Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Quentin Beresford, Professor of Politics, Edith Cowan University

With the final approval of the Adani Carmichael coal mine now apparently imminent, it is important to ask how it has seemingly defied the assessment of experts that it is not financially viable.

After all, it’s only a week since the Chinese owner of another mine planned for the Galilee Basin, the China Stone mine, suspended its bid for mining leases because of commercial considerations.

The numbers appear not to add up because the location is remote, the coal would be expensive to transport, and the price is expected to fall.

But such a purely financial analysis ignores the political forces driving the development of the coal industry in both India and Australia.

Mates in in India, mates in Australia

In short, both are locked into what I describe as a model of crony capitalism, in which special deals are handed out to projects such as Adani that tip the scales in favour of development.

The actions of China and Japan in deploying enormous state power to export their respective coal technologies to Southeast Asia strengthens the hands of those pushing such developments.

In my recent book, Adani and the war over coal, I outline a network of power that for several decades has promoted the development of Australia’s coal resources in the interests of national and international corporations.

The mining companies, then the big four banks became part of it, lending billions in the rush to develop Australian coal mines as Asian countries sought to lock in long-term supplies. The Minerals Council of Australia, the New South Wales Minerals Council and the Queensland Resources Council, with their collective close ties to both political parties, handled public relations.

Read more: With the LNP returned to power, is there anything left in Adani’s way?

Yet they have faced resistance from the rise of an anti-Adani movement that links grassroots environmentalists, peak environmental lobby groups and progressive organisations such as GetUp!

By mid-2018, these campaigners seemed to have backed the Carmichael mine into a cul de sac by scaring off both Australian and foreign investors. They had also pressured the Queensland government to withdraw its support for a loan to the project from the Commonwealth government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility.

Then Adani surprised them by announcing that it would scale back the project and fund it from its own resources. On the face of it this seemed unlikely, but it had help.

Adani and Modi have history

The chairman and founder of the Adani group, Gautam Adani, has had a long relationship with the recently re-elected Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.

Modi played a decisive role in paving the way for Adani’s latest mega deal: selling coal-fired power from a plant in the Indian state of Jharkhand to nearby Bangladesh.

The power for Bangladesh is set to be fired by Carmichael coal. Many Australians would be concerned to learn that our coal is to be used to power one of the most climate-challenged countries on the planet, but we have this on the authority of Adani’s previous Australian-based chief executive, Jeyakuma Janakaraj.

Twelve days before the 2019 Indian election date was announced, the Modi government gave approval for an Adani project in Jharkhand to become the first designated power project in India to get the status and benefits of a Special Economic Zone, saving Adani billions of dollars in taxes, including clean energy taxes.

The Indian state will provide land, infrastructure and water for the project and shoulder the burden of pollution. The cost of the power to Bangladesh is not expected to be cheap.

Will we be asked for more?

Adani’s form suggests it might come back to Australia for more. Following the re-election of the Morrison government it is already being speculated that the pro-coal Minister for Resources, Matt Canavan, will revisit the original proposal for a billion-dollar government-sponsored loan from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility to construct the railway from the Galilee Basin to the Abbot Point coal port.

The Adani saga points to a critical flaw in the Paris climate agreement. It is an agreement between nation states, but what those states do is often determined by arrangements between politicians and private companies that feel no particular obligation to keep global warming to less than two degrees.

We are pawns in a larger, climate-destroying game.

Read more: Interactive: Everything you need to know about Adani – from cost, environmental impact and jobs to its possible future

– ref. If the Adani mine gets built, it will be thanks to politicians, on two continents – http://theconversation.com/if-the-adani-mine-gets-built-it-will-be-thanks-to-politicians-on-two-continents-118043

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stuart Kells, Adjunct Professor, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University

Last year two Danish librarians – Christian Lauersen and Marie Eiriksson – founded Library Planet: a worldwide, crowdsourced, online library travel guide. According to them, Library Planet is meant to inspire travellers “to open the awesome book that is our world of libraries, cities and countries”.

The name of the online project is a deliberate nod to the Australian-made Lonely Planet. The concept is simple and powerful. Library lovers contribute library profiles and images from their travels; the founders then curate and publish the posts, with the ambition of capturing library experiences and library attractions from around the world.

Why make libraries a focus of travel? There are a thousand practical and aesthetic reasons, as well as cultural ones. Libraries for the most part are safe and welcoming places. And they tell unique stories about the people who build and appreciate them. If books are the basic data of civilisation, then nations’ libraries provide windows on national souls. They are precious places in which to seek traces of the past, and reassurance about the future.

Library Planet now has dozens of intriguing profiles – including from Burma, Iceland, Tanzania and French Polynesia. A recent entry celebrated the Melbourne Cricket Club library at the MCG. The site has rapidly become a favourite among the bibliographical communities and subcultures of Instagram and Twitter, such as #rarebooks, #amreading and #librarylove.

The Grand Tour – of libraries

Library Planet may be new, but library tourism has been around a long time. In the Western Renaissance, Italian humanists visited derelict monastic libraries throughout Europe to rescue the unique manuscripts that had fallen into mouldy neglect in the late Middle Ages. In the 18th century, old libraries were a focus of the Grand Tour, and the subject of a rich travel literature.

Not all visits went smoothly. The author and historian Friedrich Hirsching called the directors of Germany’s public libraries “arrogant misanthropes who look upon their positions as sinecures”.

Well into the 19th century, people were still touring libraries and they were still rescuing manuscripts. In 1843, the bibliographer Obadiah Rich wrote to the bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps:

More manuscripts are destroyed by ignorant people than by civil wars. I once found a bookseller at Madrid occupied in taking off the parchment covers from a large pile of old folios and throwing them into his cellar to sell by weight to the grocers: I opened one, and immediately bought the whole (120 volumes) at about two shillings per volume: you will hardly believe that among them was one of the most precious volumes in your collection; a volume of original documents relating to England in the time of Philip the second!

The era of the biblio-treasure hunt extended, Indiana-Jones style, into the 20th century. In the spring of 1910, villagers were digging for fertiliser at the site of the destroyed Monastery of the Archangel Michael, in Egypt’s Fayyum oasis, near present-day Hamuli. In an old stone cistern the villagers found 60 Coptic manuscripts. Evidently, early in the tenth century, the monks had buried the monastery’s entire library for safekeeping, shortly before the monastery closed for good.

Written in Sahidic (a Coptic dialect) and ranging in date from 823 to 914 AD, the manuscripts formed the oldest, largest and most important group of early Coptic texts with a single provenance.

Dealers and bibliographers relished the discovery. Soon the illustrious American banker and bibliophile J. P. Morgan would buy most of the manuscripts, and they are now among the treasures that visitors can see at New York’s extraordinary biblio-temple, the Morgan Library and Museum.

A modern pilgrimage to old libraries

In 2017, my wife Fiona and I retraced the steps of some of the first library tourers. With our two young daughters (aged five and one at the time), we visited libraries in Switzerland, such as the spectacular Abbey Library of St Gall (Sankt Gallen), a former monastery, and the handsome Zentralbibliothek in Zurich. In Britain, we called on the Bodleian Library, the Wellcome Library, Lambeth Palace Library, University College Library and the irreplaceable British Library.

Our library touring also took us to North America, Asia, Oceania and major state and regional libraries in Australia. Visiting institutions like the Morgan, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Libraries, Harvard’s Widener and Houghton libraries, the New York Public Library, the Boston Public Library, the National Library of Australia, the state libraries of Victoria and NSW and national and university libraries in China and Indonesia and New Zealand; these were life-changing experiences.

Which libraries were our favourites? A few institutions stand out as having done everything right: beautiful, welcoming buildings; important and accessible holdings; and internal spaces designed for future scholars as well as current ones. Prominent members of this Goldilocks category include the Boston Athenaeum Library, the NYPL, the Folger Shakespeare Library and its larger Washingtonian neighbours.

In 2018, the four of us embarked on another library tour, this time of Japan. We sought out major libraries and everyday ones. An example from the first category is Japan’s principal public library, the National Diet Library. (The Diet is Japan’s national parliament.) The Tokyo Main Library in Chiyoda, a civic and parliamentary precinct, is the Diet Library’s principal site. It serves members of parliament and is also open to members of the public, who must register before entering.

The building itself features boarded concrete beams, stained glass and chunky tiles. The “high brutalist” style reminded us of a Dr Who set. The library is rich in Japanese and foreign literature, rare books and manuscripts, technical and official volumes and a multitude of other holdings. The total collection numbers in the tens of millions of items, making it one of the world’s largest and most important.

Also in the Chiyoda district, the building that houses the National Archives of Japan is a poignant place that contains Japan’s foundational documents, such as the decree that changed the city of Edo to Tokyo; the documents that returned to Japan its sovereignty after post-war occupation; and those that returned to Japan the ownership of Okinawa.

Children need special permission to enter the Tokyo Main Library – special permission that my daughters did not have. But a few suburbs north of Chiyoda, in the cultural precinct near Ueno Park, is the excellent International Library of Children’s Literature. Visitors can access this library without charge and without a library card.

Another priority for our visit was on the hilly, green outskirts of Tokyo. A private university, Meisei University is home to the world’s second largest collection of Shakespeare First Folios. (The Folger has by far the largest collection. The New York Public Library and the British Library are among the small number of institutions that also hold multiple copies.) In addition to its cache of First Folios, Meisei also possesses other early Shakespeare editions, and much else of Shakespearean interest including artworks and artefacts.

Kyoto, the former capital of Japan, is a city of libraries. Many of its beautiful old buildings and neighbourhoods have been preserved. Those neighbourhoods are peppered with large and small libraries, such as the Kyoto Library of Historical Documents, the Kyoto Prefecture Library, the Kansai Library (another branch of the National Diet Library) and the glorious temple of pulp: the Manga Museum.

All hail the librarian

So what did we learn from all this library touring? Reports of the death of the library are certainly exaggerated. People, including young people, continue to use and appreciate libraries. People are still investing in libraries, and they are still buying and reading books. But the libraries and their custodians are engaged in hot battles on multiple fronts, including the fight against underfunding and creeping volunteerism, and the epochal clash between analogue and digital content.

Libraries as physical spaces have been transformed. Library architecture is a wonderful site of experimentation. (Great examples include the new Library of Alexandria, China’s amazing Tianjin Binhai Library, the University of Zurich’s ultra-modern Law Faculty library, and the stylish Melton Library and Learning Hub in Victoria.) Library spaces now permit an expansive variety of uses, including noisy and smelly ones. As welcoming, non-commercial and non-judgemental “third spaces”, libraries are increasingly serving a generous variety of pro-social purposes.

In their curation and display of books and manuscripts, comics and posters and realia, libraries are telling rich and important stories – about women’s rights, LGBTIQ rights, civil rights, counter-culture movements, climate change and the crimes of history. Libraries and librarians are contributing to social inclusion directly and in practical ways, such as by helping people write their CVs, and by lending ties, handbags and briefcases for job interviews.

In our world of gobbling capitalism and pervasive consumerism, libraries continue to be founded on humanism. The diverse roles of libraries as places of education and participation are becoming more urgent each day. Libraries are part of our knowledge system and our civic and social infrastructure; their accessibility is meant to transcend class, race, gender, sexuality and all the other classifications that elsewhere can divide us. Not everyone, though, has got the memo.

In all the battles about what libraries are for and who can use them, librarians are in the trenches, fighting the good fight. Both on-line and in-world, the latest renaissance of library appreciation has naturally seen much respect and affection directed towards librarians, who for the most part are certainly not “arrogant misanthropes”, and who generally don’t conform to the bookish, shushing stereotype.

But in this new world of library love, librarians also need personal space. They emphatically don’t want random kisses or hugs or cakes. They want you to use their libraries, relish their services, and listen to what their collections and resources say about our collective past, present and future.

If libraries didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them

In the curation and mobilisation of collections and resources, librarians are making the best of our digital future, without discarding our analogue past (though many rightly bemoan the loss of physical card catalogues and the tangible, fractal, serendipitous experiences that came with them).

Rare and fragile books are being digitised on a massive scale; scandalous and hitherto hidden books are being let out; and librarians are helping to curate and navigate the messy, unbounded and uncooperative soup that we call the internet.

Librarians are also welcoming library tourists as well as regular users and other visitors. In 2016, the New York Public Library reportedly hosted 18 million visitors – many of them from other municipalities, states and countries. That same year, the National Library of China, the largest library in Asia, welcomed 5.6 million visitors. Our very own domed library, the wonderful State Library of Victoria, is also among the world’s most visited libraries. According to that institution’s latest annual report, the library hosted precisely 1,937,643 visitors last year, and had more than twice as many on-line interactions.

Glue or gum?

Is there a downside to all this visiting? Are we just setting up another tension, in which libraries are victims of their own success, and locals compete with tourists for library space and time? Could our best libraries come to resemble parts of Amsterdam and Venice: pseudo-historical theme-parks; mere caricatures of civic spaces, more for tourists than for locals? Could the “social glue” of libraries be replaced by tourists’ discarded chewing gum?

At showcase libraries such as St Gall and the Library of Congress, tourists are in the majority, but those libraries are fully ready for them – and their gum. In our more humble municipal libraries, the library tourists certainly don’t outnumber the locals, but there is definitely tension between the demands of different types of library users. Nevertheless, I’m optimistic about the future, in part because those tensions are exactly what librarians are deft at resolving.

I’m optimistic, too, because of the progressive and truth-telling roles that libraries are increasingly playing. In Japan, the National Library and the National Archives tell candid and affecting stories about Japan and its fraught modern history. In the US and the UK, libraries such as the Houghton and the British Library have infinite potential to be crusty and excluding. But instead, through exhibitions of books, posters, artefacts and artwork, they are telling diverse stories from marginalised voices about the fight for fairness and social inclusion. These are stories and voices that everyone should hear.

Who exactly are libraries for? Much of the history of libraries is concerned with matters of access. In British and European libraries, for example, people have been shut out at different times based on their gender, class, age, nationality and religion. Each of these exclusions has been, in its turn, the subject of hot debate. But all the arguments have landed us in a good place: today’s library ethos of openness and welcome.

The modern library is a humanist project, founded on inclusion rather than division. Today, it is possible for libraries to be islands of humanity. In the future, if we are unlucky, they might become its warehouses. But with luck, they’ll be its wellsprings.

– ref. Friday essay: the library – humanist ideal, social glue and now, tourism hotspot – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-library-humanist-ideal-social-glue-and-now-tourism-hotspot-116432

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University

Benjamin Netanyahu is now in the fight of his turbulent political life. The stakes for Israel’s prime minister could hardly be greater. His continuance in office, his own reputation, his legacy, his immunity from prosecution on various corruption charges, and possibly jail are all at play.

Israel’s political history is marked by volatility. But few moments since the proclamation of the Jewish State in 1948 have involved such high drama in attempts to form a government.

Read more: Trouble in the Gulf as US-Iran dispute threatens to escalate into serious conflict

Netanyahu’s failure this week to get the numbers for a coalition that would withstand challenge on the floor of the Knesset means Israel will go back to the polls on September 17.

This will be a re-run of elections in April. But this does not mean Israeli voters, fed-up with the melodrama surrounding Netanyahu’s alleged corruption, his attempts to secure immunity from prosecution, and now a political meltdown, will return the same result.

If they do not, Israel may find itself gripped by another lengthy period of uncertainty as various players, including Netanyahu, seek to forge a coalition that would command a Knesset majority.

All this political upheaval also vastly complicates attempts by the Trump administration to advance a Middle East peace process in what Donald Trump himself has described as the “deal of the century”.

His son-in-law Jared Kushner’s plans to convene a peace forum in Bahrain in June to discuss the outline of a possible way forward may be curtailed.

The event was in trouble anyway. Palestinian representatives would not attend, nor would Palestinian business figures from the diaspora.

Representatives from Gulf states, and further afield from countries like Morocco, might question attending when a caretaker Israeli government is living on borrowed time.

What is remarkable in all this is that just a few months ago, Netanyahu was being acclaimed as a political maestro after managing to win what appeared to be his fourth term in office.

He would become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

When his nationalist Likud Party won 35 Knesset seats out of 120, it was assumed he would comfortably get the numbers to form a government in alliance with other parties of the right. This includes the powerful ultra-orthodox religious bloc.

But as the days and weeks passed, such an outcome began to seem more problematic. So it proved.

What eventually stymied his attempt to build a majority was disagreement over what has long been one of the most contentious issues in Israeli politics.

That issue is the exemption accorded ultra-Orthodox men from serving in the military. A new law had been proposed that would set modest quotas for the enlistment of ultra-Orthodox males.

Netanyahu’s prospective coalition partner, Avigdor Lieberman of the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, insisted this requirement be adhered to. But ultraorthodox components of a coalition refused to compromise.

In essence, Israel’s attempts to form a government foundered on this issue.

However, beyond the military exemption issue it is also clear that political rivalry and personal differences between Netanyahu and Lieberman stymied a compromise.

Former allies on the Israeli right – Lieberman had served as foreign minister and defence minister in Netanyahu-led governments – the two are now locked in a bitter personal standoff. This will overshadow the election campaign.

Lieberman insists his motives are simply to secure passage of the military exemptions law, in fairness to secular Israelis who bear the burden of defending the homeland. However, his published remarks indicate a broader purpose. He said in a Facebook post:

I am for the state of Israel. I am for a Jewish state, but I am against a state based on Jewish religious law.

By forcing an election re-run, Lieberman’s gambit is also being seen in Israel as a direct leadership challenge posed to a weakened Netanyahu, compromised by bribery allegations.

Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Yediot Ahronot, puts it this way:

He is seizing leadership. He wants to prove that despite Netanyahu taking him for granted he, with his five seats, can cause turmoil.

Chief beneficiary of this bitter family feud on the right is the so-called Blue and White alignment of the centre, led by former army chief Benny Gantz.

Gantz’s alignment won the same number of seats as Likud in the Knesset elections in April, but could not marshal sufficient backing on the left to match Netanyahu’s support on the religious right.

Gantz also proved to be an awkward political campaigner against the seasoned Netanyahu. Presumably, he will be more accomplished this time.

Another wild card in events in the Middle East these days are the actions of the Trump administration. Since his election in 2016, Trump has signalled that he would accommodate Netanyahu’s nationalist impulses.

Read more: Why Trump’s recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory matters

He broke with all his presidential predecessors in his pledge to relocate the American embassy to West Jerusalem. In the process, he did not acknowledge Palestinian claims to East Jerusalem as their capital.

Provocatively, he has also recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. He has not questioned Israel’s settlement activities in the West Bank.

Unlike his predecessors, he has accommodated one of the most nationalist governments in Israel’s history. The question becomes what he might consider doing to save it.

– ref. Politics and religion collide in the Knesset as Netanyahu faces the fight of his political life – http://theconversation.com/politics-and-religion-collide-in-the-knesset-as-netanyahu-faces-the-fight-of-his-political-life-118041

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bonny Parkinson, Senior Research Fellow, Macquarie University

For many young women who take the contraceptive pill and don’t experience any side effects, seeing a doctor to renew your prescription each year is a nuisance.

For some women, it’s enough to put them off taking the pill, placing them at increased risk of unwanted pregnancy.

So why isn’t it available over the counter at pharmacies?

Our research, published this month in the journal PharmacoEconomics, found such a move could save the nation A$96 million a year in health care costs and save 22 lives a year.

What’s the problem?

The oral contraceptive pill was first available in Australia in 1961 and has since become the most popular type of contraception in Australia.

More than half a century of research has generated an extensive body of evidence showing the modern contraceptive pill is safe and effective. Despite this, women in most developed countries need a current prescription from a doctor to access the pill.

Read more: Freer sex and family planning: a short history of the contraceptive pill

But this is slowly changing. New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Oregon and California in the United States have opted to reclassify the pill to be available over the counter.

The idea of reclassifying the pill has had a mixed response in Australia.

Queensland Health will soon undertake a pilot, in which pharmacists will be allowed to prescribe repeats of the pill.

The Victorian Liberal Party last year promised to make the pill accessible over the counter if elected. But it lost the 2018 state election. The Labor government said it would look at the proposal but has not yet made any announcement.

In New South Wales some doctors’ groups oppose reclassification, and the state’s health minister recently rejected the idea.

Nationally in 2015, a committee of Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) rejected a proposal to make the pill available over-the-counter. This was largely based on safety concerns, such as a small increased risk of stroke and venous thromboembolism.

The committee didn’t consider the potential health benefits and cost savings from making the pill more accessible to women.

So what are the risks and benefits?

As with all medications, the pill has some potential side effects. These include headaches, breast tenderness, bleeding irregularities, nausea, reduced libido and, less commonly, depression.

Read more: Informed consent: women need to know about the link between the pill and depression

More serious, but rarer, problems can include venous thromboembolism, heart attack and stroke.

Use of the pill instead of condoms may also increase the risk of sexually transmitted infections.

Reclassifying the pill could reduce unintended pregnancies from women using less effective contraception methods (such as withdrawal or the rhythm method), and reduce the number of miscarriages, stillbirths, ectopic pregnancies (when a fertilised egg implants outside the uterus), and abortions.

It could cut the risk of endometrial and ovarian cancer.

Overall, reclassifying the pill could reduce health-care costs associated with unintended pregnancies and GP consultations for prescriptions.

How do the risks and benefits stack up?

We recently modelled the risks and benefits to women and the health-care system if the pill was reclassified in Australia.

We estimated more women would use the pill, and fewer would use no contraception or less effective contraceptive methods such as withdrawal and the rhythm method.

It would also mean fewer women using long-acting reversible contraceptives – such as implants placed in the arm, IUDs (intra-uterine devices) and injections – which tend to be more effective at preventing pregnancy than the pill.

Read more: Don’t want to take a contraceptive pill every day? These are the long-acting alternatives

Our modelling suggests if the pill became available without a doctor’s prescription, we would see an 8.3% reduction in pregnancies, resulting in fewer miscarriages, abortions, ectopic pregnancies, and stillbirths.

On the downside, each year around Australia we could expect to see 122 more cases of sexually transmitted infections, 97 more cases of depression, five more strokes, and four more heart attacks.

But we estimated there would be 22 fewer deaths due to pregnancy, ovarian cancer and other complications. Overall, the net health benefits of reclassifying the pill outweigh the risks.

The move would also save the nation A$96 million per year in avoided health costs.

Where to from here?

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) is currently investigating whether some prescription-only medicines, including the pill, should be reclassified so only a pharmacist must be consulted.

The TGA says there would be benefits to the consumer, but it would require “strong caveats and controls around when pharmacists can/cannot supply” the pill.

The TGA’s 2015 decision to reject reclassifying the pill was based on submissions from stakeholders and deliberation. But it didn’t analyse all of the health benefits, risks and cost savings.

This latest review must take these factors into account and come to a decision that benefits individual women and the health system as a whole.

Further research is needed to develop a protocol for pharmacists to follow when supplying the pill without a prescription. The upcoming Queensland pilot may provide some new insights.

Read more: No, women don’t need to ‘take a break’ from the pill every couple of years

– ref. Over-the-counter contraceptive pill could save the health system $96 million a year – http://theconversation.com/over-the-counter-contraceptive-pill-could-save-the-health-system-96-million-a-year-116826

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dougal Sutherland, Clinical Psychologist, Victoria University of Wellington

The New Zealand government has allocated a record NZ$1.9 billion to mental health over five years in its first well-being budget.

This includes a new frontline service for mental health, with a NZ$455 million programme and a goal of reaching 325,000 people by 2024. The package also includes a NZ$40 million boost to suicide prevention services and extra nurses in schools to reach 5,600 more secondary students.

Other initiatives are to strengthen existing services and to re-establish a Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission. The government has also shown a willingness to tackle social determinants of mental health, including poverty and homelessness. Together these initiatives are a bold step forward, although questions remain about whether the goals are achievable in a short timeframe.

Read more: NZ mental health inquiry calls for fundamental change

Going backwards to go forwards

The resurrection of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission represents a step back in time for the mental health sector. While the return of the commission to provide leadership and accountability for the sector is welcomed, the fact that it is needed shows just how far the sector hasn’t come and that district health boards have largely failed to address the mental health needs of most New Zealanders.

The commission will need to lead the development of new models of delivering mental health services to release these from the grip of district health boards, which are focused on helping those people with acute and severe issues while at the same time trying to endlessly save money. Mental health services must be integrated into primary health care and moved closer to communities that need them.

We need a holistic approach to health rather than the current mind/body split that treats mental health as a leperous outsider. Today’s budget recognised this need, with the announcement of a new universal frontline mental health service linked to GPs and iwi (tribal) providers.

But with the government boldly aiming to reach 325,000 New Zealanders within three to four years, who will staff this service? Current estimates are that the psychology workforce sees about 200,000 people per year and another 200,000 are being seen by counsellors or social workers. In order to meet the government’s target, this workforce would need to be doubled by 2023. The budget provides no details on how this will happen. Instead we are told we need to wait till later in the year.

Read more: New Zealand’s well-being approach to budget is not new, but could shift major issues

Workforce shortage

Yesterday, the government also accepted most of the recommendations made by the recent Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction. The inquiry repeatedly called for an increase in talking therapies. They are ideal for people with mild to moderate mental health issues and psychologists are experts in developing and delivering them.

But current Ministry of Education funding rates for clinical psychology training are so low that courses typically run at a loss. Clinical psychology training is funded at substantially lower rates than all other health disciplines including medicine, dentistry, dietetics and even acupuncture and osteopathy. The government cannot claim to take the mental health inquiry’s recommendations seriously, nor is it likely to achieve its ambitious 2023 goal, without stumping up the cash for training.

The government must also think about how to fundamentally reshape the delivery of mental health services. Even if the current psychology workforce were doubled overnight it would still not reach all who need access to services. Innovative initiatives will need to be considered, including e-therapies and prevention programmes targeted at children and teens.

In this regard the expansion of nurses into secondary schools for a further 5,600 students is a good start but unlikely to be enough. It may be that the soon to be re-established mental health commission will be given the task of considering how to expand services outside the current one-to-one intensive, in-person model.

Shot in the arm for existing services

The well-being budget has allocated $200 million for existing mental health services. Anybody who has worked in or used current services will know that they are frequently placed in less-than-fit-for-purpose facilities hidden away in the back-blocks of hospital grounds. The budget announcement will go some way to addressing this inequity of treatment.

It remains to be seen whether the government’s response to the mental health inquiry will go deep enough to fundamentally alter how mental health services are delivered in the public sector. Urgent change is needed in how mental health services in the public sector are managed and delivered in order to stop the exodus of psychologists from district health boards which, in some areas, is reaching epidemic proportions.

The 2019 budget was labelled the “well-being budget”. From a mental health perspective, this involves thinking more widely than just providing individuals with treatment. It also needs to address societal factors that influence mental health, such as poverty and homelessness. The government seems keen to address these broader issues with plans to reduce child poverty, increase benefit levels, and tackle homelessness. If successful, then today’s budget may yet live up to its name.

– ref. Mental health wins record funding in New Zealand’s first ‘well-being budget’ – http://theconversation.com/mental-health-wins-record-funding-in-new-zealands-first-well-being-budget-118047

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Donna Lee Brien, Professor, Creative Industries, CQUniversity Australia

Why do we tell stories, and how are they crafted? In this series, we unpick the work of the writer on both page and screen.

Two Australian books were published last year about a brutal murder that happened in Melbourne in 1930: the non-fiction A Scandal in Bohemia: The Life and Death of Mollie Dean by Gideon Haigh, and The Portrait of Molly Dean, Katherine Kovacic’s first novel.

Mary Winifred (“Mollie” or “Molly”) Dean was in her mid-twenties when she was savagely bashed in the Melbourne suburb of Elwood, only doors away from her home. Interrupted, her assailant fled, and Dean died hours later in hospital, unable to provide any information about her killer. Although a suspect was arrested, he was later released. The attacker was never identified and the murder remains unsolved.

Interest by Australian writers and publishers in this story is not remarkable. Mystery, thriller and detective novels remain popular with readers.

True crime-related storytelling is also attracting notice and – whether in books, on television or online – has shrugged off its seedy, low-brow image. Instead, true crime is winning major literary and journalism awards. Audiences for true crime podcasts are significant and growing, with the well researched Australian Casefile a riveting example.

Cold cases are the basis for many of the more intriguing investigations. Newspaper reports and podcasts are re-opening unsolved criminal cases and probing the evidentiary record. In some cases, these publications and broadcasts attract new informants to come forward, and have led to arrests. These narratives, and their audiences, revel in these successes, and how they bring long-denied justice to victims and their loved ones.

Read more: A criminal record: women and Australian true crime stories

Dean’s murder is a very cold case, as she was violently assaulted some 90 years ago. The Melbourne newspapers covered the murder and ensuing police investigation daily in breathless, sensationalist detail. Soon, the story also attracted national, and then international, attention.

As the decades passed, Dean’s story, thinly veiled, was retold a number of times, including in George Johnston’s classic 1964 novel, My Brother Jack. But, apart from a flurry of excited news reports when a new witness came forward in 1966, this crime and the individuals affected by it largely slipped into obscurity until Haigh’s and Kovacic’s books were published.

Turning evidence into narrative

Gideon Haigh is best known as a cricket and business writer. But his riveting true crime biography Certain Admissions, subtitled A Beach, A Body and A Lifetime of Secrets, brought his work to a new audience when it was published in 2015. Certain Admissions examines the 1949 Melbourne murder of Beth Williams and the enigmatic story of the man convicted and gaoled for this crime, John Bryan Kerr.

In A Scandal in Bohemia, Haigh takes a similar biographical approach. As an independently-minded school teacher, promising aspiring writer and artists’ muse, Mollie Dean was, as the title of the book indicates, a member of Melbourne’s more freethinking artistic set. Framing Dean’s story with biographical details about other members of the group, Haigh pays particular attention to her lover Colin Colahan, who was then a well known painter and bohemian figure in Melbourne.

Aside from archival sources such as legal records and private papers, Haigh notes how he found evidence for this story in the copious contemporary newspaper reports as well as secondary sources, including retired CSIRO research scientist Eric J. Frazer’s 2017 article about the murder.

Relying heavily on previously unused files in the Victorian Public Record Office, Frazer’s is a fascinating account of how attention at the time focused on Dean’s personal life (her quest for independence was seen as being “fast”) and her difficult relationship with her widowed mother. Frazer also described her mother’s possibly sexual relationship with a much younger man, who may have also been an admirer of Dean’s. Haigh’s account weaves together information about these various characters in recounting the case.

Katherine Kovacic’s The Portrait of Molly Dean focuses in closely on Dean’s own story, with an invented character as narrator. When art dealer Alex Clayton buys a nude portrait (of what turns out to be Molly Dean) at auction, she is prompted to uncover the sitter’s story.

Kovacic has Alex, together with her art conservator friend John, first find, and then work through, the same evidence as Frazer and Haigh. For reasons that become obvious in the plot, Alex’s narrative of this quest is set in 1999. Alternate chapters are set in 1930, relating Molly Dean’s story, until the attack silences her. By the end of the novel, Alex has discovered not just the murderer, but also the motivation for the crime.

True crime biography

Today, the victims, perpetrators, witnesses, police, journalists and everyone else directly or even tangentially related to Dean’s murder are long dead. This means that, after all these decades, the apprehension and arrest of a criminal is not the main motivation for these publications.

Instead, both these extended narratives want to provide a more fully rounded biography for Mollie/Molly Dean, providing a life story that goes beyond her brutal murder. Part of the biographer’s art is to find and then sift through the evidence that exists about a person’s life, and order it in a way that tells a compelling story. Each of these volumes – in their different ways – achieve this.

Haigh and Kovacic also demonstrate how biographers can deal with evidence that is ambiguous, contradictory or patchy. Both authors discuss the evidence they have and where it was found, and then make it very clear when they are stepping in and interpreting that information. Neither exaggerates, lies nor manufactures material to fill in the missing bits of Dean’s story. When they speculate on the aspects of the crime, they signal to the reader they are doing so.

Both also avoid gratuitous descriptions of sex and violence.

For all these reasons, A Scandal in Bohemia: The Life and Death of Mollie Dean and The Portrait of Molly Dean show how well sensitive, empathic and intelligent writers can re-tell a victim’s story. In doing so, both these volumes are models of how to write compassionately and humanely about a terrible crime – whether this offence is recent or, as in the case of Mollie/Molly Dean, deeper in the past.

– ref. Inside the story: humanising a cold case victim – writing the life and brutal death of Mollie Dean – http://theconversation.com/inside-the-story-humanising-a-cold-case-victim-writing-the-life-and-brutal-death-of-mollie-dean-111185

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eddie Synot, Senior Research Assistant, Griffith University

Ken Wyatt is the first Indigenous cabinet minister in the history of the Commonwealth government. That he was also the first Indigenous member of the House of Representatives when elected in 2010 as the member for Hasluck, WA, and is now the first Indigenous person to be minister for Indigenous Australians, makes his appointment especially significant.

Wearing his Noongar kangaroo skin booka, the significance of this appointment should not be understated. The short history of Indigenous participation in Australia’s political community is one of exclusion. But that exclusion was never the result of a lack of Indigenous persistence and ability.

Australian society was structured on the exclusion, or limited inclusion, of Indigenous people. Laws targeted Indigenous people for special treatment based on biological and sociological beliefs in their racial inferiority. These attitudes permeated Australian society throughout the protection and assimilation eras. These laws set effective limits on the participation of Indigenous peoples in Australian society.

Read more: Constitutional reform made easy: how to achieve the Uluru statement and a First Nations voice

Australian society has come a long way since the days of oppressive exclusion. But we still bear the heavy burden of a history of torment and powerlessness. Perhaps more than any other member of cabinet, Ken Wyatt will feel the weight of history, hope and expectation as he faces the challenge of Indigenous affairs.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison seems aware of the significance of this appointment. An example of this awareness is the name change from Minister for Indigenous Affairs to Minister for Indigenous Australians. This fits the narrative of social cohesion that Morrison has deployed to emphasise Australian unity in response to calls for Indigenous constitutional recognition. This rhetoric has persisted despite many emphasising that Indigenous constitutional recognition would unify and enhance Australian democracy rather than challenge it.

The Indigenous affairs portfolio has had a long and troubled history. Nigel Scullion’s tenure as minister was plagued by significant issues and dissatisfaction from within the Indigenous community. Multiple reports have been scathing of the Commonwealth’s policies, especially its flagship Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS) and Closing the Gap (CTG).

The 2017 review of the IAS by the Australian National Audit Office was particularly scathing. The report found a culture of arbitrary decision-making, a lack of transparency, poor record-keeping, a lack of oversight and accountability, no access to review of decisions, and a significant number of submissions having been lost.

The reviews of CTG were also scathing. Reports emphasised a continued failure to make significant inroads in targeted outcomes, despite over a decade of policy action.

Most striking, though, has been the clear frustration of the Indigenous community with a government that has ignored Indigenous peoples and worked according to dated and paternalistic practices.

This frustration resulted in the formation of a coalition of peak Indigenous bodies. This coalition in turn was able to obtain a negotiated partnership with the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) announced in December 2018.

COAG acknowledged a need for actions to:

align with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ and communities’ priorities and ambition as a basis for developing action plans.

This is important recognition of the desire of Indigenous peoples to control their own affairs through community-controlled delivery of service programs. COAG also recognised that “to effect real change, governments must work collaboratively and in genuine, formal partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as they are the essential agents of change”.

These policy concerns are part of the broader place and understanding of Indigenous peoples within Australia. This foundational issue informed the Uluru Statement from the Heart and its sequenced priorities of voice, treaty and truth. Fully aware of the difficult history and challenges ahead, the Uluru Statement from the Heart asked all Australians “to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future”.

The second anniversary of the Uluru statement has coincided with Wyatt’s appointment, National Sorry Day and Reconciliation Week. This timing has provided a unique opportunity to reflect on the importance of Wyatt’s appointment, successes to date, challenges ahead, and the acceptance of that invitation from the Uluru statement.

Read more: The Indigenous community deserves a voice in the constitution. Will the nation finally listen?

Wyatt faces a significant challenge. That cannot be denied. Any increased expectations on him because he is Indigenous should be tempered.

The challenge is bigger than the Indigenous affairs portfolio, as recent reports into Indigenous affairs have addressed. Solutions require partnerships across government, ministerial portfolios and the community to be successful. The challenges are not simply those of Indigenous peoples and the minister for Indigenous Australians. This is the responsibility of all Australians.

It is hard to say what Wyatt’s first priority as minister should be, as there are so many issues demanding attention. Indigenous youth suicide and the much maligned Community Development Program stand out. But the relationship between Indigenous peoples and other Australians, including the respect and recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, remains front and centre of the work ahead.

Wyatt brings a notable difference to the Indigenous affairs portfolio. He is experienced, having served as a senior public servant and as an MP since 2010. He has been minister for aged care and Indigenous health. He has also been involved in and is supportive of major reform agendas being called for in Indigenous affairs – implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart and achieving meaningful partnerships with Indigenous Australians.

– ref. Ken Wyatt faces challenges – and opportunities – as minister for Indigenous Australians – http://theconversation.com/ken-wyatt-faces-challenges-and-opportunities-as-minister-for-indigenous-australians-117896

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robin Smit, Adjunct professor, The University of Queensland

When it comes to road transport, Australia is at risk of becoming a climate villain as we lag behind international best practice on fuel efficiency.

Road transport is one of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions and represented 16% of Australia’s total carbon dioxide emissions in 2000, growing to 21% in 2016. Total CO₂ emissions from road transport increased by almost 30% in the period 2000-16.

Fuel efficiency (CO₂ emission) standards have been adopted in around 80% of the global light vehicle market to cap the growth of transport emissions. This includes the United States, the European Union, Canada, Japan, China, South Korea and India – but not Australia.

Read more: Emissions standards on cars will save Australians billions of dollars, and help meet our climate targets

If Australia had introduced internationally harmonised emissions legislation three years ago, households could have made savings on fuel costs to the tune of A$1 billion.

This shocking figure comes from our preliminary calculations looking at the effect of requiring more efficient vehicles to be sold in Australia.

A report, published yesterday by Transport Energy/Emission Research, looked at what Australia has achieved in vehicle fuel efficiency and CO₂ standards over the past 20 years. While Australia has considered and tried to impose standards a number of times, sadly these attempts were unsuccessful.

Legislative action on vehicle CO₂ emissions is long overdue and demands urgent attention by the Australian government.

How did Australia get here?

The most efficient versions of vehicle models offered in Australia are considerably less efficient than similar vehicles in other markets.

Australia could increasingly become a dumping ground for the world’s least efficient vehicles with sub-par emissions performance, given our lack of fuel efficiency standards. This leaves us on a dangerous path towards not only higher vehicle emissions, but also higher fuel costs for passenger travel and freight.

Australia has attempted to impose CO₂ or fuel efficiency standards on light vehicles several times over the past 20 years, but without success. While the federal government was committed to addressing this issue in 2015, four years later we are still yet to hear when – or even if – mandatory fuel efficiency standards will ever be introduced.

The general expectation appears to be that average CO₂ emission rates of new cars in Australia will reduce over time as technology advances overseas. In the absence of CO₂ standards locally, it is more likely that consumers will continue to not be offered more efficient cars, and pay higher fuel costs as a consequence.

Estimating the fuel savings

Available evidence suggests Australian motorists are paying on average almost 30% more for fuel than they should because of the lack of fuel efficiency standards.

The Australian vehicle fleet uses about 32 billion litres of fuel per year.

Using an Australian fleet model described in the TER report, we can make a conservative estimate that the passenger vehicle fleet uses about half of this fuel: 16 billion litres per year. New cars entering the fleet each year would represent about 5% of this: 800 million litres per year.

So assuming that mandatory CO₂ standards improve fuel efficiency by 27%, fuel savings would be 216 million litres per year.

In the last three years, the average fuel price across Australia’s five major cities is A$1.33 per litre. This equates to a total savings of A$287 million per year, although this would be about half the first year as new cars are purchased throughout the year and travel less, and would reduce as vehicles travel less when they age.

The savings are accumulative because a car purchased in a particular year continues to save fuel over the following years.

The table below shows a rough calculation of savings over the three year period (2016-2018), for new cars sold in the same period (Model Years 2016, 2017 and 2018).

As a result, over a period of three years, A$1.3 billion in potential savings for car owners would have accumulated.

Policy has come close, but what are we waiting for?

The Australian government is not progressing any measures to introduce a fuel efficiency target. In fact, it recently labelled Labor’s proposed fuel efficiency standard as a “car tax”.

But Australia has come close to adopting mandatory vehicle CO₂ emission standards in the past.

In late 2007, the Labor government committed to cutting emissions to achieve Australia’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. The then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, instructed the Vehicle Efficiency Working Group to:

… develop jointly a package of vehicle fuel efficiency measures designed to move Australia towards international best practice.

Then, in 2010, the Labor government decided mandatory CO₂ emissions standards would apply to new light vehicles from 2015. But a change in government in 2013 meant these standards did not see the light of day.

Things looked promising again when the Coalition government released a Vehicle Emissions Discussion Paper in 2016, followed by a draft Regulation Impact Statement in the same year.

The targets for adopting this policy in 2025, considered in the draft statement, were marked as “strong” (105g of CO₂ per km), “medium” (119g/km) and “mild” (135g/km) standards.

Under all three targets, there would be significant net cost savings. But since 2016, the federal government has taken no further action.

It begs the question: what exactly are we waiting for?

The technical state of play

Transport Energy/Emission Research conducted preliminary modelling of Australian real-world CO₂ emissions.

This research suggests average CO₂ emission rates of the on-road car fleet in Australia are actually increasing over time and are, in reality, higher than what is officially reported in laboratory emissions tests.

In fact, the gap between mean real-world emissions and the official laboratory tests is expected to grow from 20% in 2010 to 65% in 2025.

This gap is particularly concerning when we look at the lack of support for low-emissions vehicles like electric cars.

Read more: Why battery-powered vehicles stack up better than hydrogen

Given that fleet turnover is slow, the benefits of fuel efficiency standards would only begin to have a significant effect several years into the future.

With continuing population growth, road travel will only increase further. This will put even more pressure on the need to reduce average real-world CO₂ emission rates, given the increasing environmental and health impacts of the vehicle fleet.

Even if the need to reduce emissions doesn’t convince you, the cost benefits of emissions standards should. The sale of less efficient vehicles in Australia means higher weekly fuel costs for car owners, which could be avoided with the introduction of internationally harmonised emissions legislation.

– ref. Australians could have saved over $1 billion in fuel if car emissions standards were introduced 3 years ago – http://theconversation.com/australians-could-have-saved-over-1-billion-in-fuel-if-car-emissions-standards-were-introduced-3-years-ago-117190

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Wanna, Sir John Bunting Chair of Public Administration, Australian National University

Labor has taken a major gamble by appointing Anthony Albanese unopposed as party leader. His speedy elevation came because he was not tarred with the Bill Shorten-Chris Bowen brush that failed so spectacularly on May 18. So a cross-factional deal for a unity ticket held sway.

“Albo” has carefully crafted his image as a knockabout but likeable scallywag. He mixes easily with ordinary folks, “does” the local pubs and community centres, volunteers his services as an occasional DJ. He is a rugby league fanatic who regularly marches in the Sydney Mardi Gras and has a beer named in his honour. He’s an impish politician with a nose for a pithy or humorous riposte; an iconoclastic puncturer of hyperbole and bunkum (remember his throwaway dismissal of the “convoy of no consequence” when a pitiful truck convoy descended on Canberra).

Albanese was also Labor’s smartest parliamentary tactician as the Leader of the House in the Gillard government. He sees himself as a “commonsense guy” who is prepared to “stand up for what [he] thinks is commonsense propositions”.

He also has the distinction of remaining loyal to both former Labor PMs Kevin Rudd and then Julia Gillard, and has earned respect for this among his colleagues, unlike Shorten.

Read more: How might Labor win in 2022? The answers can all be found in the lessons of 2019

Of more significance, he is from the left wing of the party, which could be a political millstone around his neck as leader.

He regards high office not simply as a vocation but as a messianic obligation. Given his advocacy of radical policies in his recent past, including death duties and redistributive taxes, his promotion to the leadership provides him with ample opportunities to shape the party’s policy agendas. He is, in reality, only the second left-wing leader of the ALP after the troubled H.V. “Doc” Evatt in the 1950s (Julia Gillard was nominally from the left, but more conservative than most of her party colleagues).

Already, conservative media like The Australian have signalled a willingness to attack him along these lines.

Similarly, his political opponents have described him as “too left wing” to become prime minister. And some of his Labor colleagues from Victoria have argued that he is “too old and tired” to win an election.

In the Labor Party, the only real difference between the right and left factions is that the right don’t believe in anything much except that power is an end in itself. By contrast, the left are ideological, believe in social engineering and consider power as a means to pursue transformational agendas.

So, coming from the left may be Albanese’s Achilles’ heel, a vulnerability to his leadership. He has the opportunity in the immediate term to defuse many issues that bedevilled Labor over the past parliamentary term. These include: passing the Coalition’s full income tax cuts; agreeing to a bipartisan emissions target; working with the government on a joint policy towards Indigenous Australians; advocating a moratorium on further changes to superannuation; abolishing the symbolic medevac policy that feigns assistance to offshore detainees; and helping resolve some glaring disparities in welfare benefits.

But such concessions to the government would likely infuriate Labor’s tribal adversarial spear-throwers and its throng of left-Labor lawyers. An initial consensual approach, however, may make sections of the right-wing media look more closely at Albanese’s qualities as leader. Others might argue that “leopards cannot change their spots” and that Albanese will be confrontational and fight for redistributive agendas – making him a prime target for conservative media attacks that he remains a dangerous leftie.

Albanese now has two important imperatives – unify the party behind a refreshed policy agenda, and increase the party’s appeal to the community in order to rebuild the vote. Neither of these tasks is particularly easy, especially as Labor is likely to engage in a bout of recrimination after its recent disappointing electoral tilt.

He also has to work out tactically how to deal with the Morrison government basking in the afterglow of victory – so far, he has promised not to be an opposition leader like Tony Abbott, who opted for outright confrontational tactics.

Albanese’s immediate problems are to construct a shadow ministry on talent, not seniority or factional standing, with the right mix of skills to hold the government to account. He needs to match up his best performers against the high-profile or difficult portfolios (treasury, Indigenous affairs, water, NDIS) and the weaker government ministers (Stuart Robert, Sussan Ley, Ken Wyatt, Bridget McKenzie, Michaelia Cash and Greg Hunt). He will have to work out whether to give Shorten a significant shadow portfolio or find something else for him to do.

There are many in Labor’s caucus who demand more responsibility, especially women of ambition including Kristina Keneally, Katy Gallagher, Linda Burney, Jenny McAllister, Clare O’Neil, Ged Kearney, Terri Butler and Kimberley Kitching, as well as the likes of Jim Chalmers, Ed Husic, Stephen Jones, Murray Watt, Nick Champion and Andrew Leigh. Many of Labor’s previous front bench under Shorten failed to cut through and should be demoted.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Shocked Labor moves on – but to what policy destination?

Albanese’s Labor must address a series of debilitating and contentious policy areas – most of which should be either settled or defused. It needs to clarify where it stands on the big versus smaller government debate and whether increased federal involvement in multitudes of policy areas is prudent and responsible.

It ought to focus on the economy and increased productivity, while being less opportunistic on taxation proposals. For all Australians, Labor ought to allow a coherent set of policies on climate change and emissions targets. It could then consolidate effective environmental policies, rather than engaging in the chopping and changing that has characterised this sector (unlike our nearest neighbours in New Zealand). Labor has to define its position in relation to mining and, in particular, the coal industry. There is also scope to advance Indigenous well-being and some form of constitutional recognition.

Some mainstream media have speculated that the deputy leader, Richard Marles from the Victorian right, will be able to moderate any leftward drift under Albanese. This is possible, but the right faction is divided and fractious.

Albanese’s leftism represents a potential debility in the opposition’s platform, which a conservative government with wind in its sails might easily exploit.

The battle for the hearts and minds of Australians is more likely to be fought over practical and pragmatic policies than any ideological lurch to either the left by Labor or to the right by the government.

– ref. Policies, not posturing, will help Albanese shake the ‘left-wing’ tag and restore faith in his party – http://theconversation.com/policies-not-posturing-will-help-albanese-shake-the-left-wing-tag-and-restore-faith-in-his-party-117817

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robin Smit, Adjunct professor, The University of Queensland

When it comes to road transport, Australia is at risk of becoming a climate villain as we lag behind international best practice on fuel efficiency.

Road transport is one of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions and represented 16% of Australia’s total carbon dioxide emissions in 2000, growing to 21% in 2016. Total CO₂ emissions from road transport increased by almost 30% in the period 2000-16.

Fuel efficiency (CO₂ emission) standards have been adopted in around 80% of the global light vehicle market to cap the growth of transport emissions. This includes the United States, the European Union, Canada, Japan, China, South Korea and India – but not Australia.

Read more: Emissions standards on cars will save Australians billions of dollars, and help meet our climate targets

If Australia had introduced internationally harmonised emissions legislation three years ago, households could have made savings on fuel costs to the tune of A$1 billion.

This shocking figure comes from our preliminary calculations looking at the effect of requiring more efficient vehicles to be sold in Australia.

A report, published yesterday by Transport Energy/Emission Research, looked at what Australia has achieved in vehicle fuel efficiency and CO₂ standards over the past 20 years. While Australia has considered and tried to impose standards a number of times, sadly these attempts were unsuccessful.

Legislative action on vehicle CO₂ emissions is long overdue and demands urgent attention by the Australian government.

How did Australia get here?

The most efficient versions of vehicle models offered in Australia are considerably less efficient than similar vehicles in other markets.

Australia could increasingly become a dumping ground for the world’s least efficient vehicles with sub-par emissions performance, given our lack of fuel efficiency standards. This leaves us on a dangerous path towards not only higher vehicle emissions, but also higher fuel costs for passenger travel and freight.

Australia has attempted to impose CO₂ or fuel efficiency standards on light vehicles several times over the past 20 years, but without success. While the federal government was committed to addressing this issue in 2015, four years later we are still yet to hear when – or even if – mandatory fuel efficiency standards will ever be introduced.

The general expectation appears to be that average CO₂ emission rates of new cars in Australia will reduce over time as technology advances overseas. In the absence of CO₂ standards locally, it is more likely that consumers will continue to not be offered more efficient cars, and pay higher fuel costs as a consequence.

Estimating the fuel savings

Available evidence suggests Australian motorists are paying on average almost 30% more for fuel than they should because of the lack of fuel efficiency standards.

The Australian vehicle fleet uses about 32 billion litres of fuel per year.

Using an Australian fleet model described in the TER report, we can make a conservative estimate that the passenger vehicle fleet uses about half of this fuel: 16 billion litres per year. New cars entering the fleet each year would represent about 5% of this: 800 million litres per year.

So assuming that mandatory CO₂ standards improve fuel efficiency by 27%, fuel savings would be 216 million litres per year.

In the last three years, the average fuel price across Australia’s five major cities is A$1.33 per litre. This equates to a total savings of A$287 million per year, although this would be about half the first year as new cars are purchased throughout the year and travel less, and would reduce as vehicles travel less when they age.

The savings are accumulative because a car purchased in a particular year continues to save fuel over the following years.

The table below shows a rough calculation of savings over the three year period (2016-2018), for new cars sold in the same period (Model Years 2016, 2017 and 2018).

As a result, over a period of three years, A$1.3 billion in potential savings for car owners would have accumulated.

Policy has come close, but what are we waiting for?

The Australian government is not progressing any measures to introduce a fuel efficiency target. In fact, it recently labelled Labor’s proposed fuel efficiency standard as a “car tax”.

But Australia has come close to adopting mandatory vehicle CO₂ emission standards in the past.

In late 2007, the Labor government committed to cutting emissions to achieve Australia’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. The then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, instructed the Vehicle Efficiency Working Group to:

… develop jointly a package of vehicle fuel efficiency measures designed to move Australia towards international best practice.

Then, in 2010, the Labor government decided mandatory CO₂ emissions standards would apply to new light vehicles from 2015. But a change in government in 2013 meant these standards did not see the light of day.

Things looked promising again when the Coalition government released a Vehicle Emissions Discussion Paper in 2016, followed by a draft Regulation Impact Statement in the same year.

The targets for adopting this policy in 2025, considered in the draft statement, were marked as “strong” (105g of CO₂ per km), “medium” (119g/km) and “mild” (135g/km) standards.

Under all three targets, there would be significant net cost savings. But since 2016, the federal government has taken no further action.

It begs the question: what exactly are we waiting for?

The technical state of play

Transport Energy/Emission Research conducted preliminary modelling of Australian real-world CO₂ emissions.

This research suggests average CO₂ emission rates of the on-road car fleet in Australia are actually increasing over time and are, in reality, higher than what is officially reported in laboratory emissions tests.

In fact, the gap between mean real-world emissions and the official laboratory tests is expected to grow from 20% in 2010 to 65% in 2025.

This gap is particularly concerning when we look at the lack of support for low-emissions vehicles like electric cars.

Read more: Why battery-powered vehicles stack up better than hydrogen

Given that fleet turnover is slow, the benefits of fuel efficiency standards would only begin to have a significant effect several years into the future.

With continuing population growth, road travel will only increase further. This will put even more pressure on the need to reduce average real-world CO₂ emission rates, given the increasing environmental and health impacts of the vehicle fleet.

Even if the need to reduce emissions doesn’t convince you, the cost benefits of emissions standards should. The sale of less efficient vehicles in Australia means higher weekly fuel costs for car owners, which could be avoided with the introduction of internationally harmonised emissions legislation.

– ref. Australians could have saved over $1 billon in fuel if car emissions standards were introduced 3 years ago – http://theconversation.com/australians-could-have-saved-over-1-billon-in-fuel-if-car-emissions-standards-were-introduced-3-years-ago-117190

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sharon Parkinson, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Transitions, Swinburne University of Technology

Homelessness has increased greatly in Australian capital cities since 2001. Almost two-thirds of people experiencing homelessness are in these cities, with much of the growth associated with severely crowded dwellings and rough sleeping.

Homelessness in major cities, especially severe crowding, has risen disproportionately in areas with a shortage of affordable private rental housing and higher median rents. Severe crowding is also strongly associated with weak labour markets and poorer areas with a high proportion of males.

These are some of the key findings of our Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) research released today.

Read more: Why Australia’s homelessness problem is getting worse, despite a rise in housing stock

Extending previous AHURI work, we combine 15 years (2001-2016) of homeless estimates from the Australian Census, other customised census and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s Specialist Homelessness Service Collection (SHSC) data.

People counted as homeless on census night live in: improvised dwellings, tents or sleeping out (rough sleeping); supported accommodation; staying temporarily with other households (i.e. couch surfing); boarding houses; temporary lodging; or severely crowded conditions.

How has the geography of homelessness changed?

Nationally, 63% of all homelessness is found in capital cities. That’s up from 48% in 2001.

Shares (%) of homelessness and population by area type

At the same time, homelessness has been falling in remote and very remote areas. However, it still remains higher in these areas per head of population.

Homelessness is also becoming more dispersed across major cities.

In Sydney, a corridor of high homelessness rates stretches from the inner city westward through suburbs such as Marrickville, Canterbury, Strathfield, Auburn and Fairfield (more than 30km from the CBD).

In Melbourne, high homelessness rates are found in Dandenong (around 25km southeast of the CBD), Maribyrnong and Brimbank to the west, Moreland and Darebin to the north and Whitehorse to the east, about 15km from the CBD.

Homeless rates in Australia 2016

After accounting for population growth, we see a decline in homeless rates in the CBD and inner areas of Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and to an extent Brisbane over the 15 years. At the same time, homeless rates in outer urban areas have increased. In many regions this increase outpaced population growth.

Change in homeless rate compared with population growth 2001–2016

The numbers of households living in severely crowded dwellings in capital cities have doubled in 15 years, accounting for much of the growth in homelessness overall. In 2001, this group accounted for 35% of people experiencing homelessness, with 27% living in cities. By 2016, severe crowding rates had soared to 44% of all people experiencing homelessness, with 60% living in capital cities.

Share of severe crowding by area type, 2001–2016

Read more: Tracking the rise of room sharing and overcrowding, and what it means for housing in Australia

Rough sleeping has also transformed into an urban phenomenon — nearly half of all rough sleepers in Australia are now found in capital cities.

What is driving these changes?

Homelessness has risen disproportionately in areas with a shortage of affordable private rental housing and higher median rents. That’s especially the case in Sydney, Hobart and Melbourne. In capital city areas with a shortage of affordable private rentals in both 2001 and 2016, severe crowding grew rapidly (by 290.5%) against all homelessness growth (32.6%).

Changes in share of homeless and population by city and region, 2001-16

The effects of rental affordability on homelessness rates still hold after controlling for other area characteristics. We also find that these rates are strongly correlated with higher shares of particular demographic groups in an area, including males, younger age groups, young families, those with an Indigenous or ethnic background, and unmarried persons.

Read more: Youth homelessness efforts get a lowly 2 stars from national report card

Severe crowding in capital cities is also strongly associated with weak labour markets and poorer areas with a high proportion of males. However, these associations do not hold for severe crowding in remote areas.

What should governments and services do?

The way our cities are becoming more unequal over time is shaping the changes in the geography of homelessness.

Governments must find ways to urgently increase both the supply and size of affordable rental dwellings for people with the lowest incomes. We also require better integration of planning, labour, income support and housing policies targeted to areas of high need.

Rates of severe crowding remain highest in remote areas, and continued efforts to increase housing supply in remote areas, such as the National Partnership on Remote Housing (NPRH), are needed. Targeted responses are required to combat its growth in major cities.

Read more: Building in ways that meet the needs of Australia’s remote regions

It is critical that specialist homelessness services, as a first response to homelessness, are well located to respond in areas where demand is highest.

The AHURI report can be downloaded here.

– ref. Homelessness soars in our biggest cities, driven by rising inequality since 2001 – http://theconversation.com/homelessness-soars-in-our-biggest-cities-driven-by-rising-inequality-since-2001-117833

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison Young, Francine V. McNiff Professor of Criminology, University of Melbourne

The news of Courtney Herron’s death has shocked Melburnians. While full details are yet to emerge, both she and the man charged with murdering her have been widely reported as being homeless. It’s revealing how news media use this information in framing their coverage of what happened.

Media use of the term “homeless” is rarely neutral. This is not to say someone’s housing status should never be included in reporting such events. However, we should be wary of how media coverage connects homelessness to violent crimes.

Read more: What’s in the name ‘homeless’? How people see themselves and the labels we apply matter

Before continuing, we should say we have relied entirely on the information reported in the media to write this article.

Connotations of homelessness

For victims of crime who lack stable housing, news media use their homelessness as evidence of their vulnerability. For perpetrators without housing, media use their homelessness as a context and explanation of their behaviour.

On the Monday following Herron’s death, The Guardian ran the headline: “Homeless man appears in court charged with murder of Courtney Herron”.

Including the adjective “homeless” in the headline means the accused, Henry Hammond, 27, is from the outset defined by a lack of housing, and by any adverse associations that might relate to individuals experiencing homelessness. In this context, the expression “homeless man” indicates how “homelessness” can be read as shorthand for criminal offending.

It’s striking that news reporting of Herron’s homelessness has tended to use expressions such as “of no fixed address”, rather than “homeless”, perhaps indicating an awareness of the adjective’s negative associations. The Age quotes an acquaintance as saying Herron should be “remembered for the lovely woman she was and not just another homeless person who died on the streets”.

For readers, knowing Herron was homeless helps us understand her vulnerability. Women experiencing homelessness face a range of risks and challenges, such as higher risks of sexual violence, exploitation and assault.

Read more: ‘Just a piece of meat’: how homeless women have little choice but to use sex for survival

In contrast, Hammond’s homelessness has been reported in a way that frames the act of violence he has been charged with. Yet how does it help us understand this horrific act? Housing status is not generally included in reporting: we don’t see headlines like “Man who lives in renovated Victorian terrace accused of murder”.

In fact, criminal behaviour by homed people, in the form of family violence, is the main driver of homelessness in Australia. The relationship between homelessness and crime is thus more complex than media coverage suggests.

Hammond’s homelessness may well be an aspect of what has happened, but news headlines like The Guardian’s tap into on a longstanding association in some people’s minds between homelessness and criminality.

Read more: Ex-prisoners are more likely to become homeless but the reverse isn’t true

Victims and perpetrators

Following the 2014 killing of Renae (Yuk Ling) Lau by Scott Allen Miller in King’s Domain, Melbourne, the media depicted Miller as a dangerous monster. His homelessness was central to this framing. One news outlet (The Advertiser) ran the headline “Killer hobo” alongside Miller’s mug shot on the front page.

The equation of people experiencing homelessness and criminal behaviour can appear natural or logical. However, it is anything but: people experiencing homelessness are more likely to be victims of violent offending, not its perpetrators.

Also in 2014, Morgan Wayne “Mouse” Perry was killed while sleeping rough in Melbourne. His homelessness revealed the intense marginalisation and disadvantage he faced. This was in stark contrast to the wealthy privilege of his killer, Easton Woodhead, who was found not guilty of murder because of mental impairment.

There is therefore an entrenched duality at work, in which homelessness leads to victimisation and yet also causes offending. This is inaccurate and simplistic.

The roles of the law and the media

Why is the association of homelessness and crime so strong? There are two main factors.

First, many behaviours made necessary by homelessness are criminalised. Simply trying to survive puts people who are experiencing homelessness in direct contact with the criminal justice system.

In Victoria, for example, begging is a criminal offence. Other laws that unfairly target the homeless include indecent exposure laws, which result in homeless people being arrested for going to the toilet or washing themselves in public (because they lack the option to do so in private).

The second factor is the persistent linking of homelessness and crime in the media.

News stories proliferate in the tabloid media about aggressive beggars, foreign backpackers pretending to be homeless to make money and people who exploit their pets as they beg for donations.

Coverage of the homeless camp at Flinders Street Station in Melbourne during the 2017 Australian Open tennis tournament routinely described inhabitants as drug dealers, criminals and professional troublemakers.

Read more: Clearing homeless camps compounds the violation of human rights and entrenches the problem

Being homeless means being vulnerable

When reading about any event involving people experiencing homelessness, we should remember that being homeless involves serious vulnerability. Homelessness is better understood not as a condition itself, but as a manifestation of multiple vulnerabilities: mental illness, chronic ill-health, unemployment, disadvantage, lack of education, histories of trauma or neglect, substance dependence and, always, poverty. This remains the case regardless of whether the person in question is a victim, an offender, or a bystander.

Read more: Homelessness soars in our biggest cities, driven by rising inequality since 2001

– ref. Carelessly linking crime to being homeless adds to the harmful stigma – http://theconversation.com/carelessly-linking-crime-to-being-homeless-adds-to-the-harmful-stigma-117834

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ralph-Christopher Bayer, Professor of Economics , University of Adelaide

Kogan Australia has grown from a garage to an online retail giant in a little more than a decade. Key to its success have been its discount prices.

But apparently not all of those discounts have been legit, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

The consumer watchdog has accused the home electronics and appliances retailer of misleading customers, by touting discounts on more than 600 items whose prices it had sneakily raised by at least the same percentage.

Kogan is yet to have its day in court, so we won’t dwell on its case specifically.

But the scenario does raise an interesting question. How effective are these types of price manipulation? After all, checking and comparing prices is dead easy online. So what could a retailer possibly gain?

Well, as it happens, potentially quite a lot.

Because consumers are human beings, our actions aren’t necessarily rational. We have strong emotional reactions to price signals. The sheer ubiquity of discounts demonstrate they must work.

Lets review a couple of findings from behavioural (and traditional) economics that help explain why discounting – both real and fake – is such an effective marketing ploy.

Save! Save! Save!

In standard economics, consumers are assumed to base their purchasing decisions on absolute prices. They make “rational” decisions, and the “framing” of the price does not matter.

Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky challenged this assumption with their insights into consumer behaviour. Their best-known contribution to behavioural economics is “prospect theory” – a psychologically more realistic alternative to the classical theory of rational choice.

Kahneman and Tversky argued that behaviour is based on changes, which were relative. Framing a price as involving a discount therefore influences our perception of its value.

The prospect of buying something leads us to compare two different changes: the positive change in perceived value from taking ownership of a good (the gain); and the negative change experienced from handing over money (the loss). We buy if we perceive the gain to outweigh the loss.

Suppose you are looking to buy a toaster. You see one for $99. Another is $110, with a 10% discount – making it $99. Which one would you choose?

Evaluating the first toaster’s value to you is reasonably straightforward. You will consider the item’s attributes against other toasters and how much you like toast versus some other benefit you might attain for $99.

Standard economics says your emotional response involves weighing the loss of $99 against the gain of owning the toaster.

For the second toaster you might do all the same calculations about features and value for money. But behavioural economics tells us the discount will provoke a more complex emotional reaction than the first toaster.

Research shows most of us will tend to “segregate” the price from the discount; we will feel separately the emotion from the loss of spending $99 and the gain of “saving” $11.

Economist Richard Thaler demonstrated this in a study involving 87 undergraduate students at Cornell University. He quizzed them on a series of scenarios like the following:

Mr A’s car was damaged in a parking lot. He had to spend $200 to repair the damage. The same day the car was damaged, he won $25 in the office football pool. Mr B’s car was damaged in a parking lot. He had to spend $175 to repair the damage. Who was more upset?

Just five students said both would be equally upset, while 67 (more than 72%) said Mr B. Similar hypotheticals elicited equally emphatic results.

Economists now refer to this as the “silver lining effect” – segregating a small gain from a larger loss results in greater psychological value than integrating the gain into a smaller loss.

The result is we feel better handing over money for a discounted item than the same amount for a non-discounted item.

Must end soon!

Another behavioural trick associated with discounts is creating a sense of urgency, by emphasising the discount period will end soon.

Again, the fact people typically evaluate prospects as changes from a reference point comes into play.

The seller’s strategy is to shift our reference points so we compare the current price with a higher price in the future. This makes not buying feel like a future loss. Since most humans are loss-averse, we may be nudged to avoid that loss by buying before the discount expires.

Expiry warnings also work through a second behavioural channel: anticipated regret.

Some of us are greatly influenced to behave according to whether we think we will regret it in the future.

Economic psychologist Marcel Zeelenberg and colleagues demonstrated this in experiments with students at the University of Amsterdam. Their conclusion: regret-aversion better explains choices than risk-aversion, because anticipation of regret can promote both risk-averse and risk-seeking choices.

Depending to what extent we have this trait, an expiry warning can compel us to buy now, in case we need that item in the future and will regret not having taken the opportunity to buy it when discounted.

Discounting is thus an effective strategy to get us to buy products we actually don’t need.

Look no further!

But what about the fact that it is so easy to compare prices online? Why doesn’t this fact nullify the two effects we’ve just discussed?

Here the standard economics of consumer search would agree that consumers might be misled despite being perfectly rational.

If a consumer judges a discount promotion is genuine, they have a tendency to assume it is less likely they will find a lower price elsewhere. This belief makes them less likely to continue searching.

In experiments on this topic, my colleague Changxia Ke and I have found a discernible “discount bias”. The effect is not necessarily large, depending on circumstances, but even a small nudge towards choosing a retailer with discounted items over another could end up being worth millions.

Read more: Why consumers fall for ‘sales’, but companies may be using them too much

Once a consumer has made a decision and bought an item, they are even less likely to search for prices. They therefore may never learn a discount was fake.

There are entire industries where it is general practice to frame prices this way. Paradoxically, because this makes consumers search less for better deals, it allows all sellers to charge higher prices.

The bottom line: beware the emotional appeal of the discount. Whether real or fake, the human tendency is to overrate them.

– ref. The behavioural economics of discounting, and why Kogan would profit from discount deception – http://theconversation.com/the-behavioural-economics-of-discounting-and-why-kogan-would-profit-from-discount-deception-117895

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

The oft-quoted saying “may you live in interesting times” has been (rightly or wrongly) interpreted as a Chinese curse. The exhibition Terracotta Warriors & Cai Guo-Qiang at the National Gallery of Victoria has a similar subtle duality: the implication of threat in what might seem benignly interesting.

This is reflected in the warriors themselves, 2200-year-old figures of supreme beauty made to accompany their Emperor into death, and mirrored by very contemporary works (some made in the last few weeks) of inspiring ethereality, formed using that most mercurial and potentially deadly Chinese invention – gunpowder.

The eight individual (and individualised) serene and commanding warriors who march down the main hall of the gallery’s temporary exhibition space come from the burial site of Chinese Emperor Qin Shihuang who died in 210 BCE. These figures are answered by contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s murmuration or sweep of birds (again individually made, similarly in clay,) flying miraculously in unison.

That each individual warrior (some 8000 apparently exist, most still buried) and each bird is given this respect and value within the group reflects an understanding espoused by Confucius some hundreds of years before the warriors were made.

It’s an element that challenges the Western notion of the supremacy of the individual above and beyond the group. It explains the potential power of Chinese culture – the capacity to move a huge civilisation in a direction that benefits every person.

This exhibition reveals this reality, albeit subtly. The Emperor was just one person, albeit at the apex, within this system and was expected to behave with moral honour and rectitude – or bring down the wrath of heaven on the whole empire.

Each warrior and starling retain this sense of themselves as a part of a wider whole. For a Westerner to see this, and reflect, is to better understand our own culture.

As leaders of society in Confucian China, scholars espoused the ideal of controlling one’s vital energy towards the good for all; in art, scholar-artists directed this inner energy, called qi (or chi), into a single perfect brushstroke. The warriors have this “less-is-more” inner strength, taut in their bodies yet appearing calm, faces determined yet full of life, hands ready for action but so soft you can almost feel the flesh.

Cai harnesses this inner force through gunpowder: the explosive energy resulting in the final flourish, like the brushstroke of old finally laid down with such controlled bravura.

It takes time to see the restraint and admire its qualities. Western art has traditionally admired the opposite, of “more-being-more”, especially art made at the height of Western colonial power.

Cai talks of the essential tension in his work between harmony and chaos, words so central to Chinese concepts of “world balance”, as articulated by Confucius and still resonant today. I interviewed Cai in 2013 in Brisbane for the film series A Journey Through Asian Art. He talked then as now of the seeming calmness of the gunpowder contrasted with its ignited energy, reflecting on the invisible forces that “inform the spirit of Chinese art and culture”.

The Cai work at NGV has a subtitle of “The Transient Landscape”, and indeed, besides the murmuration of birds, he has evoked the inexorable forces of the natural world in his room mural of dying peonies, with a funereal “grave” of singed terracotta flowers in its centre.

In another room, a landscape of Mt Li, the sacred peak where the Qin Emperor was buried, is further suggested as a rise on the horizon delineated in that spare, harsh gunpowder flash.

The exhibition is fleshed out, if that is the right term for a show exploring burial and death, by further ancient objects from various museums in Shaanxi, the exhibition partner. These include the small, slender, even elfin female figure, also made in terracotta during the (next) Han dynasty. In her own case, in the last room, she seems to be smiling to herself, perhaps at the display of pomp and circumstance of these men around her.

Art and politics

The contrasts here, or binaries if you wish, are revealing and many: life and death, harmony and chaos, energy and control, art and politics. But perhaps this last couplet is not so antithetical, especially in these interesting times.

The first major exhibition of ancient Chinese art in Australia, shown in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide in 1977, came in the wake of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s official recognition of the People’s Republic and two visits there. This was a political act of significance internationally.

The 1982-3 exhibition of Terracotta Warriors shown in all the mainland state capitals, which again had Prime Ministerial support, (from Malcolm Fraser), was timed to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Australia and China. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this – how many Euro-American grand exhibitions reinforce diplomatic relations, passing without comment?

At the end of 2018, the Victorian Government announced a Memorandum of Understanding with China. Chinese Premier Xi Jinping acknowledged the discussion of culture (or civilisation) as a political force a few weeks ago in Beijing saying, “… it is foolish to believe that one’s race and civilisation are superior to others and it is disastrous to wilfully reshape and even replace other civilisations”.

Xi, like Whitlam and Fraser before him, sees the links between history, politics and culture. Confucius surely would have nodded in agreement.

As ever, if the art is without perceived value no amount of political encouragement will lift its success.

The late Edmund Capon, long-term recent director of the Art Gallery of NSW, wrote the catalogue for the 1982-3 Warriors exhibition, a text remarkable for its expertise in ancient Chinese culture. He championed a return Warriors show in Sydney in 2010, and untiringly advocated for understanding of Chinese culture in person, on film, and through his museum work.

This exhibition is about life and death. Its aim and scope are as big as humanity can conjure. I like to think Edmund is sitting in true ancestor mode (with his arms resting on his knees), grinning at this – the first NGV Winter Masterpiece exhibition from Asia – and the fact that a new generation of people, especially in Melbourne, get to see it. These are interesting times indeed, but, one hopes, in the best way.

Terracotta Warriors & Cai Guo-Qiang is on at the National Gallery of Victoria until October 13.

– ref. A scope as big as humanity can conjure: the Terracotta Warriors & Cai Guo-Qiang – http://theconversation.com/a-scope-as-big-as-humanity-can-conjure-the-terracotta-warriors-and-cai-guo-qiang-117825

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Billy Tusker Haworth, Lecturer in GIS and Disaster Management, University of Manchester

With natural hazard and climate-related disasters on the rise, online tools such as crowdsourced mapping and social media can help people understand and respond to a crisis. They enable people to share their location and contribute information.

But are these tools useful for everyone, or are some people marginalised? It is vital these tools include information provided from all sections of a community at risk.

Current evidence suggests that is not always the case.

Read more: ‘Natural disasters’ and people on the margins – the hidden story

Online tools let people help in disasters

Social media played an important role in coordinating response to the 2019 Queensland floods and the 2013 Tasmania bushfires. Community members used Facebook to coordinate sharing of resources such as food and water.

Crowdsourced mapping helped in response to the humanitarian crisis after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Some of the most useful information came from public contributions.

Twitter provided similar critical insights during Hurricane Irma in South Florida in 2017.

Research shows these public contributions can help in disaster risk reduction, but they also have limitations.

In the rush to develop new disaster mitigation tools, it is important to consider whether they will help or harm the people most vulnerable in a disaster.

Who is vulnerable?

Extreme natural events, such as earthquakes and bushfires, are not considered disasters until vulnerable people are exposed to the hazard.

Read more: Understanding the root causes of natural disasters

To determine people’s level of vulnerability we need to know:

1. the level of individual and community exposure to a physical threat
2. their access to resources that affect their capacity to cope when threats materialise.

Some groups in society will be more vulnerable to disaster than others. This includes people with immobility issues, caring roles, or limited access to resources such as money, information or support networks.

When disaster strikes, the pressure on some groups is often magnified.

The devastating scenes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 revealed the vulnerability of children in such disasters.

Unfortunately, emergency management can exacerbate the vulnerability of marginalised groups. For example, a US study last year showed that in the years after disasters, wealth increased for white people and declined for people of colour. The authors suggest this is linked to inequitable distribution of emergency and redevelopment aid.

Policies and practice have until recently mainly been written by, and for, the most predominant groups in our society, especially heterosexual white men.

Research shows how this can create gender inequities or exclude the needs of LGBTIQ communities, former refugees and migrants or domestic violence victims.

Read more: More men die in bushfires: how gender affects how we plan and respond

We need to ask: do new forms of disaster response help everyone in a community, or do they reproduce existing power imbalances?

Unequal access to digital technologies

Research has assessed the “techno-optimism” – a belief that technologies will solve our problems – associated with people using online tools to share information for disaster management.

These technologies inherently discriminate if access to them discriminates.

In Australia, the digital divide remains largely unchanged in recent years. In 2016-17 nearly 1.3 million households had no internet connection.

Lower digital inclusion is seen in already vulnerable groups, including the unemployed, migrants and the elderly.

Global internet penetration rates show uneven access between economically poorer parts of the world, such as Africa and Asia, and wealthier Western regions.

Representations of communities are skewed on the internet. Particular groups participate with varying degrees on social media and in crowdsourcing activities. For example, some ethnic minorities have poorer internet access than other groups even in the same country.

For crowdsourced mapping on platforms such as OpenStreetMap, studies find participation biases relating to gender. Men map far more than women at local and global scales.

Research shows participation biases in community mapping activities towards older, more affluent men.

Protect the vulnerable

Persecuted minorities, including LGBTIQ communities and religious minorities, are often more vulnerable in disasters. Digital technologies, which expose people’s identities and fail to protect privacy, might increase that vulnerability.

Unequal participation means those who can participate may become further empowered, with more access to information and resources. As a result, gaps between privileged and marginalised people grow wider.

For example, local Kreyòl-speaking Haitians from poorer neighbourhoods contributed information via SMS for use on crowdsourced maps during the 2010 Haiti earthquake response.

But the information was translated and mapped in English for Western humanitarians. As they didn’t speak English, vulnerable Haitians were further marginalised by being unable to directly use and benefit from maps resulting from their own contributions.

Participation patterns in mapping do not reflect the true makeup of our diverse societies. But they do reflect where power lies – usually with dominant groups.

Any power imbalances that come from unequal online participation are pertinent to disaster risk reduction. They can amplify community tensions, social divides and marginalisation, and exacerbate vulnerability and risk.

With greater access to the benefits of online tools, and improved representation of diverse and marginalised people, we can better understand societies and reduce disaster impacts.

We must remain acutely aware of digital divides and participation biases. We must continually consider how these technologies can better include, value and elevate marginalised groups.

– ref. Online tools can help people in disasters, but do they represent everyone? – http://theconversation.com/online-tools-can-help-people-in-disasters-but-do-they-represent-everyone-116810

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Dickinson, Professor, Public Service Research, UNSW

In one of his first official public remarks since being re-elected, Prime Minister Scott Morrison pledged that addressing failures in the national disability insurance scheme (NDIS) would be a priority for the new government.

Stuart Robert has assumed the role of minister for the NDIS and will be charged with delivering on this important agenda.

So what does the new minister need to do to get the NDIS back on track?

There is much that the NDIS has done well. Just over 277,000 people have already accessed the scheme and this is set to rise to 460,000 at full roll-out in 2020.

Some scheme participants report greater choice over support workers, access to new services and technologies, and generally strong satisfaction rates.

Read more: Explainer: how much does the NDIS cost and where does this money come from?

Alongside these positives are a number of concerns about the scheme and areas that need improvement.

The development of the NDIS is a massive undertaking; such schemes take time to get right and inevitably face a number of teething issues. But in recent months, the number of challenges has grown and the calls for change have become louder.

Every Australian Counts, the grassroots disability advocacy group that campaigned for the introduction of the NDIS recently released a statement arguing:

The problems with the NDIS must be fixed so people can finally get the support they desperately need. Too many people are falling through the cracks and not getting essential help. The scheme is not working the way it was intended to.

Long waits for services

Many of the problems with the scheme relate to the time people have to wait – either to receive a plan, to activate it, or to have it reviewed.

In 2018, the Commonwealth Ombudsman investigated the NDIS’s handling of reviews on the basis that around one-third of all complaints it received about the scheme related to this issue.

This system was judged “unapproachable” and “lacking in fairness and transparency” and leading to delays of up to nine months to receive an outcome.

Read more: The NDIS is delivering ‘reasonable and necessary’ supports for some, but others are missing out

The Coalition addressed some of these issues in its election promises around the NDIS.

It committed to introducing an NDIS Participant Service Guarantee. This would set timeframes for participants to receive an access decision, and have their plan approved or reviewed.

This, the Coalition promised, should reduce the time taken for people with disability to access the NDIS and have their plan approved and implemented.

There is also a commitment to introduce a single point of contact for the NDIS and to allow those with a “stable” disability to opt into a three-year plan, rather than being reviewed every 12 months.

These developments have been welcomed by those who have experienced significant delays in having plans approved, executed or reviewed – delays that often lead to significant personal and family costs.

Yet the minister will face a challenge in terms of how to deliver on these promises.

Staff shortages

The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) is the independent statutory agency charged with implementing the NDIS. One of the challenges it has faced is limited staff to drive these changes.

In 2014, a staffing cap was placed on the NDIA, restricting the numbers employed to 3,000. Although the government has committed to increasing the cap gradually to 3,400 in 2020-21, it will be a challenge to deliver on this bold agenda with a limited workforce.

Read more: Why more investment in the NDIS may not boost employment

The Productivity Commission has previously criticised the pace of the roll-out of the scheme, arguing it is taking place too quickly for the volume of resources available to the NDIA.

The NDIA received significant criticism for spending over A$600 million in 2017-18 on consultants, contractors and outsourced staff.

Continuing to spend significant amounts of money on consultants may put pressure on future NDIS budgets.

But it will be challenging for the minister to avoid using consultants and outsourced staff to help fill this workforce gap.

Under-spending and tightening eligibility

It was widely reported that the surplus seen in the last federal budget was boosted by a A$1.6 billion dollar underspend on the NDIS.

Some disability advocates argued this underspend only occurred due to the delays in people getting on to the schemes and issues in relation to the supply of services in a rapidly developing market.

Disability advocates have also noted some of these savings might have been the result of tightening criteria for accessing services. This might mean individuals who were once eligible for the NDIS find that they no longer are. This has been a particular issue in relation to autism spectrum disorders. Or, when plans are reviewed, they are reduced or gradually trimmed back, often with little clear rationale for why this has happened.

Labor had made the election promise of putting any NDIS underspend into a “locked box” to be managed by the Future Fund and ensure it would be used to guarantee the NDIS would be fully funded into the future.

The Coalition has committed to ensuring that all those who are eligible will continue to receive a fully funded plan and necessary supports to achieve their goals.

The minister has some significant work ahead to ensure the budget for the NDIS continues to be sufficient to do this and to ensure that criteria are not unnecessarily adjusted.

Accommodating diversity

Alongside these broad issues, the NDIS continues to face challenges in accommodating diversity. While the rates of disability are higher in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations (almost 25%), just 5% of NDIS participants are of this heritage.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disabilities are not well-engaged with the NDIS and we see similar challenges across culturally and linguistically diverse populations more broadly.

The NDIA has recently introduced strategies to address these issues, although there is some distance to go until a cultural competency framework is well-embedded. The development of different entry paths into the NDIS is one way to assist this process, with community workers helping to explain and navigate the system for these audiences.

Read more: Indigenous people with disability have a double disadvantage and the NDIS can’t handle that

– ref. Here’s what needs to happen to get the NDIS back on track – http://theconversation.com/heres-what-needs-to-happen-to-get-the-ndis-back-on-track-117835

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

The vocational education and training (VET) sector is integral to Australia’s economy and the businesses and workforce that underpin it. The sector provides skills to 4.2 million students at 4,200 registered training providers.

This is important because, as the World Economic Forum highlights, access to skilled workers is a key factor that distinguishes successful enterprises from unsuccessful ones. But many Australian employers are unhappy with the VET system – employer satisfaction is the lowest it’s been in the decade.

The rise of the digital economy and the fourth industrial revolution are predicted to cause major job disruptions. In essence, industry needs are changing rapidly and the VET sector isn’t keeping up. And there are ongoing concerns about the quality of the sector itself, after the rise of some dodgy private organisations offering questionable qualifications.

Read more: To fix higher education funding, we also need to fix vocational education

In November 2018, the federal government appointed former New Zealand skills minister Steven Joyce to lead a once-in-a-generation review of VET. The Coalition government based many of its pre-election announcements on some recommendations of this review (now known as the Joyce review), which were released in April 2019.

So, what did Joyce recommend and is the government actually heeding the advice?

What did Joyce recommend?

The Joyce review details 71 recommendations. These form the basis of a six-point plan to transform VET so it can provide students with skills that reflect the needs of employers.

The plan centres on:

• strengthening quality assurance

• speeding up qualification development

• simplifying funding and skills matching

• providing better careers information

• providing clearer secondary school pathways into VET

• providing greater access for disadvantaged Australians.

The Joyce review noted it might take five to six years to act on many of the recommendations. In the interim, the report advised moving early on recommendations that would address the declining confidence in the sector. These early steps are:

1. bringing forward reforms to strengthen the Australian Skills Quality Authority – the national VET regulator

2. piloting a new business-led model of organising skills for qualification development, and extending work-based VET further into less traditional areas, such as assistant professional jobs in health care or high-tech industries

3. establishing a national skills commission, which would start working with the states and territories to develop a nationally consistent funding model based on shared needs

4. revamping apprenticeship incentives to increase their attractiveness to employers and trainees

5. establishing a national careers institute, which would provide better careers information to students

6. introducing new vocational pathways into senior secondary schools to create a more seamless transition from Year 11 and 12 into VET courses

7. providing new support for second-chance learners needing foundation language, literacy, numeracy and digital skills.

Is the government doing it?

The federal government agreed to implement most of the early action recommendations. It committed A$525 million to the Delivering Skills for Today and Tomorrow package. But it has a looser interpretation of how early these should be put in place.

Only two of the six early actions identified by the Joyce review were budgeted for in 2019-2020: the establishment of a national skills commission and a national careers institute. Some actions, such as 40% of the funding for a new apprenticeship initiative, or A$108 million, are only planned to be resourced as late as the 2023-24 budget.

The review’s recommendations mainly focused on the slow process of creating and updating qualifications. This is good, but it could be argued the review didn’t directly address the needs articulated by various industry groups.

Read more: Employer incentives may not be the most cost-effective or fair way of boosting apprenticeship numbers

These included calls for more collaboration between the VET and university sectors. Then there was the Business Council of Australia’s appeal for a single market platform and funding model for the two sectors to enable workers to more easily retrain and reskill over their lives.

However, the review agrees with industry that “change will take time”. It will require the federal government to “work with the states and territories” but also, as the Productivity Commission noted, the changes will need to be “piloted and evaluated by willing industries”.

Some creative partnerships

Some states and territories have already started experimenting with a small number of players in the VET sector to overcome industry concerns. There is Rio Tinto’s collaboration with Western Australia’s South Metropolitan TAFE to develop an autonomous vehicle qualification. And Blockchain Collective’s development of an Advanced Diploma of Applied Blockchain).

Other significant experiments include the New South Wales government’s Sydney School of Entrepreneurship between TAFE NSW, universities and industry, and the Factory of the Future between the Victorian government, Swinburne University and Siemens.

These green shoots point to a willingness in governments, industry and broader VET stakeholders to take the initiative to work together and experiment. We believe this will help overcome the inertia in making changes to the VET sector, and better meet the future needs of employers and students.

Read more: Fewer Australians will have uni or TAFE skills if governments don’t reform tertiary education

– ref. The government keeps talking about revamping VET – but is it actually doing it? – http://theconversation.com/the-government-keeps-talking-about-revamping-vet-but-is-it-actually-doing-it-117743

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Beth Webster, Director, Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology

Karen Andrews will continue as Australia’s Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, sworn in today with other cabinet members in Scott Morrison’s refreshed Coalition government.

As one of the shepherds of the Australian innovation system, Andrews finds herself between a rock and a hard place.

Read more: Infographic: who’s who in the new Morrison ministry

The “rock” is the consistent evidence that successful, developed country economies – such as the US, Germany and the UK – all commit large amounts of public funds to the development of business capabilities. These countries have large programs to translate and commercialise research and diffuse new methods of production from leading to lagging businesses.

The “hard place” is the Australian reality that businesses do not always voice strong support for public strategies to improve their long-term performance. Instead, on the whole they tend to preference tax cuts – although some prefer programs to build capabilities.

It is against this context that, under a Coalition government, our public innovation policy bodies have to walk a tight rope. They must be seen to be doing something effective, but with minimal budget and some semblance of a traditional pro-business stance.

National Innovation and Science Agenda

The overarching need for innovation is clear. Innovation means change – for the better – and without these changes we will not experience improvement in productivity and a rise in standard of living.

With that in mind, in December 2015 the Coalition government established the National Innovation and Science Agenda (NISA).

NISA is coming to the end of its natural life span and it’s worth reflecting on how well its recommendations have been travelling.

A key part of the agenda was the establishment of a strategic advice body, Innovation and Science Australia. As anyone involved in producing independent policy documents will attest, recommendations are usually vetted, at some level, by the relevant Ministers’ offices. Nothing too pointed gets said if the Ministers will not back it.

From the recommendations of this body came a policy document Australia 2030: Prosperity through Innovation, which contains a mixture of general aspirations – such as “business productivity in all sectors can be facilitated by healthy levels of competition” – and concrete suggestions.

Keeping teachers and kids in STEM

The first set of concrete recommendations aimed to reverse declines in both the quality of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) school teachers and the low enrolment of pupils in STEM subjects.

This policy is tricky for the Commonwealth government to enact, as school education is in the jurisdiction of the states and territories. Nonetheless, the Commonwealth has all the money and it can do much to address both these issues.

The 2030 Strategy recommends raising entry grades and prerequisites for teacher training, and increasing ongoing teacher professional development.

The difficulty here is that we already know it is the low pay of teachers, compared with alternative careers, that causes STEM teacher shortages. So raising entry requirements and requiring more in-service training is likely to have no impact on teacher quality, and may reduce STEM teacher quantity.

Australia should look to Finland if it wants to see how it’s done. Primary and secondary school teacher salaries are some of the highest among OECD countries and student outcomes are about the strongest.

Research and development focus

Strategy 2030 is quite sceptical about the ability of research and development (R&D) tax credit schemes to encourage business to do more R&D.

Many international empirical studies have looked at this question. The most recent of these are more positive about the effect of R&D subsidies than the strategy document.

For example, a comprehensive Australian study estimates that A$1 of subsidy will lead to about A$1.90 R&D (so a net increment of 90c).

Nonetheless, the 2030 Strategy recommended capping the subsidy (which the government did) and targeting the subsidy at mission-oriented, impact-focused programs and collaborations (which the government did not do). It’s too early to analyse the effects of this policy change.

Read more: It’s the only way to save Australia from a deep hole, but innovation policy is missing in action

Missions and direct research programs

The 2030 Strategy also recommended the government adopt a missions approach to public innovation strategy. To date, two missions have been established: genomics and precision medicine , and the Great Barrier Reef.

These missions need to be complemented with an evaluation process – which appears to be underway, although it is too early for results.

To complement the capping of the R&D subsidy, Strategy 2030 recommended increasing the funding for direct programs such as Cooperative Research Centres (CRC), the Entrepreneurs’ Programme and Industry Growth Centres.

The 2019 budget indicated a 10% rise in CRC funding for 2019-20 but a decline in real terms for the subsequent three years.

However, there was no increase in the Entrepreneurs’ Programme or Growth Centres. Nor does there appear to be any evaluation process for these programs to assess whether they represent value for the Australian tax payer. We don’t know if these should be scaled up or scrapped.

Working with the rest of the world

A key to transforming any economy is engaging with global value chains. These allow specialist producers of R&D, design, parts and components to achieve economies of scale – even if they are located in a small local market such as Australia.

The 2030 Strategy report notes there is evidence that export market development grants and trade missions increase business exports (compared with exports in the absence of these programs). It recommends increasing funding for these programs – which the Government did for the export market scheme in April 2019, with a A$60 million boost. But there has been no announcement for Austrade’s trade mission or tailored services programs.

Following a productivity commission review in 2017, Strategy 2030 also recommended exploiting the latent value present in government data through registrations and regulations.

Opening these data to the public may create financial value for companies and better service for governments. The strategy recommended the creation of a new national data custodian and a National Data Commission is currently being established.

We need to be more ambitious

If we’re giving our country a mark on innovation, Australia’s score is not a ten, but neither is it zero. Genuine attempts have been made to implement many of the concrete recommendations from the 2030 Strategy.

Really though, it’s most pertinent to look at what’s missing from our current government’s approach.

The overall level of funding for innovation system programs in Australia still remains low. Most programs are so small they essentially constitute pilots.

The implementation of some of the big ideas – such as using government procurement to de-risk innovation – have been left untraceable. Though looking closely at procurement and NISA in general does appear to be on Andrew’s agenda in the coming weeks.

The government has not announced any clear intentions to evaluate current programs to assess (and publish) whether they return value for the Australian public.

It is time for Australia to become more ambitious. As the world transforms away from thermal coal to renewable sources of energy, we may be in for the biggest terms of trade shock in a long time. We need to start transforming our economy and now is not the time to be timid.

– ref. Enough with the pilot programs: we need to kickstart innovation in Australia – http://theconversation.com/enough-with-the-pilot-programs-we-need-to-kickstart-innovation-in-australia-117826

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cameron Webb, Clinical Lecturer and Principal Hospital Scientist, University of Sydney

The Queensland city of Rockhampton was free of dengue for decades. Now, a case of one of the most serious mosquito-borne diseases has authorities scratching their heads.

Over the past decade, dengue infections have tended to be isolated events in which international travellers have returned home with the disease. But the recent case seems to have been locally acquired, raising concerns that there could be more infected mosquitoes in the central Queensland town, or that other people may have been exposed to the bites of an infected mosquito.

What is dengue fever?

The illness known as dengue fever typically includes symptoms such as rash, fever, headache, joint pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, and abdominal pain. Symptoms can last for around a week or so. Four types of dengue virus cause the illness and they are spread by mosquito bites.

Once infected, people become immune to that specific dengue virus. However, they can still get sick from the other dengue viruses. Being infected by multiple dengue viruses can increase the risk of more severe symptoms, and even death.

Hundreds of millions of people are infected each year. It is estimated that 40% of the world’s population is at risk given the regions where the virus, and the mosquitoes that spread it, are active. This includes parts of Australia.

Read more: Explainer: what are antibodies and why are viruses like dengue worse the second time?

The last significant outbreak in Australia occurred in far north Queensland in 2009, when more than 900 people were infected by local mosquitoes.

Only a handful of locally acquired cases have been reported around Cairns and Townsville in the past decade. All these cases have two things in common: the arrival of infected travellers and the presence of the “right” mosquitoes.

The dengue virus isn’t spread from person to person. A mosquito needs to bite an infected person, become infected, and then it may transmit the virus to a second person as they bite. If more people are infected, more mosquitoes can pick up the virus as they bite and, subsequently, the outbreak can spread further.

Why are mosquitoes important?

Australia has hundreds of different types of mosquitoes. Dozens can spread local pathogens, such as Ross River virus, but just one is capable of spreading exotic viruses such as dengue and Zika: Aedes aegypti.

Aedes aegypti breeds in water-holding containers around the home. It is one of the most invasive mosquitoes globally and is easily moved about by people through international travel. While these days the mosquito stows away in planes, historically it was just as readily moved about in water-filled barrels on sailing ships.

The spread of Aedes aegypti through Australia is the driving force in determining the nation’s future outbreak risk.

The mosquito was once widespread in coastal Australia but since the 1950s, it become limited to central and far north Queensland. We don’t really know why – there are many possible reasons for the retreat, but the important thing now is they don’t return to temperate regions of the country.

Authorities must be vigilant to monitor their spread and, where they’re currently found, building capacity to respond should cases of dengue be identified.

Read more: Is climate change to blame for outbreaks of mosquito-borne disease?

What happened in Rockhampton?

Last week, for the first time in decades, a locally acquired case of dengue was detected in Rockhampton, in central Queensland. The disease was found in someone who hasn’t travelled outside the region, which suggests they’ve been bitten locally by an infected mosquito.

This has prompted a full outbreak response to protect the community from any additional infected mosquitoes.

While the risk of dengue around central Queensland is considered lower than around Cairns or Townsville, authorities are well prepared to respond, with a variety of techniques including house-to-house mosquito surveillance and mosquito control to minimise the spread.

These approaches have been successful around Cairns and Townsville for many years and have helped avoid substantial outbreaks.

The coordinated response of local authorities, combined with the onset of cooler weather that will slow down mosquitoes, greatly reduces any risk of more cases occurring.

What can we do about dengue in the future?

Outbreaks of dengue remain a risk in areas with Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. There are also other mosquitoes, such as Aedes albopictus (the Asian tiger mosquito), that aren’t currently found on mainland Australia but may further increase risks should they arrive. Authorities need to be prepared to respond to the introductions of these mosquitoes.

Read more: How we kept disease-spreading Asian Tiger mozzies away from the Australian mainland

While a changing climate may play a role in increasing the risk, increasing international travel, which represents pathways of introduction of “dengue mosquitoes” into new regions of Australia, may be of greater concern.

There is more that can be done, both locally and internationally. Researchers are working to develop a vaccine that protects against all four strains of dengue virus.

Others are tackling the mosquitoes themselves. Australian scientists have played a crucial role in using the Wolbachia bacteria, which spreads among Aedes aegypti and blocks transmission of dengue, to control the disease.

The objective is to raise the prevalence of the Wolbachia infections among local mosquitoes to a level that greatly reduces the likelihood of local dengue transmission.

Field studies have been successful in far north Queensland and may explain why so few local cases of dengue have been reported in recent years.

While future strategies may rely on emerging technologies and vaccines, simple measures such as minimising water-filled containers around our homes will reduce the number of mosquitoes and their potential to transmit disease.

– ref. After decades away, dengue returns to central Queensland – http://theconversation.com/after-decades-away-dengue-returns-to-central-queensland-117821

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Petter Nyman, Research Fellow, University of Melbourne

Slurries of mud increasingly threaten the water we drink. This rush of sediment, known as “debris flow”, is a type of erosion where mud and boulders in steep catchments suddenly tumble down the stream channel, often travelling at speeds of several metres per second.

And they don’t just damage water supplies – they can cut roads, damage infrastructure, and even kill people. Last year, California saw mudslides that destroyed more than 100 homes and killed 21 people.

Read more: Deadly California mudslides show the need for maps and zoning that better reflect landslide risk

In our research, published in the journal Geology, we found that debris flow is likely to become more frequent and widespread as bushfire activity and rainfall intensity are predicted to increase. Climate change is likely to provoke the extreme weather conditions that cause these bushfires and intense rainfall events.

In turn, these debris flows can contaminate the water supply, with the potential to affect large catchment dams.

In 2003, debris flows poured mud into Canberra’s Cotter Dam – an event caused by bushfires in the catchment of the reservoir. The fires made debris flows more likely because they reduced vegetation cover and soil infiltration (a process in which water can be absorbed by soil).

The resulting turbidity (cloudiness), iron and manganese in the reservoir closed Canberra’s main water supply for six months. A new A$38 million treatment plant had to be built, in case this happens again.

Debris flows such as this one were once rare, but over the last decade they have become more common in southeastern Australia. In fact, we mapped nearly 500 debris flows that occurred in Victoria between 2009 and 2012.

Concern about this threat has led Melbourne Water, East Gippsland Water and the Department of Environment Land Water and Planning in Victoria to partner with us on a project that aims to develop tools for predicting and mitigating impacts of debris flows on water quality.

We can expect debris flows to increase

Debris flow frequency is a water contamination risk. The threat is at a maximum when there are frequent shifts between wet and dry extremes.

Read more: This is what Australia’s growing cities need to do to avoid running dry

And climate change, which is likely to cause more intense rainfall, more wet and dry extremes, stronger El Niños and more bushfires, will make both types of debris flow more common.

During wet conditions, often associated with La Niña, such flows are caused by landslides, which occur when soils are saturated and lose their cohesiveness. Landslides become debris flows when they travel through stream channels.

There were several hundred large debris flows in Wilsons Promontory and the Grampians National Parks, for example, during the extremely wet summer of 2011.

Read more: Cities turn to desalination for water security, but at what cost?

The debris flows in the Grampians caused water supply issues like those in Canberra. Lake Bellfield, for instance, which supplies water to 48 towns in the Wimmera region, could not be used for drinking water for more than three years.

During dry conditions, often associated with El Niño, debris flows are caused by post-fire surface runoff and a process called “sediment bulking”. This is when ash, gravel and debris are eroded from hillsides and stream channels by surface runoff during sudden thunderstorms with short and intense bursts of rainfall. These debris flows typically occur when soil is dry.

We identified more than 300 debris flows of this kind in areas burned by the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.

Following the February 2019 fires, there is greater likelihood of debris flow, which in turn could contaminate water coming from Melbourne’s Thomson catchment. What’s more, the Upper Yarra catchment, which is crucial to Melbourne’s water supply, was close to being burned by bushfires in both 2009 and 2019.

In our study, we modelled post-fire debris flows with the movement of clay particles in a reservoir. The model suggests water contamination in the Upper Yarra catchment could disrupt Melbourne’s water supply for up to 12 months.

Based on our model, the cost of sourcing alternative water supplies during such interruptions is in the order of A$100 million.

How can we manage this problem?

Apart from ensuring we have alternative water supplies, there are some things we can do to reduce the chance of debris flows.

The risk of post-fire debris flows would be greatly reduced if high-severity bushfires could be avoided in steep and erodible areas. Strategic fire breaks, targeted firefighting efforts and fuel reduction burning are, to some extent, measures that can make this happen. We have developed models to identify high-risk areas to be targetted.

Read more: Massive storms are pumping pollution into our oceans: time to clean up our cities

Engineering structures to control debris flows are another option. Japanese and European engineers have developed structures such as “debris flow barriers” that can trap sediment, but also dissipate energy of the flow.

It is not clear if these structures can trap the fine sediment that would contaminate our reservoirs, but methods are being trialled in the Thomson water catchment.

Mitigating the risk through fire management and debris-flow control will need a coordinated approach, particularly in settings with complex land arrangements, such as Melbourne’s water supply catchments.

– ref. Freak mud flows threaten our water supplies, and climate change is raising the risk – http://theconversation.com/freak-mud-flows-threaten-our-water-supplies-and-climate-change-is-raising-the-risk-116418

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mai Sato, Fellow, School of Regulation and Global Governance, The Australian National University, Australian National University

On May 27, a 51-year old man went on a killing spree in the Japanese city of Kawasaki, located south of Tokyo. With a knife in each hand, he killed a 39 year-old man and a 12 year-old schoolgirl, and injured 15 school children aged between six and twelve as they waited for a school bus.

The attacker was detained at the scene, but later died from self-inflicted stab wounds to his neck and shoulders. A witness reported seeing the attacker swinging his knives and shouting “I will kill you” while children screamed for help.

Read more: Why Japan is reluctant to retry the world’s longest-serving death row inmate

A recent history of indiscriminate killings

The attacker was identified as Ryuichi Iwasaki. He grew up with, and was still living with, his relatives in Kawasaki city where the attack took place.

Those interviewed who knew Iwasaki did not seem surprised by the attack. His classmates from junior high school described him as a troubled child often losing his temper, behaving violently, and being bullied at school. More recently, Iwasaki was verbally aggressive to his neighbour because the leaves from the neighbour’s garden had brushed against him.

With the perpetrator dead, we are unlikely to get to the bottom of what motivated an apparently indiscriminate attack, but this incident isn’t the first time Japan has experienced a mass stabbings of this kind.

In 2016, 19 residents at a care home for people with mental disabilities were stabbed to death. A former employee at the care home who confessed to the killing claimed that:

it is better that disabled people disappear.

In 2008, a 24-year-old unemployed man who wanted to “end his boring life” went on a stabbing spree in Ibaraki, killing two people and injuring seven.

In the same year, a 25-year-old man stabbed and killed seven people and injured ten in Akihabara, a busy shopping hub in Tokyo. A month before the incident, the attacker wrote on an online platform:

I don’t have a single friend and I won’t in the future. I’ll be ignored because I’m ugly.

Children have also been victims of indiscriminate attacks. In 2001, a 37-year-old man killed eight children at a school in Osaka. He later told police:

I hate everything. I tried to commit suicide several times but could not die. I wanted to be arrested and executed by the death penalty.

Read more: The evidence is in: you can’t link imprisonment to crime rates

Low crime rates, but fear of crime is growing

Despite these incidents, Japan remains one of the safest countries in the world.

According to the 2016 UNODC statistics, Japan’s rate of intentional homicide per 100,000 population is the lowest in the world at 0.3 (if we exclude Macau at 0.2), compared with 0.9 for Australia and the 5.4 for the United States.

Officially recorded cases of murder in Japan have been decreasing steadily since the 1960s. The recorded statistics for murder averaged around 3,500 cases per year in the 1960s, decreasing to around 1,500 cases per year in the 1980s, and down to 710 cases in 2017.

The same downward trend can be seen in murder convictions: 234 cases in 2017, down from 609 cases in 2007.

While Japan’s remains extremely low, the Japanese public’s fear of crime has been growing. Government surveys, and the results of the Japan General Social Survey, show that the Japanese public are more fearful of being a victim of crime, and believe that violent crime is on the rise. At the same time, Japanese public are ill- and mis-informed about crime and punishment issues.

For example, while the majority of the Japanese public supports the death penalty, the same survey respondents lacked basic knowledge about how it works, such as the number of people executed per year, or the method of execution. Respondents overestimated rate of homicides and violent crimes.

The perception gap between actual crime trends and public perceptions is not unique to Japan. It is seen in countries, such as the UK, US and Colombia. And while people generally believe that the crime is on the rise, they are less pessimistic about local crime and overly pessimistic about national crime rates.

An ageing prison population

The low crime rate in Japan makes a horrific crime like the Kawasaki stabbing newsworthy. The moral panic created by media coverage of horrific crimes in the past has an impact on public perceptions of crime, but also on criminal justice policy and practice.

Some researchers argue that public’s fear of crime, and politicians’ response to the fear, resulted in new legislation imposing more severe punishment on offenders. This widened the criminal justice net, with a greater proportion being diverted into the formal criminal justice process.

The result of the expanded use of criminal justice system to deal with deviance, combined with the ageing population, has resulted one in five prisoners being over the age of 60. Japanese prisons have been described as a “nursing home”. Recidivism is high among elderly prisoners because they lack family and financial support. In 2016, of the 2,500 prisoners over the age of 65 who were convicted in 2016, around a third had six or more previous convictions.

Read more: Aum Shinrikyo subway sarin attack: Japanese cult members await execution two decades on

Lone attacks are different in Japan

After the Kawasaki stabbing, Japan’s education minister, Masahito Shibayama, announced that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe had instructed him to make every possible effort to secure safety at schools.

Unlike a number of lone actor attacks that have occurred outside of Japan in recent years – such as the Christchurch mosque attacks and the Pittsburgh synagogue attack – the attacks carried out in Japan are not motivated by right-wing ideology.

What lone attackers in Japan have in common are social exclusion and low social capital. A further expansion of formal social control through the use and threat of imprisonment is unlikely to prevent future attacks.

I grew up in Tokyo, where it was – and still is – normal for children as young as six to play without the presence of an adult, or to take public transport alone. I hope that the Kawasaki stabbing does not result in “indirect damage” that further excludes vulnerable people via the criminal justice system, or curtails the freedom and independence currently enjoyed by Japanese school children.

– ref. Despite Japan’s low crime rates, it’s seen a number of mass stabbings in the past decade – http://theconversation.com/despite-japans-low-crime-rates-its-seen-a-number-of-mass-stabbings-in-the-past-decade-117910

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Staff, PhD Candidate, Australian National University

Australia could once count itself among the vanguard of women’s rights reform, being the first country in the world to grant (some) women the dual rights of voting and standing for parliament in 1902.

While we have made significant advances since then, we are still lagging behind global standards when it comes to equal representation. Before the 2019 federal election, Australia was 48th in the world in terms of women’s lower house representation, tied with Angola and Peru and falling below many other countries such as as Rwanda, Nepal and Ecuador.

The election has not brought much of an improvement in this respect. Though the proportion of women in parliament looks set to rise to from 33% to around 35%, this clearly falls short of equal representation. This is a problem particularly for the Liberal party: only 23% of their representatives are women, compared to Labor’s 47%.

Read more: To achieve gender equality, we must first tackle our unconscious biases

And, despite the fact that Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s newly unveiled ministry is being touted for its “record” number of women, it too falls short of equal representation. The seven women in the ministry hold just eight of the 28 total cabinet positions.

This is a problem for political leadership across the spectrum. In light of Tanya Plibersek’s decision to not contest the Labor party leadership, clearing the way for Anthony Albanese to become the new Leader of the Opposition, men once again hold the leadership of both major parties. This trend extends to most of the federal minor parties as well, bar Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and the Jacquie Lambie Network.

Why are women still struggling to make gains in our parliament and what does this say about the state of our democracy?

Women becoming political citizens

From the mid-19th century, women around the world – including in Australia – were voicing their discontent at the injustices they faced in many aspects of life, such as their lack of political rights.

Though women could vote in some Australian states from the 1890s, the Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 standardised voting laws across the newly federated nation, granting women the right to vote at the federal level, as well as the right to stand for parliament.

This put Australia ahead of every other country at the time, including the UK (which gave some women the right to vote and stand for office in 1918) and even New Zealand (which took until 1919 to allow women to stand for office, despite having granted their voting rights in 1893).

Read more: Australian politics explainer: how women gained the right to vote

These victories were celebrated at the time, but it is important to note that not everyone was able to enjoy them. The Commonwealth Franchise Act explicitly excluded Aboriginal peoples and women from Asian, African and Pacific backgrounds from placing their name on the electoral roll. In 1925, the act was amended to allow all naturalised citizens to vote. Yet, for Indigenous Australians it would be a much longer battle – they would have to wait until 1962 to win the right to vote.

Standing for parliament

Women immediately seized on their new-found rights in Australia, approaching the 1903 federal election not only as voters, but also as candidates. In total, four women were nominated and stood as candidates: Nellie Martel, Mary Ann Moore Bentley and Vida Goldstein for the Senate; and Selina Siggins for the House of Representatives.

Vida Goldstein was the most well-known of this group. She had been active in the suffrage movement in Victoria in the 1890s, eventually becoming one of its most vocal leaders. She even travelled abroad in 1902 to promote the cause of women’s suffrage to a wider audience, including leaders like US President Theodore Roosevelt.

Read more: Birth of a nation: how Australia empowering women taught the world a lesson

Though unsuccessful in her bid for parliament, Goldstein stood four more times between 1910 and 1917. Believing in the need for women to work outside party politics, she campaigned as an independent every time – a choice that, though true to her values, also proved a hindrance.

It took almost two decades for a woman to be elected to a parliament anywhere in Australia. This milestone was reached when Nationalist candidate Edith Cowan won a spot in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly, representing the seat of West Perth. Her image remains familiar today, adorning one side of the A$50 note.

It would be another 20 years before women cemented their place as federal parliamentary representatives. In 1943, Dame Enid Lyons won a spot for the United Australia Party in the House of Representatives and Dorothy Tangney captured a seat in the Senate for Labor.

Why did it take so long? In spite of their new political rights, women continued to face discrimination from those who viewed politics as a man’s domain. Additionally, women struggled to make their voices heard in a system dominated by the major political parties and their ideologies. Fractured along these lines, they lost some of the solidarity fostered by the battle for women’s suffrage.

Where are we now?

In 2010, Australia finally got its first woman prime minister with Julia Gillard, a historic moment that should have marked a turning point for women in politics. But the proportion of women in parliament has increased by just a few percentage points since Gillard’s rise to the top.

Women also continue to remain a minority in higher-ranking positions. And though those elected to parliament represent a somewhat greater diversity than the candidates of the early 1900s, there is much more to be done on that front, as well.

But this is not just a numbers issue. Women in politics continue to be the targets of gendered abuse and misogyny not endured by their male counterparts, as Senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s recent experience with David Leyonhjelm demonstrates. This kind of entrenched sexism places limits on women’s ability to participate in politics on an equal footing.

The future of Australian democracy must be one in which true gender equality – both in terms of numbers and attitudes – forms a central part of the political system. We have a way to go yet to see this goal fully realised.

– ref. Why is it taking so long to achieve gender equality in parliament? – http://theconversation.com/why-is-it-taking-so-long-to-achieve-gender-equality-in-parliament-117313

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emil Jeyaratnam, Data + Interactives Editor, The Conversation

As Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s ministry is sworn in today, we’re taking a closer look at the members of the newly revamped cabinet.

Some of the faces are new – Stuart Robert, for example, takes over the new portfolio overseeing the National Disability Insurance Scheme. And some of the portfolios have shifted, notably Sussan Ley replacing Melissa Price as environment minister.

We’ve asked our experts to appraise the performances of the ministers and highlight what could be the key challenges in their new roles.

In some cases, ministers hold more than one portfolio. To simplify the policy analysis, we’ve chosen a key policy area for which they’re responsible and asked our experts to analyse those.

– ref. Infographic: who’s who in the new Morrison ministry – http://theconversation.com/infographic-whos-who-in-the-new-morrison-ministry-117909

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emil Jeyaratnam, Data + Interactives Editor, The Conversation

As Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s ministry is sworn in today, we’re taking a closer look at the members of the newly revamped cabinet.

Some of the faces are new – Stuart Robert, for example, takes over the new portfolio overseeing the National Disability Insurance Scheme. And some of the portfolios have shifted, notably Sussan Ley replacing Melissa Price as environment minister.

We’ve asked our experts to appraise the performances of the ministers and highlight what could be the key challenges in their new roles.

In some cases, ministers hold more than one portfolio. To simplify the policy analysis, we’ve chosen a key policy area for which they’re responsible and asked our experts to analyse those.

– ref. A closer look at Scott Morrison’s new ministry – http://theconversation.com/a-closer-look-at-scott-morrisons-new-ministry-117909

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Graham, Executive Director, La Trobe Asia, La Trobe University

The 2019 federal election, unlike previous campaigns, did not feature a dedicated debate on foreign affairs or defence. The conventional cynicism – that there are no votes in foreign policy – does not adequately explain this. It seems Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Labor leader Bill Shorten reached a shabby consensus that foreign and security policy questions were uniformly too hot to handle.

Foreign affairs is in fact among the most important challenges facing the Morrison government. The simple reason: the status quo that has served Australia so well in the past couple of decades is fast coming to an end.

Australia has uniquely avoided recession among the developed economies because it has surfed a once-in-a-generation wave of Chinese demand for commodities. Australia’s security has also been assured through its longstanding alliance with the US, while its military commitments have been kept largely at arm’s length in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Read more: Foreign policy should play a bigger role in Australian elections. This is why it probably won’t

However, as Asia-Pacific scholar Nick Bisley has commented, Australia now finds itself caught between two different forms of revisionism: the strategic revisionism of Xi Jinping’s China and the economic revisionism of Donald Trump’s United States.

Trump’s trade wars and protectionist policies are likely to be a continuing point of friction with Australia, which remains heavily reliant on Asian markets (not only China) for trade.

But China is the most important external challenge Australia faces. It’s so all-encompassing that it transcends traditional foreign, trade and defence policy silos, and includes a significant domestic dimension in terms of political interference, as well.

Even though Morrison has already served the better part of a year in office, it’s hard to be sure of his convictions on China. With his mandate secured, he now has both the opportunity and obligation to show his true colours.

Caught between a rock and a hard place

In theory, the Coalition’s election victory should mean continuity in foreign policy, as signalled by Morrison’s decision to retain Marise Payne as foreign minister.

When China was – belatedly – raised during the campaign, Morrison repeated a well-worn mantra about not having to “pick sides” between the United States and China. The former he characterised as Australia’s “friend”, labelling China as a “customer”. While this description no doubt raised eyebrows in Beijing, Morrison was arguing Canberra could “stand by” both.

The Morrison administration has generally sought to position Australia somewhere in between its chief ally and its chief customer. His reticence thus far to make waves with the country’s number one customer may be borne of a desire to maintain Canberra’s room for manoeuvre as a middle power, though this is getting steadily harder.

If the prime minister truly believes Australia can play an intermediary role, few in Canberra’s foreign policy and defence circles would agree. To do so would only expose Australia to heightened risk, precipitating the kind of invidious strategic choices that Morrison wishes to avoid.

It also plays into the Chinese Communist Party’s objective of sowing discord between the US and its Pacific allies.

Read more: In his first major foreign policy test, Morrison needs to stick to the script

If Morrison is privately more attuned to the strategic risks China poses – and after nine months of intelligence briefings he should be – then he has a duty to prepare the public for the likelihood of tougher times ahead. Should Australia-China relations take a darker turn, it may prove difficult for the government to persuade the public to back a significant adjustment in national security policy, including increased defence spending.

Moreover, there are risks to publicly framing US-China strategic competition as a destabilising factor for Australia’s security. Australians could judge the prospect of entrapment in a confrontational US policy towards China as potentially more threatening to Australia’s security than Beijing’s deliberate challenge to the “rules-based order” in the region.

This could undermine public support for Australia’s alliance with the US, which remains the bedrock of our security.

Stepping up in the Pacific

The Pacific is where the strategic interests of China and Australia clash most directly. Morrison’s most important security policy decision thus far, announced at last year’s APEC summit, was to establish a joint naval base with the US and Papua New Guinea at Lombrum on Manus Island. This was partly aimed at denying the location to China, as well as establishing a forward ADF presence in the Pacific.

It is also notable that Morrison will visit the Solomon Islands on his first post-election overseas trip. China is inevitably part of the subtext here, as Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare is reported to be swaying towards switching allegiances from Taiwan to Beijing – yet another sign of China’s growing influence in the region.

Of course, there is more than geopolitics to the Pacific region and Morrison must be careful to demonstrate empathy and humility, given Australia’s patchy engagement with the region and the Coalition’s ambivalence on climate change – a major grievance for most Pacific nations.

Morrison’s appointment of Alex Hawke as both minister of international development and Pacific and assistant defence minister provides easy ammunition to critics, who will charge that the government’s Pacific “step up” is narrowly conceived through a geopolitical lens.

But Morrison appears to take the step up seriously, and a commitment to reversing the relative decline in Australia’s influence in its immediate neighbourhood (note: not “backyard”). A volatile political situation in PNG further demands a close watch on the Pacific.

Other key alliances to shore up

Elsewhere in the neighbourhood, Morrison has fallen on his feet now that friendly incumbents in Indonesia and India – President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and Prime Minister Narendra Modi – were also returned in recent elections, making it easier for continuity to be maintained.

Morrison was quick off the mark to congratulate Jokowi on Twitter, who promptly replied that Australia is one of Indonesia’s “greatest allies.”

By pulling off an unlikely election victory, Morrison is in the fortunate position of being the first prime minister for some time who is not looking immediately over his or her shoulder for political assassins within their party.

Morrison also has more bandwidth to devote to foreign issues than any leader since Kevin Rudd. He is disadvantaged, however, by his relative inexperience and the thinness of his front bench. That places a special burden on whoever will be advising Morrison on international security – a role sure to take on greater importance in his administration – to provide the counsel he needs and to wrangle the bureaucracy into line. For there will be no shortage of challenges ahead.

– ref. Scott Morrison’s biggest foreign policy test: keeping peace with both China and the US – http://theconversation.com/scott-morrisons-biggest-foreign-policy-test-keeping-peace-with-both-china-and-the-us-117598

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire McKie, Senior Lecturer, Clinical and Communication Skills, Deakin University

In January, 107-year-old Daphne Keith broke her hip and became the oldest Australian to have a partial hip replacement. This isn’t something you would have heard of two or three decades ago.

For Daphne, the decision was fairly clear-cut. Surgery, with all its risks, was a better option than the alternative: to be stuck in bed for the rest of her life. As she summed it up, “What do I have to lose?”

But in many cases the balance between benefits and harms of surgery for older people is not as clear-cut.

Advances in anaesthetic and surgical techniques (especially keyhole surgery) now allow older adults to undergo operations and procedures that were previously not possible.

As the population ages, we’re operating on older and older people. Rates for elective surgery in Australia are increasing the most among those aged over 85.

So how do we decide who should and shouldn’t undergo surgery?

Age is a factor, but not the only one

As we age there are increasing differences between individuals in terms of how our minds and bodies function. Younger people – whether they’re aged five, 20 or even 40 – are generally very similar to their age-matched peers, in terms of their cognitive and physical abilities.

But if we compare older adults, there are marked differences in their function. Some 70-year-olds are fit, healthy and still working full-time. Other 70-year-olds have multiple medical conditions, are frail and living in nursing homes.

So decisions about surgery shouldn’t be based on age alone.

Read more: What’s happening in our bodies as we age?

However, we can’t ignore the changes associated with ageing, which means sometimes the potential harms of surgery will outweigh the benefits.

The harms associated with surgery and anaesthesia include death, surgical complications, longer hospital stays and poorer long-term outcomes. This might mean not being able to return to the same physical or cognitive level of function or needing to go into a nursing home.

The changes in our body as we age, as well as an increase in the number of diseases, and therefore medications we take, can increase the risks associated with surgery and anaesthesia.

Frailty is the strongest predictor of poor outcomes after surgery. Frailty is a decrease in our body’s reserves and our ability to recover from stressful events such as surgery. Frailty is usually associated with increasing age, but not all older people are frail, and you can be frail and still relatively young.

Consider the patient’s preferences

Patients tend to overestimate the benefits of surgery and underestimate the harms. This highlights the importance of shared decision-making between patients and clinicians.

Shared decision-making means the patient and clinicians come to a decision together, after discussing the options, benefits and harms, and after considering the patient’s values, preferences and circumstances.

Read more: Surgery isn’t always the best option, and the decision shouldn’t just lie with the doctor

Research shows that as we age many of us become less focused on longevity and prolonging life at all costs and much more focused on what that life is like, or our quality of life.

Outcomes such as living independently, staying in our own home, the ability to move around, and being mentally alert often become increasingly important in the decision-making process. This information about a person’s values is critical for shared decision-making conversations.

When considering these preferences, the discussion becomes more than just “could” we do this operation – it’s about “should” we do this operation? Someone living at home with early dementia may decide the risk of this worsening, and the possible need to move to a nursing home, is not worth any benefits of surgery.

It’s also important to note that, in some cases, cognitive impairment and dementia associated with ageing mean it’s not the patient (but their appointee) making decisions about surgery.

Not everyone should be offered surgery

The ageing of our population raises challenges for policymakers. More surgeries means greater pressure on the health budget. We don’t have a bottomless pit of health funding, so how do we decide who is eligible, based on fair and equitable resource allocation?

Given the marked variability between individuals as we age, decisions and policies about access to medical care (including surgery) should not be based on age alone. There should not be policies that say “no” to surgery based on age.

Equally, when considering resource allocation, it should not just be about how many years a person has to live, or blunt assessments based on how much their operation might cost the health system.

Take a decision about performing a hip replacement on a 90-year-old with arthritis, for example. A patient who has an elective hip replacement for arthritis and is able to remain living at home will probably “cost less” overall than if that same person would otherwise have had to live in a nursing home.

Read more: Who gets a piece of the pie? Spending the health budget fairly

However, this also does not mean we can, or should, offer surgery to everyone.

The practice of medicine, especially when considering older adults, needs to remain focused on individualised patient care. Decisions should be based on medical appropriateness of treatment combined with a patient’s goals and values.

To do this we need to train clinicians in shared decision-making and how to have these often difficult discussions. The goal is to have clinicians who are able to explore a patient’s values and preferences around outcomes, effectively communicate individualised information about options, benefits and harms, and then come to a decision together.

– ref. Surgery rates are rising in over-85s but the decision to operate isn’t always easy – http://theconversation.com/surgery-rates-are-rising-in-over-85s-but-the-decision-to-operate-isnt-always-easy-116814

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Rogers, Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Law, Macquarie University

Privacy was not a hot topic in the recent Australian election, but it should have been. This is because the City of Darwin is adapting elements of the Chinese social credit system for use in Australia. The Chinese system’s monitoring of citizens’ behaviour has been widely condemned as “Orwellian”, with frequent comparisons to the dystopian near-future sci-fi of Black Mirror. But for Australians it’s pitched as progress towards a digitally integrated future, embedded innocuously in the “Switching on Darwin” plans for a smarter city.

Read more: China’s Social Credit System puts its people under pressure to be model citizens

To see why this is a worrying development for Australian democracy one must first play a patient game of join the dots.

Dot 1. One of Darwin’s six “sister cities” is Haikou, capital of the Chinese island province of Hainan. Links established through sister-city relationships are commonly understood to be a springboard to wider networks of co-operative arrangements. Such connections may provide opportunities for cultural exchange, but also for technological exchange.

Recently there have been reports on how smart city plans in Darwin draw inspiration from the Chinese social credit surveillance system.

The potential of the system for gathering data on citizens’ use of public services, such as Wi-Fi, has been noted. The potential to enhance council profitability through sale of user data to the private sector is significant. More so is the potential for this system to track citizen movements in real time.

Dot 2. The 2019 Northern Territory government budget earmarks A$1.4 million for expanding the local CCTV network as part of “Investing in a Safer Territory”. This figure might yet be supplemented by “proceeds of crime” funds, making the investment much larger.

That’s enough money to roll out biometric facial recognition software, which can link your face from a live CCTV image to your driver licence or passport, as well as “triggerfish” apps that can access, for example, identifying data on your smartphone remotely without your knowledge. All of these systems can be automated.

Read more: Big brother is watching: how new technologies are changing police surveillance

Dot 3. The Encryption Act, rushed through federal parliament in December 2018, gave law enforcement and intelligence agencies unprecedented access to communications technology. Telecommunications providers must now provide potentially unlimited back doors into private data. They must also, by law, conceal that they have done so from customers/citizens.

Read more: The government’s encryption laws finally passed despite concerns over security

Foundations of a surveillance state are in place

Each dot offers a point of triangulation for very real fears about the form and nature of Australian democracy in years to come. Combine these points of technology and law and we see the foundation of a surveillance state.

The ability of agencies to track citizen activity extends from which websites you browse on your mobile to what you write in your private messages to where you are right now. Given how grey these laws are, and the absence of a constitutionally protected right to privacy in Australia, this could extend to criminal records, medical files, payslips, spending patterns and browsing histories.

The Northern Territory News reported:

Darwin council will use Chinese-inspired surveillance technology to gather data on what people are doing on their phones and to put up ‘virtual fences’ that will instantly trigger an alert if crossed.

That is correct. This technology can track a smart phone. It can also, potentially, identify the user. Darwin City’s general manager for innovation, growth and development services, Josh Sattler, told the NT News:

We’ll be getting sent an alarm saying, ‘There’s a person in this area that you’ve put a virtual fence around.’ […] Boom, an alert goes out to whatever authority, whether it’s us or police, to say ‘look at camera 5’.

That equates to real-time tracking of a private citizen by law enforcement and local council. And this in a free and democratic country.

Is it smart for the public to be so trusting?

The Encryption Act takes on a different tint when looked at through this lens. Law enforcement and intelligence organisations have been empowered by law to invade your privacy and protected by law from you knowing that they have done so.

Such data can be used to place restrictions on free movement, a hard limit placed on a universal human right. Such data may also be sold to third parties, either in exchange for deals with government or to boost city coffers. The potential for abuse and the lack of safeguards for Australian citizens are staggering.

The public are told to place angelic trust in the honesty of government agencies, agencies that by and large regulate themselves. There is toothless public oversight by groups like the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, which are all too often hamstrung by a culture of silence.

But, remember, if you’ve got nothing to hide you don’t need to be afraid! After all, it’s only a smart city Wi-Fi program for better street lights.

Read more: Australians accept government surveillance, for now

The City of Darwin and City of Palmerston have also bought five new high-definition mobile CCTV units with A$635,000 in funding from the Australian government’s Safer Communities Fund. Northern Territory Police will deploy these across both municipalities. The camera systems will be used to police “crime and anti-social behaviour” and to “protect organisations that may face security risks”.

Remember the city of the future is a safer and more vibrant space. And, if you want to be in it, you will be watched both online and offline, wherever you go. All the time.

– ref. Is China’s social credit system coming to Australia? – http://theconversation.com/is-chinas-social-credit-system-coming-to-australia-117095

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Lecturer in Architecture, UNSW

Unless the federal government changes its funding policy for universities, less well-off ones, particularly regional universities, are going to fail.

In Britain, it is already happening. Several bankruptcies are imminent.

In Australia, many are clearly in financial difficulties and are trying to raise money any way they can.

During the election campaign, ABC’s Four Corners highlighted questionable practices in the recruitment of full-fee paying international students at institutions including Murdoch University and Central Queensland University.

Desperate for funds…

The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency has found “severe shortcomings” in the performance of Charles Sturt University, sufficient to reduce its period of accreditation from seven to four years.

In an extraordinary move, the departing Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra has asked his staff to donate up to A$1,000 per annum to “support students”.

It’s easy to blame the universities themselves, but it is the government that has designed the policies that have forced them up against a financial brick wall.

This situation has come about partly because of a pea and thimble trick performed by both Labor and the Coalition. While recurrent funding has risen due to the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government’s introduction of “demand driven” funding, it has been followed by a withdrawal of capital funding.

…but it’s not their fault

In 2015 the Coalition axed A$11 billion Education Investment Fund set up by Labor in 2008 to maintain infrastructure “in urgent need of attention”. In 2017 it froze recurrent funding.

Four years after the Education Investment Fund was axed, estimates from the higher education facilities consultancy ARINA put the maintenance deficit at more than the $23 billion dollars that was estimated at the time. That’s what’s needed to return campuses to a condition where they are fit for purpose.

Although the new government has announced small additional funding for regional universities, it is nowhere near enough. Many have dilapidated campuses that are hard to work or study in. University buildings constructed during the 1960s are nearing the end of their useful lives.

It’s alright for the Group of Eight

The current funding model works best for the prestigious Group of Eight (Go8) universities – those named after the cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide as well as the states of NSW, Queensland and Western Australia plus Monash University and the Australian National University.

The universities in Sydney and Melbourne have the best access to high-quality full-fee paying international students, although even for them there are issues.

The Go8 universities require huge amounts of capital to build facilities to support research in the STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering and medicine. Under current funding policy, most of which now has to come from recurrent student income.

The proportion of international students at the biggest Go8 campuses climbs year by year. And they are continuing to expand domestic enrolments as fast as they can.

For the rest, options to fund capital works are limited. While some may have recruited international students regardless of quality, others are getting new buildings by doing deals with property developers.

There are few options for others

Western Sydney University is renting its new “state of the art” campus in the Parramatta CBD. Unfortunately, the rental model carries risks because it narrows the options for reducing costs if revenue falls.

Revenue can fall for many reasons outside the control of the university, including an abrupt reduction in the number of international students due to geopolitical factors or changes in government policy on immigration.

Rent is also more expensive than direct funding because the price charged includes margins for commercial risk and profit. The property sector likes the idea, but then it would, wouldn’t it?

The best way to fund needed capital works on university buildings, and make sure they survive, is for the government to return to making capital payments on the basis of need. It would mean that universities facing a chronic shortage of capital wouldn’t need to resort to extreme measures.

Direct funding would mean they would have to conform to government-imposed area and cost standards for buildings. This would put welcome downward pressure on building costs, which have soared for some of the big city universities that have access to cash from international students.

City universities are paying too much for buildings

General academic buildings, and those providing offices and teaching space, are in some cases being delivered for twice as much as they were 20 years ago, corrected for inflation, in large part because they have become unnecessarily elaborate, in part to attract foreign students.

The Monash Teaching and Learning building and the University of Melbourne Architecture building are examples, as is the $180 million University of Technology Sydney business school building.

Instead of making every new university building an award-winning icon, we ought to be content with making at least some of them just good.

Providing capital funding to universities is likely to cost at least an extra A$1.5 billion a year. But that’s small compared to the more than A$30 billion international education exports are said to pump into the economy.

It is also small compared to what would happen if they folded or failed to deliver the research we need.

Others can afford little

The sector can help its own case by focusing more on building costs and less on winning design awards. University peak bodies in Britain play an active role in benchmarking building and operational costs. Universities Australia should consider doing the same.

It ought to be in a position to document improvements in the operational efficiency of universities and highlight the magnitude of the maintenance funding needed. At the moment, it is not.

Read more: How has education policy changed under the Coalition government?

No one, including the government, really wants a university to fail. The cost of recovery would probably end up being borne taxpayers and the impact on students would be devastating.

It is in the interests of all Australians to have a university funding model that does not send less well-off universities to the wall, including most of our regional universities.

The current model generates perverse incentives to reduce acceptance standards for international students, encourages universities to use expensive developer-provided sources of capital and has driven the creation of mega campuses that are more about income than student outcomes. We can and should do better.

– ref. Why regional universities are at risk of going under – http://theconversation.com/why-regional-universities-are-at-risk-of-going-under-109374

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian CH Lee, Associate Professor, Global Studies, RMIT University

The monsters that stalk us in popular culture embody fears about our contemporary human condition. As a new Godzilla film opens in cinemas this week, we might gain insight into what currently haunts us most.

The endless waves of zombies in film, TV and literature are said to reflect the mindlessness of our behaviour, whether as a cog in the industrial machine, or as noted by film scholar Leo Braudy, as “an unthinking member of a mass consumer society”.

For Braudy, zombies “may best represent the anxieties of the 21st century” because these nameless monsters can represent whatever fear most consumes us as individuals, which might include pandemics, globalisation, or the anonymity imposed by impersonal technology.

However, the age we are currently living in requires another monster – one that is capable of representing the awesome complexity and enormity of the challenges facing humanity today. That monster is Godzilla.

The consequences of human-induced climate change are now spoken of with increasing alarm, with prominent experts, including David Attenborough, suggesting the possibility of civilisational collapse. With the new film upon us, audiences may see their fears about the damage we have wrought reflected back at them.

A monster of awe

In their 1987 book Angels Fear, anthropologists Gregory and Mary Catherine Batseon proposed a fictional god called Eco, one that would represent the importance of seeing the world as a system of interconnected organisms, or the “unity in which we make our home”. They hoped that the existence of such a god might encourage humanity to behave more respectfully towards our world.

However, in today’s world, a figure such as Eco does not inspire the awe or respect which our age of existential crisis demands. A monster is needed, and as I have argued in my co-authored book Monsters of Modernity: Global Icons for Our Critical Condition, Godzilla is the perfect monster to make us think about the consequences of our actions.

From the first Japanese Godzilla film in 1954, all the way through to Godzilla’s latest outing in this year’s aptly named Hollywood blockbuster Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla has been understood as a response to humanity’s mistreatment of the earth.

The first case of mistreatment to provoke Godzilla in 1954 was the use of nuclear weapons. While developing a premise for the first film, Tanaka Tomoyuki, a young producer at Toho Studios in Japan asked himself: “What if a dinosaur sleeping in the Southern Hemisphere had been awakened and transformed into a giant by the Bomb? What if it attacked Tokyo?”

Subsequent films, which vary immensely in their level of earnestness or goofiness, have referenced other environmental misdeeds, such the 1971 film Godzilla vs Hedorah (aka the Smog Monster) in which mankind’s pollution becomes a nearly invincible monster. Although Godzilla defeats the Smog Monster, viewers are left in no doubt that we ignore the effects of our pollution at our peril.

As time has moved on, so has the particular crisis that brings forth the monster. In the words of a protagonist in the trailer for the 2019 movie, “Our world is changing. The mass extinction we feared has already begun and we are the cause. We are the infection. But like all living organisms, the earth has unleashed a fever to fight this infection”.

Here lies an important trait of Godzilla’s. As the scientist Dr Serizawa says in the 2014 Hollywood movie simply titled Godzilla: “we may not have created this monster. But we summoned it. We brought this on ourselves.”

Godzilla is not on our side. It threatens humanity, although it sometimes incidentally helps humanity avert a larger threat (such as the Smog Monster) or Godzilla’s archenemy, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. But even when Godzilla and humanity share a common goal, it is not that Godzilla takes our side or that we make Godzilla “our pet”, as it is put in the 2019 trailer. Instead, Dr Serizawa observes, “we would be his”.

Wherever Godzilla appears, the triviality of humanity’s accomplishments and defences are made plain. Godzilla treats us and our great cities with the contempt and disregard with which we regularly treat our world.

Read more: Friday essay: is this the Endgame – and did we win or did we lose?

The Godzilla principle

In project management, The “Godzilla Principle” refers to the idea that problems should be addressed while small, because “left unchecked and uncared for, they wax, not wane, until they are too big too handle”. However, I argue that the lesson of Godzilla is in fact starker. The Godzilla Principle is that there is no forgiveness.

There is no forgiveness because Godzilla is our environmental transgressions reflected back to us, personified in the form of a monstrous reptile. In this way, Godzilla echoes Bateson and Bateson’s Eco: it “is of no avail to tell [Eco] that the offense was only a small one, that you are sorry and that you won’t do it again.” Every one of our misdeeds against the world irrevocably rebounds against us.

In reality, the impacts of our vandalism or thoughtlessness can remain in out-of-sight lands or immense garbage patches in our oceans, or be borne in the future. However, in fiction, Godzilla is karma incarnate, bringing ruin today to the cities that represent “civilisation”.

Although people can forgive the wrongdoings of each other and start afresh, our world cannot forgive in this way. We must act from the outset with an awareness of the gravity of our actions, to avoid awakening unstoppable “climate monsters”.

Godzilla, then, is the monster for our times. Godzilla is awful, implacable, and irresistible. Our only hope is not to bring it upon ourselves.

– ref. Why Godzilla is the perfect monster for our age of environmental destruction – http://theconversation.com/why-godzilla-is-the-perfect-monster-for-our-age-of-environmental-destruction-116996

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Guihot, Senior Lecturer in Law, Queensland University of Technology

Australia is among 42 countries that last week signed up to a new set of policy guidelines for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Yet Australia has its own draft guidelines for ethics in AI out for public consultation, and a number of other countries and industry bodies have developed their own AI guidelines.

So why do we need so many guidelines, and are any of them enforceable?

Read more: Artificial intelligence in Australia needs to get ethical, so we have a plan

The new principles

The latest set of policy guidelines is the Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

It promotes five principles for the responsible development of trustworthy AI. It also includes five complementary strategies for developing national policy and international cooperation.

Given this comes from the OECD, it treads the line between promoting economic improvement and innovation and fostering fundamental values and trust in the development of AI.

The five AI principles encourage:

1. inclusive growth, sustainable development and well-being

2. human-centred values and fairness

3. transparency and explainability

4. robustness, security and safety

5. accountability.

These recommendations are broad and do not carry the force of laws or even rules. Instead they seek to encourage member countries to incorporate these values or ethics in the development of AI.

But what do we mean by AI?

It is hard to make specific recommendations in relation to AI. That is partly because AI is not one thing with a single application that poses singular risks or threats.

Instead, AI has become a blanket term to refer to a vast number of different systems. Each is typically designed to collect and process data using computing technology, adapt to change, and act rationally to achieve its objectives, ultimately without human intervention.

Read more: To protect us from the risks of advanced artificial intelligence, we need to act now

Those objectives could be as different as translating language, identifying faces, or even playing chess.

The type of AI that is exceptionally good at completing these objectives is often referred to as narrow AI. A good example is a chess-playing AI. This is specifically designed to play chess – and is extremely good at it – but completely useless at other tasks.

On the other hand is general AI. This is AI that it is said will replace human intelligence in most if not all tasks. This is still a long way off but remains the ultimate goal of some AI developers.

Yet it is this idea of general AI that drives many of the fears and misconceptions that surround AI.

Many many guidelines

Responding to these fears and a number of very real problems with narrow AI, the OECD recommendations are the latest of a number of projects and guidelines from governments and other bodies around the world that seek to instil an ethical approach to developing AI.

These include initiatives by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the French data protection authority, the Hong Kong Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the European Commission.

Read more: Call for independent watchdog to monitor NZ government use of artificial intelligence

The Australian government funded CSIRO’s Data61 to develop an AI ethics framework, which is now open for public feedback, and the Australian Council of Learned Academies is yet to publish its report on the future of AI in Australia.

The Australian Human Rights Commission, together with the World Economic Forum, is also reviewing and reporting on the impact of AI on human rights.

The aim of these initiatives is to encourage or to nudge ethical development of AI. But this presupposes unethical behaviour. What is the mischief in AI?

Unethical AI

One study identified three broad potential malicious uses of AI. These target:

• digital security (for example, through cyber-attacks)

• physical security (for example, attacks using drones or hacking)

• political security (for example, if AI is used for mass surveillance, persuasion and deception).

One area of concern is evolving in China, where several regions are developing a social credit system linked to mass surveillance using AI technologies.

The system can identify a person breaching social norms (such as jaywalking, consorting with criminals, or misusing social media) and debit social credit points from the individual.

When a credit score is reduced, that person’s freedoms (such as the freedom to travel or borrow money) are restricted. While this is not yet a nationwide system, reports indicate this could be the ultimate aim.

Read more: China’s Social Credit System puts its people under pressure to be model citizens

Added to these deliberate misuses of AI are several unintentional side effects of poorly constructed or implemented narrow AI. These include bias and discrimination and the erosion of trust.

Building consensus on AI

Societies differ on what is ethical. Even people within societies differ on what they regard as ethical behaviour. So how can there ever be a global consensus on the ethical development of AI?

Given the very broad scope of AI development, any policies in relation to ethical AI cannot yet be more specific until we can identify shared norms of ethical behaviour that might form the basis of some agreed global rules.

Read more: To protect us from the risks of advanced artificial intelligence, we need to act now

By developing and expressing the values, rights and norms that we consider to be important now in the form of the reports and guidelines outlined above, we are working toward building trust among nations.

Common themes are emerging in the various guidelines, such as the need for AI that considers human rights, security, safety, transparency, trustworthiness and accountability, so we may yet be on the way to some global consensus.

– ref. Will we ever agree to just one set of rules on the ethical development of artificial intelligence? – http://theconversation.com/will-we-ever-agree-to-just-one-set-of-rules-on-the-ethical-development-of-artificial-intelligence-117744