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

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the federal government’s employment white paper is “ambitious”. I’m not convinced.

A clearly ambitious statement would have specified a target for unemployment, ideally one that was a bit of a stretch.

The Keating Labor government’s Working Nation statement did that in 1994. Released at a time when unemployment was almost 10%, it specified a target unemployment rate of 5% – an ambition that served as a beacon for decades.

That target certainly needs to be updated. Unemployment is now well below 5%, meaning “full employment” is now much less than 5%. Yet the Albanese government has passed up a historic opportunity to say how much less, which it could have done by setting its own target.

Setting our sights below 5%

The white paper released on Monday defines full employment as a state in which “everyone who wants a job should be able to find one without searching for too long”. That means our unemployment target ought to be somewhere between zero and 5%.

Of course, the unemployment rate can never be zero.

There will always be people out of work while they are moving between jobs, what the white paper calls “frictional” unemployment. That will also be true when Australia’s mix of employers changes – what the paper calls “structural” unemployment, as new industries requiring one sort of training replace old industries that required another.

The white paper says what matters in addition to unemployment (539,700 Australians) is “underemployment” in which people work fewer hours than they want (1 million) and “potential workers” who would like work but aren’t actively looking and so aren’t counted as unemployed (1.3 million).

I get that these things matter. I get that we need, in the words of the white paper, “a higher level of ambition than is implied by statistical measures”.

What gets measured gets done

But that higher level of ambition ought not replace targets.

If a target isn’t specific, it isn’t a target at all (or at best it’s a fuzzy target). That means it’s less likely to be aimed at and less likely to be hit.

That’s how it’s been with full employment itself. In 1996 Treasurer Peter Costello and the man he appointed Reserve Bank governor, Ian Macfarlane, signed what became the first Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy, an agreement that’s been updated six times.

As with all of the agreements since, that first statement set out an inflation target (“between 2% and 3%, on average, over the cycle”) but not an employment target – even though both are meant to be objectives under the Reserve Bank Act.

As a result, Governor Macfarlane was able to step down ten years later, secure in the knowledge that on average he had hit the middle of the target band: 2.5% inflation. His successor Glenn Stevens stepped down ten years further on, quietly boasting the same thing.

But neither could make any boast about hitting the employment target – because there wasn’t one.

How failing to set a target costs jobs

The governor who has just retired, Philip Lowe, looks like he’ll hit an inflation average of 2.8%, which is pretty low given how high inflation has been lately.

But an estimate by former Reserve Bank staffer Isaac Gross, prepared using the Reserve Bank’s own economic model, suggests that in doing so he kept unemployment a good deal higher than it needed to be between 2016 and 2019 – the equivalent of 270,000 people being out of work for one year.

Read more:
The RBA’s failure to cut rates faster may have cost 270,000 jobs

Lowe wasn’t held to account for the extra unemployed in the same way as he is being held to account for his performance on inflation. Why? Because he was never actually given an unemployment target.

I am quite prepared to acknowledge that other measures of employment matter, underemployment among them. But here’s the thing: they move in line with unemployment.

When Australia’s unemployment rate falls, Australia’s underemployment rate falls, almost in tandem.

It’s easy to see why. As employers find it hard to hire new workers, they get existing workers to put in more hours. And retirees and others who haven’t been looking for work begin putting themselves out there.

Australia’s participation rate measures the proportion of the population making itself available for work. As unemployment has fallen, it has climbed to an all-time high.

Our unemployment rate is a proxy for what matters

This makes the unemployment rate just about the perfect proxy for everything else about the labour market that matters, and just about the perfect number to target.

The Albanese government could have recognised that this week – setting a stretch target of 3% (or even 4%) as an aspiration. Even that would have been less “ambitious” than Keating choosing 5%, when the rate was twice as high.

Treasurer Chalmers says the government didn’t set a target because apparently the unemployment rate doesn’t capture “the full extent of spare capacity in our economy or the full potential of our workforce”.

The saving grace is this government has a second chance at this. Chalmers is about to update the Reserve Bank’s statement of expectations, the one that until now hasn’t included a target for unemployment.

It would be open to him to put a specific target in there – making the RBA as accountable as it is now on inflation.

At the moment, it looks more likely Chalmers will adopt a recommendation of the independent review of the bank, which reported in March.

That review recommended the bank be required to produce its own “best assessment of full employment at any point time”, including its estimate of the lowest rate of unemployment that can be sustained without accelerating inflation.

It would be a small step forward. That full employment estimate would become a number to watch, in the same way as the bank’s performance on inflation is at the moment.

But it still won’t be an official government target. The Albanese government had an opportunity to live up to its ambitious rhetoric – and it passed.

Read more:
1 in 5 Australian workers is either underemployed or out of work: white paper

Peter Martin 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. The Albanese government blew its shot at setting a historic new unemployment target – https://theconversation.com/the-albanese-government-blew-its-shot-at-setting-a-historic-new-unemployment-target-214357

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

Dan Andrews has announced he is quitting, after nine years as premier and three election wins.

Andrews’ surprise announcement came early Tuesday afternoon. He said his resignation would take effect at 5pm Wednesday.

He told a news conference it was not an easy decision “because as much as we have achieved together, there’s so much more to do. But when it’s time, it’s time”.

He said recently, in talking to his family, “thoughts of what life will be like after this job has started to creep in.

“I have always known that the moment that happens it is time to go and to give this privilege, this amazing responsibility, to someone else.”

Andrews, 51, who became premier in December 2014, has been a highly controversial state leader, instigating the toughest lockdowns in the country during COVID. But despite criticisms of that, he won the November 2022 election handsomely. Andrews said he had never been focused on being “100 per cent popular”.

He said he came to his decision fairly recently. But it was right to “go when they are asking you to stay”.

“I am worse than a workaholic,” he said, with every waking moment consumed with the work. He did not know what he would do next. He wouldn’t do much for a while.

Andrews said when he had previously declared he would stay for the duration of this parliamentary term, “it was true then”. He had since changed his mind.

The state caucus will meet on Wednesday to anoint a new premier, with Deputy Premier Jacinta Allen widely favoured. Andrews said if there was a ballot he would be voting.

He had spoken to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who was “a bit shocked”. “I thanked him for the partnership.”

Earlier this year another longstanding Labor premier, Mark McGowan in Western Australia, resigned unexpectedly.

Michelle Grattan 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. Dan Andrews quits after nine years as premier of Victoria – https://theconversation.com/dan-andrews-quits-after-nine-years-as-premier-of-victoria-214372

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pi-Shen Seet, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Edith Cowan University

As part of the new employment white paper, the federal government has announced it is thinking seriously about a national skills passport.

It has set aside A$9.1 million to prepare a business case for the passport to “help workers promote their qualifications and businesses find more skilled workers”.

What might this involve? And is it a good idea? As our research shows, skills passports can build trust between employers and employees.

Read more:
1 in 5 Australian workers is either underemployed or out of work: white paper

What is the government proposing?

At this stage, the national skills passport is just a proposal and the government says it still needs to consult with businesses and state governments.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the government wants to develop a business case to “define the scope, outcomes and benefits” of a skills passport.

It would apply to anyone undertaking post-school vocational education and training or higher education. The idea is it would make it easier for employees to demonstrate their skills and for employers to hire candidates possessing the specific skills and qualifications they require.

Similar to other personal data on other government systems (such as My Health Record), it will create a one-stop, secure online repository where you can view and manage your skills, certificates and training. There would also be a digital certification system that would allow for information to be verified.

Where did the idea come from?

The idea of a skills “passport” (also known as a skills portfolio, learning passport, human capital account, life work portfolio, career passport and cumulative record of learning achievement) emerged at the end of the 1990s.

In recent years, skills passports have gained more attention due to the changing nature of work and education. This includes rapid changes in technology, combined with improved transport and communication systems and globalisation. This means workers are much less likely to stay in one job for a significant length of time.

Instead, they will have to retrain and learn new skills regularly to keep up with these changes. They may have different careers in multiple locations in different phases of life.

A skills passport should not just include transcripts (or results), but also other evidence of an individual’s skills and qualifications. This could include microcredentials, digital badges, portfolios, resumes and references.

Read more:
Explainer: what is credentialism and is a degree more than just a piece of paper?

Our research shows skills passports are important

Our 2023 research has shown digital initiatives that improve transparency – such as skills passports – help overcome information and trust gaps between employers and employees.

Besides showing relevant information about potential candidates in a standardised, unbiased manner, skills passports verify qualifications.

This reduces the problem of fake certificates and wrong information. Further, by showing all the skills on one platform, skills passports can help individuals, employers and educational institutions recognise more easily the skills individuals have developed at school, work and through life experiences.

Not only does it help people get jobs, it helps them plan how to further their skills.

What happens in other countries?

In 2004, the European Union launched the Europass initiative – a set of documents that help individuals communicate their skills and qualifications and make skills and qualifications more transparent and comparable across the EU. The Europass includes a CV, language passport, mobility document and qualifications supplement.

In 2019, Singapore introduced a digital skills passport. This is a digital record of an individual’s skills and qualifications, issued by accredited schools, polytechnics, universities and other training providers.

In the United States, large companies are taking the lead. In 2019 financial services firm JP Morgan created its own skills passport. This helps employees assess their skills and provides learning suggestions based on their current skills and role requirements.

What about Australia?

Australia’s national training authority started consulting on a skills passport as far back as the late 1990s. But progress has been slow. This is largely because of the complexities of the skills, training, education and employment systems in Australia.

Since 2015, Australia has had a “unique student identifier” for all vocational students. This is a unique reference number made up of ten numbers and letters and tracks students’ learning and qualifications. Since 2021, this has also applied to all new university students.

Would it work here?

In many ways, the national skills passport is a natural extension of the unique student identifier.

But it may be difficult to gain consensus quickly on why there is a need to extend the current unique student identifier to a skills passport.

This is because it will involve different education sectors, different employment sectors, different levels of governments, and different states, territories as well as professional bodies and industries.

But as a way to make getting a job, hiring and planning career development easier, this is an important idea to pursue.

Read more:
The National Skills Agreement needs time in the policy spotlight and it must include these 3 things

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. Is it time for Australia to introduce a national skills passport? – https://theconversation.com/is-it-time-for-australia-to-introduce-a-national-skills-passport-214267

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christiane Gerblinger, Visiting Fellow, Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University

Australia’s public service is no stranger to reform. In the past nine years, it has undergone three significant reviews of its policy advising capabilities, all of which broadly agreed that its policy advice tends towards reticence and needs to be strengthened.

While these reviews triggered reform processes to improve how policy advice is built, a glaring gap remains largely unexplored: the language of policy advice itself. How public servant policy advisers articulate arguments, communicate ideas and influence decision-makers has profound implications for how their policy recommendations land and whether the public interest is served. It’s an area urgently in need of reform.

Read more:
After robodebt, here’s how Australia can have a truly ‘frank and fearless’ public service again

Policy advice needs the right language

Policy advice is not just about data and analyses – it’s about conveying arguments, views and a compelling narrative that resonates with decision-makers and serves the broader public.

This means language wields immense power. It shapes perceptions, frames issues and influences decisions. Yet reviews of the Australian Public Service (APS) have not explicitly focused on the language used in policy advice.

Language can stymie policy. A convoluted, risk-averse document that avoids uncomfortable knowledge in case it is controversial or requested under Freedom of Information laws almost always obscures the proposal’s merits. This in turn can make it difficult for people to gauge if it is in their interest.

Policy advice serves a dual audience: government decision-makers and the public. The language used to communicate policy directions must understand the needs of these audiences. And advisers must remember that policies are not only shaped by those in power, but are made in the public interest.

Moreover, the public’s ability to access and scrutinise policy advice has expanded dramatically. If policy language remains inaccessible and opaque, public trust erodes – not just in governments but within departments.

A language that shows context, addresses dissent, and provides clear directions fosters understanding and trust. This enables everyday citizens to make informed judgments about whether their interest has been served. Addressing the language used in policy advice is not a surface concern – it is a crucial factor in strengthening democratic participation and accountability.

Rectifying the challenge posed by policy language is not a straightforward undertaking. However, several potential avenues could lead the public service towards resolution.

Read more:
Pezzullo story points to serious systemic problems in the Australian Public Service

How it can be fixed

As a first step, the importance of language to policy success must be explicitly acknowledged. This might spark a cultural transformation, where language becomes a cornerstone of policy advising rather than the afterthought it so often is. The public service also needs to explore why its language is as weak and ambiguous as it is.

From here, professional development focused on finding and distilling complex ideas into accessible language is also key. However, simply providing resources for plain language writing or increasing the amount of communication misses the mark. As has been observed, the answer to better policy-advising is not to produce more rigorous, more relevant, less ambiguous, more timely or more appealingly presented evidence. Rather, it is for policymakers to develop a better awareness of how to communicate their ideas.

Finally, interdisciplinary and lateral collaboration could revolutionise policy advising as a fully robust form of knowledge communication. As former Australian Public Service Commissioner Peter Woolcott has noted, policymakers need to “get better at engaging in policy discussions with civil society to ensure a full understanding”.

Following this thinking, collaborations between science communicators, social scientists, citizen experts, organisational linguists and policy advisers could yield innovative approaches to framing and conveying policy ideas.

The public service’s effectiveness hinges on its willingness to stare into the abyss of policy language. The language used in policy advice is not an inconsequential detail, but a pivotal determinant of success.

If it does not address this problem, the public service risks becoming an unwitting participant in its own decline. The path forward demands not just a cursory nod to the issue but a profound shift in policy advisers’ perception and prioritisation of policy language, as well as the culture in which it exists.

Only then can the public service empower its policy advisers to communicate with impact, cultivate public trust and navigate the complex landscape of policy-making in the 21st century.

Christiane Gerblinger 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. The many reviews of the public service miss one vital problem – the language used to communicate ideas – https://theconversation.com/the-many-reviews-of-the-public-service-miss-one-vital-problem-the-language-used-to-communicate-ideas-213654

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liz Conor, ARC Future Fellow, La Trobe University

In 2022, the burning of fossil fuels provided 82% of the world’s energy. In 2000, it was 87%. Even as renewables have undergone tremendous growth, they’ve been offset by increased demand for energy.

That’s why the United Nations earlier this month released a global stocktake – an assessment on how the world is going in weaning itself off these energy-dense but dangerously polluting fuels. Short answer: progress, but nowhere near enough, soon enough.

If we consult history, we find that energy transitions are not new. To farm fields and build cities, we’ve gone from relying on human or animal muscle to wind and water to power sailboats and mill grain. Then we began switching to the energy dense hydrocarbons, coal, gas and oil. But this can’t last. We were first warned in 1859 that when burned, these fuels add to the Earth’s warming blanket of greenhouse gases and threatening our liveable climate.

It’s time for another energy transition. We’ve done it before. The problem is time – and resistance from the old energy regime, fossil fuel companies. Energy historian Vaclav Smil calculates past energy transitions have taken 50–75 years to ripple through societies. And we no longer have that kind of time, as climate change accelerates. This year is likely the hottest in 120,000 years.

So can we learn anything from past energy transitions? As it happens, we can.

Energy shifts happen in fits and starts

Until around 1880, the world ran on wood, charcoal, crop residue, manure, water and wind. In fact, some countries relied on wood and charcoal throughout the 20th century – even as others were shifting from coal to oil.

The English had used coal for domestic heating from the time of the Romans because it burned longer and had nearly double the energy intensity of wood.

So what drove the shift? Deforestation was a part. The reliance on wood worked while there were trees. In the pre-industrial era, cities of 500,000 or more needed huge areas of forests around them.

In some locales wood seemed boundless, free and expendable. The costs to biodiversity would become apparent only later.

Britain was once carpeted in forest. Endemic deforestation drove the change to coal in the 16th and 17th centuries. Most English coal pits opened between 1540 and 1640.

When the English figured out how to use coal to make steam and push a piston, it made even more possible – pumping water from deepening mining pits, the invention of locomotives, and transporting produce, including the feed needed by working animals.

Yet for all this, coal had only reached 5% of the global market by 1840.

In North America, coal didn’t overtake wood until as late as 1884 – even as crude oil became more important.

Why did America first start exploiting oil reserves? In part to replace expensive oil from the heads of sperm whales. Before hydrocarbon oil was widely available, whaling was depended upon for lubricants and some lighting. In 1846, the US had 700 whaling vessels scouring the oceans for this source of oil.

Crude oil was struck first in Pennsylvania in 1859. To extract it required drilling down 21 metres. The drill was powered by a steam engine –  which may have been fired by wood.

Steam and muscle

The 19th century energy transition took decades. It wasn’t a revolution so much as a steady shift. By the end of that century, global energy supply had doubled and half of it was from coal.

When they were first invented in 1712, steam engines converted just 2% of coal into useful energy. Almost 150 years later they were still highly inefficient at just 15%. (Petrol-powered cars still waste about 66% of the energy in their fuel).

Even so, steam sped up early proto-industries such as textiles, print production and traditional manufacturing.

But the engines did not free us from the yoke. In fact, early coal mining actually increased demand for human labour. Boys as young as six worked at lighter tasks. Conditions were generally horrific. Alongside human muscle was animal strength. Coal was often raised from pits by draft horses.

Read more:
A globalised solar-powered future is wholly unrealistic – and our economy is the reason why

In 1850s New England, steam was three times more expensive than water flows powering textile mills. Vaclav Smil has shown industrial waterwheels and turbines “competed successfully with steam engines for decades”. The energy of flowing water was free. Digging up coal was labor-intensive.

Why did steam win? Human ecologist Andreas Malm argues what really drove the shift to steam-powered mills was capital. Locating steam engines in urban centres made it easier to concentrate and control workers, as well as overcoming worker walk-outs and machine breaking.

The question of who does the work is often overlooked. When energy historians refer vaguely to human muscle, we should ask: whose muscles? Was the work done by slaves or forced labourers?

Even in the current energy transition there can be gross disparities between employer and worker. As heat intensifies, some employers are giving ice vests to their migrant workers so they can keep working. That’s reminiscent of coal shovelers in the furnace-like stokeholes of steam ships being immersed in ice-baths on collapse, as historian On Barak has shown.

What does this mean for us?

As Vaclav Smil points out, “every transition to a new energy supply has to be powered by the intensive deployment of existing energies and prime movers”. In fact, Smil argues the idea of the “industrial revolution” is misleading. It was not sudden. Rather, it was “gradual, often uneven”.

History may seem like it unfolds neatly. But it doesn’t at all. In earlier transitions, we see overlaps. Hesitation. Sometimes, more intense use of earlier energy sources. They start as highly localised shifts, depending on available resources, before new technologies spreads along trade routes. Ultimately market forces have driven – or hindered – adoption.

Time is short. But on the plus side, there are market forces now driving the shift to clean energy. Once solar panels and wind turbines are built, sunlight and wind are free. It is the resistance of the old guard – fossil fuel corporations – that is holding us back.

Read more:
Despairing about climate change? These 4 charts on the unstoppable growth of solar may change your mind

Liz Conor receives funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. Muscle, wood, coal, oil: what earlier energy transitions tell us about renewables – https://theconversation.com/muscle-wood-coal-oil-what-earlier-energy-transitions-tell-us-about-renewables-213550

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Fulcher, Senior Lecturer, School of Physics, University of Sydney

Complexity is all around us, from the daily fluctuations of financial markets to the intricate web of neurons in our brains.

Understanding how the different components of these systems interact with each other is a fundamental challenge for scientists trying to predict their behaviour. Piecing together these interactions is like deciphering a code from an intricate set of clues.

Scientists have developed hundreds of different methods for doing this, from engineers studying noisy radio channels to neuroscientists studying firing patterns in networks of interacting neurons. Each method captures a unique aspect of the interactions within a complex system – but how do we know which method is right for any given system sitting right in front of us?

In new research published in Nature Computational Science, we have developed a unified way to look at hundreds of different methods for measuring interaction patterns in complex systems – and working out which ones are most useful for understanding a given system.

A scientific orchestra

The science of complex systems can be, well, complex. And the science of comparing and combining different ways of studying these systems even more so.

But one way to think about what we’ve done is to imagine each scientific method is a different musical instrument playing in a scientific orchestra. Different instruments are playing different melodies with different tones and in different styles.

Read more:
Fireflies, brain cells, dancers: new synchronisation research shows nature’s perfect timing is all about connections

We wanted to understand which of our scientific instruments are best suited to solving which types of problems. We also wanted to know whether we could conduct all of the instruments to form a harmonious whole.

By presenting these methods as a full orchestra for the first time, we hoped we would find new ways of deciphering patterns in the world around us.

Hundreds of methods, more than 1,000 datasets

To develop our orchestra, we undertook the mammoth task of analysing more than 200 methods for computing interactions from as many datasets as we could get our hands on. These covered a huge range of subjects, from stock markets and climate to brain activity and earthquakes to river flow and heart beats.

In total, we applied our 237 methods to more than 1,000 datasets. By analysing how these methods behave when applied to such diverse scientific systems, we found a way for them to “play in harmony” for the first time.

In the same way that instruments in an orchestra are usually organised as strings, brass, woodwind and percussion, scientific methods from areas like engineering, statistics and biophysics also have their traditional groupings.

But when we organised our scientific orchestra, we found that the scientific instruments grouped together in a strikingly different way to this traditional organisation. Some very different methods behaved in surprisingly similar ways to one another.

This was a bit like discovering that the tuba player’s melody was surprisingly similar to that of the flute, but no one had noticed it before.

Our weird and wonderful new orchestral layout (which sometimes places cello and trumpet players next to the piccolo player), represents a more “natural” way of grouping methods from all across science. This opens exciting new avenues for cross-disciplinary research.

The orchestra in the real world

We also put our full scientific orchestra to work on some real-world problems to see how it would work. One of these problems was using motion data from a smartwatch to classify activities like “badminton playing” and “running”; another was distinguishing different activities from brain-scan data.

Properly orchestrated, the full ensemble of scientific methods demonstrated improved performance over any single method on its own.

To put it another way, virtuosic solos are not always the best approach! You can get better results when different scientific methods work cooperatively as an ensemble.

Read more:
Electricity flow in the human brain can be predicted using the simple maths of networks, new study reveals

The scientific ensemble introduced in this work provides a deeper understanding of the interacting systems that shape our complex world. And its implications are widespread – from understanding how brain communication patterns break down in disease, to developing improved detection algorithms for smartwatch sensor data.

Time will tell what new music scientists will make as they step up to conduct our new scientific orchestra that simultaneously incorporates diverse ways of thinking about the world.

Ben Fulcher receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

– ref. From stock markets to brain scans, new research harmonises hundreds of scientific methods to understand complex systems – https://theconversation.com/from-stock-markets-to-brain-scans-new-research-harmonises-hundreds-of-scientific-methods-to-understand-complex-systems-214261

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melinda Jackson, Associate Professor at Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University

You’re lying in bed, trying to fall asleep but the racing thoughts won’t stop. Instead, your brain is busy making detailed plans for the next day, replaying embarrassing moments (“why did I say that?”), or producing seemingly random thoughts (“where is my birth certificate?”).

Many social media users have shared videos on how to fall asleep faster by conjuring up “fake scenarios”, such as a romance storyline where you’re the main character.

But what does the research say? Does what we think about before bed influence how we sleep?

Read more:
How do I stop my mind racing and get some sleep?

How you think in bed affects how you sleep

It turns out people who sleep well and those who sleep poorly have different kinds of thoughts before bed.

Good sleepers report experiencing mostly visual sensory images as they drift to sleep – seeing people and objects, and having dream-like experiences.

They may have less ordered thoughts and more hallucinatory experiences, such as imagining you’re participating in events in the real world.

For people with insomnia, pre-sleep thoughts tend to be less visual and more focused on planning and problem-solving. These thoughts are also generally more unpleasant and less random than those of good sleepers.

People with insomnia are also more likely to stress about sleep as they’re trying to sleep, leading to a vicious cycle; putting effort into sleep actually wakes you up more.

People with insomnia often report worrying, planning, or thinking about important things at bedtime, or focusing on problems or noises in the environment and having a general preoccupation with not sleeping.

Unfortunately, all this pre-sleep mental activity can prevent you drifting off.

One study found even people who are normally good sleepers can have sleep problems if they’re stressed about something at bedtime (such as the prospect of having to give a speech when they wake up). Even moderate levels of stress at bedtime could affect sleep that night.

Another study of 400 young adults looked at how binge viewing might affect sleep. The researchers found higher levels of binge viewing were associated with poorer sleep quality, more fatigue, and increased insomnia symptoms. “Cognitive arousal”, or mental activation, caused by an interesting narrative and identifying with characters, could play a role.

The good news is there are techniques you can use to change the style and content of your pre-sleep thoughts. They could help reduce nighttime cognitive arousal or to replace unwanted thoughts with more pleasant ones. These techniques are called “cognitive refocusing”.

What is cognitive refocusing?

Cognitive refocusing, developed by US psychology researcher Les Gellis, involves distracting yourself with pleasant thoughts before bed. It’s like the “fake scenarios” social media users post about – but the trick is to think of a scenario that’s not too interesting.

Decide before you go to bed what you’ll focus on as you lie there waiting for sleep to come.

Pick an engaging cognitive task with enough scope and breadth to maintain your interest and attention – without causing emotional or physical arousal. So, nothing too scary, thrilling or stressful.

For example, if you like interior decorating, you might imagine redesigning a room in your house.

If you’re a football fan, you might mentally replay a passage of play or imagine a game plan.

A music fan might mentally recite lyrics from their favourite album. A knitter might imagine knitting a blanket.

Whatever you choose, make sure it’s suited to you and your interests. The task needs to feel pleasant, without being overstimulating.

Cognitive refocusing is not a silver bullet, but it can help.

One study of people with insomnia found those who tried cognitive refocusing had significant improvements in insomnia symptoms compared to a control group.

How ancient wisdom can help us sleep

Another age-old technique is mindfulness meditation.

Meditation practice can increase our self-awareness and make us more aware of our thoughts. This can be useful for helping with rumination; often when we try to block or stop thoughts, it can make matters worse.

Mindfulness training can help us recognise when we’re getting into a rumination spiral and allow us to sit back, almost like a passive observer.

Try just watching the thoughts, without judgement. You might even like to say “hello” to your thoughts and just let them come and go. Allow them to be there and see them for what they are: just thoughts, nothing more.

Research from our group has shown mindfulness-based therapies can help people with insomnia. It may also help people with psychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and schizophrenia get more sleep.

What can help ease your pre-sleep thoughts?

Good sleep starts the moment you wake up. To give yourself your best shot at a good night’s sleep, start by getting up at the same time each day and getting some morning light exposure (regardless of how much sleep you had the night before).

Have a consistent bedtime, reduce technology use in the evening, and do regular exercise during the day.

If your mind is busy at bedtime, try cognitive refocusing. Pick a “fake scenario” that will hold your attention but not be too scary or exciting. Rehearse this scenario in your mind at bedtime and enjoy the experience.

You might also like to try:

• keeping a consistent bedtime routine, so your brain can wind down

• writing down worries earlier in the day (so you don’t think about them at bedtime)

• adopting a more self-compassionate mindset (don’t beat yourself up at bedtime over your imagined shortcomings!).

Read more:
Why do we wake around 3am and dwell on our fears and shortcomings?

Melinda Jackson receives funding from NHMRC, Brain Foundation and Dementia Australia.

Hailey Meaklim is the founder of My Better Sleep.

– ref. What do people think about when they go to sleep? – https://theconversation.com/what-do-people-think-about-when-they-go-to-sleep-207406

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dale Mitchell, Lecturer in Law, University of the Sunshine Coast

From Elle Woods in Legally Blonde to Jennifer Walters in She-Hulk, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird to Denny Crane in Boston Legal, our popular culture is often where we first see and witness legal practice.

Sometimes this comes via the silver screen, other times television. But it would be wrong to think that all we see on legal television shows is accurate – even when it claims to capture reality.

Most legal dramas are terrible at capturing the realities of law.

Not accurate: Law(less) and (dis)Order

Law and Order (1990-) innovated television drama by showcasing both the investigation of a crime by police, and then its prosecution in court. With its multiple spin-offs, including Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (1999-) and the shortlived Law and Order: Trial by Jury (2005-2006) (which had the best theme song of all the series), the Law and Order franchise is a televisual legal juggernaut.

As with most serials, Law and Order presents the criminal justice system as moving quicker than you can say dun dun. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The mean duration of criminal law matters in Australian higher courts was almost one year (50 weeks) across 2021-22.

While procedural rules in civil matters require courts to facilitate the “just and efficient resolution of disputes at minimum expense”, in criminal law, speed and efficiency must not be prioritised over accuracy: a person’s liberty is at stake.

Most criminal matters do not proceed to a full trial as an accused will often plead guilty to the charges. As a result, the matter proceeds to sentencing without prosecutors needing to prove the offence. The rates of this occurring are quite alarming. Data across 2021-22 reveals over 75% of defendants in Australian courts entered a guilty plea, and almost four in five criminal convictions (79%) resulted from a guilty plea.

Research suggests defendants plead guilty for a variety of reasons, including to avoid the cost of a trial and to receive a lesser sentence. Data from the United States suggests the pressures of the pandemic led to innocent people pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit.

Read more:
Pandemic pushed defendants to plead guilty more often, including innocent people pleading to crimes they didn’t commit

If Law and Order was a more accurate reflection of criminal law, matters would proceed immediately to sentencing due to guilty pleas. And should an accused be found guilty, a chunk of their sentence would be reduced by time served awaiting trial.

Not accurate: Suits

Suits (2011-19) centres around law firm partner Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) and his mentorship of Mike Ross (Patrick Adams) – the “lawyer” who never graduated law school and provides legal advice thanks to his photographic memory.

This is, obviously, a brutal ethical breach for all involved, and clearly fraud. In Australia, law students who present themselves to be lawyers are subject to sanctions by the Legal Services Commission. They can cause harm to clients who have hired their services. And the Legal Admissions Board may deny their entry into the profession.

(Spoilers) Ross is eventually sentenced to two years in prison for this fraud, a similar sentence to a recent case in the United States, but he only serves three months before solving a crime and earning early release. More unrealistic than this early release is that Ross does fairly quickly thereafter gain admission to the profession, which seems unlikely to occur so soon after such an act of fraud.

While Suits has left its mark(le) on the popular imagination of law, it fails to address one of the primary duties of civil litigation: the duty of disclosure.

The MacGuffin-ing of law is common in TV serials. It’s the “smoking gun” found on the day of the trial, or for the lawyers in Suits, the random document which shows up during the trial to turn the case – dramatically presented by our protagonists as they flail into court armed with this data sans ethics.

This is not quite accurate.

In adversarial legal systems like Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US, civil litigation rules require parties to disclose to one another all documents in their possession or control which are directly relevant to a matter in dispute.

This is a continuing duty, so if you discover such a document at any time during the case, it must be disclosed. While exceptions based on various privileges may apply, this essentially means civil litigation must be run in an “all cards on the table” manner. Randomly producing undisclosed material at trial requires the leave of the court and may result in orders of contempt and cost penalties.

It’s not like the lawyers of Suits have ever really been concerned about ethics, though.

Not accurate: How to Get Away with Murder(ing rules of evidence)

While most lawyers would support making it a criminal offence to critique Viola Davis, How to Get Away with Murder (2014-20) presents one of the most common offences within legal dramas: the haphazard approach to rules of evidence.

Annalise Keating (Davis) and her ragtag team of morally illiterate law students (although I never see them studying?!?!) manipulate people to obtain evidence and then dramatically prompt witnesses on the stand to read this information into the record, or otherwise “sneak” it into the trial.

This is not accurate. And it ignores the basic reality that so much of legal practice is about not just obtaining evidence, but ensuring that evidence is admissible in court.

One of the most important rules of evidence deals with hearsay evidence. A court cannot allow evidence to be considered if its reliability is unable to be interrogated. Witnesses can only present evidence that they saw, heard or perceived themselves. Unless an exception to the hearsay rule applies, such evidence would be inadmissible.

Like in Suits, these approaches to presenting evidence may have serious implications. This poor trial management results in delays to criminal trials..

Accurate: Fisk

Fisk (2021-) follows Helen Tudor-Fisk (Kitty Flanagan), an established contract lawyer whose personal dramas lead her to move to the boutique Melbourne probate law firm of Gruber and Gruber (played by Marty Sheargold and Julia Zamero).

Fisk excels in showing the importance of lawyer-client relations and the word-of-mouth that sustains much of small legal practice. It’s the anti-Suits, and Fisk is more powerful for it.

The discussions of wills and estates and most basic legal principles in Fisk are mostly sound – and the show doesn’t need to get into “legalese” as matters are resolved out-of-court.

This is a distinct reality of law: litigation is a last resort. Forms of alternative dispute resolution, including mediation, negotiation and conciliation, have become the primary way of resolving legal disputes.

Fuelled by legislative changes which require the exhaustion of alternative dispute resolution measures before proceeding to litigation, and a pursuit of reduced costs, the drama of trial is not something anyone should yearn for.

Accurate: Rake

Cleaver Greene, a character said to be loosely based on the career of a Sydney barrister, shows us the absolute madness of work as a “silk”. Rake excels at showing the reality of law. The show raises interesting and accurate questions of law (yes, it is true there is no explicit offence of cannibalism in New South Wales) and presents Australian court process accurately.

Thankfully, there’s not a gavel in sight. Australian courts do not use gavels, and their presence in legal dramas in Australian and UK courts shows a lack of attention to detail. The presence of the gavel as a symbol of justice is an entirely American invention.

Rake is accurate, in part, because the site of drama is rarely the courtroom, but rather Greene’s personal life. The accuracy of that element for law I will leave up to the jury. But with a 2014 study finding 35% of lawyers engaged in hazardous or harmful drinking and another showing high rates of anxiety and depression in the legal profession, the evidence is compelling.

Dale Mitchell 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. No gavels, no hearsay and lots of drinking: a law expert ranks legal dramas by their accuracy – https://theconversation.com/no-gavels-no-hearsay-and-lots-of-drinking-a-law-expert-ranks-legal-dramas-by-their-accuracy-212880

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eleanor K. Sansom, Research Associate, Curtin University

After a journey of billions of kilometres, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has culminated in a small black capsule blazing through the sky before touching down in the Utah desert.

Inside is likely to be the largest ever sample of dust and rock returned from an asteroid. Extracted and brought back with great technical ingenuity from an asteroid called Bennu, scientists will now study in search of clues about the origins of the Solar System and life itself.

The seven-year mission took OSIRIS-REx to a near-Earth carbon-rich asteroid, which it orbited for two and a half years, mapping its surface and measuring properties such as its density and spin. This “rubble pile” asteroid also has a (very) small chance of one day impacting Earth, so getting intricate measurements of its orbit and other dynamics was also a mission goal.

The origins of the Solar System – and life

Most asteroids are the rocky leftovers of failed planets and destructive collisions in the early Solar System, orbiting in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. They vary drastically in size, shape and composition, and finding out what they are made of can help us learn more about how the planets formed.

These primitive bodies – some more than 4.5 billion years old – can also shed light on the origins of life, because they tell us about the distribution of water, minerals and other elements such as carbon.

There is also an element of self-interest in studying these asteroids, to understand the risk they may pose if they are heading Earth’s way.

Read more:
Our Solar System is filled with asteroids that are particularly hard to destroy, new study finds

Using telescopes on Earth, we can get a rough idea of what an asteroid’s surface is made of. However, to do an in-depth chemical analysis we need to get hold of some actual samples.

Most of the asteroid samples we have are meteorites – lumps of space rock that have crashed into Earth. There are more than 70,000 meteorites in collections around the world, but we know the origins of less than 0.1% of them.

Read more:
A pristine chunk of space rock found within hours of hitting Earth can tell us about the birth of the Solar System

What’s more, we know the samples we have are not very representative of the kinds of asteroids in space. Part of the reason for this is that some kinds of asteroids are better than others at surviving the fiery descent through the atmosphere.

But some meteorites don’t appear to correspond to any known type of asteroid. So where do they come from?

Using dedicated camera networks such as Australia’s Desert Fireball Network we can observe incoming asteroids, recover meteorite samples and track their paths back through space to determine their origins. This process can deliver relatively uncontaminated samples to the lab.

Even still, linking a meteorite to a known parent asteroid, or even a type of asteroid observed via telescope, is very difficult.

Bringing pieces of space back to Earth

Sample return missions are the gold standard for analysing the makeup of extraterrestrial bodies. They can bring pieces from a different planet or asteroid back to Earth to study.

The first such mission was to the Moon, bringing back lunar samples for analysis. We learned the Moon was made from the same material as the Earth, and that it likely formed from the orbiting debris after a giant impact.

Sample return missions are technically very challenging. Not only does a spacecraft have to travel hundreds of millions of kilometres from Earth, but it has to match speed with the target (not just zoom past), find a safe landing site, touch down to collect a sample (without crashing), stow the sample in a sealed capsule, take off again, and return to Earth. Much of this process needs to be autonomous, as the time delay for communications with Earth is too long for remote control.

Other than the lunar samples returned by the Apollo missions, OSIRIS-REx is the fourth mission to return extraterrestrial material back to Earth.

NASA’s Stardust mission, launched in 1999, returned microscopic samples from the trail of comet Wild-2. The Hayabusa mission, launched in 2003 by the Japanese space agency, JAXA, returned less than 1 milligram from asteroid Itokawa. JAXA’s Hayabusa2 (launched 2014) returned 5.4 grams of sample from asteroid Ryugu.

NASA estimates OSIRIS-REx has brought back around 250 grams from asteroid Bennu, by far the largest sample yet recovered. We will know for sure once the sample is carefully examined at Johnson Space Centre over the coming days.

The sound of fireballs

We and our colleagues at Curtin University are heavily involved in the global effort to find out what asteroids are really made of, having participated in or analysed samples from all of these sample return missions and leading the Global Fireball Observatory.

There are six OSIRIS-REx mission scientists from Curtin (including one of us – Nick Timms), and they will be among those receiving the first wave of samples in the coming weeks.

The re-entry of the capsule also had its own incredible science value. It was essentially a human-made fireball.

Read more:
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft is about to drop a chunk of asteroid in the Australian outback

Fireballs, or really bright shooting stars from large space rocks, are quite rare and impossible to predict. This is why we use dedicated camera networks to observe large areas of sky (The Desert Fireball Network observes nearly three million square kilometres of Australian skies every night).

When objects from outer space enter the atmosphere, travelling much faster than the speed of sound, they ignite the air to create a fireball and also trigger other less-studied phenomena such as shockwaves – which can be hazardous.

A sample return is a great opportunity to set out seismic sensors and other instruments to analyse the shockwave, which can tell us more about the physics of re-entry and why some meteorites survive while others don’t make it. This was done for the Hayabusa2 sample return in 2020, and researchers from Sandia Labs and the University of Southern Queensland had detectors set up in Utah for the OSIRIS-REx return.

What’s next?

Like Hayabusa2, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft itself isn’t finished yet. Both of these spacecraft dropped their precious samples to Earth and have continued on with the aim of future asteroid fly-bys.

The mission, now renamed “OSIRIS-APEX”, has already begun to redirect itself towards an asteroid called Apophis, which it will intercept not long after the asteroid zooms past Earth in April 2029.

Eleanor K. Sansom receives funding from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and is supported by the Space Science and Technology Centre at Curtin University and the Australian Research Council (DP230100301).

Nick Timms received funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment, and Facilities (LIEF) scheme and is supported by the Space Science and Technology Centre at Curtin University.

– ref. 7 years, billions of kilometres, a handful of dust: NASA just brought back the largest-ever asteroid sample – https://theconversation.com/7-years-billions-of-kilometres-a-handful-of-dust-nasa-just-brought-back-the-largest-ever-asteroid-sample-214151

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Erica Mealy, Lecturer in Computer Science, University of the Sunshine Coast

In 2018-19, identity crime directly and indirectly cost Australia an estimated A$3.1 billion.

To address such costs, the federal government is proposing a national digital identity scheme that will let people prove their identity without having to share documents such as their passport, drivers licence or Medicare card.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher opened consultations for the draft bill last week, with plans to introduce the legislation to parliament by the end of the year.

Let’s look at what it proposes, and what it could mean for you.

What would change?

The digital ID scheme would initially be regulated by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Information Commissioner, with a view to eventually establish a new governing body.

The draft bill package includes strong updates to security requirements for how organisations store people’s IDs, as well as the reporting of data breaches and suspected identity fraud.

In her speech to the Australian Information Industry Association, Gallagher outlined a four-phase rollout.

• Phase one: establishing the legislation and accreditation of private and public providers.
• Phase two: adding state- and territory-issued IDs to the scheme for use with federal government services.
• Phase three: bringing recognition of the digital ID into the private sector. This would, for instance, allow you to use your digital ID to apply for a bank loan without having to provide your identity documents or copies.
• Phase four: allowing accredited private sector digital IDs to help verify you when accessing certain government services.

How would it work?

For the general public, the voluntary scheme would come in the form of a smartphone app, requiring biometric information (such as a face print) to be unlocked.

To prove your identity to a participating organisation, you would log into the organisation’s website and select MyGovID as your verification method.

You would then log into your MyGovID app and give consent for your identity to be verified with that organisation. In this way, you could verify your identity to the organisation without needing to share your drivers licence, passport or similar.

Gone will be the days of 100 points of ID and copies of documents stored all over the internet.

The upside of the proposal

The Medibank, Optus and Latitude data breaches of 2022-23 have demonstrated the lack of regulation and enforcement of identity protection legislation in Australia.

A welcome part of the draft bill is the increased power given to the Australian Information Commissioner, as well as restrictions on how organisations request, store and disclose people’s personal identifying information.

The bill also outlines minimum cybersecurity standards, and requires regular review of organisations dealing with identity data.

Unresolved MyGovID security flaws

In releasing the draft bill, the government has highlighted a voluntary national digital identity – the MyGovID – which is already being used by more than 6 million Australians and 1.3 million businesses.

MyGovID is a government-issued authenticator app which verifies your identity using one of three factors: something you know (such as a password), something you are (such as a biometric scan), or something you have (such as a verified phone number, where you can receive one-time codes). Adding additional factors makes verification more secure.

In 2020, security researchers warned the public against using MyGovID due to security flaws in its design. It’s unclear if these have been addressed. The Australian Tax Office declined to fix the issue when raised.

Governments in Australia also have a poor track record of securing our information.

According to Webber Insurance, 14 of the 44 recorded data breaches between January to June this year were reported by government authorities. These included the Department of Home Affairs, and the Northern Territory, Tasmania, ACT and NSW governments.

This is on top of data breaches involving the Australian Tax Office, National Disability Insurance Scheme and MyGov, as reported by the ABC last year.

More worryingly, the privacy act has a loophole which allows state and government authorities to remain exempt from compulsory data breach reporting. As such, we don’t know just how many government data breaches have occurred.

The draft bill explicitly maintains these loopholes, stating entities are exempt from data reporting if “the entity is a department or authority of a State or Territory”.

Read more:
The government wants to expand the ‘digital identity’ system that lets Australians access services. There are many potential pitfalls

A honey trap for hackers

Even if the government carries out its end of the bargain securely, the proposed scheme would still only be as secure as your phone. Having a weak password, losing your phone, or having your phone hacked could lead to data being compromised.

Also, streamlining distributed identification systems in this way will create an irresistible target for hackers. In cybersecurity this is called a honeypot, or honey trap.

Just as honey is irresistible to bears, these data lures are irresistible to hackers. Failure to secure the data would make it a one-stop-shop for identity theft and extortion.

Perhaps most concerning is how closely the proposed scheme resembles government surveillance. By linking all our personal identification data across federal and state jurisdictions, as well as private entities, we would be giving the federal government complete oversight of our lives.

Small changes to the law, such as those quietly made in the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Distrupt) Act in 2021, could mean our locations could be tracked, and all our interactions with public and private organisations recorded.

What can you do?

It’s clear the draft bill has a number of issues. That said, all hope is not lost.

The government has committed to genuine consultation on its proposal. However, you don’t have much time to have your say: public submissions are being sought until October 10.

This extremely short consultation period doesn’t provide much confidence a fit-for-purpose solution will be created.

While protecting our digital identities is a welcome and well-overdue part of this proposed bill, getting it wrong could lead to harm at an even larger scale.

Read more:
Australia’s National Digital ID is here, but the government’s not talking about it

Erica Mealy is member of the Australian Computer Society, the Australian Information Security Association, and the International Association for Public participation (IAP2). Erica is not a member of nor affiliated with any political organisations.

– ref. A national digital ID scheme is being proposed. An expert weighs the pros and (many more) cons – https://theconversation.com/a-national-digital-id-scheme-is-being-proposed-an-expert-weighs-the-pros-and-many-more-cons-214144

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Carson, Professor of Political Communication, Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University

With early voting set to open next week for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, this is a critical time for campaigners to win over voters.

If the 2022 federal election is anything to go by, Australians have developed a taste for early voting, with fewer than half of all voters actually going to a polling station on election day.

If the same voting patterns apply to the referendum, this means more than half of Australians, particularly older voters, may have cast a vote before voting day on October 14.

What’s happening in the polls?

Public polls indicate support for the “yes” campaign continues to decline, despite, as we’ve shown below, huge spending on advertising and extensive media coverage of its message.

According to Professor Simon Jackman’s averaging of the polls, “no” currently leads “yes” by 58% to 42% nationally. If this lead holds, the result would be even more lopsided than the 1999 republic referendum defeat, where the nationwide vote was 55% “no” to 45% “yes”.

The rate of decline in support for “yes” continues to be about 0.75 of a percentage point a week. If this trend continues, the “yes” vote would sit at 39.6% on October 14, 5.5 percentage points below the “yes” vote in the republic referendum.

If “yes” were to prevail on October 14, it would take a colossal reversal in public sentiment, or it would indicate there’s been a stupendously large, collective polling error. Or perhaps both.

What’s happening in the news and social media?

Using Meltwater data, we have seen a massive spike in Voice media coverage since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the referendum date at the end of August.

In the most recent week we analysed, from September 14-21, we saw a huge jump of mentions of the Voice to Parliament (2.86 million) in print media, radio, TV and social media. This compares to about a quarter million mentions in the first week of the “yes” and “no” campaigns, which we documented in our last report of this series monitoring both campaigns.

Read more:
The ‘no’ campaign is dominating the messaging on the Voice referendum on TikTok – here’s why

Voice coverage now constitutes 6.7% of all Australian media reporting, up from 4.2% in week one. To put that in perspective, mentions of Hugh Jackman’s marriage split from Deborra-Lee Furness comprised 1.5% of total weekly coverage, while mentions of the AFL and NRL amounted to 4.1% and 1.7%, respectively.

Media coverage of the Voice peaked on September 17 with 38,000 mentions, thanks to widespread coverage of the “yes” rallies that day around the country.

This was followed closely by 35,000 Voice mentions the next day, led by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s claim on Sky News that a Voice to parliament would see lawyers in Sydney and Melbourne “get richer” through billions of dollars worth of treaty negotiations.

Our analysis of X (formerly Twitter) data provides further insight to these trends, showing the nationwide “yes” rallies on September 17 received the most public engagement about the Voice during the week we analysed.

Who is advertising online?

This week, we specifically turned our attention to the online advertising spending of the campaigns. We also examined the types of disinformation campaigns appearing on social media, some of which are aimed at the Australian Electoral Commission, similar to the anti-democratic disinformation campaigns that have roiled the US.

The main online advertising spend is on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms. We have real-time visibility of this spending thanks to the ad libraries of Meta and Google.

The Yes23 campaign has far outspent any other Voice campaigner on these platforms. In the last three months, its advertising expenditure exceeds $1.1 million, compared to just under $100,000 for Fair Australia, the leading “no” campaign organisation.

Yes23 has also released a far greater number of new ads in September (in excess of 3,200) on both platforms, compared to Fair Australia’s 52 new ads. The top five spenders from both sides are listed below.

As early voting nears, this graph shows Yes23 ad spending outpaced Fair Australia on both Google and Meta platforms in week three, as well.

The advertising spending data shows how drastically different the strategies of the two main campaigns are. Yes23’s approach is an ad blitz, blanketing the nation with hundreds of ads and experimenting with scores of different messages.

In contrast, the “no” side has released far fewer ads with no experimentation. The central message is about “division”, mostly delivered by the lead “no” campaigner, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. All but eight of the ads released by the “no” side in September feature a personal message by Price arguing that the referendum is “divisive” and “the Voice threatens Aussie unity.”

To win, “yes” requires a majority of voters nationwide, as well as a majority of voters in a majority of states. The “no” side is strategically targeting its ads to the two states it believes are most likely in play – South Australia and Tasmania. It only needs to win one of these states to ensure the “yes” side fails.

Referendum disinformation

The Meltwater data also reveal a surge in misinformation and disinformation targeting of the AEC with American-style attacks on the voting process.

Studies show disinformation surrounding the referendum has been prevalent on X since at least March. To mitigate the harms, the AEC has established a disinformation register to inform citizens about the referendum process and call out falsehoods.

We’ve identified three types of disinformation campaigns in the campaign so far.

The first includes attempts to redefine the issue agenda. Examples range from the false claims that First Nations people do not overwhelmingly support the Voice to conspiracy myths about the Voice being a globalist land grab.

These falsehoods aim to influence vote choice. This disinformation type is not covered in the AEC’s register, as the organisation has no provisions to enforce truth in political advertising.

Read more:
Why is it legal to tell lies during the Voice referendum campaign?

The register does cover a second type of disinformation. This includes spurious claims about the voting process, such as that the referendum is voluntary. This false claim aims to depress voter turnout in yet another attempt to influence the outcome.

Finally, a distinct set of messages targets the AEC directly. The aim is to undermine trust in the integrity of the vote.

A most prominent example was Dutton’s suggestion the voting process was “rigged” due to the established rule of counting a tick on the ballot as a vote for “yes”, while a cross will not be accepted as a formal vote for “no”. Sky News host Andrew Bolt echoed this claim in his podcast, which was repeated on social media, reaching 29,800 viewers in one post.

Attention to the tick/cross issue spiked on August 25 when the AEC refuted the claim (as can be seen in the chart below). Daily Telegraph columnist and climate change denialist Maurice Newman then linked the issue to potential voter fraud, mimicking US-style attacks on the integrity of voting systems.

The volume of mentions of obvious disinformation on media and social media may not be high compared to other mentions of the Voice. However, studies show disinformation disproportionately grabs people’s attention due to the cognitive attraction of pervasive negativity, the focus on threats or arousal of disgust.

All three types of disinformation campaigns attacking this referendum should concern us deeply because they threaten trust in our political institutions, which undermines our vibrant democracy.

Andrea Carson receives funding from a La Trobe University Synergy grant for this project and from the ARC for a Discovery project on media and political trust.

Max Grömping receives funding from the Australian Research Council (DP220100050; DP230101777). He is an affiliate of the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), and member of the Electoral Integrity Project‘s International Advisory Board.

Rebecca Strating receives funding from a La Trobe University Synergy grant for this project. She is a recipient of external grant funding, including from the governments of Australia, United States, United Kingdom, the Philippines and Taiwan.

Simon Jackman is an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney and a past recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation (USA) and was one of the principal investigators of the Australian Election Survey (funded by the Australian Research Council).

– ref. The ‘yes’ Voice campaign is far outspending ‘no’ in online advertising, but is the message getting through? – https://theconversation.com/the-yes-voice-campaign-is-far-outspending-no-in-online-advertising-but-is-the-message-getting-through-213749

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greig de Zubicaray, Professor of Neuropsychology, Queensland University of Technology

We’ve all experienced that moment mid-sentence when we just can’t find the word we want to use, even though we’re certain we know it.

Why does this universal problem among speakers happen?

And when can word-finding difficulties indicate something serious?

Everyone will experience an occasional word-finding difficulty, but if they happen very often with a broad range of words, names and numbers, this could be a sign of a neurological disorder.

The steps involved in speaking

Producing spoken words involves several stages of processing.

These include:

1. identifying the intended meaning

2. selecting the right word from the “mental lexicon” (a mental dictionary of the speaker’s vocabulary)

3. retrieving its sound pattern (called its “form”)

4. executing the movements of the speech organs for articulating it.

Word-finding difficulties can potentially arise at each of these stages of processing.

When a healthy speaker can’t retrieve a word from their lexicon despite the feeling of knowing it, this is called a “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon by language scientists.

Often, the frustrated speaker will try to give a bit of information about their intended word’s meaning, “you know, that thing you hit a nail with”, or its spelling, “it starts with an H!”.

Tip-of-the-tongue states are relatively common and are a type of speech error that occurs primarily during retrieval of the sound pattern of a word (step three above).

What can affect word finding?

Word-finding difficulties occur at all ages but they do happen more often as we get older. In older adults, they can cause frustration and anxiety about the possibility of developing dementia. But they’re not always a cause for concern.

One way researchers investigate word-finding difficulties is to ask people to keep a diary to record how often and in what context they occur. Diary studies have shown that some word types, such as names of people and places, concrete nouns (things, such as “dog” or “building”) and abstract nouns (concepts, such as “beauty” or “truth”), are more likely to result in tip-of-the-tongue states compared with verbs and adjectives.

Less frequently used words are also more likely to result in tip-of-the-tongue states. It’s thought this is because they have weaker connections between their meanings and their sound patterns than more frequently used words.

Laboratory studies have also shown tip-of-the-tongue states are more likely to occur under socially stressful conditions when speakers are told they are being evaluated, regardless of their age. Many people report having experienced tip-of-the-tongue problems during job interviews.

When could it spell more serious issues?

More frequent failures with a broader range of words, names and numbers are likely to indicate more serious issues.

When this happens, language scientists use the terms “anomia” or “anomic aphasia” to describe the condition, which can be associated with brain damage due to stroke, tumours, head injury or dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Recently, the actor Bruce Willis’s family revealed he has been diagnosed with a degenerative disorder known as primary progressive aphasia, for which one of the earliest symptoms is word-finding difficulties rather than memory loss.

Primary progressive aphasia is typically associated with frontotemporal or Alzheimer’s dementias, although it can be associated with other pathologies.

Anomic aphasia can arise due to problems occurring at different stages of speech production. An assessment by a clinical neuropsychologist or speech pathologist can help clarify which processing stage is affected and how serious the problem might be.

For example, if a person is unable to name a picture of a common object such as a hammer, a clinical neuropsychologist or speech pathologist will ask them to describe what the object is used for (the individual might then say “it’s something you hit things with” or “it’s a tool”).

If they can’t, they will be asked to gesture or mime how it’s used. They might also be provided with a cue or prompt, such as the first letter (h) or syllable (ham).

Most people with anomic aphasia benefit greatly from being prompted, indicating they are mostly experiencing problems with later stages of retrieving word forms and motor aspects of speech.

But if they’re unable to describe or mime the object’s use, and cueing does not help, this is likely to indicate an actual loss of word knowledge or meaning. This is typically a sign of a more serious issue such as primary progressive aphasia.

Imaging studies in healthy adults and people with anomic aphasia have shown different areas of the brain are responsible for their word-finding difficulties.

In healthy adults, occasional failures to name a picture of a common object are linked with changes in activity in brain regions that control motor aspects of speech, suggesting a spontaneous problem with articulation rather than a loss of word knowledge.

In anomia due to primary progressive aphasia, brain regions that process word meanings show a loss of nerve cells and connections or atrophy.

Although anomic aphasia is common after strokes to the left hemisphere of the brain, the associated word-finding difficulties do not appear to be distinguishable by specific areas.

Read more:
What is aphasia, the condition Bruce Willis lives with?

There are treatments available for anomic aphasia. These will often involve speech pathologists training the individual on naming tasks using different kinds of cues or prompts to help retrieve words. The cues can be various meaningful features of objects and ideas, or sound features of words, or a combination of both. Smart tablet and phone apps also show promise when used to complement therapy with home-based practice.

The type of cue used for treatment is determined by the nature of the person’s impairment. Successful treatment is associated with changes in activity in brain regions known to support speech production. Unfortunately, there is no effective treatment for primary progressive aphasia, although some studies have suggested speech therapy can produce temporary benefits.

If you’re concerned about your word-finding difficulties or those of a loved one, you can consult your GP for a referral to a clinical neuropsychologist or a speech pathologist.

Read more:
In a chatty world, losing your speech can be alienating. But there’s help

Greig de Zubicaray receives funding from the Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Foundation.

– ref. Is it normal to forget words while speaking? And when can it spell a problem? – https://theconversation.com/is-it-normal-to-forget-words-while-speaking-and-when-can-it-spell-a-problem-212852

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kay Critchell, Lecturer in Oceanography, Deakin University

Our beaches are in trouble. Limited recycling programs and a society that throws away so much have resulted in more than 3 million tonnes of plastic polluting the oceans. An estimated 1.5–1.9% of this rubbish ends up on beaches.

So can waste-management strategies such as container deposit schemes make a difference to this 50,000–60,000 tonnes of beach rubbish?

The Queensland government started a container deposit scheme in 2019. We wanted to know if it reduced the rubbish that washed up on beaches in a tourist hotspot, the Whitsundays region.

To find out, our study, the first of its kind, used data from a community volunteer group through the Australian Marine Debris Initiative Database.

It turned out that for the types of rubbish included in the scheme – plastic bottles and aluminium cans – the answer was an emphatic yes.

Read more:
Spotting plastic waste from space and counting the fish in the seas: here’s how AI can help protect the oceans

Container deposit schemes work

After the scheme began, there were fewer plastic bottles and aluminium cans on Whitsundays beaches. Volunteer clean-up workers collected an average of about 120 containers per beach visit before the scheme began in 2019. This number fell to 77 in 2020.

Not only that, but those numbers stayed down year after year. This means people continued to take part in the scheme for years.

Rubbish that wasn’t part of the scheme still found its way to the beaches.

However, more types of rubbish such as larger glass bottles are being added to the four-year-old Queensland scheme. Other states and territories have had schemes like this for many years, the oldest in South Australia since 1971.

But we didn’t have access to beach data from before and after those schemes started. So our findings are great news, especially as some of these other schemes are set to expand too. The evidence also supports the creation of new schemes in Victoria this November and Tasmania next year.

These developments give reason to hope we will see further reductions in beach litter.

Read more:
Spin the bottle: the fraught politics of container deposit schemes

The data came from the community

To find out whether the scheme has reduced specific sorts of rubbish on beaches we needed a large amount of data from before and after it began.

The unsung heroes of this study are the diligent volunteers who provided us with these data. They have been recording the types and amounts of rubbish found during their cleanups at Whitsundays beaches for years.

Eco Barge Clean Seas Inc has been doing this work since 2009. In taking that extra step of counting and sorting the rubbish, they may not have known it at the time, but they were creating a data gold mine. We would eventually use their data to prove the container deposit scheme works.

The rubbish clean-ups are continuing. This means we’ll be able to see how adding more rubbish types to the scheme will further reduce rubbish on beaches.

The long-term perspective we can gain from such data is testament to this sustained community effort.

Read more:
Local efforts have cut plastic waste on Australia’s beaches by almost 30% in 6 years

There’s still more work to do

So if we recycle our plastics, why do we still get beaches covered in rubbish? The reality is that most plastics aren’t recycled. This is mainly due to two problems:

• technological limitations on the sorting needed to avoid contamination of waste streams
• inadequate incentives for people to reduce contamination by properly sorting their waste, and ultimately to use products made from recycled waste.

Our findings show we can create more sustainable practices and a cleaner environment when individuals are given incentives to recycle.

However, container deposit schemes don’t just provide a financial reward. Getting people directly involved in recycling fosters a sense of responsibility for the environment. This connection between people’s actions and outcomes is a key to such schemes’ success.

Read more:
The new 100% recyclable packaging target is no use if our waste isn’t actually recycled

Our study also shows how invaluable community-driven clean-up projects are. Not only do they reduce environmental harm and improve our experiences on beaches, but they can also provide scientists like us with the data we need to show how waste-management policies affect the environment.

Waste management is a concern for communities, policymakers and environmentalists around the world. The lessons from our study apply not only in Australia but anywhere that communities can work with scientists and governments to solve environmental problems.

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. Container deposit schemes reduce rubbish on our beaches. Here’s how we proved it – https://theconversation.com/container-deposit-schemes-reduce-rubbish-on-our-beaches-heres-how-we-proved-it-213562

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Inga Smith, Associate Professor in Physics, University of Otago

After two seasons of record-breaking lows, Antarctica’s sea ice remains in dramatic decline, tracking well below any winter maximum levels observed since satellite monitoring began during the late 1970s.

A layer of frozen seawater that surrounds the Antarctic continent, sea ice cycles from maximum coverage in September to a minimum in February. The summer minimum has also continued to diminish, with three record low summers in the past seven years.

Some scientists have suggested this year could mark a regime shift for Antarctic sea ice. The consequences could be far-reaching for Earth’s climate, because sea ice keeps the planet cooler by reflecting solar energy back into the atmosphere and insulating the ocean. Its formation also generates cold, salty water masses that drive global ocean currents.

The annual freeze-thaw cycle of Antarctic sea ice is one of Earth’s largest seasonal changes, but is a major challenge for climate models to predict accurately.

Since the 1970s, satellites have been tracking a quantity known as “sea ice extent”, which is the total surface area where at least 15% is covered by sea ice.

This September, it reached a satellite-era record low for this time of year. The previous year, after tracking much lower than the median all winter, Antarctic sea ice extent made a late rally and was 18.3 million square kilometres at its maximum by September 2022, around 2% below the 1981-2010 median.

Although 2% might not sound like much, the following summer biologists reported devastating effects on Emperor penguins. No chicks survived in four out of five breeding sites in one region of sea ice loss.

In 2023, Antarctic sea ice extent started the winter even lower than in 2022, and by the end of July was almost 13% below the 1981-2010 median for that time of year. It reached its maximum extent on September 7, at just under 17 million square kilometres, which is nearly 9% below the 1981-2010 median.

Why we couldn’t predict this

Antarctica has bucked the trend of vanishing sea ice observed in the Arctic for decades. Satellite records show a small increasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent from 2007 to 2016, but this was followed by a decrease since then.

A recent study shows that almost all models in the current collection of simulations used for the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to reproduce the trend in Antarctic sea ice area observed between 1979 and 2018.

Global climate models predicted that Antarctic sea ice extent should have been diminishing for all of that period, which is at odds with the observations.

Read more:
Devastatingly low Antarctic sea ice may be the ‘new abnormal’, study warns

These models remain our best tools for forecasting future climate. They have been developed since the 1960s to represent the wide range of physical processes of importance to the climate system as realistically as possible.

They are made up of individual component models for the circulation of the atmosphere and oceans, the transfer of solar energy through the atmosphere, land surface properties and the evolution of sea ice.

While these models have generally done well at forecasting ocean and land surface warming over the past few decades, they have struggled to simulate Antarctic sea ice.

Many research groups around the world have investigated the reasons why models have failed to accurately simulate Antarctic sea ice. Changes in wind and wave patterns, natural variability, stratospheric ozone and melt water from the Antarctic ice sheet entering the Southern Ocean have all been proposed as potential explanations.

So far, none of these have proved to be the definitive answer.

Changes in sea ice thickness

The thickness, or depth, of sea ice cannot be measured directly by satellites because it is thin, salty and hidden below a layer of snow of unknown thickness.

Unlike the Arctic, where we have extensive data from submarines and other sources, information about Antarctic sea ice thickness is very sparse. The data we have mainly come from holes drilled in the sea ice, sea ice monitoring stations, and electromagnetic induction measurements from sleds, helicopters or planes.

The data are mostly from land-fast sea ice, which is the sea ice attached to land or ice shelves.

Read more:
Fractured foundations: how Antarctica’s ‘landfast’ ice is dwindling and why that’s bad news

We have only a few airborne thickness measurements over freely moving pack ice, which makes up most of Antarctic sea ice. We need both sea ice area and thickness to determine sea ice volume, which is important for knowing the overall impact of climate change on sea ice.

Antarctic storms

McMurdo Sound is a region of the Antarctic coastline in the Ross Sea where both New Zealand (Scott Base) and the USA (McMurdo Station) have Antarctic bases. The sea ice in McMurdo Sound was dramatically thinner than usual in 2022, but not in 2023.

In 2022, multiple storms kept blowing out McMurdo Sound sea ice during winter. Sea ice that would normally be about two metres thick was around 1-1.3 m thick because it was not able to stay in place and grow thicker over the winter season.

Snow was thicker than usual in places, which slowed down the growth of sea ice by insulating it from the cold air above. The weather was not warmer, and the ice had not melted; it had been blown out by strong winds.

This thinner-than-usual sea ice caused major disruptions in Antarctic operations for New Zealand and other countries in 2022. The University of Otago’s automated sea ice monitoring system is installed each year to measure sea ice thickness, temperature and snow depth. In 2022, Scott Base staff had to take the equipment onto the sea ice on foot for the first time because the sea ice was deemed unsafe to drive vehicles on.

Seeing open water in front of McMurdo Station in the middle of winter in 2022 was shocking for us. However, despite the extremely low winter sea ice extent around most of Antarctica in 2023, sea ice in McMurdo Sound formed in a similar way to most years.

It is not yet clear how much climate change has driven the huge anomalies in Antarctic sea ice extent or thickness, but events like these could be a harbinger of things to come.

To have a chance of predicting these changes, we will need dramatically improved modelling capabilities, more measurements of crucial factors driving sea ice change, and new ways of making those measurements.

We have received research funding from the Deep South National Science Challenge, the Antarctic Science Platform and the Marsden Fund. We received logistical support for Antarctic field work from Antarctica New Zealand, and high performance computing resources through NeSI.

Pat Langhorne has worked on sea ice for 35 years, receiving research funding from the Deep South National Science Challenge and the Marsden Fund, among others. Logistical support for Antarctic field work has been provided by Antarctica New Zealand and the Australian Antarctic Division.

– ref. As Antarctic sea ice continues its dramatic decline, we need more measurements and much better models to predict its future – https://theconversation.com/as-antarctic-sea-ice-continues-its-dramatic-decline-we-need-more-measurements-and-much-better-models-to-predict-its-future-213747

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Naomi Zouwer, Visual Artist and Lecturer in Teacher Education, University of Canberra

As a visual artist and educator, I know how important it is to encourage your child to think and behave like an artist. But this is not necessarily about drawing or painting in a particular way.

The habits of an artist include the ability to generate ideas, trust in creative processes, be comfortable with ambiguity, take risks and embrace failure.

All this helps children embrace “failures” as a learning experience. In doing so, you are building their resilience.

These are all transferable skills kids can use in other areas of learning and life. As the late UK education expert Ken Robinson said:

If you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original.

How to think and behave like an artist

You can encourage children to develop the habits of an artist by providing opportunities for them to take creative risks and use problem finding skills. Problem finding skills are identifying unforeseen problems using critical and analytic thinking.

Here are three art activities to try in the holidays – or any time – to build these skills.

These activities work for kids from five and up. Some children will need help but parents should try to be the “guide on the side”. This means helping children make their own discoveries and not jumping in and taking over.

Read more:
Holiday help! An art expert suggests screen-free things to do in every room of the house

1. Blind contour drawing

In blind contour drawing you don’t look at the paper while you draw and once your drawing implement touches the paper, you don’t lift it off until you are done.

You can draw anything, but portraits are a lot of fun. Look closely at your subject and slowly draw what you see, looking for lines and contours to draw in and around them.

This is a gentle way of extending creative potential of drawing. It also stops your inner critic telling you you “can’t draw” (because you can’t see what you’re doing, so you can’t criticise yourself). It also connects your hand to your brain and allows you to draw what you see, not what you think you see.

The lines are always lovely. They are free flowing and fluid as opposed to what I call “furry lines” that show all insecurities, second thoughts and apprehensions.

Read more:
How to set up a kids’ art studio at home (and learn to love the mess)

2. Make your own brushes

In a previous article, I talked about how to make paint.

Another similar activity is making brushes or “mark-making tools” as I like to call them. You can use a range of materials from outside or even the recycling bin: a few sticks, masking tape and some string. Tie a bunch of twigs and leaves or feathers together and bind them to the top of a stick.

Why use not the bottom of the stick to make a double-ended tool? Or cut up an old sponge and tie it to a stick.

Try really long sticks or short stubby sticks. The size and shape of the stick will change the way you use it and affect the marks you will make.

Dip your tools in ink and try them out on reams of butcher’s paper rolled out in a space where children feel free to move around and put their body into it. You can use paint too, though you might want to add water to make it runnier.

This encourages becoming comfortable with uncertainty (who knows what marks these new tools will make?).

In this context “failure” might look like the tool not making the mark the child had in their mind. This forces the child to either go with the mark it makes or go back and redesign their tool.

This helps children to become comfortable with that idea of testing, experimenting and creating your way through an issue.

3. Change your medium and your size

Willow charcoal – made from burnt willow branches – is an excellent medium for experimenting with and enables children to “draw big”.

It can be crumbly and smudges easily (it’s also extremely messy) so it can make some unexpected marks and children can explore a range of tones from black to light grey.

Children can use the tip of it to draw lines, or use the side of the stick to create wide shapes and shades.

Get some large pieces of paper and encourage your child to draw as big as they can to create huge gestural drawings with the charcoal. This encourages kids to move out of their comfort zone (and beyond A4 paper).

Challenge them to upscale what they see, such as flowers or their favourite object. Or put on some music and suggest to your child they draw what they hear and feel.

If you don’t have charcoal, you could also use jumbo chalk and draw on the footpath.

Another approach is to sit on a piece of paper and get them to trace their bodies, move, trace themselves and again, like Australian artist Julie Rrap.

If the page gets covered in charcoal just keep going, cover the paper completely with charcoal and then use a eraser to draw “in reverse”.

As I have said before, try not to worry about the mess. This is also part of being an artist – and learning to think like one, too.

Read more:
Stand back and avoid saying ‘be careful!’: how to help your child take risks at the park

Naomi Zouwer 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. Take risks, embrace failure and be comfortable with uncertainty: 3 activities to help your child think like an artist – https://theconversation.com/take-risks-embrace-failure-and-be-comfortable-with-uncertainty-3-activities-to-help-your-child-think-like-an-artist-214142

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shea X. Fan, Senior Lecturer in International Business, School of Management, RMIT University

Loneliness is a much discussed social issue, but it is rarely considered to be a workplace problem that needs to be managed like other health issues at work.

The Social Connection in Australia 2023 report acknowledges loneliness hurts businesses, as it causes employee absenteeism and reduced productivity.

However, people are often unaware particular work roles, environments, responsibilities and work-related relocation is often what causes loneliness.

These work conditions may cause social isolation, distort interpersonal relationships, and prevent employees from developing or maintaining social connections – all of which are a catalyst for loneliness.

The expression “it is lonely at the top” suggests senior managers or chief executives are especially likely to suffer from loneliness.

Their position and associated power makes authentic workplace relationships rare because they are socially and psychologically distanced from most people in their organisation.

As leaders, they are held responsible for making significant decisions. Having nobody to share the risks and responsibilities with is an implicit social deficiency that increases workplace loneliness.

Similarly, loneliness is also a classic occupational hazard for business entrepreneurs who are prepared to take risks in pursuit of goals developing their own businesses. In 2019 and 2022, we surveyed 363 entrepreneurs in Indonesia and the United Kingdom, and found 50% reported they sometimes or always experienced loneliness.

This rate was consistent with an article published in Harvard Business Review in 1984 written by D. E. Gumpert and D. P. Boyd titled, The loneliness of the small-business owner. Their research found 52% of the business owners researched frequently experienced loneliness.

It appears that loneliness experienced by entrepreneurs has not changed over 40 years. Entrepreneurs’ responsibilities for running and developing their businesses substantially reduce the time they can share with families and friends.

Read more:
Can Australian employers stop you working from home? Here’s what the law says

Entrepreneurs may also have to withhold negative information about the business and pose a strong and positive image to others in order to retain resources and support for their companies. The nature of this line of work turns them into “lone wolves”.

Loneliness is also found among employees relocated overseas by their multinational corporations. It is common among expatriates separated from their social networks, to find it difficult to develop new connections because of cultural differences, language barriers or insufficient social resources.

Remote work accelerated by the COVID pandemic has given people the flexibility to work from home but it has also worsened social isolation as a result of fewer opportunities for informal chats and face-to-face bonding with colleagues and managers.

Although most companies are keen to see workers return to offices, the continuation of hybrid forms of working creates challenges in addressing work-related loneliness as many people continue to work partly from home.

Similarly, digital technology has created another modern work phenomenon, gig work. While gig workers may enjoy flexible schedules, the nature of their work provides few opportunities to develop deep relationships with colleagues.

Given the pervasiveness of workplace loneliness and the challenges it poses, it is surprising that there is little public awareness of how to deal with it.

To stimulate more interest in this topic and to help ease this modern pandemic, our research, soon to be released，proposes resource-based solutions to combat loneliness. We also identify strategies for both individuals and organisations to deal with loneliness:

Strategies for individuals

• Understand your desired level of social goals.

Loneliness arises when desired social relations are not satisfied by actual relations. People need to be clear about their social needs at work. Some may be happy with a few strong relationships, some may prefer broad but weak social connections. Understanding personal social goals helps employees notice when they might need to develop appropriate strategies to battle loneliness.

• Evaluate personal resources that make developing social connections difficult.
Employees need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of personal factors and change them if they are preventing social connections. For instance, is the lack of contact caused by our personality, lack of social skills, or low social motivation? As individuals, we cultivate our social connections, so we are the key to shaping them.

• Do not waste daily resources. Time, energy and mood are also resources, but they fluctuate daily. They can also be used to achieve social goals. We all have regular feelings of being time-poor, tired, not wanting to talk to people or to be social. This causes daily opportunities to develop connections to be wasted. Desired social relations are developed gradually, and we need work on this regularly to achieve our desired level of connection.

Strategies for companies

• Audit work practices and identify what causes social isolation. Organisations need to acknowledge that work practices can cause loneliness for employees and find creative solutions. For example, they could reduce work intensity and give employees time to socialise; they could help expatriates maintain old social bonds and develop new connections in their new work location.

• Remove social barriers for employees by cultivating an inclusive work environment. An inclusive environment is especially beneficial for demographically diverse employees. Organisations have the power to promote and normalise inclusion, shape employees’ social behaviours and help minority groups to develop desired social ties in the workplace.

• Provide opportunities for employees to have occasional and repeated face-to-face interactions. Organisations can offer a variety of socialising opportunities. These might include mentoring and support programs, social events, holiday celebrations, coffee breaks and team-building activities.

Of course, employees must be proactive and take charge of overcoming their loneliness. They can begin this by developing or expanding their repertoire of personal resources and by taking up opportunities offered by their employer.

These investments in alleviating workplace loneliness will result in employees having a stronger sense of belonging to organisations and being more productive.

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. Workplace loneliness is the modern pandemic damaging lives and hurting businesses – https://theconversation.com/workplace-loneliness-is-the-modern-pandemic-damaging-lives-and-hurting-businesses-213873

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Miles Pattenden, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University

The medieval is part of the mosaic of modern Australia. Our nation’s heritage on this island continent is full of it: in aesthetics, institutions, laws, languages, identities, moralities. Indeed, the very idea of a university is medieval – a concept developed by the Catholic Church around the year 1100.

We have a crown and common law because of old-time kings called Henry. Sydney suburbs called St Ives, St Clair, St Leonards, St Marys reflect medieval England’s big-name saints.

Melbourne’s Luna Park has a giant gaping mouth you walk through to the amusements. Why? Because a medieval design mediated over centuries showed the gates of Hell this way.

All this is part of why the Australian Catholic University’s recent decision to axe dozens of humanities jobs, with the medieval and early modern studies program entirely disbanded, is so controversial.

People sometimes say the Middle Ages don’t matter in this bright new modern age. They were a time of backwardness, violence, racism, homophobia, witch-burnings and so on. Nothing like modern Australia!

There’s no point in taxpayer dollars being spent studying a bunch of lords and peasants and weird men in dresses. If we want to know about that, why not just watch Game of Thrones?

Getting medieval

Medievalists interpret and explain the many meanings imbued in cultural forms and structures we navigate daily. You think the Middle Ages was just a parade of kings and queens – “one damn thing after another” to quote Alan Bennett’s The History Boys? You couldn’t be more wrong.

One “medieval” project at ACU today shows how old religious institutions responded to the problems of housing precarity and homelessness. (Anyone complaining about rent or mortgage payments lately?) Another, shows how contemporary conspiracy theories derive from medieval models. A third, how the solace of medieval spirituality was a key resource for men dying of AIDS in 1980s New South Wales.

You think we have a problem with antisemites now? Let me tell you about Norwich 1144. Islamophobia? You might be interested in the Crusades! Homophobia? What about the medieval legend of “sodomite Christmas”. (Jesus was born and all the gays died?)

Even those Game of Thrones producers have to get their ideas and aesthetics from somewhere. Usually, it’s from what medievalists have told them life was like back then. They talk to us, we consult for them. Industry partnership.

In fact, and paradoxical as it might seem, medieval history has always moved with the times. The fantastic success of the medieval on film courses (and the like) reflects this.

Medievalists just don’t ask the same questions today that the great beardy Bishop Stubbs did when he wrote his Constitutional History of England (the first book I remember mentioned in my first undergrad lecture). We’re concerned with many of the same questions and problems that other boffins study in social sciences, sometimes even hard sciences, law, economics, business and philosophy.

What does it mean to have an emotion, for instance? Neuroscientists can give you one idea. But they can’t help you describe the feeling. A medieval mystic like Margery Kempe can. And the fact that Kempe describes it differently to us is itself important self-knowledge.

It reminds us that the meanings of words change. So many stoushes in Australian public life would be resolved if people could just get a grip on that.

Protecting the narrative around our heritage

For those of us of a liberal disposition there’s another compelling reason to keep the medieval close. We surrender it to less liberal people if we don’t.

My colleague at Deakin, Helen Young, has just won an ARC Future Fellowship to study (among other things) how neo-Nazis and other hate groups use the Middle Ages as a setting for their sick fantasies of white supremacism.

Read more:
The Rings of Power is suffering a racist backlash for casting actors of colour – but Tolkien’s work has always attracted white supremacists

The Catholic Church, an organisation which cops a lot of criticism in Australia, deserves credit for its efforts to preserve an unsanitised, objectively studied medieval past for everyone – giving us resources to counter those who would use it as propaganda against us. The Vatican Library, in the heart of Rome, for instance, isn’t just a setting for Dan Brown page-turners. It is a great treasure of the modern cultural world.

Notorious nonsense that the medieval is “ornamental” to the modern – a silliness once espoused by former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s education minister in Britain – needs to be countered all the time. Such sentiments never lie quietly for long.

Just last year, then-Minister Stuart Robert said studying Elizabethan theatre – Shakespeare! – is only important to Great Britain (a political formation that did not exist in Elizabeth’s time).

We need to protect our cultural heritage from efforts to erase them. Especially at a time when we’re debating profound questions about our own society – how we recognise First Nations peoples in Australia, what it means to be Australian – we should make sure we retain a good understanding of the ongoing impacts of the European heritages that are common to many of us.

It’s a necessary resource for our civic debates.

Miles Pattenden has received funding from the UK Government, the Spanish Government, and the European Commission.

– ref. From Luna Park to neo-Nazis – why the Middle Ages still matters to middle Australia – https://theconversation.com/from-luna-park-to-neo-nazis-why-the-middle-ages-still-matters-to-middle-australia-214246

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

Mike Pezzullo, one of Canberra’s most powerful and certainly most controversial public servants, cannot survive the revelation of the trove of text messages showing him blatantly inserting himself into the political process.

Pezzullo, the secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, has been stood aside while his extraordinary behaviour, exposed by Nine Entertainment, is scrutinised by a former public service commissioner, Lynelle Briggs. But the end of the story is predictable.

In the tsunami of encrypted texts, running over five years and sent to Scott Briggs (no relation to Lynelle Briggs), a Liberal insider and confidant of prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, Pezzullo repeatedly lobbied for his departmental interests and his views.

He dissed ministers in the way of these interests or those (and other people) he didn’t rate. He used Briggs to seek leverage with the then PMs, asking for his opinions to be passed on. Briggs was happy to comply.

Nine says it learned of the messages “via a third party who obtained lawful access to them”.

Pezzullo is a one-off in the today’s public service. He can perhaps be partly understood by referring back to the so-called bureaucratic “mandarins” of decades ago. They ran their departments with iron grips, and in some cases were, or tried to be, as powerful as ministers, or more so. They gave no quarter in bureaucratic battles.

The mandarins were “players”. Pezzullo is a “player”.

He’s tough and polarising, with supporters and bitter enemies. Critics have long questioned his judgement. On security matters, he’s the hawks’ hawk. While at first blush his texts appear highly partisan, that is too simplistic an interpretation. He fights bureaucratic and policy/ideological battles, rather than being directly party-political.

His addiction to texting is certainly bipartisan. Within the Albanese government they joke about it starting first thing in the morning and running well into the night.

As a public servant, Pezzullo has served both sides of politics. When in the defence department, he was lead author of the Rudd government’s 2009 defence white paper, which raised the hackles of China. Earlier, he was a senior staffer to Kim Beazley when Beazley was opposition leader. His primary interest is defence – he would have liked nothing better than to head the defence department.

When Anthony Albanese won government, some in Labor wanted Pezzullo gone. He survived not least because the new home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, in charge of this huge, sprawling empire, needed an experienced hand.

In some ways, Pezzullo is a stickler for process – as we saw when Morrison was trying to make political use of a boat headed for Australia on election day – which makes these texts all the more shocking. But he portrayed himself as acting in broader interests, telling Briggs at one point during the 2018 battle over the prime ministership, “I say that from a policy perspective and not from a Liberal leadership perspective”.

Pezzullo lobbied relentlessly for the creation of the home affairs “super” department, which Turnbull set up in December 2017 to placate the ambitious Peter Dutton.

Those who resisted its establishment, particularly then attorney-general George Brandis, became Pezzullo’s targets. He accused Brandis of “lawyering” public servants “into a state of befuddlement”.

Pezzullo is particularly fond of military imagery. During the struggle to get home affairs up, he texted Briggs, “I am running deep and silent. Won’t come up to periscope depth for a while”. In another message he said the attorney-general’s department needed to be “put to the sword” on a matter, then “we can break out of the Normandy beachhead”. (In a 2021 Anzac Day message to staff Pezzullo caused a public ruckus when he wrote of “the drums of war” beating.)

Moderates were an all-round worry in the Pezzullo texts. Marise Payne, in the defence portfolio, was “completely ineffectual”, “a problem” and “doesn’t have a clear view of the national interest”. Julie Bishop received short shrift; he “almost had a heart attack” when she put her hand up as a candidate in the 2018 upheaval. He was sarcastically relieved when Briggs assured him she had few numbers.

In that battle, in which Dutton (Pezzullo’s minister) challenged Turnbull and Morrison ultimately emerged as prime minister, Pezzullo was concerned about who would end up his minister.

“You need a right winger in there – people smugglers will be watching”, he texted Briggs.

“Any suggestion of a moderate going in would be potentially lethal viz” for Operation Sovereign Borders, he said.

Pezzullo had little time for the head of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson: he was not up to the job and “entirely lacking in self awareness”. In one of those nice ironies of politics, Parkinson was commissioned by the Labor government to lead O’Neil’s migration review.

Pezzullo, whose tug-of-war appearances at Senate estimates hearings are often compulsory viewing, complained to Briggs in 2020, after enduring a particularly long session, that the hearings were “actually a concern for our democracy”. But he boasted that “in batting terms we are 0-400”.

Free speech came well behind security in Pezzullo’s priorities. After an awkward story by reporter Annika Smethurst, who was subjected to a police raid, Pezzullo reportedly argued for a revival of the D-notice system, under which editors were requested not to publish certain information affecting defence or national security. It didn’t happen.

Pezzullo in one text asked Briggs, “Please keep our conversations confidential. Tricky tight rope for me”. Tricky indeed. The player obsessed by security has been undone by some unidentified power play that has left him totally exposed.

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. View from The Hill: ‘Player’ Mike Pezzullo undone by power play – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-player-mike-pezzullo-undone-by-power-play-214262

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Podger, Honorary Professor of Public Policy, Australian National University

The revelations in the Nine newspapers that Mike Pezzullo, secretary of the powerful Home Affairs department, shared with Liberal Party powerbroker Scott Briggs are certainly extraordinary. But, just like the revelations about Robodebt from the royal commission, they must not be treated as an isolated case but as evidence of serious systemic problems in the Australian Public Service (APS).

So what is expected from public servants in terms of their relationship with government? The answer is in the Public Service Act, which states secretaries – those at the very top of each department – must uphold and promote the APS Values and Employment Principles. One of those values is impartiality:

The APS is apolitical and provides the government with advice that is frank, honest, timely and based on the best available evidence.

The conduct of the public service is overseen by the public service commissioner, who issues legal directions about how bureaucrats must conduct themselves consistent with each APS Value.

Regarding being impartial, this means, among other things:

• serving the government of the day with high quality professional support, irrespective of which political party is in power and of personal political beliefs

• ensuring the individual’s actions do not provide grounds for a reasonable person to conclude the individual could not serve the government of the day impartially

• ensuring management and staffing decisions are made on a basis that is independent of the political party system, free from political bias and not influenced by the individual’s political beliefs

• implementing government policies in a way that is free from bias, and in accordance with the law.

The APS Code of Conduct requires public servants

at all times to behave in a way that upholds the APS Values and Employment Principles, and the integrity and good reputation of the employee’s Agency and the APS.

In the event the head of an agency (including a departmental secretary) is alleged to have breached the code, the commissioner is responsible for inquiring into the allegation and reporting to the prime minister. Penalties for breaches include dismissal.

Read more:
View from The Hill: A soft reprimand from one hard man to another

From the details in the article, it is understandable Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has referred the matter to the commissioner. By implication, the article alleges breaches of the code for not upholding the APS value of impartiality: Pezzullo’s alleged actions not only suggest partisanship, but also lack of objectivity and allowing his personal political beliefs to affect his professional support for the government. It’s extremely difficult to see how the messages Pezzullo allegedly sent to Briggs could be seen to be consistent with upholding the values, let alone promoting them as he is required to do.

Pezzullo may claim the material revealed in the article was private, as demonstrated by its encryption. He may also highlight the references the article said he included about his own neutrality. But it would be hard to suggest he was not trying to influence decisions by the government, or that the alleged messages were not highly political.

Moreover, when a person is as senior as Pezzullo, trying to distinguish between public and private behaviour is problematic. I recall telling Max Moore-Wilton, former secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet under John Howard, that his presence at Howard’s election night function in 2001 was inconsistent with his obligation to uphold and promote non-partisanship, despite his claims this was a private matter in his private time. I noted that, had Kim Beazley won that election, Moore-Wilton would have needed to be able to demonstrate his capacity to serve the new prime minister professionally and impartially.

Trust is the critical ingredient of a secretary’s relationship with their minister. And a secretary does not know who their minister will be tomorrow or next year, whether within the current government or under a new government.

So trust has to be achieved across the parliament and with the Australian public. It’s hard to see that Pezzullo’s messages are in any way consistent with such trust. A host of Liberal ministers, had they known of the messages, would have had no trust in Pezzullo, let alone a Labor minister.

At a different time, Pezzullo was on Beazley’s staff. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does raise the question of whether he has behaved, to use the late professor of public administration Peter Aucoin’s term, in a “promiscuously partisan” way. That is, crossing the boundary between the public service and politics.

Read more:
After robodebt, here’s how Australia can have a truly ‘frank and fearless’ public service again

A central issue in the Robodebt case was whether senior public servants were being overly responsive to their ministers and ignoring their obligations to uphold and promote the values (and the law). Public service failures in the sports rorts and Morrison multiple-ministries cases have raised a similar question. Aucoin drew attention to this problem in Australia and other Anglophone countries over a decade ago. Clearly, it has become a lot worse in Australia since then.

My own view is that the contract system for secretaries, which means they are constantly under an implicit threat of losing their jobs, is contributing to excessive willingness to please. There is evidence of some sensible actions by the current APS commissioner and the secretary of prime minister and cabinet to place more emphasis on merit in the appointment process.

But more needs to be done, including in the legislation, if we are to rebuild the trust that is essential between the public service and all sides of politics, the parliament and the Australian public.

Another possible measure, but one not directly relevant in the Pezzullo case, is to prohibit any senior public servant from being a member of any political party. That might put some meat on the requirement to promote, as well as uphold, the value of impartiality.

Andrew Podger 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. Pezzullo story points to serious systemic problems in the Australian Public Service – https://theconversation.com/pezzullo-story-points-to-serious-systemic-problems-in-the-australian-public-service-214253

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hunter Fujak, Lecturer in Sport Management, Deakin University

The Wallabies have suffered a record-breaking defeat to Wales at the Rugby World Cup. This represents Australia’s worst result in a World Cup match and its biggest-ever losing margin to Wales. And it will almost certainly end Australia’s 2023 World Cup campaign at the group stage for the first time.

Given pundits had suggested a strong World Cup performance was vital for the health of the game domestically, the horror result heaps further pressure onto a sport shrinking out of the mainstream and facing numerous challenges.

Sport Management 101: Investing in grassroots and junior development

A notable feature of the Australian sport system is that while organisations such as the Australian Football League, National Rugby League and Rugby Australia oversee professional football leagues and generate millions of dollars in commercial revenue, they are also tasked with looking after their sports at the community level.

The AFL understands this investment in the grassroots level is not only vital to producing the next batch of superstar players, but also key to ensuring the sport remains embedded within local communities.

Rugby Australia has not valued this necessity, with World Cup results illustrating the deleterious impact of falling behind competitors when it comes to grassroots investment.

My colleagues and I have performed a study of Rugby Australia’s financial performance since 1980. We discovered the code’s professionalisation in the mid-1990s resulted in a drastic shift in how the organisation spent its money. A clear implication from the analysis was a significant divestment from grassroots development in the past 20 years.

In 2001, 13.76% of Rugby Australia expenditure (A$7.06 million) related to community rugby. By 2015, this had hit a record low of 2.65% ($2.37 million).

And while Rugby Australia spent $4.3 million (3.59%) on community rugby in 2019, this paled in comparison to how much the AFL spent on game development ($58.8 million, or 13.7% of its overall expenditure), as well as the NRL ($43.3 million, or 8.2% of its overall expenditure).

This lack of resourcing for community rugby prompted former Wallaby Brett Papworth to quip:

[Rugby Australia has] chopped all the trees down and been a fantastic logging business and they’ve built massive timber mills, but they’ve forgotten to plant any new trees.

This lack of new tree growth appears to now be biting the code in 2023.

Fighting a losing battle for talent

Contributing further to the Wallabies’ struggles has been the somewhat unique situation whereby a significant proportion of the code’s elite juniors ‘defect’ to another sport upon turning professional.

Many rugby-playing junior athletes developed in the private school system – think Cameron Murray, Angus Crighton, Patrick Carrigan or Kalyn Ponga – instead choose the NRL and have become household names in the competing code.

Certainly, the NRL has benefited from becoming the destination code for many union-trained athletes, a phenomenon Melbourne Storm captain Christian Welch astutely described in economic terms as a “free rider problem” for Rugby Australia.

Read more:
Are the Wallabies’ struggles a sign of rugby union’s decline in Australia?

Rugby’s challenge here is two-fold.

First, with 16 Australian NRL clubs to Super Rugby’s five, there are simply more professional opportunities available to aspiring young players – and they are far more lucrative, too.

The pragmatic reality for aspiring athletes is that the lure of a professional contract is often far more important than the rugby code they play. This is particularly the case for Pasifika rugby players, for whom maximising professional incomes is tied to familial and cultural priorities.

Second has been the growing financial superiority of the NRL compared to Australian rugby.

The salary caps (the total value a team can spend on player salaries) of the codes are instructive. Both the NRL and Super Rugby salary caps were around $4.4 million in 2012. Since then, however, the NRL cap has grown 275% to $12.1 million in 2023, while Super Rugby’s cap has lifted by only 25% to $5.5 million.

Rugby Australia has taken a more bullish public tone in recent times, suggesting the allure of participating in international competition will entice NRL stars to rugby union via the Wallabies.

Thus far, however, the code has secured only one such emerging star in Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii – and it required one of the largest contracts in Australian sport to do so. Poor Wallaby performances will only drive up the cost of buying established talent.

Where to next for rugby union in Australia?

Rugby Australia is in an increasingly perilous market position, with declining on-field performance only adding to a vicious spiral of downward pressures.

It was announced in recent days that Rugby Australia has disengaged from private equity discussions on account of disappointing valuations. This low commercial valuation was said to stem from the extension of its existing broadcast deal with Channel Nine to 2025, originally valued at $30 million per year.

By contrast, the AFL’s broadcast deal commencing in 2025 will generate $643 million in annual revenue, illustrative of the gulf between the “rich” and “poor” in Australian sport.

This gulf is only widening. In 1996, rugby union’s overall revenue ($21 million) was a quarter of the AFL’s ($85 million). By 2022, Rugby Australia’s revenue ($129 million) was just 14% of the AFL’s ($944 million).

Of particular concern is that Rugby Australia has historically focused its efforts on the men’s national team, which has now failed to yield a dividend. This focus prompted sharp criticism recently from athletes in the women’s national team, who called out perceived broken promises and gender inequalities by Rugby Australia.

Rugby Australia’s semi-professional women’s rugby program is now firmly behind both other national rugby unions, as well as the many vibrant domestic women’s leagues such as the Women’s Big Bash League, AFLW and NRLW.

Rugby Australia seems to thus be stuck with a wicked problem. The code appears underfunded at the community level, the domestic professional level and in the women’s game, yet it is not generating the revenue required to make improvements in these areas.

Meanwhile, the code’s largest competitors continue to get stronger, making it ever more difficult to cultivate the new fans required to generate higher revenues.

With a highly anticipated Lions tour in 2025 and the home World Cup in 2027 both on the horizon, the question now is whether Australian rugby will be in a position to capitalise on these opportunities.

Prior to the Wallabies’ final loss at the World Cup, Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan offered some curious advice: “For all the Wallaby detractors, don’t watch the game.” McLennan well may have this request granted.

Read more:
The Barassi Line: a globally unique divider splitting Australia’s footy fans

Hunter Fujak 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. Australian rugby has reached its lowest point. How did it get here? – https://theconversation.com/australian-rugby-has-reached-its-lowest-point-how-did-it-get-here-214255

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

Today’s employment white paper has adopted the broadest-ever definition of what “full employment” means for Australia.

The new paper says closer to 2.8 million Australians are either underemployed or out of work – equivalent to one-fifth of the current workforce. That new estimate is much higher than the official unemployment total of 539,700.

Going further than any of the previous employment white papers over the past 80 years, the new report defines full employment as meaning

everyone who wants a job should be able to find one without searching for too long

While it commits the government to keeping employment as close as possible to the current maximum sustainable level “consistent with low and stable inflation”, it goes further, noting that this measure – the so-called non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) – has been falling and is hard to estimate.

The white paper still cautions that “full employment” does not mean zero unemployment.

There will always be some “frictional unemployment” (as people change jobs) and “structural unemployment” (as industries decline or skills do not match needs). But it commits the government to minimise “cyclical unemployment”: unemployment caused by the state of the economy.

It incorporates into its definition of full employment “underemployment”, which happens when people who do have jobs are unable to get the number of hours they want.

Underemployment and unemployment approach 2.8 million

While 539,700 Australians are unemployed, there are another 1 million who are employed but want to work more. And there are another 1.3 million “potential workers” who are interested in working, but not currently actively looking.

This lifts the total number of Australians who are in some way unemployed to 2.8 million, according to the white paper.

The white paper also talks of “inclusive full employment”, by which it means “broadening labour market opportunities” to encourage more people to seek jobs.

Economists refer to this as further increasing the participation rate, which is already near a record high.

Enhanced support for childcare (already announced in Labor’s first budget) is one of the sorts of measures that would help, reducing barriers to work for parents.

Another, announced in this white paper, is a permanent extension of the A$11,800 work bonus for pensioners over age pension age and eligible veterans, which was temporarily lifted from $7,800 to $11,800 in the October 2022 budget.

Read more:
Employment white paper to deliver more highly qualified workers in net zero, care and digitisation

Employment white papers date back to WWII

This isn’t the first Australian government employment white paper.

The very first was released by the wartime Curtin government in 1945, entitled Full Employment in Australia.

Curtin wanted to ensure that post-war unemployment would not return to the extraordinarily high levels experienced in the 1930s.

That 1945 white paper was inspired by the British white paper released in 1944, which set out an ambitious plan to carry forward the high employment achieved during wartime into peacetime.

A large team of economists and other experts, led by HC “Nugget” Coombs, spent almost a year preparing the white paper, producing eight drafts.

No specific target for our unemployment rate

As with today’s white paper, the 1945 full employment white paper didn’t put a number on the unemployment rate which corresponds to “full employment” – although early drafts of the 1945 paper included numbers ranging from 2% to 5%.

The 1965 Vernon Report on the economy was more optimistic, defining full employment as an unemployment rate of 1 to 1.5%.

The Keating government’s Working Nation paper – released in 1994 when unemployment was almost 10% – adopted a target of 5% by 2000. That wasn’t quite met – unemployment remained above 6% in 2000, but fell to 5% by 2004.

By 2010, many economists regarded 5% as effectively “full employment”.

In June this year, the present Reserve Bank governor, Michele Bullock, defined full employment as

the point at which there is a balance between demand and supply in the labour market (and in the markets for goods and services) with inflation at the inflation target

She nominated an unemployment rate of around 4.5%.

Australian economists surveyed by The Conversation and the Economic Society of Australia last month nominated 4%. Curiously, that’s the same rate nominated by the Department of Postwar Reconstruction’s Chief Economist, Trevor Swan, in work for the full employment white paper in 1945.

The words, but not the numbers, in today’s employment white paper are consistent with an unemployment rate of 4% or lower.

Read more:
We can and should keep unemployment below 4%, say top economists

Few ideas for lifting productivity

The white paper identifies labour productivity (output per hour worked) as crucial to increasing the purchasing power of wages, yet details few ideas for increasing it.

Labour productivity has slowed over recent decades, and in recent years has actually fallen. The causes are not obvious. Some of it may be a temporary reflection of the very desirable reductions in unemployment.

Workers who have been out of work for a while are, at first, likely to produce less than workers already in work.

Declining labour productivity is also likely to reflect the gradual shift from manufacturing to services.

The white paper says the services sector now accounts for more than 80% of employment, compared to around 50% at the turn of the 20th century.

Productivity in many services is hard to increase. A haircut or a live performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by a string quartet takes about as many hours of labour now as it did a century ago.

Read more:
Government’s employment white paper commits to jobs for all who want them – and help to get them

But weak productivity probably also reflects other things. The white paper refers to evidence that dynamism and innovation have declined in Australia. This is not easy to address. The government’s two-year competition review will help.

And low investment is another problem. Companies might not be moving fast enough to equip workers with the tools they need to help them produce more.

A more robust economy might encourage them to invest, as could tax changes – but they were beyond the scope of this white paper.

John Hawkins was formerly a senior economist in the Australian Treasury.

Selwyn Cornish 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. 1 in 5 Australian workers are either underemployed or out of work: white paper – https://theconversation.com/1-in-5-australian-workers-are-either-underemployed-or-out-of-work-white-paper-210967

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamin Isakhan, Professor of International Politics, Deakin University

Almost a decade ago, the Sunni jihadist network known as the Islamic State (IS) declared the formation of an Islamic Caliphate after they captured the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014.

In response, tens of thousands of Shia men joined a complex patchwork of militias to fight against IS. Many of these militias are notoriously violent and directly loyal to Iran’s theocratic state.

But very little is known about how these Shia militias were so quickly and so effectively mobilised. In our research, we have taken a novel approach, examining the many popular music videos produced by these militias.

These music videos drew on a complex cocktail of historical myths and contemporary clergymen to mobilise Iraq’s Shia population to fight the IS.

Read more:
Understanding Islamic State: where does it come from and what does it want?

Foundational myths, historical grievances

The popular music videos explicitly reference a deeply held set of religious myths and symbols that have informed Shia politics since its inception.

One video shows images of militiamen driving towards the front-lines and firing from a bunker at IS targets.

The singer extols the religious virtues of fighting the IS by comparing those killed today with the Shia martyrs at the Battle of Karbala:

We fight our enemies. Our martyrs are similar to the martyrs of Karbala. Our people are supporters of Hussein.

The divide between the Sunni and Shia sects dates back to the early years of Islam.

A debate emerged after the Prophet Muhammad’s death about who should lead the Islamic community. The majority accepted the authority of the Prophet’s senior companion, Abu Bakr. A minority, later identified as Shiites, believed only a blood relative of the Prophet – in particular, his cousin Ali – had the right to lead.

In the year 680, the division between the two sects escalated at the Battle of Karbala, where Ali’s son Hussein and many of his followers were defeated and executed by Sunni forces.

The legend of the Battle of Karbala has come to symbolise the historical injustice of the Shia faithful at the hands of the Sunni majority. It is commemorated at the annual Ashura festival in which Shiites reenact the battle, including by self-flagellation.

The emotive lyrics and tone of the song are specifically designed to resonate with this history of suffering.

Read more:
What is the Shia-Sunni divide?

The Shia jihad against the IS

The popular music videos produced by different Shia militias also draw on fatwas (religious edicts) issued by several prominent Shia clerics in response to the violence of the IS.

In 2014, Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa announcing a jihad (holy war) against the IS.

He called for a mass Shia mobilisation, arguing

It is the legal and national responsibility of whoever can hold a weapon to take up arms to defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites.

Some popular music videos explicitly cite the fatwas of Sistani and other clerics, encouraging their young supporters to heed these calls. A short clip shows armed members of one militia chanting: “Al-Sistani is like a crown on our heads. Your wish is our command.”

One very slickly produced music video refers to both historical grievances over the failure to recognise Ali as the legitimate heir of the Prophet Muhammad and to the centrality of Sistani’s fatwa to their decision to fight the IS:

We are the Turkmen [of Iraq]

We follow Ali’s path

Iraq must live in peace and happiness

When Sistani orders us, we obey. We will defeat and destroy the IS

We believe in the fatwas of our religious authorities, and we defend our holy sites.

As the singer recites each verse, the footage shows heavily armed Shia men posing in front of a tank. It also features live action footage from various battles against the IS, including advancing on key targets, firing machine guns and heavy artillery.

Mobilising young men

These videos serve as a unique archive of the war against the IS, demonstrating the ways in which these militias found novel ways to mobilise young men to fight by drawing on a rich catalogue of Shia religious symbolism as well as the fatwas of clerics like Sistani.

Slick popular music videos draw on a rich catalogue of historical motifs of suffering as well as the contemporary edicts of key clergymen, produced by different Shia militias and shared on YouTube and other social media platforms.

These evocative and poignant songs played an underappreciated and under-examined part in mobilising young men to fight back against the horrors of the IS, indicating the powerful role popular culture plays in contemporary warfare.

Read more:
The Islamic State flag hijacks Muslim words of faith. Banning it could cause confusion and unfair targeting of Muslims

Benjamin Isakhan receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Department of Defence.

Ali Akbar 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. How popular music videos drove the fight against the Islamic State – https://theconversation.com/how-popular-music-videos-drove-the-fight-against-the-islamic-state-213148

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeffrey McNeill, Senior Lecturer in Resource & Environmental Planning, Massey University

RMA – three letters that have struck fear into a generation of farmers, developers, politicians and anyone building a house. Or so legend would have it.

Whatever its original goal of promoting sustainable management of natural and physical resources, the Resource Management Act (RMA) has long been dogged by claims of unnecessary and inefficient rules that strangle innovation and progress.

The subject of any number of reviews since its inception in 1991, the act was finally replaced in August this year with the Natural and Built Environments Act (NBEA).

This new law established a framework that replaces the RMA’s plethora of regional, city and district plans with a single, unified system. At the centre of it sits te Oranga o te Taiao, a concept taken from te ao Māori that is described in the official literature as:

[…] an intergenerational ethic that speaks to the health and wellbeing of the natural environment, and the essential relationship between a healthy environment and its capacity to sustain all life.

For the Labour government that introduced the NBEA, it is mission accomplished. But with the election campaign into its final weeks, there is still great uncertainty about what will happen if there’s a change of government. In short, is the RMA really gone?

Town and country

Labour’s main potential coalition partner, the Green Party, appears committed to the new legislation. But the centre-right and right parties have other ideas. National, ACT and NZ First all want the NBEA gone.

National and NZ First both want to resurrect the RMA as an interim measure while new legislation is developed. National promises to repeal the NBEA with some urgency, before its new regional planning panels are established.

One of National’s proposals is to split the management of built and natural environments into different laws. There is logic to this – the former is about improving quality of life for individuals and communities, while the latter addresses the sustainability of underlying biophysical systems within which we live.

Read more:
Incremental environmental change can be as hazardous as a sudden shock – managing these ‘slow-burning’ risks is vital

Put another way, one enables us to live, the other makes life worth living. For example, long commute times and poorly designed dwellings degrade the quality of life for the people affected. But they don’t directly affect biodiversity or natural water quality. The two are related, but the goals are separate.

For its part, NZ First wants to “temporarily reinstate the RMA before replacing that with a Town and Country Planning Act modelled on legislation used by the Republic of Ireland”. This harks back to 1977 legislation of the same name, which created many of the problems the RMA was designed to address.

In fact, the Irish model quoted by NZ First is not dissimilar to Labour’s NBEA. Both avoid market-led decision making by developing national and regional planning frameworks. But “Project Ireland 2040” is far more ambitious, incorporating the United Nations sustainable development goals and seeking to integrate economic development and education within the planning mix.

Back to court

The NBEA and Irish policies represent a far more planned economy than we’ve become used to since the mid-1980s. Perhaps because of that, ACT simply promises to repeal the NBEA without resuscitating the RMA.

The party proposes separating urban development from environmental protection, and wants to focus environmental management on property rights. Changes to property should be allowed unless they directly affect others in some way.

Read more:
Trees, rivers and mountains are gaining legal status – but it’s not been a quick fix for environmental problems

The policy is reminiscent of 19th century laws and the reliance on a “tort of nuisance” for dispute resolution. Don’t like what the neighbours are doing? Take them to court – more specifically, a planning tribunal established to settle disputes and determine compensation when negotiations break down.

Theoretically elegant, this solution inevitably involves significant legal costs and would potentially pit individuals with limited resources against large corporations or city councils. (It’s also unclear who would speak for the trees and fish, who will struggle to get to the planning tribunal.)

In practice, such a policy could see some very upset property owners who find their neighbours building medium-density units or social housing. And in theory, without environmental laws and some rules in a city plan, it would still be a property dispute even if they planned a “harmless” waste dump.

Read more:
Freshwater quality is one of New Zealanders’ biggest concerns – water-trading ‘clubs’ could be part of the solution

The once and future RMA

If there is a change of government, then, what might we expect? Firstly, it is worth remembering the bipartisan origins of the RMA. While it was instigated by a Labour government in the 1980s, it was National that saw the bill into law – with very little substantive change to the draft legislation.

Indeed, Shane Jones, now number two on NZ First’s list, was an architect of the original RMA during the law reform process at the time.

National in 2024 might also decide that unpicking the NBEA could achieve little other than to scratch healing scabs. If a National-led government opted to simply make changes at the margins, these might include re-configuring the composition of the regional planning committees to meet any concerns about co-governance from coalition partners.

But much of what is now in place under the RMA will keep ticking over anyway. The NBEA has a long transition period, with the Ministry for the Environment advising it will be ten years before it becomes fully functional.

Any new government will need time to develop new legislation if it wants to make significant change. In the meantime, environmental management will be business as usual under the RMA system, regardless of the election result. Complaining about it may well be the other constant.

Jeffrey McNeill 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 RMA is dead, long live the RMA: why NZ’s resource laws won’t change overnight after this election – https://theconversation.com/the-rma-is-dead-long-live-the-rma-why-nzs-resource-laws-wont-change-overnight-after-this-election-214247

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

The employment white paper, released on Monday, has outlined multiple measures the Albanese government will implement to assist the about three million people who want jobs or more hours of work.

They include making permanent a temporary measure allowing pensioners to earn more, smoothing the transition to work for people on welfare, and alleviating the disadvantage many of the unemployed face.

In the white paper, prepared by Treasury, the government commits to full employment, which it defines as “everyone who wants a job [being] able to find one without having to search for too long”.

It does not put a number on the unemployment rate this represents.

The government will make permanent the current work bonus measure for older pensioners and eligible veterans so they can work more without reducing their pension.

It will double the period during which many income support recipients can receive no payment, thus allowing them to keep access to social security benefits such as concession cards for longer when they first get back into work.

Social enterprises will be backed to address persistent labour market disadvantage. TAFE will be boosted, and the take up of “higher apprenticeships” in the priority areas of net zero, the care and digitisation will be accelerated.

In addition to nine immediate measures the paper looks to longer term policies to enhance people’s access to the labour market.

“The government’s vision is for a dynamic and inclusive labour market in which everyone has the opportunity for secure, fairly paid work and people, businesses and communities can be beneficiaries of change and thrive. We are working to create more opportunities for more people in more places,” the paper says.

The paper comes as the unemployment rate is at 3.7%, which is expected to tick up as the economy slows. This is very low for modern times but the white paper highlights constraints to higher employment.

“Inclusive full employment is about broadening opportunities, lowering barriers to work including discrimination, and reducing structural underutilisation over time to increase the level of employment in our economy.”

Structural underutilisation is a mismatch between potential workers and available work. Reasons include workers’ skills not matching what the jobs need, workers and jobs being geographically apart, and barriers presented by disadvantage or discrimination.

“The government will take a broad approach to achieving sustained and inclusive full employment. This includes sound macroeconomic management to help keep employment as close as possible to its current maximum sustainable level in the short term. We are also committed to addressing the structural sources of underutilisation to increase the level of full employment that can be sustained over time without adding to inflationary pressures,” the paper says.

“We are taking comprehensive action, including improved education, migration and regional planning systems, and setting out reform directions to improve key enablers such as employment services, affordable and accessible child care, and housing. We are equipping the workforce with the skills needed for the jobs of the future, and enhancing the ability of individuals and businesses to adapt to the modern labour market”.

The report says increasing participation in work promotes social inclusion as well as boosting the country’s economic potential.

It notes the five regions with the highest long term unemployment make up 12% of all the country’s long term unemployed, although they have only 5% of the working age population.

Disadvantage can led to “intergenerational cycles of joblessness”, the paper says. Complex personal circumstances and discrimination compound local factors.

“Many people face multiple, interconnected barriers to employment such as a lack of access to services or secure and affordable housing.”

Unemployment particularly affects certain cohorts, including Indigenous people, people with disabilities and the young.

The paper points to the major forces that will shape the economy over coming decades. They are the ageing population, a rising demand for care and support services, the growing use of digital and advanced technologies, the global net zero transformation, and increasing geopolitical risk and fragmentation disrupting supply chains and making resilience more important.

“These forces are changing the composition of our industries, workforce needs, and the nature of work itself.”

The paper looks to renewable energy and digital technologies to improve productivity and says boosting productivity in industries such as care and support services will be increasingly important. “Rather than repeating previous waves of reforms, Australia’s productivity agenda needs to respond to current economic circumstances and identify modern strategies to advance enduring policy goals.”

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. Government’s employment white paper commits to jobs for all who want them – and help to get them – https://theconversation.com/governments-employment-white-paper-commits-to-jobs-for-all-who-want-them-and-help-to-get-them-214256

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Downie, Associate Professor in Optometry and Vision Sciences, The University of Melbourne

Blue-light glasses are said to reduce eye strain when using computers, improve your sleep and protect your eye health. You can buy them yourself or your optometrist can prescribe them.

But do they work? Or could they do you harm?

We reviewed the evidence. Here’s what we found.

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What are they?

Blue-light glasses, blue light-filtering lenses or blue-blocking lenses are different terms used to describe lenses that reduce the amount of short-wavelength visible (blue) light reaching the eyes.

Most of these lenses prescribed by an optometrist decrease blue light transmission by 10-25%. Standard (clear) lenses do not filter blue light.

A wide variety of lens products are available. A filter can be added to prescription or non-prescription lenses. They are widely marketed and are becoming increasingly popular.

There’s often an added cost, which depends on the specific product. So, is the extra expense worth it?

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Blue light is all around us

Outdoors, sunlight is the main source of blue light. Indoors, light sources – such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and the screens of digital devices – emit varying degrees of blue light.

The amount of blue light emitted from artificial light sources is much lower than from the Sun. Nevertheless, artificial light sources are all around us, at home and at work, and we can spend a lot of our time inside.

Our research team at the University of Melbourne, along with collaborators from Monash University and City, University London, sought to see if the best available evidence supports using blue light-filtering glasses, or if they could do you any harm. So we conducted a systematic review to bring together and evaluate all the relevant studies.

We included all randomised controlled trials (clinical studies designed to test the effects of interventions) that evaluated blue light-filtering lenses in adults. We identified 17 eligible trials from six countries, involving a total of 619 adults.

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Do they reduce eye strain?

We found no benefit of using blue light-filtering lenses, over standard (clear) lenses, to reduce eye strain with computer use.

This conclusion was based on consistent findings from three studies that evaluated effects on eye strain over time periods ranging from two hours to five days.

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Do they help you sleep?

Possible effects on sleep were uncertain. Six studies evaluated whether wearing blue-light filtering lenses before bedtime could improve sleep quality, and the findings were mixed.

These studies involved people with a diverse range of medical conditions, including insomnia and bipolar disorder. Healthy adults were not included in the studies. So we do not yet know whether these lenses affect sleep quality in the general population.

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Do they boost your eye health?

We did not find any clinical evidence to support using blue-light filtering lenses to protect the macula (the region of the retina that controls high-detailed, central vision).

None of the studies evaluated this.

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Could they do harm? How about causing headaches?

We could not draw clear conclusions on whether there might be harms from wearing blue light-filtering lenses, compared with standard (non blue-light filtering) lenses.

Some studies described how study participants had headaches, lowered mood and discomfort from wearing the glasses. However, people using glasses with standard lenses reported similar effects.

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What about other benefits or harms?

There are some important general considerations when interpreting our findings.

First, most of the studies were for a relatively short period of time, which limited our ability to consider longer-term effects on vision, sleep quality and eye health.

Second, the review evaluated effects in adults. We don’t yet know if the effects are different for children.

Finally, we could not draw conclusions about the possible effects of blue light-filtering lenses on many vision and eye health measures, including colour vision, as the studies did not evaluate these.

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In a nutshell

Overall, based on relatively limited published clinical data, our review does not support using blue-light filtering lenses to reduce eye strain with digital device use. It is unclear whether these lenses affect vision quality or sleep, and no conclusions can be drawn about any potential effects on the health of the retina.

High-quality research is needed to answer these questions, as well as whether the effectiveness and safety of these lenses varies in people of different ages and health status.

If you have eye strain, or other eye or vision concerns, discuss this with your optometrist. They can perform a thorough examination of your eye health and vision, and discuss any relevant treatment options.

In the past three years, Laura Downie’s research laboratory at the University of Melbourne has received funding from Alcon Laboratories, Azura Ophthalmics, CooperVision and Novartis for clinical research studies unrelated to this article. She is affiliated with the Tear Film and Ocular Surface Society, as a global ambassador.

– ref. Do blue-light glasses really work? Can they reduce eye strain or help me sleep? – https://theconversation.com/do-blue-light-glasses-really-work-can-they-reduce-eye-strain-or-help-me-sleep-213145

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne

A national Newspoll, conducted September 18–22 from a sample of 1,239, gave Labor a 54–46 lead, a one-point gain for Labor since the previous Newspoll, three weeks ago. Primary votes were 36% Labor (up one), 36% Coalition (down one), 11% Greens (down two), 6% One Nation (down one) and 11% for all Others (up three).

While Labor’s primary vote improved at the Coalition’s expense, the drop for the Greens should have cost Labor preferences. Rounding appears to have contributed to Labor’s gain after preferences.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s ratings were 47% satisfied (up one) and 44% dissatisfied (down three), for a net approval of +3, up four points. He returns to net positive approval after falling into net negative for the first time this term in the previous Newspoll.

Here is a graph of Albanese’s net approval in Newspoll.

Liberal leader Peter Dutton’s net approval fell nine points to -20. This is his worst net approval, beating a -19 net approval in April. Albanese led as better PM by 50–30 (50–31 three weeks ago).

While Labor and Albanese improved and Dutton fell, the Voice’s slump continued, with “no” now ahead by 56–36, out from a 53–38 “no” lead in early September. Newspoll figures are from The Poll Bludger.

This Newspoll is the second to be conducted by Pyxis after it was previously conducted by YouGov.

The referendum on the Indigenous Voice to parliament will be held on October 14. I have updated the 2023 Voice polls graph with Newspoll and Redbridge (see below).

Since June, every pollster has released worse results for “yes” in their most recent poll than in their prior poll. The history of Labor-initiated referendums shows they have been defeated heavily when held as standalone referendums, with closer losses when held with a general election.

Read more:
While the Voice has a large poll lead now, history of past referendums indicates it may struggle

It’s clear from the polling that it was a blunder to hold this referendum as a standalone vote rather than with a general election.

Voting in the referendum is compulsory, but not everyone will vote. A question on likelihood to vote in The Australian’s report found 91% of “yes” supporters and 90% of “no” supporters would either definitely or very likely vote.

There is a large gap in “yes” support by educational attainment, with university-educated people voting “yes” by 54–40, while those with TAFE/college are voting “no” by 59–34 and those without tertiary education are “no” by 66–25.

Dutton’s negativity on the Voice may be affecting his ratings, and Labor may be benefiting from better perceptions on the economy. Morgan’s consumer confidence index has been below 80 for a record 29 successive weeks or almost seven months, but it was barely below 80 at 79.8 last week.

In last fortnight’s federal Resolve poll, the Liberals extended their lead over Labor on economic management from 33–32 in August to 36–30. For the first time this term, the Liberals led on keeping the cost of living low, by 28–27, reversing a Labor lead of 30–26 in August.

Referendum court case, Morgan and Redbridge polls

United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet challenged the Australian Electoral Commission’s decision, based on longstanding legal advice, to count ticks as formal “yes” votes but crosses as informal. The federal court last Wednesday ruled in the AEC’s favour. With “no” so far ahead in the national Voice polls, it’s very unlikely this issue will affect the result.

A national Morgan poll, conducted September 11–17 from a sample of 1,234, gave Labor a 54–46 lead, a 1.5-point gain for Labor since the previous week. Primary votes have not been provided.

The Daily Telegraph reported Sunday that a Redbridge national Voice poll, taken “last week”, gave “no” a 62–38 lead, a slight widening from a 61–39 “no” lead in early September.

Victorian Redbridge poll: Labor far ahead

A Victorian state Redbridge poll, conducted August 31 to September 14 from a large sample of 3,001, gave Labor a 56.5–43.5 lead, from primary votes of 37% Labor, 34% Coalition, 13% Greens and 16% for all Others. There are detailed breakdowns by gender, age, region, education level, household income and home ownership status.

This is the first Victorian Redbridge poll. The last Victorian Resolve poll, conducted in July and August, also gave Labor a large lead.

Adrian Beaumont 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. Labor and Albanese recover in Newspoll as Dutton falls, but the Voice’s slump continues – https://theconversation.com/labor-and-albanese-recover-in-newspoll-as-dutton-falls-but-the-voices-slump-continues-213867

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, University of South Australia

Fish oil, which contains omega-3 fatty acids, is promoted for a number of health benefits – from boosting our heart health, protecting our brain from dementia, and easing the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.

But what exactly are omega-3 fats and what does the evidence say about their benefits for keeping us healthy?

And if they are good for us, does eating fish provide the same benefit as supplements?

What are omega-3 fats?

Omega-3 fatty acids are a type of polyunsaturated fatty acid. They are essential to consume in our diet because we can’t make them in our body.

Three main types of omega-3 fats are important in our diet:

• alpha-linoloneic acid (ALA), which is found in plant foods such as green leafy vegetables, walnuts, flaxseed and chia seeds

• eicosapentanoic acid (EPA), which is only found in seafood, eggs (higher in free-range rather than cage eggs) and breast milk

• docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) is also only found in seafood, eggs (again, higher in free-range eggs) and breast milk.

Omega 3s are key to the structure of our cells, and help keep our heart, lungs, blood vessels, and immune system working.

Eating fish vs taking a supplement

The initial studies suggesting omega-3 fats may have health benefits came from observational studies on people eating fish, not from fish oil.

So are the “active ingredients” from supplements – the EPA and DHA – absorbed into our body in the same way as fish?

An intervention study (where one group was given fish and one group fish oil supplements) found the levels of EPA and DHA in your body increase in a similar way when you consume equal amounts of them from either fish or fish oil.

But this assumes it is just the omega-3 fats that provide health benefits. There are other components of fish, such as protein, vitamins A and D, iodine, and selenium that could be wholly or jointly responsible for the health benefits.

The health benefits seen may also be partially due to the absence of certain nutrients that would have otherwise been consumed from other types of meat (red meat and processed meat) such as saturated fats and salt.

So what are the benefits of omega 3 fats? And does the source matter?

Let’s consider the evidence for heart disease, arthritis and dementia.

Heart disease

For cardiovascular disease (heart attacks and stroke), a meta-analysis, which provides the highest quality evidence, has shown fish oil supplementation probably makes little or no difference.

Another meta-analysis found for every 20 grams per day of fish consumed it reduced the risk of coronary heart disease by 4%.

The National Heart Foundation recommends, based on the scientific evidence, eating fish rich in omega-3 fats for optimal heart health. Fish vary in their omega-3 levels and generally the fishier they taste the more omega-3 fats they have – such as tuna, salmon, deep sea perch, trevally, mackeral and snook.

The foundation says fish oil may be beneficial for people with heart failure or high triglycerides, a type of fat that circulates in the blood that increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. But it doesn’t recommend fish oil for reducing the risk of cardiovascular diseases (heart attack and stroke).

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Arthritis

For rheumatoid arthritis, studies have shown fish oil supplements do provide benefits in reducing the severity and the progression of the disease.

Eating fish also leads to these improvements, but as the level of EPA and DHA needed is high, often it’s difficult and expensive to consume that amount from fish alone.

Arthritis Australia recommends, based on the evidence, about 2.7 grams of EPA and DHA a day to reduce joint inflammation. Most supplements contain about 300-400mg of omega-3 fats.

So depending on how much EPA and DHA is in each capsule, you may need nine to 14 capsules (or five to seven capsules of fish oil concentrate) a day. This is about 130g-140g of grilled salmon or mackeral, or 350g of canned tuna in brine (almost four small tins).

Dementia

Epidemiological studies have shown a positive link between an increased DHA intake (from diet) and a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, a type of dementia.

Animal studies have shown DHA can alter markers that are used to assess brain function (such as accumulation of amyloid – a protein thought to be linked to dementia, and damage to tau protein, which helps stabilise nerve cells in the brain). But this hasn’t been shown in humans yet.

A systematic review of multiple studies in people has shown different results for omega-3 fats from supplements.

In the two studies that gave omega-3 fats as supplements to people with dementia, there was no improvement. But when given to people with mild cognitive impairment, a condition associated with increased risk of progressing to dementia, there was an improvement.

Another meta-anlayses (a study of studies) showed a higher intake of fish was linked to lower risk of Alzheimers, but this relationship was not observed with total dietary intake of omega-3 fats. This indicates there may be other protective benefits derived from eating fish.

In line with the evidence, the Alzheimer’s Society recommends eating fish over taking fish oil supplements.

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So what’s the bottom line?

The more people stick to a healthy, plant-based diet with fish and minimal intakes of ultra-processed foods, the better their health will be.

At the moment, the evidence suggests fish oil is beneficial for rheumatoid arthritis, particularly if people find it difficult to eat large amounts of fish.

For dementia and heart disease, it’s best to try to eat your omega-3 fats from your diet. While plant foods contain ALA, this will not be as efficient as increasing EPA and DHA levels in your body by eating seafood.

Like any product that sits on the shop shelves, check the use-by date of the fish oil and make sure you will be able to consume it all by then. The chemical structure of EPA and DHA makes it susceptible to degradation, which affects its nutritional value. Store it in cold conditions, preferably in the fridge, away from light.

Fish oil can have some annoying side effects, such as fishy burps, but generally there are minimal serious side effects. However, it’s important to discuss taking fish oil with all your treating doctors, particularly if you’re on other medication.

À lire aussi :
Can supplements or diet reduce symptoms of arthritis? Here’s what the evidence says

Evangeline Mantzioris is affiliated with Alliance for Research in Nutrition, Exercise and Activity (ARENA) at the University of South Australia. Evangeline Mantzioris has received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, and has been appointed to the National Health and Medical Research Council Dietary Guideline Expert Committee.

– ref. Are fish oil supplements as healthy as we think? And is eating fish better? – https://theconversation.com/are-fish-oil-supplements-as-healthy-as-we-think-and-is-eating-fish-better-212250

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Formosa, Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Macquire University Ethics & Agency Research Centre, Macquarie University

Australians will soon be asked to vote on whether we should “alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice”.

Two philosophical concerns have been raised about this proposal.

First, is it appropriate for members of one group to decide what rights members of another group get? Why should non-Indigenous Australians get to decide if the First Peoples of Australia are granted an institutional Voice?

Second, is it appropriate to give members of one group rights that members of another group lack? Isn’t our system of government based on the idea we are all equal and therefore we should all have the same rights?

I’ll explore the ethical and philosophical basis of each question here.

1. Should one group get to decide for another group?

An analogy is often made between the same-sex marriage plebiscite and the Voice referendum. Given evidence about the harm the debate surrounding the same-sex marriage plebiscite had on the LGBTQIA+ community, it’s reasonable to ask whether that plebiscite should have occurred, given parliament could have legislated same-sex marriage without the plebiscite.

But despite the fact there are already reports of mental harm to First Nations people, considerations of whether or not we need this public vote do not apply to the Voice. The Voice, as a form of constitutional recognition that many (but not all) Indigenous people are seeking, can only occur via a referendum.

And there is actually nothing unusual about citizens and their elected representatives making decisions about what rights and entitlements others have. This is the very nature of democracies.

But this raises a more fundamental tension within our liberal-democratic political system. The tension lies between the “liberal” element, which seeks to secure the rights and liberties of all individuals, and the “democratic” element, which seeks to enact self-rule by the people.

This tension generates a problem known as the “tyranny of the majority”. This is where a democratic majority is able to violate the rights of a smaller minority.

In both the same-sex marriage and Voice votes, there is a large majority with the power to decide the rights of a minority.

Democracies typically guard against a majority mistreating a minority, in part, by enshrining foundational rights and liberties in a constitution that is difficult to change democratically.

This puts an imperfect, but practical, check on the exercise of that tyranny. The rights and entitlements set out in a constitution stipulate the fundamental terms of cooperation within a political community.

For example, the Australian constitution sets out that our political community is based around a Commonwealth with legislative, executive and judicial branches, as well as granting several explicit rights (such as the right to vote and the right to trial by jury) and implied rights (such as the freedom of political communication).

Enacting a constitutional change serves both a symbolic function, by expressing that something is part of the foundational framework of our political community, and a practical function of partially insulating it from changing democratic whims.

2. Should one group get something others don’t get?

This leads to the second issue, whether there is something undemocratic about members of one group having different rights to members of other groups.

But this is not necessarily problematic (although it can be).

Members who belong to one group, such as the citizens of Queensland, have rights that members of other groups, such as the citizens of New South Wales, do not have, such as being entitled to elect representatives to the Queensland parliament.

Something similar would apply to the Voice, with First Nations people having the right to elect members to the Voice that members of other groups would not have.

But surely not every group should have its own constitutionally enshrined Voice? On what basis should we grant the First Peoples of Australia such a right?

There are at least two obvious bases.

First, as a rectification of past injustices. For example, if someone steals a painting from you, then you are entitled to have your property back or to receive restitution. This can apply cross-generationally.

If the Nazis stole your great grandfather’s painting, then you are entitled to have it returned to you or receive compensation if the painting emerges many years later, even if your great grandfather is long deceased.

First Nations people of Australia have suffered specific and significant injustices that other groups have not, such as the loss of sovereignty over their traditional lands, and they are therefore entitled to redress, which could (in part) take the form of a Voice.

The second basis is to rectify a specific disadvantage. As Canadian political philosopher Will Kymlicka puts it:

we match the rights to the kinds of disadvantage being compensated for.

For example, Australians with a disability are entitled to certain rights, such as disability support, that members of other groups are not.

On a range of measures, from health to education and wealth, Australia’s First Nations people face significant disadvantages, and it’s therefore reasonable members of that group receive specific rights to counteract the specific forms of disadvantage they experience.

Read more:
Your questions answered on the Voice to Parliament

Neither of these questions are the important ones

In democracies, majorities are asked to vote on what rights a minority has and members of different groups can have different rights.

Rather than focus on whether a Voice would “divide us by race”, we should focus (among other things) on the substantive issues of whether the proposed changes will be effective in helping to rectify past injustices or to counteract specific disadvantages, and whether any such changes should be embedded in our Constitution.

Inclusion in the Constitution would serve as an enduring expression of their foundational role in our political community, and would partially insulate them from democratic meddling.

Read more:
7 rules for a respectful and worthwhile Voice referendum

Paul Formosa 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. Is it ethical non-Indigenous people get to decide on the Voice? Is it OK for one group to have rights others don’t? An ethicist weighs in – https://theconversation.com/is-it-ethical-non-indigenous-people-get-to-decide-on-the-voice-is-it-ok-for-one-group-to-have-rights-others-dont-an-ethicist-weighs-in-213977

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jared Mondschein, Director of Research, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

The US Congress has had no shortage of viral moments in recent months. Senator Dianne Feinstein seemingly became confused over how to vote. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell experienced two extended “freeze episodes” during press conferences. And several members of Congress mistook TikTok for the name of a breath mint (Tic Tac).

The world’s oldest democracy currently has its oldest-ever Congress. President Joe Biden (80 years old) is also the oldest US president in history. His leading rival in the 2024 presidential race, former President Donald Trump, is not far behind at 77.

Biden and Trump are both older than 96% of the US population. Unsurprisingly, they are both facing widespread questions about their ages and cognitive abilities.

How did we get to this ‘senior moment’?

America’s increasingly geriatric political leadership is not a surprising phenomenon. As the authors of the book, Youth Without Representation, pointed out earlier this year, the average age of US members of Congress has consistently risen over the past 40 years.

Some of this shift can be attributed to actuarial realities: much like the ageing US electorate, American politicians are living longer and fuller lives in old age than they did before, particularly compared to the time of America’s “founding fathers” (many of whom were under the age of 40 when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776).

Some of this may also be attributed to older Americans being far more likely to vote than their younger counterparts. In 2016, for instance, nearly three-quarters of eligible voters over the age of 65 reported they had voted, compared to less than half of those aged under 30. And those older Americans may prefer electing politicians closer to their age range.

Yet lifespans have increased around the world and the ageing of US politicians still stands out compared to other developed nations. The average age of government leaders in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has actually decreased since 1950 – and today is nearly 25 years younger than Biden.

Florida governor and Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis said the country’s founding fathers would “probably” implement maximum age limits on elected officials if they “could look at this again”. But this raises the question of why they didn’t do it the first time.

Read more:
Yes, Joe Biden is old and has low approval ratings, but this is why he’s still confident of re-election

What did the founding fathers think about term limits?

The founding fathers fiercely debated term limits for both presidents and members of Congress and even included them for members of the Continental Congress in the first Articles of Confederation. However, they ended up not being written into the Constitution.

As much as Americans cherish the idea of the nation being founded on a constitution and laws instead of traditions and monarchy, the founding fathers ultimately did not legislate any term limits. Instead, they largely assumed custom, tradition and democratic elections would dictate the terms of office.

In fact, the first president, George Washington, helped begin the custom of a president not seeking longer than two terms in office.

Mirroring Cincinnatus, a Roman leader who became legendary for being given dictatorial control over Rome during a crisis but then voluntarily relinquishing control once the crisis was over, Washington left the presidency after two four-year terms.

For more than a century after that, US presidents adhered to Washington’s convention (which historians contend that Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, in reality ended up setting) and did not serve a third term in office.

The first to break that tradition was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who won four terms in office, including a third just before the second world war. After he died in office at the age of 63, Congress ratified the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution that limited presidents to two four-year terms.

While US presidents have faced term limits for most of the past century, members of Congress continue to serve as long as they like. (There are currently 20 members over the age of 80. Feinstein, the oldest at 90, has served six terms as a senator from California.)

Part of the reason for this omission may be that the founding fathers and early American leaders did not expect members of Congress to stay in office as long as they now do. In the years after the Constitution was ratified, members of Congress simply did not seek re-election as frequently.

For example, the average length of service for US senators has more than doubled from about 4.8 years back then to 11.2 years today.

The price of elected office and who can afford it

Beyond demographics and changing habits of US politicians, one underestimated contributor to America’s increasingly elderly political leadership is that running for political office in America is more expensive than ever.

The 2020 election was not only contentious, but it was also the most expensive in US history. It cost more than US$14.4 billion (A$22.5 billion) for the presidential and congressional races – more than double what was spent in the 2016 elections.

The 2022 elections also broke a record for spending in a midterm election at US$8.9 billion (A$13.9 billion).

On an individual level, the average winner of a House of Representatives race in 1990 spent around US$400,000. By 2022 that had risen to US$2.79 million. The average winner of a Senate race in 1990 spent nearly US$3.9 million, compared to US$26.5 million in 2022.

Read more:
Why do voters have to pick a Republican or a Democrat in the US?

It should come as no surprise that the ten most expensive House and Senate races in US history took place in the past five years.

Those with the resources necessary to afford such expensive campaigns are more likely to be older than not. Whether it be independently wealthy business owners or well-established politicians with extensive fundraising networks, the high cost of admission for political office undeniably favours the old.

In an era of extensive polarisation, it can often seem like Americans cannot agree on much. One area of agreement, however, is that their politicians are simply too old.

Yet while a majority of Americans may tell pollsters that, most still consistently end up voting for a candidate who is considerably older than them. That will very likely be the case again in the 2024 presidential election. At least one of those probable candidates (Trump or Biden), though, will be barred by term limits from being on the ballot again in 2028.

Jared Mondschein 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. America’s leaders are older than they’ve ever been. Why didn’t the founding fathers foresee this as a problem? – https://theconversation.com/americas-leaders-are-older-than-theyve-ever-been-why-didnt-the-founding-fathers-foresee-this-as-a-problem-213653

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Renée M Prokopavicius, Postdoctoral Researcher in Plant Ecophysiology, Western Sydney University

Australians are bracing for a hot spring and summer. The Bureau of Meteorology has finally declared El Niño is underway, making warmer and drier conditions more likely for large parts of the country. And we’ve just watched the Northern Hemisphere swelter through their summer, making July 2023 Earth’s hottest month on record.

We studied the effects of extreme heat on urban trees in Western Sydney during Australia’s record-breaking summer of 2019–20. So we hold grave concerns for the survival of both native Australian and exotic species in our urban forest. These stands of trees and shrubs – along streets and in parks, gardens, and yards – play vital roles in our cities. Trees improve people’s mental health and wellbeing, lower energy use, and reduce temperatures through shading and evaporative cooling.

In previous research, we compared the heat tolerance of different species. Our new research, published in the journal Global Change Biology, assessed their water use. Most of the trees we measured lost more water on hot days than models predicted.

Much like sweating in humans, trees lose water to keep cool. If there’s not enough water, dieback or tree death occurs. This means access to water will be crucial for the survival of our urban forests during the hot summer ahead.

Read more:
Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide

Trees during heatwaves in Sydney

During December 2019 and January 2020, Western Sydney had 12 days over 40℃. The city’s record maximum temperature of 48.9℃ was set on January 4, 2020.

We measured carbon uptake and water loss from urban tree leaves on these hot summer days.

We found some species had low heat tolerance. Those most vulnerable to heatwaves included both native Australian and exotic species. Some trees died, including red maple (Acer rubrum), tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), coast banksia (Banksia integrifolia) and water gum (Tristaniopsis laurina). Others did not die but suffered to such an extent they were later removed.

In contrast, Chinese elm (Ulmus parvifolia) and ash (Fraxinus excelsior) avoided excessive dieback or death, as did the native weeping bottlebrush (Callistemon viminalis) and kurrajong (Brachychiton populneus).

Read more:
Without urgent action, these are the street trees unlikely to survive climate change

Why are some species more vulnerable?

Some species are inherently less heat and drought tolerant. For example, species with large, thin leaves are particularly vulnerable. Large leaves have thicker insulating boundary layers and so release heat more slowly. Thin leaves are less able to buffer against overheating on hot, sunny days when the wind lulls.

But it can be hard to predict how individual trees will respond to heat stress. That’s because access to water is important, but changes over time.

Trees with enough water can usually tolerate high temperatures. Microscopic pores in the leaves called stomata open up, allowing water vapour to pass through. This cools the plant down.

In drought, trees conserve water by closing these pores. This causes tree leaves to heat up. When hot days occur during drought, tree leaves can reach lethal temperatures above 45℃.

Our research found most urban tree species –- even those under drought stress –- opened their pores to cool leaves on hot summer days. This results in rapid water loss but may help prevent tree leaves from scorching.

Why is water so important during heatwaves?

As part of the latest research, we grew seedlings in a glasshouse to test how access to water affected heat tolerance. We kept half the plants well watered and exposed the rest to drought conditions.

We found water loss was higher than predicted during heatwaves for all plants.

For well-watered trees and shrubs, water loss was 23% higher than predicted. This kept leaves nearly 1℃ cooler than the air temperature.

Thirsty plant leaves were more than 1℃ hotter than the air temperature.

In urban trees, leaves reached lethal temperatures of 49–50℃ for species with the lowest rates of water loss. But when species with low rates of water loss had access to water, there was little heat damage or scorched leaves. For trees that lost foliage due to overheating, their recovery took multiple years after the end of drought and return of average temperatures.

Preserving our natural air conditioners

Our research shows access to water is crucial for the survival of urban trees during heatwaves.

That means urban greening programs need to find ways to provide trees with enough water when rainfall is unreliable.

It’s worth exploring new techniques such as passive irrigation storage pits and raingardens. Passive irrigation pits capture and store stormwater in underground trenches. This both decreases runoff during storms and provides water for trees. Raingardens also naturally reduce stormwater runoff and use plants to filter pollutants from rainfall.

Providing trees with the water they need to keep cool on hot summer days will not only improve their chances of survival, but also protect people. Cities need trees now more than ever, as these natural air conditioners take the edge off the extremes.

Read more:
The illegal killing of 265 trees on Sydney’s North Shore is not just vandalism. It’s theft on a grand scale

Renée M Prokopavicius receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the New South Wales Government, and Hort Innovation.

Belinda Medlyn receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the NSW Government, the Victorian Country Fire Authority, Bush Heritage Australia, Arid Recovery, and the Australian Citizen Science Association. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel for Land Life Company.

David S Ellsworth receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the New South Wales Government, Hort Innovation, and the Herman Slade Foundation.

Mark G Tjoelker receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the New South Wales Government, Hort Innovation, the Herman Slade Foundation and the Australian Citizen Science Association. He is affiliated with Standards Australia.

– ref. We need urban trees more than ever – here’s how to save them from extreme heat – https://theconversation.com/we-need-urban-trees-more-than-ever-heres-how-to-save-them-from-extreme-heat-211414

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Ginns, Associate Professor in Educational Psychology, University of Sydney

Around Australia, Year 12 students are heading into the final stretch of study before exams start in early term 4. This is typically seen as a very intense period of preparation. But, as our research shows, it is also important to rest during this time if you want to maximise your performance.

Intuitively, we understand breaks are important. We can take rest breaks across different times in our lives. They include sabbaticals, gap years and holidays, weekends and nightly sleep.

But rest breaks can be beneficial on even shorter time frames, during study sessions and even during exams themselves.

Read more:
Self-compassion is the superpower year 12 students need for exams … and life beyond school

Firstly, try and get some sleep

Students may be tempted to stay up late, trying to cram for an exam the following day. The big risk here is that lack of sleep can do more harm than good.

Sleep plays an important role in a range of brain functions, including maintaining attention and consolidating memories. So getting a poor night of sleep before an exam may mean the topics you’ve tried to cram aren’t well-formed in your long-term memory. Even if they were, the brain fog from lack of sleep means you may not recall what you’ve learned under the pressure of exam conditions.

In the lead-up to your exams, here are some specific things to consider:

• try and keep all screens out of the bedroom: people often struggle with sleep because they’re tempted to check their phone at bedtime.

• screens also emit blue light: this can interfere with your body’s circadian rhythms. Blue light during the day enhances attention, but too much of it in the evening can interfere with sleep quality.

• so don’t use a smartphone as an alarm: get an old-fashioned alarm clock instead.

For more information about sleep, the Sleep Health Foundation has specific advice for high school students.

You need study breaks

When we study, we’re using our working memory (processing of small amounts of information, needed for things like comprehension and problem-solving). This builds our understanding of a topic. We then want to encode that understanding into long-term memory for use later, such as in an exam.

Without breaks, over time, these working memory resources become depleted and we notice it’s harder and harder to concentrate.

In our 2023 study, we found that a short (five minute) break following a period of difficult cognitive work (solving mental arithmetic problems) made a substantial difference to how much students learned during a lesson on a mental mathematics strategy.

Students who took a “do nothing” break performed 40% better than the no-break students on a subsequent test. Students who watched a first-person perspective video of a walk in an Australian rainforest for five minutes also performed better (57%) than the no-break students.

This suggests building in short rest breaks during study can help you learn.

How do you build in breaks?

Here are some specific strategies to help you get the rests you need:

• when you plan your study schedule build in short breaks: drawing on the Pomodoro time management technique, we recommend using a timer (but not one on a smartphone). Aim to take a five-minute break after 25 minutes of study.

• again, don’t use a smartphone: many of the features of a phone are purpose-built to capture and keep your attention, which you need for studying! These short breaks could take many forms: getting a cup of tea, playing with a pet, getting some sun outside, doing some star jumps to wake yourself up, or some breathing exercises (I explain these below).

• longer breaks are important too: following the Pomodoro technique, aim to take a longer break (15-30 minutes) after four rounds of 25 minutes study/five minutes rest. Use at least some of these longer breaks for your physical and mental health away from your desk (and screens) – such as exercise, meditation, or a 20-30-minute nap.

Also take breaks during exams

It’s reasonable to think we should be using every minute of an exam for answering questions. But just as rest breaks during study can help restore attention, breaks during exams themselves may also be helpful.

Breaks are a common part of exams for students with disability provisions, but with some planning, all students might benefit from breaks.

A common strategy you can use to prepare for Year 12 exams is to complete past exam papers. When you do this, use the same “short break” study strategy described above. When it seems like a good break point (for example, in between finishing one section of the paper and starting another), stop for a few minutes and practise taking a short break.

Under exam conditions, you’re more limited in what type of break you can take. But simple controlled breathing routines such as “box breathing” or the “4-7-8 method” can help you refocus.

These routines can also activate the “relaxation response” – the opposite of the “flight-or-flight” response we experience under stressful conditions (including exams).

An even shorter form of breathwork to reduce stress in the moment is the physiological sigh – two inhales, followed by an exhale.

When it comes to the actual exam, you’ll be using the reading time to plan how you’ll complete the various sections. Take this time to also think carefully about when you’ll take some short breaks. When the exam begins, you might even write “take a two-minute break now” at suitable points in the exam booklet.

There is so much to think about in the lead-up to and during exams. If you schedule in and practise taking breaks, you will get better at doing it and give yourself and your brain a really important rest.

Read more:
How to beat exam stress

Paul Ginns 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. How to manage exam season: don’t forget to take regular breaks and breathe – https://theconversation.com/how-to-manage-exam-season-dont-forget-to-take-regular-breaks-and-breathe-213982

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Olympia Nelson, PhD Candidate in Modern Greek & Byzantine Studies specialising in Byzantine art and literature, University of Sydney

Mary of Egypt, a fourth-century saint with a large medieval following, had a thriving and active sex life. But we only find out about Mary’s past from her repudiation of it.

She lived in poverty, earning a living by begging and spinning flax. For over 17 years, she enjoyed erotic liaisons with as many men as she liked: according to her male biographer, Sophronios, her life was all about libidinous pleasure.

Sophronios takes over her voice in an outpouring of shame. In his account, Mary says she is “ashamed even to think about how I corrupted my virginity” and reflects on “how recklessly and immodestly I lived with my passion for sexual intercourse”.

She admits to having had “an insatiable and unrestrained desire for passionate love”. She “was drawn to wallow in filth”.

Even today, Mary’s salacious past is understood by the church as reprehensible, something to atone for and repent over.

Why should we talk about Mary of Egypt today? I was drawn to her multifaceted identity as a woman desert saint, an ascetic, a highly sexual individual navigating her own redemption. Is there something edifying about Mary’s story – or does it go into the feminist shame file?

Read more:
‘A promiscuous she-pope with a dilated cervix’: the legend of Pope Joan, who gave birth on a horse

The antithesis of seductress

Mary’s rejection of her previous life came when she was unable to enter a church.

One day, she encountered a group of young sailors bound for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to venerate the Holy Cross. She went along for the ride, seducing the young men entirely for the fun and excitement of it.

Upon attempting to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, an invisible barrier prevented her from crossing the threshold. In that moment she experienced an epiphany. Her life of pleasure was redefined as a life of sin. She looked up and saw an icon of the Virgin Mary above her. She vowed to forsake all her worldly desires and follow wherever the Virgin would guide her.

In Sophronios’ biography, Mary then embraced the life of solitude and asceticism in the desert that would make her famous – and a saint.

Physically and psychologically, she became the antithesis of seductress. She endured harsh conditions without clothing, becoming sunburnt and only eating meagre portions of bread for over 40 years.

In Byzantine frescoes, Mary is depicted as old and gaunt, emaciated and with unkempt grey hair. You’ll never see Mary enjoying her own beauty and sexuality as a young woman; rather, she embodies virtue as a wraith who forswears her former happiness.

When she was canonised as a saint, it was because she fulfilled the Christian ideal of repentance to an extreme degree.

Over the centuries, Mary’s narrative has been preserved and shared through various mediums, including literature, art and at least one hammed-up film.

Repentance and redemption

Sophronius indicates her promiscuity had a corrupting influence on men. But her past is understood as reprehensible within Mary herself: the relish she obtained from sexual pleasure is described as wantonness (ἀσελγεία) and debauchery (πορνεία).

Because these qualities are within you and your joy, they are the opposite of devotion and sacrifice expected by God. They therefore must be spurned.

But with the focus on repentance and redemption in Mary’s story, two strange qualities emerge.

First, Mary’s repentance is proportional to her suffering in the desert. The more abject her physical condition, the greater her new devotion.

Second – and this is the lurid paradox – Mary’s repentance is proportional to the extent of her previous lust. The lustier she was, the greater is her holiness now, because she has rejected it.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, contrition is especially meaningful when someone has done something especially wayward in the past. To understand the holiness of our repentant saint, we have to have a live picture of their previous transgressions.

This tells us a lot about society. For a woman, the saint can never altogether transcend her past. It stays with her, haunting her right down to the symbolic nakedness: once a vehicle for her pleasure; now a monument to her shame.

Read more:
Madonna or whore; frigid or a slut: why women are still bearing the brunt of sexual slurs

Purity and piety

Since the sixth century, Mary’s story has served as a means of control over women’s behaviour and sexuality.

Shame over erotic behaviour is not unique to Mary. Other women saints, such as Pelagia of Antioch, who was a reformed harlot, and St Thaïs of Egypt, who underwent a profound conversion, similarly had their narratives framed in terms of wrongfulness atoned for.

Thanks to contemporary feminist discourse, we can start to approach Mary’s story through a new lens: is the way we talk about Mary simply a form of slut-shaming?

Mary’s story reflects the belief a woman’s worth and virtue were intrinsically tied to an ideal of sexual purity. It reinforces long-held expectations of women as chaste, obedient and pious individuals. Women were either seen as temptresses, associated with sin and debauchery, or as virtuous saints, embodying purity and piety.

Paradoxically, to go from one to the other can make you a saint.

Mary’s story no longer holds the sway in the church it once did. The desert saints have not travelled well because it is harder to see what they should be ashamed of.

Yet it is possible to find Mary’s story touching in its own terms: the pathetic frail figure of the saint in Byzantine art captures the pathos of a person wrestling with the burden of piety.

Read more:
Standards for sainthood: what defines a ‘miracle’?

Olympia Nelson 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. ‘An insatiable and unrestrained desire for passionate love’: the holy slut-shaming of Mary of Egypt – https://theconversation.com/an-insatiable-and-unrestrained-desire-for-passionate-love-the-holy-slut-shaming-of-mary-of-egypt-210805

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

The government will commit $41 million for technical and further education and “higher apprenticeships” when it releases its white paper on employment on Monday.

Of this, $31 million will be for new TAFE “centres of excellence” and $10 million will be to develop higher and degree apprenticeships in the priority areas of care, net zero emissions, and digitisation.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said on Sunday the white paper will sketch out 31 future reform directions and contain nine new policies. Its emphasis would be on action.

The extra funding will fast track up to six new centres of excellence under the five-year national skills agreement presently being negotiated. The new centres will be upgrades of existing TAFEs and will establish a co-ordinated national network of institutions that help address the economic challenges facing Australia in the transformation to cleaner energy, the care economy and digitisation.

“The intention is to create new degree apprenticeship qualifications and enable TAFEs to deliver new bachelor equivalent higher apprenticeships independent of universities, giving them capacity to provide students with opportunities to gain the advanced skills needed by industries,” Chalmers and education and skills ministers Jason Clare and Brendan O’Connor said in a statement.

“The government is aiming to double higher apprenticeship commencements in the priority areas identified in the white paper over five years.

“These reforms will mean that apprentices can get degree-level qualifications and university students can more easily get practical training and skills.”

Chalmers said the expansion of TAFE offerings would produce

more graduates with more of the skills they’ll need to make the most of the big shifts that are shaping our economy into the future – whether it’s the net zero transformation, growth in the care economy or adapting and adopting new technology.

The white paper, prepared by Treasury, will set out five objectives:

• delivering sustained and inclusive full employment

• promoting job security and strong, sustainable wage growth

• reigniting productivity growth

• filling skills needs and building the future workforce

• overcoming barriers to employment and broadening opportunities.

Its initiatives will cover ten areas: strengthening economic foundations; modernising industry and regional policy; planning for the future workforce; broadening access to foundation skills; investing in skills, tertiary education and lifelong learning; reforming the migration system; building capabilities through employment services; reducing barriers to work; partnering with communities; and promoting inclusive, dynamic workplaces.

Centrally, the paper will outline the government’s definition of full employment. It has avoided putting a number on it, instead saying it will be achieved when “everyone who wants a job should be able to find one without searching for too long”.

The paper will say discussions of full employment have often too narrowly centred around statistical estimates of the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment or NAIRU

which do not capture the full extent of spare capacity in our economy or the full potential of our workforce. The NAIRU should not be confused with, nor constrain, longer-term policy objectives.

The government has “broader and bolder aspirations for full employment, aimed at increasing the maximum level of employment we can sustain over time, by reducing structural underutilisation”.

Chalmers on Sunday played down suggested differences between the white paper’s definition of full employment and the Reserve Bank’s calculation of NAIRU, saying it was important not to try to find differences where they did not exist.

The targets in the white paper should be seen as complementary to, but “not in conflict with” the Reserve Bank’s targets.

The paper will say there are at present 2.8 million people wanting work they don’t have or hours they don’t have – equivalent to one fifth of the current workforce.

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. Employment white paper to deliver more highly qualified workers in net zero, care and digitisation – https://theconversation.com/employment-white-paper-to-deliver-more-highly-qualified-workers-in-net-zero-care-and-digitisation-214229