Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa A. Wheeler, Senior Lecturer, Department of Management and Marketing, Swinburne University of Technology

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing Australians’ view of public education, our analysis of Australian Leadership Index (ALI) data shows. In contrast to the government’s instrumental view of education, with its focus on producing “job-ready graduates”, the public now takes a wider view of education as a public good.

Public education, such as public schools and universities, is understood as serving the interests of the many, not the few. And the importance of ethics and accountability has only become more pronounced throughout the pandemic.

Read more: 3 flaws in Job-Ready Graduates package will add to the turmoil in Australian higher education

The Australian Leadership Index has tracked public perceptions of leadership across a number of sectors, including public education, since 2018. We analysed ALI scores for public education through three periods – before COVID, first wave and second wave.

An intensifying debate about education

Since the pandemic began, debate about the role of education and its contribution to the public good has intensified. Universities have been at the centre of this debate.

Between January and March, before COVID-19 hit our shores, universities were in the public spotlight due to their reliance on international student fees.

In this period, the ALI score (our indexed measure of leadership) for public education dipped into the negative (-2) for the first time since we began tracking in September 2018.

During the first wave of COVID-19 (March-June), public discourse focused on the role of universities in finding a vaccine. At the same time, the exclusion of universities from the JobKeeper program forced them into cost-cutting, with implications for research output. More recently, news of wage theft in universities hit the headlines.

Read more: As universities face losing 1 in 10 staff, COVID-driven cuts create 4 key risks

Despite these challenges, the ALI score for education recovered strongly. It hit a peak (+19) in the June quarter and stabilised in the September quarter (+15).

Education and the public good

Over the past few months, the federal government has brought in sweeping changes intended to encourage students to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The stated aim is to produce “job-ready graduates” to fuel economic recovery.

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

By contrast, our data show the Australian public takes a wider view of education.

Drawing on nationally representative surveys from September 2018 to September 2020, we statistically modelled how nine different factors have influenced public perceptions of leadership in education institutions.

We then plotted the importance of each factor (vertical axis) against the proportion of Australians who agree education is performing well on that factor (horizontal axis). The results show which factors are important in driving perceptions of education leadership, and also how the sector performs against them.

Notably, Australians see accountability, ethicality and creating social value as highly important for education institutions. The sector performs well against these factors.

By contrast, responsiveness to the needs of society and creating economic value are also important, but the sector underperforms against these factors.

In short, Australians believe that how public education creates value – through demonstrable commitments to ethics and accountability – is as important as the type of value it creates. This reflects an understanding that serving the public interest is as much about process as it is about outcome.

Overall, these results suggests a marked discrepancy between how the government and Australians view public education.

How views changed through the pandemic

Our data (click on the table to enlarge it) show how Australians’ view of public education changed through the course of the pandemic.

In the period before COVID (January-March), the sector’s apparent accountability, responsiveness to society, and a focus on economic value creation had the most influence on perceptions of the sector’s leadership.

In the first wave (April-June), ethics and balancing the needs of different groups became more important. Accountability, economic value creation and responsiveness to societal needs were also important. Performance scores improved across all five factors.

This possibly reflects the optimistic discourse around vaccine research, producing job-ready graduates and an element of sympathy for universities, as university staff lost their jobs and international students were left to fend for themselves.

Read more: ‘No one would even know if I had died in my room’: coronavirus leaves international students in dire straits

In the second wave (July-September), the focus shifted away from the sector’s economic contributions and its responsiveness to society. Instead, ethics, accountability and balancing the needs of different groups became most important.

Performance scores for balancing the needs of different groups decreased. This possibly reflects the changes to tertiary education funding, which triggered backlash from both domestic and international students.

Rethinking the role of universities

Australians have important decisions to make on the role of public education. Rather than positioning public education and universities as a panacea for economic recovery, a wider view is required.

Universities are uniquely positioned to serve the public good. The purpose of education leadership itself has been described as being “as and for public good”. This insight is reflected in the actions of university benefactors, who are motivated by a belief in the public good that only universities can create.

Although philanthropic support is vital, it is in the national interest to properly fund universities to enable them to serve and enhance the public good as only universities can.

– ref. Pandemic widens gap between government and Australians’ view of education – https://theconversation.com/pandemic-widens-gap-between-government-and-australians-view-of-education-148991

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

It’d be wrong to interpret last week’s Reserve Bank decision to cut its cash rate to 0.10% as an emergency response to the COVID crisis.

The implication would be that once the pandemic is controlled the economy will return to something like the pre-crisis “normal” and the ultra-low interest rates will end.

In reality, in this as in many other things, the pandemic has merely accelerated developments that have been underway for a long time.

One is the long-term decline in the “neutral” rate of interest.

The neutral rate is normally defined as the real (inflation-adjusted) rate of interest which is neither expansionary, pushing up inflation, nor contractionary, pushing up unemployment.

More importantly the neutral rate should be one that over time matches the total supply of savings with the total demand for those savings by businesses and households wanting to put them to work making buildings and equipment (capital investment).

‘Neutral’ is less than it was

As Treasury Secretary Stephen Kennedy observed in this year’s post-budget address, the neutral rate of interest has been falling for 40 years.

Reserve Bank estimates suggest it fell from around 3% in the 1980s and 1990s to around less than 1% in 2016.

It will have fallen further since, and fallen more sharply since the pandemic began, turning negative.

One way to work that out what the Reserve Bank thinks the real neutral rate is now is to look at where the nominal cash rate is now (near zero) and what the bank says inflation will have to climb to before it will allow the cash rate to climb (2%).

This suggests the bank believes the real (inflation adjusted) neutral cash rate is minus 2%.

Read more: The government has just sold $15 billion of 31-year bonds. But what actually is a bond?

Another way to get a handle on it is to look at long-term real rates, one of the longest being the return on a 30-year US Treasury inflation-indexed bond.

Like the Reserve Bank estimate of the neutral rate for Australia, this estimate for the US fell to around 1% by 2016.

Then it fell further, dropping to close to zero by the start of this year, before turning negative with the onset of the pandemic.

Most other countries don’t sell inflation-indexed bonds with such long maturities. But the 50-year and 100-year non-indexed bonds issued by a number of OECD countries are yielding interest rates below 2%, the target rate of inflation for most central banks.

Even highly-rated private corporations like Alphabet (the parent of Google) are refinancing their debt with long-term bonds paying less than 2%.

Too much saving?

Much of the discussion of declining interest rates has focused on the idea of a “savings glut”, with a particular focus on China, which had very high savings rates early this century.

But China’s savings rate peaked some years ago and is headed down. Savings rates in other countries have been falling as well.

Too little investment

The real problem is a lack of demand for those saved funds.

Corporate profits have grown strongly, but instead of being reinvested they have often been returned to shareholders, through either dividends or share buybacks.

Companies seem to believe they don’t need that many funds.

The simplest explanation is that the dominant firms in an information economy don’t need much capital in the form of buildings and equipment to maintain their position.

Read more: Vital Signs. Business investment is flatlining, and it isn’t clear that suasion or a special allowance will help

The market value of a typical manufacturing or resource-based firm is usually about the same as the book value of the capital invested in the firm. In the jargon of financial markets, the price-book ratio is close to 1.

By contrast, leading firms in the information economy, such as Alphabet and Facebook, have price-book ratios of five or six. Microsoft and Apple, with profits derived from control of operating systems that require only gradual upgrades, have price-book ratios of 15 and 21.

Read more: We asked 13 economists how to fix things. All back the RBA governor over the treasurer

Public investment hasn’t come to the rescue enough, even when it has been cheap to borrow.

It’s been tightly constrained by decades of policy driven the ideas variously described as neoliberalism, economic rationalism and market liberalism.

Bank of England economist Lukasz Rachel and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers argue that in the absence of the large-scale public programs we have had, the neutral rate of interest would be even lower.

There’s no sign of a revival

When there’s a greater supply of something (savings) than there is demand for it (for investment) the price of it (the interest rate) won’t rise.

After we emerge from the pandemic we are going to have to adjust to a world where interest rates (at least adjusted for inflation) are permanently at or below zero.

As Dorothy says to Toto in the Wizard of Oz (believed by some to be an allegory about monetary policy) “we’re not in Kansas any more”.

– ref. Why zero interest rates are here to stay – https://theconversation.com/why-zero-interest-rates-are-here-to-stay-149523

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanna Mendelssohn, Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, University of Melbourne

Review: Streeton, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has launched its summer season with a large, optimistic reconsideration of one of Australian art’s most favoured sons.

Curator Wayne Tunnicliffe has indicated that his decision to name the exhibition simply Streeton, without any subtitles, was part of his strategy to emphasise Streeton’s importance to Australian art and culture.

This assessment is hardly new. Lionel Lindsay, in The Art of Arthur Streeton of 1919 called him “our national painter”.

In 1923 when Streeton’s The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might was first exhibited in London, Lindsay wrote,

Streeton has painted the light and colour of Australia with such truth and beauty that his service to our country must ever remain the equivalent of Constable’s to England.

Six years later, in 1929, James S. MacDonald, the then director of the AGNSW, claimed Streeton

has shown us our land as no one else has done, and is still our best exemplar of the craft and mystery of painting as applied to landscape.

In 1931, as a way of lifting spirits in the Great Depression, the cash-strapped gallery gave Streeton the first ever survey exhibition of work by a living Australian artist.

In the years between the two world wars, Streeton’s characteristic paintings of blue tinged bush, golden fields, and clear Australian skies spoke of a country that had never seen war. His work was easily seen as characteristic of Australian smug insularity.

Most are pure landscapes but some show stocky soldier settlers attempting to tame the land by culling trees. Others show cattle grazing in newly cleared land. In The Land of the Golden Fleece (1926) a flock of sheep confidently graze in a valley sheltered by the Grampians.

It is not surprising this painting so effectively encapsulates the sentiment of the conservative establishment: a label on the frame indicates it is the proud possession of one of Australia’s gentleman’s clubs.

Conservatives and conservation

Streeton’s art is also a reminder that conservatives once cared about conservation. He was a passionate advocate for the need to conserve the Australian bush against the timber industry.

Silvan Dam of 1939 is a celebration of the tree clad landscape near his home in the Dandenongs. But in Silvan Dam and Donna Buang, AD 2000, painted the following year, the same subject becomes an apocalyptic vision condemning the then state government’s proposed logging of the forest. Stark, bleached, tree trunks stand against bare rock and denuded mountains.

Streeton’s advocacy for nature over industry was not new. In 1895, when living in Sydney, he painted Cremorne Pastoral, an exquisite landscape of a grassy hill framed by graceful trees and Sydney Harbour as a political response to a proposed coal mine.

It is one of many harbour subjects painted in his Sydney years. As the AGNSW is directly opposite Sirius Cove, where Streeton lived in the 1890s, the bias towards this subject matter is understandable. The camp where Streeton, Roberts and others lived during the 1890s recession was built by the Brasch brothers who were active patrons of the arts.

Reuben Brasch supplied the artists with discarded varnished cedar panels from his department store. Their dark tones and elongated shape encouraged Streeton to become more experimental in his composition.

The colours of the harbour of his paintings in this period are almost dazzling in their intense blue of the water and gold of the Sydney sandstone, with flashes of gum tree green.

A further room shows his second Sydney period, after his return from spending some years in England. These are virtuoso pieces, but lack the experimental flair of the earlier works.

His paintings of Coogee Beach, a subject previously painted by Tom Roberts and Charles Conder, deserve a close look as a reminder of how Sydney’s magnificent beaches have been so degraded.

Lack of context

If there is one problem I have with this exhibition, and indeed with all celebrations of the life of a single artist, it is the lack of context. From the beginning, Streeton was praised simply because he was an Australian, born with a natural talent developed with little formal teaching.

But this is not quite true. While he attended evening classes with Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, the young artist met the academically trained Tom Roberts and the sophisticated adventurer Charles Conder.

Streeton’s art developed during his relationship with these more experienced artists. He painted alongside them at Box Hill and Eaglemont. The exhibition includes his Settler’s Camp (1888), a less than successful homage to Tom Roberts’ The Artists’ Camp (1886). Streeton was, however, a fast learner, and by the time he participated in the 9 by 5 Impressions exhibition, was their equal.

The wall of Streeton’s paintings from that most radical of all Australian art exhibitions is a joy. Conder’s influence can be seen in many of Streeton’s earlier paintings, especially in his Symbolist works and in The Railway Station, Redfern (1893), a painting that successfully quotes Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay (1888).

‘Smike’

The clearest indication of Streeton’s position in the early hierarchy of these brothers of the brush lies in the nickname bestowed on him by the dogmatic Roberts (aka “Bulldog”). Streeton was called “Smike”, after Nicholas Nickleby’s amiable but feeble-minded acolyte.

Arthur Streeton’s later career serves as a repudiation of that assessment. Travel broadened his perspective. He relished the exoticism of Egypt, where magical architecture took the place of gum trees. After initially being intimidated by the sophistication, class system and muted light of England, he did eventually achieve modest success in the centre of the empire.

At the end of World War I, he returned to Australia for real fame and fortune. In 1937, he became the only one of the artists who painted at Heidelberg to be honoured with a knighthood.

The last Arthur Streeton exhibition, curated by Geoffrey Smith for the National Gallery of Victoria in 1995, was shown in other state galleries. This much larger exhibition will not travel.

It is, however, on view throughout summer until February 14 2021. It is well worth the effort of an interstate trip for those newly liberated from quarantine.

– ref. Streeton: an optimistic celebration of the golden boy of Australian art – https://theconversation.com/streeton-an-optimistic-celebration-of-the-golden-boy-of-australian-art-148341

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

Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon this week quit the frontbench, ensuring he’ll become even more vocal in his campaign to have Labor’s climate policy move to the centre and the party give greater attention to the working class part of its constituency.

Fitzgibbon – who was shadow minister for resources – and climate spokesman Mark Butler have been at loggerheads, and in this podcast Fitzgibbon makes it clear he believes Butler should be moved when Albanese has an expected pre-Christmas reshuffle.

“I think a refresh in that area would be good … I think someone without his history, someone who doesn’t bring baggage, if you like, to the conversation might be better placed to prosecute Labor’s case in the broader electorate.”

Fitzgibbon was active in Labor’s 2013 leadership change back to Kevin Rudd.

He says he supports Albanese’s leadership. But asked whether, if it became clear next year Labor was heading to a likely really bad defeat, he would be willing to push for a change, he says: “I think senior people in the party have a responsibility to ensure that the party doesn’t go over the proverbial cliff.

“And none of us are as big or bigger than the party itself.

“The party has to be the key interest and its capacity to win government, because millions of people are relying upon us to be a government from time to time. And we owe it to them to be electable.”

Sounds like a warning.

Additional audio

A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Joel Fitzgibbon on Labor climate policy and leadership – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-joel-fitzgibbon-on-labor-climate-policy-and-leadership-149925

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Throsby, Distinguished Professor of Economics, Macquarie University

Female artists across all areas of the arts experience gender-related disadvantage in pursuing their creative careers, which reflects discriminatory problems affecting women in society more generally.

This is our conclusion after delving more deeply into our 2014-15 data on the incomes of practising professional artists in Australia. Although women are more engaged as consumers and supporters of the Australian arts than men, the total income from all art and non-art sources for the average female artist was $41,600, 25% less than her male counterpart.

When it came to earnings from their creative practice alone, women earned 30% less than men. Across all fields of employment, the national gender pay gap is currently an estimated 14%.

Although accurate data are yet to be obtained for this year, there is no doubt that artists’ incomes generally have plummeted during the pandemic. Given the particularly vulnerable position of women, there are reasons to expect the gender pay gap to have grown even wider.

Read more: Coronavirus: 3 in 4 Australians employed in the creative and performing arts could lose their jobs

Possible reasons

In research underway, we are digging more deeply into the possible reasons why such a significant gap exists in the arts.

To some extent, the gender pay gap for artists may be influenced by the same sorts of factors that affect female workers across all labour markets. These include underrepresentation in leadership roles, casualised work arrangements, work/family conflicts, discriminatory hiring practices and prejudice.

But are there specific characteristics of women artists that make their income position even more precarious?

For instance, what of education? Education and training in the arts are somewhat more important in determining female artists’ income from creative work than for men, and, in fact, women artists are more educated on average. However, these differences are far from enough for women to catch up to their male colleagues’ income levels.

We wondered whether personal traits might also have an effect. In the wide-ranging literature on females in the workplace, attention has been paid to the influence of gender-related psycho-social characteristics. These include the proposition women are more caring, nurturing and communicative; more risk and competition-averse, and less likely to initiate negotiation. Men, on the other hand, are depicted as more assertive, aggressive and self-confident.

We have only limited data on such characteristics. Nevertheless, a few notable differences between men and women can be observed from our research. For example, female artists who believe receiving support from family and friends has helped them advance their career tend to have higher creative incomes on average than men, other things being held equal.

Read more: Giving it away for free – why the performing arts risks making the same mistake newspapers did

In addition, female artists who perceived themselves as having the wrong temperament, or a lack of self-confidence, or insufficient talent, or an inability to take risks, had relatively lower incomes from creative work than other women artists. Such an outcome is not evident among male artists, according to the survey data.

Yet none of these factors provides a significant explanation of the earnings difference between men and women artists. This leads us to conclude that gender inequity in the artistic workplace must ultimately be reflective of more fundamental issues relating to the treatment of women in society.

First Nations remote communities more equal

In separate analyses, we have been comparing male and female earnings for First Nations artists working in several remote communities in the Northern Territory and South Australia, using data from the National Survey of Remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Artists.

There are only minor differences between the genders in the levels of income earned by artists in these communities. For example, in Arnhem Land, women artists earned $8,600 from their creative work in 2017-18, while men earned $8,700.

There was a similarly insignificant difference between males and females in their total work incomes from all sources in that year. Women earned $23,400, compared to $23,000 for men.

Much the same result applies in other communities. It seems the gender gap affecting incomes of most female artists in Australia is not evident in these remote First Nations communities.

But it must be remembered that the incomes of First Nations artists are considerably lower than those of their non-Indigenous counterparts.

The results of our research for both mainstream and First Nations cultural practitioners highlight the particularity of the social and cultural context in which art is made.

Read more: To fix gender inequity in arts leadership we need more women in politics and chairing boards

But there are systemic features of this context in Australian society, such as attitudes to women in leadership, that perpetuate gender-based discrimination in working life.

For these problems to be overcome, it seems changes in attitudes and behaviours will be needed, not just within the arts community itself but — more importantly —in society at large.

– ref. Why is the gender pay gap in the arts so large? Widespread discrimination is the most likely cause – https://theconversation.com/why-is-the-gender-pay-gap-in-the-arts-so-large-widespread-discrimination-is-the-most-likely-cause-149626

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Normann Witzleb, Associate Professor in Law, Monash University

Federal Attorney-General Christian Porter has called for submissions to the long-awaited review of the federal Privacy Act 1988.

This is the first wide-ranging review of privacy laws since the Australian Law Reform Commission produced a landmark report in 2008.

Australia has in the past often hesitated to adopt a strong privacy framework. The new review, however, provides an opportunity to improve data protection rules to an internationally competitive standard.

Here are some of the ideas proposed — and what’s at stake if we get this wrong.

Read more: It’s time for privacy invasion to be a legal wrong

Australians care deeply about data privacy

Personal information has never had a more central role in our society and economy, and the government has a strong mandate to update Australia’s framework for the protection of personal information.

In the Australian Privacy Commissioner’s 2020 survey, 83% of Australians said they’d like the government to do more to protect the privacy of their data.

The intense debate about the COVIDSafe app earlier this year also shows Australians care deeply about their private information, even in a time of crisis.

Privacy laws and enforcement can hardly keep up with the ever-increasing digitalisation of our lives. Data-driven innovation provides valuable services that many of us use and enjoy. However, the government’s issues paper notes:

As Australians spend more of their time online, and new technologies emerge, such as artificial intelligence, more personal information about individuals is being captured and processed, raising questions as to whether Australian privacy law is fit for purpose.

The pandemic has accelerated the existing trend towards digitalisation and created a range of new privacy issues including working or studying at home, and the use of personal data in contact tracing.

Australians are rightly concerned they are losing control over their personal data.

So there’s no question the government’s review is sorely needed.

Issues of concern for the new privacy review

The government’s review follows the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Digital Platforms Inquiry, which found that some data practices of digital platforms are unfair and undermine consumer trust. We rely heavily on digital platforms such as Google and Facebook for information, entertainment and engagement with the world around us.

Our interactions with these platforms leave countless digital traces that allow us to be profiled and tracked for profit. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) found that the digital platforms make it hard for consumers to resist these practices and to make free and informed decisions regarding the collection, use and disclosure of their personal data.

The government has committed to implement most of the ACCC’s recommendations for stronger privacy laws to give us greater consumer control.

However, the reforms must go further. The review also provides an opportunity to address some long-standing weaknesses of Australia’s privacy regime.

The government’s issues paper, released to inform the review, identified several areas of particular concern. These include:

• the scope of application of the Privacy Act, in particular the definition of “personal information” and current private sector exemptions

• whether the Privacy Act provides an effective framework for promoting good privacy practices

• whether individuals should have a direct right to sue for a breach of privacy obligations under the Privacy Act

• whether a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy should be introduced into Australian law, allowing Australians to go to court if their privacy is invaded

• whether the enforcement powers of the Privacy Commissioner should be strengthened.

While most recent attention relates to improving consumer choice and control over their personal data, the review also brings back onto the agenda some never-implemented recommendations from the Australian Law Reform Commission’s 2008 review.

These include introducing a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy, and extending the coverage of the Privacy Act.

Exemptions for small business and political parties should be reviewed

The Privacy Act currently contains several exemptions that limit its scope. The two most contentious exemptions have the effect that political parties and most business organisations need not comply with the general data protection standards under the Act.

The small business exemption is intended to reduce red tape for small operators. However, largely unknown to the Australian public, it means the vast majority of Australian businesses are not legally obliged to comply with standards for fair and safe handling of personal information.

Procedures for compulsory venue check-ins under COVID health regulations are just one recent illustration of why this is a problem. Some people have raised concerns that customers’ contact-tracing data, in particular collected via QR codes, may be exploited by marketing companies for targeted advertising.

Under current privacy laws, cafe and restaurant operators are generally exempt from complying with privacy obligations to undertake due diligence checks on third-party providers used to collect customers’ data.

The political exemption is another area of need of reform. As the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal showed, political campaigning is becoming increasingly tech-driven.

However, Australian political parties are exempt from complying with the Privacy Act and anti-spam legislation. This means voters cannot effectively protect themselves against data harvesting for political purposes and micro-targeting in election campaigns through unsolicited text messages.

There is a good case for arguing political parties and candidates should be subject to the same rules as other organisations. It’s what most Australians would like and, in fact, wrongly believe is already in place.

Read more: How political parties legally harvest your data and use it to bombard you with election spam

Trust drives innovation

Trust in digital technologies is undermined when data practices come across as opaque, creepy or unsafe.

There is increasing recognition that data protection drives innovation and adoption of modern applications, rather than impedes it.

The COVIDSafe app is a good example. When that app was debated, the government accepted that robust privacy protections were necessary to achieve a strong uptake by the community.

We would all benefit if the government saw that this same principle applies to other areas of society where our precious data is collected.

Information on how to make a submission to the federal government review of the Privacy Act 1988 can be found here.

Read more: People want data privacy but don’t always know what they’re getting

– ref. 83% of Australians want tougher privacy laws. Now’s your chance to tell the government what you want – https://theconversation.com/83-of-australians-want-tougher-privacy-laws-nows-your-chance-to-tell-the-government-what-you-want-149535

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Simpson, Program Director, Master of Communication, University of South Australia

Last weekend, a few hours after the US presidential election was called for Joe Biden, Myanmar voters started lining up for their own chance to decide whether the National League for Democracy (NLD) government, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, would return for a second term.

With 5,643 candidates from 91 parties competing for 1,119 seats, at both the state and federal level, the country’s almost 38 million voters were asked to cast judgment on the last five years of NLD rule.

After three days of vote counting, the ruling party has claimed a huge victory, likely extending its resounding wins from the 2015 general election.

Under the military-authored constitution, a quarter of the seats in the national legislature are still reserved for military-appointed representatives, who generally vote as a bloc. The NLD, therefore, needed to win two-thirds of the elected seats to achieve a governing majority.

This requirement was designed by the military to be a high, almost impossible, threshold for any democratically oriented party in such a diverse, multi-ethnic political system. But it looks like the NLD has achieved it again, with ease.

The NLD appears to have displaced the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) from some of its strongholds in rural areas and southern Mandalay. And its dominance in Yangon and much of the country has been met with jubilation among die-hard supporters, eager to see a further consolidation of the country’s democratic ambitions.

The renewed mandate for the NLD will also be taken by Suu Kyi’s millions of supporters as repudiation of the widespread international backlash against the government for its handling of the Rohingya crisis, which saw nearly a million people displaced in 2017.

This led to a genocide case being brought against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice and a dramatic fall from grace for Suu Kyi, in particular.

Read more: Aung San Suu Kyi’s extraordinary fall from grace

Conflict remains a big issue

During her first term, Suu Kyi sought to broker a new nationwide peace agreement with the various ethnic minority armed groups, but was frustrated by the entrenched complexities of the country’s borderland politics.

Well-armed militias, some of which draw considerable financial strength from wide-ranging illicit businesses, proved unwilling to accept her government’s claims on their territories.

In some of these areas, the Election Commission cancelled voting in the election, ostensibly due to the ongoing fighting. Northern Rakhine state and also areas of Chin, Shan, Kachin, Kayin and Mon states, and in Bago Region, were all affected by these cancellations.

In Rakhine and Chin states, however, elections were able to be held in NLD strongholds less affected by the conflict between the military and the Buddhist ethnic Rakhine Arakan Army, while voting was cancelled in areas held by ethnic minority parties.

In all, 22 seats in both houses of the national legislature will remain vacant until the conflicts have eased, which may not happen any time soon.

Because the decision to call off the voting in these areas benefited the NLD, it called into question the independence of the Election Commission.

About 1.5 million voters were disenfranchised by the move. This does not include the Rohingya in Rakhine state and refugee camps in Bangladesh who have historically been denied citizenship and voting rights.

Human Rights Watch has called the elections “fundamentally flawed”, and many countries have qualified their support for the result by highlighting this disenfranchisement.

Is the military really loosening its grip?

At best, the military will only grudgingly accept the election results, especially since its favoured party, the USDP, performed poorly.

The past five years have seen generally amiable relations between the NLD and the military, even in light of the military’s brutal “clearance operations” of the Muslim-minority Rohingya in Rakhine state in 2017.

However, in the lead-up to the elections, the commander in chief of the military, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, released a statement criticising the Election Commission, arguing that

weakness and deficiencies which were never seen in the previous elections are appearing.

He blamed the NLD for the commission’s performance and, the next day, argued the government was making “unacceptable mistakes”, insinuating he might not accept the election result.

Recently, a reputable website run by activists investigating the military was blocked and various opposition parties had their political broadcasts censored when they appeared on state television.

In addition to other restrictions on freedom of speech, the election cancellations, internet shutdowns, disenfranchisement of ethnic minorities and campaign restrictions due to COVID-19 have cast a pall over the vote.

Outlook for the new NLD government

While the treatment of the Rohingya — and Suu Kyi’s defence of the military’s crimes against them — is impossible to accept, foreign governments have little choice but to continue providing support for the newly empowered NLD government.

International pressure should continue to be applied, however, to resolve the Rohingya crisis and protect freedom of speech.

If the military were to step in and take back control from the civilian-led government, this would, in every sense, be a significant backward step for democracy in Myanmar. While we have argued the chances of a coup looked relatively low during the NLD’s first term, recent events have demonstrated the military can always find an excuse to reassert itself at the centre of Myanmar politics.

To avoid further turbulence, and with its fresh mandate, Myanmar’s government will need to quickly concentrate on broad-based economic development and human security. The election result also offers a chance to focus on the peaceful resolution of longstanding conflicts in what remains a tragically divided and impoverished society.

– ref. Aung San Suu Kyi wins big in Myanmar’s elections, but will it bring peace — or restore her reputation abroad? – https://theconversation.com/aung-san-suu-kyi-wins-big-in-myanmars-elections-but-will-it-bring-peace-or-restore-her-reputation-abroad-149619

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anita M Elias, Senior lecturer, Dept O & G, Monash University

The social and cultural messages we receive around sex give the impression everyone’s “doing it” and it’s always fun and enjoyable. But for many people, having sexual intercourse is extremely painful or impossible. One of the leading causes of painful sex is vaginismus.

Vaginismus is an extremely common condition, that can have a huge impact on women, their partners and relationships. Yet many with it feel alone and without hope as it’s rarely talked about.

But women don’t need to live with it — it’s easy to diagnose and it’s treatable.

Painful sex

Australian research shows about 20% of women and 2% of men experience painful sex.

Male sexual problems, such as erectile dysfunction, have been in the public awareness since the advent of “the little blue pill” — Viagra. But sexual difficulties in women are missing from the story.

Without the push of pharmaceutical industries, awareness and knowledge about sexual difficulties in women (or people with vaginas who don’t identify as women) has not advanced in the same way as it has for men.

Read more: Sex and women’s diseases: it’s common and important to include men’s perspectives

A recent study, which is not yet published, found, in 2019 57% of female patients who attended the Sexual Medicine and Therapy clinic (Monash Health) attended because of painful sex. 60% of them had Vaginismus. Almost half of these women had experienced this for more than five years, and it had occurred in around one in five of these women for ten or more years.

What is vaginismus?

Vaginismus occurs when someone has persistent or recurrent difficulties in allowing vaginal entry of a penis, finger or any object, despite her wish to do so.

Some women experience fear, difficulties or pain from the first time they try to insert something into their vagina and instead of getting better, it can get worse over time. This is called “primary vaginismus”.

Others can be fine for years and develop pain at some later date. This is “secondary vaginismus”.

Vaginismus can be mild, moderate or severe. The pain is often described as burning, cramping, or a tight feeling. And for some, nothing can go into the vagina. Sufferers describe it as like hitting a brick wall.

The impact of vaginismus

Those with undiagnosed vaginismus can feel embarrassed or abnormal which can deter them from seeking help. And undiagnosed vaginismus can significantly impact self-esteem, and lead to anxiety or depression.

Read more: ‘Is it normal to get sore down there after sex?’

Those with vaginismus may avoid being sexual, as it can be a very painful experience. They also may avoid any intimacy for fear that it may lead to “sex”. This can significantly impact relationships, leading to distance and conflict.

It can also inhibit single people from forming relationships. They may avoid socialising, dating and meeting new partners, feeling burdened with a “shameful secret”.

Causes

When it comes to sex (and life), you can’t separate the mind and the body. Vaginismus is no exception. Underlying causes are extremely variable and often influenced by multiple factors.

Read more: Health Check: what is normal vaginal discharge and what’s not?

Sometimes there is no obvious cause, but common factors in the development of primary vaginismus include:

• fear or anxiety: about pain, pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. Generalised anxiety or other anxiety disorders can also cause vaginismus

• taboos: cultural or religious taboos around sex, or inner conflict about whether to be sexual or not

• unaroused sex: having sex when you don’t really want to

• history of abuse: a history of physical, emotional or sexual trauma or abuse

• unrealistic expectations: of sex leading to fear of not being “good enough”.

Secondary vaginismus can occur due to any of the above or after anything that leads to painful sex, such as:

• relationship problems: leading to lack of libido or arousal

• infections or skin problems: vaginal infections, such as thrush and vulval dermatological (skin) problems or Vulvodynia can cause vaginismus

• gynaecological problems: such as endometriosis, gynaecological (or breast) cancer and it’s treatment or pelvic surgery

• pregnancy: vaginismus can occur after pregnancy, delivery or as a new parent.

A normal reaction to any anxiety and fear is a tightening of muscles, and vaginismus occurs when this happens in the pelvic floor muscles. A strong pelvic floor is important, but we also need to learn how to relax it, when we want to.

Read more: 1 in 10 women are affected by endometriosis. So why does it take so long to diagnose?

Diagnosis

Vaginismus can usually be diagnosed by taking a careful history and looking at which factors may be causing it.

Those who suspect they may have vaginismus should initially seek help from GPs, gynaecologists, pelvic floor physiotherapists, sexologists or psychotherapists who have experience with this condition.

Medical professionals who are experienced in treating the condition will do an examination in a gentle, empowering way, only when the woman is ready to, so she is not distressed or traumatised in any way.

Read more: Isolation could improve how we think about and navigate sex and relationships

Treatment

Women should be reassured tightness in the pelvic floor is an involuntary, protective response they can learn to overcome, with help.

A multidisciplinary approach of management has been shown to be most effective, this includes:

• education about vaginismus, the pelvic floor and sex

• medical management of any underlying physical conditions

• psychological management of any underlying worries

• pelvic floor physiotherapy can help women learn how to relax, generally and in the pelvic floor

• learning about what is pleasurable, as unaroused sex is a common cause of painful sex.

Woman should also be empowered to feel free to choose if, when and how to be sexual. Many women are either coerced into sex or are compliant for the sake of their partner’s needs.

They need to be supported to recognise and express their own needs and wishes. Although women can continue to be sexual in any way they wish, it’s vital to stop doing anything that hurts, such as continuing to try to have penetrative sex, while vaginismus is being treated.

– ref. Vaginismus: the common condition leading to painful sex – https://theconversation.com/vaginismus-the-common-condition-leading-to-painful-sex-148801

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Patrick Rule, Palaeontology PhD Candidate, Monash University

A fossil discovery in New Zealand has revealed a new species of monk seal that once called Australasia home. We introduce the three million-year-old seal, Eomonachus belegaerensis, in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Eomonachus is the first monk seal species, living or extinct, ever found in the southern hemisphere — and the oldest found anywhere.

It’s rewriting everything experts thought they knew about the evolution of “monachines”, a group of seal relatives comprising the two living species of monk seal, the elephant seals, as well as certain species of Antarctic seals.

On the brink of vanishing

Monk seals are some of the world’s rarest and most endangered marine mammals. There are fewer than 2,100 Mediterranean and Hawaiian monk seals alive today. The Caribbean monk seal was hunted to extinction by the 1950s.

Conservationists are now scrambling to save what’s left of Earth’s last exclusively tropical seals from disappearing.

That said, we would be wrong to assume monk seals were doing just fine before humans began exploiting them. How they fared over the past few million years remains unclear. We also don’t know where they originated, as fossils are few and far between.

Scientists traditionally thought all monk seals evolved in the North Atlantic Ocean. Before the discovery of Eomonachus, monk seals had only been found in the Northern Hemisphere.

In fact, most monachine fossils are found in the north, even though several living monachines (Antarctic seals and elephant seals) live almost exclusively in the Southern Ocean.

The unexpected discovery of Eomonachus has completely flipped the evolutionary history not only of monk seals, but of all monachines — by placing all three in the Southern Hemisphere for the first time.

Read more: Marine species are more threatened than we thought – and we’ve only looked at 3%

A monk seal from New Zealand

The recovery of the first known Eomonachus fossils came in the form of seven skulls uncovered along the coast of Taranaki, on New Zealand’s North Island. The fossils were retrieved by local collectors and donated to the Te Papa Tongarewa and Canterbury museums.

Our team eventually named the species Eomonachus belegaerensis. This translates to “dawn monk seal from Belegaer”. Belegaer is the fictional sea that lies west of “Middle Earth”, the land from J. R. R. Tolkein’s Lord of The Rings trilogy which is often associated with New Zealand.

But what were monk seals doing in New Zealand three million years ago?

Well, in the past, southern oceans were a lot warmer than they are today. And ancient monk seals, much like their modern relatives, lived in subtropical waters.

But until this year, few scientific studies on extinct monachines had been conducted in the southern hemisphere. This is likely why Eomonachus eluded scientists for so long.

Read more: In a land of ancient giants, these small oddball seals once called Australia home

The evolution of monachines

Following the unveiling of Eomonachus, we decided to re-investigate the evolution of the monachines.

Our research indicates this group of seals evolved in the Southern Hemisphere after all. This is in contrast with every theory previously put forward by scientists.

If there is indeed a southern origin for monachines, this would mean the group crossed the equator at least eight times throughout its evolutionary history.

However, the warm waters at the equator are widely accepted to be a thermal barrier which is difficult for marine mammals to cross.

If past monachines did jump between both hemispheres, they would have had broad environmental tolerances that let them do this. And this would have enabled their dispersal around the world.

It’s difficult to say conclusively whether modern seals share this trait, but we do know it’s rare for them to cross the equator during their lifetime.

Climate change and seal extinction

So why aren’t monk seals living around New Zealand now?

About 2.5 million years ago, marine megafauna experienced an extinction event, thought to have been caused by a drop in sea levels as a result of falling global temperature.

Previous research has theorised this change in climate spurred the extinction of many ancient seals in the Southern Hemisphere. This would have included Eomonachus, as well as other extinct monachines.

This suggests the world’s last two species of monk seal, vestiges of what was once likely a widespread group, are also at risk from climate change.

If sea levels continue to rise, the beaches monk seals rely on for resting and breeding may disappear. Rising temperatures could also disrupt food webs, making it difficult for them to find food.

While the discovery of Eomonachus is exciting, it can also be considered a cautionary tale.

– ref. Scientists thought these seals evolved in the north. 3-million-year-old fossils from New Zealand suggest otherwise – https://theconversation.com/scientists-thought-these-seals-evolved-in-the-north-3-million-year-old-fossils-from-new-zealand-suggest-otherwise-149746

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Thomas, Research assistant, University of Technology Sydney

When the Black Lives Matter movement re-emerged powerfully this year, it encouraged a cultural reckoning about how Black stories are told, reaching deep into Australia’s mainstream media. Once more, research showed just how unselfconsciously white Australian media is.

Our study of 45 years of mainstream print news reportage of Aboriginal self-determination found the media overwhelming reports from and assumes a white standpoint.

Published in a book titled Does the media fail Aboriginal political aspirations? 45 years of news media reporting of key political moments, our findings signal that the media’s problems go deeper than representation.

A podcast series based on the book has now been released. In this five-part series, titled Black Stories Matter, we bring together media researchers, historians, policy makers, a former Aboriginal Affairs minister and members of the growing cohort of Aboriginal journalists, to discuss how we can disrupt the negative patterns of the past.

What emerges from our research — and from the podcast — is the degree to which a white lens distorts Black stories. Aboriginal political aspirations for treaties, self-determination and agreement-making have been met with procrastination and denial from successive Australian governments — and, as we discovered, Australian media.

This matters because reporting shapes the way Aboriginal political worlds are understood and talked about in public discourse.

Read more: Friday essay: death on the Darling, colonialism’s final encounter with the Barkandji

A media failure to take Aboriginal efforts seriously

Our study systematically examined the history of media coverage of moments where Aboriginal people have claimed their rights. It comes at a time when the Victorian government is negotiating a treaty, and when the NSW government, among others, has adopted policies in support of self-determination and agreement-making.

A majority Aboriginal research team undertook 11 case studies. We examined 90 mainstream news print stories, and compared them to Aboriginal community media coverage.

We began in Darwin, Larrakia country, in 1972, just prior to the victory of Gough Whitlam’s Labor Party in the federal election. The Larrakia nation’s attempt to deliver a petition to visiting Princess Margaret was symbolic of the growing confidence of the national land rights movement. Yet, in the reporting surrounding this, activism was described as failing and change was considered unlikely, unpopular and unnecessary.

Fast forward to a crucial event in 2017, when more than 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representatives came together in the red centre of the country. After decades of consultation, inquiries, reports and recommendations, the Aboriginal polity arrived at a cohesive position and communicated the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Initially, the reporting appeared sympathetic. But it dissolved once more into constraining narratives after the immediate rejection by then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and the systematic reassertion by most media that reform was doable only if it did not challenge the subordination of Aboriginal sovereignty.

Over 45 years of Aboriginal people explaining and agitating with patience and persistence, the media almost always failed to take Aboriginal efforts seriously.

We found a failure to understand key concepts, such as the distinction between treaty, agreement-making, Makarrata and compact. If it was not for the Aboriginal media’s effective communication of Aboriginal demands, the historical record would be much impoverished.

Read more: Australia’s media has been too white for too long. This is how to bring more diversity to newsrooms

The coverage we reviewed in our study revolved around three dominant and repeated narratives.

The first, what we termed a “White Mastery narrative”, sees Aboriginality as a problem to be solved through assimilation, and Aboriginal political demands as an obstacle to a cohesive society. Present in the reporting on the Larrakia petition, it re-emerged around the time of Prime Minister John Howard’s emphasis on “practical reconciliation”.

The second, which we termed the “irreconciliation narrative”, was strongest in reporting on Aboriginal demands for a treaty through the 1980s. Here, great sympathy was undercut by the idea that Aboriginal calls for self-determination are impossible, “irreconcilable” demands, unpopular with the Australian populace. This narrative promotes a politics of procrastination on the one hand, and hopelessness on the other.

The third, which we termed the “subordination narrative” seeks to reposition Aboriginal desires for self-determination into frames of disadvantage and deficit. It sees the socioeconomic uplift of Aboriginal people as the most pressing concern. In this narrative, if addressing statistical inequality and “closing the gap” means subordinating Aboriginal self-determination, it’s justifiable.

The three dominant narratives demonstrate how a white lens distorts Black stories.

Another narrative, which we called the “sovereignty/nationhood narrative” only appeared in glimpses. It recognises the growing depth and strength of the Aboriginal polity, and acknowledges aspirations to self-governance as legitimate. In particular it validates the Aboriginal polity as an equal negotiating partner with the state.

Some examples of real headlines we came across in our study — and the narratives we identified across the reportage of each moment — are highlighted in the table at the end of this article.

Nuanced and complex representations of the Aboriginal polity

Over time, there were increasing invitations for opinion pieces in the mainstream media from Aboriginal voices. The Aboriginal polity engaged more deliberately with the media.

Yet, the media’s focus remained on parliamentary fracas, scandal and conflict. In the reports we examined, predominantly from Fairfax/Nine and News, we could not identify a single Aboriginal journalist at work.

We also examined Aboriginal media, such as Koori Mail or Land Rights News, for example. We found that, with far fewer resources, these outlets achieved nuanced and complex representations of the Aboriginal polity.

It should be a given for mainstream media outlets to place Aboriginal journalists at the centre of any attempt to tell Black stories. That, on its own, however, is not enough. Australia’s media landscape requires a transformation that needs to go much deeper than issues of representation.

By understanding how the mainstream media has failed, we can also see the pathways to telling the Black stories that can change Australia’s future. It is only by reconsidering its white standpoint that the media can give due justice to Black stories.

Subscribe to the Black Stories Matter podcast on your favourite podcast app: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher.

Black Stories Matter was made by Impact Studios at the University of Technology Sydney — an audio production house combining academic research with audio storytelling for real world impact. The podcast was made with the support of Aboriginal Affairs NSW as part of a strategy to improve the dynamics between Aboriginal people and governments.

– ref. The Black Lives Matter movement has provoked a cultural reckoning about how Black stories are told – https://theconversation.com/the-black-lives-matter-movement-has-provoked-a-cultural-reckoning-about-how-black-stories-are-told-149544

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Wake, Program Manager, Journalism, RMIT University

Immediately after ABC’s Four Corners aired allegations about the conduct of government ministers Alan Tudge and Christian Porter, questions were raised about whether the report was in the “public interest”.

The Australian’s editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, said on Q&A that Porter was “trashed” by the program, adding

What the ABC has done tonight is that it’s crashed through some media barriers and created new media barriers. How far do we go in terms of our definition of the public interest?

We need to be very careful about the damage we do to people’s reputations here and ask ourselves is that an accurate portrait or was it a caricature?

Asked about the story in a Senate committee before the story aired, ABC managing director David Anderson defended it as “absolutely” being in the public interest.

It goes to conduct of ministers, ministers of the Crown, to be held to the highest standard in society. That’s the nature of the story.

Porter has denied the claims made against against him. He had earlier discussed considering legal options against the ABC, but played that down in an interview yesterday.

Read more: Why a code of conduct may not be enough to change the boys’ club culture in the Liberal Party

Even tawdry stories are in the public interest

Despite Porter’s protestations, the ABC clearly had an obligation to air a story that contained allegations of ministerial misconduct (however tawdry).

News reports about politicians, sex and booze are as old as time and have brought shame to many a politician, from the former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce to Deputy Labor Leader Gareth Evans and the UK Secretary of War John Profumo.

The one clear duty of journalism is to hold those in power to account, and that appears to have been lost on those members of government as they reportedly attempted to pressure the ABC, its managers and journalists, over the broadcast.

Standards for those in government

Many ethical issues arise from the broadcast, the attempt to pressure the ABC and the legal threats that have followed.

Even before the program had made it to air, the ABC’s management found themselves under attack, with an excruciating Senate Estimates Committee hearing a couple of hours before the broadcast.

But it certainly wasn’t a quick piece of “gotcha” journalism with a blurry photo at its centre. The Four Corners team have an exacting process to their work. For this story, the ABC said they interviewed 200 people over several months. They also contextualised the story beyond the two central politicians to raise real concerns about the place and safety of women who work in Parliament House.

Anderson also said the allegations had been thoroughly sourced and checked legally. Those named in the story were given “ample” opportunity to respond.

Moreover, while the so-called “bonk ban” on ministers having sexual relations with their staff was only introduced by Prime Minister Malcolom Turnbull in 2018, Cabinet ministers have had rules governing their behaviour since John Howard first established a public ministerial code in 1996.

Members of the Morrison Cabinet now sign up to a code of conduct which says they will “act with integrity” and be “open to public scrutiny and explanation”.

Specifically, there is no grey area in these ministerial standards on the point of sexual relationships with staff:

2.24. Ministers must not engage in sexual relations with their staff. Doing so will constitute a breach of this code.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison pointedly said this week that neither Porter nor Tudge were in breach of his code of conduct.

But allegations of sexual misconduct and power imbalances, even historic ones, are still clearly a cause for community concern, and cannot not be ignored by journalists or political leaders. Such matters are no longer private affairs between consenting adults.

Just ask the complainants at AMP, the former CEO of Seven in WA, or even former US president Bill Clinton.

Read more: AMP doesn’t just have a women problem. It has an everyone problem

Action should be taken

Regardless of the salacious allegations made on the Four Corners program, there is also a point to be made about the hypocrisy of politicians who market themselves as having “family values” and demand others follow “Australian values”.

Certainly, it is not edifying to watch details of alleged impropriety by politicians broadcast on television, and it’s uncomfortable that such stories inevitably impact those who are innocently caught up in the furore (particularly partners and children).

Tudge did issue a statement saying he regretted his actions “and the hurt it has caused my family”.

Read more: Is Canberra having a #metoo moment? It will take more than reports of MPs behaving badly for parliament to change

But with this story, Four Corners has not only produced a program that has interest from the public, it is also in the public’s interest.

There are many questions to be answered from the ministers named in the story and also those who knew about the allegations and did nothing (or even worse, promoted them).

The real outcome of this program should not be a defamation case, but rather action from Morrison. Questions over ministerial conduct are important. This is certainly a matter of public interest.

– ref. What’s in the ‘public interest’? Why the ABC is right to cover allegations of inappropriate ministerial conduct – https://theconversation.com/whats-in-the-public-interest-why-the-abc-is-right-to-cover-allegations-of-inappropriate-ministerial-conduct-149821

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marija Taflaga, Lecturer, School of Political Science and International Relations, Australian National University

Sex and politics is a well-established theme of political life.

Often the debate comes back to whether or not politicians deserve private lives. The short answer is yes, of course. But this question is also misleading.

Too often the scandals arise out of political workplaces. While it might be Liberal Party ministers in the spotlight this time, this is not a problem exclusive to the Coalition. It is pervasive across political systems in Australia and worldwide.

Amid fresh allegations of MPs behaving badly, we need to look past the personal drama of each individual story and consider what they tell us about the wider structures in which politicians and their staff operate.

Minister-staff dynamics

Political staff are not public servants. They are employed under separate legislation and are hired and fired at the discretion of their boss — the minister, shadow minister or MP.

Staffers’ duties are poorly defined, and can range from emotional support to high level policy work. Their employment can be terminated with no notice (although this is currently under review in the latest enterprise bargaining agreement).

Read more: Porter rejects allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour and threatens legal action after Four Corners investigation

There is little oversight over who MPs appoint, with involvement from party leaders typically viewed as interference. Indeed, there is little oversight of the work of political advisers generally — they cannot be summoned to appear before parliamentary committees.

Theoretically, ministers are responsible for their staff, but as we increasingly see, advisers can also be shields for their ministers, resigning when things go wrong.

While it may not be illegal or even immoral, the issue at stake here is a power imbalance. It is hard to argue sexual relations within this work environment could meet our modern standard of a mutually consensual relationship. Even if things start well, what happens if they end badly?

Political advisers turn into politicians

What happens in political offices matters for many reasons. Beyond creating safe workplaces, it also has an impact on who rises through the political ranks.

Evidence from across Westminster systems shows politicians increasingly have a background in political advising before they are elected.

Emerging evidence also suggests a stint as an adviser is increasingly associated with the probability of selection to safe seats and, later, ministerial office.

Why? Because politics is a networks game. And as politics has become more professionalised, the skills political staff obtain are seen as more important than skills gained via community organising or pathways through party membership.

We already know this has a disproportionate impact on women. Women were less likely to gain experience via their party machines and are less likely to be promoted to the most senior ranks of political offices.

Read more: Why a code of conduct may not be enough to change the boys’ club culture in the Liberal Party

The type of work they do in political offices tends to be of a lower status, less strategic and with less access to ministers. Put another way, they are less likely to get the valuable experience they require to move forward in their careers and less likely to have seniority and power in the office.

Adding any unwanted sexual advances, or relationships which fail, place yet another barrier for young female staff. This was reflected in the case of two Liberal staffers who came forward with claims of sexual assault in 2019.

Parliament House is a workplace

It is true federal parliament is an atypical work environment: it is more intense than most and is more likely to breed a dimension of co-dependence with support staff than most other professions.

But parliament’s status as the seat of government does not make it “special” and therefore, beyond community standards.

If anything, public expectations suggest politicians are held to a higher standard than most managers. This is because there is a recognition politicians are disproportionately powerful and influential. MPs regularly affirm their legitimacy by claiming to represent everyday Australians. This means they need to reflect community standards.

This trade-off between ministers’ privileges and responsibilities are reflected in the Statement of Ministerial Standards which begins with two principles:

The ethical standards required of Ministers in Australia’s system of government reflect the fact that, as holders of public office, Ministers are entrusted with considerable privilege and wide discretionary power.

In recognition that public office is a public trust, therefore, the people of Australia are entitled to expect that, as a matter of principle, Ministers will act with due regard for integrity, fairness, accountability, responsibility, and the public interest, as required by these Standards.

Importantly, the same dynamics that may result in sexual harassment for some staff, may also result in bullying for others. This is because the core issue is the asymmetry of power in the ministerial-staffing relationship, compounded by the intensity of the work environment and complicated by gender relations. All staff deserve better.

Currently, an inadequate complaints process, run by the Department of Finance, makes it difficult for staff to come forward if they feel they have been mistreated at work. It has only recently added sexual harassment and the complaints procedures are opaque.

There needs to be clearer and more effective mechanisms for all staff to seek support and redress.

What could we learn from around the world?

Both the United Kingdom and Canada have introduced new complaints mechanisms. The Canadian parliament has adopted a code of conduct and a complaints procedure. The UK Parliament has a behaviour code and complaints hotline.

However, both schemes have come in for criticism, ultimately because they do not fully address the imbalance between MPs and complainants.

This points to the fact that too much of the emphasis is on women (and junior staff) to cope, adapt or seek out resolutions after something has already happened.

Really, what is required is a deeper cultural change that sees parliament treated like any other workplace.

What happens now?

Is this Canberra’s #metoo moment? We should not get our hopes up.

Read more: #MeToo has changed the media landscape, but in Australia there is still much to be done

Without effective enforcement of the current ministerial code of conduct, which prohibits relationships with their staff, an adequate complaints process that does not disadvantage complainants and clear leadership that signals the need to shift the culture within parliament, it may not be.

After all, can Australians trust their politicians if there appears to be one rule for some and a different rule for others? Everyone needs to abide by, and be seen to abide by, the same rules and standards.

– ref. Is Canberra having a #metoo moment? It will take more than reports of MPs behaving badly for parliament to change – https://theconversation.com/is-canberra-having-a-metoo-moment-it-will-take-more-than-reports-of-mps-behaving-badly-for-parliament-to-change-149819

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Giselle Bastin, Associate Professor of English, Flinders University

Peter Morgan’s fourth season of The Crown faces perhaps its greatest challenge so far. The 1980s was one of the most documented, catalogued, debated and scrutinised decades of the House of Windsor. Morgan will, no doubt be keenly aware of viewers using telephoto lenses to, once again, see if the program-makers “get it right”.

They do.

Season four is a triumph of accuracy blended with creative invention that continues the program’s process of recentering the Queen (Olivia Colman).

Queen Elizabeth II’s main rivals for centre stage are Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (played dazzlingly well by Gillian Anderson) and Lady Diana Spencer (played wide-eyed and en pointe by newcomer Emma Corrin).

The production standards, casting and acting are excellent; the script structure now well known to fans of the series; the costumes are without a stitch out of place; and they even — I never thought I’d type these words — get Diana’s hair and voice right.

Royal rituals

The series pivots around episode two, The Balmoral Test. Thatcher and Diana must adapt to royal ways during the Windsors’ annual decamping to Balmoral in Scotland. The seemingly jokey initiation ceremonies disguise a deeply serious process of vetting suitability to enter the royal fold.

Will they bring the right footwear and clothes for country life? (Diana yes, Thatcher, no). Do they know that dinner is at 8pm, not 6pm?; that no-one is to sit in Queen Victoria’s chair? (Thatcher, no).

Do they love blood sports such as fly-fishing, grouse hunting and — perhaps bloodiest of all — after dinner parlour games? (A big “no” for Maggie; Diana proves better at faking it).

The initiation rituals reveal the royals’ ignorance of the seismic social shift taking place in Britain. Thatcher’s ascendancy to Downing Street signalled an emergence of a system that recognised the validity of meritocracy over aristocracy, even monarchy.

Colman’s queen begins by enjoying pulling rank and the rug out from underneath Thatcher’s muddy feet during their bleak Balmoral summer, but she becomes increasingly discombobulated by a PM who imagines herself more regal than her sovereign.

During the 1985 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the Queen oversteps her constitutional role and presses for political action; the PM tears strips off her and puts her in her place with a level of frosty imperiousness that would have put Queen Victoria to shame.

The scenes between Anderson and Colman are spellbinding.

The hunter and the hunted

The season charts the civic unrest of the UK during a period of high unemployment and the clashes over nationalist spending for endeavours such as the Falklands War.

Episode five brings this narrative thread together with the break-in to Buckingham Palace by unemployed and socially dispossessed Londoner, Michael Fagan (Tom Brooke). Having scaled the palace walls, he sits on the Queen’s bed: a symbol of the bleeding and broken Britain under Thatcherite rule.

Read more: The death of Margaret Thatcher, and the legacy of ‘Thatcherism’

The other major storyline is the courtship and marriage of Charles (Josh O’Connor) and Diana. During her first visit to Balmoral, Diana is subjected to one of her first tests. She and Philip (Tobias Menzies) go deer stalking together with the aim of finishing off a 14-pointer Imperial stag that has been badly injured by an “overseas” hunter (echoes of the paparazzi?).

With Diana’s assistance, Philip cleanly dispatches the stag. The royal pair return to Balmoral ahead of a procession of the dead animal now strapped to the back of a horse — an unsettling premonition of what will be Diana’s coffin in her funeral procession 17 years later.

Having been an early ally, Philip moves to read Diana the rule book when the princess threatens to break out with her own royal show. Philip tells her:

Everyone in this system is lost, lonely, irrelevant, [an] outsider, apart from the one person, the only person that matters. She is the oxygen we all breathe, the essence of all our duty. Your problem […] is that you seem to be confused about who that person is.

A closing scene sees Diana framed against a wall-mounted stag, its horns appearing to be Diana’s own. The message is clear: the assassins Diana has to keep an eye out for may lurk within palace walls.

The bride stripped bare

It is poignant and clever that we do not get to see a full blown recreation of the “fairytale wedding of the century”. The Charles and Diana we meet in St Paul’s are there merely for their wedding rehearsal, Diana in plain clothes and fake wedding veil and train, the rehearsal wedding vows interrupted and left unsaid.

This is the bride stripped bare, the marriage finished before it’s even begun.

Read more: Diana revived the monarchy – and airing old tapes won’t change a thing

The rest of the royals drift through exhibiting degrees of pain and loneliness, all craving affection, recognition and meaning.

Princess Margaret continues to party and suffer hard. Princess Anne’s marriage (barely glimpsed in all four seasons) disappears altogether. Prince Andrew emerges as a smug and entitled buffoon (bring on season seven); and Camilla is, to say the least, equivocal about a future with Charles.

Only the Queen and her husband seem to have found a happy place, with Philip her major protector, her Walsingham.

This latest series of The Crown opens with a close-up of the Queen preparing for ceremonial duty and ends with a close-up of Diana’s face as she poses for a family photo at Sandringham.

The Crown’s bookending of the two leading royal women signals the next season will be the Windsors’ reckoning with the late 20th century, a period of enormous adjustment and reinvention for the family.

The Crown season 4 will air on Netflix from November 15.

– ref. The Crown season 4 review: a triumphant portrait of the 1980s with a perfectly wide-eyed Diana – https://theconversation.com/the-crown-season-4-review-a-triumphant-portrait-of-the-1980s-with-a-perfectly-wide-eyed-diana-149633

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Nelson, Associate Professor of Economics, Griffith University

It’s been a busy couple of months in global energy and climate policy. Australia’s largest trading partners – China, South Korea and Japan – have all announced they will reach net-zero emissions by about mid-century. In the United States, the incoming Biden administration has committed to decarbonising its electricity system by 2035.

These pledges have big implications for Australia. With some of the best renewable resources in the world, we have much to gain from the transition. And this week, the New South Wales government embraced the opportunity.

Its new A$32 billion Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap will, among other things, support the construction of 12 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity by 2030. This is six times the capacity of the state’s Liddell coal-fired power station, set to close in 2023.

The roadmap was developed by NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean through extensive consultation with industry and others, including ourselves. While we believe a national carbon price is the best way to reduce emissions, the NSW approach nonetheless sets an example for other states looking to increase renewable energy capacity. So let’s take a closer look at the plan.

What’s the roadmap all about?

The roadmap acknowledges that within 15 years, three-quarters of NSW’s coal-fired electricity supply is expected to reach the end of its technical life. It says action is needed now to ensure cheap, clean and reliable electricity, and to set up NSW as a global energy superpower.

The plan involves a coordinated approach to transmission, generation and storage. By 2030, the government aims to:

• deliver about 12 gigawatts of new transmission capacity through so-called “renewable energy zones” in three regional areas by 2030. It would most likely be generated by wind and solar

• support about 3 gigawatts of energy storage to help back up variable renewable energy supplies. This would involve batteries, pumped hydro, and “hydrogen ready” gas peaking power stations

• attract up to A$32 billion in private investment in regional energy infrastructure investment by 2030

• support more than 6,300 construction and 2,800 ongoing jobs in 2030, mostly in regional NSW

• reduce NSW’s carbon emissions by 90 million tonnes.

The plan also aims to see the average NSW household save about A$130 a year in electricity costs, although this might be hard to achieve in practice. And regional landholders hosting renewable projects on their properties are expected to earn A$1.5 billion in revenue over the next 20 years.

Giving generators options

One of the most innovative aspects of the NSW proposal is that generators will have two options when it comes to selling their electricity.

First, the government will appoint an independent “consumer trustee” to purchase electricity from generators at an agreed price – giving the generators the long-term certainty they need to invest. The trustee would then sell this electricity either directly to the market, or through contracts to retailers.

But the trustee will encourage generators to first seek a better price by finding their own customers, such as energy consumers and other electricity retailers.

Read more: Zali Steggall’s new climate change bill comes just as economic sectors step up

This system is different to the approach adopted in Victoria and the ACT, where government contracts remove any incentive for generators to participate in the energy market. Over time, this limits market competition and innovation.

The NSW plan improves on existing state policies in another way – by aligning financial incentives to the physical needs of the system. The Consumer Trustee will enter into contracts with projects that produce electricity at times of the day when consumers need it, and not when the system is already oversupplied.

While this won’t be easy for the trustee to model, this approach is likely to benefit consumers more than in other jurisdictions where lowest-cost projects seem to be preferred, irrespective of whether the energy they produced is needed by consumers.

One shortcoming of the roadmap is it does not financially reward existing low-emissions electricity generators in NSW, nor does it charge carbon-heavy electricity producers for the emissions they produce. This could be corrected in the future by integrating the policy into a nationally consistent carbon price, which transfers the cost of carbon pollution onto heavy emitters.

Why is all this so important?

NSW’s ageing coal-fired power stations are chugging along – albeit with ever-declining reliability. But it’s only a matter of time before something expensive needs fixing. This was the case with Hazelwood in Victoria: the old walls of the boilers had thinned to less than 2 millimetres. The repair cost was prohibitive and the station closed with just five months’ notice. Electricity prices shot up in response to unexpectedly reduced supply.

In NSW, the consumer trustee will be tasked with helping ensuring replacement generation is delivered in a timely way. This means developing new generation capacity well ahead of announced coal plant closures.

This is a helpful development. But ultimately a stronger measure will be needed to ensure coal plants give early notice of their intention to exit the market. The Grattan Institute has previously suggested coal generators put up bonds that are forfeited if they close early. We think this model is worth considering again.

Seize the opportunity

As the world’s largest exporter of coal and LNG, Australia has much to lose as global economies shift to zero emissions. But our renewable energy potential means we also have much to gain.

Australia needs a durable, nationally consistent policy framework if we’re to seize the opportunities of the global transition to clean energy. The NSW roadmap is a significant step in the right direction.

Read more: Biden says the US will rejoin the Paris climate agreement in 77 days. Then Australia will really feel the heat

– ref. NSW has joined China, South Korea and Japan as climate leaders. Now it’s time for the rest of Australia to follow – https://theconversation.com/nsw-has-joined-china-south-korea-and-japan-as-climate-leaders-now-its-time-for-the-rest-of-australia-to-follow-149731

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sally Potter, Hazard and Risk Management Researcher, GNS Science

November 12 marks the 50th anniversary of Cyclone Bhola, the deadliest weather event on modern record.

When this storm made landfall over Bangladesh, it coincided with a lunar high tide. The subsequent storm surge killed at least 300,000 people.

This month also marks the start of the cyclone season in the Pacific. The outlook suggests New Caledonia should prepare for stronger cyclone activity. New Zealand also faces a higher risk of being battered by ex-tropical cyclones.

In the 50 years since Cyclone Bhola, the accuracy of weather forecasts has improved dramatically. Today’s five-day cyclone forecast is as good as a three-day forecast was 20 years ago. But the way we communicate their risks and impacts is lagging behind.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is working with its member countries to change that by shifting to impact-based forecasting — moving from communicating what the weather will be, to what the weather will do.

Preparing for a storm surge

Storm surges generated by tropical cyclones are among the world’s most deadly and destructive natural hazards. They may have killed as many as 2.6 million people around the world over the past two centuries.

The warming of the oceans means the world is experiencing more intense cyclones. Relative to 2000, sea level is expected to rise by 20–30cm by 2050, leaving many coastal communities, especially those in small island nations, increasingly vulnerable to cyclone-generated storm surges.

Read more: Storm warning: a new long-range tropical cyclone outlook is set to reduce disaster risk for Pacific Island communities

Traditional hazard-based warnings are based on criteria such as wind speeds or rainfall intensity, but impact-based forecasts focus on the level of damage expected from an impending storm.

Impact-based forecasts for small island nations

When Cyclone Winston hit Fiji on February 20, 2016, it was the most intense cyclone ever recorded in the southern hemisphere.

In 2017, the unprecedented hurricane season in the Caribbean unleashed major hurricanes Irma and Maria, devastating many small island countries.

The premise of impact-based forecasting is that a well communicated warning will enable people to make decisions and take actions to reduce their exposure to life-threatening risks.

But while such warnings may be more effective in increasing awareness of potential impacts, my earlier research suggests this does not necessarily translate to more action.

Preparedness is also an essential part of the equation, and can only be achieved by working with communities and emergency services before extreme events. Impact-based forecasting will only be effective if it helps at-risk communities to take action ahead of these impacts.

Read more: Our new model shows Australia can expect 11 tropical cyclones this season

Early-warning systems a priority

The 2020 State of Climate Services report, published by the WMO and 15 other agencies last month, suggests impact-based forecasting could be a game-changer for small island nations in the Pacific and Caribbean regions.

Since 1970, small island developing states have lost US$153 billion because of weather, climate and water-related hazards. Almost 90% of small island developing nations have identified early-warning systems as a top priority in their pledges under the Paris climate agreement.

Known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, these pledges describe efforts by each country to reduce national emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

While the knowledge of cyclone risk is high in small island developing states, their capacity to communicate impacts and disseminate warnings is lower than the global average. In an interview, the WMO’s chief of early-warning services, Cyrille Honoré, told us the move towards impact-based forecasting should improve the way different agencies can work together to protect vulnerable communities:

The reason we are introducing impact-based forecasting in small island nations is because it will help to save more lives and better protect assets, infrastructure and livelihoods. In the context of small island nations, these impacts may be significant enough to annihilate years of development efforts, so this is really a contribution to enhancing the resilience of these nations.

Fiji’s prime minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama told us he hopes impact-based forecasting will help Fijians prepare to deal with the new normal of “climate-fuelled, extreme weather patterns”:

This work to improve cyclone forecasting is vital because it gives us a lifesaving window of opportunity to prepare for a storm’s arrival, allowing relevant authorities to make accurate and timely predictions for better informed decisions.

– ref. New cyclone forecasts: why impacts should be the focus of hazardous weather warnings – https://theconversation.com/new-cyclone-forecasts-why-impacts-should-be-the-focus-of-hazardous-weather-warnings-149358

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Linda Galligan, Associate professor, University of Southern Queensland

A recent New South Wales report showed about one quarter of Year 12 students did not take any Higher School Certificate (HSC) maths courses over the last decade. This was compared to around 6% students who opted out of HSC maths in 2000.

In Queensland, reports show nearly one-third of senior students drop out of the intermediate mathematical methods subject, which includes algebra and calculus. The number of Year 11 students choosing the easiest maths subject (not automatically counted towards the ATAR), essential mathematics, has soared by 45% this year — from 12,687 in 2019 to 18,431 in 2020.

Because of the move towards automation, some recent industry reports note 75% of the fastest growing occupations will require high-level skills in STEM (science, maths, engineering and technology). But studies consistently show in Australia, participation in secondary school advanced maths continues to decline.

Although national participation rates in Year 12 maths subjects are still high — at around 80% — the proportion of students choosing advanced (calculus-based) maths subjects has declined sharply in the last 20 years. In every year of the last decade, fewer than 30% of students chose intermediate or higher mathematics.

Changes at university level aren’t enough

Strategies designed to improve participation in maths include reintroducing maths prerequisites for certain areas of university study (such as engineering) and offering bonus points for university entry for students who have done advanced maths. The government’s recent job-ready graduates legislation will also make STEM degrees cheaper to study.

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

These strategies all focus on improving the flow to tertiary education.

But students’ engagement with maths, including their level of achievement and attitude to its importance, are formed much earlier than senior secondary school. This means the impact of the above initiatives may not be as effective as intended.

Recent NSW data shows the University of Sydney’s reintroduction of prerequisites for a wide range of their degrees has failed to shift the dial significantly for falling enrolments in HSC mathematics.

A 2019 report by the Australian Council for Educational Research, suggested that, for the Group of Eight universities in the study, most students entering science degrees had in fact completed an appropriate level of maths even though they weren’t required to.

What about other countries?

It is hard to get standardised data useful for comparing Australian and international participation in upper level, high school maths. There are differences in curriculum structures and content across and within countries.

For example, comparing participation in countries where maths is compulsory until the end of school, for example, Sweden, Japan, Korea, Russia, Finland, Taiwan, and Estonia,to those where it is not, makes little sense.

Some interesting comparisons, however, can still be made. In the US, where maths is not compulsory, only 19% of students who completed high school in 2013 took calculus-based courses.

The United Kingdom, after recognising participation in advanced maths was in serious decline, launched a national campaign to reverse the trend. This included a £67 million initiative to improve teacher supply in maths and physics. While there was some improvement after the campaign, almost three-quarters of students who achieved good marks in maths still chose not to study it after the age of 16.

Participation rates in higher level maths can predict the number of tertiary STEM graduates and the future of the STEM workforce. But strong levels of achievement in maths earlier in the school years are essential to feed the pipeline.

Maths achievement scores for Australian 15-16 year olds, based on international comparative reports — such as the Programme for International Student Assessment PISA and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study TIMSS — have shown steady decline since 2003. Perhaps even more concerning is that the ranking-gap between Australia and top performing countries is widening.

Read more: Estonia didn’t deliver its PISA results on the cheap, and neither will Australia

In recent TIMSS reports, which also provide information about students’ attitudes to maths, Australian Year 8 students place almost the same value on maths as their international peers. But a striking difference in attitude emerges from the data — Australian students are significantly less satisfied and engaged with maths than their international peers.

Half of our students don’t like maths, compared to 38% of students in other countries. About one-quarter of our students find maths teaching unengaging, compared to 17% for international students.

What can we do?

Australia can look to successful strategies overseas.

Estonia, the highest ranked European country for maths in PISA in 2018, has small classes and almost no high-stakes tests for school children, leaving more time for instruction.

In Australia, the introduction of NAPLAN has resulted in no perceivable improvement in student outcomes. NAPLAN has come under increased criticism, particularly around the amount of valuable class time that may be devoted to NAPLAN style tasks.

Australia needs to concentrate on high-quality student instruction not testing, and improving attitudes to, and engagement in, mathematics.

Australia has one of the highest rates of out-of-field teaching (teaching outside field of expertise) in mathematics and science in the world. Only in the United States, Brazil and Australia does this occur on a large scale. And it appears to be worse in Australia than the United States.

Read more: More teens are dropping maths. Here are three reasons to stick with it

Over half of school principals in 2017 reported they had maths and science classes being taught by teachers who weren’t fully qualified in the discipline. Research has also found 22% of Australian Year 8 students were taught by out-of-field teachers, compared to an international average of 13%.

The Australian government has tried to close this gap by providing A$9.5 million for professional learning and resources for teachers from primary to secondary school. But more funding needs to be directed towards out-of-field maths teachers in higher year levels to reach international standards.

In Ireland, for example, about €7 million has been committed towards professional development for out-of-field maths teachers in the post-primary years.

Australian maths curricula are ambitious, including a strong emphasis on calculus. And they have recently expanded the amount of statistics included at upper year levels.

The UK has looked to successful STEM-education countries like Singapore. Half of its primary schools will adopt their model of deep learning of maths. This moves away from simple rote learning to focus on teaching children how to problem solve. It also covers fewer topics in far greater depth.

Whatever strategies Australia adopts over the next decade to improve maths participation for school children, all levels of education must be involved and include teacher professional development.

– ref. Fewer Australians are taking advanced maths in Year 12. We can learn from countries doing it better – https://theconversation.com/fewer-australians-are-taking-advanced-maths-in-year-12-we-can-learn-from-countries-doing-it-better-149148

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Roberto Minunno, Research Fellow in Sustainability Buildings, Curtin University

Designing buildings so they can easily be taken apart and the materials reused provides a feasible and commercial pathway for minimising waste and greenhouse gas emissions. Our research shows one such Curtin University building, the Legacy Living Lab in Fremantle, reduces construction waste and cuts emissions to almost a tenth of what a conventional building process would produce.

The modular, circular economy building produces benefits in all six environmental indicators we assessed. It’s part of our vision for the decarbonisation of buildings.

Read more: Buildings produce 25% of Australia’s emissions. What will it take to make them ‘green’ – and who’ll pay?

Learning from nature

Natural biogeochemical cycles create little or no waste. These circular cycles eventually transform used material into a new resource. For example, through the nutrient cycle a fallen leaf provides the building blocks for future leaves.

It’s simple and beautiful. The opposite of a linear model of “take, make, dispose”. It’s complex and ugly.

Unfortunately, this is the model industrialised society has adopted. And not only for our coffee pods, which mostly end up in landfill, but also for most commercial and residential buildings.

The building industry consumes about 50% of mineral resources and produces about 35% of waste. It’s a major source of global greenhouse gas emissions. What, then, can be done?

Read more: We create 20m tons of construction industry waste each year. Here’s how to stop it going to landfill

Rethinking ‘downward spiral’ recycling

The answer lies in revisiting the basics of our recycling practices. Since the late 1990s, recycling has been considered an environmental solution, with recycling bins popping up everywhere. However, researchers and consumers alike have begun to realise recycling often comes down to mere “wishcycling”. Less than 10% of plastics is actually being recycled.

Reprocessing is considered the best way to keep materials in use, particularly for artefacts like coffee cups or microchips. However, for many other products, such as building materials, recycling often translates into less than helpful down-cycling.

Even seemingly environmentally benign material, such as timber, often cannot be recycled. Rather, it is remanufactured into products of lower economic value and quality. The material is in a downward spiral that only delays its disposal to landfill.

Clearly, it is much better for the environment if we can find ways to reuse products. Indeed, there are “reusable alternatives for almost everything: beeswax or silicone food wraps, reusable coffee pods, shampoo and conditioner bars, reusable safety razors and bars of soap, rather than liquid soap”.

Read more: With the right tools, we can mine cities

Applying reuse principles to buildings

Can this reuse practice be adopted for buildings too? After all, a building is a sophisticated and complex product compared to coffee pods or cling wrap.

Researchers from Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute put this question to the test by building a modular, reusable laboratory. It’s a place where researchers, builders and citizens alike can meet to prototype and study new products.

The Legacy Living Lab (L3) is a highly functional, state-of-the-art building with offices and space for collaboration. Yet it can be taken apart – deconstructed or disassembled – moved and reused anywhere within weeks.

Findings from studying the environmental impact of this facility point towards a resounding yes to the question of whether reuse practices can be adopted for buildings. The in-built reuse practices of the L3 save 18 tonnes of construction materials from disposal compared to common building industry practices. This leads to an 88% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.

So how was this done? Simply, by choosing reused steel frames, opting for steel foundations instead of concrete, and designing internal wall cladding that’s easily disassembled. This makes it almost as easy to take the building apart as your average Lego spaceship.

Read more: Green cement a step closer to being a game-changer for construction emissions

When the time comes to decommission the building, it can be deconstructed as eight modules. These can be moved to the next site for reuse rather than being demolished.

Modular buildings are made of box-shaped structures, built off-site and delivered on-site in a matter of hours. This has the added benefit of minimum disruption for our cities compared to traditional construction sites.

Modular buildings come in all shapes and dimensions, from tiny houses to skyscrapers and factories. They are often more cost-effective to produce than traditional double-brick constructions.

Thus, as well as a minimal environmental footprint, the advantages of modular buildings include flexibility, speed and cost.

Creating a new building materials market

By adopting easily disassembled modular buildings, we can create a whole new market for reusable building materials. Design-for-disassembly and closed-loop supply chains can keep building components in the material loop as they are – without the need for wishy-washy and wasteful recycling procedures.

Similar to the way nature operates, the team at CUSP created a building whose byproducts from one process remain in the loop as inputs for the next, keeping waste to a minimum. In this way, disassembly becomes much safer and cleaner, which benefits our cities and their residents.

Read more: Unbuilding cities as high-rises reach their use-by date

All that does not mean recycling building waste isn’t beneficial. It all depends on the project. Timber can at least be chipped into garden mulch, bricks and concrete crushed into road base, and so forth.

But this approach is not nearly as neat as nature’s way of handling waste. Design for disassembly and modularity comes closer to that. It can lead the way towards a marketplace where it is common practice to retain material in the supply chain.

If our goal is to create products and processes that “solve our greatest design challenges sustainably and in solidarity with all life on Earth”, it’s time we turned toward nature. We believe it will be a wiser guide than any other in our efforts to redefine wasteful, linear business models.

– ref. A third of our waste comes from buildings. This one’s designed for reuse and cuts emissions by 88% – https://theconversation.com/a-third-of-our-waste-comes-from-buildings-this-ones-designed-for-reuse-and-cuts-emissions-by-88-147455

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Flavio Romero Macau, Senior Lecturer in Supply Chain Management and Global Logistics, Edith Cowan University

Santa Claus is the ultimate global logistics worker, magically delivering gifts all over the world in a single night.

The rest of us have to rely on more mundane delivery systems to get gifts under the Christmas tree and into stockings – and this year those systems are under huge pressure.

So if you’re ordering gifts online, how late can you leave it to guarantee they arrive in time?

Our advice is to lock in your orders in the next few days. Anything ordered from late November may not arrive before 2021.

Even if you’re planning on traditional bricks-and-mortar Christmas shopping, do it sooner rather than later. The supply chains that usually keep shops stocked during December could fall behind.

Leave it too late and you may find your most wanted item out of stock.

Read more: Whatever the hardships of COVID-19, let’s be thankful it wasn’t COVID-99

Parcel pressures

Delivery services have been under strain for most of 2020 due to the dramatic increase in online shopping driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the US online shopping is up more than 30% year on year. The UK is similar, and set to increase as the country goes into another lockdown. In Australia it’s up more than 75% to last year.

With online sales in September already more than 7% higher than the 2019 Christmas peak, Australia Post is projecting a huge increase in the month prior to Christmas.

Number of online purchases, Australia, 2019-2020

What this means, of course, is many more parcels to deliver – more than eight times the monthly average if 2019 is anything to go by. Delivery services will find it hard – if not impossible – to cope.

As noted by James Thomson, chief strategy officer with US company Buy Box Experts (a service provider to Amazon sellers) the weakest link in the delivery chain is “last-mile delivery capacity”.

With consumers moving so many more shopping dollars online, all of those sites need last-mile delivery through UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc […] While these carriers are building capacity, they likely will not build anywhere near enough, resulting in late shipments and disappointed customers.

If that’s the case in the US, it’s even more true in Australia. In 2019 Australia Post delivered 41.5% of parcels to premises. While it and other postal services (such as the UK’s Royal Mail) hire thousands more casual workers from as early as September to cope with the load, there are still only so many sorting facilities and delivery vehicles.

Read more: You’ve got (less) mail: COVID-19 hands Australia Post a golden opportunity to end daily letter delivery

Overseas delays

To these local delivery delays, add delays for goods coming from overseas.

Many regions are experiencing renewed COVID-19 restrictions, reducing manufacturing and distribution capacities. These disruptions, going back over the whole year, will mean shortages.

Also, many items “shipped” from places such as China have historically come by air – not just in dedicated cargo planes but also commercial passenger planes. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic half of all air cargo was transported in passenger planes. The International Civil Aviation Organisation estimates passenger aircraft “belly cargo capacity” has fallen 80%.

While freighter capacity has increased, as of late October global air cargo capacity was still 20% lower than a year ago.

December is usually the busiest period for air travel, with these extra passenger flights helping to deliver higher cargo volumes. That’s not going to be the case this year. So expect any deliveries relying on air transport to take longer.

Currently Australia Post advises allowing for more than 25 days for international deliveries.

Post haste

These stresses on international supply chains will also affect stocks in local retail shops.

Even in the best of times supply chains are pushed to their limits towards the end of the year. If they are not healthy to start with, Christmas can be the last straw. Inventory for products as different as bicycles, video games and dumbbells are already way down.

The signs are there – out-of-stock messages, caveats on expected dispatch times, and long delays in promised delivery times.

So you want the full Christmas experience with a tree full of presents, order or buy now to avoid disappointment.

This is not a year to procrastinate, or wait until the last moment to get the best deal. In 2020 first come will be first served.

– ref. When to buy Christmas gifts online to get them in time? The answer is now – https://theconversation.com/when-to-buy-christmas-gifts-online-to-get-them-in-time-the-answer-is-now-149157

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

It’s quite a moment, when the country’s first law officer is asked on his home town radio station, “So you don’t think you’re a sleazebag or womaniser or someone who’s drunk in public too much now?”

Overnight, Christian Porter had been reduced from high-flying attorney-general to a man forced to publicly confront a nightmare episode of “This is Your Life” delivered by Monday’s Four Corners.

“No, it’s definitely not indicative of who I am now,” he told interviewer Gareth Parker.

Parker did not resile from going to some of the worst of the confronting detail in the program. “Did you ever say you wouldn’t date a woman who weighed over 50 kilograms and preferred that they had big breasts?‘

“Absolutely not. I mean, like, give me a break.”

But Porter – who’s having to turn up on the House of Representatives frontbench all week under the eye of colleagues and opponents – was given no breaks in this long-distance grilling. His regular Perth 6PR spot became akin to a courtroom, with him in the dock.

First up: had he ever had an intimate relationship with a staffer?

Well, certainly not the staffer he’d been seen drinking with at Canberra’s Public Bar in December 2017, in the (details disputed) incident that led then-PM Malcolm Turnbull telling him to watch his ways.

Indeed, Porter said, the woman in question had categorically denied to Four Corners (which said she worked for another cabinet minister) the slant put on the story or that it indicated any relationship. But (unfortunately for him) her denial had been “off the record,” he said. it was not reported.

Porter was lawyerly when quizzed about whether he’d ever had a relationship with any other staffer. He wasn’t going to be pushed down byways. “Is there another allegation?” he countered.

With the nose of the experienced prosecutor he once was, Porter smells political payback.

The program’s biggest punch was delivered by Turnbull, with whom Porter had a major falling out just before the former PM lost the leadership.

In a heated dispute Turnbull argued the governor-general should refuse to commission Peter Dutton, if he won the leadership, because he might be constitutionally ineligible to sit in parliament. But Porter insisted Turnbull’s suggested course would be “wrong in law” and threatened to repudiate his position if he advanced it publicly.

“I often suspected that there would be some consequences for that,” Porter said in the 6PR interview.

“I don’t think that Malcolm is a great fan of mine, I’d say that much,” he told Parker, when asked whether he was suggesting Turnbull was motivated by revenge.

Porter’s strategy is to own and apologise for his distant past – “I’m no orphan in looking back on things that I wrote and did 25-30 years ago that make me cringe” – but strongly contest the construction put on his more recent life.

He’s threatened legal action, but his Tuesday tone suggested he’s more likely to suck up the damage rather than taking the distracting, expensive and risky course of going to a real court.

He and fellow cabinet minister Alan Tudge – whose affair with his staffer the program exposed – retain the support of Scott Morrison.

Morrison relies on the “BBB” defence. That is, these incidents were Before the Bonk Ban – specifying no sex allowed between ministers and their staff – imposed by Turnbull early 2018 in response to the Barnaby Joyce affair.

Morrison was at the time, and is now, an enthusiastic supporter of the prohibition. He’d like to see it embraced by Labor, who’d “mocked” it when it was announced. (One of the government’s many gripes about the Four Corner’s program is that it didn’t poke around to find Labor’s dirty washing.)

“I take that code very seriously and my ministers are in no doubt about what my expectations are of them,” Morrison told a news conference.

But please, can people keep the language more delicate? Terms matter to this PM, who once lectured the media against using “lockdown”.

When female minister Anne Ruston was asked (at their joint news conference on another matter) to reflect on whether the parliament house culture had become better or worse since the “bonk ban”, Morrison interrupted her.

“How this ban is referred to I think is quite dismissive of the seriousness of the issue,” he said.

“I would ask media to stop referring to it in that way. We took it very seriously and I think constantly referring to it in that way dismisses the seriousness of this issue, it’s a very serious issue.”

We can’t know whether the Porter story will fade or there’ll be some fresh spark.

Porter was asked if he could “go to bed tonight, comfortable in the knowledge that there isn’t a woman out there who’s going to come forward and give a truthful account of her interactions with Christian Porter that would further embarrass you or damage the government”.

Porter said: “I haven’t conducted myself in a way that I think would lead people to provide that sort of complaint about me”.

Whether the story goes somewhere or nowhere, one thing seems clear. The hopes of 50-year old Porter – who switched to federal politics after an impressive state career – of ever reaching prime minister are in the mud.

In under an hour on Monday night, a red line was likely struck through his name on the list of future Liberal leadership prospects.

– ref. View from The Hill: When Australia’s first law officer is in the dock of public opinion – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-when-australias-first-law-officer-is-in-the-dock-of-public-opinion-149841

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Harry Al-Wassiti, Bioengineer and Research Fellow, Monash University

German biotech company BioNTech and US pharmaceutical Pfizer announced on Monday promising early results from their phase 3 clinical trial for a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

These early results are what is known as an “interim analysis”. It’s an early look at the data before a study is complete, to understand if there is any indication of whether the vaccine might work.

Currently, this trial has enrolled 43,538 volunteers, giving half the volunteers two doses of the vaccine and the other half two doses of a placebo. These volunteers then continued their normal lives, but they were monitored for any symptoms that could be COVID-19, with testing to confirm.

Analysis of 94 volunteers with confirmed COVID-19 suggests the vaccine has an efficacy of over 90%.

This means that if you took ten people who were going to get sick from COVID-19 and vaccinated them, only one out of ten would now get sick.

Read more: Australia’s just signed up for a shot at 9 COVID-19 vaccines. Here’s what to expect

Can we get excited yet?

There is more data to come. This is a press release and the data have not undergone “peer-review” through scientific publication, although it has been assessed by an independent monitoring board. The study also won’t be complete until 164 volunteers have confirmed COVID-19, and the estimate of efficacy may therefore change. Finally, the volunteers must be monitored for a defined period of time after vaccination for any side effects and this must be completed.

Important questions also remain. It’s unclear how long protection will last, as this study has only been underway for three months. It’s unclear if this vaccine protects against severe disease or if this vaccine will work equally well in everyone. For example, a phase 1 clinical trial with this vaccine showed that immune responses were lower in older people.

But 90% efficacy is striking. To give some context, the US Food and Drug Administration indicated they would licence a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine with 50% efficacy. The flu vaccine often provides around 60% efficacy and the mumps vaccine, which is currently the fastest vaccine ever made at four years, provides around 88% efficacy.

The BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine could outstrip that, after just nine months of development. This level of efficacy means virus transmission could be very effectively controlled.

That has the research community excited. It bodes well for other vaccines currently being tested for SARS-CoV-2 and we could end up with multiple successful vaccines. This would be great because some might work better in certain populations, like older people.

Multiple vaccines could also be manufactured using a broad range of established infrastructure, which would accelerate vaccine distribution.

Australia has no capacity to produce mRNA on a commercial scale

The BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine is what’s called an mRNA vaccine.

As this article by Associate Professor Archa Fox, an expert on molecular cell biology from the University of Western Australia, explains:

mRNA vaccines are coated molecules of mRNA, similar to DNA, that carry the instructions for making a viral protein.

After injection into muscle, the mRNA is taken up by cells. Ribosomes, the cell’s protein factories, read the mRNA instructions and make the viral protein. These new proteins are exported from cells and the rest of the immunisation process is identical to other vaccines: our immune system mounts a response by recognising the proteins as foreign and developing antibodies against them.

The problem is Australia can’t make mRNA vaccines onshore yet.

The Australian government has an agreement for ten million doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. Since this vaccine requires two doses, this agreement is sufficient for five million Australians. It’s unclear how long it will take until any vaccine is widely available, but we may hear more about this in the coming weeks and months.

The vaccine requires storage at a temperature below -60℃. This will certainly be a challenge for shipping to Australia and local distribution, although not impossible. One solution to this problem is to form vaccination centres to roll out the vaccine once it becomes available. In a briefing by Pfizer, the company said it will use ultra-low temperature shipment strategies and the vaccine can then be distributed on “dry-ice”.

Currently, Australia has no capacity to produce mRNA on a commercial scale given the technology’s novelty. But we (the authors) and others have been working to coordinate and build the manufacturing capacity in Australia for future mRNA vaccine and therapeutics. With financial support aimed at private-public mRNA manufacturing collaboration, Australia can equip itself with this vital technological asset.

Read more: Australia may miss out on several COVID vaccines if it can’t make mRNA ones locally

– ref. 90% efficacy for Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccine is striking. But we need to wait for the full data – https://theconversation.com/90-efficacy-for-pfizers-covid-19-mrna-vaccine-is-striking-but-we-need-to-wait-for-the-full-data-149818

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

The federal government will extend the JobSeeker Coronavirus supplement for an extra three months, to the end of March, at a cost of $3.2 billion.

The supplement, which is currently $250 a fortnight, will be at a reduced rate of $150 a fortnight during that period.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the financial “lifeline” that had been extended during the COVID crisis could not be allowed now to hold Australia back, as the country moved into the next phases of recovery.

The extension is a recognition that longer-term assistance is needed for the high number of people who will be unemployed early next year and that extra stimulus is needed to help lift the economy out of recession as soon as possible.

But the government is still avoiding the question of what change it will make to the base JobSeeker rate, which was widely recognised as inadequate long before the pandemic.

At the same time, the government is pushing a tougher approach to trying to ensure people take what jobs are available.

Morrison told a news conference mutual obligation requirements were being enforced. There were nearly 260,000 suspensions between September 28 and October 31, and from August 4 to October 31, 242 payments were cancelled.

“So the mutual obligation requirements are there and we are serious about them. But we are also serious about the support we need to provide to Australians,” Morrison said.

“We are seeing confidence return, whether it’s on the NAB measures just released today, the ANZ measures showing confidence getting above where it was pre-pandemic or the Westpac figures that were released for last month,” Morrison said.

“Australia is safely reopening and it needs to remain safely open. Jobs are returning. Job advertisements have doubled since May on the most recent figures in October, and we know that employers are looking for people to come back to work and we need to ensure that we have the right settings in place to support that.”

The shadow minister for families, Linda Burney, said the government would “cut unemployment support by $100 per fortnight after Christmas.

“With the Morrison Government expecting 1.8 million Australians to be on unemployment support by the end of the year, now is not the time to cut unemployment support. There are simply not enough jobs for every Australian who needs one.”

– ref. JobSeeker supplement extended to end-March, at lower rate – https://theconversation.com/jobseeker-supplement-extended-to-end-march-at-lower-rate-149829

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kyla Johnstone, PhD candidate, University of Sydney

Rodents such as house mice (Mus musculus) aren’t just pests at home, they can cause serious damage to native ecosystems.

Lord Howe Island, for example, harboured up to 150,000 introduced rats and 210,000 introduced mice that wrought havoc on the island’s native wildlife, before an intensive eradication effort was carried out. It was declared a success earlier this year, although monitoring for survivors will continue.

Read more: Invasive predators are eating the world’s animals to extinction – and the worst is close to home

But emerging research suggests the success of eradicating pests may depend on the personality of individual animals within a species.

Bolder, more active, aggressive or social individuals are more likely to interact with baits, traps or new objects and foods. As a result, they can be removed quickly.

On the other hand, shyer or less active individuals can take longer to be caught.

Why is this so important? Well for starters, animals that actively avoid eradication will breed and repopulate.

If the personality traits of these survivors are reflected in all, or even most, offspring then we could be facing a pest population that is incredibly difficult to remove. This is what our new research aimed to find out.

When eradication efforts fail

Australia is home to more than 8,300 islands that provide refuge for unique species often found nowhere else in the world, including species now extinct on the mainland.

Introduced mammalian pests, particularly rodents, are huge threats to island species, which often evolve without predators. They don’t recognise these introduced mammals as a threat, making them easy targets.

For example, a 2010 study observed house mice literally eating albatross chicks alive on Marion Island near Antarctica. Neither the chicks nor parents showed any defensive or escape behaviour.

Read more: Feral animals are running amok on Australia’s islands – here’s how to stop them

Eradicating introduced pest species is the ultimate solution if we want to protect native island ecosystems.

But eradication efforts are only effective if every animal in a population is eliminated. While most failed efforts likely go unreported, on average, 11% of eradication attempts for rodents fail. For house mice in particular, failure rates can be as high as 75%.

When efforts fail, pest populations quickly bounce back. One study in 2016 found around 50 rats survived an eradication attempt by avoiding baits on Henderson Island in the South Pacific. Within only two years, the population had exploded into roughly 75,000 animals.

Developing personality traits

So if animal behaviour influences if an individual enters a trap or takes a bait, how much of the parent personality is reflected in the offspring?

If you’ve thought about the similarity between parents and children — in both human and our animal companions — then you know some offspring behave just like their parents, while others are very different.

Personality traits develop through a combination of experience, learning from parents and genetic inheritance.

Humans have selectively bred domestic animals, including dogs, cattle and horses for preferred personality traits, such as docility.

Read more: Understanding dog personalities can help prevent attacks

And studies on laboratory animals, including mice and chicks, have found selecting for preferred traits in parents can lead to these traits being strongly expressed in the offspring within a single generation.

However, can this immediate generational response occur in wild populations?

What our study did

To begin untangling this web, we used house mice as a model species and mimicked a failed eradication, where residual mice (the would-be survivors) were selected for biased personality traits.

After catching wild house mice, we tested for personality traits by filming their behaviour in a modified open-field arena. Mice that moved frequently between compartments and into light compartments (which present a risky scenario to a small nocturnal rodent) were considered to be “high active-bold” individuals.

Based on their behaviour, we then grouped individual mice into populations: high active-bold individuals, low active-bold (shy) individuals and intermediate individuals.

Read more: How to know if we’re winning the war on Australia’s fire ant invasion, and what to do if we aren’t

To closely mimic wild conditions, we released the populations into large outdoor yards and left the mice to breed for one generation. After recapturing every single mouse from the yards, we tested the offspring for the same personality traits.

The good news

Interestingly, although the parent populations had strong personality biases, there was a broad spectrum of personality among offspring of every population. In other words, bold mice didn’t necessarily produce bold offspring, nor shy mice, shy offspring.

This was reassuring news. However, demonstrating there’s no generational bias in house mice doesn’t mean it can’t arise elsewhere or in other species. And our study is an important stepping stone to explore this concept in other invasive species and over multiple generations.

Still, for house mouse eradications at least, our findings suggest that, even if all surviving individuals had a similar personality, by the next generation a broad spectrum of personality should emerge again.

This suggests we’re unlikely to be faced with a population that’s impossible to remove, and can focus on improving success rates for these difficult-to-remove individuals and species.

Read more: ‘Compassionate conservation’: just because we love invasive animals, doesn’t mean we should protect them

– ref. Shy rodents may be better at surviving eradications, but do they pass those traits to their offspring? – https://theconversation.com/shy-rodents-may-be-better-at-surviving-eradications-but-do-they-pass-those-traits-to-their-offspring-146924

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Ellerton, Senior Lecturer in Critical Thinking; Curriculum Director, UQ Critical Thinking Project, The University of Queensland

Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz

Why do humans instinctively reject evidence contrary to their beliefs? Do we understand why and how people change their mind about climate change? Is there anything we can do to engage people?

These are three very significant questions. They could be answered separately but, in the context of climate science, they make a powerful trilogy.

We understand the world and our role in it by creating narratives that have explanatory power, make sense of the complexity of our lives and give us a sense of purpose and place.

These narratives can be political, social, religious, scientific or cultural and help define our sense of identity and belonging. Ultimately, they connect our experiences together and help us find coherence and meaning.

Narratives are not trivial things to mess with. They help us form stable cognitive and emotional patterns that are resistant to change and potentially antagonistic to agents of change (such as people trying to make us change our mind about something we believe).

Read more: How do you know that what you know is true? That’s epistemology

If new information threatens the coherence of our belief set, if we cannot assimilate it into our existing beliefs without creating cognitive or emotional turbulence, then we might look for reasons to minimise or dismiss it.

At odds with each other

Consider the current presidential election in the United States and the supporters of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The seemingly irreconcilable views of segments of the population are the result of very different narratives.

Each side interprets events through a lens of pre-existing beliefs that determines the meaning of new information. They might all be looking at the same thing, but they understand it in very different ways.

Information that one side points out can refute a claim from the other side is dismissed as conspiracy or deliberate falsehoods, or whatever it takes not to have to engage with and assimilate it.

More than this, sometimes we can only make sense of people who don’t share our world view by assuming they have some defect of perception or cognition that limits their ability to see things as clearly as we do.

After all, if they could see as clearly, surely they’d agree with us!

Climate science denial

Climate science is a typical example of this kind of effect.

Not only are there very different narratives people use to describe themselves and each other, but misinformation produced by some media organisations and private corporations is designed to feed into and amplify existing narratives for the purposes of creating doubt and dissent.

But it gets even worse. Because of an increasingly polarised political environment in many parts of the world and the intensification of the so-called culture wars, stances on topics that might once have been shared across the political and ideological spectrum are now grouped together.

For example, denial of the science of climate change is linked to denial of COVID-19 as a legitimate concern. We also find positions on climate science highly correlated to other, more basic ideologies.

Pick a topic and it’s increasingly easy to predict what someone might think about it based on their opinion about another topic in that same political basket of ideologies. The narratives are becoming more inclusive; it’s been a while since the politics of climate science has just been about the science.

Read more: Climate sceptic or climate denier? It’s not that simple and here’s why

It is also the case that belief in climate science is not a binary affair. There are many shades of belief here.

But all this does not mean people are immune to changing their view, even when they are deeply woven into their personal identity.

Yes, you can engage people … and change their mind

US musician, actor and writer Daryl Davis is a black man responsible for dozens of members of the Ku Klux Klan leaving and denouncing the organisation, including national leaders.

He did this through engaging them in conversation, and ultimately befriending them, in a genuine attempt to understand their world views and the deep assumptions on which they were based.

For Davis, mutual respect and a desire to understand each other are necessary conditions for peaceful coexistence and a convergence of views.

What Davis appreciated is a core principle of public reasoning, or reasoning together. If we wish others to join us in believing in something or in some course of action, we must not only have reasons that make sense to us, they must also be meaningful to others. Otherwise, explaining our reasoning amounts to little more than making another kind of assertion.

Creating shared meaning through reasoning together requires respectful dialogue and an intimate understanding and appreciation of each other’s world views.

Don’t lose sight of the truth

Let’s be clear, trying to understand how someone thinks is not about meeting them halfway on everything. The truth still matters.

In the case of climate change, we know that the planet is warming, that the consequences of this warming are very serious and that humans contribute significantly to it.

Read more: Climate explained: are we doomed if we don’t manage to curb emissions by 2030?

We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, and we are. But that rationality is not devoid of emotional contexts. Indeed, we seem to need emotions to be rational.

For this reason, facts alone are not as convincing as we would like them to be. But facts coupled with respect, understanding and compassion can be enormously persuasive.

– ref. Climate explained: why do humans instinctively reject evidence contrary to their beliefs? – https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-do-humans-instinctively-reject-evidence-contrary-to-their-beliefs-149436

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dimitri Perrin, Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

Genetic engineering has already cemented itself as an invaluable tool for studying gene functions in organisms.

Our new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, now demonstrates how gene editing can be used to pinpoint genes involved in corals’ ability to withstand heat stress.

A better understanding of such genes will lay the groundwork for experts to predict the natural response of coral populations to climate change. And this could guide efforts to improve coral adaptation, through the selective breeding of naturally heat-tolerant corals.

A threatened national treasure

The Great Barrier Reef is among the world’s most awe-inspiring, unique and economically valuable ecosystems. It spans more than 2,000 kilometres, has more than 600 types of coral, 1,600 types of fish and is of immense cultural significance — especially for Traditional Owners.

But warming ocean waters caused by climate change are leading to the mass bleaching and mortality of corals on the reef, threatening the reef’s long-term survival.

Read more: The first step to conserving the Great Barrier Reef is understanding what lives there

Many research efforts are focused on how we can prevent the reef’s deterioration by helping it adapt to and recover from the conditions causing it stress.

Understanding the genes and molecular pathways that protect corals from heat stress will be key to achieving these goals.

While hypotheses exist about the roles of particular genes and pathways, rigorous testings of these have been difficult — largely due to a lack of tools to determine gene function in corals.

But over the past decade or so, CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing has emerged as a powerful tool to study gene function in non-model organisms.

CRISPR: a technological marvel

Scientists can use CRISPR to make precise changes to the DNA of a living organisms, by “cutting” its DNA and editing the sequence. This can involve inactivating a specific gene, introducing a new piece of DNA or replacing a piece.

In our 2018 research, we showed it is possible to make precise mutations in the coral genome using CRISPR technology. However, we were unable to determine the functions of our specific target genes.

For our latest research, we used an updated CRISPR method to sufficiently disrupt the Heat Shock Transcription Factor 1, or HSF1, in coral larvae.

Based on this protein-coding gene’s role in model organisms, including closely related sea anemones, we hypothesised it would play an important role in the heat response of corals.

Past research had also demonstrated HSF1 can influence a large number of heat response genes, acting as a kind of “master switch” to turn them on.

By inactivating this master switch, we expected to see significant changes in the corals’ heat tolerance. Our prediction proved accurate.

Read more: What is CRISPR, the gene editing technology that won the Chemistry Nobel prize?

What we discovered by injecting coral eggs

We spawned corals at the Australian Institute of Marine Science during the annual mass spawning event in November, 2018.

We then injected CRISPR/Cas9 components into fertilised coral eggs to target the HSF1 gene in the common and widespread staghorn coral Acropora millepora.

We were able to demonstrate a strong effect of HSF1 on corals’ heat tolerance. Specifically, when this gene was mutated using CRISPR (and no longer functional) the corals were more vulnerable to heat stress.

Larvae with knocked-out copies of HSF1 died under heat stress when the water temperature was increased from 27℃ to 34℃. In contrast, larvae with the functional gene survived well in the warmer water.

Let’s understand what we already have

It may be tempting now to focus on using gene-editing tools to engineer heat-resistant strains of corals, to fast-track the Great Barrier Reef’s adaptation to warming waters.

However, genetic engineering should first and foremost be used to increase our knowledge of the fundamental biology of corals and other reef organisms, including their response to heat stress.

Not only will this help us more accurately predict the natural response of coral reefs to a changing climate, it will also shed light on the risks and benefits of new management tools for corals, such as selective breeding.

It is our hope these genetic insights will provide a solid foundation for future reef conservation and management efforts.

– ref. Gene editing is revealing how corals respond to warming waters. It could transform how we manage our reefs – https://theconversation.com/gene-editing-is-revealing-how-corals-respond-to-warming-waters-it-could-transform-how-we-manage-our-reefs-143444

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

Opposition resources spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon has quit the frontbench, accusing Labor of talking too much about issues like climate change and not enough about the needs of its traditional base.

Fitzgibbon told a news conference Labor should wait for Prime Minister Scott Morrison to set a medium-term emissions reduction target and then consider backing it.

Although he said he’d planned to step down from the frontbench 18 months after the election – and had told Labor leader Anthony Albanese some months ago he would do so before Christmas – Fitzgibbon’s timing couldn’t be worse for his leader.

It undermines Albanese’s push to use Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s victory in the US election to ramp up Labor’s attack on the government over climate policy.

Fitzgibbon’s exit from the shadow ministry follows his increasingly outspoken public campaign – which has infuriated many colleagues and caused serious friction with climate spokesman Mark Butler – to push Labor’s climate and energy policy towards the centre.

The tensions between Fitzgibbon and Butler forced the shadow cabinet recently to settle an agreed set of words on the party’s position on gas, to contain public differences on that issue.

At the weekend, Fitzgibbon, who is from the NSW right, sent a thinly veiled warning to his party, saying “this idea that a Biden victory is a vindication of all those who want to set Australia on a path to slower economic growth and large job losses is delusional”.

Fitzgibbon’s behaviour came under fire at a Monday night meeting of left caucus members.

He will be replaced on the frontbench and in the agriculture and resources post by the NSW right’s Ed Husic, who was squeezed out of a frontbench position after the election to accommodate Kristina Keneally.

Fitzgibbon affirmed his support for Albanese’s leadership, saying he would lead to the election. But with some in caucus restless at Albanese’s failure to cut through, there is always a risk of leadership destabilisation.

At Tuesday’s caucus, Albanese moved a motion recognising Fitzgibbon’s service.

Fitzgibbon said that since the election “I’ve been trying to put labour back into the Labor Party. Trying to take the Labor party back to its traditional roots, back to the Labor party I knew when I first became a member 36 years ago.”

“I think the Labor party has been spending too much time in recent years talking about issues like climate change – which is a very important issue – and not enough time talking about the needs of our traditional base.”

He said he had told the caucus meeting Labor should allow candidates and members “to express the aspirations of their local communities”. It couldn’t expect a candidate in an inner Melbourne seat to be saying the same thing as one in central Queensland.

Asked what Labor should do on climate policy, Fitzgibbon said its policy should be “meaningful”.

“I’m a serious believer that the climate is changing and humankind is making a contribution. And government should act.”

But “we need to stop so often being government-in-exile,” he said.

He said Morrison was committing a lot of money on the technology side of the climate change issue, rather than addressing it with a constraint on carbon.

“If Scott Morrison is serious about his actions, spending taxpayers’ money, then who knows where we’ll be on the carbon output equation or ledger in possibly two years’ time?” he said.

“I think we should let Scott Morrison make his investment, allow him to encourage others to invest. … Let him establish his next medium-term target.” Once he did so “the Labor Party should think about backing it.”

Fitzgibbon said he supported 2050 net zero emissions “as an ambition”.

“But the path to 2050 will not be linear. As technology kicks in, the effort will reduce. See, you don’t have to be halfway there at the halfway point.

“So, let Scott Morrison govern it. Let’s hold him to account. Let’s see what he sets. And let’s take some time to see whether he’s on track to meeting the commitment he makes.”

Fitzgibbon said Labor could not form government without winning at least two central and north Queensland electorates, and a couple around the rim of Perth, where there were a lot of fly-in-fly-out workers.

He said Labor had had at least six climate change/energy policies in the last 14 years.

“Only one of them was ever adopted by a Labor government. And, of course, that policy, having been legislated, was repealed by Tony Abbott.

“So, the conclusion you can draw from that is that after 14 years of trying, the Labor party has made not one contribution to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in this country,” he said.

“So, if you want to act on climate change, the first step is to become the government.

“And to become the government, you need to have a climate change and energy policy that can be embraced by a majority of the Australian people. That is something we have failed to do for the last seven or eight years.”

– ref. Joel Fitzgibbon quits Labor frontbench but not his fight over the party’s climate policy – https://theconversation.com/joel-fitzgibbon-quits-labor-frontbench-but-not-his-fight-over-the-partys-climate-policy-149825

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

Opposition resources spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon has quit the frontbench, accusing Labor of talking too much about issues like climate change and not enough about the needs of its traditional base.

Fitzgibbon told a news conference Labor should wait for Prime Minister Scott Morrison to set a medium-term emissions reduction target and then consider backing it.

Although he said he’d planned to step down from the frontbench 18 months after the election – and had told Labor leader Anthony Albanese some months ago he would do so before Christmas – Fitzgibbon’s timing couldn’t be worse for his leader.

It undermines Albanese’s push to use Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s victory in the US election to ramp up Labor’s attack on the government over climate policy.

Fitzgibbon’s exit from the shadow ministry follows his increasingly outspoken public campaign – which has infuriated many colleagues and caused serious friction with climate spokesman Mark Butler – to push Labor’s climate and energy policy towards the centre.

The tensions between Fitzgibbon and Butler forced the shadow cabinet recently to settle an agreed set of words on the party’s position on gas, to contain public differences on that issue.

At the weekend, Fitzgibbon, who is from the NSW right, sent a thinly veiled warning to his party, saying “this idea that a Biden victory is a vindication of all those who want to set Australia on a path to slower economic growth and large job losses is delusional”.

Fitzgibbon’s behaviour came under fire at a Monday night meeting of left caucus members.

He will be replaced on the frontbench and in the agriculture and resources post by the NSW right’s Ed Husic, who was squeezed out of a frontbench position after the election to accommodate Kristina Keneally.

Fitzgibbon affirmed his support for Albanese’s leadership, saying he would lead to the election. But with some in caucus restless at Albanese’s failure to cut through, there is always a risk of leadership destabilisation.

At Tuesday’s caucus, Albanese moved a motion recognising Fitzgibbon’s service.

Fitzgibbon said that since the election “I’ve been trying to put labour back into the Labor Party. Trying to take the Labor party back to its traditional roots, back to the Labor party I knew when I first became a member 36 years ago.”

“I think the Labor party has been spending too much time in recent years talking about issues like climate change – which is a very important issue – and not enough time talking about the needs of our traditional base.”

He said he had told the caucus meeting Labor should allow candidates and members “to express the aspirations of their local communities”. It couldn’t expect a candidate in an inner Melbourne seat to be saying the same thing as one in central Queensland.

Asked what Labor should do on climate policy, Fitzgibbon said its policy should be “meaningful”.

“I’m a serious believer that the climate is changing and humankind is making a contribution. And government should act.”

But “we need to stop so often being government-in-exile,” he said.

He said Morrison was committing a lot of money on the technology side of the climate change issue, rather than addressing it with a constraint on carbon.

“If Scott Morrison is serious about his actions, spending taxpayers’ money, then who knows where we’ll be on the carbon output equation or ledger in possibly two years’ time?” he said.

“I think we should let Scott Morrison make his investment, allow him to encourage others to invest. … Let him establish his next medium-term target.” Once he did so “the Labor Party should think about backing it.”

Fitzgibbon said he supported 2050 net zero emissions “as an ambition”.

“But the path to 2050 will not be linear. As technology kicks in, the effort will reduce. See, you don’t have to be halfway there at the halfway point.

“So, let Scott Morrison govern it. Let’s hold him to account. Let’s see what he sets. And let’s take some time to see whether he’s on track to meeting the commitment he makes.”

Fitzgibbon said Labor could not form government without winning at least two central and north Queensland electorates, and a couple around the rim of Perth, where there were a lot of fly-in-fly-out workers.

He said Labor had had at least six climate change/energy policies in the last 14 years.

“Only one of them was ever adopted by a Labor government. And, of course, that policy, having been legislated, was repealed by Tony Abbott.

“So, the conclusion you can draw from that is that after 14 years of trying, the Labor party has made not one contribution to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in this country,” he said.

“So, if you want to act on climate change, the first step is to become the government.

“And to become the government, you need to have a climate change and energy policy that can be embraced by a majority of the Australian people. That is something we have failed to do for the last seven or eight years.”

– ref. Joel Fitzgibbon quits Labor frontbench but not his fight over the party’s climate polcy – https://theconversation.com/joel-fitzgibbon-quits-labor-frontbench-but-not-his-fight-over-the-partys-climate-polcy-149825

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alwyn Louw, Vice Chancellor, Torrens University Australia

The importance of higher education for the growth and development of society is generally accepted. But openness and access to education for all is essential to maximise its benefits. Leaders in higher education must be ready to examine what it will take to achieve this.

What do we mean by open access? Higher education should provide access for as many people as possible to reach their full potential as individuals. It is a priority in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals because inequality is emerging as a key threat to societal development.

Openness in education depends on the democratisation of societies and, with it, the democratisation of information and knowledge. Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen described development as freedom. That is, development that enhances meaningful and quality living.

In this context, openness broadly refers to flexible, fair, welcoming and unprejudiced access to higher education. Openness of access requires adherence to basic purpose values – the promotion of self-regulated life-long learning, self-determination and personal agency. Enabling citizens to realise these aspirations contributes to strengthening our democracy.

So what will it take?

Changes in mindset will be non-negotiable for open access. Removing barriers, challenging assumptions and finding innovative means to ensure access and support are important starting points.

Torrens University and Think Education, like other institutions such as ANU and Swinburne, recently announced the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) will no longer be the only thing that determines students’ entry into university. We now have alternative entry pathways. Systematic support and monitoring to ensure student success will be critical.

Read more: Students are more than a number: why a learner profile makes more sense than the ATAR

Higher education openness should also be understood in terms of the choice and flexibility it allows individuals. Service delivery needs to respond to personal circumstances and learning and support needs. It enables people to choose between different types or modes of access, geographical locations, synchronous (learning with others at same time) or asynchronous (learning individually in one’s own time) activity – in timeframes that suit their circumstances.

This is why online or hybrid learning is essential. At Torrens University, students can choose face-to-face or online study – or both – to undertake their studies.

Importantly, online offerings must never compromise on quality. Students studying remotely must not be worse off than students learning face-to-face.

Offering choice through innovation

To help secondary students consider their options, higher education providers pulled together a series of virtual expos this year. Technology enabled these expos to reach almost 20,000 students across Australia and New Zealand. These expos showed how the higher education sectors in Australia and New Zealand can adapt, innovate and collaborate to ensure no one lacks choices.

Read more: New learning economy challenges unis to be part of reshaping lifelong education

It is important to understand that the ideas of openness and inclusive learning environments do not refer to having no norms or boundaries. Openness or open access to higher education depends on the values, ideology and practices of each institution. Equally important are regulatory and societal systems that provide the freedoms and incentives for institutions to develop complementary approaches and capacity.

In South Africa, for example, the higher education and school systems were transformed to open opportunities for all. Policies to increase participation among disadvantaged communities included financial and academic support throughout the education journey.

A set of enabling values and mechanisms will be critical. This means putting in place ideology that gives people the right and the means to participate. It involves creating an ethos that ensures every person is welcome in the education system.

A full spectrum of support services will be just as important. But why? And what will they be?

Well, while you may open up education for all, remote locations as well as lack of resources in secondary schools could be barriers. So you need arrangements in place to ensure access. Adjustments to entrance requirements and financial support might also be needed to deliver on the promise of education for all.

Read more: Poorer NSW students study subjects less likely to get them into uni

Time to come down from the ivory tower

In higher education, the institutionalised roles of knowledge creators and education providers require them to lead and support societal development through the creation of knowledge that supports innovation. This equips citizens with the social and human capital they need to prosper.

This advancement of human well-being will necessitate breaking down existing barriers between higher education and society. It requires coming down from the ivory tower where a monopoly over knowledge, knowledge creation and distribution has been institutionalised. It means reviewing entrance requirements, policies and procedures that result in exclusion.

Read more: After coronavirus, universities must collaborate with communities to support social transition

This is not to suggest it will be straightforward.

Higher education providers function in a complex and dynamic environment. Each institution will have to carefully choose the focus and scope of its activities. Institutions will have to follow up with strategies, systems and processes that open their boundaries to interaction with industry, society, decision-makers and government, while providing for individual choice and participation.

At Torrens University, Think Education and Media Design School, for example, we collaborate with industry from the outset as we build our curricula. This engagement continues throughout the student journey – through work-integrated learning, our “success coaches” and teaching staff who are industry leaders in their own right.

Openness is therefore not only a matter of access to higher education. It is an inclusive process of opening entrance opportunities, followed by a purpose-driven support environment that aims to prepare successful graduates to contribute to society.

– ref. Open access to higher education is about much more than axing ATARs – https://theconversation.com/open-access-to-higher-education-is-about-much-more-than-axing-atars-147447

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Merryn McKinnon, Senior lecturer, Australian National University

Marie Curie is one of the most recognised scientists of the last 200 years. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize – let alone two – and the first to win in two different fields (physics in 1903, and chemistry in 1911).

Curie changed the prevailing understanding of the world and the practice of medicine along the way. She won acceptance and acclaim from the same colleagues who once thought she had no place in science.

Radioactive, Jack Thorne’s screenplay adaptation of Lauren Redniss’ graphic novel, is directed by Marjane Satrapi (most famous for her own graphic novel, Persepolis). Purportedly biographical, it attempts to portray the drive and dedication Curie must have possessed to achieve her career success.

Curie’s story is incredible, without any need for dramatic emphasis or artistic licence. Radioactive, which employs both, does manage to convey her brilliance. It also highlights and reinforces issues affecting women – and other marginalised groups — in science, then and now.

Paris, 1894

The story begins with Maria Sklodowska (Rosamund Pike) literally bumping into her future collaborator and husband, Pierre Curie (Sam Riley), on the streets of Paris. Pierre is quickly established as a similarly poorly respected scientist. He and Marie share a respect for each other’s work.

The film focuses on the Curies’ discoveries – in particular the theorising of radioactivity and the discovery of polonium and radium.

The dichotomy between the initial use of the Curies’ findings of radium in makeup, matches and toothpaste is in stark contrast to the scenes showing some of the key applications of their work after their death.

The elements they discovered enabled radiotherapy medical treatments, but were also a key component of the nuclear devastation in Hiroshima and Chernobyl.

Advances in knowledge come with the potential for both harm and good, a theme reiterated throughout Radioactive.

Read more: Radium revealed: 120 years since Curies found the most radioactive substance on the planet

We are shown the realities of being a female scientist in that time. Curie’s isolation is palpable. She is frequently the only woman in a professional context, and further ostracised because of her immigrant status. This isolation of science professionals because of their gender, culture and/or socioeconomic status can still happen today.

Working in the physics laboratory of Professor Gabriel Lippmann (Simon Russell Beale), Curie expresses her frustration at the repeated movement of her equipment in the shared laboratory space. Lippmann revokes her access to the laboratory, citing her “constant demands”.

All Curie wants is the same courtesy and respect shown to the men who work in the laboratory, but she is portrayed as “difficult”.

Curie is presented as prickly, arrogant and often emotionally distant to both her colleagues and family.

Satrapi says she liked the flawed nature of Curie that emerged in the screenplay, her diaries and from discussions with Curie’s granddaughter. She has said it made Curie “a human being, she’s not perfect and she doesn’t do everything right.”

But in the process, Radioactive reinforces what some women in male dominated STEM fields might still encounter today: women can be perceived as competent or likeable, but not both.

Role model or cautionary tale?

Satrapi and Pike have spoken of how they want the scientist and the science in Radioactive to be an inspiration – especially to young girls. The film is certainly a tale about the value of intelligence and the importance of tenacity and perseverance.

It shows the human side of Curie, especially through her familial relationships. Pierre and Marie’s partnership – both scientific and romantic – is given the hallmarks of an epic love story.

Pierre is a staunch ally and advocate, ensuring Marie is recognised for the quality of her work and thinking. The original nomination for the Nobel Prize made by the French Academy of Sciences excluded Marie – she was only added at Pierre’s insistence.

Still, Radioactive takes some liberties in the retelling of Marie’s life. It shows Pierre attending the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm alone to accept the Curies’ award, ostensibly because Marie had just given birth.

This reinforces the idea that motherhood creates impediments to career progression. In reality, Marie and Pierre attended the ceremony together in 1905.

Marie is portrayed as a sometimes distant mother to her two daughters. In a scene with her now adult eldest daughter, Irene (Anya Taylor-Joy), driving an ambulance on a World War I battlefield, Marie turns to her daughter and says: “I wasn’t a very good mother was I?”

Irene responds she is proud of her mother, but the not so subtle subtext is you can’t be a world-leading scientist and a good parent at the same time.

Certainly a recent study shows increasing difficulty for parents to reconcile caregiving with STEM careers, with nearly half of new mothers and a quarter of new fathers leaving full-time employment in STEM.

Some things haven’t changed

Radioactive shows how the media fed voraciously upon Marie’s scandalous affair with a married man in the years after Pierre’s sudden death in 1906.

The media, she tells her sister, are “merely having a hard time separating my scientific life from my personal life”. This is still seen in media coverage of women scientists today: their physical appearance is commonly mentioned in stories about their professional accomplishments.

Still, in Radioactive, it isn’t her gender that Curie identifies as the greatest impediment in her career. “I have suffered much more from a lack of resources and funds,” she says, “than I ever did from being a woman.”

Radioactive is in cinemas now.

Read more: Gender diversity in science media still has a long way to go. Here’s a 5-step plan to move it along

– ref. Radioactive: new Marie Curie biopic inspires, but resonates uneasily for women in science – https://theconversation.com/radioactive-new-marie-curie-biopic-inspires-but-resonates-uneasily-for-women-in-science-148986

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Orlando, Researcher: Children and Technology, Western Sydney University

COVID has led to children spending more time on screens using social networks, communication apps, chat rooms and online gaming.

While this has undoubtedly allowed them to keep in touch with friends, or connect with new ones, during the pandemic, they are also being exposed to increased levels of online hate.

That’s not just the bullying and harassment we often hear about. They’re also being exposed to everyday negativity — Twitter pile-ons, people demonising celebrities, or knee-jerk reactions lashing out at others — several times a day.

This risks normalising this type of online behaviour, and may also risk children’s mental health and well-being.

What are children exposed to?

Hate speech can consist of comments, images or symbols that attack or use disapproving or discriminatory language about a person or group, on the basis of who they are.

It can even be coded language to spread hate, as seen on the world’s most popular social platform for children, TikTok. For example, the number 14 refers to a 14-word-long white supremacist slogan.

Read more: TikTok can be good for your kids if you follow a few tips to stay safe

People can be exposed to hate speech directly, or witness it between others. And one study, which analysed millions of websites, popular teen chat sites and gaming sites, found children were exposed to much higher levels of online hate during the pandemic than before it.

The study, run by a company that uses artificial intelligence to detect and filter online content, found a 70% increase in hate between children and teens during online chats. It also found a 40% increase in toxicity among young gamers communicating using gaming chat.

Of particular note is the rise of hate on TikTok during the pandemic. TikTok has hundreds of millions of users, many of them children and teenagers. During the pandemic’s early stages, researchers saw a sharp spike in far-right extremist posts, including ideologies of fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigration and xenophobia.

Children may also inadvertently get caught up in online hate during times of uncertainty, such as a pandemic. This may be when the entire family may be in distress and children have long periods of unsupervised screen time.

Read more: Social media can be bad for youth mental health, but there are ways it can help

Witnessing hate normalises it

We know the more derogatory language about immigrants and minority groups people are exposed to (online and offline), the more intergroup relations deteriorate.

This leads to empathy for others being replaced by contempt. Terms like “hive mind” (being expected to conform to popular opinion online or risk being the target of hate) and “lynching” (a coordinated social media celebrity hate storm) are now used to describe this online contempt.

Being exposed to hate speech also leads young people to become less sensitive to hateful language. The more hate speech a child observes, the less upset they are about it. They develop a laissez-faire attitude, become indifferent, seeing hateful comments as jokes, minimising the impact, or linking hateful content to freedom of speech.

There is also little reputational or punitive risk involved with bad behaviour online. A child playing soccer might get sent off the field in a real-life sporting game for “flaming”, or “griefing” (deliberately irritating and harassing other players). But there is no such consequence in online gaming.

Social platforms, including Facebook and TikTok, have recently expanded their hate speech guidelines. These guidelines, however, cannot eradicate hate speech as their definitions are too narrow, allowing hate to seep through.

So kids are growing up learning “bad behaviour” online is tolerated, even expected. If what children see every day on their screen is people communicating with them badly, it becomes normalised and they are willing to accept it is part of life.

Read more: Technology and regulation must work in concert to combat hate speech online

Witnessing hate affects children’s health and well-being

Prince Harry recently warned of a “global crisis of hate” on social media that affects people’s mental health.

It impacts the mental health of all involved: those giving out the hate, those receiving it, and those observing it.

If a young person has negative, insulting attitudes or opinions, this is often put down to having unresolved emotional issues. However, channelling pent-up emotions into hate speech does not resolve these emotional issues. As hate posts can go viral, it can encourage more hate posts.

And for people who are exposed to this behaviour, this takes its toll. The increased mental preparedness it takes to deal with or respond to microaggressions and hate translates into chronically elevated level of stress — so-called low-grade toxic stress.

Read more: 6 actions Australia’s government can take right now to target online racism

In the short term, too much low-grade toxic stress lowers our mood and drains our energy, leaving us fatigued. Prolonged low-grade toxic stress can lead to adverse health outcomes, such as depression or anxiety, disruption of the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increases in the risk of stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years.

It can also cause a child to develop a low threshold for stress throughout life.

Children growing up in already vulnerable, stressed environments will be more impacted by the stress they are also exposed to long-term online.

Read more: With kids spending more waking hours on screens than ever, here’s what parents need to worry about

What to do

Unfortunately, we can’t eradicate hate online. But the more we understand why others post hate speech and the strategies they use to do this helps a child be more in control of their environment and therefore less impacted by it.

Hate speech is driven not only by negativity, but also by the simplicity in how groups are portrayed, for instance, boys are superior, girls are side-kicks. Teach children to notice over-simplicity and its use as a put-down strategy.

An aggressor (the one dishing out the hurt) can also easily hide behind a non-identifying pseudonym or username. This type of anonymity allows people to separate themselves from who they are in real life. It makes them feel free to use hostility and criticism as a viable way of dealing with their pain, or unresolved issues. Teach your child to be aware of this.

Resources on the impact of toxic stress on young people, mental health support and what to do if you experience or witness online hate are available for parents and children.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

– ref. Young people are exposed to more hate online during COVID. And it risks their health – https://theconversation.com/young-people-are-exposed-to-more-hate-online-during-covid-and-it-risks-their-health-148107

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna Malos, Project Manager, climate and energy policy, ClimateWorks Australia

Yesterday, Zali Steggall, the independent member for Warringah, introduced her long-awaited climate change bill to the Australian parliament.

Much of the debate around the bill centres on what needs to be done for Australia to reach net zero emissions by 2050. That’s a crucial discussion — but it’s equally vital to recognise what’s already been committed.

Read more: Conservative but green independent MP Zali Steggall could break the government’s climate policy deadlock

Our project, the Net Zero Momentum Tracker, monitors Australia’s journey towards net zero emissions, tracking climate commitments and progress in key sectors of the economy. This includes superannuation, transport, retail, property and local government, and a forthcoming analysis of the resources sector.

We’ve found progress is, in general, going well. These sectors are increasingly making more climate-active commitments, which means the moment is right for precisely the kind of pivot Steggall’s bill seeks to facilitate.

What the climate change bill proposes

Steggall has garnered huge support outside of politics. In a joint letter this week, more than 100 Australian businesses, industry groups and community organisations endorsed the bill as a critical step in the recovery from the pandemic.

This included Oxfam, the Business Council of Australia, the ACTU, the Australian Medical Association and our organisation, ClimateWorks Australia

Along with the 2050 target, the bill proposes the establishment of an independent Climate Change Commission. It also adopts the government’s low emissions technology roadmap and would require the government to introduce risk assessment and adaptation plans.

To reach the 2050 target, the bill calls for a process to review the target every five years, and ensure independent advice on five-yearly emissions budgets.

An emissions budget sets the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted over five-year periods — in line with requirements for the Paris Agreement on climate. This is important because the amount of global warming depends on cumulative emissions, not emissions in any one year.

Tracking the sectors

Australia can no longer consider a commitment to a net zero target as a matter of ideology or a moral gesture. Increasingly, it’s simple economic common sense, especially for investors.

In 2019, Geoff Summerhayes from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority pointed out that climate change now constitutes “a legally foreseeable risk facing many different companies in a range of different industries”. As such, the financial sector has an obligation to act.

In 2020, the level of ambition in the superannuation sector rose considerably, with REST super now joining Cbus, HESTA and UniSuper with net zero pledges.

Read more: Super funds are feeling the financial heat from climate change

Similarly, the recent ANZ announcement of “strong action to support the Paris Agreement” signals that all the major banks and insurers are moving away from thermal coal, as the International Energy Agency declares solar energy to be the cheapest source of electricity in history.

Certainly, some sectors of the Australian economy are moving faster than others. Our analysis of 21 major property companies found 90% had set an emissions reduction target, while nearly a third were already committed to net zero.

The local government sector is equally proactive. Over a third of the largest local governments we assessed (representing a fifth of the Australian population) have committed to reaching zero community emissions by or before 2050.

And more than half are acting to reduce their operational (or direct) emissions by, for instance, installing solar panels and switching their vehicle fleet to electric vehicles.

By contrast, our analysis showed the retail and transport sectors have a long way to go before they’re aligned with net zero.

Asking ‘how’, not ‘why’

Even in a historically difficult sector like resources, progress is being made.

BHP, for instance, now says it can flourish under conditions compatible with the Paris Agreement. Rather than posing a problem for business, action to decarbonise the global economy will, it declares, present “opportunities to invest in commodities such as potash, nickel and copper”, which will “provide a strong foundation” for its business.

This shows when it comes to net zero many of Australia’s biggest companies no longer ask “why”, but instead focus on “how”.

In part, that’s because businesses that don’t change know they increasingly risk isolation.

For example, the International Energy Agency said in its annual report that demand for Australian thermal coal has peaked, and renewables will meet 80% of the world’s energy demands in the coming years.

Japan, South Korea and the European Union have committed to reaching net zero by 2050, and US President-elect Joe Biden says his administration will make the same pledge. China also recently committed to reaching net zero by 2060.

Read more: Biden says the US will rejoin the Paris climate agreement in 77 days. Then Australia will really feel the heat

That means the vast majority of Australia’s exports are going to trading partners who have committed to transform their economies.

This will result in a shift in demand from high-carbon products and services, such as thermal coal, towards zero or near zero carbon alternatives, such as renewable hydrogen.

An opportunity, not a threat

Such a demand also presents extraordinary opportunities. The international transition to cleaner economies is a chance for Australia to become a renewable energy superpower.

After all, Australia possesses the world’s third-largest reserves of lithium and currently produces nine of the ten elements required for lithium-ion batteries.

Likewise, by 2030, Australia could be using renewable electricity and water to produce 500,000 tonnes of green hydrogen annually, one of the most important commodities of the transition into a clean economy.

Providing certainty to businesses

In tracking the momentum to net zero, we’ve seen the importance of clear targets in raising ambition, encouraging innovation and fostering the deployment of known solutions quickly and at scale.

And a parliamentary commitment to decarbonisation at the federal level, backed by interim targets set every five years, would provide businesses and the public with the certainty they need to plan.

Read more: The UK has a national climate change act – why don’t we?

Many other countries, such as Britain, already have their own climate change acts. So, too, does the state of Victoria.

Across the country, all the state and territory governments have made net zero commitments – and our assessment of local governments found many of them to be taking strong stands, too. It’s time for the federal parliament to get on board.

– ref. Zali Steggall’s new climate change bill comes just as economic sectors step up – https://theconversation.com/zali-steggalls-new-climate-change-bill-comes-just-as-economic-sectors-step-up-149728

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Hurley, Policy Fellow, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

The international student crisis is causing a population shock that is only going to get worse, a new report by the Mitchell Institute has found. The education policy think tank estimates over 300,000 fewer international students — half the pre-coronavirus numbers — will be in Australia by July 2021 if travel restrictions remain in place. The pandemic has already cut the number of international student who would normally be in Australia by over 210,000.

The report, Coronavirus and International Students, uses the latest data to map the impacts on international student numbers across Australia’s cities.

Where are international students now?

Since the pandemic began, the Australian government has released data showing the location of international students inside and outside Australia.

The table below compares the figures from March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, and November 2020.

The table shows total enrolments are down by 12% since March 2020. Border closures mean new students are not replacing current students as they finish their courses.

The number of Australian-enrolled international students now studying remotely from outside Australia has increased from 116,774 to 138,060.

Enrolments from China have been the most affected. This is because travel restrictions were first imposed on people travelling from China in February. Many Chinese students were unable to enter Australia before the start of semester one in 2020 and remain outside Australia.

These data suggest Australia is facing the dual problem of fewer enrolments and fewer international students inside the country.

How will Australian cities be affected?

The Mitchell Institute has used the latest data to update previous research to explore the impact of the international student crisis on our cities.

Read more: Interactive: international students make up more than 30% of population in some Australian suburbs

Our research shows the location and density of the reductions in international students vary by city.

For instance, an estimated 72,000 fewer international students are living in Sydney because of the pandemic.

Shown below is a three-dimensional visualisation of where in Sydney this reduction is likely to have occurred. The higher the column, the greater the reduction.

The map shows inner-city regions have been the most affected. Areas with large Chinese international student populations, such as Hurstville in Sydney’s south-west and Strathfield in Sydney’s west, also show significant reductions.

Melbourne has experienced a similar reduction to Sydney — an estimated 64,000 international students. The three-dimensional visualisation for Melbourne is shown below.

Compared to Sydney, the reduction in numbers is much more concentrated in the inner city. There is also a notable reduction in Melbourne’s south-east, near Monash University’s Clayton campus.

Every major Australian city will be experiencing a significant drop in international students, although in different ways.

The tables below list the ten areas in each state and territory estimated to have had the greatest reduction in international students to October 2020. (Click through the pages to find each state and territory.)

The interactive map of Australia below shows the Mitchell Institute estimates of reductions in population across each city because of the international student crisis. (Click on the magnifying glass icon to search for a city.)

As the crisis continues, the impact on Australia’s cities will evolve. The initial shock affected areas with large Chinese student populations. Further reductions are likely to involve students from other countries.

This will result in a more noticeable impact in areas with higher populations of non-Chinese international students.

What can be done?

The location of international students is important. These students spend in the wider economy. About 57%, or A$21.4 billion, of the A$37.5 billion associated with the international education sector comes from spending on goods and services.

If international students are outside Australia, this will affect the many local communities and businesses that rely on them.

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

Trials are planned to bring international students back into Australia. This will help those whose studies have been disrupted by the pandemic.

However, it is unclear whether such efforts will be enough to reverse the downward trend in the number of international students living in Australia.

Australia’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic might also create opportunities. Australia competes with other countries in the international education market, such as the United Kingdom and the United States.

Fewer cases of coronavirus might make Australia a more attractive study location than other countries.

Read more: Coronavirus: how likely are international university students to choose Australia over the UK, US and Canada?

Ultimately, Australia’s international education sector will look very different after coronavirus.

The emphasis that the Australian government has placed on the international education sector suggests it is not a matter of “if” international students return, but “when”.

It may also be wise to add “how” to the discussions. This is because there were concerns before the pandemic about Australia’s reliance on international student revenue.

Planning for the return of international students will ensure Australia rebuilds with a sustainable and equitable international education sector.

– ref. COVID to halve international student numbers in Australia by mid-2021 – it’s not just unis that will feel their loss – https://theconversation.com/covid-to-halve-international-student-numbers-in-australia-by-mid-2021-its-not-just-unis-that-will-feel-their-loss-148997