Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sean Smith, Professor and Director, NCI Australia, Australian National University

As 2020 began, Australia was stunned by the worst bushfires on record. Six months later we are weathering the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe.

This year, perhaps more than ever before, decision-makers, emergency services, health providers and threatened communities have needed fast, reliable information to understand what’s happening. And beyond that, they have needed high-powered modelling to get a sense of what is yet to come.

That’s where supercomputers come in. Australia’s high-performance research computing infrastructure is led by two centres: the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI Australia) in Canberra and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth.

NCI Australia is home to Gadi, the most powerful supercomputer in the southern hemisphere, which can do in an hour what would take your average desktop PC around 35 years running flat out. The Pawsey centre hosts the Nimbus cloud, which is specially designed for data-intensive research work in cutting-edge fields such as space science.

Both centres operate around the clock every day of the year. Even without a crisis, they process unimaginable quantities of data to deliver analysis and forecasts for decision-makers across the nation. To take one example, NCI’s routine work for Digital Earth Australia helps to identify soil and coastal erosion, crop growth, water quality and changes to cities and regions.

Supercomputing behind the scenes

By their nature, high-performance research computers operate mostly behind the scenes. They provide infrastructure that is less visible but no less important than a ship or a telescope, and the expertise to help researchers use it.

When Australian government agencies need to make decisions to respond to a crisis like the bushfires or COVID-19, they draw on decades of Australian and international research backed by high-performance computing and data infrastructure.

Last summer, satellite images shocked the world with detailed and strangely beautiful views of swirls of bushfire smoke the size of global weather patterns. Our Kiwi colleagues woke to apocalyptic skies, tipped off beforehand by Australian and NZ collaborations with Japan’s Himawari-8 and -9 weather satellite mission.

Research satellites like the European Sentinel-3 with a wider global view continued to track the plume as it circled the planet. NCI Australia hosts a regional data hub to support Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation program.

Read more: Australia’s bushfire smoke is lapping the globe, and the law is too lame to catch it

Data-driven models running on supercomputers can provide earlier and more accurate warning of firestorms, floods, hailstorms, cyclones and other extremes. Better warnings give emergency services crucial hours that save lives and property.

Both national facilities are contributing resources to support researchers in Australia in the fight against COVID-19.

With the Gadi supercomputer, NCI is providing the equivalent of more than 4,500 years of computer time to support three research groups. Pawsey is providing access to more than 1,100 desktop’s worth of computing power on the newly deployed Nimbus cloud for researchers across five projects.

National infrastructure working at scale

The Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) has invested A$70 million in each centre for upgrades to ensure the facilites can keep up with Australian research across all scientific domains. NCI’s Gadi supercomputer is about nine times more powerful than its predecessor, while the first phase of Pawsey’s upgrade has already delivered ten times more cloud storage and boosted network capabilities fivefold.

Reliable, collaborative facilities like NCI and Pawsey are essential to develop and improve immensely complex global and local models and prediction systems used by national and state governments.

The NCI and Pawsey systems support much more than climate and weather data and pandemic modelling. Other projects support gene sequencing, population mapping, transmission and containment modelling, and global economic predictions.

Scale, collaboration and speed

Scaling up our research computing capacity is important to meet the challenges of ever-growing amounts of research data. Collaboration makes it possible to access the best expertise. Speed is essential to meet the urgent demands of decision makers.

Supercomputers connected to massive data systems and supported by expert staff can yield crucial insights at scale, quickly enough to help our agencies identify and respond to crises. Faster processing also means researchers can identify and model trends that would otherwise go unnoticed, but which require early intervention.

Supercharging the relevant science can deliver real economic, environmental and public health outcomes. The need for informed crisis response does not look like it will go away any time soon.

– ref. How Australia’s supercomputers crunched the numbers to guide our bushfire and pandemic response – https://theconversation.com/how-australias-supercomputers-crunched-the-numbers-to-guide-our-bushfire-and-pandemic-response-141047

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Garrick, University Fellow in Law, Charles Darwin University

The death penalty is not uncommon in China. Authorities continue to execute thousands of people each year, more than all other nations combined.

However, for Australian Karm Gilespie, convicted for drug-smuggling earlier this month, what is unusual is that his is a “politically sensitive” case and his time spent in detention – between arrest and sentence – has already been a lengthy 6.5 years.

Most legal cases in Chinese courts are relatively uncontroversial. However, in cases considered “political” or “politically sensitive”, the Communist Party has weaponised the legal system and judiciary to wage political warfare against those deemed a threat to the state. Gilespie’s case has certainly triggered party intervention.

Read more: Karm Gilespie’s case cannot be separated completely from strained Sino-Australian relations

China’s foreign ministry denies the death sentence is related to strained diplomatic relations with Australia. Spokesman Zhao Lijian maintains

the ruling was made by a Chinese court in accordance with the law.

But Gilespie’s appeal, the expected next step, will reveal much about China’s socialist rule of law, which may have ominous implications for Australia and other nations. A message is clearly being sent: we have leverage with cases like this, and we demand compliance.

Socialist system of law with Chinese characteristics

The term “socialist system of law with Chinese characteristics” was announced by the Communist Party in 2011 as a major milestone in the country’s history.

But what does this mean? The Chinese legal system is based on what the party calls the current “situation and realities” in China, with the law an expression of the will of the party and the people.

These “realities” include a rejection of political reform or any relaxation of party control. There are no multi-party elections, no diversified guiding political principles and no separation of powers. The party rules absolutely, with General Secretary Xi Jinping as its Stalinist helmsman.

Read more: The world has a hard time trusting China. But does it really care?

The “situation” refers to the increasingly fraught and highly contested geopolitical rivalry between China and Western powers. With the US distracted with coronavirus and domestic issues, China has sought to advance its interests across the Indo-Pacific region.

Xi has assumed greater power than anyone since Mao. Under his rule, China has emerged as an assertive power seeking to reshape international legal, financial and trade frameworks to better reflect its own interests.

Domestically, the party has openly declared its supremacy over all key aspects of governmental functions.

In such an environment, it’s no wonder China’s criminal justice system overwhelmingly favours the state. Most cases turn on confessions by suspects, who often have no access to defence lawyers until long after questioning (if ever). Prosecutors have an extraordinarily high conviction rate of over 99% in criminal cases.

Arrests are often announced after the prosecution has enough evidence to convict. Most criminal trials are administered by a collegial bench made up of one to three judges and three to five assessors selected by the state. Defendants are usually quickly convicted and sentenced.

Criminal defence lawyers must also deal with a powerful state authority that can undermine their work and even threaten their own personal safety.

Since 2007, courts sentencing criminals to death have required the Supreme People’s Court approval. But Communist Party policies carry at least equal weight, if not more, to the country’s laws and statutes, especially in cases of a “politically sensitive” nature.

Gilespie is now entitled to appeal his sentence. However, finding and cross-examining prosecution witnesses and obtaining new evidence to support his defence when so much time has elapsed could prove to be a monumental task, particularly in the current political climate.

Pattern emerging in cases involving foreigners

Gilespie, it bears repeating, has already been detained for 6.5 years. That, and his treatment in custody, makes his case more akin to being held as a political hostage.

Another case involving a Canadian, Robert Schellenberg, set an uncanny precedent. Schellenberg was detained for 15 months before his first trial in December 2018. Prosecutors argued he tried to smuggle 227 kilograms of methamphetamine from China to Australia, using plastic pellets hidden in rubber tires. Schellenberg denied all charges and claimed he was framed.

Read more: It’s time for Canada and China to tone down the rhetoric

He was subsequently convicted of drug smuggling and sentenced to 15 years and a fine.

When Schellenberg appealed the sentence last year, the judges ruled it actually had been “too light” for a drug smuggling case and imposed a death sentence. His lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo, argued against this, as no new evidence had been presented to the court.

This month, two other Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, were also formally charged with spying after spending 18 months in detention.

Schellenberg’s trial and the detention of the other two Canadians coincided with Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou for extradition to the US. The US wants Meng to stand trial on charges linked to alleged violations of sanctions on Iran.

China’s actions against the Canadians have widely been perceived, including by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as retribution for Meng’s arrest.

Using the courts to exert pressure

The party’s use of the court system as an instrument of control involves fear and coercion – tactics to crush dissent. This has been used for years to shut down civil rights lawyers and activists and others, such as pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

Now, this tactic is apparently being used to warn off less powerful nations from challenging any official Chinese narrative. For Canada, it was detaining a Huawei executive; for Australia, it was asking for an independent inquiry into the origins of COVID-19.

Upholding the death sentence of a foreign national would be a particularly vicious way to broadcast the current will of the Communist Party during this politically charged time. Better ways forward can be found.

– ref. China has a new way to exert political pressure: weaponising its courts against foreigners – https://theconversation.com/china-has-a-new-way-to-exert-political-pressure-weaponising-its-courts-against-foreigners-141195

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jody Morgan, Associate Research Fellow, University of Wollongong

Last week the federal government’s Office of Drug Control announced changes to the importation of nicotine-containing electronic cigarette fluids that will seriously affect the estimated 227,000 regular e-cigarette users in Australia.

From January 1, 2021, users will no longer be allowed to import nicotine-containing fluids for use in e-cigarettes, even if they have a prescription. The measures, which were initially set to come into force on July 1, 2020, are in addition to the existing domestic ban on sales of these products.

Read more: Twelve myths about e-cigarettes that failed to impress the TGA

When quizzed last week on the new rules, Health Minister Greg Hunt claimed “people can still bring them in if they have a prescription from their doctor”. But this is not strictly the case.

What do the new rules actually say?

From January 1, e-cigarette users will not only need a prescription from their doctor, they will also need a doctor who is willing and able to import the products on their behalf. This will require the doctor to have a permit to import nicotine as an unauthorised therapeutic.

It is hard to imagine many doctors will to go to these lengths to provide access to nicotine so their patients can continue vaping. As these regulations have only just been announced, there are currently no medical professionals in Australia with these permits already in place.

With doctors already hesitant to prescribe nicotine for vaping (there are only nine GPs on the Australian Tobacco Health Reduction Association’s list of known prescribers), it is unlikely there will be any who are willing to add the additional burden of applying for permits and organising importation.

So, come January 1, what are Australians who use nicotine-containing e-cigarette fluids going to do?

Option one: vapers go “cold turkey” and give up nicotine altogether. Many vapers use e-cigarettes because they were unable to quit smoking using any other method, including nicotine replacement therapy. One study found 18% of ex-smokers who had switched to e-cigarettes were still smoke-free at the one-year mark, compared with 9.9% of those who had switched to nicotine patches.

Read more: It’s safest to avoid e-cigarettes altogether – unless vaping is helping you quit smoking

Option two: vapers ignore the new regulations and attempt to continue importing their e-cigarette fluids. Besides risking a A$222,000 fine if caught, there are significant risks to buying e-fluids on the black market. There will be no warning labels or instructions for safe usage; nicotine levels may be unknown or inconsistent; and samples might be cut with dangerous substances, as in the case of the bootleg cannabis vape refills contaminated with vitamin E acetate that killed 60 people and hospitalised a further 2,558 in the United States last year.

Option three: vapers go back to smoking cigarettes, as a legal and more easily accessible source of nicotine. Current estimates are that e-cigarette use is 95% less harmful than smoking. There are fears among the vaping community that this will be the default option for many users, despite the increased health risks of smoking over vaping. Vapers who are worried they may turn back to cigarettes should consider asking their GP to help them devise a plan to stay away from smoking.

Why is the government doing this anyway?

The government’s rationale is twofold. First, it points to the increase in nicotine poisonings associated with e-cigarette fluids in the past few years in Australia, including the death of a toddler in Victoria in 2018.

But these cases, including the toddler’s tragic death, involved highly concentrated imported nicotine-containing fluids, purchased from overseas because of the existing domestic ban. Cracking down on legitimate imports would arguably make it more likely, not less, that users may end up accessing illicit e-cigarette fluids with little or no safety labelling.

The government’s second argument is the increasing use of e-cigarettes among US school students aged 14-18. But while there has indeed been an increase in vaping, smoking has declined among these age groups, so it is likely a case of experimentation, rather than vaping being a gateway to smoking.

Read more: Are e-cigarettes a gateway to smoking in 14-year-olds? New US data

There is a crucial distinction to draw here: if the new rule change is intended to restrict youngsters’ access to vaping, it is unlikely to succeed. E-cigarettes and e-fluids without nicotine will still be available at any tobacconist or vape store. The only banned products will be nicotine-containing e-fluids.

The rule change may be framed partly as a preventative move to protect young people from vaping. But the people most likely to be affected are those who have successfully used e-cigarettes to quit smoking.

For that reason, it’s my view the new rules will do more harm than good. I would urge the government to consider regulating nicotine-containing products rather than banning them.

A regulated e-cigarette fluid market should consider: limiting the maximum concentration of nicotine to 24 milligrams per ml; childproof packaging for all products, with dropper-style tops to prevent accidental exposure through spillage; and appropriate warning labels and ingredient lists.

– ref. Why the ban on nicotine vape fluid will do more harm than good – https://theconversation.com/why-the-ban-on-nicotine-vape-fluid-will-do-more-harm-than-good-141365

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Clissold, Researcher, The University of Queensland

They contribute only 0.03% of global carbon emissions, but small island developing states, particularly in the Pacific, are at extreme risk to the threats of climate change.

Our study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, provides the first mega-assessment on the progress of community-based adaptation in four Pacific Island countries: the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati and Vanuatu.

Read more: Five years on from the earthquake in Bhaktapur, Nepal, heritage-led recovery is uniting community

Pacific Island nation communities have always been resilient, surviving on islands in the middle of oceans for more than 3,000 years. We can learn a lot from their adaptation methods, but climate change is an unprecedented challenge.

Effective adaptation is critical for ensuring Pacific Islanders continue living fulfilling lives in their homelands. For Australia’s part, we must ensure we’re supporting their diverse abilities and aspirations.

Short-sighted adaptation responses

Climate change brings wild, fierce and potentially more frequent hazards. In recent months, Cyclone Harold tore a strip through multiple Pacific countries, killing dozens of people, levelling homes and cutting communication lines. It may take Vanuatu a year to recover.

Expert commentary from 2019 highlighted that many adaptation responses in the Pacific have been short-sighted and, at times, even inadequate. The remains of failed seawalls, for example, litter the shorelines of many island countries, yet remain a popular adaptive solution. We cannot afford another few decades of this.

Read more: Pacific island cities call for a rethink of climate resilience for the most vulnerable

International climate aid commitments from rich western countries barely scratch the surface of what’s needed, yet it’s likely funding will dry up for regions like the Pacific as governments scramble together money for their own countries’ escalating adaptation costs.

This includes Australia, that has long been, and continues to be, the leading donor to the region. Our government contributed about 40% of total aid between 2011 and 2017 and yet refuses to take meaningful action on climate change.

Understanding what successful adaptation should look like in developing island states is urgent to ensure existing funding creates the best outcomes.

Success stories

Our findings are based on community perspectives. We documented what factors lead to success and failure and what “best practice” might really look like.

We asked locals about the appropriateness, effectiveness, equity, impact and sustainability of the adaptation initiatives, and used this feedback to determine their success.

Read more: For Pacific Island nations, rising sea levels are a bigger security concern than rising Chinese influence

The results were mixed. While our success stories illustrate what “best practice” involves, issues still emerged.

Our top two success stories centred on community efforts to protect local marine ecosystems in the Federated States of Micronesia and Vanuatu. Nearby communities rely on these ecosystems for food, income and for supporting cultural practice.

One initiative focused on establishing a marine park with protected areas while the other involved training in crown-of-thorns starfish control. As one person told us:

we think it’s great […] we see the results and know it’s our responsibility.

Initiatives that focus on both the community and the ecosystem support self-sufficiency, so the community can maintain the initiatives even after external bodies leave and funding ceases.

In these two instances, the “community” was expanded to the whole island and to anyone who utilised local ecosystems, such as fishers and tourism operators.

Through this, benefits were accessible to all: “all men, all women, all pikinini [children],” we were told.

Standing the test of time

In Vanuatu, the locals deemed two initiatives on raising climate change awareness as successful, with new scientific knowledge complementing traditional knowledge.

And in the Federated States of Micronesia, locals rated two initiatives on providing tanks for water security highly. This initiative addressed the communities’ primary concerns around clean water, but also had impact beyond merely climate-related vulnerabilities.

This was a relatively simple solution that also improved financial security and minimised pollution because people no longer needed to travel to other islands to buy bottled water.

But even among success stories, standing the test of time was a challenge.

For example, while these water security initiatives boosted short-term coping capacities, they weren’t flexible for coping with likely future changes in drought severity and duration.

Read more: Pacific islands are not passive victims of climate change, but will need help

Adaptation needs better future planning, especially by those who understand local processes best: the community.

Listening to locals

For an adaptation initiative to be successful, our research found it must include:

1. local approval and ownership

2. shared access and benefit for community members

3. integration of local context and livelihoods

4. big picture thinking and forward planning.

To achieve these, practitioners and researchers need to rethink community-based adaptation as more than being simply “based” in communities where ideas are imposed on them, but rather as something they wholly lead.

Communities must acknowledge and build on their strengths and traditional values, and drive their own adaptation agendas – even if this means questioning well-intentioned foreign agencies.

Being good neighbours

Pacific Islands are not passive, helpless victims, but they’ll still need help to deal with climate change.

Pacific Island leaders need more than kind words from Australian leaders.

Read more: Pacific Island nations will no longer stand for Australia’s inaction on climate change

Last year, Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, took to Facebook to remind Australia:

by working closely together, we can turn the tides in this battle – the most urgent crisis facing not only the Pacific, but the world.

Together, we can ensure that we are earthly stewards of Fiji, Australia, and the ocean that unites us.

Together, we can pass down a planet that our children are proud to inherit.

– ref. Their fate isn’t sealed: Pacific nations can survive climate change – if locals take the lead – https://theconversation.com/their-fate-isnt-sealed-pacific-nations-can-survive-climate-change-if-locals-take-the-lead-136709

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so too is the road to economic recovery if we don’t get it right.

The COVID-19 Recovery (Fast Track Consenting) Bill, currently rushing through the parliamentary process, certainly has noble aims. In simple terms, the new law is designed to green light a number of projects that would normally take much longer to be approved under the Resource Management Act.

In the process, its architects argue, it will boost employment and kickstart economic recovery.

The trick will be balancing those aims with the law’s other lofty ambition “to promote the sustainable management of natural and physical resources”. History shows this is not always the way it goes.

The past should guide us

Governments often pass laws with vast powers during emergencies to drive economic recovery. The law of unintended consequences can take a lot longer to repeal.

During the great depression in the 1930s, new laws to deal with mass unemployment were often degrading in practice. Unemployed people were sent far and wide from their homes to perform sometimes useless tasks.

Read more: Rich and poor don’t recover equally from epidemics. Rebuilding fairly will be a global challenge

In the late 1970s, the National government of Robert Muldoon tried to reduce the country’s dependence on imports with so-called “Think Big” projects. Special laws were passed to circumvent normal planning mechanisms and we are still dealing with their economic and environmental consequences.

More recently, the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes have pushed dozens of laws to one side. This resulted in citizens and communities struggling to be heard, be treated fairly and have their rights protected under the emergency recovery process.

We are now inviting the same risks with the proposed fast-track consenting law. It will be the most radical shake-up of environmental regulation in a generation.

Moreover, although the law has a two-year lifespan, there is a risk it could become permanent if a sympathetic government is elected. There is the additional risk it will give the green light to projects that in normal times would never proceed.

Pace versus public protections

The core of the proposed legislation is speed. This will be achieved by by-passing usual consenting process steps, including public consultation, hearing processes, and appeals to the Environment Court. Judicial review is still possible, but it’s not clear how far this will go.

Once passed, critical decisions on large-scale projects will be made by “expert consenting panels”. This is a radical proposition. Public participation sits at the heart of our democracy. To shrink from this rather than strengthen it at this time in our history is very risky.

Read more: Past pandemics show how coronavirus budgets can drive faster economic recovery

If environmentally sustainable development is to have any real meaning, people and participation are key to making better decisions that take into account all relevant community interests.

But for the next two years our biggest environmental decisions will be made by panels consisting of a current or retired Environment Court judge (or person with similar experience), someone from the local authority and one other nominated by the relevant iwi authority in the project area.

Given what is at stake, however, there should also be an independent voice for the environment, separate from the others, the government and its agencies.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment would be ideal. While this may require some legislative rejigging, without an independent voice tasked only with speaking to environmental protection there is a risk of imbalance in the system.

Five ways to improve the law

According to the new legislation, these expert panels must “apply” the high level purpose and principles of the Resource Management Act and “act consistently” with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi (and associated settlements). They must also “have regard” to relevant plans and to regional and national policy statements.

Read more: Recession hits Māori and Pasifika harder. They must be part of planning New Zealand’s COVID-19 recovery

Cultural impact assessments will be mandatory and the law also requires the “actual and potential” environmental effects of a project should be assessed.

All of this is good, but it would be improved with five over-riding principles.

First, the decision makers should act in a precautionary manner. If there is significant uncertainty about a project’s environmental impact it should not proceed.

Second, while replacing damaged or destroyed ecosystems is an excellent principle, there should be clear “red lines” around certain irreplaceable places, landscapes, endangered species and ecosystems.

Third, the law should go beyond simply calling for the examination of environmental effects to requiring actual environmental impact assessments. This would mean wider questions – such as whether there are alternatives to a given project – can be addressed.

Fourth, the right to compensation should be entrenched for citizens or communities directly affected by any proposed development.

Finally, if public participation is to be suspended, the ability to witness and have access to all panel deliberations should be underlined. When we are largely excluded from such important decisions, full transparency is the least we should expect in return.

– ref. Unless we improve the law, history shows rushing shovel-ready projects comes with real risk – https://theconversation.com/unless-we-improve-the-law-history-shows-rushing-shovel-ready-projects-comes-with-real-risk-141530

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kyle Clem, Research Fellow in Climate Science, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Climate scientists long thought Antarctica’s interior may not be very sensitive to warming, but our research, published today, shows a dramatic change.

Over the past 30 years, the South Pole has been one of the fastest changing places on Earth, warming more than three times more rapidly than the rest of the world.

My colleagues and I argue these warming trends are unlikely the result of natural climate variability alone. The effects of human-made climate change appear to have worked in tandem with the significant influence natural variability in the tropics has on Antarctica’s climate. Together they make the South Pole warming one of the strongest warming trends on Earth.

Read more: Antarctica has lost 3 trillion tonnes of ice in 25 years. Time is running out for the frozen continent

The South Pole is not immune to warming

The South Pole lies within the coldest region on Earth: the Antarctic plateau. Average temperatures here range from -60℃ during winter to just -20℃ during summer.

Antarctica’s climate generally has a huge range in temperature over the course of a year, with strong regional contrasts. Most of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula were warming during the late 20th century. But the South Pole — in the remote and high-altitude continental interior — cooled until the 1980s.

Scientists have been tracking temperature at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Earth’s southernmost weather observatory, since 1957. It is one of the longest-running complete temperature records on the Antarctic continent.

Our analysis of weather station data from the South Pole shows it has warmed by 1.8℃ between 1989 and 2018, changing more rapidly since the start of the 2000s. Over the same period, the warming in West Antarctica suddenly stopped and the Antarctic Peninsula began cooling.

One of the reasons for the South Pole warming was stronger low-pressure systems and stormier weather east of the Antarctic Peninsula in the Weddell Sea. With clockwise flow around the low-pressure systems, this has been transporting warm, moist air onto the Antarctic plateau.

South Pole warming linked to the tropics

Our study also shows the ocean in the western tropical Pacific started warming rapidly at the same time as the South Pole. We found nearly 20% of the year-to-year temperature variations at the South Pole were linked to ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific, and several of the warmest years at the South Pole in the past two decades happened when the western tropical Pacific ocean was also unusually warm.

To investigate this possible mechanism, we performed a climate model experiment and found this ocean warming produces an atmospheric wave pattern that extends across the South Pacific to Antarctica. This results in a stronger low-pressure system in the Weddell Sea.

We know from earlier studies that strong regional variations in temperature trends are partly due to Antarctica’s shape.

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet, bordered by the South Atlantic and Indian oceans, extends further north than the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, in the South Pacific. This causes two distinctly different weather patterns with different climate impacts.

More steady, westerly winds around East Antarctica keep the local climate relatively stable, while frequent intense storms in the high-latitude South Pacific transport warm, moist air to parts of West Antarctica.

Scientists have suggested these two different weather patterns, and the mechanisms driving their variability, are the likely reason for strong regional variability in Antarctica’s temperature trends.

Read more: How solar heat drives rapid melting of parts of Antarctica’s largest ice shelf

What this means for the South Pole

Our analysis reveals extreme variations in South Pole temperatures can be explained in part by natural tropical variability.

To estimate the influence of human-induced climate change, we analysed more than 200 climate model simulations with observed greenhouse gas concentrations over the period between 1989 and 2018. These climate models show recent increases in greenhouse gases have possibly contributed around 1℃ of the total 1.8℃ of warming at the South Pole.

We also used the models to compare the recent warming rate to all possible 30-year South Pole temperature trends that would occur naturally without human influence. The observed warming exceeds 99.9% of all possible trends without human influence – and this means the recent warming is extremely unlikely under natural conditions, albeit not impossible. It appears the effects from tropical variability have worked together with increasing greenhouse gases, and the end result is one of the strongest warming trends on the planet.

These climate model simulations reveal the remarkable nature of South Pole temperature variations. The observed South Pole temperature, with measurements dating back to 1957, shows 30-year temperature swings ranging from more than 1℃ of cooling during the 20th century to more than 1.8℃ of warming in the past 30 years.

This means multi-decadal temperature swings are three times stronger than the estimated warming from human-caused climate change of around 1℃.

The temperature variability at the South Pole is so extreme it currently masks human-caused effects. The Antarctic interior is one of the few places left on Earth where human-caused warming cannot be precisely determined, which means it is a challenge to say whether, or for how long, the warming will continue.

But our study reveals extreme and abrupt climate shifts are part of the climate of Antarctica’s interior. These will likely continue into the future, working to either hide human-induced warming or intensify it when natural warming processes and the human greenhouse effect work in tandem.

– ref. New research shows the South Pole is warming faster than the rest of the world – https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-the-south-pole-is-warming-faster-than-the-rest-of-the-world-141536

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dale Boccabella, Associate Professor of Taxation Law, UNSW

Nearly all of the income tax focus in the context of “working from home” during COVID-19 has been on claiming “running expenses” – things like electricity, heating and internet/broadband fees.

These are pretty straightforward.

The Australian Tax Office released a temporary shortcut for claiming running expenses to make it easier: it’s 80 cents for each hour you work from home between March and July.

At the same time, it has made the brief comment that employees generally cannot claim “occupancy expenses” as deductions. Occupancy expenses are things like interest on housing loans, rent, council rates, building insurance and similar things.

These would be deductible if you were running a business from home, but generally should not be if you are merely working from home for an employer that normally provides you with a place to work.

Claim running expenses, not occupancy expenses

Occupancy expenses are usually far bigger than running expenses and their deductibility assumes considerable importance to government revenue, and to people who claim them.

And there’s something else about them.

The capital gains tax exemption for the gain on sale of the family home (the main residence) is linked to them; in particular to the deductibility of interest expenses.

If a taxpayer is entitled to deductions for interest on the home loan, she can lose a portion of her capital gains tax exemption.

In effect, the tax benefit from deductibility is offset or clawed back through denial of the full capital gains tax exemption later on.

Of course, if there is no immediate prospect of the sale of the home, then to many people the loss of the full capital gains tax exemption won’t be of much concern.

Try not to put capital gains into play

An interesting, perhaps strange, aspect of this part of the rules is a homeowner can lose part of their capital gains tax exemption even when they don’t have interest to deduct (such as when they have paid off their home loan).

The relevant rule poses the question: would you have got interest deductions if you still had a loan on the home? If the answer is yes, the homeowner loses part of the capital gains tax exemption, even though the home owner did not in fact obtain tax deductions for interest.

There is a perception among some taxpayers, and perhaps some tax practitioners, that taxpayers have choices in this area, that it will help to say: “I will not claim my deductions, and therefore I get to keep my capital gains tax exemption.”

In short, there is no choice given to taxpayers in the relevant substantive tax rules. If the tax office knows you have used your home to earn an income, it has every right to deny you some capital gains tax benefits if and when you sell later on.

Not claiming deductions might not help

Of course, how taxpayers (possibly with help of tax agent) fill in their tax returns is their choice; they can decide to depart from the law, assuming they know how it applies in their situation. In turn, whether ATO audit coverage is sufficient to pick up incorrect tax returns depends on a range of factors.

What could be a disastrous outcome for a taxpayer would be to forgo a deduction (when entitled to it), but later on sale, have the ATO apply the capital gains tax rule correctly and withdraw part of the capital gains tax exemption.

If the taxpayer was out of time to amend (or make) their deduction claim, they would suffer both ways. The other issue with occupancy expense deductions is that if there is “financial union” in the finances of spouses, the spouse entitled to occupancy expenses may only be entitled to 50% of the relevant expenses because the other 50% is incurred by the other spouse.

Regrettably, legal cases and the tax office itself have not dealt with this issue in a meaningful way.

There’s a high bar for occupancy expenses

The central question therefore becomes whether a worker’s situation of working at home could be sufficient to attract deductions for occupancy expenses.

The courts and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) have set the bar very high. Let’s put aside for the moment the situation of the mere contemplative worker who needs little equipment to work, other than perhaps a laptop computer.

There are two requirements; both must be satisfied.

First, the room claimed for occupancy expenses must be used extensively and systematically for taxpayer’s work. Some cases have put this requirement in terms of near exclusive use for work such that the taxpayer and family have forgone domestic use of that room and/or that the room is not readily adaptable back to domestic use. Minimal domestic use (such as storing some clothes in room, thoroughfare to rest of home) will not preclude satisfying the usage requirement.

This usage requirement will be enough to deny deductions to many COVID-19 at-home workers because many are working in bedrooms, lounge rooms, dining rooms and so on.

Read more: Mortgage deferral, rent relief and bankruptcy: what you need to know if you have coronavirus money problems

Those who choose to “run the risk” of satisfying deductibility for occupancy expenses and thereby losing part of the capital gains tax exemption might consider retaining a significant degree of domestic use of the relevant room.

(Renters, not being owners, have no capital gains tax cost down the track so obtaining deductions for occupancy expenses would be a win with no accompanying loss.)

Assuming the usage requirement is met, the second criterion is the requirement that the home office is not just a mere convenient place to work. This has come to mean that the home office is needed as a place of necessity because the worker does not have anywhere else to carry out their work and/or the employer does not provide a work location.

A worker who has been lawfully directed, due to COVID-19, that they cannot work at the normal employer-provided premises must be taken to satisfy this second criterion; that working at home is a necessity and not for the mere convenience of the taxpayer.

It’s hard to claim a place for contemplation

What about the mere contemplative worker, the one who needs very little equipment or items to carry out their work, perhaps just a laptop computer and a range of hard-copy documents.

There is little to no guidance in the cases on this. However, it’s likely if a worker is a mere contemplative worker, that person cannot deduct occupancy expenses even if there is extensive use of a room.

The reasoning is likely to be that the worker could work in many places (such as a lounge room, public library, café) without compromising their quality of work.

Read more: About that spare room: employers requisitioned our homes and our time

The room in the home they are working in does not have that degree of necessity about it and/or working in that room might have a high degree of mere convenience. It is also likely that aspects of the “usage criterion” will be drawn on to help deny the deduction (such as that the room has not lost its domestic character).

In the end, a court or the Administrative Appeals Tribunal will have to rule on at least one COVID-19 case. It is hoped that the case(s) are roughly representative of workers more generally so serve as guidance.

As well, some authoritative ruling on the mere contemplative worker would be very welcome, even for a post-COVID-19 world.

The commentary in this article is largely based on two articles by Dale Boccabella and Kathrin Bain, namely, The age of the home worker – part 1: deductibility of home occupancy expenses (2018) and The age of the home worker – part 2: calculation of home occupancy expense deductions, deduction apportionment and partial loss of CGT main residence exemption (2019), both in Australian Tax Forum.

– ref. Be careful what you claim for when working from home. There are capital gains tax risks – https://theconversation.com/be-careful-what-you-claim-for-when-working-from-home-there-are-capital-gains-tax-risks-141364

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Ellis, Professor, Curtin University

Following a A$2 million funding injection from the federal government, the ABC and SBS have introduced an audio description service for audiences who are blind or vision impaired.

Audio description is a voice-over narration describing important visual elements, including facial expressions, actions, costumes or the weather. Up to 14 hours of audio described content will be available on each service per week, using existing audio narration from international productions and descriptions made locally.

More than 453,000 Australians live with blindness and vision impairment. This greatly impacts their ability to consume visual media like television and participate in cultural events such as sport, theatre, museums and galleries. Without audio description, a significant portion of the population is excluded from fully engaging with these activities.

The launch of audio description on Australia’s public broadcasters comes following almost 30 years of advocacy.

A long time coming

Audio description is far from new.

In 1929, in an attempt to attract new audiences to cinema when sound was introduced, an audio described screening of Bulldog Drummond was held in New York City.

In the 1940s, radio presenter Gerardo Esteban started narrating films for his listeners in Spain.

Audio description was available on television in the US in 1982, with PBS’ American Playhouse offering a simulcast audio description via radio. In the 1990s, audio description became available like closed captioning – turned on and off by the preference of the viewer.

Read more: Four things students with vision impairment want you (their teachers and friends) to know

As Australia began its plan to transition to digital television in 1993, advocate bodies for people who are blind or vision impaired called for the introduction of audio description when this service would be launched.

But while blind or vision impaired Australians were increasingly able to access audio description on DVDs, in cinemas, at cultural events and subscription video on demand, television lagged behind.

Audio description trials took place on the ABC in 2010, and on iView in 2015. No Australian broadcaster has introduced an ongoing service.

Rosalie O’Neil of Sale, Victoria, is vision impaired and lives with severe osteoarthritis. She welcomes the introduction of audio description for a number of groups of people who live with disability or disadvantage:

TV is a low-cost, low-energy activity for me as sometimes I can’t see or walk around. Audio description opens up accessibility to people with low vision, blind[ness], seizures, autism, movement difficulties, learning difficulties and social difficulties.

The Department of Communications and the Arts held an audio description working group in 2017 to discuss options for introducing it on Australian free-to-air television.

The group identified three options: audio description on broadcast television, via on-demand platforms, or through a standalone app. It also encouraged broadcasters to introduce audio description without the implementation of legislation. But it is only now audiences like Roselie can access this feature on free-to-air television.

Beyond one community

Accessibility features that help people with disability have a long history of benefiting the mainstream population.

Closed captions were originally intended for people with hearing impairments and are now used by large portions of the audience. Electric toothbrushes were designed to help people with limited motor ability, but provide benefits beyond these users.

In 2018, we conducted research into the potential benefits of audio description beyond the blind and vision impaired community.

We discovered audio description can also benefit sighted people in a variety of ways: from parents caring for children and multitasking around the home, to commuters who want to engage with television but cannot always look at the screen while travelling.

Work still to do

The introduction of audio description on the public broadcasters is cause for celebration, but Australia still falls well short of other countries.

In the UK, 10% of content on both free-to-air and subscription television channels must be audio described. In the United States, free-to-air stations in the top 60 TV markets, as well as paid services with over 50,000 subscribers, must provide seven hours a week of of audio-described programming.

Read more: Oscars: audio description brings film to life for blind people, it deserves an award too

Emma Bennison, CEO of Blind Citizens Australia, calls for the Australian television industry to go further. She says audio description must be “enshrined in legislation, in the same way captioning is for Australians who are Deaf or hard of hearing.”

The commercial stations have still not made public their plans for this service. Legislating audio description for all Australian broadcasters is the next logical step.

– ref. Audio description finally comes to ABC and SBS – https://theconversation.com/audio-description-finally-comes-to-abc-and-sbs-141276

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

The federal government is repurposing $1.35 billion of its planned defence spending over a decade to meet the increasing threat of cyber attacks on Australia.

The announcement follows Scott Morrison recently revealing “a sophisticated state-based cyber actor” was targeting “Australian organisations across a range of sectors including all levels of government, industry, political organisations, education, health, essential service providers and operators of other critical infrastructure”.

Although the government has refused to identify the state-based actor, it is known to be China.

The repurposed funds will boost capabilities provided through the Australian Signals Directorate and the Australian Cyber Security Centre to identify and ward off cyber attacks.

The government says the funding will enable more threats to be identified, and the activities of more foreign cybercriminals to be disrupted. It will facilitate partnerships between industry and government to help deal with the problem.

A large slice of the money – $470 million – will go to expanding the workforce devoted to fighting the cyber threat. More than 500 new jobs will be created within ASD.

Announcing the initiative, Morrison said malicious cyber activity against Australia was increasing in frequency, scale and sophistication.

“The federal government’s top priority is protecting our nation’s economy, national security and sovereignty. Malicious cyber activity undermines that,” he said.

Some $359.5 million of the spending is over the forward estimates.

The package aims to strengthen protection and resilience at all levels – from individuals and small businesses through to the providers of critical services.

Giving an example of the planned enhanced capability, Defence Minister Linda Reynolds said “this package will enable ASD and Australia’s major telecommunications providers to prevent malicious cyber activity from reaching millions of Australians by blocking known malicious websites and computer viruses at speed”.

She said the package “is one part of our $15 billion investment in cyber and information warfare capabilities that will form part of Defence’s 2020 Force Structure Plan to address the rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape”.

Among the funding to develop capabilities to disrupt and defeat malicious cyber activity there will be:

• more than $31 million to enhance the ability of ASD to disrupt cybercrime offshore, and provide assistance to federal, state and territory law enforcement agencies

• more than $35 million to deliver a new cyber threat-sharing platform, so industry and government can share intelligence about malicious cyber activity, and quickly block threats

• more than $12 million which will help ASD and major telecommunications providers to prevent malicious cyber activity from reaching millions of Australians by speedily blocking malicious websites and computer viruses.

Other measures will improve understanding of malicious cyber activity so emerging threats can be identified and dealt with faster. There will be:

• more than $118 million for ASD to expand its data science and intelligence capabilities

• more than $62 million to deliver a national situational awareness capability to better enable ASD to understand and respond to cyber threats on a national scale. This includes informing vulnerable sectors of the economy about threats and the best ways to mitigate them

• more than $20 million to establish research laboratories to better understand threats to emerging technology.

Other spending details will be announced later.

– ref. Morrison announces repurposing of defence money to fight increasing cyber threats – https://theconversation.com/morrison-announces-repurposing-of-defence-money-to-fight-increasing-cyber-threats-141629

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mehmet Ulubasoglu, Professor of Economics, Head of the Department of Economics and Director of the Centre for Energy, the Environment and Natural Disasters, Deakin University

Victoria’s outbreak of COVID-19 infections, with 75 more cases identified overnight on top of 173 cases the previous five days, underlines the need to stick with social distancing measures wherever possible.

Working at home, in particular.

About 23 cases have been linked to Melbourne’s Stamford Plaza hotel, where people flying in from overseas have been quarantined. Victorian premier Daniel Andrews said on Sunday the hotel outbreak might be due to staff sharing a cigarette lighter or carpooling to work.

Read more: Victoria’s coronavirus hotspots: not quite a second wave, but still cause for concern

So what proportion of the workforce in Australia can feasibly work from home?

We estimate 39% of all jobs in Australia – 41% full-time and and almost 35% of part-time – can be done from home. Full-time jobs are more teleworkable than part-time jobs. Women are also more likely to have teleworkable jobs – 46% to 33% of men.

How we made our calculations

To make these estimates, we used the methodology of University of Chicago economists Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman. In June they published findings that 37% of jobs in the United States could be done at home.

They took data from the Occupational Information Network, a US government-funded online database describing about 1,000 occupations in the US. Any job involving outdoor work, operating vehicles or equipment, general physical activities, handling objects, dealing directly with the public and so on was deemed not teleworkable.

Dingel and Nieman also made calculations for 85 other countries. In general, they concluded, the higher per capita GDP, the greater the teleworkability. Sweden and Britain, for example, exceeded 40% while Mexico and Turkey were less than 25%.

Read more: Heading back to the office? Here’s how to protect yourself and your colleagues from coronavirus

Australian assumptions

To apply Dingel and Nieman’s approach to Australia we assumed the nature of work and general economic activity is similar to the US.

Next we converted occupational classifications from the Australasian equivalent of the US database – the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO) compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Stats NZ.

The ANZSCO classifications do not exactly match the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) used by the US database. In such cases we evenly distributed the jobs in the Australian classification between the corresponding international classifications.

Our estimate is therefore a proximate indicator of teleworkability. Our results broadly confirm those by Harvard University economist James Stratton (an Australian) using Dingel and Niemans’s methodology.

Stratton’s results highlighted the geographic and socio-economic disparities in teleworkability: for example, 45% of jobs in Australia’s eight major cities can be done at home, compared to 33% elsewhere.

To complement this work, we’ve drilled into the gender differences.

Teleworking favours women

Importantly, we estimate 45.7% women have teleworkable jobs compared to 32.9% of men.

This is due to about 60% of female employment being concentrated in administrative, clerical, teaching and customer-service jobs.

Teleworkability is highest in the Australian Capital Territory (50.3%), followed by Victoria (40%), the Northern Terrioty (39.5%), Queensland (37.2%), WA (36.8$), SA (36.2%) and Tasmania (34.9%).

Full-time jobs are more teleworkable than part-time jobs, 41% to 34.7%. Moreover, 51.7% of women with full-time jobs can work from home, compared with 34.7% of men.

Younger employees are less likely to have teleworkable jobs, particularly in part-time employment. Young men in part-time jobs are the least likely to have a job they can do at home.

The labour-market effects of working from home remain to be better understood. But these calculations – as broad as they are – provide some good news on the economic gender impacts of COVID-19, hitting women marginally more.

While working from home is not for everyone, these estimates show it’s a viable arrangement for many.

And a crucial measure for Australia to beat the coronavirus pandemic.

– ref. Teleworkability in Australia: 41% of full-time and 35% of part-time jobs can be done from home – https://theconversation.com/teleworkability-in-australia-41-of-full-time-and-35-of-part-time-jobs-can-be-done-from-home-140723

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Bentley, Professor of Social Epidemiology, Centre for Health Equity, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne

Melbourne is once again grappling with increasing COVID-19 rates. Ten suburbs in Melbourne have been designated COVID-19 outbreak hotspots: Broadmeadows, Keilor Downs, Maidstone, Albanvale, Sunshine West, Hallam, Brunswick West, Fawkner, Reservoir and Pakenham.

The outbreaks have sparked discussions about lockdowns and travel restrictions for people living in these parts of Melbourne and generated intensive suburb-specific testing.

The outbreaks have been attributed to family gatherings in homes and people failing to self-isolate, even after positive test results. This has occurred alongside possible breaches of infection control protocols in hotels accommodating people in quarantine – with security guards from major hotels having contracted the virus.

Read more: The housing boom propelled inequality, but a coronavirus housing bust will skyrocket it

Socio-spatial clues

While chance and circumstances converge to create outbreaks there are also some obvious factors related to where and how people live that impact their capacity to isolate.

As we potentially face a two year-long wait for vaccines (16 are in clinical evaluation internationally (with one being developed in Australia), we need to acknowledge the spatial concentration of these sites of vulnerability is not random. There are socio-spatial clues as to why we have had outbreaks in these locations.

First, the hotspots have some of the highest rates of housing precarity and financial hardship across Melbourne. People in overcrowded or unaffordable or insecure housing may have less control over their immediate environment and less capacity to isolate themselves than other community members.

Read more: Homelessness and overcrowding expose us all to coronavirus. Here’s what we can do to stop the spread

The recent Melbourne outbreaks have occurred largely in areas with:

• high housing affordability stress: where those in the lowest 40% of income spend more than 30% of their household income on housing,

• overcrowding: measured in terms of the number of people in a household, their age and gender in relation to the number of bedrooms in a dwelling, and/or

• homelessness: where a person does not have suitable accommodation alternatives and their current living arrangement is in a dwelling that is inadequate, has no tenure, or if their initial tenure is short and not extendable or does not allow them to have control of, and access to space for social relations.

While housing security seems like an obvious problem to fix, it remains a long-standing, difficult issue for governments to tackle. Going into the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia exhibited high rates of homelessness and spiralling housing costs.

Many people in Melbourne and Sydney live in overcrowded or inadequate forms of housing as a result of what has become known as our “housing affordability crisis”. Alongside this, the numbers of people who require emergency accommodation far outstrip our cities’ capacity to house them on a medium- to long-term basis.

Second, people without savings may be compelled to go to work despite feeling unwell. They need to meet their weekly housing costs and don’t have savings enough to go two weeks (or longer) without income. This can occur even if people have negotiated reduced rent with their landlords.

Where housing and COVID-19 collide

When one considers these housing and financial factors from the perspective of COVID-19 suppression, their geographical clustering should not be disregarded. The areas in Melbourne with high rates of household overcrowding, homelessness, housing affordability stress and (related to this) financial hardship (often measured using people’s self-reported capacity to access funds in an emergency) map closely to areas where there are now high numbers of COVID-19 cases.

Read more: If Australia really wants to tackle mental health after coronavirus, we must take action on homelessness

Using publicly available data, we created a simple index describing capacity isolate based on the above four characteristics. We created maps of Greater Melbourne to examine the relationship between current COVID-19 cases and these housing and financial vulnerability factors. Our index shows Hallam, Sunshine West, Albanvale, Broadmeadows, Falkner, Reservoir and Maidstone are all in the top two quintiles.

Over the last decade, Melbourne has seen itself become more spatially segregated. And household overcrowding and precarity are geographically clustered.

Acknowledging correlation is not causation, these findings suggest solving some of Melbourne’s housing problems might reduce the spread of COVID-19 now and in future outbreaks as we await a vaccine.

Taking this further, when assessing where in cities we are likely to see a spike in cases in the future, we should take housing-related vulnerabilities into account alongside other factors.

While steps have been taken by the Victorian government to address some of the issues we have flagged, such as the one-off payment of up to A$2,000 for eligible renters who are unable to afford rent, and the A$1,500 payment to people who test positive and have no leave cover, more could be done in the medium to long term to reduce the risk of overcrowding, housing related financial stress and precarious forms of housing (that lead to homelessness) across the city.

Read more: Coronavirus shows housing costs leave many insecure. Tackling that can help solve an even bigger crisis

The past months of COVID-19 restrictions have highlighted how critical housing and financial security are to our health and well-being at both an individual and population level. The Victorian Council of Social Service has noted disasters can be “profoundly discriminatory” in where they occur, and in their impacts.

Successful COVID-19 suppression requires safe and equitable cities and addressing housing vulnerability is one of the many challenges we must take up.

– ref. Overcrowding and affordability stress: Melbourne’s COVID-19 hotspots are also housing crisis hotspots – https://theconversation.com/overcrowding-and-affordability-stress-melbournes-covid-19-hotspots-are-also-housing-crisis-hotspots-141381

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Heather R. Stevens, Doctoral student in Environmental Sciences, Macquarie University

The link between hot weather and aggressive crime is well established. But can the same be said for online aggression, such as angry tweets? And is online anger a predictor of assaults?

Our study just published suggests the answer is a clear “no”. We found angry tweet counts actually increased in cooler weather. And as daily maximum temperatures rose, angry tweet counts decreased.

We also found the incidence of angry tweets is highest on Mondays, and perhaps unsurprisingly, angry Twitter posts are most prevalent after big news events such as a leadership spill.

This is the first study to compare patterns of assault and social media anger with temperature. Given anger spreads through online communities faster than any other emotion, the findings have broad implications – especially under climate change.

Algorithms are watching you

Of Australia’s 24.6 million people, 18 million, or 73%, are active social media users. Some 4.7 million Australians, or 19%, use Twitter. This widespread social media use provides researchers with valuable opportunities to gather information.

When you publicly post, comment or even upload a selfie, an algorithm can scan it to estimate your mood (positive or negative) or your emotion (such as anger, joy, fear or surprise).

This information can be linked with the date, time of day, location or even your age and sex, to determine the “mood” of a city or country in near real time.

Our study involved 74.2 million English-language Twitter posts – or tweets – from 2015 to 2017 in New South Wales.

We analysed them using the publicly available We Feel tool, developed by the CSIRO and the Black Dog Institute, to see if social media can accurately map our emotions.

Some 2.87 million tweets (or 3.87%) contained words or phrases considered angry, such as “vicious”, “hated”, “irritated”, “disgusted” and the very popular “f*cked”.

Hot-headed when it’s cold outside

On average, the number of angry tweets were highest when the temperature was below 15℃, and lowest in warm temperatures (25-30℃).

The number of angry tweets slightly increased again in very high temperatures (above 35℃), although with fewer days in that range there was less certainty about the trend.

On the ten days with the highest daily maximum temperatures, the average angry tweet count was 2,482 per day. Of the ten coldest days, the average angry tweet count was higher at 3,354 per day.

Read more: Meet ‘Sara’, ‘Sharon’ and ‘Mel’: why people spreading coronavirus anxiety on Twitter might actually be bots

The pattern of angry tweets was opposite to that of physical assaults, which are more prevalent in hotter weather – with some evidence of a decline in extreme heat.

So why the opposite patterns? We propose two possible explanations.

First, hot and cold weather triggers a physiological response in humans. Temperature affects our heart rate, the amount of oxygen to our brain, hormone regulation (including testosterone) and our ability to sleep. In some people, this in turn affects physical aggression levels.

Second, weather triggers changes to our routine. Research suggests aggressive crimes increase because warmer weather encourages behaviour that fosters assaults. This includes more time outdoors, increased socialising and drinking alcohol.

Those same factors – time outdoors and more socialising – may reduce the opportunity or motivation to tweet. And the effects of alcohol (such as reduced mental clarity and physical precicion) make composing a tweet harder, and therefore less likely.

This theory is supported by our finding that both angry tweet counts, as well as overall tweet counts, were lowest on weekends, holidays and the hottest days,

Read more: Car accidents, drownings, violence: hotter temperatures will mean more deaths from injury

It’s possible that as people vent their frustrations online, they feel better and are then less inclined to commit an assault. However, this theory isn’t well supported.

The relationship is more likely due to the vastly different demographics of Twitter users and assault offenders.

Assault offenders are most likely to be young men from low socio-economic backgrounds. In contrast, about half of Twitter users are female, and they’re more likely to be middle-aged and in a higher income bracket compared with other social media users.

Our study did not consider why these two groups differ in response to temperature. However, we are currently researching how age, sex and other social and demographic factors influence the relationships between temperature and aggression.

The Monday blues

Our study primarily set out to see whether temperatures and angry tweet counts were related. But we also uncovered other interesting trends.

Average angry tweet counts were highest on a Monday (2,759 per day) and lowest on weekends (Saturdays, 2,373; Sundays, 2,499). This supports research that found an online mood slump on weekdays.

We determined that major news events correlated with the ten days where the angry tweet count was highest. These events included:

• the federal leadership spill in 2015 when Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott as prime minister

• a severe storm front in NSW in 2015, then a major cold front a few months later

• two mass shootings in the United States: Orlando in 2016 and Las Vegas in 2017

• sporting events including the Cricket World Cup in 2015.

Twitter in a warming world

Our study was limited in that Twitter users are not necessarily representative of the broader population. For example, Twitter is a preferred medium for politicians, academics and journalists. These users may express different emotions, or less emotion, in their posts than other social media users.

However, the influence of temperature on social media anger has broad implications. Of all the emotions, anger spreads through online communities the fastest. So temperature changes and corresponding social media anger can affect the wider population.

We hope our research helps health and justice services develop more targeted measures based on temperature.

And with climate change likely to affect assault rates and mood, more research in this field is needed.

Read more: Nine things you love that are being wrecked by climate change

– ref. Anger is all the rage on Twitter when it’s cold outside (and on Mondays) – https://theconversation.com/anger-is-all-the-rage-on-twitter-when-its-cold-outside-and-on-mondays-141589

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Grey, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Sydney

Victoria’s chief health officer has admitted the government did not properly engage with linguistically diverse communities about COVID-19 in the runup to Melbourne’s recent spike in cases.

Professor Brett Sutton last week said:

We know that there are some migrant communities, recent migrants or culturally and linguistically diverse communities, who are overrepresented now with some of our new cases […] It’s our obligation as government to reach those people. It’s not their fault if we’re not going in with appropriate engagement.

This issue is not confined to Victoria. My research has indicated that linguistically diverse communities in New South Wales are likewise not receiving official coronavirus advice.

Read more: Victoria’s coronavirus hotspots: not quite a second wave, but still cause for concern

What’s happening in Victoria?

Clusters of COVID-19 cases in “hotspots” across Melbourne have seen the Victorian government announce a testing blitz across 10 suburbs.

We don’t know for certain if language barriers have contributed to this spike.

However, the Victoria government is clearly worried about a link between linguistic diversity and infection, and is sending public health officials door to door to deliver health messages.

More than one in five (about 22%) of Australian households speak a language other than English. In Casey, a Melbourne hotspot, it’s about 38% and in Brimbank it’s up to 62%.

Read more: Keep your nose out of it: why saliva tests could offer a better alternative to nasal COVID-19 swabs

Poor health messaging to multilingual communities isn’t new

Victoria’s spike is not the first indication that official coronavirus health communications in languages other than English have been ineffective.

A small study in Melbourne early in the pandemic indicated people speaking languages other than English were not receiving sufficient, reliable information.

Concerns have also been raised nationally. The National COVID-19 Health and Research Advisory Committee reported to the Australian government that migrants were less likely to receive public health information because of sporadic government engagement, increasing their risk of contracting COVID-19 and transmitting it unwittingly.

People in Australia who aren’t proficient in English tend to be older, having started speaking it as adults, and older people are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. So community leaders are concerned about this combination of vulnerabilities.

Here’s what I found in Sydney

My research examined official online COVID-19 information and public health signage in four Sydney suburbs with two to three times the national rate of households speaking a language other than English.

Multilingual posters from federal and state health departments, freely available to download, were rarely displayed.

Written information, communications using technical wording and English-medium government websites can be challenging, even if people are bilingual in spoken English.

In a submission to the federal Senate COVID-19 inquiry (number 156), I outline how some websites are easier to navigate than others and the limited use of other languages on government social media. State and federal health departments have commissioned the production of online videos about COVID-19 in languages other than English, but uptake is low.

It’s also difficult to ensure such communications are good quality.

Here’s what we could be doing better

We could make it the law

We could make it a legal obligation for federal and state health departments to collect and analyse data about who reads or watches their communications.

They could use that data to develop a cohesive, nationwide public health communications plan for languages other than English before the next emergency.

Setting legal standards could also mean government communications become consistent across online platforms, to increase accessibility.

Read more: Our culture affects the way we look after ourselves. It should shape the health care we receive, too

While government communications are already partially regulated, there are no overall rules about public health communications in languages other than English.

These rules would be important for public safety. That is, we can better collectively manage public health risks when everyone knows what to do.

These rules would also be important for equal autonomy. Being able to reliably receive not just a simple “stay 1.5m apart” message but official, up-to-date rules and details about the local pandemic situation enables us to determine our own course of conduct and manage our own anxiety. People whose dominant language is not English deserve that same autonomy.

We could clarify what local governments should be doing

Legal standards could also clarify the responsibilities of local governments.

My research found some local governments produced their own COVID-19 communications in locally common languages, such as the Strathfield signage below in Mandarin, Korean and English.

But others didn’t. In Strathfield’s neighbouring suburb of Burwood, which is just as multilingual, there are no local government COVID-19 posters.

Instead, local businesses produced and shared bilingual COVID-19 signage, as shown in this article’s lead image.

Other suburbs have neither local government nor local businesses providing multilingual health information.

We need greater transparency

Setting legal standards for government public health communications before our next health emergency may be a controversial, yet effective, way to reach everyone in our community.

We also need greater transparency about current government policies on communicating to people with languages other than English, and whether these policies are being followed during this pandemic.

– ref. Multilingual Australia is missing out on vital COVID-19 information. No wonder local councils and businesses are stepping in – https://theconversation.com/multilingual-australia-is-missing-out-on-vital-covid-19-information-no-wonder-local-councils-and-businesses-are-stepping-in-141362

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Griffin, Senior Lecturer, Geospatial Sciences, RMIT University

Maps have shown us how the events of this disastrous year have played out around the globe, from the Australian bushfires to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. But there are good reasons to question the maps we see.

Some of these reasons have been explored recently through maps of the bushfires or those created from satellite images.

Maps often inform our actions, but how do we know which ones are trustworthy? My research shows that answering this question may be critically important for the world’s most urgent challenge: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read more: Satellite imagery is revolutionizing the world. But should we always trust what we see?

Why are trustworthy maps important?

Maps guide decisions, including those made by governments, private companies, and individual citizens. During the pandemic, government restrictions on activities to protect public health have been strongly informed by maps.

Governments rely on public cooperation with the restrictions, and they have used maps to explain the situation and build trust. If people don’t trust information from the government, they may be less likely to comply with the restrictions.

This highlights the importance of trustworthy COVID-19 maps. Maps can be untrustworthy when they don’t show the most relevant or timely information or because they show information in a misleading way.

Below are a few question you should ask yourself to work out whether you should trust a map you read.

What information is being mapped?

The number of cases of COVID-19 is an important piece of information. But that number could just reflect how many people are being tested. If you don’t know how much testing is being done, you can misjudge the level of risk.

Low case numbers might mean that there isn’t much testing being done. If the percentage of positive cases (positive test rate) is high, we might be missing cases. So not accounting for the number of tests can be misleading.

The World Health Organization suggests that at least ten negative tests to one positive test, a positive test rate of at most 10%, is the lowest rate of testing that is adequate.

In Australia, we have been at the forefront of making sure we are doing enough testing and we are confident that we are identifying most of the cases. Undertesting has been a problem in some other countries.

How is the information being mapped?

It’s not just the numbers that matter. How the numbers are shown is also important so that map readers get an accurate picture of what we know.

The Victorian Government recently advised Melburnians to avoid travel to and from several local council areas because of high case numbers. But their publicly available map does not show this clearly.

Compare the government-produced map with a map of the same data mapped differently. Most people interpret light as few cases and dark as more cases. The government-produced map uses dark colours for both low and high numbers of cases.

Who made this map and why did they make it?

Maps can inform, misinform, and disinform, like any other information source. So it is important to pay attention to the map’s context as well as the author.

Viral maps are maps that spread quickly and widely, often via social media. Viral maps cannot always be trusted, even when they come from a reputable source. Maps that are trustworthy in one context may not be in another.

An example from Australian news media in February shows this. Several media outlets showed a map that was tweeted by UK researchers. The tweet announced the publication of their new paper about COVID-19.

The media reported the map showed locations to which COVID-19 had spread from Wuhan, China, the origin of the outbreak. It actually depicted airline flight routes, and was used in the tweet to illustrate how globally linked the world is. The map was from a 2012 study not the 2020 study.

Many readers may have trusted that reporting because their justifiable anxiety about COVID-19 was reinforced by the map’s design choices. The mass of overlapping red symbols creates a powerful and alarming impression.

While the lines in the map indicate potential routes for virus spread, it doesn’t provide evidence that the did virus spread along all of these routes. The researchers didn’t claim that it did. But without understanding why the map was made and what it showed, several media outlets reported it inaccurately.

Maps on social media are especially likely to be missing important context and explanation. The airline route map was re-shared many times as in the tweet below, often without any source information, making it hard to check its trustworthiness.

Limiting the damage done by COVID-19 is a very substantial challenge. Maps can help ordinary citizens to work together with governments to achieve that outcome. But they need to be made and read with care. Ask yourself what is being mapped, how it’s being mapped, who made the map and why they made it.

– ref. Can I trust this map? 4 questions to ask when you see a map of the coronavirus pandemic – https://theconversation.com/can-i-trust-this-map-4-questions-to-ask-when-you-see-a-map-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic-141131

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Smith, Senior Lecturer in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

The US presidential election is being shaped by the two crises that have defined 2020 so far: the coronavirus pandemic and the national reckoning over police brutality and racism.

COVID-19 has infected millions of Americans and killed 125,000, while causing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Camera phone footage of George Floyd’s brutal killing sparked America’s largest wave of protests at least since the 1960s.

The term “unprecedented” has been used widely to describe these events, but they are just the latest versions of the two oldest and biggest problems in American politics: government dysfunction and racial injustice.

The “winning” years

In 2016, Donald Trump presented appealingly easy solutions to these problems.

Untainted by government, he would “drain the swamp” of bureaucrats and his business acumen would fix problems that conventional politicians could not, from trade deficits to crumbling infrastructure. Harnessing racial resentment and a backlash against Black Lives Matter, Trump promised white Americans an end to the painful reckonings of the Obama years, instead offering them a fantasy of black gratitude for white success.

Read more: The backlash against Black Lives Matter is just more evidence of injustice

For three years, Trump crafted a re-election narrative around his “winning” approach, based mainly on an economy that was already booming by the time he became president. The partisan polarisation of the 2016 election continued into his presidency.

Trump’s approval rating has always been relatively low despite the strong economy, but it has also been resilient in the face of scandal. Trump faced few crises in this period not of his own making, although there was one that foreshadowed the disasters to come: Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.

The federal government response to the hurricane was slow, uncoordinated and under-resourced. Trump showed little interest in it and took no responsibility for it. He briefly appeared on the island to congratulate himself and throw paper towels to residents. When the death toll was revealed to be nearly 3,000, revised up from initial reports of 64, Trump claimed Democrats made up most of the deaths “to make me look as bad as possible”.

Pandemic politics

The Puerto Rican tragedy was largely ignored and forgotten, but COVID-19 has replayed many of its themes on an even bigger scale.

There were bewildering government failures, despite the nation’s immense wealth and resources. There was an absence of coordination between different parts of the government. There was a visible disregard among some whites for non-white lives. And there were familiar claims by Trump that his opponents were exaggerating the scale of the crisis, this time to sink his re-election chances.

Even now, as experts stress the need for widespread testing, Trump complains that testing inflates coronavirus numbers, and says it should slow down.

You can’t fight a pandemic with racial slurs. After a very brief “rally round the flag” boost in polling, voter ratings of Trump’s handling of the pandemic have been poor, and are dropping.

Meanwhile, the kinds of experienced public servants Trump and his allies deride are enjoying much higher approval as Americans rediscover the virtues of scientific expertise.

Read more: Donald Trump blames everyone but himself for the coronavirus crisis. Will voters agree?

The pandemic itself may be less electorally consequential for Trump than its economic effects. It is very rare for presidents to win re-election during a recession.

Trump’s re-election hopes rest on a swift economic recovery, but that is unlikely while infections continue to surge, driven by attempts to reopen too quickly.

Black Lives Matter

The wave of Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis has damaged not just Trump’s electoral prospects, but the political order he represents.

For decades, conservatives have used the prospect of black unrest to scare white moderates, and Trump’s Nixonian rhetoric suggests he expected the same effect this time.

Instead, public opinion has solidified in support of the large, multiracial protests. The protests have changed minds, including white minds, about the systemic nature of racism in the United States. Racist backlashes may be less potent when there is a polarising white president in power.

Trump has floundered in response to the protests. He has paid lip service to the cause of justice for George Floyd, but has shown more genuine sympathy for those who worry about being called racist.

Ultimately, he has retreated to his comfortable daydreams of black gratefulness. When announcing better-than-expected job numbers, Trump said:

Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country.

African American unemployment is actually getting worse, and Trump’s response to the protests is costing Republicans support across the country.

What about Biden?

Joe Biden has been much less visible than Trump during the pandemic, which so far is working well for his campaign. Trump seems desperate for a fight with Biden, and his campaign is reassuring nervous supporters that things will turn around when they get the chance to “define” Biden.

Biden is hard to paint as a radical. He has been quick to distance himself from proposals such as defunding police, and he has never supported “Medicare for all”, despite its popularity with the Democratic base and relevance during the pandemic. As president he would be unlikely to bring the kinds of lasting changes that most Democrats want to see.

This is why Trump and his allies cast Biden as “sleepy” and senile. They warn that he would easily be manipulated by radicals, and Trump is really running against the “far left”. So far, however, this approach has compelled Trump to talk a lot about his own physical and mental fitness.

Trump is a classically charismatic leader, whose hold on his supporters stems from their perception he is blessed with unique powers. This might be why Trump worries about any sign of weakness or change in his image – why he refuses to wear a mask, feels the need to physically prove himself, and is crushed by the sight of empty seats at a rally.

Biden, whose support stems from a perception that he is safe and familiar, having served as vice president in the Obama adminstration, chooses instead to display certain vulnerabilities. This helps explain his rising support among older Americans during the pandemic.

And in a year when race is a defining election issue, Biden has a vast advantage with African American and Hispanic voters, despite parts of his legislative record and his cringeworthy “you ain’t black” interview. He also owes his nomination to African American voters. As Juan Williams put it bluntly, “Joe Biden would be retired if not for the black vote”.

The polls look bad for Trump, but the race remains unpredictable

Averages of national polls currently show Biden leading Trump by between nine and ten points. Even without the pandemic, Trump was never going to have an easy contest against Biden.

Before he secured the nomination in March, Biden had an average lead of 5% in hypothetical poll match-ups with Trump, which is the likely reason Democrats settled on him as an alternative to Bernie Sanders.

Polls still show Trump’s supporters are a lot more enthusiastic about voting for Trump than Biden’s supporters are about voting for Biden, which could be important if voting becomes a health risk.

But enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate may not matter. The 2018 midterm was effectively a referendum on Trump, and the 2020 election will be an even more focused one.

There is reason to believe the race could tighten, if only because no candidate has won a presidential election by more than 9% since 1984, and partisan divisions have become a lot sharper since then. Many conservative-leaning Americans who are undecided about the election may return to Trump. Closer to the election, many pollsters will restrict their samples to people who they believe are likely to vote, rather than just able to vote. These likely voter screens may reveal Trump’s standing is stronger than it currently looks.

Read more: As Minneapolis burns, Trump’s presidency is sinking deeper into crisis. And yet, he may still be re-elected

Of course, the election isn’t decided by a national popularity contest. Democrats are haunted by the 2016 election, in which Hillary Clinton got 2.8 million more votes than Trump but still lost the state-based electoral college. Currently, The Economist’s election forecast gives that scenario about a 10% chance of happening again.

Everyone will be watching key swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida and North Carolina, as well as newly competitive states like Arizona and Minnesota.

Polls show Biden leading in most of these contests, but these leads are smaller and more volatile than his national lead. The quality of many state polls has also been questionable, raising the possibility they will repeat the same mistakes as last time.

Biden is discouraging complacency. Referencing a recent NYT/Siena poll that showed him leading Trump nationally by 14%, Biden tweeted:

COVID-19 has sabotaged the usual election-year registration drives that bring millions of new voters into the electorate, which could disadvantage Democrats who traditionally benefit from younger voters.

Coronavirus is also likely to cause increased mail voting. There is currently no evidence increased use of mail voting advantages one side over the other, and state officials from both parties have pushed to increase voting by mail. Mail voting could alleviate the electoral chaos recently seen in places like Georgia, where the pandemic kept election workers home and shut down polling places.

But mail voting brings its own problems. Most states currently do not have the infrastructure or rules to required to quickly process mail ballots, which means we may be unlikely to see a result on election night if the contest is close.

An uncertain result hinging on a prolonged mail ballot count could lead to the nightmare scenario of a disputed election outcome.

Would Trump accept defeat?

Trump already seems to be preparing to dispute the election. He has repeatedly claimed, with no evidence, that mail voting will facilitate massive voter fraud.

In March he said increased mail voting would mean “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”, and he recently tweeted:

These fraud claims have been repeatedly debunked, and Twitter was so worried about Trump attacking the electoral process that, for the first time, it flagged two of his tweets as misleading.

Trump may believe, with reason, that Republicans could benefit from in-person voting disarray on election day. Minority voters are far more likely than white voters to have to wait for long periods in lines at polling places.

In 2018, a federal court ruled for the first time since 1982 that Republicans could mount “poll watching” operations without prior judicial approval. This involves organising volunteers to challenge the eligibility of voters at polling places. Courts have previously found these tactics are used to intimidate and exclude minority voters, and they result in even longer delays. Republicans reportedly want to recruit 50,000 poll watchers for the 2020 election, including retired military and police officers.

But the purpose of Trump’s war on mail voting may simply be to delegitimise the election result in advance. He did this throughout 2016, saying the election would be “rigged” when it appeared he was set to lose. Even after he won, he claimed for years that he would have won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”.

These claims have also been thoroughly debunked, including by Trump’s own lawyers.

Trump’s resistance to the factual possibility that he could lose has raised fears he might not accept a defeat. Biden, noting that military leaders criticised Trump’s handling of Black Lives Matter protests, has fantasised that the military would escort him from the White House if he tried to “steal the election”.

Extensive lawsuits are a more likely scenario than military intervention, but there is also the danger Trump’s supporters would not accept the legitimacy of a Biden victory.

Given Trump has often warned his supporters that their enemies will take away the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms), there is a possibility of a violent backlash, even if it only consists of isolated incidents.

At the same time, it is increasingly normal that large parts of the population dispute the legitimacy of the president. From Bill Clinton’s impeachment to George W. Bush’s contested victory; from Trump’s “birther” conspiracies about Obama to his own impeachment last year, refusals to accept the lawfulness of the presidency, on grounds real or imaginary, have become a standard part of America’s political repertoire.

A lot can happen in four months, as we’ve already seen this year. The outcome of this race is far from certain, but its ugliness is guaranteed.

– ref. Trump is struggling against two invisible enemies: the coronavirus and Joe Biden – https://theconversation.com/trump-is-struggling-against-two-invisible-enemies-the-coronavirus-and-joe-biden-139667

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Bricknell, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Health, CQUniversity Australia

One of the most profound ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our lives has been in the way we work. For people lucky enough to keep their jobs, and for those of us in professions where it’s possible, working from home has become the new normal.

Australia’s success in “flattening the curve” means restrictions are now being lifted. With this, many employers are bringing their staff back into the office, or at least contemplating doing so.

But as the current outbreaks in Victoria show, it’s dangerous to think we’re now safe from the threat of COVID-19.

So, what do we need to consider as we take those first tentative steps back into the office?

Read more: Coronavirus could spark a revolution in working from home. Are we ready?

First, how does the virus spread?

While there’s a lot we still don’t know about SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, we do know it spreads most effectively from person to person in droplet form. Infected people emit these droplets when they sneeze, cough, and even speak.

Those droplets can be transmitted directly through the air — say when an infectious person coughs in the direction of someone else close by — or they can settle on surfaces, where they can remain viable for hours.

The virus enters the body of a non-infected person through contact with mucous membranes in the nose, mouth or eyes and attaches to cells in the upper respiratory tract to establish infection.

What does this mean for office workers?

In many workplaces, employees share a small office space, work in an open-plan office, or use “hot desks” that are shared between several different employees on different shifts.

Workers in these situations are often required to work for long periods in environments that make it hard to maintain the recommended 4m² distancing rule.

This combination — several hours spent in close contact — increases the risk of COVID-19 transmission. This is illustrated by an outbreak in an open-plan call centre in Seoul, where more than 43% of workers contracted COVID-19 during February and March.

Read more: Employers, schools, take note. Coronavirus ‘clearance certificates’ are a waste of everybody’s time

Considerations for employers

First, each employee in a shared office should be able to have at least 4m² to themselves. If this isn’t possible, it would be a good idea to stagger staff or allow them to continue working from home for now.

Second, think about airflow. Small offices often have insufficient airflow to dilute the virus, and, if an infectious person is present, could end up with high concentrations of viral particles over the course of an hour or so.

Conversely, higher rates of airflow combined with poor ventilation can also lead to infection, as droplets can be carried further.

So where possible, increase ventilation and air exchange in open-plan workspaces. Increasing the ratio of fresh air intake to recirculated air can reduce the concentration of virus particles in air conditioned spaces. Even simply opening windows can reduce viral spread.

Third, cleaning protocols need to be increased. Where once a twice weekly visit from a contracted cleaner to vacuum the floors, empty the bins and quickly wipe over surfaces was considered sufficient, during COVID-19 you need to ensure a thorough daily clean of all surfaces.

Frequently touched surfaces, such as desks, light switches, door handles, phones, staircase railings, touch screens, keypads, taps and toilets should be given special attention and may require more frequent cleaning.

Read more: You better hope your work cleaner is one of the few who has time to do a thorough job

Fourth, if a worker becomes sick with respiratory symptoms, isolate them from other staff and arrange for them to go home. Advise them to get tested for COVID-19 and not return to work until they have a negative result.

Similarly, reinforce the message, “if you’re sick, get tested and don’t come to work”. Now more than ever, the culture of “soldiering on” while unwell puts others at risk.

Finally, you might also consider asking employees to wear face masks at work. Face masks are unlikely to protect the person wearing them but can limit the disease being spread by coughs and sneezes.

Considerations for employees

First, you should clean equipment like keyboards, phones and mice regularly, and definitely between each user if desks are shared. Simply wipe your desk and equipment with a domestic spray cleaner.

Second, the best protection against the virus is personal hygiene. Washing your hands with soap and water offers excellent protection against SARS-CoV-2. When you can’t wash your hands, use an alcohol-based hand sanitiser instead.

You should wash or sanitise your hands regularly throughout the day, especially any time you touch anything you suspect someone else has recently been in contact with.

Third, maintain a distance of 1.5m from other people to protect yourself from airborne droplets.

Fourth, practise good respiratory hygiene by coughing and sneezing into a tissue or the crook of your elbow. This prevents viral particles spreading over surfaces and toward people around you.

Lastly, if you have any symptoms, don’t go to work. Get tested as soon as possible and stay at home until you receive the results.

Read more: As coronavirus restrictions ease, here’s how you can navigate public transport as safely as possible

– ref. Heading back to the office? Here’s how to protect yourself and your colleagues from coronavirus – https://theconversation.com/heading-back-to-the-office-heres-how-to-protect-yourself-and-your-colleagues-from-coronavirus-140436

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Burnett, Honorary Associate Professor, ANU College of Law, Australian National University

A long-awaited draft review of federal environment laws is due this week. There’s a lot riding on it – particularly in light of recent events that suggest the laws are in crisis.

Late last week, the federal Auditor-General Grant Hehir tabled a damning report on federal authorities’ handling of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. Incredibly, he found Australia’s premier environmental law is administered neither efficiently or effectively.

It followed news last month that mining company Rio Tinto detonated the 46,000 year old Juukan rock shelters in the Pilbara. The decision was authorised by a 50 year old Western Australian law –and the federal government failed to invoke emergency powers to stop it.

Also last month we learned state-owned Victorian logging company VicForests unlawfully logged 26 forest coupes, home to the critically endangered Leadbeater’s possum. The acts were contrary both to its own code of practice, and the agreement exempting VicForests from federal laws.

As relentless as Hehir’s criticisms of the department are, let there be no doubt that blame lies squarely at the feet of government. As a society, we must decide what values we want to protect, count the financial cost, then make sure governments deliver on that protection.

Shocking report card

I’ve been involved with this Act since before it began 20 years ago. As an ACT environment official reading a draft in 1998 I was fascinated by its complexity and sweeping potential. As a federal official responsible for administering, then reforming, the Act from 2007-2012, I encountered some of the issues identified by the audit, in milder form.

But I was still shocked by Hehir’s report. It’s so comprehensively scathing that the department barely took a trick.

Overall, the audit found that despite the EPBC Act being subject to multiple reviews, audits and parliamentary inquiries since it began, the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment’s administration of the laws is neither efficient nor effective.

Read more: Mr Morrison, you can cut ‘green tape’ without harming nature – but it’ll take money and gumption

While the government is focused on efficiency, the lack of effectiveness worries me most – especially findings concerning so-called “environmental offsets”. These are measures designed to compensate for unavoidable losses, such as creating a nature reserve near a site to be cleared.

In the early years of the law, offsets were rare. By 2015 they featured in almost 90% of decisions, dropping to about 75% last year. In effect, we now rely on offsets to protect the environment.

The Auditor-General found that the absence of guidance and quality control for offsets has led to “realised risks”.

For example, offsets must be mapped and disclosed publicly, to ensure their integrity. But not only did the department fail to create a public register, in 2019 it stopped loading offset data into its systems altogether. This makes it likely offsets will be forgotten and so either destroyed later, or put up a second time and thus double-counted.

Hehir cites one example where the department accepted offsets for damage to koala habitat in 2015 that did not meet its offset standards. After negotiations with the developer and involvement from the Minister’s office, the department accepted the offsets. Worse, the developer secured a futher non-complying offset for a second development in 2018, arguing for consistency with the previous decision.

Apart from politicisation and failure to protect the environment, this case reveals a significant legal issue. Under administrative law, a decision is invalid if it has regard to an “irrelevant consideration”. An offset in one development in 2015 is surely irrelevant to an offset in another development in 2018.

Read more: Environment laws have failed to tackle the extinction emergency. Here’s the proof

Offsets aside, the Auditor-General higlighted key risks such as high volumes of unapproved land clearing for agriculture, and non-compliance in residential and mining developments. The department had proposed actions to address the issues, but made no progress on them.

And the report found arrangements to monitor whether approval conditions had been met before work started on a project were inadequate, which “leaves the department poorly positioned to prevent adverse environmental outcomes”.

At the end of the day, the federal department doesn’t have the tools to distinguish whether an environmental effect is the result of its own regulations, or other factors such as state programs or extreme weather. Essentially, it doesn’t know if the Act is delivering any environmental benefits at all.

How did this happen?

The EPBC Act itself remains a powerful instrument. Certainly changes are needed, but the more significant problems lie in the processes that should support it: plans and policies, information systems and resourcing.

As I wrote last month, between 2013 and 2019 the federal environment department’s budget was cut by an estimated 39.7%.

And while effective administration of the Act requires good information, this can be hard to come by. For example the much-needed National Plan for Environmental Information, established in 2010, was never properly resourced and later abolished.

Read more: Our nature laws are being overhauled. Here are 7 things we must fix

Officials are constrained here. The audit scope does not extend to the government decisions shaping departmental performance. And the department loyally refrains from complaining that government decisions leave it few options.

So while the audit office and the department might believe extensive government cuts are the underlying problem, neither can say so. I’m not excusing the department’s poor performance, but it must manage with what it’s given. When faced with critical audit findings, it can only pledge to “reprioritise” resources.

A national conversation

There is a small saving grace here. Hehir says the department asked that his report be timed to inform Professor Graeme Samuel’s 10-year review of the EPBC Act. Hehir timed it perfectly – Samuel’s draft report is due by tomorrow. Let’s hope it recommends comprehensive action, and that the final report in October follows through.

Beyond Samuel’s review, we need a national conversation on how to fix laws protecting our environment and heritage. The destruction of the Juukan rock shelters, unlawful logging of Victorian forests and the Auditor-General’s report are incontrovertible evidence the laws are failing.

I don’t believe we can lock nature up. But we must look after the things that enable nature to provide not just life, but quality of life. This includes a stable climate, our Indigenous and non-Indigenous heritage and the resilience that comes from nature’s richness and diversity.

– ref. Let there be no doubt: blame for our failing environment laws lies squarely at the feet of government – https://theconversation.com/let-there-be-no-doubt-blame-for-our-failing-environment-laws-lies-squarely-at-the-feet-of-government-141482

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Norton, Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy, Australian National University

Education minister Dan Tehan will be meeting with university vice-chancellors to devise a new way of funding university research. They will have plenty to talk about.

Australia’s universities have been remarkably successful in building their research output. But there are cracks in the funding foundations of that success, which are being exposed by the revenue shock of COVID-19 and the minister’s reforms announced this month, which would pay for new student places with money currently spent on research.

I estimate the gap in funding that needs to be filled to maintain our current research output at around $4.7 billion.

The funding foundations crumble

The timing of Dan Tehan’s higher education reform package could not have been worse for the university research sector.

The vulnerability created by universities’ reliance on international students has been brutally revealed this year. Travel bans prevent international students arriving in Australia and the COVID-19 recession undermines their capacity to pay tuition fees.

Read more: Australian universities could lose $19 billion in the next 3 years. Our economy will suffer with them

Profits from domestic and international students are the only way universities can finance research on the current scale, with more than A$12 billion spent in 2018.

Based on a Deloitte Access Economics analysis of teaching costs, universities make a surplus of about A$1.3 billion on domestic students. Universities use much of this surplus to fund research.

Tehan’s reform package seeks to align the total teaching funding rates for each Commonwealth supported student – the combined tuition subsidy and student contribution – with the teaching and scholarship costs identified in the Deloitte analysis.

On 2018 enrolment numbers, revenue losses for universities for Commonwealth supported students would total around $750 million with this realignment. With only teaching costs funded, universities will have little or no surplus from their teaching to spend on research.

Read more: The government is making ‘job-ready’ degrees cheaper for students – but cutting funding to the same courses

International student profits are larger than domestic – at around $4 billion. Much of this money is spent on research too, and much of this is at risk. The recession will also reduce how much industry partners and philanthropists can contribute to university research.

Australia’s Chief Scientist estimates 7,700 research jobs are at risk from COVID-19 factors alone. Unless the Commonwealth intervenes with a new research funding policy, its recent announcements will trigger further significant research job losses.

Combined teaching and research academic jobs will decline

Although less research employment will be available, the additional domestic students financed by redirecting research funding will generate teaching work.

More students is a good thing in itself, as the COVID-19 recession will generate more demand for higher education.

But this reallocation between research and teaching will exacerbate a major structural problem in the academic labour market. Although most academics want teaching and research, or research-only roles, over the last 30 years Commonwealth teaching and research funding has separated.

After the latest Tehan reforms, funding for the two activities will be based on entirely different criteria and put on very different growth trajectories.

An academic employment model that assumes the same people teach and research was kept alive by funding surpluses on domestic, and especially international, students. With both these surpluses being hit hard, the funding logic is that a trend towards more specialised academic staff will have to accelerate.

We can expect academic morale to fall and industrial action to rise as university workforces resist this change.

Read more: More than 10,000 job losses, billions in lost revenue: coronavirus will hit Australia’s research capacity harder than the GFC

The funding squeeze will also undermine the current system of Commonwealth research funding. This funding is allocated in two main ways. In part, it comes from competitive project grant funding, largely from the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council.

Academic prestige is attached to winning these grants, but the money allocated does not cover the project’s costs. Typically, universities pay the salaries of the lead researchers and general costs, such as laboratories and libraries.

Universities are partly compensated for those expenses through research block grants, which are awarded based on previous academic performance, including in winning competitive grants. But because block grants do not cover all competitive project grant costs, the system has relied on discretionary revenue, much of it from students, to work. It will need a major rethink if teaching becomes much less profitable.

The stakes are high

University spending on research (which was over $12 billion in 2018), has nearly tripled since 2000 in real terms.

Direct government spending on research increased this century, but not by nearly enough to finance this huge expansion in outlays. In 2018, the Commonwealth government’s main research funding programs contributed A$3.7 billion.

An additional $600 million came from other Commonwealth sources such as government department contracts for specific pieces of research.

In addition to this Commonwealth money, universities received another $1.9 billion in earmarked research funding from state, territory and other (national) governments, donations, and industry.

These research-specific sources still leave billions of dollars in research spending without a clear source of finance. Universities have investment earnings, profits on commercial operations and other revenue sources they can invest in research.

But these cannot possibly cover the estimated $4.7 billion gap between research revenue and spending.

With lower profits on teaching, this gap cannot be filled. Research spending will have to be reduced by billions of dollars.

We are at a turning point in Australian higher education. The research gains of the last fifteen years are at risk of being reversed. The minister’s meeting with vice-chancellors has very high stakes.

– ref. Coronavirus and university reforms put at risk Australia’s research gains of the last 15 years – https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-and-university-reforms-put-at-risk-australias-research-gains-of-the-last-15-years-141452

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phillip O’Neill, Director, Centre for Western Sydney, Western Sydney University

This is the first of three articles based on newly released research on the impacts of a lack of local jobs on the rapidly growing Western Sydney region.

Western Sydney has a jobs problem. No other big regional economy in Australia fails in providing jobs for its residents more than this one. At the last census the Western Sydney jobs deficit – local jobs minus local workers – was 222,000.

If the region’s average rate of jobs growth for this century continues, this deficit will grow to 325,000 by 2036, an increase of over 30%. In our newly released reports on Western Sydney, we estimate an outflow from the region of 562,000 commuters as a consequence. Over 300,000 people already leave the region each day for work.

Read more: If the people can’t get to their jobs, bring the jobs to the people

Young professionals will have a growing presence in this long-distance, grinding, daily flow of workers. It’s an urban planning nightmare.

Fifty years ago, Western Sydney was one of Australia’s major industrial regions. In 1971, a belt of four local government areas – stretching from Bankstown, through Fairfield and Parramatta to Blacktown – was home to 104,000 manufacturing workers, more than one-third of the local workforce. By 2016 the number of these workers had fallen by two-thirds to only 36,000, or 7.8% of local resident workers.

Yet, unlike many manufacturing regions across the developed world – where de-industrialisation has left deep pools of displaced workers – the region hasn’t ended up a rust belt. Western Sydney’s workforce has undergone a remarkable intergenerational reconstruction.

Education fuels rise of professional class

University education, in particular, is driving this. In 1971, only 3,900 degree-holders lived in the old industrial belt described above. By 2016, their number had surged to 198,000.

In the region as a whole, Western Sydney in 2016 was home to 353,000 adults with bachelor or higher degree qualifications. This was 20.7% of all people in the region aged 15 years plus, up from 10.7% in 2001. Clearly a transformative change in the region’s resident workers has been under way.

At the last census, 20% of Western Sydney’s employed residents were professionals, amounting to 203,000 workers. That’s more than any other occupational group in the region.

We can also see the transformation of the Western Sydney workforce through its take-up of jobs in what has become known as “knowledge-based business services”. This term covers three industry groups: professional, scientific and technical services; financial and insurance services; and information, media and telecommunications.

Here the emergence of the Western Sydney workforce as the real deal is undeniable. Our calculation is that, for 2018, Western Sydney was home to more knowledge-based business services workers (162,000) than Brisbane (159,000) – east-coast Australia’s wonder child – and significantly more than either Perth or Adelaide.

Such is the pace of upskilling in Western Sydney, the growth from 2013-2018 of residents holding jobs in knowledge-based business services outpaced the growth of these job holders in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth combined.

Indeed, our report finds an emerging divide in Australia’s metropolitan economies. Greater Sydney, including Western Sydney, and Greater Melbourne are hurtling ahead as advanced knowledge economies. The other metropolitan regions are lagging.

But 60% don’t work locally

A key question, then, is whether there are enough jobs in Western Sydney for this growing number of professional and knowledge workers? The answer, clearly, is no.

At the 2016 census only 40.4% of Western Sydney’s knowledge-based business services workers could find jobs in their home region. The remaining 59.6% are forced to commute to destinations beyond the region to ply their 21st-century trades.

Read more: Australian city workers’ average commute has blown out to 66 minutes a day. How does yours compare?

Western Sydney’s dependence on a population-growth economy has limited the growth of jobs for knowledge workers. The region’s strong jobs growth in recent years has come overwhelmingly from two sources.

Construction, especially residential construction, has generated a lot of jobs.

The other source of jobs is the industry sectors that have grown in direct proportion to population growth. These include health care and social assistance, education and training, retailing, and accommodation and food services. The region’s population growth has fuelled growth in these population-serving sectors.

Vulnerable in the downturn

Obviously, this jobs growth has been welcome and is important for the region’s day-to-day economy. The problem is that the Western Sydney economy has failed to produce significant job growth in other sectors. This has left the population-driven sectors, including construction, as the main source of growth.

In the construction sector, however, bust follows every boom. The sector entered a significant downturn in 2019.

In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic and recession are likely to rein in Western Sydney’s record population growth rates. This will hit jobs in the population-serving sectors, including further job losses in construction.

So workforce transformation in Western Sydney is running ahead of the economic transformation needed to ensure a supply of suitable jobs in the region.

Western Sydney has grown to become something more than a suburban appendage to the Sydney metropolitan area. Yet its 1 million workers lack the diverse jobs base reasonably expected of a large advanced urban economy.

Little wonder Western Sydney’s reputation as a planning nightmare is growing.

The Centre for Western Sydney has released three reports on Western Sydney’s growing jobs deficit. You can read the reports here.

– ref. Jobs deficit drives army of daily commuters out of Western Sydney – https://theconversation.com/jobs-deficit-drives-army-of-daily-commuters-out-of-western-sydney-139384

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Coates, Program Director, Household Finances, Grattan Institute

After managing the first stage of the COVID-19 crisis so effectively, the government now faces a bigger challenge: getting us back to work.

The official employment figures indicate the scale of what’s needed. In the past two months number of Australians with a job has fallen by 835,000. Millions more are in jobs kept on life support by JobKeeper.

Employed Australians, total

The Reserve Bank’s latest public forecast has the unemployment rate peaking at 10% and then falling to 6.5% (baseline scenario) or 5% (optimistic scenario) by mid-2022.

In Grattan Institute’s latest report, The Recovery Book, released this morning, we argue this isn’t ambitious enough.

The case for ambition

The bank and the government ought to aim for something better, closer to 4.5%.

This is the rate it has previously identified as “full employment”, the lowest Australia can sustainably achieve without stoking inflation.

It would mean bringing unemployment down 1.5 percentage points further than it might otherwise fall over the next two years – to somewhere between 4% and 5%.

Projected unemployment with and without extra fiscal stimulus

The bank has passed the baton

With the bank’s cash rate already cut to 0.25%, conventional monetary policy (cutting the cash rate) has run out of steam.

Unconventional policy will help.

The Reserve Bank is advancing cheap money to private banks for onlending to businesses, buying government bonds to keep the three year bond rate near 0.25%, and has pledged to keep the cash rate at 0.25% for the next three years.

The bank can and should do more, but the rest will have to be done by government spending and tax measures, so-called fiscal policy, of the kind that has already been proved effective in suppressing unemployment.

We’ll need $70 to $90 billion

We estimate that reducing unemployment by 1.5 percentage points by mid-2022 would require additional stimulus of A$70 billion to A$90 billion over the next two years, equivalent to between 3% and 4% of GDP.

This is on top of the more than $160 billion committed to JobKeeper and other coronavirus supports to date.

Here’s how we make the calculation.

First, to reduce unemployment by that much we estimate that real gross domestic product needs to grow by about 4 percentage points more than forecast over the next two years.

The estimate is based on previous work by economist Jeff Borland. Jeff kindly updated his calculation with us for this article, finding that each one percentage point increase in annual GDP growth reduces the unemployment rate by around 0.38 percentage points.

Read more: Why even the best case for jobs isn’t good. We’ll need more JobKeeper

Second, we assume each dollar of stimulus in a particular year increases GDP in that year by between 80 cents and one dollar (some of the rest is saved and some leaks overseas).

This estimate of “fiscal multiplier” is slightly higher than that used by treasury during the global financial crisis but is in line with recent academic work finding that stimulus measures are more effective when monetary policy is out of ammunition.

If the fiscal multiplier isn’t as high – or if the recovery is more sluggish than expected, more stimulus might be needed.

There’s little risk of overkill…

A few weeks ago Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe raised the possibility that the crisis had pushed the minimum sustainable rate of unemployment higher, from 4.5% to nearer 5%, on the face of it making a case for less ambition.

His concern was “scarring” – the risk that some of the people who lose their jobs will become so damaged they become unsuitable for future employment, meaning that employers looking for staff would rather bid up the wages of existing workers than employ them, fuelling inflation.

But, if anything, his concern is a powerful argument for spending more, and more quickly, in order to avoid scarring. There’s good evidence sustained high unemployment hurts the economy in the long term.

Read more: The charts that show coronavirus pushing up to a quarter of the workforce out of work

And if the extra spending did fuel inflation, it mightn’t be such a bad thing.

Inflation has been below the bank’s target for years. If it gets above it and becomes a problem, the bank can dampen it by raising rates.

…and little time to lose

The extra stimulus will need to be announced soon: on or well before the federal budget scheduled for October. Fiscal measures take time to have their biggest effect.

We are facing a “fiscal cliff” when measures including JobKeeper and the enhanced JobSeeker payment are withdrawn at the end of September. To escape it, they will need to be wound down more gradually, as the international Monetary Fund warned last week.

There are plenty of ways to maintain support including further cash payments to households, along the lines of those in the global financial crisis showed were effective in boosting spending, as well as spending on things such as social housing, roads and school maintenance.

Fear of debt needn’t hold us back

Extra stimulus will mean extra government debt. But the Australian government can now borrow for 10 years at a fixed interest rate below 1%. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a negative real interest rate, making debt more affordable than it has been in living memory.

There will naturally be concerns that further debt will place a burden on younger generations. But they are the generations that will be lumbered with the costs of worse than necessary unemployment, some of it very long term unemployment, unless we act.

In the worst case, they’ll ask why we didn’t do more.

Read more: No big bounce: 2020-21 economic survey points to a weak recovery getting weaker, amid declining living standards

– ref. Cutting unemployment will require an extra $70 to $90 billion in stimulus. Here’s why – https://theconversation.com/cutting-unemployment-will-require-an-extra-70-to-90-billion-in-stimulus-heres-why-141376

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Plimmer, Senior lecturer in Human Resource Management, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Having had to rapidly adjust to working from home due to COVID-19, many people are now having to readjust to life back in the office. Many will have enjoyed aspects of what is sometimes called “distributed work”, but some may be dreading the return.

So is there a middle ground? Could hybrid work arrangements, known for boosting well-being and productivity, be a more common feature of workplaces in the future?

We say yes. Organisations need to recognise the valuable habits and skills employees have developed to work effectively from home during the lockdown. But they will need good strategies for easing the transition back into the physical workplace.

In doing so, they should aim for the best of both worlds — the flexibility of distributed work and the known benefits of the collaborative workplace.

Read more: The death of the open-plan office? Not quite, but a revolution is in the air

Good riddance to hot-desking

A good start would be a proper re-evaluation the two worst aspects of office life: crowded open-plan designs and so-called “hot-desking”.

Cramped shared offices and free-for-all hot-desking are both known for their negative impacts on quality of workplace life. The results are often interpersonal conflict, reduced productivity and higher rates of sickness.

Some organisations have already done away with hot-desking in an effort to improve physical and mental well-being. Acknowledging the evidence that tightly packed, cost-saving, open-plan office arrangements have not delivered what was promised should be another priority.

Hopefully, the impact of COVID-19 on business as usual will spell the end of these often poorly thought through management fads.

Working from home can be isolating

At the same time, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The office still has its advantages, and there is research showing that working from home has clear disadvantages for employees and organisations when it is offered as a permanent arrangement.

One study involved a large (anonymous) US Fortune 100 technology firm. It began as a traditional survey of what it was like for individuals to work from home, but evolved into a study of the effect of what happened to the company’s community when working from home was normalised.

Read more: The research on hot-desking and activity-based work isn’t so positive

The option of unrestricted distributed work meant employees simply stopped coming to work at the office. Many reported the well-known benefits of working from home, such as work-life balance and productivity.

They also reported a kind of “contagion effect”. As colleagues began to stay at home a tipping point arrived where fewer and fewer people opted to work in the office.

But this actually increased a sense of isolation among employees. It also meant the loss of opportunities to collaborate through informal or unplanned meetings. The chance to solve problems or be given challenging assignments were lost as well.

Those who participated in the study said social contact and productively interacting with colleagues was the main reason they wanted to come to work. Without it there was no real point. The research raises the possibility of a net loss in well-being if everyone were to work remotely.

Well-being and job satisfaction depend on a range of factors, including having clear goals, social contact and the structure of the traditional working day. Of course, jobs can also be toxic if there is too much structure. But fully distributed work may not provide the support, identity and community that offices provide for some.

Nor is technology always adequate when it comes to the subtle value of face-to-face catch ups. Five minute water-cooler talks and post-meeting debriefs still matter for both productivity, social contact and cohesion.

Management has to adapt too

None of which is to suggest there are not identifiable advantages of distributed work and the flexible workplace. As many of us discovered during the lockdown, just avoiding the daily commute helped with lowering stress and better work-life balance. Choosing when we worked was attractive too.

But this requires better management skills. Distributed workers require different (often better) engagement strategies, including the ability to build mutual trust.

Read more: Working from home: what are your employer’s responsibilities, and what are yours?

Research into how best to manage the health and safety of distributed workers has found that some leaders simply can’t adapt to the digital environment. Trust, consideration and communicating a clear vision or sense of purpose matter more for distributed workers than for those in the traditional office.

Recognition, reward, development and advancement in a distributed working environment will all need special attention. So too will ways to deal with people not pulling their weight, maybe because of too much time on social media.

Even the simple benefits of spontaneous humour in meetings or informal team interactions are easily lost with “e-leadership”, so new ways of building and maintaining morale are vital.

This is not an either/or question. Rather, the challenge is to strike a new balance — how to retain the benefits of distributed work while maintaining the sense of community that comes from personal interaction in the office.

– ref. In praise of the office: let’s learn from COVID-19 and make the traditional workplace better – https://theconversation.com/in-praise-of-the-office-lets-learn-from-covid-19-and-make-the-traditional-workplace-better-138516

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

The picture of economic recovery painted by Prime Minister Scott Morrison is looking like a mirage. The 22 leading economists polled by The Conversation from 16 universities in seven states on average expect historically weak economic growth in all but one of the next five years, with growth dwindling over time.

In June, Morrison promised to lift economic growth by “more than one percentage point above trend” through to 2025.

Growth one percentage point above trend would average almost 4% per year.

Instead, The Conversation’s economic panel is forecasting annual growth averaging 2.4% over the next four years, much less than the long-term trend, tailing off over time.

The results imply living standards 5% lower than the prime minister expects by 2025.

The panel expects unemployment to peak at around 10% and to still be above 7% by the end of 2021.

It expects wages to barely climb at all, by just 0.9% in 2020, the lowest increase on record and even less than the rate of inflation, which it expects to be only 1.2%. It expects the share market to sink further in the rest of this year before climbing a touch in 2021.

Non-mining business investment, on which much of Australia’s recovery depends, should bounce back only 3.3% in 2021 after slipping 9.5% in 2020.

Read more: The Reserve Bank thinks the recovery will look V-shaped. There are reasons to doubt it

The Conversation’s panel comprises macroeconomists, economic modellers, former Treasury, IMF, OECD, Reserve Bank and financial market economists, and a former member of the Reserve Bank board.

Several admitted to much greater uncertainty than usual. One pulled out, saying “it’s really a mug’s game right now”.

One, who did take part, despaired that forecasting had been reduced to “guessing, in the context of an unprecedented event”.

Several cautioned that climate change, along with the prospect of new waves of coronavirus, makes five-year forecasts especially difficult.

Economic growth

All of the panel expect incomes and production to shrink in the June quarter (the one finishing now) after shrinking in the March quarter, meaning we will be in a recession (if there was any doubt).

Some are expecting a small growth bounce in the September quarter, although they warn that if JobKeeper and the coronavirus JobSeeker Supplement end as planned when September finishes, economic activity will turn down again in the December quarter, creating what panellist (and former Labor politician) Craig Emerson describes as a “W-shaped economic trajectory”.

Panellist Julie Toth cautions there is “no magic V ahead”. Without government action on adaptation to climate change, productivity, industrial relations, inequality and other matters, the best that can be hoped for is a partial recovery of some of the growth that has been lost.

In in 2021 the panel expects the economy to recover only half of what it lost in 2020. After peaking at 2.9% in 2023, economic growth will slip back to less than it was before the crisis.

The panel expects China’s economy to shrink 2.3% this year before bouncing back 4% in 2021. It expects the US economy to shrink 5.6% before recovering only 2.2%.

Steve Keen suggests that the underlying US performance will be even worse. It will have attained its measured performance by being prepared to live with adverse health consequences.

Tony Makin notes that China’s near-term economic growth is likely to be hampered by a move towards deglobalisation in countries wanting to make their supply of goods and health equipment less reliant on China.

Unemployment

The forecasts for the peak in the unemployment rate range from the present 7.1% to 12%, with most of the panel expecting the peak before the end of the year.

Julie Toth points out that even with no further job losses, “which seems unlikely”, measured unemployment will continue to rise for some time as people who have stopped looking for work start looking again and return to being counted as unemployed.

Saul Eslake says this participation rate makes forecasting the unemployment rate a “crapshoot”. The rate will depend largely on how many people choose to define themselves as looking for or non longer looking for work.

Living standards

The panel expects household incomes and spending to fall by about 4% over the course of the year.

The best measure of living standards, real net national disposable income per capita, should fall 4.5%.

Real wages, a key component of living standards, are expected to fall.

Never in the 23-year history of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ wage price index has annual wage growth been much below 2%. Until now the lowest annual growth rate has been 1.9%.

The panel is forecasting growth of just 0.9% throughout 2020, a mere half of the record low to date. The forecast calls into question the timing of the current legislated increases in compulsory superannuation contributions of 0.5% of salary per year for each of the next five years, scheduled to start next year and set to eat into wage growth.

Headline price inflation should be only 1.2%, and underlying (smoothed) inflation only 1%, but both would be more than wage growth, shrinking the buying power of wages.

Share market

The spectacular recovery in the Australian share market (up 29% since late March after sliding 36% since late February) is not expected to continue this year.

The panel expects the ASX 200 to end the year down 8% before climbing 2.3% in 2021.

But the forecasts for 2021 fan out over a wide range, from a fall of 10% to a rise of 10%.

Housing

Sydney and Melbourne house prices are expected to reverse their gains of 5% and 3% in the first half of the year to close about where they started (Sydney) and down 1.3% (Melbourne).

New home building is expected to plunge a further 10% in 2020 after sliding 10% in 2019.

On balance it is not expected to improve at all in 2021, although again the range of forecasts is wide, from a recovery of 10% (Renée Fry-McKibbin) to a further decline of 10% (Stephen Hail).

Business

Mining investment is expected to continue to recover in 2020 and 2021 after huge falls between 2014 and 2019 brought about by the collapse of the infrastructure boom and the completion of several large liquefied natural gas projects.

Non-mining business investment is expected to fall 9.5% throughout 2020 before inching back 3.3% in 2021.

The Australian dollar is forecast to end the year near its present 69 US cents.

After initially diving to a low of 59 US cents as the coronavirus crisis unfolded, it and other currencies climbed against the US dollar from late March as the US response to the crisis faltered.

The price of iron ore has climbed from late March to a high of US$103 per tonne, well above the US$55 assumed in last year’s budget papers.

The panel is expecting most of those gains to be kept, forecasting US$97 by the end of the year, enough to provide one of the few welcome pieces of news for framers of the October budget.

Again, the range of forecasts is wide, from US$64 a tonne (Stephen Anthony) to US$110 (Margaret McKenzie).

Government finances

After ending 2018-19 almost in balance, the budget deficit is expected to blow out to between A$130 billion and A$150 billion in 2019-20, weighed down by about the same amount of stimulus payments.

The forecasts for 2020-21 and 2021-22 are centred around $150 billion and $100 billion respectively.

It’s a hard outcome to pick, in part because it depends on both the needs of the economy and government decisions about how to respond to them. In a report issued on Monday the Grattan Institute called for the government to spend an extra $70 billion over two years.

Forecasts for the 2021-22 budget outcome range from a deficit of $400 billion (Rod Tyers) to a deficit of just $10 billion (Renée Fry-McKibbin).

It’ll be easy to finance. The panel is forecasting a ten-year borrowing cost (bond rate) of just 1.4% per year, and it doesn’t expect it to climb that high until late 2021.

At the moment it’s 0.9%.

The Reserve Bank has committed itself to buy as many bonds as are needed to keep it low. The three major rating agencies have reaffirmed Australia’s AAA credit rating.

A survey of firsts

The 2020-21 survey is the first in 30 years not to ask for forecasts of the Reserve Bank cash rate, and the first since it has been published by The Conversation not to ask for the probability of a recession.

The Reserve Bank’s decision to push the cash rate as low as it conceivably could and leave it there for three years removed the need for the first. Australia’s descent into recession removed the need for the second.

The forecaster who proved to be the most farsighted on the recession was Steve Keen, who assigned a 75% probability to a recession in January at a time when Australia was dealing with bushfires and preparing to deal with coronavirus.

Other forecasters to assign a high probability to a recession (50%) were Julie Toth, Steven Hail, Warren Hogan and Richard Holden.

The Conversation 2020-21 Forecasting Panel

Click on economist to see full profile.

– ref. No big bounce: 2020-21 economic survey points to a weak recovery getting weaker, amid declining living standards – https://theconversation.com/no-big-bounce-2020-21-economic-survey-points-to-a-weak-recovery-getting-weaker-amid-declining-living-standards-141184

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Volodymyr Bilotkach, Associate Professor, Singapore Institute of Technology

Qantas’ announcement this week of severe job cuts comes as little surprise. The COVID-19 pandemic and closed borders have brought the global aviation industry to its knees.

According to global travel data provider OAG (formerly the Official Airline Guide), this week airlines worldwide scheduled about 63% fewer flights to the week a year ago. In Australia, there were about 78% fewer flights.

Qantas’ decision to shed about 6,000 of its 29,000 workers (a further 15,000 have been stood down without pay) is part of its plan to reduce costs by A$15 billion over three years of anticipated “lower activity”.

It would be years before international flying returned to what it was, said Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce:

We have to position ourselves for several years where revenue will be much lower, and that means becoming a smaller airline in the short term.

About 100 of the airline’s 130 jets will be grounded for at least a year – some probably longer.

Qantas is far from alone. Airlines all around the world are furloughing or laying off workers, along with retiring aircraft ahead of schedule, grounding large planes such as A-380s and postponing new aircraft orders.

The latest US Department of Transportation data, for example, shows the number of US airline jobs fell 5% in April (representing more than 36,000 lost jobs) compared to March. May figures (yet to be published) will definitely be worse. There’s talk of a “tsunami” of airline job losses in Europe.

Read more: Once the pandemic is over, we will return to a very different airline industry

Past crises

The aviation industry has not faced a crisis like this since the world’s first scheduled passenger airline service took off in 1914.

Since 2000, however, it has suffered lesser blows.

The first was the grounding of fleets following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coupled with recession in the US and Europe. Then came the SARS outbreak in China from 2002 to 2004. Then the recession caused by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

Read more: Grounded aircraft could make weather forecasts less reliable

Airlines shed jobs in all these crises. In the US, the number of airline jobs only returned to pre-2008 levels in 2016; and to pre-2001 levels in 2019.

But the slowness of that jobs recovery is mostly attributable to airlines deploying new technology, such as automated check-in and baggage handling.

This may be less of an issue in the next decade, with there being evidence most airlines have exhausted most of their capacity to replace people with machines. For example, employment in the US airline industry the five years to 2020 increased at a faster rate than the demand for air travel.

Recovery within five years

Nonetheless the general consensus among industry experts is that recovery this time around will not be quick. Qantas, for example, only expects to operating 75% of its pre-pandemic international flights by 2023.

Read more: Plane cabins are havens for germs. Here’s how they can clean up their act

My own view is a bit more optimistic. I expect recovery to 2019 levels by the end of 2022, assuming the virus “behaves itself”.

However, most experts believe the industry will return to its pre-pandemic growth path within about five years.

In 2019 global passenger numbers grew by 4.1% (to more than 4.5 billion). At that rate, passenger numbers would double in 18 years. The impact of COVID-19 means it may now take to 25 years to get to 9 billion passengers. But the aviation sector’s long-term prospects remain robust.

So if your dream is to work in the aviation sector, don’t give up.

I expect the jobs recovery in the aviation business to more closely match the recovery in demand for air travel than the experience of the previous crises mentioned, when jobs growth lagged well behind passenger demand.

– ref. Qantas cutbacks signal hard years before airlines recover – https://theconversation.com/qantas-cutbacks-signal-hard-years-before-airlines-recover-141522

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick Mullins, Adjunct assistant professor, Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra

One grey morning in October 1970, in a crowded, tizzy-pink courtroom on the corner of Melbourne’s Russell and La Trobe Streets, crown prosecutor Leonard Flanagan began denouncing a novel in terms that were strident and ringing.

“When taken as a whole, it is lewd,” he declared. “As to a large part of it, it is absolutely disgusting both in the sexual and other sense; and the content of the book as a whole offends against the ordinary standards of the average person in the community today – the ordinary, average person’s standard of decency.”

The object of Flanagan’s ire that day was the Penguin Books Australia edition of Portnoy’s Complaint. Frank, funny, and profane, Philip Roth’s novel — about a young man torn between the duties of his Jewish heritage and the autonomy of his sexual desires — had been a sensation the world over when it was published in February 1969.

Greeted with sweeping critical acclaim, it was advertised as “the funniest novel ever written about sex” and called “the autobiography of America” in the Village Voice. In the United States, it sold more than 400,000 copies in hardcover in a single year — more, even, than Mario Puzo’s The Godfather — and in the United Kingdom it was published to equal fervour and acclaim.

But in Australia, Portnoy’s Complaint had been banned.

Read more: Philip Roth was the best post-war American writer, no ifs or buts

Banned books

Politicians, bureaucrats, police, and judges had for years worked to keep Australia free of the moral contamination of impure literature. Under a system of censorship that pre-dated federation, works that might damage the morals of the Australian public were banned, seized, and burned. Bookstores were raided. Publishers were policed and fined. Writers had been charged, fined and even jailed.

Seminal novels and political tracts from overseas had been kept out of the country. Where objectionable works emerged from Australian writers, they were rooted out like weeds. Under the censorship system, Boccacio’s Decameron had been banned. Nabokov’s Lolita had been banned. Joyce’s Ulysses had been banned. Even James Bond had been banned.

There had been opposition to this censorship for years, though it had become especially notable in the past decade. Criticism of the bans on J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Norman Lindsay’s Redheap had prompted an almost complete revision of the banned list in 1958.

The repeated prosecutions of the Oz magazine team in 1963 and 1964 had attracted enormous attention and controversy.

Outcry over the bans on Mary McCarthy’s The Group and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been loud and pronounced, and three intrepid Sydney activists had exposed the federal government to ridicule when they published a domestic edition of The Trial of Lady Chatterley, an edited transcript of the failed court proceedings against Penguin Books UK for the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Britain in 1960.

Read more: Friday essay: the Melbourne bookshop that ignited Australian modernism

Penguin goes to battle

Penguin Books Australia had been prompted to join the fight against censorship by the three idealistic and ambitious men at its helm: managing director John Michie, finance director Peter Froelich, and editor John Hooker.

In five years, the three men had overhauled the publisher, improving its distribution machinery and logistics and reinvigorating its publishing list. They believed Penguin could shape Australian life and culture by publishing interesting and vibrant books by Australian authors.

They wanted Penguin’s books to engage with the political and cultural shifts that the country was undergoing, to expose old canards, question the orthodox, and pose alternatives.

Censorship was no small topic in all this. Those at Penguin saw censorship as an inhibition on these ambitions. “We’d had issues with it before, in minor ways,” Peter Froelich recalled, “and we’d have drinks we’d say, ‘It’s wrong! How can we fix it? What can we do? How do we bring it to people’s attention, so that it can be changed?’”

The answer emerged when they heard of the ban placed on Portnoy’s Complaint. Justifiably famous, a bestseller the world over, of well-discussed literary merit, it stood out immediately as a work with which to challenge the censorship system, just as its British parent company had a decade earlier.

Why not obtain the rights to an Australian edition, print it in secret, and publish it in one fell swoop? As Hooker — who had the idea — put it to Michie, “Jack, we ought to really publish Portnoy’s Complaint and give them one in the eye”.

The risks were considerable. There was sure to be a backlash from police and politicians. Criminal charges against Penguin and its three leaders were almost certain. Financial losses thanks to seized stock and fines would be considerable. The legal fees incurred in fighting charges would be enormous. Booksellers who stocked the book would also be put on trial. But Penguin was determined.

John Michie was resolute. “John offered to smash the whole thing down,” Hooker said, later. When he was told what was about to happen, federal minister for customs Don Chipp swore that Michie would pay: “I’ll see you in jail for this.” But Michie was not to be dissuaded.

A stampede

In July 1970, Penguin arranged to have three copies of Portnoy smuggled into Australia. In considerable secrecy, they used them to print 75,000 copies in Sydney and shipped them to wholesalers and bookstores around the country. It was an operation carried out with a precision that Hooker later likened to the German invasion of Poland.

The book was unveiled on August 31 1970. Michie held a press conference in his Mont Albert home, saying Portnoy’s Complaint was a masterpiece and should be available to read in Australia. Neither he nor Penguin were afraid of the prosecutions: “We are prepared to take the matter to the High Court.”

The next morning, as the trucks bearing copies began to arrive, bookstores everywhere were rushed. At one Melbourne bookstore, the assistant manager was knocked down and trampled by a crowd eager to buy the book and support Penguin. “It was a stampede,” he said later. A bookstore manager in Sydney was amazed when the 500 copies his store took sold out in two-and-a-half hours.

All too soon, it was sold out. And with politicians making loud promises of retribution, the police descended.

Bookstores were raided. Unsold copies were seized. Court summons were delivered to Penguin, to Michie, and to booksellers the whole country over. A long list of court trials over the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint and its sale were in the offing.

A stellar line-up

So the trial that opened on the grey morning of October 19 1970, in the Melbourne Magistrates Court, was only the first in what promised to be a long battle.

Neither Michie nor his colleagues were daunted. They had prepared a defence based around literary merit and the good that might come from reading the book. They had retained expert lawyers and marshalled the cream of Australia’s literary and academic elite to come to their aid.

Patrick White would appear as a witness for the defence. So too would academic John McLaren, The Age newspaper editor Graham Perkin, the critic A.A. Phillips, the historian Manning Clark, the poet Vincent Buckley, and many more. They were unconcerned by Flanagan’s furious denunciations, by his shudders of disgust, and by his caustic indictments of Penguin and its leaders.

They were confident in their cause. As one telegram to Michie said:

ALL BEST WISHES FOR A RESOUNDING VICTORY FOR LITERATURE AND LIBERTY.

This is an edited extract from Trials of Portnoy by Patrick Mullins, published by Scribe.

– ref. Trials of Portnoy: when Penguin fought for literature and liberty – https://theconversation.com/trials-of-portnoy-when-penguin-fought-for-literature-and-liberty-141525

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kcasey McLoughlin, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Newcastle

As debate rages about sexual harassment in the legal profession, a key outstanding question is reforming the way judges are appointed.

Underscoring the response to these allegations has been the acknowledgement the legal system – created by and for men – has excluded women through its formal and informal structures.

Read more: Dyson Heydon finding may spark a #MeToo moment for the legal profession

One important and long overdue change is boosting the diversity of the judges, who sit at the top of the profession.

‘Pale, stale and male’

To borrow a phrase used by former chief justice of Western Australia, Wayne Martin, Australia’s judiciary is overwhelmingly “pale, stale and male”.

Although it stands to reason the judiciary will not necessarily be representative in terms of age (given the importance of experience), no such justification can made in regard to other key characteristics.

Women’s historic formal exclusion from the profession has been well documented.

Women have since entered the law in significant numbers, and it was assumed they would then begin to occupy positions of power and authority within the profession.

This has not been borne out by the statistics.

Women today comprise 62% of Australian law graduates, 52% of NSW solicitors, and 23% of NSW barristers. The number of barristers is significant, as judges tend to be chosen from leaders at the bar.

Indeed, only 36% of Commonwealth judges are women. The proportion of women judges and magistrates is between 31 and 37% across at the state level, with the ACT (54%), Victoria (42%) and Tasmania (24%) as outliers.

How are judges appointed?

Australia’s judges are appointed by state and federal governments. Particularly at the federal level, this is an opaque system that lacks transparency and genuine political accountability.

When it comes to High Court appointments, there is no formal application process, no formal system for the checking of references, and no requirement that candidates undertake interviews.

In practice, the appointment is made by the government of the day, with the attorney-general presenting a nominee to Cabinet, which then recommends the appointment to the governor-general.

The government is therefore largely unrestrained in making their appointments beyond a requirement they consult with state attorneys-general and the appointee meets the minimum qualifications of admission as a legal practitioner.

Certainly, there is nothing that legally compels those making judicial appointments to consider diversity.

Reluctance to implement formal reforms

Pressure to reform judicial appointment practices is not new.

There have been previous calls to improve not just diversity but also transparency and accountability.

Importantly, these criticisms have very rarely been personal (about the suitability of individual appointees). But about the potential for political or other concerns to influence the process.

Read more: 72% of Australians have been sexually harassed. The system we have to fix this problem is set up to fail

In fact, some of these debates came to the fore in 2003, with the Howard government’s appointment of Dyson Heydon to the High Court.

The appointment raised concerns about what his appointment meant for the diversity of the bench, because he was replacing the first and, at that time, only woman member of the High Court, Mary Gaudron.

The lack of publicly available selection criteria speaks to the breadth of this discretion.

The ‘merit’ myth

Another issue here is the insistence these appointments are made solely on the basis of “merit” – as though this imprecise concept, which has the potential to reproduce informal networks of power and privilege, is an adequate substitute for clearly articulated selection criteria.

As Australian National University professor Kim Rubenstein noted in response to Heydon’s appointment:

when male politicians gaze at the available gene pool of potential High Court appointees, they only see reflections of themselves, and what they understand as depictions of merit.

Of course, what counts as meritorious is the eye of the beholder. It is notable that former prime minister, John Howard stands by his appointed of Heydon, observing this week he was an “excellent judge of the High Court of Australia”.

Previous reforms have not been enough, or stuck

In 2007, then attorney-general Robert McClelland instituted a number of reforms to the Federal Court judicial appointment process, during the early days of the Rudd government.

These included the introduction of publicly available selection criteria for appointments and the requirement that vacancies be advertised, as well as the use of advisory panels to make recommendations.

But these reforms (which did not extend to the High Court in any case) were abandoned in 2013, when the Coalition came to power.

Why the life experience of judges matters

Inevitably, questions have been raised about how Chief Justice Susan Kiefel’s gender shaped her response and leadership regarding the High Court inquiry into sexual harassment.

Would a male chief justice have responded in the same way?

Read more: Australia urgently needs an independent body to hold powerful judges to account

Of course, we may never know the answer to this, but her apology to the young women in question and her words “their accounts … have been believed” are powerful and important and will form an important part of her legacy.

This week, former Family Court chief justice Diana Bryant told the ABC “this kind of behaviour isn’t new” and said she had been sexually harassed by a former High Court judge as a young lawyer.

During that interview, she also described the changes she made once she had the power to do so on the Family Court – making clear that associates are not the personal employees of the judges they work with.

What next?

Addressing the lack of accountability and transparency in making these appointments is an obvious area of reform. We need to make selection criteria public and clear to create the political accountability that is currently lacking.

But more must also be done to explicitly value diversity in judicial appointments.

Some relatively straightforward changes could include, involving women’s lawyer groups in judicial appointments, as well as quotas.

In the context of High Court appointments, Rubenstein has argued that any given point in time, the High Court should be comprised of at least 40% of either gender.

Of course, diversity is not a synonym for “women”, although their exclusion is especially visible. Moving away from “state, male and pale” has the important potential to address the law’s homogeneity on other fronts, including race.

Any changes must be formalised

Importantly, any reforms which reflect this commitment to judicial diversity across must be formalised.

Formalising them would safeguard any gains so that they are not at the whim of the politics of the day.

Who our are judges are matters. It always has.

This moment of reckoning should be a catalyst for change in finally demanding long overdue reforms to the process by which these important appointments are made.

– ref. No selection criteria, no transparency. Australia must reform the way it appoints judges – https://theconversation.com/no-selection-criteria-no-transparency-australia-must-reform-the-way-it-appoints-judges-141446