Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anne Pender, Kidman Chair in Australian Studies and Director, JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide

Barry Humphries began his career as a Dadaist. His street performances around Melbourne in the early 1950s foreshadowed performance art in Australia. He was the most daring student prankster Melbourne University had ever known.

Years later, academic Peter Conrad accurately described Humphries’ adolescence as a “one man modern movement”.

The young man secured his first paid acting role after a number of complaints from various women about a Dadaist event called Call Me Madman!, staged at the University of Melbourne’s Union Theatre in 1953. It was anarchic, just like the early Dada shows of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich several decades earlier.

Call Me Madman! opened with a single musical phrase played on a violin over and over again, then a pianist sitting out of view of the audience sounded the same chords and notes in repetition, and ended in a ferocious food fight, with Humphries hiding in a cupboard from the outraged students who stormed the stage.

This parody taught him how to provoke his audience, securing their complicit and violent participation in his act. It also gave him his first taste of the power of an audience to determine what happens in the theatre. It was both risky and intoxicating.

When John Sumner, founder of the burgeoning Union Theatre Repertory Company (which would go on to become Melbourne Theatre Company), heard the complaints about the revue, he offered the young man a job.

Read more:
Does Australia ‘get’ culture?

The birth of Edna

On a tour of country Victoria with the company, Humphries performed a spidery Orsino in Twelfth Night, directed by Ray Lawler with Zoe Caldwell as Viola.

Humphries entertained the cast on the long bus rides, with falsetto speeches in cruel but hilarious parody of the predictable words of thanks given in every town by ladies of the Country Women’s Association over tea. The character invented to pass the time on the bus made her debut in Lawler’s Christmas revue in 1955.

Edna was a composite portrait of various women whose mannerisms had imprinted themselves in his brain as a boy, growing up in staid Camberwell.

With his new character, Humphries summoned a whole new world to the stage and created a comedy of ordinariness that had never been presented before.

This Mrs Average took on a life of her own and shone as the centrepiece of Humphries’ theatrical world for the next 60 years, becoming Dame Edna Everage – elevated by the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam himself – in Barry McKenzie Holds His Own in 1974.

Just two years later, Humphries’ extravaganza Housewife Superstar! charmed the West End. Wearing a massive hat sculpted to resemble the Sydney Opera House, Edna stopped the crowds at Royal Ascot that year.

The image of her in that sumptuous creation (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum) launched Edna and Humphries around the world.

Conquering the world

Edna hosted a series of chat shows on British television, watched every week by an audience of eight million. She skewered dozens of politicians, pop stars, singers and actors who graced the program every week.

Her appearance with Jerry Hall singing Stand by your Man remains one of the most hilarious television moments of that time.

Humphries’ success on British television in the 1980s and 1990s were among the major achievements of his career. He created his very own theatre of the absurd with his reinvention of the chat show. The me-generation could not get enough.

After that, Edna conquered Broadway.

Humphries’ theatrical magic also included dozens of other characters, all of them parodic and sharply satirical, such as the hard-drinking diplomat Sir Les Patterson.

He delighted audiences and prosecuted his satirical attacks on Australian life. On stage and on television, his ingenuity as a performer derived from his instinct for improvisation. At his best, the audience was treated to exceptional satirical theatre.

The early years

John Barry Humphries was born February 17 1934, the oldest child of Eric and Louisa Humphries. Eric ran a flourishing building business (he might be called a developer nowadays) and Louisa was a homemaker. As a child, Barry was close to his sister, Barbara. Barry also enjoyed adult company. He loved dressing up and accompanying his mother on trips to the city or out for lunch with other ladies.

At Melbourne Grammar, Humphries found the boys who excelled in sports rewarded and praised for their achievements. Everyone else was a second-class citizen. An interest in art or music was considered by the headmaster to be suspicious, a disappointment for Humphries, passionate about art.

In time, Humphries found a way to survive Melbourne Grammar – through provocation. When he was reprimanded for failing to cut his hair to regulation length, he stared coolly at the headmaster and said, “There’s one man in the chapel with hair that is longer than mine. His name is Jesus”.

Humphries’ comment was not punished. Before long everyone had heard of his audacious retort.

On icy winter afternoons at the MCG – compelled to watch the titans of the school wrestle in the mud – Humphries found an ingenious way of expressing his view of proceedings. He positioned himself in a chair with his back to the football field, facing the spectators.

Slowly he drew out of his specially made Gladstone bag a set of large knitting needles and ball of wool; he would sit for the duration of the match calmly knitting a cardigan.

A transformational artist

Humphries was resilient and indomitable. He defeated alcoholism. He was generous, competitive and single minded.

With his mask off he was as witty as when he wore it. He married four times and raised two daughters and two sons.

He is survived by his wife Lizzie Spender, and children Tessa, Emily, Oscar and Rupert.

Humphries transformed Australian comedy, bringing an astringent and anarchic Australian theatre to the world. Manning Clark called him one of the “mythmakers and prophets of Australia […] enriching the culture which had been dominated by the straiteners”.

He certainly enriched the culture, reimagined the one man show and upended the cultural cringe. Bravo Barry. Farewell.

Read more:
Friday essay: Barry Humphries’ humour is now history – that’s the fate of topical, satirical comedy

Anne Pender received funding from the Australian Research Council for a project on Barry Humphries. Anne’s biography of Humphries, One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries, was published in 2010.

– ref. Remembering Barry Humphries, the man who enriched the culture, reimagined the one man show and upended the cultural cringe – https://theconversation.com/remembering-barry-humphries-the-man-who-enriched-the-culture-reimagined-the-one-man-show-and-upended-the-cultural-cringe-188719

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alon Loeffler, PhD researcher, University of Sydney

Over the past year or so, generative AI models such as ChatGPT and DALL-E have made it possible to produce vast quantities of apparently human-like, high-quality creative content from a simple series of prompts.

Though highly capable – far outperforming humans in big-data pattern recognition tasks in particular – current AI systems are not intelligent in the same way we are. AI systems aren’t structured like our brains and don’t learn the same way.

AI systems also use vast amounts of energy and resources for training (compared to our three-or-so meals a day). Their ability to adapt and function in dynamic, hard-to-predict and noisy environments is poor in comparison to ours, and they lack human-like memory capabilities.

Our research explores non-biological systems that are more like human brains. In a new study published in Science Advances, we found self-organising networks of tiny silver wires appear to learn and remember in much the same way as the thinking hardware in our heads.

Imitating the brain

Our work is part of a field of research called neuromorphics, which aims to replicate the structure and functionality of biological neurons and synapses in non-biological systems.

Our research focuses on a system that uses a network of “nanowires” to mimic the neurons and synapses in the brain. These nanowires are tiny wires about one thousandth the width of a human hair. They are made of a highly conductive metal, such as silver, typically coated in an insulating material like plastic.

Nanowires self-assemble to form a network structure similar to a biological neural network. Like neurons, which have an insulating membrane, each metal nanowire is coated with a thin insulating layer.

When we stimulate nanowires with electrical signals, ions migrate across the insulating layer and into a neighbouring nanowire (much like neurotransmitters across synapses). As a result, we observe synapse-like electrical signalling in nanowire networks.

Learning and memory

Our new work uses this nanowire system to explore the question of human-like intelligence. Central to our investigation are two features indicative of high-order cognitive function: learning and memory.

Our study demonstrates we can selectively strengthen (and weaken) synaptic pathways in nanowire networks. This is similar to “supervised learning” in the brain. In this process, the output of synapses is compared to a desired result. Then the synapses are strengthened (if their output is close to the desired result) or pruned (if their output is not close to the desired result).

We expanded on this result by showing we could increase the amount of strengthening by “rewarding” or “punishing” the network. This process is inspired by “reinforcement learning” in the brain.

Read more:
Neuronlike circuits bring brainlike computers a step closer

We also implemented a version of a test called the “n-back task” which is used to measure working memory in humans. It involves presenting a series of stimuli and comparing each new entry with one that occurred some number of steps (n) ago.

The network “remembered” previous signals for at least seven steps. Curiously, seven is often regarded as the average number of items humans can keep in working memory at one time.

When we used reinforcement learning, we saw dramatic improvements in the network’s memory performance.

In our nanowire networks, we found the formation of synaptic pathways depends on how those synapses have been activated in the past. This is also the case for synapses in the brain, where neuroscientists call it “metaplasticity”.

Synthetic intelligence

Human intelligence is still likely a long way from being replicated.

Nonetheless, our research on neuromorphic nanowire networks shows it is possible to implement features essential for intelligence – such as learning and memory – in non-biological, physical hardware.

Read more:
Five ways the superintelligence revolution might happen

Nanowire networks are different from the artificial neural networks used in AI. Still, they may lead to so-called “synthetic intelligence”.

Perhaps a neuromorphic nanowire network could one day learn to have conversations that are more human-like than ChatGPT, and remember them.

Zdenka Kuncic owns shares in Emergentia, Inc.

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

– ref. Networks of silver nanowires seem to learn and remember, much like our brains – https://theconversation.com/networks-of-silver-nanowires-seem-to-learn-and-remember-much-like-our-brains-204115

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Newell, Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Director of the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney

A quick search on the internet for “climate change images” readily yields the familiar photograph of a lone polar bear on a shrinking block of ice. Despite signifying an impending crisis, such images make climate change seem abstract – happening a long way off (for most of us), to animals we’ve probably never encountered.

The idea that climate change is perceived as “psychologically distant” – happening in the future, in distant places, to other people or animals – has long been presented as a major barrier to action on climate change.

Despite the intuitive appeal of this idea, new research published today in the journal One Earth by behavioural scientists at the University of Groningen now challenges it. The authors argue the psychological distance of climate change has been overestimated – according to their results, most people view climate change as “psychologically close”.

A review of the evidence

To investigate how prevalent psychological distance to climate change really is – and whether it might prevent climate action – the researchers systematically reviewed the available evidence.

First, they analysed data from 27 public opinion polls from around the world – including China, the US, UK, Australia and the EU – finding that most people perceive climate change as happening now and nearby. And this was not just in recent polls. Data from as far back as 1997 indicated almost half of US respondents believed climate change was already occurring.

Second, based on an analysis of past studies, they found people who perceive climate change as more distant do not necessarily engage in less climate action. Indeed, some studies have shown the opposite pattern. People who perceived climate change as affecting people in far-away locations were more motivated to support climate action.

In short, the evidence for the idea that psychological distance is preventing us from climate action is very mixed.

Third, after examining 30 studies, the team found very little evidence that experiments aimed at changing people’s perception of the psychological distance of climate change actually increase their climate action. For example, studies where people watch videos about the impacts of climate change in local versus distant locations do not show these people having different intentions to engage in environmental behaviour.

As I’ve written in an article on the new study, these results remind us that evidence should always trump intuition when it comes to applying psychological theory. The conclusions also echo earlier calls by me and colleagues to be cautious about the relevance of psychological distance when it comes to climate action.

How should we communicate about the climate, then?

Climate communication strategies and guidelines from a host of different organisations have popularised the idea that climate change is perceived as psychologically distant.

Our own Australian Psychological Society recommends reducing psychological distance by making the local impacts of climate change more salient. For example, highlighting the increase in the number of extreme heat days in one’s town or region.

But if the aim here is to increase climate action, is this good advice?

There is a trade-off between using psychological distance to capture attention, and the idea that it provides a scientific explanation for why people aren’t doing something.

I’ve often used the idea of psychological distance in talks, and spoken to journalists about it, because it starts a conversation and can be a good way to engage otherwise hard-to-reach audiences. But there is a risk of mixing up the narrative appeal with the scientific support.

At worst, repeating ideas about psychological distance could lead people to overestimate the extent to which others think climate change is psychologically distant. In turn, this might demotivate action. If everyone else thinks this is a problem for the future, why should I do something about it now?

Read more:
For fossil-fuel reliant governments, climate action should start at home

We already know it’s here, now let’s act

Another implication is that advocacy groups and governments could be wasting effort on information campaigns that focus on reducing the psychological distance of climate change. If people know that climate change is near and now, why do we need to reinforce that idea?

Our efforts might be better spent increasing people’s belief in being able to take climate action (“self-efficacy”), and that those actions will be effective (“response-efficacy”).

This implies a need to make pro-environmental actions like driving less or eating more plant-based foods easier and cheaper. But it also highlights the need for structural and societal changes that incentivise behavioural change: from offering subsidies for electric vehicles or renewable energy installation, to international agreements on carbon emissions.

There is also a need to remind people of the moral imperative of taking action.

Read more:
Climate change: multi-country media analysis shows scepticism of the basic science is dying out

Climate change hasn’t moved ‘closer’

There is no doubt climate change is becoming more “real” and more concerning for most of us. From 2018 to 2022, the number of Australians “very concerned” about climate change has nearly doubled, from 24% to 42%.

These changes in attitude are almost certainly linked to the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20. But does explaining this shift as a reduction of psychological distance add anything to our scientific understanding?

The results of this new study strongly suggest the answer is no. It is time we moved on from considering psychological distance as an impediment to action.

We know climate change is affecting polar bears, but we also know it is affecting us right now. Our efforts now must be focused on changing behaviour at both the societal and individual level.

Read more:
Why attending a climate strike can change minds (most importantly your own)

Ben Newell receives funding from The Australian Research Council.

– ref. Most people already think climate change is ‘here and now’, despite what we’ve been told – https://theconversation.com/most-people-already-think-climate-change-is-here-and-now-despite-what-weve-been-told-203425

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Harry Hobbs, Associate professor, University of Technology Sydney

The federal government today released the long-awaited legal advice on the Voice to parliament from Australia’s solicitor-general, Stephen Donaghue.

In it, Donaghue states that the proposed model for the Voice “will not fetter or impede the exercise of existing powers of Parliament”, adding that the proposal

is not just compatible with the system of representative and responsible government prescribed by the Constitution, but an enhancement of that system.

The advice makes clear the Voice is legally sound.

The Voice to parliament

In the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people expressed the “torment of our powerlessness”. They explained that they do not feel they are heard in the design of law and policy that affects them. They called for a Voice to be put in the Constitution to allow them to have a say.

In our system of government, proposed laws are developed within the executive, which includes the cabinet and government departments. Then they’re presented to parliament. This means that if an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice is to be able to inform law and policy, it needs to speak to both the parliament and the executive.

The Albanese government’s proposed constitutional amendment recognises this. Section 129(2) provides that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice “may make representations” to the parliament and the executive government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

This language was developed with the advice of some of the nation’s leading constitutional law experts. However, some concerns have been raised about the proposal.

For example, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has argued that allowing the Voice to present its views to the executive will mark a radical change in Australia’s system of government. Conservative commentators have suggested the Voice will delay or derail proper administration. They argue ministers and public servants will need to give the Voice time and information to enable the Voice to make representations. Ministers may even be obliged to consult and adopt those representations.

The solicitor-general has dismissed these concerns.

Read more:
Why can’t we just establish the Voice to Parliament through legislation? A constitutional law expert explains

Who is the solicitor-general?

The solicitor-general is Australia’s second highest-ranking law officer, after the attorney-general. However, while the attorney-general is a political position filled by a member of parliament, the solicitor-general is independent. Their job is to provide independent legal advice to the government and represent the Commonwealth in legal proceedings.

The solicitor-general was asked to advise the government on two questions.

1. whether the proposed amendment is compatible with Australia’s system of government

2. and whether the proposed amendment gives parliament the power to decide the legal effect of any representation, or whether parliament and the executive are required to consider or follow those representations.

What does the advice say?

Question 1

The solicitor-general was very clear. The Voice “would not pose any threat” to our system of government. In fact, it would “enhance” our system.

Donaghue reached this conclusion for two reasons. First, the Voice does not alter the powers of parliament or government in any way. Section 129(2) makes clear the Voice has no veto. Section 129(2) also does not impose any obligation on parliament or the executive to consult with the Voice or follow its advice.

Second, more fundamentally, the Voice would remedy a “distortion” in our system of government. The solicitor-general explained that the Voice would help overcome “barriers that have historically impeded effective participation by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in political discussions and decisions that affect them”. In short, it would improve our democracy by ensuring Indigenous people can have their voices heard.

Question 2

The second question was directed at the scope of the Voice’s power. It asked whether the parliament or executive would be required to consider or follow representations made by the Voice.

Once again, the solicitor-general was very clear: the answer is no. Donaghue explained that although it would “plainly be desirable for the Executive Government to consider any representations that the Voice makes to it”, parliament has the ultimate say.

This means parliament could enact a law to require ministers or public servants take the advice of the Voice into account when making decisions. However, parliament could always amend or remove such a requirement. The Voice is subject to parliament.

What happens next?

The Voice is a proposal which seeks to ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can participate “in the democratic life of the state”. It seeks to provide an opportunity for them to have their voices heard in the design and delivery of law and policy that affects them.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has argued the solicitor-general’s advice “puts to bed” concerns raised by Dutton and others. While the Opposition may disagree, the advice strengthens the view that the Voice is legally sound.

Harry Hobbs is a member of the ALP.

– ref. Solicitor-general confirms Voice model is legally sound, will not ‘fetter or impede’ parliament – https://theconversation.com/solicitor-general-confirms-voice-model-is-legally-sound-will-not-fetter-or-impede-parliament-204266

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cassandra Cross, Associate Dean (Learning & Teaching) Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s latest Targeting Scams report indicates Australians reported more than A$3 billion lost to fraud in 2022. This is about a $1 billion increase on reported losses from 2021.

Year upon year, we’re witnessing a rise in monetary losses to fraud. Behind these figures sit millions of Australians who experience a range of financial and non-financial harms.

Here’s what we’ve learned from the latest report – and some advice on what to look out for in the year ahead.

2022 at a glance

Of the reported $3 billion lost, about half was stolen as part of investment schemes – more than double the $701 million figure from 2021. A desire to invest in cryptocurrency has driven up these losses, with potential investors inadvertently transferring money to offenders advertising a range of falsehoods.

Remote access schemes – in which a scammer convinces the victim to grant them access to their computer – jumped into second place, with $229 million in reported losses. This was followed by payment redirection scams (also known as business email compromise fraud).

Those who reported directly to Scamwatch lost an average of $19,654 – an increase of 54% from the $12,742 reported in 2021.

The report also shows not all victims are targeted equally; people aged 65 years and older reported the highest losses across all demographics. Indigenous Australians, people with a disability, and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds were also overrepresented.

For the first time in many years, text message was the most popular method for offenders to target victims. And while bank transfers were the most popular way to send funds to offenders, cryptocurrency transfers continue to increase in popularity – rising 162.4% in one year.

There was, however, a reduction in fraudulent phone calls. This is likely attributable to the introduction of regulatory action to block known scam calls. It’s a bright spot in an otherwise dark report.

Read more:
Scammers can slip fake texts into legitimate SMS threads. Will a government crackdown stop them?

Trends to look out for

The Targeting Scams report demonstrates the many ways offenders seek to defraud victims. On one hand, people are becoming more aware of common scam tactics. On the other, criminals are adjusting their methods to gain the upper hand.

Here are five types of relatively lesser-known frauds everyone should be aware of.

1. Romance baiting

Also known as “cryptorom” or “pig butchering”, this scam is a convergence of investment fraud and traditional romance fraud approaches.

The offender first initiates a relationship with the victim – through dating apps, websites or social media platforms. Once they’ve established trust, they encourage the victim to put their money into an “investment” opportunity, often cryptocurrency. The victim will then unknowingly transfer their money to the offender, who is under a different guise.

This kind of romance baiting raises fewer red flags than directly asking for money, and is targeting a younger demographic compared to more traditional romance fraud.

Such deceptions are coded under investment schemes. This is likely driving the surge in investment scheme losses reported in recent years, while also accounting for a lack of substantial increases in romance fraud.

2. Online shopping fraud

Offenders are skilled at creating fake websites and product advertisements that look genuine.

Often these fake sites will have only subtle differences from their real counterparts. Consumers may not be able to tell the difference. Criminals can directly access funds through victims’ credit card details obtained on these sites.

Online shopping fraud targets a range of demographics. It’s happening on stand-alone websites, social media platforms and online marketplaces.

3. Jobs and employment fraud

Research has indicated that working from home and flexible working conditions are strong indicators of a fraudulent job listing.

But in a post-COVID world, flexibility at work is often a key criterion for job seekers, if not a deal-breaker. Offenders have noticed this, and are responding by posting attractive job advertisements that offer flexibility and high incomes.

Victims submit their CVs and personal credentials (setting themselves up for identity crime), or may be required to pay upfront for training or materials costs for a job that doesn’t exist.

Employment scams are targeting younger people in particular, as they’re more likely to have experienced job loss and insecurity in the wake of the pandemic.

4. Recovery schemes

Many fraud victims will want to take whatever action possible to recover lost funds.

To exploit this, offenders will trade the details of victims with each other. They will then pose as authorities (often law enforcement, banks or private agencies) who are aware of the victim’s circumstances and promote their ability to regain the missing funds for a fee.

In this way, victims who are desperate to recover losses are manipulated into paying even more money to offenders.

5. Remote access schemes

Receiving a phone call from a computer technician advising of a problem with your computer and offering to fix it is a common experience for many. While this approach isn’t new, it made a strong resurgence in 2022 – particularly targeting older people.

These scam calls often come through landlines and prey on people’s fear for the security of their bank details and other personal data. The fraudsters often invoke a sense of urgency about needing to rectify the “problem”, and victims are persuaded to give the offender remote access to their computer.

The criminal can then access a wealth of personal information. They can gain direct entry to bank accounts to transfer funds, and can access identity credentials and other sensitive details to commit identity crime in the future.

Change is needed to protect the public

The threat of fraud will only increase alongside technological evolution. Experts are concerned about artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT and image and video generators giving cybercriminals yet another tool to add to their arsenal.

Read more:
Scams, deepfake porn and romance bots: advanced AI is exciting, but incredibly dangerous in criminals’ hands

The latest Scamwatch report is further evidence banks and financial institutions need to implement measures to help reduce fraud losses; among these, the checking of account names against BSB numbers for all transactions. The UK has a confirmation-of-payee policy that does this.

The government is attempting to address the continued surge in fraud losses through the revision of its cybersecurity strategy and the potential establishment of a National Anti-Scams Centre.

These are both positive steps but it’s clear there’s a need for more work to be done.

If you or someone you know has been a victim of fraud, you can report it to ReportCyber. For support, contact iDcare. For prevention advice, consult Scamwatch.

Cassandra Cross has previously received funding from the Australian Institute of Criminology and the Cybersecurity Cooperative Research Centre.

– ref. Australians lost more than $3bn to scammers in 2022. Here are 5 emerging scams to look out for – https://theconversation.com/australians-lost-more-than-3bn-to-scammers-in-2022-here-are-5-emerging-scams-to-look-out-for-204018

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martin Crotty, Associate Professor in Australian History, The University of Queensland

Anzac Day continues to feature on the Australian calendar as a day for celebrating and commemorating the deeds of our military personnel.

Traditionally focused on the first world war, the mythology of the Anzacs – bronzed bushmen storming the cliffs of Gallipoli or walking fearlessly through artillery bombardments on the western front – has long clouded the reality of the experience of fighting in what was then an unprecedented conflict.

Many Australian soldiers did not fit this Anzac myth. Some were taken prisoner of war and some broke down with shellshock. Others were just “bad characters”, whose trouble-making, both within and outside their units, caused endless headaches for military and civilian authorities.

Australian soldiers stationed in Egypt, England and France were charged with various transgressions, including insubordination, repeated malingering and theft. Some were accused of committing heinous acts, such as murder and rape.

In our research on these soldiers, we found that, in total, 115 Australians were court-martialled during WWI and sentenced to death for serious military crimes – primarily desertion.

Read more:
Why Australia is still grappling with the legacy of the first world war

Researching desertion

Desertion needs to be distinguished from being absent without, or overstaying, authorised leave from one’s unit. Under the military law that governed members of the Australian Imperial Force during WWI, desertion was defined as leaving or refusing to enter the front lines or being absent from areas behind the front lines for more than four weeks.

Desertion was considered such a serious offence because the soldier had refused to do the duty for which he had enlisted, wasted resources, weakened military strength and endangered comrades.

Not surprisingly, the sanction was severe. More than 3,000 members of the British empire’s forces were sentenced to death for desertion and similar offences during WWI, of whom 361 were executed by firing squad. (Among those were 25 Canadians and five New Zealanders.) The remaining deserters had their sentences commuted to something lesser – usually a substantial prison term.

But Australian law – specifically the Defence Act first passed in 1903 – effectively precluded the Australian Imperial Force from carrying out the death penalty. Soldiers could be sentenced to death, but none were executed.

In our research, we combed through amateur histories, theses and historical archives to unearth the 115 Australian soldiers who were sentenced to death in WWI (fewer than the usually cited number of 121, which we consider exaggerated). We then examined their service records, court-martial files and repatriation records.

Who were these men? We found them to be not just bad soldiers, but men for whom military service was just one unfortunate aspect of their lives.

As historians peering into their lives, we see them wrestle with their obligations in the armed forces and confront the military justice system. We witness their back-and-forth with the government repatriation authorities as they plead for financial and other assistance, and we all too often see their early or otherwise unfortunate deaths.

Two cases stick out for us: those of privates James McCormick and Nicholas Permakoff. Both had colourful service records prior to their sentences, including hospitalisation with venereal disease, insubordination and absences from their units. And both had sad and lonely, although very different, ends.

Read more:
The Anzac legend has blinded Australia to its war atrocities. It’s time for a reckoning

The chronic absentee

McCormick enlisted in Western Australia in June 1915 at the age of 36. He hardly saw any action on the battlefield; he spent more time in hospital suffering from venereal disease, episodes of epilepsy and stomach issues (he was identified as an alcoholic by military authorities), or in military prison.

He absconded almost as soon as he arrived in France in June 1916 and was sentenced to one year of hard labour. Reflecting the manpower issues faced by the Australian Imperial Force, his sentence was suspended in early 1917 so he could rejoin his battalion.

Two months later, McCormick again disappeared. This time, he was charged with desertion and sentenced to death. This was later commuted to ten years of penal servitude and eventually suspended again. And in May 1918 he transferred back to his battalion. He was almost immediately hospitalised for chronic stomach issues and was sent to England, where he stayed until almost the end of the war.

McCormick was finally discharged from the force as “medically unfit” in December 1918. His less-than-glorious service record made him ineligible for war medals or the war gratuity. He travelled around Australia picking up odd jobs, but continued to struggle from stomach complaints and alcoholism. He died in 1950.

McCormick’s body was found in a school shed in Albury, New South Wales, an empty wine bottle next to him and his feet in an old onion bag. The coroner attributed his death to chronic alcoholism and exposure. No next of kin was found, so the local police organised his funeral in Albury cemetery.

The deserter shot by his own side

An even more curious case – and just as sad – is that of Nicholas Permakoff. Born in Russia, he served for two years in the Russian Army before migrating to Australia where, at the time of his enlistment in 1916, he was a miner in NSW.

He later claimed he joined the Australian Imperial Force on the bizarre promise that he could transfer to the Russian Army once he was back in Europe. By the time he got there, however, the Russian Revolution was underway and Permakoff had decided he didn’t want any part of the war.

In November 1917, he told his superior officer “yes, fuck you” – or words to that effect – when ordered to put on his pack and march towards the front, earning himself a six-month prison term.

After his release, he was essentially forced to the front line, despite telling his officers he would not shoot. That night, according to Australian sentries, he was spotted without his weapon walking towards the Germans. Permakoff was fatally shot by his own side – an action later endorsed by a Court of Inquiry.

He left very sketchy next-of-kin details: “Mrs Permakoff, Archangel, c/- Imperial Russian Consul, Sydney”. Efforts to contact his mother in Archangel, a city in Russia, were unsuccessful, and the NSW public trustee could not find anyone to claim his few assets.

Permakoff is one of only five Australians who died in WWI to be excluded from the Australian War Memorial’s Roll of Honour. He lies in a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Esquelbecq, France.

Revealing the complexity of military service

There were long public campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s in Britain, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland to posthumously pardon those executed during the war.

But Australian deserters sentenced to death have remained largely overlooked. This is perhaps because they were not ultimately executed (with Permakoff’s odd exception), so they have not aroused an indignant sense of injustice.

Moreover, they present an uncomfortable counter-narrative to the idealised Anzac character and feats.

Our research seeks to rescue these men, their experiences and their voices from the historical void. Doing so enhances our understanding of the complexity and diversity of Australian military experiences and highlights the impossibility – for most – of the Anzac ideal.

Martin Crotty receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Part of this research was funded by an Australian Army History Unit grant.

Kate Ariotti receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Challenging the Anzac ideal: the tragic stories of two Australian deserters in WWI – https://theconversation.com/challenging-the-anzac-ideal-the-tragic-stories-of-two-australian-deserters-in-wwi-199516

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Scott Dwyer, Research Director – Energy Futures, University of Technology Sydney

Australia has long had a love affair with the internal combustion engine. Its first petrol-powered car was developed in 1901. (Admittedly, the engine was imported from Germany.)

Roll forward 122 years and there’s now a registered motor vehicle for every one of the 20 million people of driving age in Australia. And fossil fuels power 99.9% of these vehicles.

The slow pace at which Australia has adopted electric vehicles is maddening to many. But the transition to electric vehicles is changing gear in Australia, driven by both consumers and government.

The early signs of this shift can be seen in the latest quarterly vehicle sales data. Two-thirds of medium-sized cars sold were electric.

Also this week, the National Electric Vehicle Strategy filled a glaring hole in federal policy. All the states and territories and many local governments had for some time taken steps to boost the uptake of electric vehicles.

Electrifying the vehicle fleet is going to be one of Australia’s biggest challenges this century. But what makes Australia different from other countries? And why does it make sense to embrace a position as a fast follower?

Read more:
Australia finally has an electric vehicle strategy. How does it stack up?

A country wedded to the car

You can see why cars are so popular in a country like Australia. We’re the sixth-largest country in the world, but the 55th-most-populous. With only around three people per square kilometre, we regularly travel large distances through sparsely populated areas.

Australia also had a burgeoning automotive industry, which spawned fierce loyalties among fans of domestic brands. Its long decline began in the 1940s, with the last vehicle manufacturer shutting up shop in 2017.

Read more:
Made in Australia? The electric vehicle revolution gives us a chance to revive an industry

Globally, too, the time of internal combustion engine manufacturing seems to have passed. The impacts of human-induced climate change are intensifying, with the transport sector responsible for a large share of global emissions that stubbornly refuses to decline.

The electrification of transport offers a route to decarbonise this sector. It will also bring a host of other benefits such as improved health through reduced local air pollution.

Electric vehicles aren’t new. The first cars were electric but were eventually outcompeted by their fossil-fuelled counterparts. It wasn’t until the start of the last decade that upstarts such as Tesla began disrupting the automotive sector with fully electric offerings.

Not long after this Australia began a series of electric vehicle demonstration projects. The first was a Western Australian trial way back in 2010. However, sales and model availability remained stubbornly low. This was largely due to weak policies.

Read more:
The surprising history of how electric vehicles have played the long game and won

We have the resources to go electric

Adding to the frustration of EV advocates is Australia’s wealth of resources that can enhance the benefits electric vehicles offer.

Australia has some of the best wind energy resources in the world with an estimated 5 terawatts of potential. It also has the world’s highest rooftop solar capacity per person. Over 3 million households can power their homes (and potentially vehicles) for free when the sun is shining. There are also 180,000 residential batteries, helping households store the sun’s energy for later use.

The “lucky country” also boasts huge deposits of the minerals needed for making renewable energy technology like solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. Australia produces over 50% of the world’s lithium and 20% of its cobalt, as well as aluminium (27%), nickel (23%) and copper (11%).

And there’s expertise to accelerate the transition

While the new national strategy makes all the right noises, the main critique emerging is that it lacks real teeth. In particular, the specifics of a badly needed fuel-efficiency standard are still being developed.

However, there is still plenty in the strategy to offer promise. It identifies the need for:

• better infrastructure planning and deployment
• training and attracting a workforce with the necessary skills
• product stewardship for end-of-life EV batteries
• better access to charging for apartment residents
• funding for more guidance and demonstrations.

We also have a vibrant and innovative domestic electric vehicle industry. It boasts exciting companies such as NASDAQ-listed Tritium, the ubiquitous JetCharge and a host of others including EVIE Networks, Jolt Charge, ACE EV and EVSE Australia. They have been creating a market without any federal government encouragement or support. Harnessing their innovation and drive will be key.

Australia’s world-class energy researchers have been exploring issues relating to a mostly renewables-powered electricity grid for decades. In recent years, they have been investigating how electric vehicles could become an important asset for the electricity grid as “batteries on wheels”. The renewable energy agency, ARENA, has spent over $2 billion to increase the renewable energy supply in Australia. Over $100 million has gone to transport-related projects.

Read more:
Australia’s electric vehicle numbers doubled last year. What’s the impact of charging them on a power grid under strain?

The RACE for 2030 Cooperative Research Centre is another major long-term industry and research collaboration. It has received $69 million in government funding and $280 million in cash and in-kind support from partners to accelerate the transition to reliable, affordable, clean energy. This year it allocated $3.4 million to the Australian Strategic EV Integration (SEVI) project.

The SEVI project will test how electric vehicles can be incorporated within government fleets, holiday parks, and residential areas and in three states (New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia). To take one example, the South Australian part of the trial will examine how holiday parks could benefit from electric vehicles generating new sources of revenue and reinforcing the grid in rural areas. We can draw on the lessons from such trials to speed up the adoption of electric vehicles across Australia in ways that maximise the benefits for consumers, communities, businesses and the grid.

Read more:
A rapid shift to electric vehicles can save 24,000 lives and leave us $148bn better off over the next 2 decades

Australia now has impressive capacity within industry, government and academia to help drive the transition to an all-electric fleet. We will need to embrace our country’s unique features and harness its resources to translate the new electric vehicle strategy from good intent into real action.

Scott Dwyer has previously received funding from the RACE for 2030 Cooperative Research Centre and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

– ref. Australia’s adoption of electric vehicles has been maddeningly slow, but we’re well placed to catch up fast – https://theconversation.com/australias-adoption-of-electric-vehicles-has-been-maddeningly-slow-but-were-well-placed-to-catch-up-fast-203923

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simone Celine Marshall, Professor of Medieval Literature, University of Otago

The COVID “lab leak” story clearly isn’t going away soon. The theory that the pandemic began with an accidental release of the virus from a lab in Wuhan recurs like clockwork – most recently in a report from Senate Republicans in the US this week.

Earlier this year, the US Department of Energy and FBI endorsed the same theory. It’s a very modern story – but as medievalists, we can tell you we’ve been here before, and we should be wary of simple narratives of blame.

The lab leak theory remains a legitimate hypothesis to investigate. Yet much of the discussion surrounding it shows evidence of the “contagion effect” of magical thinking – the belief that a visible effect is somehow contaminated by a hidden essence linked to its origin.

The anxieties still whirling in conservative media echo the escalating accusations of well-poisoning in medieval Europe. These exploded into mass violence in the mid-14th century, and survive in later legends about witches’ ability to concoct poisonous agents.

In an age of antibiotics and scientific explanations, we like to consider ourselves more advanced than our forebears. But our research into the early history of conspiracy theories and xenophobia tells a more complicated story about how magical thinking continues to shape our response to disasters like the pandemic.

Poisonous powders and plagues

Fears of contagion often derive from anxieties about unknown or poorly understood aspects of disease. Who among us never felt compelled to disinfect our groceries or mail during the early months of the pandemic?

Our current research, “The First Era of Fake News: Witch-Hunting, Antisemitism and Islamophobia”, examines how myths that emerged during the Middle Ages are still being used to justify modern atrocities. It shows how the contagion effect also leads to scapegoating and faulty attributions of blame. The threat of disease is layered onto suspicious “others” – such as Jews during the Middle Ages, or Chinese labs today.

When Jews were accused of poisoning wells to cause outbreaks of plague in 1348-49, the “contagion” associated with them was both literal and metaphorical. Jews were accused of concocting poisonous powders from spiders, toads and human remains – the ingredients form a running list of items invoking disgust and fear of infection.

Read more:
COVID-19: why lab-leak theory is back despite little new evidence

But Jews were also considered suspicious simply because they were Jews – exotic religious outsiders who might have connections with coreligionists in other cities, or who might travel far from home. Jews were feared to contaminate Christian communities by their very presence, and medieval preachers weren’t shy about saying so.

We can call this kind of contagion “magical” – fear that simple contact with a mistrusted outsider somehow makes us vulnerable to influences or activities we do not understand. We should take heed: in the case of well-poisoning accusations, those fears led to the wholesale slaughter of Jewish communities in Central Europe.

Individual Jews were tortured into elaborate confessions of guilt, then murdered along with their communities. They were blamed for the plague’s spread and devastation. The contagion effect easily convinced medieval Christians that a terrible disease must originate with people already considered suspicious.

Conspiracy and Christianity

There are similar fears of magical contagion in theories about the lab leak being the pandemic’s origin. Blame is a powerful motivator. We continue to be swayed by the idea that some specific agency must be responsible, rather than unpredictable processes of virus mutation.

Even China has embraced this logic, with various suggestions made about the virus emerging somewhere (anywhere) outside its borders. The contagion effect has also been manipulated for political advantage. Donald Trump’s early fear mongering about a “China virus” was a convenient distraction from the failures of his own administration in the early days of the pandemic.

Read more:
Young people may be more likely to believe in conspiracy theories that deny COVID facts – here’s how to respond

Like medieval civic leaders, it was easier for some politicians to assuage the rage and anxiety of people with stories of blame than by acknowledging failures and unknowns.

There are bad as well as good reasons to investigate the lab-leak hypothesis. Using the theory as a way to target and punish enemies is a bad reason. So is the a priori assumption that nefarious intentions lie somewhere behind every major event, a cornerstone of conspiratorial thinking both ancient and modern.

We should be on the alert for this style of thinking. It tends to get people killed. When Jews were accused of poisoning wells in medieval Europe, they were believed by many to be doing so “in order to destroy and eradicate the whole Christian religion”.

Read more:
China’s only now revealed crucial COVID-19 origins data. Earlier disclosure may have saved us 3 years of political argy-bargy

Viral magical thinking

In some political quarters, the lab-leak theory operates as the thin edge of a similar civilisational struggle, with the Chinese as the villains working in secret on various schemes to dominate or destroy Western democracies.

Such accusations attempt to impose coherence on a profoundly uncertain situation, and suggest a reassuring narrative of clear cause and effect rather than random chance.

Read more:
From UFOs to COVID conspiracy theories, we all struggle with the ‘truth out there’

China’s tight-lipped approach to information-sharing isn’t helping to allay suspicions. In the eyes of lab-leak theory advocates, the desire to hide information suggests something more nefarious than a simple desire to avoid blame.

But embracing an argument built on a tissue of circumstantial evidence is also part of the conspiracy theory playbook: magical thinking enters the grey zone of unanswered questions to create elaborate narratives of false reassurance.

Some questions about the origin of COVID-19 may never be answered. For many, that is an unpalatable idea. Yet if we are to intervene in this historical pattern of overreaction, conspiracy theory and blame, we need to be honest about the limits of our knowledge.

Simone Celine Marshall and Hannah Johnson have received Fulbright funding for their project, “The First Era of Fake News: Witch-Hunting, Antisemitism and Islamophobia”.

Work on this project is being supported by a Fulbright fellowship. Neither Fulbright International nor Fulbright NZ pays fellowship recipients for publication. The authors’ opinions are entirely their own, and do not represent the views of any organisation.

– ref. Plagues, poisons and magical thinking – how COVID lab leak hysteria could be straight from the Middle Ages – https://theconversation.com/plagues-poisons-and-magical-thinking-how-covid-lab-leak-hysteria-could-be-straight-from-the-middle-ages-204025

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charlotte Ganderton, Senior lecturer (Physiotherapy), Swinburne University of Technology

You might have seen media articles or fitness influencers online urging people to do “dead hangs”, where one hangs loosely from a bar – usually with feet off the floor. The goal is usually to improve upper-body strength and shoulder stability, or stretch out muscles around the shoulder.

But what does the science say? Are dead hangs good for shoulder health?

As with so many things health and fitness, it’s not an easy “yes” or “no”. It really depends on your reason for doing it, your individual biology, and how you do them. For some, dead hangs may risk musculoskeletal injury.

The shoulder: a relatively unstable joint

Dead hangs may improve grip strength and endurance in rock climbers. This suggests that if you’re well adapted to this type of exercise and have very good upper-body strength, dead hangs may bring hand and forearm benefits.

But while dead hangs may be OK for people with good upper-body strength and no shoulder problems, they can be risky for others. People with shoulder hypermobility (excessive motion of the shoulder) or shoulder instability (such as those who easily dislocate their shoulder) may need to be cautious.

The shoulder, by design, is a relatively unstable joint. It has a large ball-type bone called a humerus, which sits in a relatively small socket called a glenoid.

The passive (non-muscle) tissue around these bones (the capsule, labrum and ligaments) creates a generous space around the shoulder joint – all so you can move your arm though a large range of motion.

Because there’s not much passive support in the shoulder, it relies heavily on active muscle coordination and strength to keep it stable.

The coordination of muscles around the shoulder blade help keep the socket in the right place, and the rotator cuff and deltoid muscles help to control the “ball” in the centre of the socket as you move.

All this means dead hangs, if not done correctly, could present a risk for people with hypermobility in their shoulders.

Hypermobility and the shoulder

Some people have excessive motion of their joints due to increased elasticity of joint tissue. This is called hypermobility and may be in the shoulder or all joints.

The overhead arm position of a complete dead hang puts you in a position where, inside your shoulder, the ball is pulled away from the socket. Hanging your entire body weight can, in hypermobile people, cause the tissue to stretch even more.

People with shoulder hypermobility are more likely to develop painful shoulder instability, which is when the ball often pops out of the socket.

Shoulder instability may be caused by acute trauma (such as dislocation). Or it can develop over time from a loss of muscle control, deriving from micro-trauma (by, for example, swimming laps in the pool with hand paddles).

Shoulder instability is associated with reduced strength and coordination in the shoulder muscles. In people under 40, it’s often misdiagnosed as “rotator cuff pain” or “shoulder muscle tightness”.

What can I do instead of dead hangs?

Dead hangs require good baseline strength, can risk popping the ball from the socket for some people, and can stretch the passive tissue. They are not the best exercise for those for shoulder hypermobility and instability.

So what’s the alternative? A treatment known as the Watson Instability Program has had good results for resolving non-traumatic shoulder instability when compared to a general shoulder strength program.

This program focuses on gaining shoulder blade control (such as the upward rotation you get when you reach up to a high shelf). It involves recruiting the shoulder blade and shoulder joint muscles to improve the contact between the ball and the socket.

Building shoulder blade control and strength can help boost broader shoulder strength.

Still keen to try dead hangs?

If you are determined to do dead hangs, remember to:

• start with small increments; hang for just ten seconds or fewer at first, and build from there

• don’t allow yourself to get too fatigued; your shoulder joint can become less stable when it’s tired

• try stepping off a box under the bar rather than jumping up to the bar

• keep some “active” tone in your shoulders as you hang; hanging completely passively can come with risk.

Our team is conducting a trial of the Watson Instability Program. We are investigating brain changes in patients with multidirectional instability of the shoulder.

If you’re female, aged 18-35, have non-traumatic, right-sided shoulder instability and would like to have the chance to receive six months of free Watson Instability Program physiotherapy treatment as part of our study, please contact either of us or read more about the study here.

Charlotte Ganderton receives funding from Arthritis Australia, Physiotherapy Research Foundation, Swinburne University of Technology, National Institute of Circus Arts and La Trobe University. Charlotte Ganderton is a member of the Australian Physiotherapy Association and Sports Medicine Australia.

Sarah Warby consults and receives research funds from the Melbourne Shoulder Group.

– ref. What are dead hangs? What are the shoulder pain risks and how do I do them safely? – https://theconversation.com/what-are-dead-hangs-what-are-the-shoulder-pain-risks-and-how-do-i-do-them-safely-202346

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rossana Ruggeri, Research Fellow in Cosmology, The University of Queensland

Physicists believe most of the matter in the universe is made up of an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see.

We’re not crazy! Without this “dark matter”, the universe as we see it would make no sense.

But the nature of dark matter is a longstanding puzzle. However, a new study by Alfred Amruth at the University of Hong Kong and colleagues, published in Nature Astronomy, uses the gravitational bending of light to bring us a step closer to understanding.

Invisible but omnipresent

The reason we think dark matter exists is that we can see the effects of its gravity in the behaviour of galaxies. Specifically, dark matter seems to make up about 85% of the universe’s mass, and most of the distant galaxies we can see appear to be surrounded by a halo of the mystery substance.

But it’s called dark matter because it doesn’t give off light, or absorb or reflect it, which makes it incredibly difficult to detect.

So what is this stuff? We think it must be some kind of unknown fundamental particle, but beyond that we’re not sure. All attempts to detect dark matter particles in laboratory experiments so far have failed, and physicists have been debating its nature for decades.

Read more:
Why do astronomers believe in dark matter?

Scientists have proposed two leading hypothetical candidates for dark matter: relatively heavy characters called weakly interacting massive particles (or WIMPs), and extremely lightweight particles called axions. In theory, WIMPs would behave like discrete particles, while axions would behave a lot more like waves due to quantum interference.

It has been difficult to distinguish between these two possibilities – but now light bent around distant galaxies has offered a clue.

Gravitational lensing and Einstein rings

When light travelling through the universe passes a massive object like a galaxy, its path is bent because – according to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity – the gravity of the massive object distorts space and time around itself.

As a result, sometimes when we look at a distant galaxy we can see distorted images of other galaxies behind it. And if things line up perfectly, the light from the background galaxy will be smeared out into a circle around the closer galaxy.

This distortion of light is called “gravitational lensing”, and the circles it can create are called “Einstein rings”.

By studying how the rings or other lensed images are distorted, astronomers can learn about the properties of the dark matter halo surrounding the closer galaxy.

Axions vs WIMPs

And that’s exactly what Amruth and his team have done in their new study. They looked at several systems where multiple copies of the same background object were visible around the foreground lensing galaxy, with a special focus on one called HS 0810+2554.

Using detailed modelling, they worked out how the images would be distorted if dark matter were made of WIMPs vs how they would if dark matter were made of axions. The WIMP model didn’t look much like the real thing, but the axion model accurately reproduced all features of the system.

The result suggests axions are a more probable candidate for dark matter, and their ability to explain lensing anomalies and other astrophysical observations has scientists buzzing with excitement.

Particles and galaxies

The new research builds on previous studies that have also pointed towards axions as the more likely form of dark matter. For example, one study looked at the effects of axion dark matter on the cosmic microwave background, while another examined the behaviour of dark matter in dwarf galaxies.

Although this research won’t yet end the scientific debate over the nature of dark matter, it does open new avenues for testing and experiment. For example, future gravitational lensing observations could be used to probe the wave-like nature of axions and potentially measure their mass.

A better understanding of dark matter will have implications for what we know about particle physics and the early universe. It could also help us to understand better how galaxies form and change over time.

Read more:
Explainer: Standard Model of Particle Physics

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

– ref. New look at ‘Einstein rings’ around distant galaxies just got us closer to solving the dark matter debate – https://theconversation.com/new-look-at-einstein-rings-around-distant-galaxies-just-got-us-closer-to-solving-the-dark-matter-debate-204109

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

It was observed […] that the English had slain wounded and captured German prisoners.

So reads a disturbing war diary entry of the Bavarian 18th Regiment from June 7 1917, quoting one Schütze (Rifleman) Jakob Eickert of the 2. Machine Gun Company.

Another Bavarian soldier, Karl Kennel, was nearly one of those slain. He later wrote to the Red Cross that he and his friend Friedrich Christoffel were wounded when enemy troops bombed their dugout.

They emerged, belts unbuckled in surrender, and begged for mercy. Christoffel was on his knees with hands raised when a soldier pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. Kennel escaped death by rolling into a shell hole.

The Bavarians were fighting the New Zealand Division that day in 2017, at the very bloody Battle of Messines. Both Eickert and Kennel were describing New Zealand soldiers’ actions – then, as now, war crimes.

These days, New Zealanders and Australians tend to place their soldiers on pedestals on Anzac Day. We are led to believe these mostly volunteer civilian soldiers were an exceptional body of fighting men (something the men themselves also believed). But this reputation came at a price.

‘It was quite common’

Anzac soldiers should have known such killing of enemy prisoners was forbidden. The British Manual of Military Law, which codified the 1907 Hague Convention on land warfare, forbade soldiers from killing or wounding an enemy who had surrendered at their own discretion. “This prohibition is clear and distinct”.

Furthermore, officers and men alike were expected to know these regulations. Yet as I show in my book, Taking the Ridge: Anzacs and Germans at the Battle of Messines 1917, New Zealand soldiers’ diaries and memoirs confirm that killing prisoners and the wounded was a feature of the fighting at Messines, and likely elsewhere.

Some diary entries were matter of fact: “Our fellows used the steel [bayonet] a great deal so there were not so many prisoners as there might have been,” wrote one soldier. “Lots of Germans were bayoneted on the ground, wounded men. It was quite common,” wrote another.

Read more:
An urgent rethink is needed on the idealised image of the ANZAC digger

One wrote of speaking to a German he took prisoner: “He was like the rest, full of the tales of British cruelty to prisoners. They all expect to be killed and I am afraid I saw some very dirty work done, which might account for the tales they hear.”

Others simply distanced themselves from such actions: “I’m proud to say it never entered my head to [kill wounded men] or shoot down people with their hands up,” wrote one.

There are also examples of compassion and soldiers comforting wounded Germans. But other actions were contingent on the circumstances – a case of “them or us”. When Rifleman Edward Miller and his officer struck a dugout of “Fritzes”, for example, they took prisoner a solitary German. But they took no chances with another group of Germans, one holding up a white handkerchief – they were “finished off”.

‘Officially sanctioned’

The New Zealanders sent some 300 prisoners to the rear in the battle. But that is only half the number the adjacent British 25th Division took prisoner. The discrepancy suggests particularly savage fighting by the New Zealanders.

Individuals must bear responsibility for their actions, but so must their commanders. The New Zealanders’ senior officers’ support for killing prisoners tended to be tacit. A bloodcurdling lecture on bayonet use by the Scottish firebrand Major Ronald Campbell to the New Zealanders before the Somme attack in 1916 gives some insight.

Read more:
Anzacs behaving badly: Scott McIntyre and contested history

Campbell had discouraged taking prisoners. Rather, soldiers should bayonet surrendering enemy soldiers when they put they hands up – “that’s your chance to stick him in the soft part of the belly where the bayonet goes in easily and comes out quickly”, Campbell instructed.

The New Zealand Division’s commander, General Andrew Russell, approved: “Lecture by Major Campbell on bayonet fighting – very good indeed.” Captain Lindsay Inglis, a law clerk before the war and a brigadier in the next war, did not. He wrote in his diary:

It would be interesting to know to what extent [these lectures were] responsible for deeds of the kind which even in war amount to nothing less than brutal murder […] We were astonished that it should have been officially sanctioned.

Read more:
The Anzac legend has blinded Australia to its war atrocities. It’s time for a reckoning

Lest we forget

Airing this dirty laundry may seem inappropriate for Anzac Day, especially as many men did not commit war crimes. But knowing what happened in battle provides a more complete understanding of their experience.

War is brutal. Despite headlines at the time proclaiming Messines a great New Zealand victory “for extraordinarily light losses”, some 3,700 New Zealanders were killed or wounded in the battle. Around 3,600 of the Bavarians opposite them were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Only three officers and 30 men of the three Bavarian front-line battalions returned.

And war is still brutal today, with similar consequences. Investigations into the behaviour of Australian and New Zealand troops in Afghanistan in recent decades only underline the contemporary relevance of older misdeeds.

This includes the inquiry into the conduct of New Zealand SAS troops during Operation Burnham, and the Australian Brereton Report, which found serious breaches of ethical, legal, professional and moral responsibilities by Australian Defence Force soldiers.

By acknowledging this kind of behaviour has occurred during past wars, the public will perhaps be less reluctant to accept evidence that it can still happen. It should also mean the military itself will work to ensure it doesn’t happen again in the future.

Jeffrey McNeill is the author of Taking the Ridge: Anzacs and Germans at the Battle of Messines 1917 (Rifleman Press, 2022) from which some of the material in this article is drawn.

– ref. Less than illustrious: remembering the Anzacs means also not forgetting some committed war crimes – https://theconversation.com/less-than-illustrious-remembering-the-anzacs-means-also-not-forgetting-some-committed-war-crimes-203043

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Francisco Perales, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland

Today’s men express their maleness in different ways. Some adhere to more traditional models of masculinity, characterised by beliefs in male superiority and endorsement of risky or violent behaviours. Others embrace more progressive stances.

But how do men develop their ideas, beliefs and behaviours in relation to masculinity?

Our new study addresses this question by focusing on one important factor influencing how young men express their masculinity – their fathers.

Our research set out to ask: do young men “copy” their fathers’ masculinity?

We found that young men whose fathers support more traditional forms of masculinity are more likely to do so themselves.

This highlights the critical role fathers play in steering boys towards healthier ideas about masculinity.

Read more:
Who is a real man? Most Australians believe outdated ideals of masculinity are holding men back

Measuring masculinity

We analysed data from 839 pairs of 15-to-20-year-old men and their fathers. These data were taken from a large, Australian national survey on men’s health.

The survey asked men a set of 22 scientifically validated questions about how they felt and behaved in relation to many issues around masculinity. For example, they were asked about:

• the significance of work and social status for their sense of identity

• their take on showing emotions and being self-reliant

• their endorsement of risk-taking and violent behaviours

• the importance they assigned to appearing heterosexual and having multiple sex partners

• and their beliefs about winning, dominance over others and men’s power over women.

Taken together, the answers to these questions offered us a window into whether the men participating in the survey adopted more of a traditional or progressive type of masculinity. They also enabled us to compare fathers’ and sons’ expressions of masculinity.

What we found

We found that, on average, young men are slightly more traditional in how they express their masculinity than their fathers.

On a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 indicating high conformity to traditional masculinity and 0 indicating low conformity, the average masculinity score for young men was 44.1, and for their fathers, it was 41.

Using statistical models, we then examined whether there was an association between how traditional a father’s masculinity is and how traditional their son’s masculinity is. To make sure we isolated the effect of fathers’ masculinity, the models took into account other factors that may also shape young men’s expressions of masculinity. These included their age, education, sexual orientation, religion, household income and place of residence, among others.

The results were clear. Young men who scored highly on the traditional masculinity measures tended to have fathers who also scored highly.

We identified similar results for 20 of the 22 individual masculinity questions. The strongest father-son associations emerged for questions about the endorsement of violence, importance of appearing heterosexual, and desirability of having multiple sexual partners.

This indicates these aspects of masculinity are comparatively more likely to be “passed on” from fathers to sons.

What our findings mean

As is well-established, social learning is important in shaping young people’s attitudes and behaviours. While fathers aren’t the only influence, our study suggests young men learn a lot about how to be a man from their dads. This is an intuitive finding, but we had little empirical evidence of it until now.

Confirming that dads “pass on” their masculinity beliefs to their sons has far-reaching implications. For example, it goes a long way in explaining why traditional models of masculinity remain entrenched in today’s society. Our study indicates that breaking this cycle requires bringing fathers into the mix.

Read more:
The draw of the ‘manosphere’: understanding Andrew Tate’s appeal to lost men

Policies, interventions and programs aimed at promoting healthy masculinity among young people are more likely to work if they also target their dads. This proposition is consistent with a growing body of programs focused on engaging fathers in positive parenting.

What’s more, our findings underscore the potential long-term effects of successful intervention. If a program manages to help young people develop positive masculinity, it’s likely that — as they themselves become fathers — their own children’s masculinity is also positively affected.

Ella Kuskoff receives funding from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (Project ID CE200100025).

Michael Flood has received funding from the AFL, Australia Institute, Australian Research Council, Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute Foundation, BHP, Department of Defence, Diversity Council of Australia, Human Rights Commission, Jesuit Social Services, NAPCAN, NRL, Our Watch, PwC, UNWomen, Victorian Government, Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, White Ribbon Australia, and World Health Organization.

Tania King receives funding from the Australian Research Council (DE200100607 & LP180100035)

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

– ref. Like father, like son: new research shows how young men ‘copy’ their fathers’ masculinity – https://theconversation.com/like-father-like-son-new-research-shows-how-young-men-copy-their-fathers-masculinity-203834

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Breadon, Program Director, Health and Aged Care, Grattan Institute

GP fees are hitting more Australians than they did a few years ago. There’s a lot of talk about a crisis in bulk billing, with many people reporting they’re unable to see a doctor without paying an out-of-pocket fee.

But the biggest, most urgent problem is in the communities where most people pay fees, so called bulk-billing “deserts”. These deserts are more likely in poorer areas, so the people who most need bulk billing are missing out.

While Medicare funding changes are needed to address this problem, we also need to look at more innovative solutions. One option is for federal and state governments to step in and support or set up clinics that employ doctors, nurses and other health workers.

Bulk billing is falling, but from a historic high

The share of patients who never paid a GP fee fell from 67% in 2020-21 to 64% in 2021-22. But those rates are still high by recent standards. The rate has only fallen back to the level of 2015, and it remains much higher than a decade ago.

Yes, it’s troubling to see bulk billing falling, especially when fees have risen a lot. Patients who are not bulk billed now pay on average A$45 out of pocket when they see a GP. This is up 20% in real terms over the past decade.

But while the national trend is concerning, it masks a much bigger problem.

Great disparity

In some parts of Australia – for example, the electorates of Chiefly, Fowler, and Werriwa in outer-western Sydney – more than nine in ten GP patients are always bulk billed.

But in other parts – for example, the electorates of Canberra, and Franklin and Clark in southern Tasmania – that figure is less than four in ten.

Unlike the overall bulk-billing rate, these vast disparities have persisted for many years: the problem was just as bad a decade ago.

Bulk-billing deserts wouldn’t be such a problem if they were only in the wealthiest parts of Australia, because fees are less likely to stop wealthy people getting the care they need. But there are bulk-billing deserts in many poorer areas.

Compared to all but the wealthiest areas, the bottom fifth of electorates by income have the lowest bulk-billing rates. In 13 of the lowest-income electorates, less than 60% of patients are bulk billed.

Rural areas are worse off too: 60% of patients in rural areas are always bulked billed, compared to almost 69% in metropolitan areas.

The bulk-billing deserts in poorer parts of Australia represent a serious failure of the system. Nationally, about 3.5% of people say they skip GP care because of the cost, with higher rates in rural and poorer areas. Those figures will be far higher in bulk-billing deserts, putting many people’s health at risk.

What the government should do

There have been calls to pour billions of dollars into increasing the Medicare rebate and bulk billing incentives.

But while the government should make sure payments to GPs keep up with their costs, that won’t fix the problem of bulk-billing deserts.

It might help arrest the decline in bulk billing nationally, and in some areas where bulk billing is low. But the money will mostly flow to high-bulk billing areas – it won’t do much to provide more care where there is far too little.

Read more:
General practices are struggling. Here are 5 lessons from overseas to reform the funding system

Bulk billing deserts are an enduring problem that need new solutions. To turn them around, the government must tackle two of the structural problems causing them: one-size-fits-all funding of GPs, and areas that don’t have enough health care to go around.

The government has already signalled it will develop a new funding model that pays GPs for providing ongoing care, which would improve on the current outdated and dysfunctional system. That funding should give higher payments for patients with greater need.

That would boost income for clinics with patients who need free care the most, helping those clinics to avoid charging their patients. It would be a big step in the right direction.

But even then, there would still be areas without enough health-care workers to meet the community’s needs, including many rural areas, resulting in too little care, and too little bulk billing. Governments must go well beyond the Medicare rebate and other incentives to fix these broken health-care “markets”.

The federal and state governments need to step in to support existing clinics or set up new ones that employ salaried health-care workers. This support needs to be tailored to local needs. It could be employing a GP to work out of a rural hospital if there are no GPs in the area, or setting up a new community-controlled primary care service, or helping an existing clinic hire extra staff.

Rather than ad hoc announcements, there should be secure national funding for this care, targeted at the areas of greatest need – especially the poorest bulk-billing deserts.

This change should be accompanied by many other reforms to attract clinicians to areas where they’re needed most, such as further expanding new models of GP employment and training in rural areas, which give “rural generalist” doctors a single employer during their training across a range of different health settings in a region.

There should also be reforms to expand the teams supporting GPs in areas with too little care. This can reduce GP burnout, allow clinics to provide more care, and bring Australia in line with other countries. As well as administrative, allied health, pharmacist and other roles, some teams could include physician assistants, who work under the supervision of a doctor and can provide the full range of services a doctor provides.

One test for next month’s federal budget is whether it funds solutions to bulk-billing deserts – an enduring injustice in our health-care system.

Read more:
Medicare reform is off to a promising start. Now comes the hard part

Peter Breadon’s employer, Grattan Institute, has been supported in its work by government, corporates, and philanthropic gifts. A full list of supporting organisations is published at www.grattan.edu.au.

Lachlan Fox’s employer, Grattan Institute, has been supported in its work by government, corporates, and philanthropic gifts. A full list of supporting organisations is published at www.grattan.edu.au.

– ref. If you live in a bulk-billing ‘desert’ it’s hard to see a doctor for free. Here’s how to fix this – https://theconversation.com/if-you-live-in-a-bulk-billing-desert-its-hard-to-see-a-doctor-for-free-heres-how-to-fix-this-204029

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Sprogis, Adjunct Research Fellow, UWA Oceans Institute, The University of Western Australia

Imagine … eco-tourists enjoying views of undisturbed whales and dolphins, watching them doing what comes naturally.

This is ultimately what we all wish to see when spending time in nature watching animals. We can achieve this by using quieter boats.

But why do we need quieter boats? Whales and dolphins primarily use hearing to sense their surroundings (rather than sight like humans do). Sound travels almost five times faster underwater than it does in the air, so it’s an important sense for whales. They rely on sounds to communicate, navigate, feed and detect predators.

Our new research confirms noise from a boat watching whales at a distance of 300 metres can still disturb them. And watching whales involves a lot of boats and millions of tourists each year. This multi-billion-dollar industry is active in waters off more than 100 countries. The Australian whale-watching industry is one of the biggest in the world.

Because the industry actively seeks out whales and dolphins, using quieter boats should be a priority. Yet current whale-watching guidelines, including Australia’s, do not include noise levels. They should.

As the whale-watching season begins in Australia for humpback whales and southern right whales, we offer tips here for individual operators to reduce noise from their boats.

Read more:
Thar she blows! An expert’s guide to whale watching 101

How does noise affect whales and dolphins?

Besides income for local communities, whale watching has education and conservation benefits if tourists are inspired to care for the environment.

Despite these benefits, watching whales from a motorised boat and swimming with whales can disturb their natural behaviour. For example, it might prevent them from resting or feeding, or change their breathing, swimming and dive patterns. These impacts are especially important for whales with young.

If the cumulative effects of these short-term impacts are not considered, they can lead to long-term consequences for the animals, such as population declines or leaving an area altogether.

Such outcomes are not only negative for the animals, but also for the whale-watching industry that depends on them.

Read more:
Drones gather new and useful data for marine research, but they can disturb whales and dolphins

Whale-watching guidelines overlook noise impacts

Many countries have guidelines on the boat’s minimum distance from the animals (typically around 100 metres), the speed at which it passes (typically below wake speed) and the approaching angle (typically from the side-rear). Guidelines, however, do not consider the noise level of the boat’s engine. A very loud boat is, in effect, considered to have the same impact on the animals as a very quiet boat.

Research confirms louder boat noise disturbs whales more than quiet boat noise. Boats should be as quiet as possible.

We recommend a noise threshold be added to whale-watching regulations, ideally around the volume of the natural underwater background noise. At this level, boat noise is perhaps audible to the whales but with a low perceived loudness. This change to the guidelines will help minimise disturbance to whales and dolphins.

You can see how humpback whales change their behaviour in response to low, medium and high underwater boat noise in this video from our study.

Read more:
Underwater noise is a threat to marine life

What do whale-watching boats sound like underwater?

A range of different boats are used for whale watching worldwide. We have calculated the underwater noise level of whale-watching boats operating at low speeds. The quietest boat was a hybrid boat using its electric engines.

The vessel with the quieter electric engines was later used in an experiment with short-finned pilot whales. This study compared the whales’ responses to the boat’s quieter electric engines and its louder petrol engines.

What was the result? The louder engines did indeed disturb the behaviour of short-finned pilot whales compared to the quieter engines. Notably, resting and nursing of young decreased.

Ultimately, some vessels are better designed to minimise noise emissions. You can hear the quieter electric-engined boat in this recording from the study. This makes this boat more appropriate for whale watching.

Read more:
Why scientists need your help to spot blue whales off Australia’s east coast

Noise when arriving and departing matters too

Having a quiet boat will reduce the disturbance to animals. However, even when a whale-watch operator adheres to current best-practice guidelines, there may still be disturbance.

This is because as a vessel increases in speed to leave the whales, it produces higher underwater noise levels. Our research shows this is likely to disturb whales. So we recommend boats maintain a slow speed when approaching and departing whales – say, less than 10 knots within 1km of the whales.

We know it is exciting to zoom off towards a breaching whale, leaving a sleeping whale behind, but the sudden increase in boat speed and noise may then disturb that sleeping whale.

5 tips to reduce boat noise

On an individual level, boat operators can easily reduce disturbance to whales and dolphins by considering the following five factors.

Speed increases noise from the propeller, so lower the speed, even when arriving/departing.

Distance: the closer a vessel is the greater the peak in noise, so keep to the regulated distance.

Gear shifts cause high-level noise changes, so minimise shifting.

Approach type to the animals can cause disturbance – driving in front of their path, for example, so drive in parallel to their path.

Movements of a boat, such as fast and erratic movements, can disturb animals, so drive consistently.

To further reduce noise, whale-watching companies can use larger, slower-moving propellers (to minimise the water disturbance that creates noise), quieter/electric engines and/or install noise absorption gear.

Both the industry and the whales will benefit from companies using quieter whale-watch boats and approaches.

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

– ref. Whale-watching guidelines don’t include boat noise. It’s time they did – https://theconversation.com/whale-watching-guidelines-dont-include-boat-noise-its-time-they-did-199977

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

Budgets are for stakeholders and interest groups like Christmas is for kids. They’re preceded by a multitude of letters to “Santa”, aka the treasurer, in the run-up.

For the May 9 budget, two key correspondents were appointed by the government itself. This week, the wish lists from the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee and the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce were released.

The inclusion committee, an ongoing body to review the adequacy of welfare support, was born out of a demand to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese from Senate crossbencher David Pocock last year, in exchange for his vote on the government’s industrial relations legislation.

It was always clear the committee would confront the government with more demands than could be met, and that would become a political challenge.

The taskforce, chaired by businesswoman and gender equity advocate Sam Mostyn, was set up to reflect the government’s desire to underline its policy tilt towards women.

Managing expectations before a budget is always tricky, and these committees are making this especially so for Treasurer Jim Chalmers ahead of his second budget.

The message from Chalmers is that funds are limited and the government can’t do all it might like to do (let alone all that others might want it to do).

Indeed, Chalmers is trying to find ways to constrain spending – to allow maximum room for budget repair – rather than expand it.

The Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Bill Shorten, this week outlined areas for reform of the NDIS to get it “back on track”. While Shorten stresses this is about improving outcomes, everyone in government knows the NDIS’s costs must be contained or the scheme will be totally unsustainable.

On Treasury figures, the inclusion report’s recommendations would cost more than $34 billion over the forward estimates.

The government has indicated it expects to adopt some of the proposals. But it has already shied away from the biggest one: a large increase in JobSeeker, which the report says should be taken to some 90% of the age pension (at a cost of $24 billion over the forward estimates).

Read more:
Boosting JobSeeker is the most effective way to tackle poverty: what the treasurer’s committee told him

That would restore the relativity of the mid-1990s. At present, the rate for singles is about 65% of the age pension.

Among the things on the “urgent” list of the women’s taskforce is reinstatement of the parenting payment (single) for women with children aged over eight, abolition of the childcare subsidy activity test, and investment in “an interim pay rise for all early childhood educators”.

Despite the government ruling out the “large” increase in JobSeeker, it is still possible the budget could make some change to it, among other pickings from the inclusion report.

Similarly, the government could take up the reinstatement of the parenting payment (single), for which there is considerable pressure.

The inclusion committee is chaired by former Labor minister Jenny Macklin, who has an extensive background in welfare policy, and includes substantial expertise among its members. Its report contains a plethora of detail and it is closely argued.

The report’s lens is squarely focused on issues of adequacy and poverty. While it says its JobSeeker recommendation would not be a significant discouragement to seeking paid work (and the current low rate is a barrier to doing so), some believe the recommended big lift would indeed create a disincentive in our present full employment labour market.

Many people, especially in Labor’s base, will see this report as a benchmark for what a Labor government should do to promote fairness for those at the bottom and create a more equitable society. The same applies with the women’s taskforce measures.

In that sense, the budget must inevitably fall short of the tests these reports pose for it.

Read more:
Grattan on Friday: Chalmers grapples with a budget where economics and politics pull in different directions

Commentators have already suggested a parallel, of sorts, between the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament and the inclusion committee. The comparison is a very long stretch, but in each case, special access is involved but the government isn’t bound by recommendations.

What we are seeing with the inclusion committee (and indeed the women’s taskforce) is that the demands may shape the public conversation. The same would apply with the Voice.

How the government responds to the inclusion committee in particular could affect its future relations with the Senate crossbench. Pocock is already out in the media rejecting the government’s arguments that it is constrained by a lack of resources. What about those $250 billion stage 3 tax cuts? he asks. (The government has said they won’t be touched in this budget.)

Read more:
Grattan on Friday: David Pocock has only just arrived in the Senate and now he’s negotiating with the PM

The way Pocock and other key crossbenchers react post-budget will depend on precisely what’s taken up. Pocock will be able to claim a victory if he can say his demand for the committee made a difference.

While the budget is a major juggling act for Chalmers, his reform of the Reserve Bank is shaping up, in political terms, as an easier task.

The changes in the report from the review panel, released on Thursday and accepted in principle by the government, are extensive. These include setting up an expert board that would decide monetary policy, which would be separate from the bank’s general board. The aim is to improve the decision-making of the bank, which has come under sharp criticism in the wake of its recent performance on interest rates.

Some of the changes will require legislation, for which Chalmers has been very anxious to get a bipartisan approach. He doesn’t want to have to haggle with the Senate crossbenchers, cutting deals and finding trade-offs, in this sensitive area.

So he has engaged the shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor, during the review process. Taylor has been briefed along the way and was given an advance copy of the report.

The strategy appears to have paid off. Taylor was positive about the review’s plan for a board of experts, and said: “It is the Coalition’s intention to continue to approach the implementation of this review with a spirit of bipartisanship.”

It’s a rare and welcome move away from the opposition’s usual hyper-negativity.

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

– ref. Grattan on Friday: The government invited ambit claims for the budget and now it will be judged against them – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-the-government-invited-ambit-claims-for-the-budget-and-now-it-will-be-judged-against-them-204193

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Partlett, Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne

This week, Victoria’s Independent Broad-Based Anti-corruption Commission (known as IBAC) issued a finding of “improper influence” on a public contract issued by the Victorian government in 2018.

IBAC did not find any “corrupt conduct” under the IBAC Act and no minister was directly involved.

On this basis, it might be possible to dismiss this report as the regrettable result of a complex governmental apparatus. After all, this was a small contract in the grand scheme of Victorian state spending, and you might think the news cycle should move on to focus on more important issues.

But this report should not be ignored. It casts important light on a growing threat to Australian parliamentary democracy: the exercise of public power by unaccountable ministerial advisors.

Operation Daintree

The Operation Daintree report investigated a $1.2 million contract between the Victorian health department and the Health Education Federation (HEF) to provide occupational violence and aggression training to health workers. The contract was signed in the hours before Victoria’s government went into caretaker mode prior to the 2018 election (the government can’t sign contracts in caretaker mode).

Despite having no relevant experience in this kind of training, HEF received this contract without a competitive tender process.

IBAC found two ministerial advisors “improperly influenced” this contract. These advisors – who are employed by the premier under Victorian law – put pressure on key public servants to award the contract to HEF.

Former Health Minister Jenny Mikakos described this pressure as a reflection of the interest of the “premier’s office” in “accommodat[ing] any union concerns”.

A threat to responsible government

Australian democracy is built on the concept of “responsible government” in which parliament holds governmental ministers to account through lawmaking and oversight. Although parliament doesn’t actually prosecute governmental misconduct, its role as overseer generates crucial information and publicity that holds these governmental ministers politically accountable.

Operation Daintree details an emerging gap in this traditional form of democratic oversight and accountability: the rise of powerful ministerial advisors.

Ministerial advisors are more powerful than ever at all levels of Australian government. For instance, former prime minister Tony Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, was widely regarded as one of the powerful players in the federal government at the time. One Liberal Party insider said of her: “She’s tough, she’s a player, she makes demands, she gives directions, she bawls people out.”

While these advisors play an increasingly powerful role in governance, they tend to operate in the shadows. In contrast to the rigorous standards of independence for public servants, ministerial advisors are political appointees who are largely accountable only to their minister. For instance, advisors are generally thought to be immune from testifying to parliament.

In this position, they can operate in a way they think the minister would support, while providing plausible deniability to that same minister.

Read more:
‘Sports rorts’ shows the government misunderstands the public service

This problem isn’t unique to Victoria. It also emerged in the so-called “sports rorts” scandal under former prime minister Scott Morrison.

In that case, Commonwealth grants were awarded to sports clubs in important constituencies in the upcoming election. The relevant minister, Bridget McKenzie, sought to deflect blame for this allocation of money onto unnamed advisors.

Associate Professor Yee-Fui Ng at Monash University describes their rise broadly as contributing to the “erosion” of ministerial responsibility.

Injecting accountability back into the system

How can we address this increasing problem of unaccountable ministerial advisors?

One option is expanding the Ministerial Staff Code of Conduct to cover more of their activities. This would go some way to bringing them out of the shadows.

But another vital reform is to shine more light on advisors. Parliament must hold ministers – including the prime minister or premier – responsible for the actions of their advisors. This should happen through an independent parliamentary committee that has the explicit legal authority to call both ministers and their advisors to answer for their actions.

IBAC hints at this very solution in the report. In the report, IBAC says the Victorian parliament may hold the premier “personally responsible” for “the conduct of his staff and its consequences, where he was aware of their actions or ought reasonably to have been aware of them”.

Read more:
Will the National Anti-Corruption Commission actually stamp out corruption in government?

The obvious institution to do this would be an independent Parliamentary Ethics Committee, which IBAC and the ombudsman called for in the Operation Watts report in 2022.

This committee should have the power to call witnesses and further investigate unethical conduct that does not meet the definition of corrupt conduct. This kind of parliamentary inquiry would shine important light on bad governance and serve as a powerful deterrent for further actions like this.

This solution carries broader lessons, too. It suggests that improving governmental integrity – particularly the kind of so-called “grey corruption” at issue here – isn’t just the business of anti-corruption bodies. It also must be the business of parliament.

Independent committee scrutiny of unethical behaviour is just one example of parliamentary involvement. It could also include stronger legal requirements that ministers (including the premier or prime minister) respond openly to questions from parliament.

Overall, these reforms are critical in ensuring parliament is restored as the original integrity institution in Australian parliamentary democracy.

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

– ref. The rise of unaccountable ministerial advisors: why Victoria’s IBAC report should concern all Australians – https://theconversation.com/the-rise-of-unaccountable-ministerial-advisors-why-victorias-ibac-report-should-concern-all-australians-204191

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Michael McCarthy, Emeritus Professor, School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia

Education Minister Jason Clare has just released a highly anticipated review into how research is funded in Australia.

This is the review of the federal legislation underpinning the Australian Research Council (ARC).

The ARC is the independent body that funds non-medical university research in Australia. So it has a hugely important role in the careers of academics.

This review follows years of concerns about political interference in ARC decisions and low success rates for academics applying for funding.

What does the review say?

The review began last year and was led by Queensland University of Technology Vice-Chancellor Margaret Sheil. It is a comprehensive product, containing ten considered recommendations on how to enhance the ARC’s procedures. The review says these

aim to enhance the trust in the ARC by the government and the research community.

They include:

• clarifying the purpose of the ARC
• further clarity and insight into the role and impact of the ARC in relation to supporting academic careers and
• more ARC fellowships for Indigenous academics.

At the heart of the review is the recommendation for a new ARC board of directors, appointed by the education minister, to run the ARC separate from political interference.

This would remove the capacity of ministers to step in and block funding to certain projects at the last minute.

The objective is to make the ARC more independent – in legislation and practice – so it can act at arm’s length from the government of the day.

A more autonomous ARC

Historically, the review harks back to the foundation of the ARC as an autonomous non-government organisation in 1988. But even then, the final say over grants was given to the education minister of the day.

As the review notes, since its legislation was updated in 2001, the ARC’s autonomy has declined, along with trust in its work.

This was highlighted by ministerial interventions to veto grants in the humanities and social science in at least five separate occasions (most recently by former minister Stuart Robert in 2021).

Ministerial veto power change

Significantly, the review recommends the ARC be given the full power to make decisions over research grants (officially called the National Competitive Grants Program).

It notes there should be checks and balances and the minister could still intervene in the “extraordinary circumstance of a potential threat to national security”.

Here, the board will be critical. It will have responsibility for appointing the ARC’s CEO, as well as the the college of experts (who assess grant applications). It will then approve grant recommendations by the college.

The board would still be appointed by the minister. It would include a chair who is a “prominent Australian, held in high regard by the universities” and six other members with combined skills across ARC disciplines, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island leadership in research.

The minister’s role in appointing the board and chair does not guarantee these appointments are immune from party politics and ideology. However, the aim of keeping ministers at arm’s length from the ARC grant processes is a step in the right direction.

Simpler grant applications

One of the major frustrations researchers have with the ARC process is the time it takes to apply for grants and the low rates of success.

Here, the review recommends a constructive change. Under a new model, researchers would apply via a two-step process.

Firstly, they would provide a brief outline of the research objective to the ARC. The ARC would assess it and make recommendations on whether a full, second-round application is warranted.

It does not guarantee a rise in success rates as this is tied to the substantive issue of available funding. But it does alleviate the arduous and overly bureaucratic approach of the current model, both for researchers and university research branches.

Read more:
A review into how university research works in Australia has just begun – it must confront these 3 issues

A new auditing role

A decisive recommendation is for a change to the ARC’s role in auditing research for quality. Previously, this has been done through the Excellence in Research Australia process via university submissions.

The review strongly opposes the existing metric-driven model, noting “the evidence that metrics can be biased or inherently flawed”.

Instead, the review wants to see a new approach whereby the ARC would cooperate with TEQSA – the university regulatory body – to develop a framework for research quality and impact.

This change will be welcomed by universities and academics, as the previous model tended to be top-heavy in its approach.

What about funding?

One issue with the review is its silence about funding. While this silence was not unexpected (terms of reference were aimed at the procedures not financing), it is still an issue.

For universities, ARC funding does not currently meet their costs in both infrastructure and staffing to service the ARC grant.

So universities largely rely on overseas student fees to meet research costs. As the pandemic showed us, these are subject to fluctuations.

This unpredictability has ramifications for university budgets and staffing, as well as the quality of research.

A step forward

Overall, the review is a step in the right direction for the academic research community and for the clarity of purpose and procedures of the ARC.

But the big question remains: will the ARC be given more adequate funds for research in Australia?

On this matter, we must turn to the current review for the Universities Accord. The federal government says this ARC review will be considered as part of broader discussions around the accord. Here, we can expect a draft in June.

When it comes to the ARC review, Clare says he will “consider the findings […] and respond in due course”.

Read more:
Introducing our new series on the future of Australian higher education

Gregory Michael McCarthy received funding from the ARC in the past.

– ref. A major review has recommended more independence for decisions about research funding in Australia – https://theconversation.com/a-major-review-has-recommended-more-independence-for-decisions-about-research-funding-in-australia-204184

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

With the Liberal Party formally opposing the Voice, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton last week kicked off his no campaign in Alice Springs. His claim that child sexual abuse is rife was quickly under attack from the government and others who accused him of politicking, using the issue as a political football.

Marion Scrymgour, a former deputy chief minister in the Northern Territory, is the federal Labor member for the seat of Lingiari, an electorate covering almost all the NT outside Darwin.

Scrymgour says Dutton is taking up the same theme as was heard in the Northern Territory intervention. “The same campaign that was done to justify the intervention is the same campaign that’s been happening with the Leader of the Opposition.

“I’m not saying that he doesn’t have a commitment to getting this issue dealt with,” she says. But she rejects the “excuse” by Dutton, his new shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Jacinta Price and others that “he can’t put forward the names”.

“That’s a complete abrogation of their responsibility. Those stories and the names of people putting forward those stories could be done in a confidential way.”

Scrymgour has proposed a statutory Family Responsibility Commission, as operates in Queensland. “I think that the important part of the Family Responsibility Commission is that it’s Aboriginal community-controlled, that you get Aboriginal people, Aboriginal leaders that go through a vetting process.

“The families are brought before the commission: they look at school attendance, they look at all of the wellbeing of the child […] but also what are the supports that the family needs to be wrapped around.

“The family has to sign a family responsibility agreement and then those agreements get entered into by both the commissioner, who has legal standing, as well as the family”.

There has been a push lately, including from Senate crossbencher Jacqui Lambie, to reinstate a former employment program to bring jobs, skills and pride back the communities in the NT.

Scrymgour tells the podcast: “We need to get beyond talking about this […] and actually get this program rolled out. I agree with Jacqui Lambie.

“This is a program that was in the Northern Territory almost 15 years ago. Everyone in a lot of the communities were employed and communities were happy and healthy and we need to hurry up […] and we need to move on that.”

Scrymgour, who immediately before the podcast had been talking about the Voice in remote communities, admits there is a vast array of opinion on the ground, and more information and clarity is needed.

“Look, you’ve got people who’ve got different views in a lot of the communities and I’ve just come back from my own community on the on the Tiwi Islands, and there was some great discussion and support for the Voice. But before that support came, people needed to know about it.”

She does, however, believe the “vibe is good” on the ground and in the community.

“The vibe was really good. I found the vibe really, really interesting yesterday. It was good. There were people who weren’t convinced, but people who sort of didn’t understand it. And then when I talked about what was different about constitutional recognition and how that would apply, it generated the discussion about ATSIC [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission], because a lot of communities still remember ATSIC, and often people talk about ATSIC and they say that they got rid of it and that was their voice. So it then generates another discussion about that. But this Voice won’t be able to be got rid of like that because it’ll be embedded in the Constitution.

“A lot of the Land Council men, you know, sort of stood up and said, Oh, well, we don’t agree with what you’re saying. We think that we’ve just got to talk about this. And, you know, this is a good thing. Let’s talk about how this could be something that we can all get behind.

“So I’m going to set another time where I can go back and sit down with my mob and go through it. But I’ll do that with all the communities.”

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

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Labor MP Marion Scrymgour on the Voice and the need for a new NT jobs program – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-labor-mp-marion-scrymgour-on-the-voice-and-the-need-for-a-new-nt-jobs-program-204129

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jamie Pittock, Professor, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University

Governments love the idea of a win-win – even when it doesn’t exist. That’s why Victoria has been spending millions on planning “red gum irrigation ponds” – essentially, engineered wetlands along the River Murray. These wetlands are designed to save some red gum ecosystems, leave many others to decline, and redirect billions of litres of water promised to the environment to farmers.

Controversy has followed these projects. Now, Victoria appears to have blinked, with the state’s water minister, Harriet Shing, halting the development of four of nine projects.

Victory for environmental water? Not quite. Victoria has spent around A$54 million just on planning these projects. By halting four of them, it sets the scene for a larger-scale federal buyback of water for the environment. This could signal a resumption of the Murray-Darling Basin water wars, with Victoria the last holdout. National Irrigators’ Council chair Jeremy Morton predicted “riot” if further water buybacks went ahead.

What was Victoria trying to do?

Historically, flooding covered 6.3 million hectares of red gum, black box and coolibah forests, lakes and billabongs in the Murray-Darling Basin. These forests rely on regular floods to survive.

But the basin is also home to most of our thirsty crops, from rice to cotton to orchards. The demand for irrigation alongside the long-term drying trend from climate change means something has had to give. You guessed it: it’s the wetlands, which are drying out and dying.

In 2012, state and federal governments launched the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in a bid to solve longstanding tussles over water. The plan was intended to preserve environmental flows while allocating set volumes of water to farmers.

But it’s not working properly. As our research shows, only 2% of the basin’s wetlands have received managed environmental flows each year since.

To keep wetlands alive with less water, there are two basic options: use pulsed flows from dams to flood a larger area, or build floodplain infrastructure to maintain some wetlands while abandoning others.

Victoria has pursued infrastructure. As originally planned, these projects would have meant building $320 million of dams, pumps, levees and roads in conservation reserves to artificially pond water – while leaving less water in the main river channels. Similar projects were proposed in New South Wales at Menindee Lakes, but these are unlikely to proceed.

These projects are greenwashed as “environmental works”. Victoria brazenly calls its plan a “floodplain restoration project”.

It is not. Since the plan began, irrigators have been credited with 605 billion litres of water for 36 largely unimplemented projects under the sustainable diversion mechanism. In November 2022, basin authority chief
Andrew McConville laid out the problem:

The credit has been banked, but the payment still needs to be delivered. The payment is in the form of the [wetland] projects being in operation by 30 June 2024.

Water has been credited to irrigators before the wetland projects were built. As a result, actual environmental flows are 19% lower than the Basin Plan target of 3,200 billion litres per year.

Building wetland infrastructure is unprecedented

Around the world, nations are going the other way to Victoria and removing floodplain infrastructure. In China, across Europe and in the United States, efforts are under way to reconnect rivers to their floodplains. Why? To reduce flood impacts (levees intensify floods downstream), improve water quality, restore flood-dependent ecosystems, make river systems more recreation-friendly and diversify local economies.

Only in the Murray-Darling Basin are we seeing governments building infrastructure for environmental water offsetting on such a huge scale.

And just as controversies have dogged Australia’s attempts to offset biodiversity losses and carbon emissions, there are major problems with water offsetting.

The reason for this offsetting is political, not ecological. In 2012, Victoria’s then water minister, Peter Walsh, stated the plan was meant to:

stop irrigation water being stripped from rural communities and food and fibre producers, and to achieve better environmental outcomes.

À lire aussi :
It’s official: the Murray-Darling Basin Plan hasn’t met its promise to our precious rivers. So where to now?

In fact, these projects are environmentally dubious. Ponding water on floodplains may meet some ecological targets, but it cannot replicate unconstrained natural floods. Worse, it risks harming ecosystems by upending aquatic food webs and leading to lower native fish populations and worse water quality.

Victoria’s very expensive projects would water only 14,000 hectares of wetlands. By contrast, safe flood pulse releases from existing dams would water 27 times that area – 375,000 hectares.

In his royal commission report into how the Murray-Darling water-sharing system works, Commissioner Brett Walker found there was “real doubt” over whether projects like this were based on the best scientific knowledge.

Our research backs his conclusions. We have found flaws in how these projects are evaluated, which mean their environmental benefits are overstated.

What’s likely to happen now?

Four down – but what about the remaining five projects?

There’s a better option. In 2013, the basin’s governments agreed to a strategy that would allow pulsed releases from existing dams to fill river channels and spill onto the floodplains.

Under this strategy, the Commonwealth would pay for roads and bridges to be removed or raised to make way for restoration of natural floods, and for compensation to landowners.

Our research shows this approach would reduce flood damage by moving infrastructure off floodplains, and allow floods to spread out more, lowering water height and speed. It would also water a much larger wetland area at far less cost. But the strategy has not yet been implemented.

Next month, federal and state water ministers will meet to discuss the failing basin plan. If the new NSW water minister, Rose Jackson, backs her federal Labor colleagues, it will leave Victoria as the last state objecting to water purchases for river restoration.

The federal water minister, Tanya Plibersek, shows every indication of implementing Labor’s 2022 election policy of buying back the remaining water needed to meet the 3,200 billion litre environmental restoration target under the plan. (The federal government has bought back around 2,100 billion litres since 2008.)

The stage is set: will Plibersek prevail and finally achieve long-sought environmental restoration goals under the basin plan, or will Victoria hold out?

À lire aussi :
Money for dams dries up as good water management finally makes it into a federal budget

Jamie Pittock is affiliated with the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists and a number of other non-governmental environment organisations. In the past he has received funding from the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility.

Matthew Colloff is affiliated with the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists. In the past he has been a member of project teams within CSIRO that have received funding from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder.

– ref. Victoria’s plans for engineered wetlands on the Murray are environmentally dubious. Here’s a better option – https://theconversation.com/victorias-plans-for-engineered-wetlands-on-the-murray-are-environmentally-dubious-heres-a-better-option-204116

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

With the Liberal Party formally opposing the Voice, Peter Dutton last week kicked off his “no” campaign in Alice Springs. His claim that child sexual abuse is rife was quickly under attack from the government and others who accused him of politicking, using the issue as a political football.

Marion Scrymgour, a former deputy chief minister in the Northern Territory, is the federal Labor member for the seat of Lingiari, an electorate covering almost all the NT outside Darwin.

Scrymgour says Dutton is taking up the same theme as was heard in the Northern Territory intervention. “The same campaign that was done to justify the intervention is the same campaign that’s been happening with the Leader of the Opposition.

“I’m not saying that he doesn’t have a commitment to getting this issue dealt with,” she says. But she rejects the “excuse” by Dutton, his new shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Jacinta Price and others that “he can’t put forward the names”.

“That’s a complete abrogation of their responsibility. Those stories and the names of people putting forward those stories could be done in a confidential way.”

Scrymgour has proposed a statutory Family Responsibility Commission, as operates in Queensland. “I think that the important part of the Family Responsibility Commission is that it’s Aboriginal community-controlled, that you get Aboriginal people, Aboriginal leaders that go through a vetting process.

“The families are brought before the commission: they look at school attendance, they look at all of the wellbeing of the child […] but also what are the supports that the family needs to be wrapped around.

“The family has to sign a family responsibility agreement and then those agreements get entered into by both the commissioner, who has legal standing, as well as the family”.

There has been a push lately, including from Senate crossbencher Jacqui Lambie, to reinstate the community development program to bring jobs, skills and pride back the communities in the NT.

Scrymgour tells the podcast: “We need to get beyond talking about this […] and actually get this program rolled out. I agree with Jacqui Lambie.

“This is a program that was in the Northern Territory almost 15 years ago. Everyone in a lot of the communities were employed and communities were happy and healthy and we need to hurry up and do it because all my trips out bush and when I’m getting around the regions, everyone asks about CDP, so we need to move on that.”

Scrymgour, who immediately before the podcast had been talking about the Voice in remote communities, admits there is a vast array of opinion on the ground, and more information and clarity is needed.

“Look, you’ve got people who’ve got different views in a lot of the communities and I’ve just come back from my own community on the on the Tiwi Islands, and there was some great discussion and support for the Voice. But before that support came, people needed to know about it.”

She does, however, believe the “vibe is good” on the ground and in the community.

“The vibe was really good. I found the vibe really, really interesting yesterday. It was good. There were people who weren’t convinced, but people who sort of didn’t understand it. And then when I talked about what was different about constitutional recognition and how that would apply, it generated the discussion about ATSIC [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission], because a lot of communities still remember ATSIC, and often people talk about ATSIC and they say that they got rid of it and that was their voice. So it then generates another discussion about that. But this Voice won’t be able to be got rid of like that because it’ll be embedded in the Constitution.

“A lot of the Land Council men, you know, sort of stood up and said, Oh, well, we don’t agree with what you’re saying. We think that we’ve just got to talk about this. And, you know, this is a good thing. Let’s talk about how this could be something that we can all get behind.

“So I’m going to set another time where I can go back and sit down with my mob and go through it. But I’ll do that with all the communities.”

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

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Labor MP Marion Scrymgour on her yes campaign trail, and reinstating the CDP – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-labor-mp-marion-scrymgour-on-her-yes-campaign-trail-and-reinstating-the-cdp-204129

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sagarika Mishra, Associate professor, Deakin University

By paying just $1 a day extra on your mortgage, you can hack the banking system and cut the time to repay your home loan from 20 years to just five years.

Sounds too good to be true? Of course it is. But that hasn’t stopped someone “good at finance” from claiming this in a TikTok video that’s garnered millions of views and spurred dozens of other “finfluencers” to amplify its claims.

According to the video: “The reason banks want you to pay interest monthly is because they rely on a thing called compound interest.” But if you pay the bank $1 every day you “will pay a big fat zero in interest”.

The video goes on to say “mortgage” is a Latin word, and the reason “they” stopped teaching Latin in schools is because “they” don’t want people understanding how the banking system works.

If this sounds like a conspiracy theory, it’s because it is. Like all conspiracy theories, this one is a falsehood built on a few grains of truth, taking advantage of people’s ignorance about complicated matters.

So let’s separate the facts from the fiction.

What is compound interest?

Compound interest, in a nutshell, is interest on interest.

Say you put $1,000 in a savings account that pays 10% interest. After the first year, you would have $1,100 ($1,000 + $100 in interest). At the end of the second year you will have $1,210 ($1,100 + $110 in interest). At the end of the third year you will have $1,331 (1,210 + $121 in interest). The interest compounds.

What if you’ve borrowed $1,000 at a 10% annual interest rate? Assuming you make no repayments, after one year you will owe $1,100 ($1,000 + $100 in interest), after two years $1,210 ($1,100 + $110 in interest), and after three years $1,331 ($1,210 + $121 in interest). Again, the interest compounds.

How to avoid compound interest

To minimise the amount of compound interest you pay, there is one effective strategy: pay off the loan as quickly as you can.

Let’s consider an example similar to the scenario mentioned in the TikTok video – a mortgage with a loan term of 20 years. To make the maths easy, let’s say the loan is for $500,000 with a 5% interest rate. To pay it off in the allotted time will require monthly repayments of about $3,300 – or $39,600 a year.

Over 20 years you will pay about $792,000 – with about $291,950 being interest. The following graph shows this.

Now let’s consider what would happen if, instead of paying $3,300 a month, you paid $1,650 a fortnight. At first glance, that might seem like the same thing.

Why? In a year there are 12 months, but 26 fortnights (because only February is exactly four weeks’ long). Paying half your monthly repayment every fortnight will mean you pay $42,900 a year, instead of $39,600.

If you can afford to do that, it would take just 17 years and six months to repay the loan, and you will pay about $41,750 less interest. The following graph illustrates this.

So what about paying daily?

Paying more frequently, such as weekly or daily, won’t make any difference unless you’re paying more.

There’s no magic trick to stopping compound interest. The following graph shows what an extra $1 a day would achieve with our hypothetical $500,000 loan.

Rather than taking 20 years to repay the loan, it will take 19 years and nine months. You would save about $5,470 in interest (paying about $286,480 rather than $291,950).

To repay the loan in five years, as claimed, would require paying an extra $201 a day – or about $113,220 a year instead of $39,600.

There are no secret hacks

So there’s no magic hack to avoid compound interest.

There are strategies to improve your loan conditions, such as refinancing when interest rates are declining, or using an offset account facility where these are offered.

But the only real way to minimise compound interest on your mortgage is to pay off what you owe as quickly as you can.

But before you do, check with your bank if there are fees involved if you make additional payments towards your home loan.

For instance, if you have a partially or fully fixed mortgage, there may be a limit on how much extra you’re allowed to pay off each year without penalty.

These penalties are intended to compensate the bank for the loss of interest income it would have received if the borrower had continued to make regular payments over the full loan term.

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

– ref. You can’t beat the bank by paying $1 a day extra on your mortgage. Here’s how compound interest really works – https://theconversation.com/you-cant-beat-the-bank-by-paying-1-a-day-extra-on-your-mortgage-heres-how-compound-interest-really-works-202838

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland

If you are a monarchist, or just enjoy the tradition of the royal family, you may have heard about the Coronation Quiche – made with spinach, broad beans and tarragon.

The idea is for us to make it and share it with friends and family during the coronation celebrations in May. King Charles and Queen Consort Camilla have just shared a recipe.

As dietitians, we’re interested in the quiche’s nutritional value. So we analysed its contents and found that although it’s quite a healthy dish, we could make a healthier version. Spoiler alert: the original recipe contains lard (pork fat).

We’ve also found we could make the quiche using cheaper or more easily available ingredients.

Read more:
King Charles III will be crowned in May. The ritual has ancient origins – here’s what we can expect

What exactly is a quiche?

Today, most people consider quiche a French dish that’s essentially a savoury pie. It typically consists of a pastry crust filled with a mixture of eggs, cream and cheese, plus various other ingredients such as veggies, meat and herbs.

Quiche can be served hot or cold. You can have it for breakfast, lunch or dinner with salad or veggies.

Read more:
Platinum pudding: a history of desserts with royal connections

How much does it cost?

Quiches are usually quite economical to make. Most of the basic ingredients are cheap, and you can adapt the fillings depending on what’s in the fridge or left over from recent meals.

Let’s see if this applies to the Coronation Quiche. We split the costs into typical quantities you can buy at the shops (for instance, six eggs) and the costs to make the quiche (which only needs two eggs).

If you make the quiche from scratch and have to buy the ingredients in quantities sold in the shops, this will cost you almost A$38. Although this may seem a lot, you’ll have some ingredients left over for another meal.

So how much do the ingredients cost for one quiche? We worked it out at
$12 for the entire quiche, or $2 a serve. Quite reasonable!

Can you make it even cheaper?

Busy lives and the rising cost of living are front of mind right now. So here are a few things you can do to save time and money when making a Coronation Quiche:

• buy pre-made pastry. Keep any sheets you don’t use for the quiche in the freezer

• use home-brand products where possible

• consider vegetable shortening as it is a little cheaper than lard

• buy vegetables in season and from a farmers’ market

• can’t find tarragon? Try seasonal and cheap herbs such as parsley, basil or rosemary

• can’t find broad beans? Try cheaper pulses such as edamame or cannellini beans.

Read more:
Are home-brand foods healthy? If you read the label, you may be pleasantly surprised

How nutritious is the Coronation Quiche?

We also looked at the Coronation Quiche’s nutritional profile. We expressed quantities for the whole quiche, and per serve.

The healthy … and the not so healthy

This quiche has high amounts of healthy protein and fibre that come from the broad beans and eggs.

One serving of this quiche gives you about 18-25% of your daily protein and about 10% of your daily fibre requirements, which is great.

But the quiche has high levels of saturated fat, mostly from its high amounts of lard, butter and cream.

Saturated fat has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular events, such as heart attacks and stroke, because it raises levels of LDL cholesterol (the bad kind of cholesterol).

This LDL cholesterol can build up in the walls of arteries and form plaques, leading to arteries hardening over time and increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke. So, high amounts of saturated fats is something we want to avoid eating too much of, especially if we have cardiovascular disease. It’s also something we want to avoid if we’re trying to lose weight.

For an average Aussie consuming roughly 9,000 kilojoules per day, the recommended maximum intake of saturated fat is about 24 grams.

Just one serve of this quiche has about 17g of saturated fat, which means there’s not much wriggle room for other foods after you have a slice.

You may be better off trying this quiche instead, as it has half the amount of saturated fat as the Coronation Quiche. You could even try a crustless quiche.

Read more:
Health Check: is margarine actually better for me than butter?

4 ways to make a healthier quiche

Here are a few swaps to help make this recipe healthier:

1. Use low-fat options. If you’re watching your weight and looking to reduce the kilojoules of the quiche, swap the full-fat cheddar cheese, milk and double cream to low-fat products. This will reduce the total fat content per serve from 29.6g to 15g and save 112.2 kilojoules per serve

2. Ditch the lard. Swap the lard for butter to save 15g of total fat per serve. This may change the texture of the quiche slightly but it will reduce the kilojoules

3. Use feta. Swap the cheddar cheese for feta cheese, which has fewer kilojoules per gram

4. Add extra veggies. This increases the fibre content of the quiche and adds loads of extra nutrients.

Lauren Ball works for The University of Queensland and receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council. She is a Director of Dietitians Australia, a Director of the Darling Downs and West Moreton Primary Health Network and an Associate Member of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.

Emily Burch works for Southern Cross University.

– ref. Coronation Quiche anyone? You’ll need to fork out A$38. Here are cheaper and healthier options – https://theconversation.com/coronation-quiche-anyone-youll-need-to-fork-out-a-38-here-are-cheaper-and-healthier-options-204100

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna Matheson, Associate Professor in Public Health and Policy, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

In the face of multiple environmental and social crises, the long-term solution to achieving fairer and healthier societies on a liveable planet will not be a technical fix. It will be a fundamental change to the way communities work.

Although we are more connected than ever virtually, where we live continues to shape many aspects of our lives. This includes food security, the quality of services, the state of essential infrastructure, employment conditions, access to information and the ability to participate in democracy and governance.

Inequality is not only an outcome. It is a process that implicates a whole system of resource extraction, with impacts for all of us through the depletion of those resources and the polarisation of social groups through growing inequity.

For some communities, especially those already with less money, fewer decision-making opportunities and poorer connection to wider society, the impacts are worse.

For the health sector in particular, the global evidence shows a strong and enduring relationship between health outcomes and geographic areas, with people in poorer regions having shorter lives than those in wealthier places.

It is no surprise New Zealanders experience a “postcode lottery” in health. But the causes of health inequality extend beyond the influence of the now dismantled District Health Boards (DHBs).

Read more:
NZ’s health system has been under pressure for decades. Reforms need to think big and long-term to be effective

Inequality is a policy and governance choice

The sum of policy attempts to reduce inequality – from taxation and regulation to health and welfare delivery – have so far not even come close to stemming the flow of resources away from local communities.

I have heard plenty of times from people working for social change in socioeconomically under-served communities about the lack of improvement, or even deterioration, despite significant financial investment.

Don’t get me wrong. Money, and more of it, is needed. But it needs to be delivered differently and accompanied by better ways of organising and working. Our current policy systems prefer blunt, siloed, distant approaches that work against learning and adapting as we go. They keep some communities from meeting basic needs, let alone being able to transform.

Societal complexity has been increasing. Growing populations and their interaction, made possible through technologies such as social media, have created “communities” of people who are geographically distant from each other. This distance has increased the challenge for our policy systems to achieve health and social goals.

The demise of DHBs shows our longstanding problem with implementation. So do primary health organisations, which were established in 2002. The latter were intended to transform local health systems, but have not yet improved equitable access, let alone spread innovative practice.

Instead, Māori, Pacific and other community organisations continue to plug local health-system gaps, despite insecure and short-term funding and the challenging community needs they respond to.

Read more:
New authority could transform Māori health, but only if it’s a leader, not a partner

Where health funding hasn’t extended to the wider socioeconomic determinants such as poverty, these organisations have carried costs to provide for basic needs such as food and transport. Where contracts don’t allow long-term planning, they have provided continuity despite uncertainty.

Where a siloed policy focus discourages local cooperation, they have pooled resources. Where adaptation has not been supported and local information has no pathways, they have gathered their own evidence and used creative ways to reach populations.

A paradigm shift to acting within complexity

There is currently a burgeoning of better options for organising ourselves. These promote regenerative action and greater local focus through more sophisticated connections and whole-system goals.

Internationally, downscaled models of Doughnut economics and versions of the post-growth movement have been guiding governments to keep their activities from breaching planetary boundaries. These and other ways of focusing on enriching and keeping value within local communities have also been flourishing.

These approaches are making their way to Aotearoa but we already have our own policy lessons for strengthening local relationships to improve health and wellbeing, including:

• building and linking up leadership

• implementing high-trust contracting between government and communities

• learning how to use scientific evidence for local action

• developing insights as to what works to make collaboration and partnerships effective

• building local communication capacity

• recognising the value and sophistication of local social and environmental practices

• and creating ways to learn from action and evolve what is working well.

But these new approaches are still marginalised by current hierarchical, technocratic and historical paradigms of organising for health. We do, however, have an opportunity to grasp some of this innovation.

New service and community networks within the current health reforms, known as “localities”, could be transformational if set up as learning systems.

Rather than being driven by data and technology, “human learning systems” support timely reflection on successes and failures, and share expert and local knowledge. They are better able to respond to changing needs and offer a way for all communities to have agency and a voice.

If done right, these new services could be central, adaptive cogs within the health system, turning information and resources into evidence-based change for better health and wellbeing. The co-benefits include strengthening societal cohesion and a head start for all communities to respond to threats such as pandemics, natural disasters and climate change.

How we organise the health system is critical. We need to think longer-term and short circuit the perpetual cycles of inequality that capitalism has wrought. Investing energy in how we organise locally could be that circuit breaker.

Anna Matheson receives funding from Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand, Te Pūnaha Matatini – the Aotearoa NZ Centre of Research Excellence in complex systems, Health Research Council of New Zealand.

– ref. Ending the ‘postcode lottery’ in health is more than a technical fix – it means fundamentally reorganising our systems – https://theconversation.com/ending-the-postcode-lottery-in-health-is-more-than-a-technical-fix-it-means-fundamentally-reorganising-our-systems-202336

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna Matheson, Associate Professor in Public Health and Policy, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

In the face of multiple environmental and social crises, the long-term solution to achieving fairer and healthier societies on a liveable planet will not be a technical fix. It will be a fundamental change to the way communities work.

Although we are more connected than ever virtually, where we live continues to shape many aspects of our lives. This includes food security, the quality of services, the state of essential infrastructure, employment conditions, access to information and the ability to participate in democracy and governance.

Inequality is not only an outcome. It is a process that implicates a whole system of resource extraction, with impacts for all of us through the depletion of those resources and the polarisation of social groups through growing inequity.

For some communities, especially those already with less money, fewer decision-making opportunities and poorer connection to wider society, the impacts are worse.

For the health sector in particular, the global evidence shows a strong and enduring relationship between health outcomes and geographic areas, with people in poorer regions having shorter lives than those in wealthier places.

It is no surprise New Zealanders experience a “post-code lottery” in health. But the causes of health inequality extend beyond the influence of the now dismantled District Health Boards (DHBs).

Read more:
NZ’s health system has been under pressure for decades. Reforms need to think big and long-term to be effective

Inequality is a policy and governance choice

The sum of policy attempts to reduce inequality – from taxation and regulation to health and welfare delivery – have so far not even come close to stemming the flow of resources away from local communities.

I have heard plenty of times from people working for social change in socioeconomically under-served communities about the lack of improvement, or even deterioration, despite significant financial investment.

Don’t get me wrong. Money, and more of it, is needed. But it needs to be delivered differently and accompanied by better ways of organising and working. Our current policy systems prefer blunt, siloed, distant approaches that work against learning and adapting as we go. They keep some communities from meeting basic needs, let alone being able to transform.

Societal complexity has been increasing. Growing populations and their interaction, made possible through technologies such as social media, have created “communities” of people who are geographically distant from each other. This distance has increased the challenge for our policy systems to achieve health and social goals.

The demise of DHBs shows our longstanding problem with implementation. So do primary health organisations, which were established in 2002. The latter were intended to transform local health systems, but have not yet improved equitable access, let alone spread innovative practice.

Instead, Māori, Pacific and other community organisations continue to plug local health-system gaps, despite insecure and short-term funding and the challenging community needs they respond to.

Read more:
New authority could transform Māori health, but only if it’s a leader, not a partner

Where health funding hasn’t extended to the wider socioeconomic determinants such as poverty, these organisations have carried costs to provide for basic needs such as food and transport. Where contracts don’t allow long-term planning, they have provided continuity despite uncertainty.

Where a siloed policy focus discourages local cooperation, they have pooled resources. Where adaptation has not been supported and local information has no pathways, they have gathered their own evidence and used creative ways to reach populations.

A paradigm shift to acting within complexity

There is currently a burgeoning of better options for organising ourselves. These promote regenerative action and greater local focus through more sophisticated connections and whole-system goals.

Internationally, downscaled models of Doughnut economics and versions of the post-growth movement have been guiding governments to keep their activities from breaching planetary boundaries. These and other ways of focusing on enriching and keeping value within local communities have also been flourishing.

These approaches are making their way to Aotearoa but we already have our own policy lessons for strengthening local relationships to improve health and wellbeing, including:

• building and linking up leadership

• implementing high-trust contracting between government and communities

• learning how to use scientific evidence for local action

• developing insights as to what works to make collaboration and partnerships effective

• building local communication capacity

• recognising the value and sophistication of local social and environmental practices

• and creating ways to learn from action and evolve what is working well.

But these new approaches are still marginalised by current hierarchical, technocratic and historical paradigms of organising for health. We do, however, have an opportunity to grasp some of this innovation.

New service and community networks within the current health reforms, known as “localities”, could be transformational if set up as learning systems.

Rather than being driven by data and technology, “human learning systems” support timely reflection on successes and failures, and share expert and local knowledge. They are better able to respond to changing needs and offer a way for all communities to have agency and a voice.

If done right, these new services could be central, adaptive cogs within the health system, turning information and resources into evidence-based change for better health and wellbeing. The co-benefits include strengthening societal cohesion and a head start for all communities to respond to threats such as pandemics, natural disasters and climate change.

How we organise the health system is critical. We need to think longer-term and short circuit the perpetual cycles of inequality that capitalism has wrought. Investing energy in how we organise locally could be that circuit breaker.

Anna Matheson receives funding from Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand, Te Pūnaha Matatini – the Aotearoa NZ Centre of Research Excellence in complex systems, Health Research Council of New Zealand.

– ref. Ending the ‘post-code lottery’ in health is more than a technical fix – it means fundamentally reorganising our systems – https://theconversation.com/ending-the-post-code-lottery-in-health-is-more-than-a-technical-fix-it-means-fundamentally-reorganising-our-systems-202336

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Isaac Gross, Lecturer in Economics, Monash University

The review into the Reserve Bank of Australia has just been published by Treasurer Jim Chalmers, and it’s a blockbuster.

The review has made 51 recommendations including:

• taking away power over interest rates from the Reserve Bank board (which has traditionally been dominated by non-economists, usually corporate executives) and devolving it to a panel of experts

• reducing the number of decision-making meetings from 11 to eight per year

• boosting the transparency of its decision-making process and holding it more accountable for those decisions.

Chalmers offered in-principle agreement to all 51 of the panel’s recommendations and would be seeking support from the Opposition for any legislation needed to implement them. The review has briefed Opposition Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor on its thinking.

Chalmers set up the three-person review in July 2022, appointing Carolyn Wilkins, a former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, Renée Fry-McKibbin, of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, and
Gordon de Brouwer, a specialist in public sector reform.

What was the problem?

While the apparent nature of the problem has changed over time, its root cause remains the same.

When the concept of the review was first mooted in 2020, the economy was in a bad state with inflation well below the bank’s target band of 2-3% and economic growth anaemic.

As a result, wage growth was too low and unemployment too high.

The most likely explanation is that the bank was focused too much on stabilising the financial system and too little on boosting the economy.

The bank was setting interest rates using its gut instead of its brain, in an almost literal sense – it was not doing what its computer model suggested it should do.

As the inquiry started, the problem had flipped. Inflation was too high.

But the underlying problem – that the board was populated by monetary policy amateurs rather than experts – remained the same.

The review concluded that monetary policy is a complex area of public policy and is best run by a team of experts who are highly informed about the current state of the economy.

Just as we have the country’s smartest legal minds on the High Court of Australia and our best health practitioners setting vaccine policy, it felt we should have Australia’s best macroeconomic minds running monetary policy at the Reserve Bank of Australia.

This lack of reliance on expertise might help explain why the bank made the ill-fated decision to indicate that interest rates would remain near 0% until 2024.

During the pandemic, bank staff explicitly recommended against forecasting how long interest rates would remain at 0%.

But the bank board ignored this advice and instead set out a three-year projection for how long rates would stay low.

When the economy recovered far quicker than expected and interest rates had to rise, many Australians interpreted the about-face as a broken promise.

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

Culture club

The review says former and current staff have told it the bank’s culture is hierarchical and risk-averse.

It is obviously less than ideal to have an important institution in which diversity of thought is discouraged and staff feel unable to speak up.

Accordingly, the review has recommended that the bank improve its culture by appointing a chief operating officer with a mandate to open up the bank up to new ideas and staff and break down silos within the bank.

What’ll this mean for rates?

Whatever is changed as a result of the review, there are unlikely to be significant changes to its current approach of keeping interest rates relatively high.

Rates will remain high for as long as inflation is projected to stay above the 2-3% target band. The latest official inflation reading was 7.8%. It will be updated next Wednesday.

The review considered whether or not the 2-3% target remains optimal and concluded that it does. It considered alternatives such as a higher inflation target or targeting nominal gross domestic product, and found them lacking.

It recommends that a new monetary policy board meet eight times a year, rather than the 11 times the present board meets. It says this will give the external expert members of the board greater scope to “do deeper and better preparatory work for
each meeting”, helping them make better decisions.

What about RBA Governor Philip Lowe?

A review that found the bank was in good working order would have been a good reason to reappoint the present governor, whose five-year term ends in September.

The scale of the changes recommended by the review is large – there is an entire section devoted to a year-long implementation process.

The government might well decide that Lowe is the right person to carry out that process and that his term should be extended rather than dropping his successor into the middle of it.

However Chalmers plans to handle it, the review he commissioned has ushered in a revolution at the bank – one that will hopefully make it stronger, smarter and better-placed to serve the Australian people.

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

– ref. Reserve Bank revolution: how Jim Chalmers will recraft the RBA for the 21st century – https://theconversation.com/reserve-bank-revolution-how-jim-chalmers-will-recraft-the-rba-for-the-21st-century-204139

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Isaac Gross, Lecturer in Economics, Monash University

The review into the Reserve Bank of Australia has just been published by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and the results are a blockbuster.

The review has made 51 recommendations including:

• taking away power over interest rates from the Reserve Bank board (which has traditionally been dominated by non-economists, usually corporate executives) and devolving it to a panel of experts

• reducing the number of decision-making meetings from 11 to eight per year

• boosting the transparency of its decision-making process and holding it more accountable for those decisions.

Chalmers offered in-principle agreement to all 51 of the panel’s recommendations and would be seeking support from the Opposition for any legislation needed to implement them. The review has briefed Opposition Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor on its thinking.

Chalmers set up the three-person review in July 2022, appointing Carolyn Wilkins, a former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, Renée Fry-McKibbin, of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, and
Gordon de Brouwer, a specialist in public sector reform.

What was the problem?

While the apparent nature of the problem has changed over time, its root cause remains the same.

When the concept of the review was first mooted in 2020, the economy was in a bad state with inflation well below the bank’s target band of 2-3% and economic growth anaemic.

As a result, wage growth was too low and unemployment too high.

The most likely explanation is that the bank was focused too much on stabilising the financial system and too little on boosting the economy.

The bank was setting interest rates using its gut instead of its brain, in an almost literal sense – it was not doing what its computer model suggested it should do.

As the inquiry started, the problem had flipped. Inflation was too high.

But the underlying problem – that the board was populated by monetary policy amateurs rather than experts – remained the same.

The review concluded that monetary policy is a complex area of public policy and is best run by a team of experts who are highly informed about the current state of the economy.

Just as we have the country’s smartest legal minds on the High Court of Australia and our best health practitioners setting vaccine policy, it felt we should have Australia’s best macroeconomic minds running monetary policy at the Reserve Bank of Australia.

This lack of reliance on expertise might help explain why the bank made the ill-fated decision to indicate that interest rates would remain near 0% until 2024.

During the pandemic, bank staff explicitly recommended against forecasting how long interest rates would remain at 0%.

But the bank board ignored this advice and instead set out a three-year projection for how long rates would stay low.

When the economy recovered far quicker than expected and interest rates had to rise, many Australians interpreted the about-face as a broken promise.

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

Culture club

The review says former and current staff have told it the bank’s culture is hierarchical and risk-averse.

It is obviously less than ideal to have an important institution in which diversity of thought is discouraged and staff feel unable to speak up.

Accordingly, the review has recommended that the bank improve its culture by appointing a chief operating officer with a mandate to open up the bank up to new ideas and staff and break down silos within the bank.

What’ll this mean for rates?

Whatever is changed as a result of the review, there are unlikely to be significant changes to its current approach of keeping interest rates relatively high.

Rates will remain high for as long as inflation is projected to stay above the 2-3% target band. The latest official inflation reading was 7.8%. It will be updated next Wednesday.

The review considered whether or not the 2-3% target remains optimal and concluded that it does. It considered alternatives such as a higher inflation target or targeting nominal gross domestic product, and found them lacking.

It recommends that a new monetary policy board meet eight times a year, rather than the 11 times the present board meets. It says this will give the external expert members of the board greater scope to “do deeper and better preparatory work for
each meeting”, helping them make better decisions.

Read more:
Sure, the RBA froze interest rates this time, but there’s plenty of pain to come

What about RBA Governor Philip Lowe?

If the review found the bank was in good working order, that would be a good reason to reappoint the present governor, whose five-year term ends in September.

The scale of the changes recommended by the review is large – there is an entire section devoted to a year-long implementation process.

The government might well decide that Lowe is the right person to carry out that implementation process, rather than dropping his successor in the middle of it.

However Chalmers plans to handle it, the review he commissioned has ushered in a revolution at the bank – one that will hopefully make it stronger, smarter and better-placed to serve the Australian people.

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

– ref. Reserve Bank revolution: How Jim Chalmers will re-craft the RBA for the 21st century – https://theconversation.com/reserve-bank-revolution-how-jim-chalmers-will-re-craft-the-rba-for-the-21st-century-204139

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hedvig Skirgård, Postdoctoral researcher, Australian National University

There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, and their grammar can vary a lot. Linguists are interested in these differences because of what they tell us about our history, our cognitive abilities and what it means to be human.

But this great diversity is threatened as more and more languages aren’t taught to children and fall into slumber.

In a new paper published in Science Advances, we’ve launched an extensive database of language grammars called Grambank. With this resource, we can answer many research questions about language and see how much grammatical diversity we may lose if the crisis isn’t stopped.

Our findings are alarming: we’re losing languages, we’re losing language diversity, and unless we do something, these windows into our collective history will close.

What is grammar?

The grammar of a language is the set of rules that determines what a sentence is in that language, and what is gibberish. For example, tense is obligatory in English. To combine “Sarah”, “write” and “paper” into a well-formed sentence, I have to indicate a time. If you don’t have tense in an English sentence, then it’s not grammatical.

That’s not the case in all languages though. In the indigenous language of Hokkaido Ainu in Japan, speakers don’t need to specify time at all. They can add words such as “already” or “tomorrow” – but speakers consider the sentence correct without them.

As the great anthropologist Franz Boas once said:

grammar […] determines those aspects of each experience that must be expressed.

Linguists aren’t interested in “correct” grammar. We know grammar changes over time and from place to place – and that variation isn’t a bad thing to us, it’s amazing!

By studying these rules across languages, we can get an insight into how our minds work, and how we transfer meaning from ourselves to others. We can also learn about our history, where we come from, and how we got here. It’s rather extraordinary.

Read more:
Meet the remote Indigenous community where a few thousand people use 15 different languages

A huge linguistic database of grammar

We’re thrilled to release Grambank into the world. Our team of international colleagues built it over several years by reading many books about language rules, and speaking to experts and community members about specific languages.

It was a difficult task. Grammars of different languages can be very different from each other. Moreover, different people have different ways of describing how these rules work. Linguists love jargon, so it was a special challenge to understand them sometimes.

In Grambank, we used 195 questions to compare more than 2,400 languages – including two signed languages. The map below provides an overview of what we have captured.

Each dot represents a language, and the more similar the colour, the more similar the languages. To create this map, we used a technique called “principal component analysis” – it reduced the 195 questions to three dimensions, which we then mapped onto red, green and blue.

The large variation in colours reveals how different all these languages are from each other. Where we get regions with similar colours, such as in the Pacific, this could mean the languages are related, or that they have borrowed a lot from each other.

Language is very special to humans; it’s part of what makes us who we are.

Sadly, the world’s indigenous languages are facing an endangerment crisis due to colonisation and globalisation. We know each language lost heavily impacts the health of Indigenous individuals and communities by severing ties to ancestry and traditional knowledge.

Read more:
People on Vanuatu’s Malekula Island speak more than 30 Indigenous languages. Here’s why we must record them

Almost half the world’s linguistic diversity is threatened

In addition to the loss of individual languages, our team wanted to understand what we stand to lose in terms of grammatical diversity.

The Grambank database reveals a dazzling variety of languages around the world – a testament to the human capacity for change, variation and ingenuity.

Using an ecological measure of diversity, we assessed what kind of loss we could expect if languages that are currently under threat were to disappear. We found certain regions will be hit harder than others.

Frighteningly, some regions of the world such as South America and Australia are expected to lose all of their indigenous linguistic diversity, because all of the indigenous languages there are threatened. Even other regions where languages are relatively safe, such as the Pacific, South-East Asia and Europe, still show a dramatic decrease of about 25%.

What’s next?

Without sustained support for language revitalisation, many people will be harmed and our shared linguistic window into human history, cognition and culture will become seriously fragmented.

The United Nations declared 2022–2032 the Decade of Indigenous Languages. Around the world, grassroots organisations including the Ngukurr Language Centre, Noongar Boodjar Language Centre, and the Canadian Heiltsuk Cultural Education Centre are working towards language maintenance and revitalisation. To get a feel for what this can be like, check out this interactive animation by Angelina Joshua.

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

– ref. Research on 2,400 languages shows nearly half the world’s language diversity is at risk – https://theconversation.com/research-on-2-400-languages-shows-nearly-half-the-worlds-language-diversity-is-at-risk-204014

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joelle Gergis, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, Australian National University

“The wet gets wetter and the dry gets drier”.

That’s one of the key messages from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report on how climate change is impacting the Earth’s water cycle.

It’s the topic of the latest episode of Fear & Wonder, a new podcast from The Conversation taking you inside that era-defining IPCC report via the hearts and minds of the scientists who wrote it.

The water cycle describes the physical processes that move water around the planet. Simply speaking, when water evaporates it is transported through the atmosphere as water vapour. It then condenses to form clouds and precipitates as rain or snow. Without water, human societies and ecosystems would not be able to function, so understanding how climate changes is influencing the water cycle is vital.

In this episode, we hear from Professor Paola Arias from Colombia and Dr Krishnan Raghavan from India. They explain how climate change is intensifying wet and dry extremes, and how human influences like air pollution and land degradation are impacting regional rainfall patterns.

As temperatures increase over land, water evaporates more readily which can cause drier conditions and lead to more severe droughts. As a warmer atmosphere is able to hold more moisture, heavy rainfall events are also becoming more intense as temperatures continue to rise, increasing flood risks in many parts of the world.

We discuss the various impacts of this phenomenon, citing examples such as Australia’s east coast floods of 2022, extremes in the South Asian monsoon that impacts millions of people, and the devastating 2020 wildfires in South America’s Pantanal, the largest tropical wetland in the world.

To listen and subscribe, click here, or click the icon for your favourite podcast app in the graphic above.

Fear and Wonder is sponsored by the Climate Council, an independent, evidence-based organisation working on climate science, impacts and solutions.

Dr Joelle Gergis has received funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources in the past. She currently receives funding from the Australian National University.

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

– ref. Fear and Wonder podcast: how climate change is affecting rainfall, droughts and floods – https://theconversation.com/fear-and-wonder-podcast-how-climate-change-is-affecting-rainfall-droughts-and-floods-203900