue for three years from the first meeting of the House, and no longer, but may be sooner dissolved by the Governor-General.

Since the prime minister advises the governor general, it means he or she makes the exact choice of date. Many people object to that, but I don’t. That power hasn’t been abused.

The now dissolved term (the 46th Parliament) was elected in May 2019, so it has run a full term.

Why do we have more seats in the House than the Senate?

The Constitution says there must be approximately double the number of seats in the House compared to the Senate.

Section 24 says:

The House of Representatives shall be composed of members directly chosen by the people of the Commonwealth, and the number of such members shall be, as nearly as practicable, twice the number of the senators.

The September 1946 election saw 74 members of the House of Representatives elected to the 18th Parliament (1946-49). There were 36 senators then, six from each of the six states.

Since 1984 there have been 76 senators, 12 from each state and two from each territory.

There are currently 151 seats in the House, which therefore meets the requirement “as nearly as practicable twice the number” of senators.

How are electoral boundaries drawn?

Electoral boundaries are drawn so there are similar numbers of voters in each seat.

Section 24 of the Constitution reads:

The number of members chosen in the several States shall be in proportion to the respective numbers of their people…

The number of 151 electorates was determined mid-way during the 45th Parliament (2016-19). In August 2017 the electoral commissioner, Tom Rogers, issued the latest population statistics and determined there should be 47 members from New South Wales, 38 Victoria, 30 Queensland, 16 Western Australia, 10 South Australia, five Tasmania, three ACT and two for the Northern Territory.

Where necessary, electoral boundaries are re-drawn according to the principle of “one vote, one value” or, as I prefer to say, equal representation for equal numbers of people.

In July 2020, Rogers acknowledged population growth was above average in Victoria and below average in Western Australia.

That is why the forthcoming election will see 39 members elected in Victoria (up one) and 15 in WA (down one). New boundaries will apply in those two states and the redistributions have been done fairly and with maximum transparency, as always.

Elsewhere the boundaries will be the same as in May 2019.

Read more:
Explainer: how do seat redistributions work?

How are Senators elected?

Since 1949 the system has been one of proportional representation.

That means within each state six Senate seats are roughly distributed according to a party’s share of the vote. So a party getting about 12% of the vote would win one seat, about 26% two seats, about 40% three seats and so on.

This is why the Greens do so well at Senate elections compared to the House of Representatives. With about 10% of the vote for both houses, they presently have nine senators but only one member of the House of Representatives.

This differs from preferential voting for the House of Representatives, introduced in 1918, where voters number candidates in the order of their preferences – first choice, second choice and so on.

How long are senators’ terms?

Senators from the states serve six year terms, and those from the territories serve three year terms.

However, a system of rotation means half the senators’ terms end every three years. So in most elections, half the Senate spots are contested.

But there’s an exception to this rule. Every so often there’s a “double dissolution”, where the entire Senate is elected. That happened most recently in 2016. This parliament was dissolved early because there was a dispute between the two houses, so the entire parliament faced the people.

In a double dissolution, half the senators from the states get three year terms instead of six. This is based on the number of votes.

One Nation’s Pauline Hanson and Larissa Waters of the Greens are good examples of how it works.

Both were elected among the 12 Queenslanders at the 2016 election. However, Hanson was one of the six more popular vote winners, and Waters one of the six less popular vote winners. So, Hanson got a six-year term and Waters a three-year term.

Waters won a higher proportion of votes in the 2019 election, so was elected to a six-year term, expiring on June 30 2025.

Hanson is up for re-election this year, and I predict she will be elected to a six-year term, and therefore her term would expire on 30 June 2028.

Issues with our voting system

About 16.5 million votes will be cast for each house of parliament.

Based on the last two federal elections, I estimate the informal vote will be roughly 800,000 for the House of Representatives (4.9%) and 650,000 for the Senate (3.9%).

By world standards that’s a high number of informal votes, which is thought by many to be a blot on our democracy.

Two reasons for this are because we have compulsory voting, and because ballot papers are unnecessarily complex and voter unfriendly, particularly for the Senate.

The United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada and New Zealand have voluntary voting and simple one-house ballot papers, and the rate of informal voting is negligible. Some argue we should copy them.

Read more:
To Australians sick of the election: this is why voting is not a waste of your time

There’s also a lack of rules around campaign finance – the stand-out case being the obscene spending by Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

I argue there’s no need to reform the Constitution and the democratic values it upholds. But there should be legislative changes to improve the system. I expect some democratic reforms during the next term, 2022-25, the 47th Parliament.

These changes wouldn’t require a referendum, just negotiation to ensure passage through both houses. By contrast, changes to the Constitution require a referendum. For that reason reforms by referendum are rare.

Malcolm Mackerras does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How does Australia’s voting system work? – https://theconversation.com/how-does-australias-voting-system-work-177737

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamin Clark, Deputy Engagement Editor, The Conversation

What do One Nation’s Pauline Hanson and Labor’s Tanya Plibersek have in common? They are both winning the battle for eyeballs on social media, says a top Facebook official.

In the final episode before polling day of our election podcast Below the Line, our regular panel talks to Mia Garlick, Facebook’s Director of Policy in Australia and New Zealand, about the ways politicians use the social media platform in election campaigns. Our political scientists quiz Garlick on how transparent the company is about the political advertising it carries and the assistance it provides to big-spending campaigners.

Video content is an increasingly important way for politicians to get their messages across to online audiences. Aside from Hanson and Plibersek, Garlick says politicians who are doing video messaging particularly well this election include the Liberal party’s Lucy Wicks and Jason Falinski, and founder of the Reason party Fiona Patten.

Andrea Carson says the digital campaign will ramp up once the three-day blackout on broadcast and newspaper political ads comes into effect on Wednesday evening, because online ads are outside the law’s reach. Jon Faine describes the law as “absurd” in the digital age, akin to using Morse Code.

Faine also asks the panel why Prime Minister Scott Morrison vowed this week to no longer be “a bulldozer”. “It was a significant shift on Scott Morrison’s part,” says Anika Gauja, in recognition that the public seems to want a more positive campaign than it has been getting. But with more than five million pre-poll and postal votes already cast, according to ABC election analyst Antony Green, has Morrison’s mea culpa come too late?

Below the Line is a limited-edition election podcast brought to you by The Conversation and La Trobe University. It is produced by Courtney Carthy and Benjamin Clark.

Below the Line will broadcast one last episode after the election result next week. If you have a question you would like the panel to answer, email us at:
belowtheline@theconversation.edu.au

Disclosures: Andrea Carson has received funding for research projects from Facebook.

Jon Faine does freelance work for Industry Super Australia, a peak body for industry superannuation funds.

Simon Jackman is an unpaid consultant on polling data for the Climate 200 network of independent candidates.

Image credit: James Ross/AAP

– ref. Below the Line: A Facebook executive explains the last-minute election battle on social media – podcast – https://theconversation.com/below-the-line-a-facebook-executive-explains-the-last-minute-election-battle-on-social-media-podcast-183221

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

The last week of campaigns used to be frantic, behind the scenes. In public, right up until the final week, the leaders would make all sorts of promises, many of them expensive, with nary a mention of the spending cuts or tax increases that would be needed to pay for them.

Then, in a ritual as Australian as the stump jump plough, days before the vote the leaders’ treasury spokesman would quietly release pages and pages of costings detailing “savings”, which (astoundingly) almost exactly covered what they were spending, meaning they could declare their promises “fully funded”.

It was a trap for oppositions. Whereas governments seeking reelection could have their savings costed by the enormously-well-resourced departments of treasury and finance before campaigns began, oppositions were forced to rely on little-known accounting firms with little background in government budgeting.

The errors, usually not discovered until after people voted, were humiliating.

Costings time was danger time

In 2010, a treasury analysis of the opposition costings prepared by the Coalition’s treasury spokesman Joe Hockey and finance spokesman Andrew Robb found errors including double counting, booking the gains from a privatisation without booking the dividends that would be lost, and purporting to save money by changing a budget convention.

The Gillard government evened the playing field in 2011 by setting up an independent Parliamentary Budget Office to provide oppositions with the same sort of high-quality advice governments got, helping ensure they didn’t make mistakes, and enabling them to publish the advice in the event of disputes.

Ahead of the 2019 election the PBO processed 3,000 requests, most them confidential.

This means you should take with a grain of salt Treasurer Josh Frydneberg’s assertion that Labor has “not put forward one policy for independent costing by treasury or finance” – these days opposition costings are done by the PBO.

But the PBO didn’t end the costings ritual. In fact, it institutionalised it.

The ritual derives from the days when, on taking office, new governments proclaimed themselves alarmed, even shocked, at the size of the deficits they inherited. From Fraser to Hawke to Howard, they used the state of the books they had just seen to justify ditching promises they had just made.

The Charter of Budget Honesty improved things

Howard applied a sort-of science to it, memorably dividing promises into “core” and, by implication, “non-core” in deciding which to ditch.

Then that game stopped. Since 1998, Howard’s Charter of Budget Honesty has required the treasury and department of finance to publicly reveal the state of the books before each election, making “surprise” impractical.

Read more:
PEFO tells us Morrison abandoned promises, but his books are in order

But the legislation that set up the Parliamentary Budget Office entrenched the costings ritual by requiring each major party to hand it a list of its publicly announced policies by 5pm on election eve, in order for it to publish an enduring account of their projected impact on the budget.

Which is why the parties have remained keen to get in early and find savings.

Sometimes, savings backfire

In 2016 this led to a human and financial tragedy. Treasurer Scott Morrison announced what came to be called “Robodebt” three days before the election as part of a savings package, designed to to offset spending. It was to save $2 billion.

Five years later in the Federal Court, Justice Bernard Murphy approved the payment of $1.7 billion to 443,000 people he said had been wrongly branded “welfare cheats”, ending what he called a “shameful chapter” in Australia’s history.

The costings document the Coalition released on Tuesday is less dramatic.

It says it will offset $2.3 billion in new spending over four years with a $2.7 billion boost in the efficiency dividend it imposes on departments to restrain spending.

Labor abandons the game

Labor will release its costings on Thursday, and here’s what’s changed. It says it won’t offset its spending.

Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers wants to be judged not on the size of spending, but on what the spending is for.

The most important thing here is not whether deficits are a couple of million dollars each year better or worse than what the government is proposing. What matters most is the quality of the investments.

He points to the hundreds of millions borrowed to support the economy during the pandemic, the $20 billion he says was spent on companies that didn’t need it, and the $5.5 billion spent on French submarines that now won’t be built.

In sporting parlance, Chalmers has walked away from the field.

Peter Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Elections used to be about costings. Here’s what’s changed – https://theconversation.com/elections-used-to-be-about-costings-heres-whats-changed-183095

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Peden, Research fellow, UNSW Sydney

Queensland residents are facing yet another arduous clean-up after floods inundated roads and towns last week.

In the current La Niña period, from November 2021 to present, at least 41 people have died (including three missing presumed dead) from floods across south-east Queensland, northern New South Wales, Greater Sydney, and Victoria. Many involved decisions to enter floodwater, often in vehicles.

Indeed, driving into floodwater is the leading cause of flood-related death. Despite media campaigns – such as Queensland’s “If It’s Flooded, Forget It” advertisements – people continue to enter the unpredictable water, risking their lives and the lives of their rescuers.

Our research exploring reasons why people drive into and avoid driving into floodwater has provided comprehensive insights into this behaviour. Having a Plan B could be the difference between life and death in these situations.

Why people drive on flooded roads

We surveyed people who had previously driven into floodwaters for our research. We found many drivers acknowledge the dangers associated with entering floodwaters, though many identify circumstances where they think it’s safe to do so.

But only a small error in judgement can result in tragedy. Water can flow faster than anticipated, rise rapidly, and roads can be washed away, but not visible under murky floodwater. In fact, water can move fast enough to strip bitumen from roads and damage bridges.

Read more:
Why do people try to drive through floodwater or leave it too late to flee? Psychology offers some answers

A small car can float in just 15 centimetres of floodwater. The record-breaking floods in Lismore earlier this year saw flood waters peak at 14.4 metres, higher than the town’s levees. Dangerous floodwaters can be experienced even during minor flooding and have been widespread in recent months.

We learned many of the reasons people chose to drive into floodwaters were based on feeling pressure. Pressure to get to work, school, or home to family or pets. Pressure from passengers in the vehicle. Or pressure from other motorists on the road.

As one respondent said:

I saw, this is going to sound dreadful, I saw signs up saying the road was closed. But there were cars, four-wheel-drives coming towards me

I thought ‘oh I should turn around, I should turn around’. But I was panicking about being late for work […] And when I saw four-wheel-drives coming towards me I thought, ‘okay I can do this’.

Another said:

It was mainly the pressure […] to get there and lecture. The silly thing is once I got through [the floodwater], people were saying [my workplace] was out of power and totally flooded in there and they were cancelling the lecture anyway.

What we found

Our research from 2021 was conducted with the State Emergency Service in Newcastle, New South Wales – an area prone to regular flooding. It showed promising results for making plans with “if/then” scenarios in place. In other words if you were to be in a particular scenario or a danger were to arise, then what would you do?

Making alternative plans may stop drivers from being faced with a situation where they feel they need to drive into floodwaters. We experimentally tested if/then plans in Newcastle using two scenarios:

1. you have a trip planned but receive an alert to potential moderate or major flooding in Newcastle before you have started driving

2. you approach a flooded section of road, and you are being pressured by other cars to drive into the floodwater.

For scenario 1, an example if/then plan was: “If its time to leave work and I receive an alert for moderate or major flooding then I will stay at work until it is safe for me to proceed.”

For scenario 2, an example if/then plan was: “If cars behind me are pressuring me to drive through floodwater, then I will turn my hazards on and let them pass, then turn around.”

After an exercise exploring these scenarios with survey respondents, people reported being more willing to stay put until the threat had passed for scenario 1, and less willing to drive into floodwater after feeling pressured from other drivers for scenario 2.

Forming your own Plan B

Our findings show the importance of having a detailed if/then plan – a Plan B – for specific scenarios, as it can lower your chances of engaging in risky, potentially life-threatening driving during floods.

Your Plan B examples may include:

• picking up children early from school or day care

• allowing workers to leave early if flooding is predicted or work from home

• knowing alternate routes should your intended route be flooded

• preparing to have safe alternative behaviours, despite pressures to drive through.

Reinforcing your Plan B is vital to its success when faced with needing to make a quick decision in the moment.

We encourage people to formulate their plans for several scenarios, put these plans in writing, and revisit them regularly by posting them on the fridge and in the car.

Read more:
In a year of endless floods, why isn’t disaster governance front and centre in the election campaign?

It’s also a good idea to verbally communicate your plan to significant others, such as friends, family and work colleagues and employers, as an additional layer of intent to solidify your plan should flooding hit.

With Queensland in the grips of yet another flood crisis and La Niña predicted to last through May, and potentially into Winter, more extreme rainfall and flooded roads should be expected.

Forming your Plan B now just might help you make safer decisions, should the worst happen.

Amy Peden is a research fellow in the School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney, an honorary Senior Research Fellow with Royal Life Saving Society – Australia and a co-founder of the UNSW Beach Safety Research Group. Dr Peden currently receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NH&MRC) and has received funding from the New South Wales Natural Disaster Resilience Program and the City of Newcastle.

Andrew Gissing has received funding from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre

Kyra Hamilton has received research funding from Royal Life Saving Society – Australia and New South Wales Natural Disaster Resilience Program and the City of Newcastle.

– ref. When roads become rivers: forming a Plan B can stop people driving into floodwaters – https://theconversation.com/when-roads-become-rivers-forming-a-plan-b-can-stop-people-driving-into-floodwaters-183036

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Scott, Professor of Health Economics, The University of Melbourne

“Strengthening Medicare” is one of Labor’s key election platforms. On Saturday, one week from the election, the opposition finally outlined its commitment to prop up the ailing primary care system, with a A$970m funding package.

The promise of additional funding for primary care is welcome. More money is badly needed, but Labor’s plans have no detail on how this will improve health outcomes and equity of access.

In order to ignite the structural health care reform we so desperately need, Labor needs to focus on three key areas: GP numbers, free access to GPs and better access to specialists.

Read more:
How do the major parties rate on Medicare? We asked 5 experts

Remind me, what is primary care?

Primary care is a person’s first point of contact with the health system. This is usually in general practice, with GPs and practice nurses, and also includes some care provided in community health centres and Aboriginal community-controlled health services.

The current Liberal government published its Primary Care ten year plan in 2022 after a consultation period starting in 2019. It included technological improvements to boost quality, voluntary patient registration for the elderly (to sign up with a GP clinic which will support their long-term, chronic diseases), and support for integrated care, allowing people to move more easily from hospital to primary care, and other parts of the health system.

But as the Australian Medical Association (AMA) has highlighted throughout the campaign, this plan remains unfunded.

What does Labor’s plan include?

Labor’s plan promises new funding of A$950 million. The centrepiece is a new, so-called Strengthening Medicare Fund of A$750 million that aims to improve access to GPs – though it doesn’t say how. There is little detail on how this fund will be used.

The “how” will be decided by a so-called Strengthening Medicare Taskforce, chaired by the new health minister, plus many of the same people who designed the Liberals’ plan. It’s therefore unclear how different this would end up being from the Coalition’s plan.

Labor’s plan also includes A$25,000 or A$50,000 grants to improve practice infrastructure including IT, “upskilling” staff, and new equipment including infection control.

Direct subsidies to support the costs of running a practice is important, though by itself does not guarantee more patients can find a bulk billing GP. Nor does it guarantee the rising health care costs will slow down.

Three problems that need to be fixed

The taskforce will take time to deliberate. But here are some ideas to begin with.

1) Address the GP shortage

There remains a chronic shortage of GPs, with many GP training places remaining unfilled and with a much higher growth in the number of specialists compared to GPs.

Our research has shown three things can persuade junior doctors to choose general practice as a career: money, more procedural work (such as helping deliver babies or removing skin lesions) and more opportunities for research and academic work.

There are no policies in any parties’ plans that address these.

Read more:
Poor and elderly Australians let down by ailing primary health system

More money needs to be used carefully and needs to reduce the large gap between GPs’ and specialists’ incomes if more junior doctors are to be attracted to this specialty.

Procedural work for GPs exists in rural areas but is more tricky in cities, but many city GPs have specific special interests in undertaking procedures that should be better supported.

Primary care research and basic data collection remains a gaping hole in need of additional funding.

2) Increase free access to GPs

The key issue for many patients is accessing free GP services, with many people avoiding GP visits because they have to pay.

Again, nothing in either party’s plan will directly reduce out-of-pocket costs.

The solution requires new, innovative funding models for primary care, especially in low socioeconomic and rural areas. This could include federal government funding to expand community health centres, which are run by states.

There has never been a specific policy focus in Medicare for low socioeconomic areas.

3) Improve access to specialists

Labor’s plans are about strengthening Medicare, yet the largest part of spending on Medicare services is for services provided by specialists. Of the total spending on Medicare benefits of A$27.5 billion in 2020-21, 32% (A$8.8 billion) was spent on GPs, while 54% (A$14.2 billion) was spent on other specialists.

However, the Labor and Coalition plans completely ignore the continuing problems of access to specialists.

Rich people have better access to specialists, including for child health services. You either wait up to a year for a public hospital appointment or pay sometimes exorbitant out-of-pocket costs. This contributes to significant inequalities in health.

Read more:
With surgery waitlists in crisis and a workforce close to collapse, why haven’t we had more campaign promises about health?

What next for Medicare?

It’s easy to point out what’s wrong with the Australian health system, and much harder to think of solutions, especially where significant structural change is actively discouraged by some in the sector.

We need primary care that is guaranteed to be free and accessible for a significant part of the population in the bottom half of the income distribution.

More money is good only if it can address these issues to properly strengthen Medicare and primary care.

Anthony Scott receives some funding from the Medibank Beter Health Foundation.

– ref. Labor’s health package won’t ‘strengthen’ Medicare unless it includes these 3 things – https://theconversation.com/labors-health-package-wont-strengthen-medicare-unless-it-includes-these-3-things-183093

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carol Johnson, Emerita Professor, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Adelaide

Scott Morrison’s election strategy was clear at the end of last year. As borders were opened up and restrictions eased, Morrison argued the Coalition would be winding back the big government measures that were necessary during the pandemic.

The Coalition would be relying instead on so-called “can-do capitalism” to build the economy and improve standards of living.

It was a post-pandemic form of neoliberal, free market populism. It aimed to attack Labor big government on the left while also countering Clive Palmer’s critique of big government attacks on freedom from the right.

The strategy built on the Coalition’s successful 2019 election campaign. Then, Morrison argued the Liberals would protect voters from a big-spending Labor government that would rip off ordinary taxpayers via higher taxes.

Morrison’s masculine image as an suburban “daggy dad” reinforced that economic message, suggesting he empathised with ordinary Australians. It also undercut Bill Shorten’s arguments the Liberals favoured the “top end of town”.

However, Morrison’s strategy faces a number of challenges in 2022.

À lire aussi :
Centre-left parties worldwide have struggled to reinvent themselves – what kind of ALP is fighting this election?

Deeper problems for Morrison

Having been burned by Bill Shorten’s big government policy agenda in 2019, Labor has now decided to pursue a small target strategy.

But Morrison’s problems go deeper. All too often, “can-do capitalism” involves leaving things to the market, not government.

The result, as business commentator Alan Kohler has observed, has been inadequate government action on several key issues, including RAT tests.

Meanwhile, criticisms of big spending governments no longer cut through in a time of record pandemic-related Coalition deficits.

Morrison no longer highlights “can-do capitalism”, but he has retained an emphasis on the market and a smaller role for government.

However, relying on the market rather than government actually reinforces Labor’s attacks on Morrison for not holding a hose and for denying issues are his job.

It’s also a difficult strategy when the market is delivering higher interest rates, inflation and low wages growth.

Relying on the market also opens up opportunities for Labor to say it’ll take action, unlike the Coalition government.

For example, it allows Labor to build a case for minimum wages keeping pace with inflation and for higher wages in female dominated professions such as aged care. It reveals opportunities for Labor to say it would be better at supporting aged care, Medicare, childcare and the NDIS.

In short, there is an ideological contest between neoliberal free market views and Labor’s argument that government action can make an important difference.

Labor’s social democratic ideology may not be quite as obvious as in the 2019 campaign, when it emphasised addressing inequality, increasing taxation and tackling the “top end” of town.

As researcher and writer Rob Manwaring observes, today’s Labor offering is a somewhat “thin”, watered down, form of social democratic ideology.

Nonetheless, the idea of governments protecting and caring for people in hard times is a very social democratic focus.

A masculinity contest – but times have changed

The ideological contest involves not just a contrast between different economic and social visions, but between different masculine images related to them.

Male political leaders tend to draw on the traditional familial male role of being both protector and economic provider.

Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd both won against Coalition governments partly by depicting themselves as more caring than their political opponents. Joe Biden used a similar strategy against Trump.

The Coalition has responded to Labor’s care agenda by suggesting Albanese is weak, promising instead strong leadership, a strong economy and a stronger future.

In other words, Morrison has tried to emasculate Albanese just as he attempted to do with Shorten in 2019.

Researcher Blair Williams has characterised it as a masculinity contest between conservative “daggy dads” and caring “state daddies”.

However, times have changed. Morrison’s masculine “daggy dad” image is not so relevant now that Labor is no longer targeting Liberal support for the “top end of town”.

And Morrison’s image as a strong male leader has been damaged by his failure to adequately protect Australians from bushfires, floods and the pandemic. He also stands accused of failing to protect women politicians and staffers from parliament’s toxic culture.

Morrison’s attempts to suggest the Coalition is stronger than Labor on issues of national security have been undercut by China’s Solomon’s deal.

Given falling real wages, rising costs of living and interest rates, many voters are now concerned about whether Morrison can fulfil another traditional aspect of a “masculine” persona – being a good economic provider.

Labor has attacked not just Morrison’s performance and personality but his masculinity, suggesting he is all spin and no delivery. Morrison, it argues, has repeatedly failed to protect Australians.

The Deves strategy

Morrison has faltered in his subsequent attempts to establish a masculine image that cuts though.

His support for transgender critic and Liberal candidate Katherine Deves reflects a long history of trying to mobilise traditional gender identities.

Such strategies have been successful overseas but may not be so effective here, even in the outer suburban seats Morrison is targeting.

Some of Deves’ extreme comments are seen as not just conservative. They’re seen as cruel to an extremely vulnerable section of the population.

Rather than successfully depicting himself as protecting women from a claimed influx of transgender athletes in women’s sport, Morrison’s support for Deves risks alienating moderate Liberals and reinforcing Labor’s argument he is uncaring.

Morrison’s recent attempts to suggest he will change his personality from being a bulldozer to an emphathetic listener are interesting. It seems to be a recognition that Albanese’s more caring form of masculinity, including around costs of living issues, may be cutting through.

Meanwhile, Albanese has appealed to traditional conceptions of masculinity as well, suggesting that while bulldozers just knock things down, he will be a builder.

When a positive becomes a negative

In short, the positive nexus between Morrison’s economic agenda and his masculine leadership image in 2019 may have turned into a negative one in 2022.

This reinforces Labor narratives about Morrison’s uncaring character and poor performance as prime minister.

Whether those challenges will facilitate a Labor election win remains to be seen.

However, some factors that assisted Morrison’s “miracle” victory in 2019 no longer seem to be working quite so well for him.

À lire aussi :
Women have been at the centre of political debate in the past two years. Will they decide the 2022 election?

Carol Johnson has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Why Morrison’s ‘can-do’ capitalism and conservative masculinity may not be cutting through anymore – https://theconversation.com/why-morrisons-can-do-capitalism-and-conservative-masculinity-may-not-be-cutting-through-anymore-183118

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Welch, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning, University of Auckland

It would be hard to find someone who’s visited Copenhagen or Amsterdam and complained about too many bikes. And you don’t tend to hear a lot of moaning about too much public transport in Singapore or Hong Kong.

Talk to someone after a trip to Los Angeles, Moscow, Rome or Mumbai, however, and you will almost certainly get an earful about the horrendous traffic.

The vast differences in such experience lie in how local and national governments invest their transportation funds. It always comes down to money, and the perennial question of how to spend limited resources while maximising the benefits and the returns on investment.

As this year’s budget approaches, and with the government’s first Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) just released, these questions are coming into sharper focus. And the biggest, perhaps, is how to reduce New Zealanders’ dependence on cars.

On your bike

The ERP contains NZ$350 million for measures to improve low-impact transport modes such as walking, cycling and public transport, including provision for at least 100km of urban cycleways.

At the same time, it offers even more subsidies for electric vehicles. With only 0.7% of New Zealand’s vehicle fleet being pure electric cars, the plan would likely have a bigger impact if it subsidised e-bikes and public transport.

The figures for cycling are particularly startling. New Zealand has over 96,000km of roads but just 111km of separated cycleways that protect cyclists from vehicles. That amounts to just 0.1% of roads with safe places for cyclists.

Read more:
Why calling ordinary Kiwi cyclists ‘elitist’ just doesn’t add up

This lack of cycling infrastructure essentially matches transport spending. Urban cycleways received just 0.5% of the transportation budget last year, despite cycling comprising 1% of all trips nationally.

Compare this to the €70 million (just over NZ$116 million) Denmark has committed to building separated cycling roads.

By 2045, Denmark also plans to have spent €295 million building 45 cycle “superhighway” routes connecting the entire country. It’s expected this will result in one million fewer car trips and 40,000 fewer sick days each year.

For reference, New Zealand spent the equivalent of more than €750 million on the Transmission Gully motorway into Wellington. It’s clear we could significantly increase spending and make cycling attractive and feasible for many more people.

Safer streets

Around 30% of urban car trips are under two kilometres in length and could easily be replaced by walking. But the lack of footpaths, or their poor condition, can deter many people.

The transport budget should recognise the importance of enabling healthy and zero-carbon modes of transport by prioritising funding for better footpaths and safer streets.

Such a budget would allocate more funding to widening footpaths, repairing the existing footpath inventory, slowing vehicles, reducing the number of cars in cities and creating more on-street amenities.

Walking and cycling also have many co-benefits, including better physical health, which would have obvious beneficial effects on healthcare budgets.

Read more:
Using valuable inner-city land for car parking? In a housing crisis, that just doesn’t add up

Funding where it’s needed

Much of the overall transport budget each year goes into long-term programmes with various aims. Of these, the National Land Transport Programme (NLTP) is arguably the hardest done by.

Its purpose is to allocate funds to provide “a safe, accessible land transport system for Aotearoa now and in the future”. It’s tasked with delivering public transport services, implementing the wide-ranging Road to Zero programme (aimed at reducing the road death toll), and maintaining roads – yet consumes just under 1.6% of the annual transport budget.

Ideally, such an important programme would attract a much larger budget share.

Read more:
To get New Zealanders out of their cars we’ll need to start charging the true cost of driving

For example, within the NLTP’s overall budget, public transportation and transport infrastructure receive roughly the same funding as the Road to Zero programme. And Road to Zero itself commits almost as much money to policing roads as will be spent on providing all public transport services.

But funding programmes that reduce the total number of car trips – such as more extensive cycleways and better public transport options – would reduce that need to police roads.

Better roads for all

Fewer cars equal safer roads, so putting more money into non-car modes is actually a win for drivers and non-drivers alike.

The apparent success of the recent half-price fare scheme for public transport has shown how making it more affordable encourages more trips. The budget should allocate funding to make these cuts permanent and increase the number of fare concessions.

Over time, fare reductions would be more than paid for by a reduction in road maintenance due to fewer cars. Currently, planned road maintenance is projected to cost more than $5 billion over the next four years.

Greater use of public transport would also reduce the pressure to expand roads. This falls under the overall transport budget’s “capital investment package”, of which nearly $3 billion has already been spent this year – 40% of all transport dollars.

Read more:
Electric cars alone won’t save the planet. We’ll need to design cities so people can walk and cycle safely

Increase spending overall

New Zealand can achieve more with its transport funding by just getting people out of their cars more often. In the same way that using trains, buses, bikes and feet is easier on personal finances, the national transport budget will benefit from less emphasis on the automobile.

But even if we don’t want to shift spending from one mode to many, there is another option – to spend more.

As a percentage of GDP, transportation spending has been declining ever since its peak in the 1950s. We don’t have to treat the relationship between road, public transport and active travel (walking and cycling) as mutually exclusive. We can keep road funding at its current level and spend more on other modes.

That way, we could do the things we so admire in other counties and still satisfy those who demand a car. The better our cycling and public transport infrastructure, the less reliant we’ll be on cars, bringing us one step closer to breaking the vicious cycle of automobile dependence.

Timothy Welch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Will the budget be another missed opportunity to get more New Zealanders out of their cars? – https://theconversation.com/will-the-budget-be-another-missed-opportunity-to-get-more-new-zealanders-out-of-their-cars-182428

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Olga Dodd, Senior Lecturer in Finance, Auckland University of Technology

Uncertainty in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has wreaked havoc with the international commodity markets.

In the normal pattern of the global economy, commodity exporting countries like New Zealand benefit from a rise in commodity prices and the subsequent strengthening of their currencies.

But these are not normal times.

In 2022, commodity prices have risen but the New Zealand dollar has failed to strengthen. So what is different and what should consumers expect?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has contributed to extreme uncertainty in financial markets, including the currency markets.

The war resulted in significant increases in global commodity prices, particularly for energy and agricultural commodities.

But on May 13, the value of New Zealand’s currency against the United States dollar dropped to its lowest in two years. The New Zealand dollar was buying US68.32 cents on January 1, peaked at US69.75c on March 31, and then dropped to US62.39c on May 13.

Historically unusual

Again, this imbalance between the commodity markets and our currency is not normal.

The New Zealand dollar is classified as a commodity currency, along with the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar and Norwegian krone. Primary commodities (dairy, meat and timber in the case of New Zealand) constitute a substantial part of these nations’ exports.

For countries like New Zealand, the changes in global commodity prices are one of the main drivers of the country’s terms of trade fluctuations and, therefore, the currency value.

Generally, the value of the currency – the exchange rate – increases when export commodity prices increase. The New Zealand dollar, for example, tends to increase in value when global dairy prices increase.

But recent research has revealed a blip in the normal pattern.

The authors studied the relationship between the changes in value of 31 currencies (including the New Zealand dollar) and commodity prices over the past ten years. The analysis confirmed the traditional positive relationship between the changes in the currency values and commodity prices.

Read more:
Boycotting Russian products might feel right, but can individual consumers really make a difference?

However, around the start of the Ukraine war this relationship reversed and became negative. The reversal was particularly evident for commodity currencies.

This study showed that despite the substantial increases in global commodity prices between January and March 2022, the expected corresponding increases in the value of commodity currencies did not occur.

The value of the New Zealand dollar dropped 0.6% from January 18 to March 1, despite sizeable increases in the global commodity index, the S&P GSCI (Standard & Poor’s Goldman Sachs Commodity Index), and the global dairy trade index, which increased 17.74% and 13.4% respectively over the same period.

Negativity driven by uncertainty

It appears the breakdown in the relationship between the value of the currencies and commodity prices was due to the extreme uncertainties and geopolitical risks during the January to March period.

This global study also found that the closer a currency was to the conflict, the worse it performed. So, New Zealand has been advantaged by its geographic distance from the war.

The New Zealand dollar value held better during the January to March period compared to the value of other currencies.

Currencies of Eastern European countries that border Ukraine (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovak Republic) lost, on average, more than 5% from January 18 to March 1.

Returning to normal

Perceived uncertainty due to the conflict has reduced as the war has dragged on and the global commodity markets reversed their upward trend.

During April and May, global dairy prices decreased 13.1%, potentially due to the expected global economic slowdown and subsequent reduction in consumption, China’s “zero-COVID” policy with lockdowns and the corresponding drop in demand, as well as the seasonal adjustments of dairy prices.

The New Zealand dollar has lost 10.6% of its value since its peak in March. It seems the expected positive relationship between commodity prices and the value of New Zealand dollar is evident again.

That said, a weak New Zealand dollar is bad news for New Zealand consumers as it increases the prices of imported goods, including fuel, further contributing to already high inflationary pressure.

It also makes it more expensive for New Zealanders to travel overseas, something many people were looking forward to after two years of closed borders.

Read more:
New Zealand is overdue for an open and honest debate about 21st-century trade relations

On the flip side, a weaker New Zealand dollar can give a much needed boost to the New Zealand tourist and tertiary education sectors, as it makes New Zealand less expensive and therefore a more attractive travel and study destination.

A weakening New Zealand dollar is also beneficial for exporters of products like wine, as it makes them more competitive in global markets and increases external demand for these products.

While the war in Europe had a global and unexpected impact on New Zealand’s currency, the normal state of play is returning. The reemerging trends can give businesses and consumers a small sense of certainty after months of things being upside-down.

Simon Sosvilla-Rivero receives funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Adrian Fernandez-Perez and Olga Dodd do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Russian invasion of Ukraine made everyone nervous, upending trade patterns for exporting countries like New Zealand – https://theconversation.com/the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-made-everyone-nervous-upending-trade-patterns-for-exporting-countries-like-new-zealand-182857

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katherine Ravenswood, Associate Professor in Employment Relations, Auckland University of Technology

Ahead of the 2022 budget, apprenticeships have been given a $230 million funding boost while negotiations between care workers and the government have fallen apart.

It’s hard not to see this as a gender equity issue.

Apprenticeships, and the industries they benefit, are held almost exclusively by men, while New Zealand’s 65,000 care, support, mental health and addiction workers are predominantly women.

Multiple court cases identified gender discrimination in the way previous governments funded care and support workers.

These court cases led to an historic $2 billion agreement between care workers and the then National-led government in 2017. But this agreement is set to expire in July and with it, warn advocates, the hard fought gains of care workers across the country.

So, the question has to be asked: do the latest budget priorities and collapse of negotiations with care workers reflect the fact that five years on from the 2017 agreement, little has changed?

An historic settlement

The 2017 Pay Equity Settlement for care and support workers was reached after years of legal action led by aged care worker Kristine Bartlett, other care and support workers and their unions.

The New Zealand Supreme Court determined that the care workers’ low wages and poor work conditions were the result of persistent gender discrimination.

In other words, their pay didn’t reflect the skills, experience and knowledge required but instead was based on the fact that most care and support workers were women. In New Zealand, women continue to be paid less than men.

Read more:
New Zealand’s health restructure is doomed to fall short unless its funding model is tackled first

The government of the day intervened to settle out of court before further legal action could be taken. But negotiations were limited from the outset, with the government concerned more with curbing costs than equal pay.

The government’s offer to the unions was about half what the unions had calculated would cover the cost of gender equal pay. The settlement also prevented these same women from taking further action on equal pay until the settlement expired.

Despite ongoing flaws in the settlement, the associated legislation delivered significant pay increases and guaranteed training opportunities for the care and support workforce.

Time is running out

After the settlement was reached, the lowest agreed wage rate for care and support workers was 121% of the minimum wage; the highest rate came in at 149% of the minimum wage.

Over the past five years, care and support workers’ wages have not maintained the same relativity to the minimum wage, let alone gender equal pay.

The current lowest wage rate for care and support workers is NZ$21.84 and the highest is $27.43 per hour. The minimum wage is $21.20. That highest rate offered to care workers is only achieved after several years of training and qualifications as well as experience on the job.

Wages for care and support workers would need to range from at least $25.60 to $31.60 or more to maintain the same relativity to the minimum wage as was seen in 2017.

Deadline comes as no surprise

That the 2017 Care and Support Workers (Pay Equity) Act expires this year is not news for the government.

Indeed, there have been some discussions on how funding models for this sector should be changed to ensure that the gender equal value of this work is maintained into the future.

However, the government only recently offered a concrete proposal to care and support workers despite earlier union calls for agreement and decision ahead of July’s deadline.

The offer is a 2.5% to 3% pay increase on current rates for the next 18 months. This is not even half the inflation rate, amounts to about 70 cents an hour and does not maintain the wages as gender equal.

The offer just does not value care and support work.

Care and support workers will now have to undergo another equal pay claim process to reassess wages – despite the earlier court decisions that identified gender discrimination as the cause for low wages within the industry.

The contrast with ‘men’s work’

At the same time as care and support workers were struggling to get gender equal pay, the government made a pre-budget announcement to invest $230 million more into apprenticeships in 2023. This follows the $1.6 billion trades and apprenticeships training package in the 2020 budget.

There is no doubt that investing in apprenticeships is important for upskilling New Zealanders to meet labour shortages in key industries. But apprenticeships favour male dominated industries and consequently provide significantly more opportunities for men than women.

At the end of 2020, women still comprised just 12.7% of all apprentices, despite the boost to apprenticeships and focus on recruiting female candidates.

Read more:
Why equal health access and outcomes should be a priority for Ardern’s new government

This figure has remained low despite the gendered impact of the global pandemic – 10,000 of the 11,000 New Zealand workers who lost their jobs during the first year of the COVID-19 crisis were women.

At the same time, care and support workers have operated as essential workers. During the pandemic, care and support workers were on the front line, with many going into people’s homes to look after vulnerable patients.

Despite this role and its risks, care workers struggled to access basics such as PPE to protect themselves and the people they support or be recognised for the sacrifices they made in the course of their work.

Time for a long-term solution

The government has had the power, but not the foresight, to conduct an updated analysis of pay ahead of the expiration of the settlement agreement.

Over the past five years, policy makers could have completed a full equal pay assessment, comparing this job not just to other female dominated jobs in the public health sector, but to male dominated occupations with similar skills, qualifications, risk and experience requirements.

Fully funded gender-equal pay for care and support workers could then have been included in this year’s budget. At the very least, the pay increase on offer could have brought wages to the same level in relation to the minimum wage as in 2017.

It would have been a win for these women, for the people who rely upon their care and support, for our healthcare system and our identity as a good country for women in work. Instead, it appears that no matter which government is in power, women are expected to take a back seat to profit, budgets and men.

Katherine Ravenswood does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Collapse of negotiations with care workers shows little has changed in how the government views the work of women – https://theconversation.com/collapse-of-negotiations-with-care-workers-shows-little-has-changed-in-how-the-government-views-the-work-of-women-183025

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Scott Hollier, Adjunct Senior Lecturer – Science and Mathematics, Edith Cowan University

When people hear the term “accessibility” in the context of disability, most will see images of ramps, automatic doors, elevators, or tactile paving (textured ground which helps vision impaired people navigate public spaces). These are physical examples of inclusive practice that most people understand.

You may even use these features yourself, for convenience, as you go about your day. However, such efforts to create an inclusive physical world aren’t being translated into designing the digital world.

Accessibility fails

Digital accessibility refers to the way people with a lived experience of disability interact with the cyber world.

One example comes from an author of this article, Scott, who is legally blind. Scott is unable to purchase football tickets online because the ticketing website uses an image-based “CAPTCHA” test. It’s a seemingly simple task, but fraught with challenges when considering accessibility issues.

Despite Scott having an IT-related PhD, and two decades of digital accessibility experience in academic and commercial arenas, it falls on his teenage son to complete the online ticket purchase.

Screen readers, high-contrast colour schemes and text magnifiers are all assistive technology tools that enable legally blind users to interact with websites. Unfortunately, they are useless if a website has not been designed with an inclusive approach.

The other author of this article, Justin, uses a wheelchair for mobility and can’t even purchase wheelchair seating tickets over the web. He has to phone a special access number to do so.

Both of these are examples of digital accessibility fails. And they’re more common than most people realise.

We can clearly do better

The term “disability” covers a spectrum of physical and cognitive conditions. It can can range from short-term conditions to lifelong ones.

“Digital accessibility” applies to a broad range of users with varying abilities.

At last count, nearly one in five Australians (17.7%) lived with some form of disability. This figure increases significantly when you consider the physical and cognitive impacts of ageing.

At the same time, Australians are becoming increasingly reliant on digital services. According to a 2022 survey by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, 45% of respondents in New South Wales and Victoria increased their use of digital channels during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In contrast, research undertaken by Infosys in December 2021 found only 3% of leading companies in Australia and New Zealand had effective digital accessibility processes.

But have we improved?

Areas that have shown accessibility improvement include social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, food ordering services such as Uber Eats, and media platforms such as the ABC News app.

Challenges still persist in online banking, travel booking sites, shopping sites and educational websites and content.

Data from the United States indicates lawsuits relating to accessibility are on the rise, with outcomes including financial penalties and requirements for business owners to remedy the accessibility of their website/s.

In Australia, however, it’s often hard to obtain exact figures for the scale of accessibility complaints lodged with site owners. This 1997 article from the Australian Human Right Commission suggests the conversation hasn’t shifted much in 25 years.

There are solutions at hand

There’s a clear solution to the digital divide. The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standard has been widely adopted across the globe. It’s universally available, and is a requirement for all Australian public-facing government websites.

It guides website and app developers on how to use web languages (such as HTML and CSS) in ways that enable end users who rely on assistive technologies. There are no specialist technologies or techniques required to make websites or apps accessible. All that’s needed is an adherence to good practice.

Unfortunately, WCAG is rarely treated as an enforceable standard. All too often, adherence to WCAG requirements in Australia is reduced to a box-ticking exercise.

Our academic work and experience liaising with a range of vendors has revealed that even where specific accessibility requirements are stated, many vendors will tick “yes” regardless of their knowledge of accessibility principles, or their ability to deliver against the standards.

In cases where vendors do genuinely work towards WCAG compliance, they often rely on automated testing (via online tools), rather than human testing. As a result, genuine accessibility and usability issues can go unreported. While the coding of each element of a website might be WCAG compliant, the sum of all the parts may not be.

In 2016, the Australian government adopted standard EN 301549 (a direct implementation of an existing European standard). It’s aimed at preventing inaccessible products (hardware, software, websites and services) entering the government’s digital ecosystem. Yet the new standard seems to have achieved little. Few, if any, references to it appear in academic literature or the public web.

It seems to have met a similar fate to the government’s National Transition Strategy for digital accessibility, which quietly disappeared in 2015.

Read more:
Good design lies at the heart of normalising disability – NZ’s new Ministry for Disabled People must make it a priority

The carrot, not the stick

Accessibility advocates take different approaches to advancing the accessibility agenda with reticent organisations. Some instil the fear of legal action, often citing the Maguire v SOCOG case, where the 2000 Olympic website was found to be inaccessible.

In a more recent example, the Manage v Coles settlement saw Coles agree to make improvements to their website’s accessibility after being sued by a legally blind woman.

In the Coles case, the stick became the carrot; Coles went on to win a national website accessibility award after the original complainant nominated them following their remediation efforts.

But while the financial impact of being sued might spur an organisation into action, it’s more likely to commit to genuine effort if this will generate a positive return on investment.

Accessible by default

We can attest to the common misconception that disability implies a need for help and support. Most people living with disability are seeking to live independently and with self-determination.

To break the cycle of financial and social dependence frequently associated with the equity space, governments, corporations and educational institutions need to become accessible by default.

The technologies and policies are all in place, ready to go. What is needed is leadership from government and non-government sectors to define digital accessibility as a right, and not a privilege.

Read more:
Making our cities more accessible for people with disability is easier than we think

Scott Hollier is on the board of the not-for-profit Disability in the Arts Disadvantage in the Arts (DADAA), and is CEO and Co-founder of the Centre For Accessibility Australia. The Centre for Accessibility Australia receives government grants for accessibility activity, but the funding has no specific bearing on the content of this article. The accessibility award that Coles won (after the Coles v Manage case) was awarded through the Centre for Accessibility Australia – however Scott was not involved in the voting for the award, or the nomination of Coles, and CFA was not involved in the website remediation.

This story is part of The Conversation’s Breaking the Cycle series, which is about escaping cycles of disadvantage. It is supported by a philanthropic grant from the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

Justin Brown is on the board of the not-for-profit Disability in the Arts Disadvantage in the Arts (DADAA)

– ref. Digital inequality: why can I enter your building – but your website shows me the door? – https://theconversation.com/digital-inequality-why-can-i-enter-your-building-but-your-website-shows-me-the-door-182432

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Williams, Associate Professor, Griffith University, Griffith University

In the first week of the campaign, we journeyed around the country with six politics experts to examine the key seats and issues affecting different parts of the Australia.

What has happened since? Which seats do you need to watch on election night? In the final week, our experts return to look at Queensland, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales.

Read more:
State of the states: six politics experts take us on a trip around Australia

QUEENSLAND

Paul Williams, associate professor in politics and journalism, Griffith University

Election watchers increasingly remark that, despite the electorate’s volatility, campaigns today are making little difference to election outcomes.

During both the 2016 and 2019 campaigns (leaving aside the inaccuracy of the 2019 data), public opinion polls hardly moved. This campaign, too, has seen little change, with almost all polls consistently pointing to a modest Labor majority.

Perhaps former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s famous remark, “a week is a long time in politics” is now redundant. Voters now appear to make their vote choice well in advance of polling day.

That appears especially true in Queensland.

Sub-national opinion polling has been sparse this campaign, but a recent Roy Morgan survey found the Liberal National Party continues to lead Labor in Queensland on after-preference votes, 53.5% to 46.5%. While this still represents a swing of almost five percentage points to Labor since 2019, Queensland maintains its longer-term trend of being a wasteland for federal Labor. Only Tasmania boasts a stronger Coalition vote.

Labor knows the perils of Queensland well. That’s why leader Anthony Albanese launched his campaign in the far more fertile ground of Western Australia with the enormously popular Premier Mark McGowan, and not in Queensland where Annastacia Palaszczuk sits under an integrity cloud.

However, Albanese did spend the campaign’s crucial second week in the Sunshine State, seeking to repair the damage wrought by his earlier economic gaffes. In fact, he invested five whole days in the electorates of Hinkler, Leichhardt and Rankin. He also sandbagged the at-risk Griffth, and visited the must-win LNP seat of Brisbane.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison soon followed with a visit to Longman – the LNP’s most marginal Queensland seat – before participating in the first leaders’ debate in Brisbane. The fact Nationals’ leader Barnaby Joyce also visited central Queensland suggests the Coalition fears losing support to both Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer there.

Like other states, cost of living (including interest rate hikes) remains a tier one issue. But, unlike other states, Morrison is still seen as the stronger leader against Albanese, with whom regional Queenslanders simply cannot identify.

However, one development of the campaign is the likely surge in minor party support in Queensland. This won’t see anyone on the populist right, except Bob Katter, win in the lower house. But watch out for a Greens upset in at least one House of Representatives seat.

VICTORIA

Zareh Ghazarian, lecturer in politics, Monash University

When the campaign began, Victoria was unlikely to be the state that captured the national attention. This was partly due to the fact that the state had just two seats held by either party by 1% or less. However, as the campaign has gone on, some important electoral contests and tactics have garnered interest.

The so-called teal independents have become a prominent feature of the political debate in the state. In the inner metropolitan and traditionally safe Liberal seat of Goldstein, independent Zoe Daniel is well placed to cause an upset on election night. While incumbent Liberal MP Tim Wilson has been campaigning vigorously in the district, a recent poll showed both candidates have a primary vote of 33% each.

The trouble for the Liberal Party also extends to Kooyong, currently held by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and being challenged by paediatric neurologist Monique Ryan. The Liberals’ Kooyong campaign appears to emphasise Frydenberg while downplaying the party and prime minister. As reports show, the campaign aims to “keep Josh”. Despite this, polling is suggesting significant support for Ryan, which makes Kooyong a key seat to watch on election night.

A loss in either seat would not only make the task of holding government more difficult for the Liberal Party, it would also deprive it of high profile MPs who would be expected to form the core of the party’s future leadership team.

These electoral problems for the Liberal Party are in addition to trying to maintain its most marginal seat of Chisholm (currently held by just 0.5%), while trying to win back Corangamite (currently held by Labor by just 1.1%).

SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Rob Manwaring, associate professor in politics and public policy, Flinders University

In South Australia, the focus remains on the key marginal seat of Boothby, which the Liberals currently hold on a margin of just 1.4%. In a sign of how prominent the seat is, ten candidates are running (an increase of two from 2019), and the seat is a critical three-way split between the two major parties and the prominent independent Jo Dyer.

Boothby is being showered with electoral promises compared to its neighbours. Labor has pledged at least $12.4 million to the seat including upgrades to various sporting and community club facilities. The Coalition has announced about $20 million for similar projects.

Federal Labor seems to want to capitalise on state Labor’s recent win through the focus on health, and Albanese visited the marginal seat to pledge $200 million in matched state funding to upgrade the Flinders Medical Centre. Questions were immediately raised about the “coincidence” the centre was in Boothby. It shows how marginal seat politics can undermine needs-based funding approaches.

But Boothby is not the only seat worth watching in South Australia. First, if Labor does pick up some final momentum, then Christopher Pyne’s old seat of Sturt is worth watching on election night, currently held by the Liberals with 6.9%.

Second, if the Liberals have an overall election loss, then the seat of Mayo (currently held by Centre Alliance’s Rebekha Sharkie on 5.1%) will be emblematic of its problems. First elected in 2016, Sharkie is an early version of the teal independents. If she cements her majority, it reflects the wider fragmentation of the centre-right.

The third seat well worth looking at is the seat of Grey (currently held by the Liberals on 13.3%), where incumbent Liberal MP Rowan Ramsey is being challenged by independent Liz Habermann. She pushed the Liberals to a very tight finish at the state election in the neighbouring (state) seat of Flinders. The message here is marginal seat politics might dictate which seats get what, but it can leave behind frustration and a sense of neglect in other, seemingly safe seats.

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

John Phillimore, professor and executive director, John Curtin Institute of Public Policy, Curtin University

Western Australia’s status as a critical battleground in the federal election was confirmed when Labor chose to launch its campaign in Perth on May 1. This was the first time a major party campaign launch had been held in WA for at least 80 years.

Despite the admittedly large hiccup of both Albanese and McGowan contracting COVID just over a week before (ruining the chance to add a few days’ local campaigning), the launch went well. Labor luminaries such as Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd attended, and the event received blanket, and generally positive, local media coverage.

The Liberal Party has also showered a lot of attention on the state. Morrison has visited twice already since the election was called, and former prime minister John Howard was a prominent visitor as well, campaigning for Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt in his marginal seat of Hasluck.

Both parties have been keen to remind voters in the west of past sins allegedly perpetrated by their opponents. Labor’s advertising (controlled by the WA branch, rather than national headquarters), focuses on Morrison’s disparaging remarks about WA’s supposed isolationism and his support in 2020 for Clive Palmer’s High Court challenge to the state’s border restrictions.

The Liberals are running advertisements reminding voters of Labor’s 2012 mining tax introduced by Rudd, and his closeness to Albanese.

The Liberals have a “plan for WA” that includes significant investments in hydrogen, critical minerals, shipbuilding and defence, as well as a major cancer treatment facility. Labor’s showcase WA promise has been a $125 million promise to support the local manufacture of electric buses, as well as support for value-adding to resources including lithium and nickel.

Electorate-based promises – particularly in the marginal seats of Cowan, Hasluck, Pearce and Swan – have been coming thick and fast, with an array of announcements supporting local sporting clubs, cultural centres and local infrastructure.

The 3 big unknowns

There are three key unknowns as we head towards the finishing line. First is the seat of Curtin, where independent Kate Chaney is receiving plenty of attention and support in her battle to unseat the Liberals’ Celia Hammond. Despite pressure from the media and the Liberal Party, Chaney is refusing to say who she will support in the case of a hung parliament.

Read more:
Why teal independents are seeking Liberal voters and spooking Liberal MPs

A second unknown is the impact of the state budget, which was handed down last Thursday. WA is the only government in Australia in surplus, and massively so ($5.7 billion in 2021-22), thanks to iron ore royalties and a GST deal negotiated with Morrison. McGowan was able to spread some financial cheer to voters in the shape of a $400 electricity credit for every household. But will that translate into more votes for Labor federally?

The third unknown is the impact of rising interest rates and inflation. Annual inflation in Perth was the highest of all the capital cities, at 7.6% (compared to 5.1% nationally). Three of the state’s most marginal seats, Cowan, Hasluck and Pearce, have a much higher share of households with mortgages than the national average of 35%.

The latest polling in WA shows Labor’s primary vote falling since the campaign began, but still enough to win Swan and Pearce. This suggests these classic “hip pocket” voters could well decide the federal election.

TASMANIA

Michael Lester, casual academic, University of Tasmania

Despite numerous visits by both major party leaders and hundreds of millions in spending commitments in the state, it may be that just one seat changes hands in Tasmania this election.

Given its small population and just five House of Representatives seats, Tasmania has received disproportionate attention from both the Coalition and Labor. But the marginal north-west seat of Braddon may be the only seat to change hands.

In the 2004 campaign, former Prime Minister John Howard’s pledged to allow old-growth logging to continue to protect jobs. This was credited with helping the Coalition win two seats in Tasmania and bolstering Coalition support nationally. In a similar move, Morrison has made a series of industry support funding announcements in Tasmania.

These include $100 million to create a national institute of forestry in Launceston as part of $219 million for the Australian forestry industry and $50 million towards the expansion of the Nyrstar zinc works near Hobart. The latter is seen as a major boost to the Tasmanian mining industry.

Meanwhile, Albanese has focused on infrastructure spending, such as $15 million for an aquatic centre in Launceston, in the seat of Bass. He has also promised $60 million to strengthen the Hobart Airport runway, which would allow it to carry heavier wide-bodied aircraft and benefit both the international tourism industry and agricultural exports. He also offered $5 million for a study for a $75 million federally-funded expansion of the industrial estate adjacent to Launceston airport. Both airports are in the marginal electorate of Lyons.

Such is the level of spending pledges, The Guardian’s “pork-o-meter” estimates Bass has received more than $550 million in pledges from the Liberal and Labor parties – and the pledges keep coming daily. This is the second-highest per-electorate spend for the Liberal Party (behind Canning in WA).

Neck and neck

Party insiders and commentators sense Labor’s Chris Lynch has drawn ahead of the Braddon incumbent, Liberal Gavin Pearce, who holds the seat on just 3.1%. Revelations of a 30-year-old drug conviction does not appear to have hurt Lynch, a vocational education teacher and youth worker. He is also expected to benefit from a decision by the Jacqui Lambie Network to preference him above the Liberals.

Labor fronbencher Julie Collins is tipped to retain her safe seat of Franklin (12.2%) while independent Andrew Wilkie (22.1%) is expected to easily hold off a challenge from Labor candidate Simon Clark. In Lyons, the Jacqui Lambie Network’s decision to preference sitting Labor member Brian Mitchell (5.2%) ahead of Liberal challenger Susie Bower should help him retain the seat.

No one is yet willing to call the ultra-marginal seat of Bass, held by maverick Liberal Bridget Archerby just 0.4%. She is up against the previous incumbent Labor’s Ross Hart. It should be noted that for almost 20 years the seat has changed hands at each election, and Bass and Braddon have been in lock-step – if one swings, so does the other.

In the Senate, the likely outcome is the return of Labor senators Anne Urquhart and Helen Polley and Liberal senators Jonathon Duniam and Wendy Askew, along with the Greens’ Peter Whish-Wilson.

Read more:
Populism and the federal election: what can we expect from Hanson, Palmer, Lambie and Katter?

Most pundits are tipping the Jacqui Lambie Network’s Tammy Tyrell – a former Lambie staffer – will take the sixth seat, though it is expected to be a three-way contest against the third Labor and Liberal candidates Kate Rainbird and Senator Eric Abetz respectively. The reasoning for this is that Labor will preference the Jacqui Lambie Network above other parties and independents, which boosts Tyrell’s chances. The question is whether personal support for Lambie will carry over to her candidate.

NEW SOUTH WALES

Mark Rolfe, honorary lecturer, School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales

Both Morrison and Albanese have led lopsided campaigns relying on highly localised issues, negative campaigning, and vague generalities. This has overshadowed any substantial explanation of policies.

Nineteen of the top 20 renter-stressed electorates and nine of the top 20 mortgage-stressed electorates are in NSW. Curiously, neither leader jumped from the blocks touting wages and housing solutions. However, these (bleeding obvious) problems have became more prominent over the course of the campaign.

The Coalition is hoping its last-minute pledge to allow first home buyers to access up to 40% of their superannuation to a maximum of $50,000, will be a vote winner. Even though former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull previously described it as “the craziest idea I’ve heard”.

Curiously, Labor has said little of its proposed National Reconstruction Fund (aimed at rebuilding Australia’s industrial base) and nothing of its Buy Australian policy (which would legislate to get the government buying more goods and services here). Both would help its cause on wages.

Sometimes, Morrison has sounded like he is competing in a local election, with pledges like a $137,000 to upgrade a Country Women’s Association hall in Robertson. Mind you, in Dobell, Labor has promised $40,000 for new shade sails at the ocean baths at The Entrance.

Morrison’s relentless energy has taken him to Macquarie (which includes the Blue Mountains), Parramatta in Sydney’s west, Dobell on the central coast and Gilmore on the south coast. But he has avoided fire-affected Eden-Monaro on the south coast and the flood-affected Richmond on the north coast. These seats are all in the top ten marginal Labor electorates where the Coalition need gains.

Albanese has campaigned across most of these seats as well as John Howard’s former seat of Bennelong, which Morrison has also visited but is behind according to polls.

The Liberals’ are also behind in the central coast’s Robertson. And are facing a tough contest in Reid, where Liberal MP Fiona Martin’s campaign has been marred by infighting and gaffes.

While Morrison has defended Liberal candidate Katherine Deves in his remarks, he has not campaigned for his controversial captain’s pick on the ground in Warringah.

Morrison has also avoided the Liberal seats of North Sydney, Warringah, Wentworth and Mackellar where teal independents are exciting local passions – using free concerts, rallies and thousands of volunteers. In the northern NSW seat of Cowper, the sitting National MP Pat Conaghan is also facing a teal challenge.

We can assume Morrison has bypassed these seats because he is not seen as a campaign asset for them. This could be due to community anger about the Liberal Party’s lack of action on climate change, or the Liberal party’s “woman problem”. Most women voted against the Liberals in 2019 and the party’s issues around gender have only has escalated since then. So, in the last dash before May 21, he is focusing his efforts elsewhere.

Paul Williams is an Associate of the T.J.Ryan Foundation.

John Phillimore worked as an adviser to state Labor governments in Western Australia in the 1980s and between 2001 and 2007.

Michael Lester was a political adviser to Labor Premier Jim Bacon from 1998 to 2002.

Mark Rolfe, Rob Manwaring, and Zareh Ghazarian do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. State of the states: six politics experts take us around Australia in the final week of the campaign – https://theconversation.com/state-of-the-states-six-politics-experts-take-us-around-australia-in-the-final-week-of-the-campaign-183099

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Markus A. Höllerer, Professor in Organization and Management, UNSW Sydney

Australia has recently experienced multiple natural and man-made disasters, creating overlapping crises, often disproportionately affecting disadvantaged populations. The situation is here to stay, and, worryingly, likely to worsen.

But what are we doing to prepare?

The federal election presents an opportunity to promote plans for improving national disaster governance and resilience.

Yet, alarmingly, the governance challenges exposed by recent crises and the vulnerabilities they highlight in Australia’s preparedness remain unknown, unheard, and far from understood.

The silence on these issues in political debates has been remarkable.

Read more:
Calling in the army for the vaccine rollout and every other emergency shows how ill-prepared we are

We must adapt while we still can

Our current research project on collective action and collaborative governance in crisis situations has, so far, involved over 50 interviews. Respondents include members of emergency services organisations, government representatives, and crisis management experts in the private, and non-profit sectors in Australia.

The message from our respondents is loud and clear: preparing for future disasters requires good collaborative governance. It is time to act now. We have some breathing space in the wake of recent disasters, and we must adapt while we still can.

Our research has highlighted three distinct governance challenges.

1. Inter-agency collaboration remains a challenge

Collaboration between response agencies during disasters is critical but remains challenging.

Although effective governance arrangements enable collaboration within states, disasters often transcend borders – and current arrangements that govern emergency response across multiple jurisdictions are far less effective.

Our respondents note, amongst other examples, that emergency workers on the ground routinely turn to ad hoc communication channels when disasters cross borders. They often bypass formal governance structures in their struggle to effectively deploy and coordinate resources.

As one respondent who works at the Victoria-NSW border told us:

You have this big formal governance structure, but for me to go and talk to the southern command in NSW, I have to go to the state duty officer, who has to go to the NSW duty officer, to talk to someone just 15 minutes away over on the other side of the river. It’s madness […] [What would be] a ten-minute conversation takes a day of everyone’s time.

2. We need overarching governance across the nation

Currently, the parallel and competing governance structures operating at federal level and within states make collaboratively managing crises extremely difficult.

As one respondent, discussing division among states on crisis governance, explains

It’s almost like nobody wants to compromise because they are so wedded to their system, or their view of the world, that we may as well be seven different nations and actually have hard borders, not soft borders.

Why do we persist with isolated and siloed disaster response planning in which systems and processes are not integrated enough?

Effective governance calls for clarity around who is responsible and takes action during crisis. In other words, it must be clear who does what, and when. For instance, our respondents consistently refer to misguided federal interventions using Australian Defence Force resources during recent fires, floods, and COVID-19.

Without an overarching and integrated governance system that defines competencies across the nation we will continue to see confused reactions to crises that undermine Australia’s disaster resilience.

3. We must better understand the community’s role in major disasters

Collaboratively dealing with disasters requires action across government, emergency services, and the community.

Our respondents highlight that when and how the community should be involved is, however, far from being clear. One person told us:

One of the things we need is community involvement to be much more systematised, so that we can bring to bear the skills, assets, and knowledge of the community to play a proper role during emergencies.

They refer to communities feeling at the same time “overwhelmed”, “abandoned”, and “under-used” during recent disasters.

As one respondent affected by the 2019-2020 bushfires outlined:

I can say from personal experience that the sense of being abandoned is something I never want to feel again […] it’s horrid. And I’ve been in the military, I’ve been in emergency services, done all those bloody things, overseas aid and development and the like […] but when you feel abandoned in your own town, you really do start to wonder what’s going on in the sector.

In future, we need robust collaborative governance arrangements that enable collective action. We must design processes and systems in a way that allows communities and emergency services to work effectively together to improve safety before, during, and after crises.

These issues have not been front and centre during the election campaign, despite the floods and severe rains seen in recent weeks and months.

In the months ahead, we hope, these issues will become the subject of debate, government commitment – and eventually new policy.

Now is the moment to take stock and prepare for a future of worsening disasters. Doing so will, more than ever, require collective action through good governance and collaboration.

Read more:
Governments love to talk about ‘shared responsibility’ in a disaster – but does anyone know what it means?

Markus A. Höllerer receives funding from the Australian Research Council. This story is part of The Conversation’s Breaking the Cycle series, which is about escaping cycles of disadvantage. It is supported by a philanthropic grant from the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

Graham Dwyer currently receives funding from Natural Hazards Research Australia. He has previously received funding as part of the Swinburne Seed Grant Scheme of which the Country Fire Authority were an industry partner. He previously worked at the Department of Justice, Victoria, Australia in the police and emergency services portfolio.

Paul Spee receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Jaco Fourie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. In a year of endless floods, why isn’t disaster governance front and centre in the election campaign? – https://theconversation.com/in-a-year-of-endless-floods-why-isnt-disaster-governance-front-and-centre-in-the-election-campaign-183026

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lara Herrero, Research Leader in Virology and Infectious Disease, Griffith University

So, you’re starting to feel unwell. Your throat hurts, your head aches, you feel tired and you’ve developed a cough.

You’ve recently had COVID but as we now know, it’s possible to be reinfected.

But how sick will you get the second time?

While your symptoms are likely to be less severe, in some cases they can be worse. Here’s what we know so far.

After COVID, you don’t need to test for 12 weeks

Current guidelines define you as a “cleared case” for 12 weeks after ending COVID isolation. If you develop COVID-like symptoms in that 12 weeks, you don’t need to be tested.

The science behind this 12-week timeframe is evolving. The original idea was that if you have recovered from COVID, and you have a healthy immune system, you will have developed immunity against reinfection. And this will protect you for at least 12 weeks.

As case numbers in Australia increase, the reports of reinfections are also on the rise. And it’s likely reinfection is occurring sooner than we first thought.

What’s happening in our body?

In order for a person to fight off re-infection with any virus, they must have developed a protective immune response.

Two main factors decide whether a person will have a protective immune response:

1) how long a person’s immune memory lasts

2) how well that memory recognises the virus, or a slightly different virus.

Immune memory is made up of many critical parts, which each play a role in the protective army of your immunity. The biggest players in protective immunity memory are your B-cells (which mature to make antibodies) and your T-cells (which destroy virus-infected host cells).

So far, the evidence suggests immune memory for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, lasts for months or even years when it comes to B-cells and the antibodies they produce.

Similarly, current evidence shows the memory T-cells can last over a year.

This means that for a healthy person, immune memory for SARS-CoV-2 appears to last for a year, against reinfection with the exact same virus.

So why the reinfections?

One clear explanation for reinfection is the virus is mutating. SARS-CoV-2 replicates fast and in doing so makes replication errors. We refer to these errors as mutations. Over time, the mutations accumulate and a new sub-variant is born.

Since the start of the pandemic we have seen the parental Wuhan strain mutate to Alpha, Beta, Delta and now Omicron.

Read more:
Why are there so many new Omicron sub-variants, like BA.4 and BA.5? Will I be reinfected? Is the virus mutating faster?

The current theory is that immunity from one variant may not provide enough protection from another.

Data so far suggest the Omicron variant is better at immune escape than its predecessors. This means Omicron is “escaping” the immune memory created by SARS-CoV-2 infections from other variants such as Delta, Beta or Alpha.

Emerging data is now showing sub-variants of Omicron can also escape immunity from a previous Omicron variant. This means a person might be able to get an Omicron reinfection.

A small, yet to be peer-reviewed study from Denmark found that in unvaccinated people, reinfection with Omicron BA.2 is possible following a primary infection with Omicron BA.1. Despite this finding, the study also concluded reinfection rates were low and therefore rare.

With winter approaching and case numbers climbing, we’re also seeing the emergence of new sub-variants such as BA.4 and BA.5. Early evidence shows these new sub-variants are even better at escaping immune memory than the parental BA.1 Omicron.

Read more:
BA.2 is like Omicron’s sister. Here’s what we know about it so far

What about severity?

For those who get a reinfection, disease severity appears to be milder and less likely to result in hospitalisation. This is likely because the immune memory can recognise at least part of the re-infecting virus.

However it’s difficult to measure disease severity on a population level. A systemic review of case studies found that while some second infections were milder, this was not so in all cases. Some reinfections resulted in worse outcomes, including death. (During this study period, one of the original strains, B.1, caused most primary infections, with reinfections caused by Alpha or Beta variants.)

But while Omicron appears to be causing more reinfections than other variants, there isn’t enough robust data to make firm conclusions about the severity of reinfection with Omicron or other variants.

What we know for certain is we need more data from more people to say that reinfection is less severe.

We also know from several studies that being vaccinated does provide protection from reinfection, including in previously infected people who then receive subsequent vaccines.

Another reason to get boosted

A recent study that’s yet to be peer-reviewed found immunity from Omicron BA.1 variant drops around 7.5 fold with the new Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 variants. This means the antibodies you produce from a BA.1 infection, which are able to detect and neutralise the BA.1 virus, are 7.5 times less able to recognise and neutralise BA.4 and BA.5 than BA.1.

This study also found vaccination plus natural exposure to Omicron BA.1 gave five times greater protection to Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 than the immunity from natural exposure to BA.1 alone.

Read more:
COVID reinfections: are they milder and do they strengthen immunity?

Data also shows the strongest protective immunity comes from a mix of triple vaccination and natural infection.

A further study found this type of hybrid immunity protects better against both reinfection and hospitalisation than natural immunity alone, highlighting the importance of vaccination and vaccine boosters.

So the question remains: if our immune memory lasts for at year, but is too specific to recognise the new variants, will we need a new vaccine every year? Time will tell.

Lara Herrero receives funding from NHMRC on emerging infectious diseases.

– ref. Got COVID again? Your symptoms may be milder, but this won’t always be the case – https://theconversation.com/got-covid-again-your-symptoms-may-be-milder-but-this-wont-always-be-the-case-182154

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Baddeley, Associate Dean Research/Professor in Economics, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney

If a week is a long time in politics, three years is an eternity. Since the 2019 election, Australia has endured devastating megafires and unprecedented floods. Meanwhile, news of extreme weather such as India and Pakistan’s horrific heatwaves has poured in. And international pressure to act on climate change is growing.

Perhaps in response, Australian views of climate change have become less partisan. A new poll my colleagues and I organised of around 1,100 Australians found almost 90% now believe climate change is a problem. That’s an average across the political spectrum, from the Greens to One Nation.

Not only that, but almost 80% of us are optimistic, believing it’s possible for Australia to halve its emissions by 2030.

In a similar poll we undertook before the 2019 election, Australians were far more divided. Then, just 48% of right-leaning voters (those intending to vote for the Liberals, Nationals, One Nation or United Australia parties) thought government policies to address environmental damage and climate change were important compared to 84% of left-leaning voters (those intending to vote for the Greens or ALP).

In our 2022 poll, views converged. Now, similar proportions of left- and right-leaning voters rate highly the need for government action on environmental damage and climate change.

What does that mean for this Saturday’s federal election? I can’t say with any certainty, given other issues are front of mind for many people – including the cost of living, house prices and rising interest rates. But the findings do challenge the pervading belief Australians are split on the need for climate action.

What did we find?

In short, we found concern for the environment is nearly universal. Fully 94% of all voters believe environmental damage is a problem and 89% believe climate change is a problem.

And as for readiness to change or help, that’s high across the spectrum too. We found 84% of people would now choose an electric vehicle if they were cheaper than internal combustion engine equivalents, while 95% report recycling regularly and the same proportion believe people should do their bit for the environment.

Read more:
No, Mr Morrison. Minority government need not create ‘chaos’ – it might finally drag Australia to a responsible climate policy

Economic factors still play a role, of course, with motivations for conserving energy more focused on costs than the environment: 82% conserve energy because they are worried about climate change, but 95% conserve energy because they are worried about their bills.

These results come from our polling undertaken over May 10-12 of around 1,100 Australian voters using a representative sample collected by market research company PureProfile. I asked the same questions on environment and climate change, as well as additional questions, as those included in a poll my colleagues and I conducted just before the 2019 election. The answers uncovered strong feelings about environmental issues – from across the political spectrum.

Of course, political preferences still matter. When we asked respondents what government priorities on the environment should be, we saw marked differences.

Overall, the Greens and the ALP – unsurprisingly – ranked highly on policies to address environmental damage, climate change, renewable energy and threatened habitats/endangered species, with little difference in priority between these four issues.

Those intending to vote for an independent candidate showed similar patterns but with a stronger preference for policies on renewable energy and threatened habitats/endangered species, and weaker preferences around climate change policies.

Liberal Party voters were less concerned about all four sets of priorities, and Nationals voters less so again. Overall, the Nationals voters rated policies around energy and the environment least strongly compared to the other groups of voters.

We unearthed interesting differences between voters in favour of newer fringe parties. One Nation voters seem especially keen on policies to address threatened habitats but were the least keen to see more climate change policies, while United Australia Party voters were similar to One Nation, but not nearly so keen on policies to address threatened habitats and endangered species.

When we posed questions about the current government’s record on the environment, we found significant dissatisfaction, especially for those intending to vote for an independent candidate. While those planning to vote Liberal ranked the government record relatively highly, the overall energy and environment report card was poor, with respondents giving the government an average of just under 5/10.

We also asked respondents general questions about environmental and energy policies relevant to any level of government. Interestingly, the leading preference was for more government investment in public transport. This was followed by incentives for green homes, for example via subsidies for insulation, with better regulation of emissions and plastics also ranked highly.

Given the political climate wars raging over the last decade, it’s no surprise a carbon tax was the most unpopular preference.

So what should we take from this poll? Voters have become more concerned about environmental issues broadly, and are willing to do their part.

Read more:
How do the major parties rate on climate policies? We asked 5 experts

That’s a promising sign, if the next government can use this groundswell to bring in policies that would substantially accelerate our progress towards net zero emissions, and tackle our many other environmental threats.

In recent years, Australia has gained a reputation for dragging its heels on climate action. This survey shows that there is a real, significant appetite for action across the spectrum of Australian voters.

Michelle Baddeley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Almost 90% of us now believe climate change is a problem – across all political persuasions – https://theconversation.com/almost-90-of-us-now-believe-climate-change-is-a-problem-across-all-political-persuasions-183038

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Dempsey, Senior lecturer, University of Canterbury

Energy is the double-edged sword at the root of the climate crisis. Cheap energy has improved lives and underpinned massive economic growth. But because most of it comes from burning hydrocarbon fuels, we’re now left with a legacy of high atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) and an emissions-intensive economy.

But what if we could flip the energy-emissions relationship on its head? We would need a technology that both generates electricity and removes CO₂ from the atmosphere.

The good news is this technology already exists. What’s more, New Zealand is perfectly positioned to do this “decarbonisation” cheaper than anywhere else on the planet.

And the timing couldn’t be better, with the government’s first Emissions Reduction Plan (released yesterday) calling for bold projects and innovative solutions.

We research how to burn forestry waste for electricity while simultaneously capturing the emissions and trapping them in geothermal fields. Since forests remove CO₂ from the atmosphere as they grow, this process is emissions negative.

This also means a carbon “tax” can be turned into a revenue. With New Zealand’s CO₂ price at an all-time high of NZ$80 per tonne, and overseas companies announcing billion-dollar funds to purchase offsets, now is time for cross-industry collaboration to make New Zealand a world leader in decarbonisation.

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage

Artificial carbon sinks are engineered systems that permanently remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) achieves this by trapping the CO₂ from burned organic matter – trees, biowaste – deep underground. An added bonus is that the energy released during combustion can be used as a substitute for hydrocarbon-based energy.

Read more:
As NZ gets serious about climate change, can electricity replace fossil fuels in time?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said climate mitigation pathways must include significant amounts of BECCS to limit global warming to 1.5℃. However, the technology is still new, with only a few plants around the world currently operating at scale.

Cost is a major barrier. New projects need expensive pipelines to move the CO₂, and deep injection wells to store it underground. Because CO₂ is more buoyant than water, there are also concerns that any gas stored underground might leak out over time.

This is where geothermal fields can help.

Geothermal systems for BECCS

Geothermal is a reliable source of energy in New Zealand, supplying almost 20% of our electricity. We use deep wells to tap into underground reservoirs of hot water, which then passes through a network of pipes to a steam turbine that generates electricity.

Afterwards, the water is pumped back underground, which prevents the reservoir from “drying out”. New Zealand companies are world leaders at managing geothermal resources, and some are even experimenting with reinjecting the small amounts of CO₂ that come up with the geothermal water.

Herein lies the opportunity. Geothermal systems already have the infrastructure needed for a successful BECCS project: pipelines, injection wells and turbines. We just need to figure out how to marry these two renewable technologies.

We propose that by burning forestry waste we can supercharge the geothermal water to higher temperatures, producing even more renewable power. Then, CO₂ from the biomass combustion can be dissolved into the geothermal water – like a soda stream – before it is injected back underground.

Read more:
IPCC report: how New Zealand could reduce emissions faster and rely less on offsets to reach net zero

Projects in Iceland and France have shown that dissolving CO₂ in geothermal water is better than injecting it directly. It cuts the cost of new infrastructure (liquid CO₂ compression is expensive) and means reinjection wells built for normal geothermal operation can continue to be used.

Unlike pure CO₂ that is less dense than water and tends to rise, the reinjected carbonated water is about 2% heavier and will sink. As long as equal amounts of geothermal water are produced and reinjected, the CO₂ will stay safely dissolved, where it can slowly turn into rocks and be permanently trapped.

How do the numbers stack up?

Our initial modelling shows that geothermal BECCS could have negative emissions in the order of -200 to -700 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt hour of electricity (gCO2/kWh). Compared to about 400 gCO₂/kWh of positive emissions from a natural gas power plant, this is a dramatic reversal of the energy-emissions trade-off.

Applied to a geothermal system the size of Wairakei (160 megawatts), a single geothermal BECCS system could lock away one million tonnes of CO₂ each year. This is equivalent to taking two hundred thousand cars off the road and, at current prices, would net tens of millions of dollars in carbon offsets.

These could be traded via the Emissions Trading Scheme to buy valuable time for industries that have been slow to decarbonise, such as agriculture or cement, to get down to net zero.

Even better, most of New Zealand’s geothermal fields are located near large forests with expansive forestry operations. Estimates put our forestry waste generation at around three million cubic meters each year. Rather than leaving it to rot, this could be turned into a valuable resource for geothermal BECCS and a decarbonising New Zealand.

We can start doing this now

According to the IPCC it is “now or never” for countries to dramatically decarbonise their economies. Geothermal BECCS is a promising tool but, as with all new technologies, there is a learning curve.

Teething problems have to be worked through as costs are brought down and production is scaled. New Zealand has a chance to get on that curve now. And the whole world will benefit if we do.

Read more:
IPCC report: this decade is critical for adapting to inevitable climate change impacts and rising costs

The success of geothermal BECCS will turn on new partnerships between New Zealand’s geothermal generators, manufacturers and the forestry sector. Forestry owners can help transition wood waste into a valuable resource and drive down gate costs.

Most importantly, geothermal operators can leverage their vast injection well inventories and detailed understanding of the underground to permanently lock up atmospheric carbon.

With the government tightening emissions budgets and investing billions in a Climate Emergency Response Fund, now is the perfect time to make geothermal BECCS work for Aotearoa New Zealand.

David Dempsey receives funding from the New Zealand Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (Empowering Geothermal).

Nothing to disclose.

Rebecca Peer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How NZ could become a world leader in decarbonisation using forestry and geothermal technology – https://theconversation.com/how-nz-could-become-a-world-leader-in-decarbonisation-using-forestry-and-geothermal-technology-182760

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steven Hamilton, Visiting Fellow, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

At their first televised debate four weeks ago, Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese were asked by an audience member how each would help his kids afford to buy their own home. Neither had much to offer.

Now, in the final week of the campaign, housing affordability is a red-hot point of difference between the parties.

Each plan reflects the core values of the party pushing them, but both sidestep the major reforms needed to improve housing affordability for all.

On the plus side, at least both are somewhat limited, which means neither should push up house prices dramatically if implemented, contrary to some hyperbolic warnings.

Coalition’s ‘super home buyer’ scheme

The Coalition’s plan, announced on Sunday, is to allow first-home buyers to withdraw up to 40% of their superannuation balance, up to a maximum of A$50,000, for a mortgage deposit. They must return the amount withdrawn, plus or minus any capital gain or loss, when they sell the property.

This amounts to borrowing from your super account. You lose the return your super savings would have accrued, but you gain the return on your house, in the form of avoided rent and any capital gain.

Read more:
View from The Hill: Scott Morrison tells Liberal launch ‘I’m just warming up’, as he pitches on home ownership

The concept is similar in principle to a recommendation of the recent parliamentary inquiry into housing affordability, chaired by Liberal MP Jason Falinski, calling for super balances to be used as collateral for home loans.

But allowing buyers to actually withdraw money from their super may require super funds to change their investment strategies – investing more in higher-liquidity, lower-return assets – which might be problematic for some super funds with a lot of younger members.

Around a quarter of all homes sold are to first-home buyers, amounting to around 150,000 houses in the past year. While all first-home buyers would be eligible, not everyone would access the scheme, nor use it in the same way.

Some won’t have enough super for it to make much difference. Some will choose not to use the scheme because they don’t want to draw down their super.

Some will offset part of their own private saving or take out a smaller loan. Some will get into the market a little earlier than they otherwise would have. And some will get into the market when they otherwise would not have.

While some have claimed the Coalition’s policy would undermine people’s security in retirement, in fact the opposite is the case.

Home ownership and superannuation are the two pillars of independent financial security in retirement. Owning a home will be preferable to super for many because it is exempt from the pension assets test.

And given housing is by far the biggest form of consumption, owning a home is a far less risky form of retirement savings, albeit potentially at a lower return.

What really matters is the total quantum of retirement assets, and that those assets are allocated in the way that best secures their retirement. So a scheme that enables portability between different forms of retirement saving makes sense.

Labor’s ‘help to buy’ scheme

Labor’s plan is to become an equity partner in 10,000 homes a year. It will chip in up to 40% of the cost of a new home, and 30% for an existing home.

To qualify, individuals must earn less than $90,000 a year, and couples a combined $120,000 a year. There will be a cap on the property value, according to location. In Sydney this will be up to $950,000.

Labor’s scheme is far more generous than the Coalition’s, but it also covers far fewer people.

The 10,000 lucky buyers a year who qualify will be able to finance a property worth an extra $380,000. In contrast, the Coalition’s scheme gives buyers up to $250,000 more in purchasing power (but a lot less for the vast majority with lower super balances).

Labor’s policy also entails a very large subsidy.

If you or I invested 40% in an investment property, we’d also receive 40% of the rental income. Under Labor’s plan, the government won’t. Taxpayers will therefore gift up to 40% of the rent the occupier would otherwise have paid – worth up to around $15,000 a year – forever.

A small portion will be offset by the owner-occupier picking up the govermnment’s share of rates, insurance, and maintenance. But the rest is gravy. That’s why it costs more than $80 million a year.

In previous shared-equity schemes (proposed as far back as 2003) the government was to chip in a proportion of the equity, but took a higher proportion of the gain to compensate for this loss.

The income limit of $90,000 is also well above the median income of $61,000, making the subsidy a generous form of middle-class welfare. Like a lottery for a lucky few.

Labor argues the scheme will make money for taxpayers through capital gains when properties are eventually sold. But consider that instead the government could invest $10 billion a year in listed property trusts, which would provide a lower-risk portfolio of housing assets at a far higher return. So, relatively speaking, Labor’s policy would run at a loss.

How much will they push up house prices?

Both policies attempt to improve housing affordability by addressing the demand side of the market. That means they both suffer from the problem of all such schemes: by increasing buyers’ purchasing power, they push up prices.

But commentary suggesting either will create a house price explosion is overstated in my view.

First-home buyers are about a quarter of the market. And about half of all 40-year-olds have less than $80,000 in their super, which means the maximum they could withdraw under the Coalition’s scheme is $30,000. And it’s not a first home owner’s grant – participants have skin in the game.

Labor’s plan is of course capped at 10,000 places.

I expect both parties’ schemes to put some modest upward pressure on house prices in the short term – as all schemes focused on demand do – blunting some of the help they offer. The Coalition’s scheme a bit more so given it will extend to more buyers, albeit at a lower amount.

Read more:
For first homebuyers, it’s Labor’s Help to Buy versus the Coalition’s New Home Guarantee. Which is better?

Supply is the real problem

It’s hard for me to get too enthused about any scheme that increases demand but does nothing about the supply side, which is the ultimate source of high house prices.

Australia’s population has doubled since 1970, and yet we all live, more or less, in the same places, fighting over the same bits of land. With greater density, the cost of that land rises. We can only contain housing costs by using that land more efficiently, or having people move to where land is more plentiful.

Increasing housing supply isn’t simply a case of building more houses. It’s also about having the right kind of homes in the right locations. On that, devolving decision making down to the street level, as proposed in the United Kingdom, is a promising idea.

And Labor’s plan to set up a National Housing Supply and Affordability Council is a welcome development that will hopefully help achieve some progress.

Read more:
More affordable housing with less homelessness is possible – if only Australia would learn from Nordic nations

Tax and transfer policy also plays a role. State government stamp duty discourages turnover, which prevents better housing matches, driving up prices. Exempting the family home from federal taxation and the assets test for the pension does the same, discouraging downsizing.

The Coalition’s proposal, backed by Labor, to allow people to sell their house, downsize, and put the proceeds in super will help. But we need more.

Negative gearing is a perennial villain but is over-hyped. It’s not clear it has a meaningful effect on house prices, and removing it actually introduces a distortion into the tax system. The real culprit is the overly generous 50% discount on capital gains tax, which is why people use negative gearing in the first place.

Read more:
Election surprise. Negative gearing isn’t a rort — but something else is

After the reception received by an ambitious (albeit somewhat misguided) tax policy agenda at the 2019 election, it may be a while before we make any meaningful progress on that front. For now, the choice between the major parties is between these relatively limited demand-side schemes. Take your pick.

Steven Hamilton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Super for housing or the government as a co-owner: how Liberal and Labor home-buyer schemes compare – https://theconversation.com/super-for-housing-or-the-government-as-a-co-owner-how-liberal-and-labor-home-buyer-schemes-compare-183113

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Hocking, Emeritus Professor, Monash University

As we enter the final week of the election campaign with its scrappy debates and breathlessly seized “gotcha” moments, the impact of Gough Whitlam’s electoral reforms can be seen at every stage.

From votes for 18-year-olds, senate representation in the ACT and Northern Territory, equal electorates and “one vote one value”, Whitlam’s commitment to full franchise and electoral equity remain central to our electoral process.

No less significant is the innovative and dynamic election campaign built around the central theme “It’s Time” which propelled him into office.

“It’s Time” was the perfect two-word slogan, encapsulating the urge for long overdue change after 23 years of coalition government, and carrying that momentum into the election itself.

This was Australia’s first television-friendly, focus-group driven, thoroughly modern campaign. Its impact on political campaigning in this country was profound.

Behind the glitz of the theme song and the over 200 policies enunciated in the policy speech, a raft of celebrities and leading figures from the arts – authors, artists, actors, musicians – played a major role.

Read more:
Few restrictions, no spending limit, and almost no oversight: welcome to political advertising in Australia

Not just political star power

The presence of well-known identities at the launch in Blacktown Civic Centre lent an air of celebration – of celebrity and even glamour – to the dour set pieces that owed more to the old-fashioned stump speeches of decades earlier, still used by the outgoing Prime Minister Billy McMahon.

Led by soul singer Alison MacCallum, household names like singers and musicians Patricia Amphlett “Little Pattie”, Col Joye, Bobby Limb, Jimmy Hannan, actors Lynette Curran from the popular ABC series Bellbird, Terry Norris and Chuck Faulkner generated an immense reach for It’s Time both as a song and as a political moment.

Patricia Amphlett recalls:

The ‘It’s Time’ commercial was far more effective than anyone could have imagined. Long before Live Aid, it came as a shock to some people that popular personalities would stand up publicly and be counted for a cause.

They were not simply there for added political star power. They were there because the arts had been neglected and constrained by decades of unimaginative conservative government – and they shared a mood for change.

‘Intellectual and creative vigour’

Whitlam harnessed the deep sense of frustration of the arts community after years of “stifling conservatism” in arts policy settings. Direct political intervention in literary grants also had a stultifying effect on cultural production.

The author Frank Hardy’s successful application for a Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowship in 1968 had been vetoed by the Gorton coalition government because Hardy was a member of the Communist Party.

Whitlam was a member of the committee that had awarded Hardy the fellowship and it drove his determination to ensure arts bodies operated as autonomous decision-makers.

He brought arts policy to the fore both in the development of his reform agenda and during the election campaign.

He drew a direct link between a healthy cultural sector, national identity and a flourishing political sphere:

the relation between politics and culture is clear and real. Political vigour has invariably produced intellectual and creative vigour.

‘Refresh, reinvigorate and liberate’

The rapid elevation of cultural policy as a major area for change soon after Whitlam came to office on December 5 1972 gave voice to his pre-election commitment to the arts community “to refresh, reinvigorate and liberate Australian intellectual and cultural life”.

Just six days later, in the ninth of the 40 decisions made by the first Whitlam “duumvirate” ministry, the government announced major increases in grants for the arts in every state and the ACT and forecast a major restructure of existing arts organisations.

On January 26 1973, Whitlam announced the establishment of the interim Australian Council of the Arts. A range of autonomous craft-specific boards would sit under it – Aboriginal arts, theatre, music, literary, visual and plastic arts, crafts, film and television – with the renowned arts administrator H.C. Coombes as its inaugural head.

After years of delay, a newly appointed interim council for the National Gallery began work in 1973 on the new gallery, with James Mollison as interim director.

Read more:
James Mollison: the public art teacher who brought the Blue Poles to Australia

This was just the beginning of “a cultural sea change” in the arts.

There would be reforms in radio with Double J, later Triple J, and the first “ethnic” broadcasting in Australia through 2EA and 3EA.

The film industry was rebooted through the establishment of the Australian Film Commission, the Australian Film & Television School and Film Australia, and an increase in the quota for Australian made television and films.

The Public Lending Rights scheme was introduced to compensate authors for the circulation of their works through libraries.

Kim Williams describes the “innovative thinking” behind the close involvement of arts practitioners in policy development and administration as:

a new ground plane for empowered decision making by artists in a profoundly democratic action for the arts.

A new choice

At a time of relentless funding reductions, cost-cutting and job losses, renewal and revival is desperately needed across our most important cultural institutions.

The dire effects of this decade of neglect can be seen most starkly in the 25% staff cuts and under-resourcing of the National Archives of Australia which, as the highly critical Tune review made clear, has led to the disintegration of irreplaceable archival material including recordings of endangered Indigenous languages. The 2022 budget only continued those reductions.

We are again at a time when renewal and reinvigoration of the arts is urgently needed – yet it has scarcely featured thus far in this campaign.

The Liberal Party’s policy statements do not feature the arts. In contrast, Labor’s Arts policy, announced last night, promises a “landmark cultural policy” which would restore arms-length funding, explore a national insurance scheme for live events and ensure fixed five-year funding terms for the ABC and SBS.

There is a choice for the arts on 21 May between stasis and renewal. I’ll take the renewal, and hope it becomes a renaissance.

Read more:
Why arts and culture appear to be the big losers in this budget

Jenny Hocking receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. ‘The relation between politics and culture is clear and real’: how Gough Whitlam centred artists in his 1972 campaign – https://theconversation.com/the-relation-between-politics-and-culture-is-clear-and-real-how-gough-whitlam-centred-artists-in-his-1972-campaign-181243

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Peterie, Research Fellow, University of Sydney

Some people in immigration detention could be asked to pay for their own incarceration, as part of a new border protection policy announced by the Coalition on Friday.

The government has indicated “foreign criminals” awaiting deportation will be the main targets of the policy. This is an ambiguous statement given the government’s propensity to criminalise refugees and asylum seekers. But it likely refers primarily to people whose visas have been cancelled on “character grounds” under provisions in the Migration Act. This includes many people who have no serious criminal history.

The proposal would see detainees charged $456 for each day they’re detained. With average detention times currently exceeding 680 days, the debts could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This isn’t the first time the Coalition has sought to charge immigration detainees for their time in detention. Morrison’s policy closely resembles a Howard-era scheme that was dismantled by the Rudd Labor government in 2009.

This time, however, Labor has backed the plan.

Whatever political thinking underlies the major parties’ positions, charging detainees for their incarceration is a bad move. Beyond cynical political calculation, this is a policy with no redeeming features.

Nobody is ‘free riding’ in detention

According to Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, making detainees pay for their detention is necessary to prevent “free riding”.

Hawke said on Friday:

We don’t believe foreign criminals deserve free rent, food and medical treatment while we go through the process of deporting them.

The idea that people in detention are living comfortably at taxpayers’ expense is far from accurate. Having researched immigration detention for years, I can attest that conditions in detention are far from hospitable.

People in detention endure constant surveillance and minimal privacy. Access to health care, recreational facilities, and legal support is highly limited. Detainees are regularly moved between interstate detention centres without warning or explanation. Friends and family members in the community struggle to visit. Frequent changes to internal rules breed instability, and centre guards sometimes use excessive force.

A wealth of evidence links immigration detention with psychological injuries including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety. Rates of self-harm in Australian detention centres are alarmingly high.

Read more:
Self-harm in immigration detention has risen sharply. Here are 6 ways to address this health crisis

People in detention do not choose to remain there as a lifestyle preference. If they elect to endure these conditions and fight their deportation in the courts, they typically do so because returning to their country of citizenship isn’t a viable option.

In some cases, detainees come from refugee backgrounds and fear violence or persecution in their country of origin. In others, detainees have spent years in Australia and don’t wish to abandon their lives and loved ones for a country that’s no longer “home”.

The right to appeal these deportation decisions is fundamental for justice. Yet pressuring detainees to leave Australia swiftly seems to be a key rationale for the policy change.

Read more:
New Zealanders have a right to be angry when Australia deports a 15-year-old

Recovering funds may prove impossible

Until now, the Coalition hadn’t sought to revive its previous scheme. One likely reason is because the Howard government’s measures simply didn’t work. Howard’s debt recovery program cost more to administer than it raised in revenue.

Part of the problem with a model where detainees pay is that many debtors will ultimately be deported to or resettled in a third country. This makes debt recovery difficult.

Another issue is that people in detention often have few financial resources. It’s both futile and cruel to ask people with almost nothing to pay for the privilege of being held against their will.

Speaking to these challenges last week, Hawke indicated funds would be recovered by seizing detainees’ assets in Australia. This is a troubling proposition, not least because Australia’s immigration detention system is officially administrative not punitive. That is, people in detention are not held as part of a criminal sentence. Legally speaking, detention isn’t supposed to be a punishment.

Seizing assets certainly appears punitive. It would compound the social and financial pressures detainees already face as a consequence of their incarceration. And it would impose serious collateral harm, punishing detainees’ children, partners, parents and families.

Read more:
‘People are crying and begging’: the human cost of forced relocations in immigration detention

Is this all just an election ploy?

Coming just one week before the election, the political calculation of Morrison’s policy revival is difficult to ignore. “Border protection” has traditionally been a vote winner for the Coalition, and the polls aren’t looking good for the incumbent prime minister.

In 2001, Howard famously came from behind to claim electoral victory on the back of the Tampa Crisis and the Children Overboard Affair. If last week’s Murdoch media headlines are any indication, Morrison may be hoping to achieve a similar boost through his own border rhetoric.

Read more:
Issues that swung elections: Tampa and the national security election of 2001

If the exorbitant costs of detention are a concern for the government, one viable solution would be to only use detention as a last resort.

For its part, Labor has been accused of performing an about-face on its previous position. This policy shift speaks to Labor’s apparent fear of being wedged on the issue of immigration.

Labor and the Coalition therefore head to the election with remarkably similar policies on immigration detention and border security. Both support offshore processing and boat turn-backs. And both seem intent on tightening the screws on people already suffering in Australian detention centres.

Michelle Peterie receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. ‘Futile and cruel’: plan to charge fees for immigration detention has no redeeming features – https://theconversation.com/futile-and-cruel-plan-to-charge-fees-for-immigration-detention-has-no-redeeming-features-183035

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Bekessy, Professor in Sustainability and Urban Planning, Leader, Interdisciplinary Conservation Science Research Group (ICON Science), RMIT University

The animals and plants at risk of extinction finally made it onto the political agenda last week, as Labor and the Greens launched biodiversity policies ahead of the federal election.

Labor’s policies included new funding for the Great Barrier Reef and long-term commitments for threatened species. The Greens announced A$24.4 billion of environmental funding over the next decade. Meanwhile, the Coalition has no new election commitments to biodiversity that we could find, beyond recent budget announcements.

Protecting biodiversity isn’t just about the niceties of saving cute and cuddly animals. It’s about maintaining our health and prosperity, productive agriculture and liveable cities.

So let’s take a closer look at political party promises, and whether they’re enough to turn things around for Australia’s threatened species.

How does Labor rate?

Labor’s policy platform is spruiked as “a better future for the Great Barrier Reef and Australia’s unique environment”, and pledged an additional $194.5 million in reef protection programs.

One welcome initiative is the long-term commitment for a Saving Native Species program. It includes $224.5 million of funding to deliver a national conservation strategy, fund rangers, and deal with the backlog of 200 recovery plans that remain unwritten for species such as the greater glider and the Eltham copper butterfly.

Also welcome is funding for 1,000 full-time Landcare Rangers across the country, which can contribute significantly to land restoration, tackling weeds and feral animals.

Like the Coalition, Labor has also promised resources to bolster Landcare, the Indigenous Protected Area network, and increase the number of Indigenous Rangers.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Labor and the Coalition is the response to a 2020 independent review of Australia’s key environment law, by Professor Graeme Samuel. The review made a suite of recommendations to reform the law and protect biodiversity, but almost none have been implemented by the current government.

The extent these reforms are rolled out will determine the fate of species and ecosystems under pressure from land clearing and habitat degradation. Shadow environment minister Terri Butler said Labor would “provide a full government response to the Samuel review”.

Read more:
How do the major parties rate on climate policies? We asked 5 experts

Labor has also committed to establishing an Environment Protection Agency, calling it a “strong cop on the beat that is genuinely independent of the government”.

This is a significant point of difference with the Coalition, which rejected this recommendation of the Samuel review. Indeed, a lack of independence and transparency remains a weakness in the Coalition’s environmental regulation and reporting.

The elephant in the room is Labor’s plan to tackle climate change. While it’s a big improvement on the Coalition plan, it’s still consistent with a 2℃ global increase in temperature this century.

This temperature rise will likely lead to a dramatic loss of species, and drive collapse of key ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef and alpine woodlands.

What about The Greens?

The Greens commitment to $24.4 billion over the next decade is for “restoring wildlife habitat, planting 2 billion trees by 2030 and re-establishing green space in our cities, regions and suburbs”.

This is a significant step up in resources compared with the Coalition and Labor platforms. It’s also consistent with an economic analysis we conducted on the funding required to bring threatened species back from the brink.

Other welcome commitments include ending native forest logging, grants to stop pollution in the Great Barrier Reef, and implementing water recovery targets and buyback schemes in the Murray Darling Basin.

Like Labor, the Greens would also strengthen Australia’s environment laws and create an an independent watchdog to enforce them.

In terms of climate change, the Greens want to cut Australia’s emissions to net zero by 2035. This is consistent with the internationally agreed level of global warming of 1.5℃ this century, and will have a better outcome for species than under 2℃.

Read more:
Scorched dystopia or liveable planet? Here’s where the climate policies of our political hopefuls will take us

The Coalition has shown its colours

Given the Coalition has been in power for nine years, it has already shown its colours when it comes to caring for nature.

For example, it has approved the destruction of more than 200,000 hectares of threatened species habitat in the last decade, and cut funding to the environment department by over 40% since 2014.

We scoured Coalition websites, but found no new election commitments beyond the March budget announcements, which included $100 million for threatened species protection and habitat restoration, and $74 million for koalas.

A spokesperson for Environment Minister Sussan Ley told The Age last week that another term of government would see the Coalition reform national environment laws and provide greater certainty, spending $52 million on environment assessments with states and territories to cut “green tape”.

The Coalition’s climate policy is consistent with global warming of 3-4℃ this century. This would be catastrophic for biodiversity, and render tropical coral reefs functionally extinct.

Read more:
Fail: our report card on the government’s handling of Australia’s extinction crisis

What are we waiting for?

Other political parties lack specific biodiversity policies, but make relevant – though very problematic – commitments.

One Nation, for example, state “we are the only political party to question climate science” and believe “Australia should withdraw from the United Nations Paris Agreement”. Katter’s Australian Party are “pro culling flying foxes” (of which some are endangered) and “aims to eliminate crocodiles from our waterways that pose a threat to human life”.

The policies of “teal” independents generally make sense for the environment. For example, Wentworth’s Allegra Spender states: “By investing in and protecting Wentworth’s stunning natural environment we’ll protect our health, wellbeing and tourism”. Likewise, Kooyong’s Monique Ryan wants to cut emissions at least 60% by 2030.

While land clearing and native timber harvesting remain prickly issues for the Coalition and Labor respectively, saving threatened species isn’t all about politically painful decisions. Many could be saved through universally popular actions that would generate employment across the nation.

This includes dramatically increased spending to control weeds and feral species. Restoring degraded habitats would not only help biodiversity, but also help heal cultural heritage and mitigate emissions.

Supporting Australian conservation organisations, Traditional Owners, land managers, zoos and herbaria to protect the most threatened species while bigger solutions come down the line, would also go a long way.

The science and Traditional Knowledge required to chart this path and monitor benefits are largely in place already. So what are we waiting for?

Read more:
‘Existential threat to our survival’: see the 19 Australian ecosystems already collapsing

Sarah Bekessy receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Ian Potter Foundation and the European Commission. She is a Board Member of Bush Heritage Australia, a member of WWF’s Eminent Scientists Group and a member of the Advisory Group for Wood for Good.

Brendan Wintle has received funding from The Australian Research Council, the Victorian State Government, the NSW State Government, the Queensland State Government, the Commonwealth National Environmental Science Program, the Ian Potter Foundation, the Hermon Slade Foundation, and the Australian Conservation Foundation. Wintle is a Board Director of Zoos Victoria.

– ref. I want my vote to count for nature: how do the major parties stack up? – https://theconversation.com/i-want-my-vote-to-count-for-nature-how-do-the-major-parties-stack-up-183023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cherine Fahd, Associate Professor, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

Review: Son of Byblos, directed by Anna Jahjah for Brave New World Theatre Company

The downstairs theatre at Belvoir might be small but the energy conjured from Son of Byblos is mighty. Written by James Elazzi and directed by Anna Jahjah, this small budget project shows how vital independent storytelling is in Australia today.

In another cross-cultural comic drama Elazzi presents the final part of a trio that included Omar and Dawn and Lady Tabouli, examining the forbidden territory of queer sexuality in a Lebanese-Australian cultural context.

A looming wedding creates a pressure cooker situation for queer cousins Adam (Mansoor Noor) and Claire (Kate Bookallil). Claire returns from Lebanon intent on marrying a guy she barely knows and who can’t speak English.

Adam tries desperately to convince her she is making a mistake, but Claire wants a family and to have kids. In her Lebanese family, she can’t if she’s a lesbian.

With his cousin turning “hetero” overnight, Adam feels abandoned. If Claire turns straight, he will be gay alone. His alienation from his family – and now Claire – has him unravelling

Adam briefly battles his way back to heterosexuality by reuniting with his ex, Angela (Violette Ayad). Angela tries to pretend that Adam isn’t gay. She is desperate to move out of home; marrying him is her only escape.

Adam, Claire and Angela have a desperate need for independence from the parental stranglehold. In their Lebanese families, heterosexual marriage is the way to freedom.

Read more:
Lady Tabouli review: a hilarious comedy about suffocating expectations

Sexual freedoms

The intensity of these domestic scenes are momentarily paused when Adam has sex with anonymous men in public toilets. These scenes play out like fragments. Dispersed throughout the story they give Adam and the audience breathing space.

With the freedom of anonymous sex Adam literally and metaphorically steps off the family stage. He takes his hetero mask off and is able to be free.

These scenes have a conceptual importance, but director Anna Jahjah doesn’t quite make enough of these moments. We are given an Adam who is hiding with his boxer shorts like a scared cat in the dark.

The sex scenes nevertheless provide poetic pause where Adam can be himself. With men sucking his cock, Adam is rescued, but only briefly.

In a playful scene of sexual freedom, Claire dresses Adam in her red engagement dress (the dress she would have worn had she been allowed to get engaged to her ex-girlfriend Kate). The beauty of this scene is in Adam’s flirtatious and camp drag performance, at distinct odds with the anger and defensiveness he displays around his father John (Simon Elrahi).

Read more:
Omar Sakr’s ‘epic, stunningly dirty’ debut novel challenges macho heterosexual myths of Arab-Australian culture

Stories of art

Elazzi demonstrates a nuanced and powerful understanding of Lebanese family life.

Carol (Deborah Galanos), Adam’s mother over salts the meals. She tries to stand up to her husband’s patriarchal rule by taking up tango. Adam fails in his attempt to core koosa (zucchini).

His father is obsessed with him being an engineer (because he thinks engineering makes money and web design doesn’t). The plastic-covered tablecloth is frantically changed when Angela, the guest, arrives unannounced at dinner.

The simple fact that these details are played out on an Australian theatre stage is significant. The woman sitting next to me turned and said: “so amazing and so unusual to hear our stories come to life like this.”

For Lebanese-Australians, there are few stories that play out in the public sphere. They are not the stories of art. The stereotypical narrative of crime, terror, war and abuse continue as dominant narratives.

Read more:
From ‘Leb bread’ to ‘Leb Kelly’, finally we’re seeing more Middle Eastern faces on TV

Despite the rhetoric of inclusivity, artists of Lebanese heritage face personal and political obstacles. Professionally, it is difficult to find a place in Australian radio, theatre and television for stories that aren’t Anglo-Australian or dumbed-down multicultural stereotypes.

On the home front, there are the challenges of persuading family and the Lebanese community that creativity is valuable, not to mention the need to be oneself if that self is queer.

Elazzi must be tough. He is a rare artist in Australian theatre prepared to take risks to write different stories that make us think and more importantly make us laugh.

Son of Byblos is at Belvoir Downstairs until May 21.

Cherine Fahd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Son of Byblos brings a nuanced and powerful understanding of Lebanese family life to the Australian stage – https://theconversation.com/son-of-byblos-brings-a-nuanced-and-powerful-understanding-of-lebanese-family-life-to-the-australian-stage-180954

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jess Carniel, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland

The 66th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest was held in Turin, Italy on Saturday night. The extravaganza didn’t disappoint in delivering our annual dose of ballads, bops and politics.

The answer to the question of whether Eurovision is political is always yes, but with various qualifications. After all, can a contest of nations ever be truly apolitical?

Can culture and politics ever be extracted from each other? Isn’t all art political?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provides an inevitable backdrop to understanding this year’s Eurovision competition. This context infuses a more specific meaning into the standard platitudes of peace and unity that are often included as part of the show.

Host country Italy’s decision to begin the grand final with a rendition of Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance set the tone for the 2022 contest.

State politics and values politics

Eurovision claims to be apolitical. Its famous politics rule states: “the Eurovision Song Contest shall in no case be politicised and/or instrumentalised and/or otherwise brought into disrepute in any way.” In practice, it focuses mainly on direct expressions of state-based politics.

For example, Belarus was excluded last year for lyrics perceived to be mocking protesters of the Lukashenko government. (They were ultimately ejected entirely from the European Broadcasting Union – Eurovision’s organising body – for suppressing journalists’ freedom of speech.) Georgia withdrew in 2009 when the EBU rejected its entry for being a barely-concealed dig at Putin.

By contrast, performances that express values-based politics – love, peace, tolerance, acceptance, and unity – are the bread-and-butter of the contest. But this has not always been consistently applied.

Read more:
‘Walking through Europe’s door, singing’ – How Eurovision helps define Europe’s boundaries (and why Ukraine will likely win)

In 2017 (in Kyiv, no less), the EBU censured Portuguese artist (and eventual winner) Salvador Sobral for wearing a sweatshirt reading SOS Refugees to his press conferences. Sobral emphasised that it was “not a political message – it is a humanitarian and essentially human message”.

Sympathy and solidarity

There were more overt political statements made throughout the evening. Many voting spokespersons – usually those about to deliver 12 points to Ukraine – wore yellow and blue ribbons or even spoke directly about the conflict. Several performers, such as Iceland’s Systur and Germany’s Malik Harris, stuck Ukrainian flags on their instruments.

The Icelandic delegation are no strangers to flag-based political statements. In 2019, the EBU fined Iceland when artists Hatari held up scarves in support of Palestine during their televote results. The difference between 2019 and 2022 in the accepted interpretation of the rules is that Ukraine is not a “contested territory”. A similar controversy ensued when Armenian artist Iveta Mukuchyan held up a flag for Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory contested with Azerbaijan.

Ukraine’s victory has been framed by many as a sympathy vote, but this doesn’t give a full picture of their success. While political sympathy undoubtedly contributed to their ultimate success over other favourites – the United Kingdom, Sweden and Spain – it is important to acknowledge that the folk-contemporary fusion featured in winning song Stefania has already proven popular with Eurovision audiences in recent years. In 2021, the Ukrainian entry Go_A came fifth with their folk-EDM hit, Shum (and were unplaced but popular in the cancelled 2020 cohort of songs). Ukraine are also considered a strong Eurovision nation – they are the only country with an unblemished record of qualifying for the grand final.

Eurovision is often spoken of as a form of cultural diplomacy and a platform for countries to display and gain soft power. Another term used in popular culture studies, participatory culture, refers to how the public don’t simply consume popular culture but actively participate in its production, creation and meaning-making.

Eurovision and Ukraine’s landslide success in the popular vote demonstrates what we can think of as participatory diplomacy – when an audience actively participates in the cultural platform to shape their own political message in response to what is communicated to them.

A return to language diversity

This year, we saw a return to language diversity, with 11 out of the 25 grand final entries featuring languages other than English. Notably, it was the first time since 2011 that a song in French did not feature. The French entry was sung in Breton, the local dialect of France’s westernmost region, Brittany.

It was also the first time since 1994 that Lithuania entered a song completely in Lithuanian (their 2001 entry featured two Lithuanian verses in an otherwise English-language song). And, of course, the winning entry was in a language other than English for the second year running.

We can hope that this signals an era of greater optimism about the appeal of non-English songs at the contest and the power of song to transcend language barriers.

The future of the contest

Traditionally, the winning country hosts the next Eurovision. The EBU acknowledge that there will be “unique challenges” in hosting the 2023 contest. Currently, it is difficult to predict whether it will be possible to host in Ukraine itself. Should Ukraine be unable to host, it won’t be the first time that another country has stepped in to assist.

The events of this year also highlight that it might be time for the EBU to revisit its politics rule to ensure that it is applied consistently to the various conflicts its member states are involved in.

And those member states might look to Eurovision with a renewed appreciation for its diplomatic value.

Jess Carniel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Ukraine’s Eurovision win shows us that despite arguments to the contrary, the contest has always been political – https://theconversation.com/ukraines-eurovision-win-shows-us-that-despite-arguments-to-the-contrary-the-contest-has-always-been-political-182767

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laurie Berg, Associate Professor, University of Technology Sydney

If the COVID years have taught us anything about migration, it is that Australia depends on it. About 7% of our workforce holds a temporary visa. When many international students, backpackers and other temporary visa holders suddenly left during COVID, the ensuing staff shortages revealed how vital these workers are to the Australian workforce.

Responding to industry demands for workers, a new agriculture visa was created, Labor has promised an extended Pacific Australia Labour Mobility Scheme, and international students were given unlimited work rights.

But the government elected on May 21 will inherit Australia’s dark legacy of entrenched wage theft among migrant workers.

A recent open letter signed by 14 legal service providers, churches and other advocacy organisations across Australia has called on the government to enact three key reforms to address theft of migrant workers’ wages:

1. enable migrant workers to act against exploitative employers by providing effective visa protections to whistle-blowers who report exploitation to the Fair Work Ombudsman or make claims through the courts.

2. implement an efficient, accessible, and inexpensive claims process for workers to promptly recover their wages and entitlements; and

3. extend the Fair Entitlements Guarantee to employees on temporary visas (a scheme of last resort that provides unpaid employee entitlements when an employer becomes insolvent).

Read more:
Closing the loophole: a minimum wage for Australia’s farm workers is long overdue

Theft of migrant workers’ wages is rampant

Our surveys of over 8,000 international students between 2016 and 2019 consistently found the majority were underpaid.

One in four earned less than half the minimum casual hourly wage. Nine in ten suffered wage theft in silence and took no action. Nine in ten believed many or most other migrant workers were underpaid.

A March 2022 Senate Committee examining unlawful underpayment of employees described the problem as “systemic, sustained and shameful”.

Allowed to continue

Exploitation flourishes because regulators do not routinely detect or punish labour law noncompliance. Most workers cannot pursue their employer directly because the system is stacked against them at every stage of the wage claim process.

The Employment Rights Legal Service (ERLS), which helps exploited migrant workers in NSW and coordinated the open letter, has said many migrant workers don’t complain because they fear losing their visa or job. For many, their fear is well-founded. One ERLS client, Sofia, told them:

I might quit and try and recover my wages and my power in the future but for now, my visa is my main concern and I just want to leave this stress behind me.

Sofia had submitted to her employer’s unlawful demands to repay part of her wages, and unwittingly committed a migration offence. This could result in cancellation of her visa if brought to the immigration department’s attention.

Another international student client, a cleaner, put it:

My visa is my main concern: 100%. I’m not going to risk my visa to chase my wages if there is only a chance or a hope that the government will protect me.

The Fair Work Ombudsman has an agreement with the immigration department that workers reporting exploitation likely will not lose their visa.

But the labour regulator still shares information about workers’ visa breaches with immigration and migrant workers are not assured of protection.

Few advances have been made since our 2019 report, but international students and backpackers are now returning in increasing numbers.

Thousands of foreign workers will also be brought in from the Pacific and Southest Asia to pick fruit and work in abattoirs across the country.

It is now clear previous lacklustre approaches to addressing wage theft – such as increasing funding for the Fair Work Ombudsman – have not worked.

Many businesses remain unconvinced exploitative treatment will be meaningfully penalised.

Seizing the moment

The next government needs to make a choice.

Its first option is to seize the moment while there are still relatively low numbers of migrant workers in Australia to fix the parts of the system that enable wage theft to flourish.

Meaningful reform would help repair the damage caused by Australia’s treatment of migrant workers during COVID by clearly signalling that migrant workers are valued members of the Australian community and workforce.

The second option is to continue tinkering around the edges of the problem, and consciously bring hundreds of thousands of young migrants into exploitative underpaid jobs they will likely endure in silence.

If the government opts to implement meaningful reform, it must accept that wage theft among migrant workers is systemic and not the exceptional misconduct of a few bad apple employers.

Businesses that do the right thing are forced to compete with the countless others that comfortably adopt wage theft as a business model, knowing they will evade detection or enjoy impunity.

The government must confront the reality that migrant workers cannot safely report exploitation, and enforcement mechanisms are inadequate.

Curbing forced labour and modern slavery

In 2019, a whole-of-government migrant worker taskforce made 22 detailed recommendations.

The government announced its support for all the recommendations, but has implemented almost none.

Since then, many parliamentary inquiries have echoed these recommendations and made others. These recommendations, too, have been largely ignored.

It is time for an Australian government to set its sights higher and adopt an evidence-based and systemic approach to tackling migrant exploitation, learning from approaches that are working in other countries.

If Australia is genuinely committed to ensuring labour compliance and curbing forced labour and modern slavery, it cannot afford to miss this opportunity.

Read more:
All these celebrity restaurant wage-theft scandals point to an industry norm

Laurie Berg has previously received funding from StudyNSW, Department of Treasury, NSW State government for research on international students. She is Co-Executive Director of Migrant Justice Institute, which undertakes strategic research and legal action to achieve fair treatment, enforcement of rights and access to justice for migrant workers. This story is part of The Conversation’s Breaking the Cycle series, which is about escaping cycles of disadvantage. It is supported by a philanthropic grant from the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

Bassina Farbenblum has previously received funding from StudyNSW, Department of Treasury, NSW State government for research on international students. She is Co-Executive Director of Migrant Justice Institute, which undertakes strategic research and legal action to achieve fair treatment, enforcement of rights and access to justice for migrant workers.

– ref. Australia is bringing migrant workers back – but exploitation is still rampant. Here are 3 changes needed now – https://theconversation.com/australia-is-bringing-migrant-workers-back-but-exploitation-is-still-rampant-here-are-3-changes-needed-now-182761

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Janine Mohamed, Distinguished Fellow and CEO, The Lowitja Institute

The Close the Gap 2022 report calls on governments to make “large-scale systemic reforms to truly empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.” This is a call to recognise and support self-determination and leadership.

It is no accident that the very first recommendation of the Close the Gap Campaign Report 2022 is for the full implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and particularly for a Voice to Parliament.

The Uluru Statement is described as a “gift to all Australians” by one of its architects, Pat Anderson, the long-term chair of the Lowitja Institute.

The Uluru Statement is foundational for change in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and well-being. Therefore, it must be core to the promises made by all parties in the lead-up to the federal election and beyond. Yet it has been sidelined by the Coalition government so far, and is at risk of being abandoned at the coming federal election.

Read more:
Victoria’s prison health care system should match community health care

Transforming power

At this federal election, change that tinkers at the edges is not good enough.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people need the system – the health and education systems in particular but, also the Australian political system – to listen and respond to Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing. To be free of racism. To hear our Voice.

The full implementation of the Uluru Statement, and its call for Voice, Treaty and Truth would be a huge step forward. This would be an opportunity to address the health inequity between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and non-Indigenous Australians.

Recognition of the distinct identities and cultures of Indigenous Australia is vitally important for the health and well-being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. For our peoples, culture is key to understanding our health and well-being, shaping the connection between self to Country, kin, community and spirituality. Moreover, it is important for the collective pride of all Australians.

A Voice to Parliament would provide the basis for a better social contract – where both Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people know where they stand. This is an opportunity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to work together on equal ground to find solutions to problems affecting both Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people.

The Voice to Parliament could help ensure calls from community to address issues such as climate change, the COVID pandemic, escalating mental health issues, deepening chronic health conditions, and other crises are heard and acted on by government.

As we await the full implementation of the Uluru Statement, Lowitja Institute is calling on the next federal government to invest in robust, equitable, transparent, and culturally safe health systems that meet the needs of our peoples.

We have identified five key priorities the federal government needs to address:

1. Embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research leadership

Governments need to invest in:

• research into the impacts of systemic racism in health systems led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations and researchers

• a long-term National Anti-Racism Framework, including monitoring and reporting on experiences of racism and the impacts of systemic racism in health systems

• a feasibility study for a national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Research Ethics Committee to embed ethical frameworks that are based in our own cultural laws and lore.

2. Implement the social and cultural determinants of health

We are calling on governments to support strengths-based approaches to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health policy by:

• investing in initiatives that strengthen cultural authority, including traditional community governance and nation building, such as Aboriginal community controlled health organisations

• investing in cultural safety and cultural determinants training for the healthcare workforce to address and eliminate racism.

3. Invest in data governance and infrastructure

In line with the government’s commitments under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, we are calling on governments to invest in:

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led data at the local level that is owned and accessed by our peoples, with the principles of data governance and sovereignty that respects our right to data ownership, management, collection, dissemination and analysis

• national digital infrastructure, such as an Indigenous Well-being Index, to measure the socioeconomic well-being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Not unlike Canada’s Community Wellbeing Index, this would streamline access to Indigenous health data and analysis for research and policy sectors, and most importantly for our own communities to make informed decisions for our future.

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4. Commitment to workforce development

We are also calling on governments to:

• invest in infrastructure to develop both the expertise and workforce of Indigenous health researchers, including through additional research projects and scholarships, and

• increase support and investment in workforce development to support the growth of the Aboriginal community controlled organisations and community-led health services.

5. Action to address climate change

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a huge stake in the climate crisis.

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Indigenous peoples across the globe are uniquely equipped to deal with the climate crisis – so why are we being left out of these conversations?

Not only because it is already disproportionately affecting the health and well-being of our peoples, but also because our knowledges and cultural practices hold solutions to the climate crisis. We are intimately connected to Country. Our local knowledges are precious, and we must be part of the conversation when it comes to climate adaptation and mitigation planning.

A Voice to Parliament can provide an avenue for this wisdom to be formally recognised.

It’s time to step up

The Uluru Statement from the Heart provides the blueprint for the political transformation this nation requires. The federal government must embrace, respect and respond to its calls for self-determination, and walking together. This is a vital step to close the gap in health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

We must work together if we are to transform our political systems. We need non-Indigenous people to walk behind and with us on this journey, to know when to stand up and when to step back. Now is the time to step up and call for change.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Uluru Statement must be core to promises made by all parties in the lead-up to the federal election – https://theconversation.com/the-uluru-statement-must-be-core-to-promises-made-by-all-parties-in-the-lead-up-to-the-federal-election-182296

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Bateson, Clinical Associate Professor, Discipline of Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Neonatology, University of Sydney

Intrauterine devices (IUDs) are small T-shaped plastic devices containing either copper or a low dose of progestogen hormone. Lasting five to ten years, they provide highly effective contraception and are chosen by increasing numbers of users of all ages from adolescence to perimenopause.

The main device sold in Australia is the Mirena Hormonal IUD, which is also used to manage heavy periods and can be part of hormonal menopause therapy. While insertion is usually well tolerated, it can also cause discomfort and pain, or severe pain for a small number of women. So it’s important to know what to expect during and after the procedure, and what pain relief options are available.

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What happens during an IUD insertion procedure?

The procedure lasts about ten minutes. Once positioned on the clinic bed, the doctor (either a GP or gynaecologist) or nurse performs what’s called a bimanual examination by inserting gloved fingers into the vagina while the other hand is on the lower abdomen to check the size, position and shape of the uterus.

An instrument called a speculum is then inserted into the vagina to allow the cervix to be seen. This is usually not uncomfortable or painful, though some conditions may make it more difficult, including vaginismus (an involuntary tightening of the pelvic muscles during vaginal penetration) and vaginal dryness. These can usually be treated before insertion to reduce discomfort.

The speculum is generally in place for around two to five minutes. To ease the insertion, most practitioners place an instrument called a tenaculum on the cervix to steady the uterus and straighten the cervix. This can sometimes cause a quite sharp pain, which usually settles in a few seconds.

A small fine instrument called a sound is passed through the cervix to measure the length of the uterus, and the IUD is then placed at the top of the uterus. This part of the procedure can cause cramping pain and make some people feel a bit lightheaded.

Lastly, the threads attached to the bottom of the IUD are shortened, so they gently wind around the cervix. The speculum is removed and the IUD insertion is complete.

Why do some people experience more pain than others?

Despite many online reports of severe pain from insertion, a study (with partial funding from the manufacturers) which surveyed more than 1,800 women from 11 European countries having a hormonal IUD inserted found the majority experienced mild or moderate pain. Severe pain was experienced by 15.5% of those who had never given birth, 4.5% of those who had caesarean sections and 1.9% of those who had vaginal deliveries.

Overall, the pain during insertion of a Mirena IUD in 413 women in Brazil, of whom one-third had never given birth, was rated at around 4.4 to 6.6 out of ten, where ten is the worst pain possible. Apart from having given birth, other predictors of experiencing greater levels of pain include having painful periods and fear of pain, although people without risk factors may nevertheless experience pain and people with risk factors may remain free of pain.

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For women, even a small co-pay for contraception can be a big deal

There is also some evidence the newer hormonal IUD (brand name “Kyleena”), which is slightly smaller than the Mirena IUD, is easier to insert and causes less pain. A recent community study of Kyleena insertion showed that around two-thirds of those who had never given birth experienced no or mild pain while around 8% experienced severe pain.

What pain relief options are available?

Evidence-based recommendations for reducing insertion pain are limited but more research is underway. Most practitioners recommend taking an anti-inflammatory medication an hour before insertion. Stronger pain relief may be considered for those with particularly painful periods, a history of endometriosis or severe worries about the procedure.

An anti-nausea tablet can be helpful if there is vomiting with menstruation. Application of a local anaesthetic spray or cream to the cervix can decrease insertion pain, although this will add to the cost and time of the procedure and may not be offered by all practitioners.

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The “green whistle” Penthrox inhaler, an anaesthetic drug used in ambulances for trauma-related pain, is also being trialled.

Less commonly, some people choose to have their IUD inserted under twilight sedation which means staying in a day surgery or hospital for around four hours. While some family planning services offer sedation at low cost, it is not universally available due to long public hospital waiting lists or costly private clinic fees.

Being aware of this option and its pros and cons is important to help informed decision-making. Sedation risks, extra time off work and costs need to be balanced against the evidence that most people tolerate the procedure without sedation, experiencing mild or moderate pain. As local anaesthesia has proven benefits for IUD insertion-related pain relief, finding a practitioner who routinely offers this option can be important.

What to expect after the procedure

After insertion, people are asked to stay at the clinic for around 20 minutes and while most will be able to get home themselves, it’s better to arrange to be picked up or to catch a taxi in case there is pain that is not settling. Once home, hot packs and over-the-counter analgesics such as naproxen, ibuprofen or paracetamol can be helpful, and taking it easy for a day or two is usually advised.

Although intermittent cramps can last for a few months as the IUD “settles in”, our own clinical experience has shown this is particularly around menstruation.

But if pain is getting worse, is not helped by simple analgesics, or accompanied by a smelly or profuse vaginal discharge or fever, it is essential to seek medical advice.

An ultrasound would be organised and if the IUD is shown to be in the correct position, and there is no evidence of an infection, it would become a personal choice whether or not, or for how long, to persist. Around 11.5% of Mirena users and 17.5% of copper IUD users who have the IUD removed early cited pain) as part of their decision for premature IUD removal.

Knowledge is power

Seeking out credible information about the IUD insertion process from family planning websites, and talking to your doctor or nurse about what to expect during the procedure, including the available pain relief options, is essential. This can help overcome the anxiety that may come about from relying solely on online scare stories.

Deborah Bateson has attended advisory committees for Bayer and provided professional training for clinicians which have been sponsored by Bayer as part of her role as Medical Director of Family Planning NSW. She has never received any personal remuneration for these activities.

Kathleen McNamee’s employer, Sexual Health Victoria, has receives funding from Bayer Australia and New Zealand to train and support doctors and nurse in IUD insertion. She has not received any personal remuneration for these activities.

– ref. Considering an IUD but worried about pain during insertion? Here’s what to expect – https://theconversation.com/considering-an-iud-but-worried-about-pain-during-insertion-heres-what-to-expect-179831

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate C. Prickett, Director of the Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families and Children, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Urgent and bold – transformative even – budget decisions are needed if we are to get serious about the cost of living crisis and what it means for families and children living in or on the edge of poverty.

Our supposedly resilient economy, with its low unemployment, has clearly missed the memo on high inflation, housing costs and plummeting real wages.

Goods that all people typically need – such as food, housing and petrol – have seen New Zealanders spending an extra NZ$4,000 to $5,000 a year on the basics. In short, people are feeling the pinch.

And while it has been higher spending households that have experienced the largest increase in the cost of living (6.9% in the past year), lower spending households and beneficiaries – families least able to fund the rising costs – were not far behind (6.0%).

Failing to keep up

Understandably, then, the cost of living crisis has been dominating media headlines and political talking points. And while much of it appears aimed at the middle class, the crisis is surely having an impact on those with the least resources.

Indeed, although we do not have child poverty figures for the past year, there was an indication this crisis and the pandemic years have started to take their toll: declines in child poverty have slowed in the past year on multiple indicators.

In fact, one of the primary poverty measures we examine has risen: the proportion of children living in households with less than 50% of the median disposable household income (before housing costs are considered). This highlights again the disproportionate burden of the housing crisis on low-income families.

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Even recent increases in welfare payments have not been enough to stem these trends. Recent modelling suggests a majority of families receiving benefits will still not meet their household costs.

Furthermore, benefits have just switched from being pegged to inflation to being indexed to wage growth. Wage growth typically outpaces inflation, but not this year. What was meant to be (and should be in future) a good thing for family budgets is having an unintended negative effect.

Modest poverty targets

Of course, it’s not all about the pandemic or the economy. The government has the tools to change the child poverty calculus. Indeed, the 2017 Labour-led government came to power on a bipartisan mandate to reduce, if not eliminate, child poverty.

The landmark Child Poverty Reduction Act 2018 brought in shortly after Labour came to power, supported almost unanimously across political party lines, mandated the government set both intermediate (three year) and long-term (ten year) child poverty targets.

One telling sign of the government’s appetite for eliminating child poverty with this week’s budget can be seen in its second intermediate poverty target (covering the 2021-2024 period). Released in June last year, it was set amid uncertainty about the extent of the economic impact of the pandemic, and in the middle of a housing affordability crisis.

In fact, the policy brief recommending the new targets acknowledged the pandemic might unravel some of that earlier progress.

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Even with this uncertainty, however, the new targets Labour set rested on an assumption of a consistent and modest downward trend towards the long-term poverty target.

This suggests we’ll see a correspondingly modest approach to poverty reduction in the budget, in line with the past three years, which child poverty experts have decried as being not enough.

That uncertainty, coupled with high inflation and slipping real wages (fuelled by stressed supply chains and the war in Ukraine), means those families doing it tough now will likely keep doing it tough.

Bold policy moves needed

Big and brave policy moves are needed – and fast. Policies that redistribute support to those who need it most during these uncertain times are not unprecedented.

The US — the perennial social policy punching bag — set an example of what a sweeping attempt to alleviate poverty might look like during this pandemic with a series of stimulus payments and child tax credits in 2021. The child poverty rate halved from 10.5% in 2019 to 4.9% in 2021.

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The US example, however, also sent a warning: when those tax credits expired in January 2022, the child poverty rate jumped back up to 12.1%.

Working For Families (WFF) tax credits are one existing avenue for delivering income support for families. But a comprehensive review of the programme now under way will be too late to significantly influence this budget.

Watch those projected trends

Furthermore, the limited scope of that review, and already proposed changes to WFF, suggest a modest redistribution of tax credits from higher earning families to the lowest. And this will be mostly for families already in work rather than those without employed adults.

Various options for investing more in WFF, and redistributing tax credits more progressively, were presented to key ministers ahead of this year’s budget. The most generous option showed changes to WFF would lift 17,000 children out of poverty – a mere 1% drop on the poverty rate (before housing costs) from 2020-21.

It’s not to say this change to WFF wouldn’t help families — it would. But it falls short of what’s needed to meet the modest child poverty targets that were set, even before the full impact of the current economic climate is reflected in current and future poverty rates.

When the budget is released on Thursday, keep an eye on the child poverty projections. Anything short of a serious correction of current trends will signal the need for big, bold and urgent policy change in next year’s budget.

Kate C. Prickett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The cost of living crisis means bolder budget decisions are needed to lift more NZ children out of poverty – https://theconversation.com/the-cost-of-living-crisis-means-bolder-budget-decisions-are-needed-to-lift-more-nz-children-out-of-poverty-181466

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Dello-Iacovo, Casual academic, UNSW Sydney

Like Earth, planetary bodies such as the Moon, Mars, asteroids and comets contain substantial deposits of valuable resources. This has caught the attention of both researchers and industry, with hopes of one day mining them to support a space economy.

But setting up any kind of off-Earth mining industry will be no small feat. Let’s look at what we’re up against.

In-situ resource utilisation

When you think of off-Earth mining, you might imagine extracting materials from various bodies in space and bringing them back to Earth. But this is unlikely to be the first commercially viable example.

If we wanted to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, as NASA has proposed, we would need to resupply astronauts living there. Resources such as water can only be recycled to an extent.

At the same time, resources are extremely expensive to launch from Earth. As of 2018, it cost about A$3,645 to launch one kilogram of material into low Earth orbit, and more to launch it higher, or onto the Moon. It’s likely materials mined in space will be used in space, to help save on these costs.

Harvesting materials required on-site is called “in-situ resource utilisation”. It can involve anything from mining ice, to collecting soil to build structures. NASA is currently exploring the possibility of constructing buildings on the Moon with 3D printing.

Mining in space could also transform satellite management. Current practice is to de-orbit satellites after 10–20 years when they run out of fuel. One lofty goal of space companies such as Orbit Fab is to design a type of satellite that can be refuelled using propellant collected in space.

Even for low-Earth orbit satellites, the energy required to reach them from the Moon is less than that needed to reach them from Earth.

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What resources are out there?

When it comes to off-Earth mining opportunities, there are a few resources that are both abundant and valuable. Some asteroids contain vast amounts of iron, nickel, gold and platinum group metals, which can be used for construction and electronics.

Lunar regolith (rock and soil) contains helium-3, which may become a valuable resource in the future if nuclear fusion becomes viable and widespread. British company Metalysis has developed a process which could extract oxygen from lunar regolith.

Ice is expected to exist on the Moon’s surface, at permanently shadowed craters near its poles. We also think there’s ice beneath the surface of Mars, asteroids and comets. This could be used to support life, or be broken down into oxygen and hydrogen and used as propellant.

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How would we mine in space?

My (Michael’s) PhD thesis involved testing how exploration techniques would operate on the Moon and Mars. Our other work has included economic modelling for ice mining on Mars, and computer modelling on the stability of tunnels on the Moon.

Some proposals for off-Earth mining are similar to mining on Earth. For instance, we could mine lunar regolith with a bucket-wheel excavator, or mine an asteroid using a tunnel boring machine.

Other proposals are more unfamiliar – such as using a vacuum-like machine to pull regolith up a tube (which has seen limited use in excavation on Earth).

Researchers from the University of New South Wales Sydney and the Australian National University propose using biomining. In this, bacteria introduced to an asteroid would consume certain minerals and produces a gas, which could then be harvested and collected by a probe.

Huge challenges persist

Our work at UNSW’s Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research involves finding ways to reduce risks in a space resources industry. Needless to say, there are many technical and economical challenges.

The same launch costs that have so many eager to begin off-Earth mining also mean getting mining equipment to space is expensive. Mining operations will have to be as light as possible to be cost-effective (or even feasible).

Moreover, the further something is from Earth, the longer it takes to reach. There is delay of up to 40 minutes when sending a command to a Mars rover and finding out whether it was successful.

The Moon only has a 2.7 second delay for communications, and may be easier to mine remotely. Near-Earth objects also have orbits similar to Earth, and occasionally pass by Earth at distances comparable to the Moon. They’re an ideal candidate to mine as they require little energy to reach and return from.

Off-Earth mining would need to be mostly automated, or remotely controlled, given the additional challenges of sending humans to space – such as needing life support, avoiding radiation, and extra launch costs.

However, even mining systems on Earth aren’t fully automated yet. Robotics will need to improve before asteroids can be mined.

While spacecraft have landed on asteroids several times and even retrieved samples – which were returned to Woomera in South Australia, during the Hayabusa 1 and 2 missions – our overall success rate for landing on asteroids and comets is low.

In 2014, the Philae lander sent to comet 67P/Churyumov/Gerasimenko famously tumbled into a ditch during a failed landing attempt.

There are also environmental considerations. Mining in space may help reduce the amount of mining needed on Earth. But that’s if off-Earth mining results in fewer, and not more, rocket launches, or if the resources are returned to and used on Earth.

Although collecting resources in space might mean not having to launch them from Earth, more launches may inevitably take place as the space economy grows.

Then there’s the question of whether proposed mining techniques will even work in space environments. Different planetary bodies have different atmospheres (or none), gravity, geology, and electrostatic environments (for example, they may have electrically charged soil due to particles from the Sun).

How these conditions will affect off-Earth operations is still largely unknown.

But work is underway

While it’s still early days, a number of companies are currently developing technologies for off-Earth mining, space resource exploration, and for other uses in space.

The Canadian Space Mining Corporation is developing infrastructure required to support life in space, including oxygen generators and other machinery.

US-based company OffWorld is developing industrial robots for operations on Earth, the Moon, asteroids and Mars. And the Asteroid Mining Corporation is also working to establish a market for space resources.

Michael Dello-Iacovo is affiliated with the Animal Justice Party and Sentience Institute.

Serkan Saydam receives funding from ARC, ACARP, CRC-P, ESA, Australia – Korea Foundation. He is affiliated with UNSW Sydney (Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research) and School of Minerals and Energy Resources Engineering, International Society of Rock Mechanics (ISRM) Commission on Planetary Rock Mechanics, Society of Mining Professors, and the Fellow member of the AusIMM, member of AaEe, Engineers Australia, Australian Geomechanics Society, and AIAA.

– ref. Humans have big plans for mining in space – but there are many things holding us back – https://theconversation.com/humans-have-big-plans-for-mining-in-space-but-there-are-many-things-holding-us-back-181721

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Strangio, Professor of Politics, Monash University

Today we are running two longer articles looking at the men who are vying to be the next Australian prime minister. You can read Michelle Grattan’s profile of Scott Morrison here.

Karen Middleton’s 2016 biography of Anthony Albanese concludes with a speech he made that year, on the 20th anniversary of his election to parliament.

“I’m patient”, he told his clapping audience, “I’m patient — I’m a Souths fan”. The South Sydney Rabbitohs are the Rugby League club Albanese supports, which for the greater part of his adult life was notorious for its competitive under-performance.

The audience realised, of course, that in proclaiming his long-suffering dedication, Albanese was really alluding to his political vocation and his other underachieving “tribe” — the Labor Party.

Albanese’s journey in Labor politics has indeed been long and arduous. He was still a boy when he began accompanying his mother and grandparents to local branch meetings of the Labor Party; he remembers handing out for Gough Whitlam in 1972 when only nine. He formally joined the ALP as a teenager. Up to his ears in student Labor politics as an undergraduate, upon leaving Sydney University he went to work for the elder statesman of the New South Wales left faction, Tom Uren. By his mid-20s he was assistant secretary of New South Wales Labor, and won the seat of Grayndler for the ALP in 1996 on his 33rd birthday.

Even his path to leadership has been unusually slow. One has to go back to the middle of last century for an opposition leader who was older (56) and who had served for longer in the parliament (23 years) when first elected to that position.

His wait for the chance to become prime minister has been of far longer duration than most of Australia’s recent national leaders. Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison averaged only around a decade between entering parliament and attaining office. For Albanese, it will be a quarter of a century if Labor wins Saturday’s election.

To continue the slow burn theme, if Albanese is to be believed, his ambition for leadership formed late. Those who reach leadership positions are typically consumed with an aspiration for the top job from early in their parliamentary careers — if not before. They are fuelled by a sense of their own prime-ministerial destiny.

Albanese is different. On his telling, it was only in 2013, on the defeat of Rudd’s second government, that he first entertained thoughts of becoming leader. Until then he had contented himself with the role of “counsellor and kingmaker”.

And still he had to wait. Despite winning a comfortable majority of the rank-and-file vote, he narrowly lost the leadership to Bill Shorten in 2013 because several of his left faction Caucus colleagues defected to support Shorten. Albanese then had to stay his hand in 2016 when Shorten’s better-than-expected performance at that year’s election insulated him from a leadership contest. When Shorten seemed poised for victory in 2019, Albanese must have figured his chance to be party leader had passed. But then came “Morrison’s miracle” and Albanese emerged as the only candidate to succeed Shorten within a demoralised Labor caucus.

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Playing the long game has also been the hallmark of Albanese’s leadership over the past three years. Beginning with “listening tours” of the regions where Labor badly faltered in 2019 — most notably in Queensland — it has been painstaking and unglamorous graft.

As journalist Katharine Murphy has observed, to his detractors his approach has been akin to a campaign of “attrition”. Those critics have harped on the theme of his leadership being a small target and his program prosaic. This is not how Labor wins office, they have insisted. Drawing on a sample size of three — the number of times Labor has claimed government from opposition since the end of the second world war under the leaderships of Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Rudd — the critics have argued the template for Labor success is a bold, transformative reform program and a charismatic, popular leader. Under Albanese, they complain, Labor has neither.

One can quibble at the edges of the critics’ reading of history. Though Whitlam unquestionably heralded an expansive reform program in 1972, the Labor Party was sufficiently concerned about his image that it launched an unprecedented advertising blitz to humanise him in the eyes of the public.

When Hawke won in 1983, Labor’s program for government was all but subsumed by the leader’s messianic appeal as encapsulated in the slogan, “Bob Hawke Bringing Australia Together”.

Rudd’s victory in 2007 was on the back of a campaign in which Labor selectively staked out policy differences with the Coalition. The nerdy Rudd painted himself as more of a fiscal conservative than John Howard, and was reassuringly perceived as a kind of youthful version of the prime minister. In short, the idea of Labor relying on larger-than-life platforms and leaders to win government is exaggerated.

This is not to deny that under Albanese, Labor is running on a considerably less daring agenda than it did in 2019. Indeed, it is an irony — or confirmation that ideological tags count for nothing in the contemporary Labor Party — that the right faction’s Shorten campaigned on an aggressively redistributive program spiced by “class war” rhetoric about the “big end of town”. In contrast, the left faction’s Albanese has abandoned those redistributive measures and has been emollient in his language towards business.

The plan to curb franking credits was first to go under Albanese, followed by the dumping of plans for changes to negative gearing, capital gains and, most recently, family trusts. As well, Labor has announced that in government it will not repeal the third tranche of the Coalition’s tax cuts that benefit high income earners. Simultaneously, Albanese has portrayed himself as a friend of aspiration. He believes, he says, in an Australia “where nobody is held back and nobody is left behind”.

To be fair to Albanese, it makes sense Labor changed tack from 2019. The party’s review of that defeat blamed it on “a cluttered policy agenda that looked risky and an unpopular leader”. In a speech to the National Press Club on the release of that review, Albanese indicated he had got the message: “too many people were confused or even frightened by our policies”. Elsewhere, he has pointedly noted none of Labor’s past successful opposition leaders campaigned on increases in taxes.

If there is a playbook to Albanese walking away from the Shorten program, then it is from the other side of politics. In 1996, heeding the lesson of John Hewson losing the unlosable election three years earlier on a radical neoliberal manifesto headlined by a new tax (the GST), John Howard renounced the GST as well as other contentious policies from Hewson’s Fightback! program. Howard determinedly narrowed the points of difference with Prime Minister Paul Keating, driving the latter to distraction.

Albanese has been unabashed about his strategy of not rejoining the battles of 2019, declaring he has no intention to “relitigate the past”. To those who cavil that Labor has abandoned its ideals by dropping the redistributive policies he has been equally blunt: “One of my Labor principles is for Labor to win elections”. Paul is there a link for this pls? This might not be as caustic as Whitlam’s famed put-down of the Labor hard left: “Only the impotent are pure”, but the point is fundamentally the same. To change the nation, Labor first has to win at the ballot box.

The abandonment of the Shorten-era revenue measures has curtailed Labor’s scope for campaign initiatives. According to the Coalition, Albanese is like a thief in the night, trying to steal his way into office on a meagre policy program. This is largely unfair. Beginning at a leisurely pace, Albanese gradually accelerated the roll out of policies.

Labor entered the campaign proposing, among other things, major investments in aged care, childcare and social housing, manufacturing renewal, greater support for TAFE and universities, an upgrade of the electricity grid, a national anti-corruption commission and implementation of the Uluru Statement. During the campaign, this program has been buttressed by further promises in areas like health, housing and pay equity for women workers.

Another conclusion of Labor’s review of its 2019 election campaign was that there was an absence of a clear narrative binding together the party’s policies. Albanese too has struggled in that space. In the second half of 2021, he seemed to be feeling his way there by talking about the reconstructive role of government following the crisis of the pandemic. This was potentially redolent of a great Labor reformist era (post-war reconstruction) and a sharp contrast to Morrison’s “can-do capitalism” mantra. Yet his prosecution of the case for the transformative power of government has remained inchoate.

Albanese’s predilection, as exposed on the hustings, for wandering into verbal marshes has not helped either in providing coherence of theme. But the lack of a compelling story line also goes back to the abiding caution of his approach.

The party’s policy on a 2030 carbon emissions reduction target is an illustration. This is another area where Labor kept its powder dry, delaying the release of its target until after the Glasgow Climate Change Conference. When Albanese finally announced a reduction target of 43%, it was almost as if the policy dare not speak its name. He declared it “a modest policy. We do not pretend it is a radical policy”. Hardly the inspirational stuff of “the great moral challenge of our time”.

Read more:
Labor’s 2030 climate target betters the Morrison government, but Australia must go much further, much faster

Making amends for the disappointment of 2019 brings us squarely to the subject of leadership. If Shorten was a millstone on Labor’s vote, a perusal of opinion poll leadership ratings indicates Albanese, though not popular, has not been subject to anything like the antipathy that dogged his predecessor.

In the first half of this year, his leadership ratings edged into positive territory and, unusually for an opposition leader, he was nipping at the heels of the incumbent on the question of preferred prime minister. This was a good place to be.

Probably the most consistent take-out from the leadership polling over the past three years, however, is that Albanese has not made a major impression on the public. The relatively high number of respondents who have nominated “don’t know” when asked to rate his performance has been an indicator of this. The pandemic is one reason Albanese remained indistinct in the electorate’s mind. For stretches of the past parliamentary term, and particularly during 2020, he struggled for oxygen.

Yet undoubtedly the tepid response towards Albanese is also a function of the fact he has bent over backwards to be a non-threatening rather than arresting figure. For someone once styled as a warrior of the left, there has been nothing remotely incendiary from him.

That Albanese has journeyed a long way from his pugilistic younger days is a sign of maturity. But the charisma he displayed as a firebrand student politician has also leached away. He presents as a slightly rough-hewn, inoffensive type, workmanlike rather than exceptional. One senses he is more visceral than cerebral, with reserves of emotional intelligence. Colleagues testify that authenticity and decency are his defining attributes: a shorthand way of saying he is the antithesis of Morrison.

Altogether, Albanese’s is an unusually modest persona for an aspiring prime minister, which goes with his insistence he never had a sense of entitlement to leadership. At the same time, there is a core of resilience and self-belief. His inner strength is rooted in his hard scrabble backstory to which he routinely harks back. This is the story of being brought up as the only child of a single mother and invalid pensioner in council housing. His mother’s struggles are the lodestar of his political vocation.

In another way, though, Albanese was blessed as a child. Like past Labor luminaries, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating, he was the recipient of maternal special investment: what he remembers is his mother’s “absolute unconditional love” for him.

While he might not have believed it was his destiny to be prime minister, his mother harboured that ambition for him. Middleton’s biography records that she “believed he could go far — as far as a person can go in the Australian political system”.

What sort of prime minister can we expect Albanese to be if he wins power on Saturday? He has referenced Hawke and, to the gall of Liberals, even invoked Howard as prime ministers he will take a leaf from. The gold standard of modern Labor prime ministers, it is hardly surprising that Albanese looks to Hawke as a role model. He says that, like Hawke, he will govern by consensus, bringing business, unions and civil society together.

The transactional business of forging networks of support is second nature to Albanese: a craft he mastered as a left faction operative in the hostile environment of the right dominated New South Wales Labor Party.

There is evidence of his capacity for wrangling a middle ground. As leader of the House of Representatives during Gillard’s prime ministership, he was integral to the functioning of Labor’s minority government by closely liaising with the crossbenches. Gillard later remarked: “Albo is a very persuasive person. He’s good at talking people into things”.

While Albanese’s leadership style over the past three years has largely escaped analysis, it is notable he has mostly kept Labor united in common purpose. The walking away from the redistributive policies of the Shorten era required extensive consultation to work through the changes within the parliamentary party and beyond.

In the end, the result was achieved with surprisingly little rancour. Albanese’s collaborative abilities are also attested to by the strong leadership team he has assembled around him. In addition to his deputy, Richard Marles, and Labor’s talented shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, that leadership group includes Katy Gallagher, Mark Butler, Kristina Keneally, Penny Wong and Tony Burke.

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Like all Labor leaders since Rudd, Albanese insists he has learnt the lessons of the dysfunction of that period of government. He will observe “proper” processes allowing genuine debate in Cabinet. Albanese’s team approach is a welcome contrast to the Coalition side, with Morrison giving the impression of running the show himself. If elected, Albanese’s ability to orchestrate consensus will hold him in good stead for tackling thorny policy challenges of which there will be many ahead.

Still, questions linger about whether Albanese has the stuff to be a substantial prime minister. Although a gifted transactional politician, does he boast the erudition and imagination to meaningfully shape the nation? He has demonstrated a flinty pragmatism over the past three years, but less certain is whether he has the driving sense of purpose required to achieve hard-fought reform.

And, like the best leaders, has he the ability to modulate his approach? Can he switch to a more dynamic galvanising mode of leadership or will the circumspection that has defined him in opposition shackle him in government? On the other hand, just maybe his unassuming leadership will provide for a dogged but conscientious form of government that suits Australia’s purposes.

With Labor enjoying a substantial lead in the opinion polls, Albanese’s patience looks set to be rewarded on Saturday. If the polls are right, on two-party preferred terms, the ALP is on track to achieve at least as handsome a victory as when the party won office in 1972, 1983 and 2007. Albanese will have defied the critics and bent the template of how the ALP wins government from opposition. Non-heroic in leadership style, he will nonetheless be celebrated as a Labor hero.

But there remain gnawing fears in the Labor camp that a low primary vote, fickle preference flows and a patchy swing might yet deny them majority government. Should a hung parliament result from Saturday’s contest, Albanese’s persuasive capacities will be tested immediately in wooing the crossbenchers. The probability is that in any negotiations he will have a stronger hand than Morrison because of an edge in numbers and the fact he is unencumbered by the same baggage as the prime minister.

It will be a final minor delay in Albanese’s protracted journey to the political summit.

Paul Strangio does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. If the polls are right, he may soon be the next Australian prime minister. So who is Anthony Albanese? – https://theconversation.com/if-the-polls-are-right-he-may-soon-be-the-next-australian-prime-minister-so-who-is-anthony-albanese-177617