Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karen Martin, Asst Professor Population Health, University of Western Australia

The Australian government committed more than A$247 million over 2019-22 to continue funding chaplains in Australian schools. The National School Chaplaincy Program aims to “support the well-being of students through pastoral care services and strategies”.

Schools are eligible for $20,280 per year year ($24,336 for remote schools) to appoint a chaplain.

Since its inception by the Howard government in 2006, there have been concerns from many, including parents and education unions, about the religious affiliations of chaplains, and the conflict this presents when they work in secular schools.

It’s worth recapping what’s known about how the chaplaincy program has operated so far, and what alternatives exist.

Are all chaplains religious?

The 2018 agreement on the national chaplaincy program, between the Commonwealth government and all states and territories, sets out that the states must ensure chaplains may be of any faith. States must also ensure chaplains do not proselytise — that is, convert or attempt to convert a student to their religion.

But the agreement also says a chaplain must be “recognised through formal ordination, commissioning, recognised religious qualifications or endorsement by a recognised or accepted religious institution”.

The ACT ended the chaplaincy program in 2019 saying the fact that chaplains must have a religious affiliation is incompatible with the education act. In March 2019, Victoria agreed to change the job description of chaplains to say they could be of any faith or no faith. However, recent reports suggest non-Christian counsellor applicants are still being denied employment in Victoria on the grounds of their faith.

Read more: High Court torpedoes chaplaincy program – for the second time

And there have been reports of chaplains being encouraged to promote a Christian theology course to students in NSW.

Under the national agreement, chaplains are required to “respect, accept and be sensitive” to the beliefs of others. But it is possible some chaplains are unable to support children (LGBTIAQ+ students for instance) whose lives do not align with their religious affiliation.

Are chaplains effective?

An independent evaluation of the chaplaincy program — conducted from 2016-17 across government, Catholic and independent schools — concluded chaplains are “highly effective in boosting student well-being”. However, principals said only 30% of children received support from the school chaplain. And only 134 students nation-wide provided feedback.

This means there is still a distinct lack of evidence as to whether the chaplaincy program is effectively supporting children and young people’s mental well-being.

Authors of the evaluation highlighted that staff saw the chaplain as being good at supporting the emotional well-being of students. This included helping students manage relationship issues and to develop self esteem.

But chaplains were seen as less equipped to manage complex student problems. These included alcohol and drug abuse, sexuality, self-harm and suicide, academic achievement, and student exposure to violence, racism and neglect.

Read more: Talking about suicide and self-harm in schools can save lives

These limits are unsurprising, as the role of chaplains under the program is well-being support.

What are the alternatives to chaplains?

A chaplain in the government program must have a certificate IV in youth work or pastoral care. This must include competencies in “mental health” and “making appropriate referrals”. The courses can be completed within 12 months and have no minimum entry requirements.

In comparison, school psychologists must have a minimum six-year sequence of education, training and supervision. Psychologists are trained in managing students with academic issues, complex personal issues, psychological issues and those related to self-harm and suicide.

Psychologists are also required to maintain minimum standards for continued training and supervision to retain their registration.

Psychologists are relatively expensive in comparison with chaplains, and can be difficult to access due to their demand. The average psychologist salary in Australia is $90,900 per year. This falls well short of the $20,280 offered through the chaplaincy program. It would only be enough for psychologists to work little over one day per week in schools, unless the school supplemented the funding.

Chaplains can also only be employed part-time if schools are not supplementing the government funding.

Schools could employ the less expensive but lesser-trained counsellors. But people aren’t expected to have specific qualifications or accreditation to work as a counsellor in Australia. The average salary for counsellors in Australia is $82,578 per year.

At the moment anyone can call themselves a counsellor regardless of their training, including people with no training at all. In contrast, the title of “psychologist” is protected.

Employing social workers in schools would likely support children and families, particularly those with more complex needs. Social workers in Australia are required to completed a bachelor of social work and are paid an average $85,331 per year.

Read more: A traumatic past can make you a better social worker, but it might block you studying it in the first place

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to our youth mental health crisis. But we do need better regulation of mental health practitioners and further evaluation of the role and impact of psychologists, social workers, counsellors and chaplains in schools.

Our recent research, exploring teenagers’ use of mental health services, noted an under-resourcing of mental health support in schools. Teenagers said there were few mental health services easily accessible to them, and they needed more support from schools.

The 2019 submission to an inquiry into mental health (by a national professional association for school psychologists, school counsellors and guidance officers) recommended schools stop spending money on “staff unqualified to occupy titles in schools if they are ill-equipped for the purpose of professional student mental health support”.

Substantial funding of any program should be linked with rigorous evaluation. Evidence about the extensive mental health and well-being needs of children and young people at school should be considered in any decision on national program funding.

– ref. School chaplains may be cheaper than psychologists. But we don’t have enough evidence of their impact – https://theconversation.com/school-chaplains-may-be-cheaper-than-psychologists-but-we-dont-have-enough-evidence-of-their-impact-148521

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Glen Searle, Honorary Associate Professor in Planning, University of Queensland, University of Sydney

The 2020 federal budget forecasts Australia’s population growth will slow to almost zero over several years because of COVID-19 and related restrictions. This leads to the question: will this period allow the big cities to catch up on infrastructure shortfalls that developed before the pandemic?

One of us recently conducted research on how infrastructure shortages – such as rail lines, open space and affordable housing – linked to Sydney’s pre-pandemic rapid growth arose in the context of government support for a lot more population. The findings gives us some insights into whether an infrastructure catch-up might happen.

Read more: City planning suffers growth pains of Australia’s population boom

The impacts of fiscal imbalance

The research centred on the consequences for infrastructure provision in Sydney of the vertical fiscal imbalance in Australia. The Commonwealth collects more than 80% of tax revenue while the states rely on the Commonwealth for 45% of their revenue.

The federal government, especially the Treasury, favours population growth. That’s because it generates extra tax revenue, reduces the risk of recession and spreads the welfare costs of an ageing society across a wider base.

The state government is also positive about growth, though less so than the Commonwealth. As a public marker of successful government, growth provides political legitimacy. However, it also requires the state, under the Australian Constitution, to provide most of the infrastructure needed to support that growth.

On the other hand, the Commonwealth garners most of the extra tax revenue from growth. Extra state revenue from a growing population is absorbed into the unavoidable recurrent costs of health, education and so on to service the increased needs. As a result, the state government is unable to fund enough new public infrastructure.

Commonwealth infrastructure funding to the state is only a small fraction of the total required. The federal budget says New South Wales will receive A$2.7 billion from the Commonwealth for infrastructure over the next decade. The state government’s forecast infrastructure spending is more than A$100 billion over the next four years.

As a result, the state needs to call on private sector funding as much as possible. This means infrastructure that can’t be fully paid for by users, such as rail lines, open space and affordable housing, is under-provided. And, as is the case in Victoria, existing assets such as public housing are sold to the private sector.

Read more: Public land is being sold exactly where thousands on the waiting list need housing

An over-reliance on growth?

This context suggests the pandemic-induced flatlining of population growth won’t necessarily allow the infrastructure shortfall to be overcome. Cities are unlikely to catch up unless the Commonwealth greatly increases its funding of state infrastructure.

State budgets rely heavily on growth-sensitive revenue such as property transfer taxes and the GST. And these are set to fall. NSW GST revenue, for example, is forecast to be A$3.5 billion lower this financial year than anticipated before the pandemic.

For states to fund infrastructure beyond user-pay projects like motorways, they have to take on debt to offset reduced taxation revenue. But this will be constrained by their desire to preserve their credit ratings as a marker of good governance.

The federal government is less constrained. The combined influences of ultra-low interest rates and the Reserve Bank’s availability to buy government bonds mean much higher Commonwealth debt is now fiscally tolerable.

The question then becomes: can the Commonwealth’s ability to shoulder increased debt be used to provide the states with more infrastructure funding? The Commonwealth’s huge budgeted outlays to offset the economic impacts of the pandemic are obviously a major constraint on this happening.

Read more: Should the government keep running up debt to get us out of the crisis? Overwhelmingly, economists say yes

Nevertheless, infrastructure projects are generally seen as an important vehicle for responding to the effects of the pandemic. And state government projects count just as much as Commonwealth projects for economic recovery.

However, the federal budget provides little cause for optimism here. The big cities received relatively little infrastructure funding, and certainly very little to overcome current shortfalls.

For instance, the main Sydney project funded was the St Marys-Western Sydney Airport rail line. However no business case for the line has been released, and it is likely to be a decades-long white elephant with little passenger traffic.

A case for more federal funding

The case for more Commonwealth funding of state infrastructure goes beyond helping a post-pandemic recovery. The big cities need funding for public goods such as public housing and mass transport.

Read more: Why more housing stimulus will be needed to sustain recovery

But developing infrastructure of this kind offers limited opportunities for user-pays financing, especially where current shortfalls are significant. These public-good projects range from relatively small projects such as dedicated cycleways to big-ticket items like Sydney’s Metro West and Brisbane’s Cross River Rail, as well as low-job but high-need items like land purchases for new public open space.

The role government played in responding to the pandemic reminded us just how important leadership, accountability and public-sector-led co-ordination are in times of crisis.

Climate change is another crisis that requires such a response, particularly when it comes to infrastructure investment and delivery. Infrastructure that reduces our dependency on carbon involves investment in high-quality public transport, active transport (walking and cycling) and public open spaces.

Read more: Cycling and walking can help drive Australia’s recovery – but not with less than 2% of transport budgets

In some areas the private sector is well placed to deliver greener outcomes. But in areas such as transport, open space and housing, government investment must play a central role. The transformation that the challenges of the 21st century demand of us needs bold leadership from our elected officials.

As our research has concluded, a deep analysis of the costs and benefits of big city population growth for state government finances should provide the basis for a new federal-state financial accord that addresses the imbalance of such costs and benefits between the two levels of government.

– ref. Will the population freeze allow our big cities to catch up on infrastructure? – https://theconversation.com/will-the-population-freeze-allow-our-big-cities-to-catch-up-on-infrastructure-148263

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Luke Nottage, Professor, Sydney Law School, University of Sydney

The death of Brittney Conway, the three-year-old Gold Coast girl killed by swallowing a button battery, has again drawn attention to deaths and injuries caused by consumer goods – and to a longstanding deficiency in Australia’s consumer safety laws.

About 20 Australian children a week are hospitalised due to swallowing batteries, and three have died since 2013. Preventing such cases was one of the top product safety priorities of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in 2019.

In 2019 a total of about 780 Australians were killed by consumer products, and a further 52,000 injured, according to the consumer watchdog.

Misadventure can never be eliminated, but more safety measures could be implemented. Product makers, for example, could ensure small batteries cannot be easily removed from devices by children.

Consider the 31,000 LED wristbands distributed to spectators at the AFL grand final in Bribane last Saturday. The AFL issued a safety recall on Tuesday, days after child safety group Kidsafe Queensland warned the wristband’s battery compartment, containing two button batteries, was not adequately secured.

The problem, as acknowledged in March 2019 by the consumer watchdog’s head, Rod Sims, is that it is generally not against consumer protection regulations to supply unsafe goods in Australia.

Only a select list of about 44 product types are regulated by mandatory safety standards. These include things such as aquatic equipment, bicycle gear, cots, prams, toys for children aged three and under, and all toys containing magnets, lead and other hazardous elements.

But for thousands of other products, the Australian Consumer Law (ACL) is reactive. Regulators can act only after a problem becomes apparent and enough people are actually or potentially injured or killed.

Sims spelled out the fix by calling on Australian law makers to follow European and other nations by introducing a “general safety provision” obliging firms to be proactive, not reactive, in ensuring they supply safe products.

Read more: Button batteries kill. Here’s how we can prevent needless child deaths from battery ingestion

Moving from reaction to prevention

Currently, for any product not covered by mandatory safety standards, Australian suppliers tend to voluntarily recall items found to be unsafe. They do this mainly to avoid compensation claims and reputational risk.

Those harmed can pursue compensation from sellers for breaching consumer guarantees or from manufacturers for product liability. But even big class-action law firms tend to find it easier to bring claims for investors rather than customers.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission can also ban products found to be dangerous, with 19 products currently on its list. These include plastic children’s items containing the chemical diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP), combustible candle holders and gas masks containing asbestos.

But all this remains a reactive response. Suppliers are only indirectly incentivised to market safe products.

A general safety provision, backed by financial penalties and other regulatory powers, would require them to supply only safe products, taking into factors such as consumer expectations and industry best practices.

Britain has had such a provision since 1987, and the European Union since 1992. Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Canada and Singapore have followed suit.

Adding a general safety provision to Australian law was canvassed by Productivity Commission inquiries in 2006 and 2008. These found insufficient evidence benefits would outweigh costs, so other legislative reforms should be tried first.

But the 2017 final report of the government’s review of the ACL reached a different conclusion. Noting the Australian market for consumer goods had changed significantly, with many more low-cost imports, it recommended an “overarching general obligation” on traders to ensure the safety of their products.

A general safety provision, the report said, would place “a clear onus” on traders to ensure the safety of the products they sold to Australian consumers:

It would shift responsibility for managing product safety risks from consumers and regulators to traders who are better placed to control those risks at the design and manufacturing stage of a product’s life.

The annual economic cost of deaths and injuries from unsafe consumer is at least A$4.5 billion, estimates the Australian Treasury (which in October 2019 sought submissions on reform options including a general safety provision). This assumes a “value of a statistical life year” of about A$200,000 for premature deaths and disability. There are also A$500 million in direct hospital costs, and further costs associated with minor injuries and property loss.

Read more: Australian consumer law is failing beer drinkers

Australia is lagging behind other nations

My own research (and submission to the Treasury) provide evidence supporting a general safety provision.

First, the OECD Global Recalls portal (which tracks product recalls around the world) shows Australia had higher per capita voluntary recalls than Korea, Britain, Japan and the US between 2017 and 2019. Canada’s recall rate was similar, but it has a more stringent duty on suppliers to report product accidents to regulators compared with Australia.

This suggests relatively more unsafe products are making it to market in Australia. About 40% of those recalls involve child products, of which around 60% come from China.

Second, the number of annual recalls has been rising in Australia, as shown by figures compiled by peak advocacy group Choice from government data. The increase from about 2011 is in line with burgeoning online shopping. Greater e-commerce due to the COVID-19 pandemic may add to the numbers.

Further analysis by Catherine Niven and colleagues shows recalls of children’s products increased 88% from 2011 to 2017 (other recalls decreased by 21%). Just as alarmingly, almost two-thirds of the recalls involved products not complying with specific mandatory standards (also demonstrated by two recent recalls pictured above).

Time to put safety first

Regulators could seek to sanction local suppliers more for such non-compliance with existing law.

But introducing a broader general safety provision would create a paradigm shift in how companies deal with safety.

Manufacturers, distributors and retailers would need to think more carefully about (and document) safety assessments before putting products into circulation.

This is more efficient and safer than releasing products and then trying to recall them after problems start to be reported, hoping not too many consumers get harmed. It would also encourage businesses to “trade up” to the standards expected in many of our trading partners.

Choice has confirmed many Australians wrongly assume we already have a general safety provision.

It’s time to improve the law to avoid confusion and send better signals to suppliers.

– ref. Rather than recalling unsafe products, why not ensure they’re safe in the first place? – https://theconversation.com/rather-than-recalling-unsafe-products-why-not-ensure-theyre-safe-in-the-first-place-146988

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bruce Mountain, Director, Victoria Energy Policy Centre, Victoria University

It’s now beyond dispute that — for new electricity generation — solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy are cheaper than anything else: cheaper than new coal fired power stations, cheaper than new gas-fired stations and cheaper than new nuclear power plants.

The International Energy Association says so. Its latest World Energy Outlook describes solar as the cheapest electricity in history.

Solar costs 20% to 50% less than it thought it would two years ago.

Attention has turned instead to the ways to best meet demand when renewable resources are not available.

The government is a big supporter of gas, and as importantly, pumped hydro.

It has backed the $6 billion-plus Snowy Hydro 2.0 pumped hydro project (the world’s biggest) and Tasmania’s proposed $7 billion “battery of the nation”.

Pumped hydro is an old technology, as old as the electricity industry itself.

Pumped hydro is old technology

It became fashionable from the 1960s to 1980s as a complement to inflexible coal and nuclear generators.

When their output wasn’t needed (mainly at night) it was used to pump water to higher ground so that it could be released and used to run hydro generators when demand was high.

Australia’s three pumped hydro plants are old, built at least 40 years ago, and they operate infrequently, and sometimes not at all for years.

Read more: Snowy 2.0 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing – it will push carbon emissions up, not down

Gas fired electricity generation, whether by turbines (essentially a bigger version of those found on aeroplanes) or by conventional reciprocating engines, has several advantages over pumped hydro including much smaller local environmental impacts and in many cases smaller greenhouse gas impacts.

They can be built quickly and, most importantly, if there is a gas supply they can be built close to electrical loads. There are 17 gas-fired peaking generators in the National Electricity Market, but none have been built over the past decade.

Batteries are cheaper

Batteries have advantages over both.

In 2017, Australia built the world’s biggest battery, but it since been overtaken by a Californian battery more than twice its size and may soon be overtaken by one 150 times the size as part of the Sun Cable project in the Northern Territory which will send solar and stored electricity to Singapore.

In a study commissioned by the Bob Brown Foundation, we have compared the pumped hydro “battery of the nation” project to actual batteries and to gas turbines.

The battery of the nation (BoTN) is a proposal instigated by the Australian and Tasmanian governments to add more pumped hydro to Tasmania’s hydro power system and used enhanced interconnectors to provide electricity on demand to Victoria.

We sought to determine what could most cost-effectively provide Victoria with 1,500 megawatts — the BoTN, gas turbines or batteries.

Partly this depends on how long peak demand for dispatchable power last. BoTN would be able to provide sustained power for 12 hours, but we found that in practice, even when our system becomes much more reliant on renewables, it would be unusual for anything longer than four hours to be needed.

Less than half the cost

We could easily dismiss gas turbines — the Australian Energy Market Operator’s costings have batteries much cheaper than gas turbines to build and operate now and cheaper still by the time the Battery of the Nation would be built.

And batteries are able to respond to instructions in fractions of a second, making them useful in ways gas and pumped hydro aren’t.

They are also able to be placed where they are needed, rather than where there’s a gas connection or an abandoned mine, cliff or hill big enough to be used for pumped hydro.

Read more: NSW has approved Snowy 2.0. Here are six reasons why that’s a bad move

We found batteries could supply 1,500 megawatts of instantly-available power for less than half of the cost of the enhanced Tasmania to Victoria cable alone, meaning that even if the rest of the BoTN cost little, batteries would still be cheaper.

Pumped hydro projects are being pulled

Origin Energy recently gave up on expanding the Shoalhaven pumped hydro scheme in NSW after finding it would cost more than twice as much to build as first thought.

Similarly, investor-owned Genex has repeatedly deferred its final investment decision on one of the cheapest pumped hydro options in Australia — using depleted gold mine pits in Queensland — despite being offered concessional loans from the Australian Government to cover the entire build cost.

Read more: Snowy 2.0 threatens to pollute our rivers and wipe out native fish

The final barrier seems to be obtaining subsidies from the Queensland Government to fund the necessary transmission lines.

Snowy 2.0 is proceeding, for now

Snowy 2.0 seems to be proceeding after the Australian Government pumped in $1.4 billion to get it going, and paid a king’s ransom to New South Wales and Victoria for their shares in Snowy Hydro.

Yet even before the main works are to start, credit rating agency S&P has down-graded Snowy Hydro’s stand-alone debt to “junk” and suggested the government will need to pump more money into Snowy Hydro to protect its debt.

Prime Minister Morrison has said recently that batteries can’t compete with gas generators , yet a couple of days later, his government announced support for a 100 megawatt battery in Western Australia, where gas is less than half the price it is on the east coast.

Read more: Enough ambition (and hydrogen) could get Australia to 200% renewable energy

Our analysis suggests neither gas nor pumped hydro can compete with batteries, and if the prime minister wants more of either, he will have to dip his hands deeply into tax payer’s pockets to get it.

– ref. Pumped hydro isn’t our energy future, it’s our past – https://theconversation.com/pumped-hydro-isnt-our-energy-future-its-our-past-146989

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

The Morrison government has made its first appointments to the High Court. In doing so it has gone for continuity, both in terms of geography and gender.

The news Justices Jacqueline Gleeson and Simon Steward will be Australia’s next High Court judges follows months of speculation.

With the upcoming retirements of Justices Virginia Bell and Geoffrey Nettle — as they reach the constitutionally prescribed retirement age of 70 — two vacancies had opened up on the High Court bench.

Read more: Two High Court of Australia judges will be named soon – unlike Amy Coney Barrett, we know nothing about them

Although it might be true that many Australians outside of the legal profession do not know who their judges are, as Bell observed in 2017, this lack of celebrity status certainly does not diminish the significance of these appointments.

As the highest court in Australia’s judicial hierarchy, the High Court makes decisions with the potential to shape the nation, including challenges to the constitutional validity of laws.

Who are the new judges?

Steward, 51, is from Melbourne and will join the court in December to replace Nettle (who is also a Victorian). He was appointed to the Federal Court in 2018, with speciality areas in tax and administrative law.

Gleeson, 54, is from Sydney, and will join the court in March 2021 to replace Bell (who is also from NSW). She was appointed to the Federal Court in 2014, with Attorney-General Christian Porter noting her “diverse legal career at the bar and as a solicitor”.

As Porter also pointed out, Gleeson’s appointment represents a first in the common law world, as she is the daughter of former High Court Chief Justice, Murray Gleeson.

Announcing the news in Canberra on Wednesday, Porter said cabinet was “incredibly confident” Gleeson and Steward would,

make very useful additions to the High Court bench, they are outstanding judges, they have been outstanding barristers, they are outstanding members of the legal and broader Australian community.

Both names floated beforehand

These appointees were not entirely unexpected.

Both new judges names’ were floated as possible contenders. However, it is fair to say Steward’s name appeared more frequently, perhaps bolstered by his conservative credentials as a so called “black-letter” lawyer, who has a more literal interpretation of the law.

Gleeson is not a huge surprise either, given her wide-ranging background, with expertise in administrative law, competition and consumer law, professional liability and tax law.

The government has, as predicted gone for a like-for-like appointment both in terms of gender and state of origin. This means three out of the seven justices are women.

The assumption the new judges would be from NSW and Victoria gives us some insight into the significance of the state balance (and the taken-for-granted dominance of Sydney and Melbourne). This dominance has not been without debate. For example, the fact that no South Australian has ever been appointed to the court has been the subject of increasing criticism.

Until now, the gender dynamics on the High Court have been carefully crafted. No woman had ever replaced another woman — lest anyone get the idea there are seats reserved for women. Moreover, decision-makers have usually been insistent gender is not taken into account (while “merit” is).

Perhaps one surprise is that both new justices have been appointed from the Federal Court. It was assumed with Bell’s retirement at least one of the new judges would be an expert in criminal law (and be appointed from a state Supreme Court).

It means the High Court will be dominated by former Federal Court judges, with all justices other than Stephen Gageler elevated from the Federal Court.

What does this mean for the High Court?

None of this means appointment decisions are devoid of political dimensions — either about the specific composition of the court, or about a particular appointee’s views about the Commonwealth’s legislative power.

As constitutional law expert Professor Anne Twomey remarked in 2007:

A government may appoint a judge for a range of reasons, including adding some form of balance to the Court (state, sex or expertise in a particular area of law in which the Court is lacking) or because a judge is the leading jurist of their generation, or simply because a person is an uncontroversial compromise when views are polarised in relation to other candidates.

Inevitably, questions will be raised about what kind of judges the new appointees will be.

They join a court, where Chief Justice Susan Kiefel has promoted a collegial approach to judgment writing. Will Steward and Gleeson embrace this culture?

The appointment of the sixth woman (and the 49th man) suggests some inroads have been made to ensuring the court reflects the society from which it is drawn. But more can be done.

Yet, with no formal recognition of the importance of diversity in appointments, or any transparency in terms of the process of appointment, any progress remains at the whim of the government of the day.

Read more: No selection criteria, no transparency. Australia must reform the way it appoints judges

For Gleeson and Steward, their appointments represent a significant personal achievement. What impact they will have on the High Court remains to be seen, but there is no doubt they have the capacity to shape the court’s decisions into the future.

Given their respective ages, they will certainly have time to make their mark.

– ref. Meet Australia’s new High Court judges: a legal scholar’s take on the Morrison government’s appointees – https://theconversation.com/meet-australias-new-high-court-judges-a-legal-scholars-take-on-the-morrison-governments-appointees-148982

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Cothren, PhD Candidate, Flinders University

It’s January 20th, 2021. Inauguration day. A triumphant Joe Biden salutes the National Mall crowd (way bigger than the last guy’s) and dedicates his victory to Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Borat, the satirical mastermind who delivered the knock-out blow to Trumpism.

Not.

Released on Amazon Prime Video in the shadow of the looming U.S. election, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is a wet firecracker of an October Surprise.

Cohen reprises his role of the smiley, Jew-hating journalist from Kazakhstan, a real country no American ever seems to have heard of. His latest mission: bribe someone close to Trump with the gift of his 15-year-old daughter (played by brilliant newcomer Maria Bakalova).

Given the rampant corruption of Trump’s inner circle, as well as Cohen’s well-honed prankster chops, many anticipated this could hammer another nail in the orange one’s coffin. Even Cohen himself seemed hopeful that satire could save the Republic.

Most hopes are pinned on a compromising scene involving Rudy Giuliani and Bakalova, with the former posing as a giggly reporter whose interview transitions into a bedside fondle.

It is undeniably disturbing to watch Giuliani get handsy with both Bakalova’s backside and his own crum. However it’s hard to believe that those mythical undecided voters will give a hoot. Like his boss, Giulani has simply denied everything and moved on.

Otherwise, the closest the movie gets to laying a glove on anyone currently in power comes during a scene shot at the Conservative Political Action Conference last February.

Dressed in a “McDonald Trump” fat suit, Cohen/Borat huffs towards the stage where Mike Pence is giving a speech, only to be quickly and efficiently ejected. Frankly, the fly did more damage.

There’s plenty of satire of the kicking down variety, and the film is successful at getting everyday Americans to either voice or condone horrific prejudice on camera. These cringy interactions lit up the first (and still pretty funny!) Borat made in 2006.

Read more: Sacha Baron Cohen: is he wrong to make fools of the unwitting?

But conservatism was more civil back then. Its face was the daftly likable George W. Bush, whose let’s-grab-a-beer appeal masked the atrocities of his administration.

It was therefore genuinely chilling to watch Cohen lift the log on that era’s patriotic rah-rah and reveal the squirming xenophobia underneath. The movie mostly lives on through its catchphrases — MAH WIFE, VERY NICE, WAWAWEEWA – but it was pointed and prophetic satire.

We’ve got reality TV

That was then, however, and this is now. It’s 2020 and we’ve had reality TV for decades: are we really shocked by scenes of a baker happily piping an antisemitic message onto a birthday cake, or by a hardware salesman high-fiving about Mexicans in cages?

If you wanted to hear strangers go on and on about how Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of tortured children, you could, until recently, just log in to Facebook.

Cohen is clearly a deadpan master at getting people to expose themselves, but that tactic is ineffective when people are already being rewarded for shouting their worst impulses into a bullhorn. Those disgusting frat boys from the first film? They’re probably Congressmen by now.

There are plenty of reasons to want Trump out, and one is it might just make satire great again. Conservative internet warriors like to joke about TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), an ailment that leaves opponents of the president convulsing at the sight of a Cheeto. It’s mostly internet banter, but when it comes to satire, there’s a kernel of truth to it.

A enormous black (orange?) hole

These past four years, the Donald has been an enormous black (orange?) hole sucking up all the satiric energy with his shamelessness. Has this endless barrage produced any effect at all? Maybe. But it’s certainly been responsible for some forgettable art.

Read more: Friday essay: has Donald Trump broken satire?

From Alec Baldwin’s excruciating just-sucked-a-lemon pucker to whatever the hell that Stephen Colbert cartoon was, satire is just as worn out (and strung out) as the rest of us right now.

You can’t blame the satirists for trying. Trump is a plump blimp of a target, and it always feels like he’s one clever joke away from going full Hindenburg. The fact that he’s still afloat has led to many declaring satire’s death.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm won’t be the Jeff Bezos-backed David that slays Goliath. The film does manage to skewer some targets beyond the White House, though. Case in point: the creepy misogyny Bakalova’s naïve waif elicits everywhere she goes.

Whereas most of the “gotcha” comedy and rehashed #TheResistence jokes fall flat, we almost vomited during a scene in which an elderly plastic surgeon tells Bakalova he would love to “sex attack” her. Elsewhere, a Georgian gentleman coolly appraises her at a debutante ball before deciding she’s worth $500.

These scenes rekindle the laugh-then-wince energy that fuelled the first Borat film. If the new movie lasts beyond the current electoral vortex, it may be the feminist satire that carries it. It’s also a reminder that the country won’t suddenly become paradise in a Biden/Harris world. Removing one pussy-grabber does not a summer make.

When satirists as talented as Cohen feel they can move on from Trump, some fresh wind will hopefully blow through the genre. The gotcha trope has been a stale for four years, but satire isn’t dead yet. It might even win Texas.

Not.

– ref. Borat’s wet firecracker of an October surprise won’t hurt Trump but succeeds as feminist satire – https://theconversation.com/borats-wet-firecracker-of-an-october-surprise-wont-hurt-trump-but-succeeds-as-feminist-satire-148811

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thea van de Mortel, Professor, Nursing and Deputy Head (Learning & Teaching), School of Nursing and Midwifery, Griffith University

In some Australian states, kids have been back on slides, swings and monkey bars for months. But in Victoria, many families are only now getting back to playgrounds, after they were closed for much of the second lockdown.

With lots of kids running around, and parents looking on, how can you ensure your trip to the playground is COVID-safe for you, your children and others?

A good place to start is to understand how COVID-19 spreads, and what you can do to interrupt it.

Droplets big and small

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the main way SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) spreads is by droplet transmission.

Droplets containing virus particles are released from the mouth or nose when someone who is infectious coughs, sneezes, laughs, talks or even breathes. The more vigorous the activity, the greater the volume of droplets and spread (so, for example, laughing releases more droplets than breathing).

Larger droplets fall to the ground relatively quickly and within a short distance of where they were released. But you can inhale them if you’re standing close to an infected person.

Smaller droplets, or aerosols, can travel further and hang around for longer in the air. Scientists are still working to understand the importance of this form of transmission — commonly termed airborne transmission — in the spread of COVID-19.

Another possible route of transmission is contact with contaminated surfaces. This happens when infectious droplets fall onto surfaces, or contaminated hands touch surfaces. If an uninfected person touches the contaminated surface and then touches their face or food, they may ingest virus particles and become infected.

A recent laboratory study found SARS-CoV-2 particles can remain both detectable and viable (able to cause infection) on surfaces for many days, particularly if the surfaces are smooth, such as metal or plastic. As with airborne transmission, scientists are still figuring out how common this mode of transmission is for COVID-19.

Read more: That public playground is good for your kids and your wallet

Playgrounds are outdoors, so that’s a plus

The good news about playgrounds is they’re generally outdoors in parks. The risk of inhaling infectious droplets is reduced because the large volume of air has a dilution effect, compared with being in a confined space indoors with other people. Outdoor breezes can also disperse particles.

The temperature also appears to influence the risk. Warmer temperatures have been shown to reduce the viability of SARS-CoV-2 more quickly than cooler temperatures, while sunlight may also help inactivate the virus. In Australia, of course, we’re now heading into the warmer and sunnier summer period.

On the other side of the coin, public playground equipment may not be cleaned regularly. So there could be some risk of transmission via contaminated surfaces.

And while warmer weather and particularly being outdoors may protect us to a degree, as with anything during the pandemic, a small level of risk remains.

Read more: ‘Stupid coronavirus!’ In uncertain times, we can help children through mindfulness and play

10 tips to stay COVID-safe at the playground

1. Check the restrictions and requirements in your state around mask wearing, how far you can travel, and the number of people permitted in a space before heading to a playground.

2. Don’t go to the playground if you or your child is sick or has any COVID-19 symptoms (fever, cough, sniffles, upset tummy).

3. Keep your distance (at least 1.5 metres) from anyone not in your household. While it’s tempting to socialise with other parents, avoid congregating closely with others.

4. Take disinfectant wipes or wet wipes with you and wipe down areas little hands frequently touch (such as swing chains) before your kids use the equipment, particularly if they’re too young to understand instructions.

5. Take hand sanitiser with you (minimum 60% alcohol). Ensure your children sanitise their hands before getting on the equipment, after playing, before eating and before leaving the playground. Supervise young children when they use alcohol-based hand sanitiser. Parents should regularly sanitise too.

6. Avoid using shared taps or water fountains; instead, bring bottled drinks. Frequently touched surfaces such as taps are more likely to be contaminated.

7. Remind children to avoid touching their face while using the play equipment.

8. Avoid physical contact between your kids and other kids in the area.

9. Avoid sharing toys with other children. If you bring toys, make sure they’re washable.

10. Use the playground outside of peak use periods to reduce the amount of contact with others.

While younger children may not understand or follow instructions well about keeping away from other children or touching their face, fortunately, they appear to have a lower risk of being diagnosed with COVID-19, and of developing severe disease if they are infected.

The focus with young children should be on frequent hand hygiene and preventing physical contact with non-family members as much as possible.

With little COVID-19 transmission in Australia now, and most playgrounds being outdoors, a trip to the playground is fairly low-risk, and we know physical activity carries many benefits for children and adults alike. But we can all do our part to minimise any risk of transmission.

– ref. Heading back to the playground? 10 tips to keep your family and others COVID-safe – https://theconversation.com/heading-back-to-the-playground-10-tips-to-keep-your-family-and-others-covid-safe-148620

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thalia Anthony, Professor of Law, University of Technology Sydney

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.

The Northern Territory court decision this week to commit Police Constable Zachary Rolfe to stand trial for the shooting death of 19-year-old Warlpiri man Kumanjayi Walker marks a historic moment in accountability for First Nations deaths in custody.

It is the first time a police officer will face a murder trial in a First Nations death in custody case in the Northern Territory in modern history.

The decision was handed down months after another policeman was charged with murder in the shooting death of an Indigenous woman in Western Australia. He has pleaded not guilty and is expected to face trial next year.

The cases are moving ahead amid a global reckoning on police and prison violence as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has focused new attention on First Nations families fighting for justice for the deaths of their loved ones.

Read more: Why the Black Lives Matter protests must continue: an urgent appeal by Marcia Langton

Circumstances of Walker’s death

Late on the evening of November 9 2019, five police officers entered Walker’s family home in Yuendumu, central Australia, to try to arrest him. This set in motion the events that led to Rolfe firing the three shots that killed the teenager.

Murder charges were laid against Rolfe days later, and bail was granted the same day.

The NT Criminal Lawyers Association described the granting of bail over the phone for a serious homicide as “very unusual in the extreme”. It also raised concerns among Yuendumu elders that justice was being compromised in Walker’s death.

The freedom that Rolfe enjoys on bail contrasts with the high remand rates for First Nations people (85%) in the NT.

Rolfe has also been stood down from the police force while on bail, but is still receiving pay.

Sufficient evidence to stand trial

Before a trial for a serious crime can proceed to the NT Supreme Court, the local court must determine whether the prosecution’s evidence is “sufficient to put the defendant on trial”. This occurs through a committal hearing.

Rolfe’s three-day committal occurred in early September in Alice Springs. His lawyer made a “no-case submission” that the charges be dropped on the grounds of self-defence.

This week, the presiding local court judge, John Birch, determined there was sufficient evidence for Rolfe to stand trial.

Birch indicated the case will proceed in Alice Springs next year unless an application is accepted by the court to move the trial to Darwin.

434 deaths in custody since 1991

There have been at least 434 First Nations deaths in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its final report in 1991.

The commission followed years of community outrage and protests over mounting Aboriginal deaths in custody. It put forward 339 recommendations that called for the use of arrest and imprisonment as a last resort, safer police and prison practices, independent investigations into deaths in custody and Aboriginal self-determination.

Yet, First Nations deaths in custody have continued in violent, reckless and negligent circumstances, reflecting the failure of governments to implement and enforce the recommendations.

Gomeroi scholar Alison Whittaker has argued colonial violence in custody has been institutionalised through the lack of accountability in First Nations death in custody cases.

Read more: Despite 432 Indigenous deaths in custody since 1991, no one has ever been convicted. Racist silence and complicity are to blame

This lack of accountability is pronounced in the NT, where deaths in custody and police violence rarely proceed to charges or prosecutions.

The 2002 killing of 18-year-old Robert Jongmin by Senior Constable Robert Whittington resulted in murder, then manslaughter, charges being brought against the officer, which were eventually dropped.

The constable was then charged with the downgraded offence of “dangerous act causing death”, which was quashed by the NT Supreme Court on statutory grounds in 2006.

Trials against police in other states

Outside the NT, two well-publicised manslaughter trials in First Nations deaths in custody cases have resulted in not guilty verdicts.

The first was in the trial of four police officers and a police aide for the the death of 16-year-old Yindjibarndi man John Pat in Rosebourne police lock-up (Western Australia) in 1983. The second was Senior Constable Chris Hurley for the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee in Palm Island watch house (Queensland) in 2004.

The empanelment of all-white juries to try the officers in both cases has been questioned by justice advocates. The Royal Commission asked in 1991 in relation to Pat’s death,

How does it come about in the Pilbara that a very important trial was conducted before a jury without Aboriginal representation, given the number of Aboriginal people in that region?

Another perceived factor behind the not guilty outcome in the Doomadgee case was the campaign run by the Queensland Police Union in support of Hurley. The defence of Hurley and his characterisation as a victim — demonstrated at police rallies and on wrist bands — received widespread media attention.

The Police Federation of Australia and NT Police Association have similarly defended the legitimacy of Rolfe’s actions in Walker’s death.

Accountability and justice

From the outset, Warlpiri people in Yuendumu have been strident in their demands for justice for Walker and protections from ongoing police violence. They have also called for police there to be disarmed.

Yuendumu Elder Harry Jakamarra Nelson deplored the recent $7 million spent on the local police station. He also implicated the lasting effects of the Northern Territory Intervention in the oppression of First Nations people by taking power out of the hands of locals.

This policy has contributed to the mass imprisonment of Indigenous people in the NT — described by many as a “gulag” — and the allegations of systemic racism in NT police practices.

Read more: Instead of demonising Black Lives Matter protesters, leaders must act on their calls for racial justice

Yuendumu community members, nonetheless, recognise they have made history as a result of the murder trial.

Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves, a senior Warlpiri man and chairperson of the Warlpiri Parumpurru [Justice] Committee, said the case provides the community with “relief”.

Meanwhile, other families continue their fight for justice. This week, the NSW coroner is hearing arguments about whether a corrective services officer who shot and killed Wiradjuri man Dwayne Johnstone as he tried to escape should be referred for prosecution. Like Walker, Johnstone was killed by an officer who fired three shots at him.

A coronial inquiry is also investigating the death of Anaiwan man Nathan Reynolds from an untreated asthma attack at a Sydney prison in 2018.

And the NSW Parliament has commenced hearings in an inquiry into the high rate of Aboriginal incarceration.

Walker’s cousin, Samara Fernandez, raised concerns earlier this year about the unequal application of the law and the lack of procedural fairness for First Nations people. She said,

You’d think it’s common sense to have a system that works equally for all populations … we want the system to be reinvented in a way that doesn’t have those stereotypes towards our people.

The dignity of procedural fairness and impartiality is the minimum First Nations families should expect when their loved one is taken by the law enforcement system.

– ref. Kumanjayi Walker murder trial will be a first in NT for an Indigenous death in custody. Why has it taken so long? – https://theconversation.com/kumanjayi-walker-murder-trial-will-be-a-first-in-nt-for-an-indigenous-death-in-custody-why-has-it-taken-so-long-148922

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo Caust, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow (Hon), School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

There was a time when artists imagined and planned work for 2020. For some, years had gone into the planning. But, as we know, everything scheduled from the middle of March had to be cancelled. Some events may be scheduled again at another time; many will no longer happen.

A group of artists have put together a map of the abandoned artistic projects for 2020. Conceived by artist Anna Tregloan and named The Impossible Project, it is a treasury of lost work and a time capsule of what we missed out on this year due to the pandemic.

There are already over 150 shows and events listed. More projects are being added all the time.

The Impossible Project captures the enormous range of work by Australian artists that could have happened in every Australian city, in regional areas and overseas.

We see the breadth and depth of artistic activity across the country; the loss for audiences, artists, and communities. Select a title, and you see the artists involved, the venue, the dates, the expected audience numbers.

It is a sobering experience.

Those that will never be…

There is a re-imagined production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (projected audience: 5,000+), to be directed by Australian theatremaker Anne-Lousie Sarks in Basel, Switzerland. In planning since 2018, involving performers from countries across the world, the play was cancelled five days before its March premiere.

Patricia Cornelius’s Do Not Go Gentle… (projected audience: 8,000) was to be directed by Susie Dee in July at the Malthouse in Melbourne.

The play focuses on the experience of people in an aged care home; Shane Bourne was cast in the lead role. Given the experience of this year, the setting could not be more relevant. The play was presented in one sell-out season in 2009 – this 2020 production was more than 10 years in the making.

River Crossing (projected audience: 4,000) was to be a large-scale outdoor performance, where First Nations’ performer Con Colleano – an internationally famous tightrope walker – would cross the Wilson River in Lismore on a high-wire in August. SeedArts Australia has been planning the project since 2018.

The all-female Belloo Creative was the resident theatre company at Queensland Theatre for 2019-20. To premiere in 2020, Katherine Lyall-Watson wrote a re-imagined Phaedra (projected audience: 7,140). The play was set in the future, with war taking place between a seceded Queensland and the rest of the country – another strangely pertinent theme.

Matt Whittet’s new play Kindness (projected audience: 3,500) was to be directed by Lee Lewis at the Griffin Theatre. This loss feels particularly poignant, as the play looked at the experiences of community kindness – kindness we have all witnessed in 2020.

Whittet says he hopes it is only on hold:

Nothing is certain in the world at the moment, which means there’s no promises but always hope.

… and those that found a new life

The Impossible Project also finds silver linings.

Sydney performance and visual artist Rakini Devi had planned a project with Melbourne video artist Karl Ockelford. With border closures, they were unable to work together.

Instead, Devi developed a solo project examining the position of women from the Indian diaspora who experience violence, being “lockdowned” and various forms of misogyny.

Melbourne musical theatre company Watch This specialises in the work of Stephen Sondheim. It had planned an exhibition of design and creative work for shows spanning seven years of the company’s productions.

Scheduled to start in March at Northcote Town Hall, the exhibition was cancelled six days before opening. But the company was able to re-mount it as a digital documentary series, The Art of Making Art. Through this, Watch This has been able to expand its audience, with the series selected for Canada’s Social Distancing Festival.

Further loss

The Impossible Project documents shows that were meant to appear at the Sydney Opera House, Griffin Theatre, the Riverside Theatre and the Ensemble in Sydney; at Malthouse, the Recital Centre, the Arts Centre and Arts House in Melbourne; at La Boite, QPAC and Queensland Theatre in Brisbane.

There are touring shows scheduled for cities and regional centres. There are festivals – all now cancelled.

We have lost the audiences who haven’t been able to see work in a live venue; the time artists spent developing a new work, only to see it cancelled with no commitment to return; we will, inevitably, lose artists who will give up on the increasingly precarious dream of a creative life.

When we talk about the impact of this year on the arts sector, we often focus on the economic losses. In April, the Grattan Institute estimated up to 75% of people employed in the creative and performing arts could lose their jobs. By May, I Lost My Gig had recorded the loss of income for Australian artists of more than A$340 million.

Shows began being cancelled in March. The Federal Government didn’t announce a support package until June. Last week it was revealed none of the $250 million package has been allocated (bar $48 million allowing Screen Australia to underwrite the insurance of films in production, which does not represent money spent).

Without support, more work will be lost.

Read more: Too little, too late, too confusing? The funding criteria for the arts COVID package is a mess

It is a mystery why the government does not take the cultural sector seriously, or value the arts, or see how it contributes to our society.

We are seeing the arts and humanities removed from our universities, artists left out in the cold during this terrible time, and no indication of a way forward.

This is a loss to Australia on a grand scale. The list of cancelled work in The Impossible Project is not one we want to see continue — but it is inevitable the list will grow.

– ref. A litany of losses: a new project maps our abandoned arts events of 2020 – https://theconversation.com/a-litany-of-losses-a-new-project-maps-our-abandoned-arts-events-of-2020-148716

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Hocking, Emeritus Professor, Monash University

This is an edited extract from The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam by Jenny Hocking.

It was cold, mid-winter in Canberra, when I returned to the National Archives in mid-2019 searching for more documents, scouring through the accession records for Sir John Kerr’s papers, where, I told myself, even the most obscure files might turn up something important, something I had never imagined.

And then, quite suddenly, one of them did.

As I waited for the High Court to consider my application for special leave, a file containing letters between Kerr and the queen’s private secretary after Kerr had left office landed in my inbox.

I had requested this file, with the arresting title “Buckingham Palace”, eight years earlier, after which it had disappeared into the archival limbo of “withheld pending advice”.

It suddenly reappeared in a “decision on access” email, with no explanation for the eight-year delay, with its cache of letters providing a jaw-dropping account of royal intervention in Kerr’s autobiography, Matters for Judgment, which was soon to be released.

The supportive exchanges between Kerr, Prince Charles and the queen and [her private secretary, Sir Martin] Charteris, which had been so welcome before the dismissal, soon became a major concern for the palace, which feared losing control of both the increasingly erratic Kerr and their letters.

As the outcry over the dismissal showed no sign of abating even a year later, including demonstrations and angry placards, and paint thrown at the vice-regal Rolls-Royce, pressure was building on Kerr to resign.

Under siege, he began to agitate for the release of the palace letters, which he felt would bolster support for his actions. This began with careless comments about the letters and “the attitude of the Palace” at the time of the dismissal to friends and colleagues.

Word of Kerr’s indiscretion, his boasting of the queen’s approval of “the way that I am going about things”, soon reached the palace itself, to great alarm. It grew to a crescendo soon after Kerr’s resignation as governor-general took effect in December 1977, with his visit to the queen’s new private secretary, Sir Philip Moore, to plead his case for the release of the letters.

Kerr was intent on using the letters to garner support for his action in dismissing Whitlam if he possibly could – and what better place to do it than in his autobiography, which he was finalising in self-imposed exile in England? His book was being eagerly, and in some quarters nervously, awaited, since Kerr was loudly proclaiming that he would now report “the facts of the happenings of 1975 […] in the interests of truth”.

With publication looming, and with it the prospect that Kerr might reveal their secret discussions, the queen’s private secretary contacted Kerr directly and asked for a copy of his draft manuscript.

“Buckingham Palace has evinced an interest in the manuscript and all parts of it which touch directly upon the Queen’s position and the Palace’s position will need to be thought about,” Kerr wrote to his lawyers in Sydney. Kerr dutifully sent his manuscript to the queen’s private secretary, and it was soon “in safe keeping now at Buckingham Palace”.

“It will make fascinating reading,” Moore assured him, “I will get into [sic] touch with you again as soon as I have finished it.”

Moore’s brief comment on the book arrived three weeks later, and if you thought the historical dissembling about the dismissal must eventually reach a natural end, think again.

The queen’s private secretary thanked Kerr for excising any references to his discussions with Charteris about “the controversy”:

I am grateful to you for being so scrupulous in omitting any reference to the informal exchanges which you had with Martin Charteris. I know that you have throughout been anxious to keep The Queen out of the controversy and I much appreciate the way in which you have achieved this in the book.

Which shows Kerr to be as unreliable in print as he was in office.

Kerr could scarcely hide his delight at this royal approbation of his expurgated history:

I did my very best of course to omit any reference to the exchanges between Martin Charteris and myself. It is particularly gratifying to me to know that the result is satisfactory.

These letters not only confirm Kerr was in contact with Charteris regarding the dismissal, but they also reveal that the palace and Kerr then agreed to keep these “exchanges” hidden by omitting any mention of them in Kerr’s “autobiography”.

Matters for Judgment duly contained no mention of his “informal exchanges” with Charteris, nor any details of Charteris’s “illuminating observations” and “advice to me on dismissal” that Kerr had noted in his journal.

Despite Kerr’s claims his book would present “the truth” and “facts” about the events of November 1975, it was a tawdry exercise in historical distortion by omission – a royal whitewash of history.

Most shocking in this latest revelation of ongoing royal intrigue was the clear example it provided of the mechanism through which the secrecy that drove the dismissal – the collusion of Kerr with others, and his deception of the prime minister – continued in the construction of its history. It shows the involvement of the palace in the construction of a flawed and filtered history about one of the most contentious episodes in Australia’s history.

It was a shameful episode in that shared history, the details of which were still emerging.

Read more: ‘Palace letters’ reveal the palace’s fingerprints on the dismissal of the Whitlam government

– ref. Book extract – The Palace Letters: the Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam – https://theconversation.com/book-extract-the-palace-letters-the-queen-the-governor-general-and-the-plot-to-dismiss-gough-whitlam-148439

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sergio Macklin, Deputy Lead of Education Policy, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

Children from disadvantaged backgrounds, very remote areas, and Indigenous Australians are up to two times more likely to start school developmentally vulnerable than the national average.

In 2018, 21.7% of Australian five year olds (70,308 children) were not developmentally ready when they started school. And in Year 7, nearly 25% of students (72,419) didn’t have the required numeracy and literacy skills.

Our report, Educational Opportunity in Australia 2020, is the first to examine Australia’s performance against the goals set out in the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Declaration, a national statement agreed to by Australian education ministers in 2019.

The statement aims for a quality education system for all young people, that supports them to be creative and confident individuals, successful learners and active and informed members of the community.

But our report finds students’ location and family circumstances continue to play a strong role in determining outcomes from school entry to adulthood.

While this crisis in educational inequality isn’t new, it’s likely to get a lot worse, as COVID-19 increases levels of student vulnerability and remote learning widens gaps in achievement.

Disadvantaged children missing out as school progresses

The Alice Springs declaration sets two ambitious goals:

• the Australian education system promotes excellence and equity. In part, this is about ensuring all young Australians have access to high-quality education, inclusive and free from any form of discrimination

• all young Australians become confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners, and active and informed members of the community. This includes all children having a sense of self-worth, self-awareness and personal identity that enables them to manage their emotional, mental, cultural, spiritual and physical well-being.

The declaration was signed last year, and builds on previous ones signed in Hobart, Adelaide and Melbourne over three decades. It recognises the role education plays in preparing young people to contribute meaningfully to social, economic and cultural life.

Read more: The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians: what it is and why it needs updating

Our report uses the best available data to paint a comprehensive picture of Australia’s performance against the above important goals.

It shows the gap in academic learning as well as other key areas, such as creativity and confidence, is clear from school entry and usually grows over time.

Analysis in our report tracked students’ learning from when they started school in 2009 to when they were in Year 5 in 2014. It showed that in literacy and numeracy for instance, the gap between the proportion of children from the most disadvantaged and advantaged families meeting relevant standards grew from 20.6 percentage points at school entry to 27.2 percentage points in Year 5.

The report also shows too many students in the senior years of school are not developing key skills. In 2018, 27.8% of 15 year olds (88,314) didn’t meet or exceed the international benchmark standards in maths, reading and science.

While some students receive the support they need to catch up to their peers, many don’t.

A lot of young people are also not developing the qualities needed to confidently adapt to challenges in adulthood and contribute to their communities.

The report shows that in 2017, 28.1% (110,410) of 23 year olds were not confident in themselves or the future and 29.9% were not adaptable to change and open to new ideas. It shows 38.1% (145,056) of 23 year olds were not actively engaged in their community and 33.2% were not keeping informed about current affairs.

Additionally, many young Australians are not being well prepared and supported to find and secure meaningful employment. Overall, according to the 2016 census, nearly 30% of 24 year olds (112,695) weren’t in full-time education, training or work.

Around half of all 24 year old Indigenous Australians, and one in three of the most disadvantaged Australians, were not engaged in any work or education, compared to 15% nationally.

This failure to address educational inequality reproduces and amplifies existing poverty across generations. It saps productivity, undermines social cohesion and costs governments and communities billions of dollars.

On an individual level, it hampers young people’s search for secure employment and is connected to poorer health and lower quality of life.

What should we do?

There are no quick ways to fix educational inequality, but there are several key improvements that will make a difference.

Closing gaps in participation and lifting the quality of early childhood education services — particularly in disadvantaged communities where services tend to be lower quality — should be one of our highest priorities. Early childhood education is critical to giving every child the best possible start. Evidence shows preschool raises children’s chances of being developmentally ready for school in key areas by around 12 percentage points.

Read more: Preschool benefits all children, but not all children get it. Here’s what the government can do about that

Despite efforts through the Gonski reforms, there is still significant room to improve how Australia targets funding and support to schools with the highest level of need. We need to address the imbalance in resources between advantaged and disadvantaged Australian schools, which is the worst in the OECD.

This is not just about money, but building strong leadership and teaching capability in every school. High quality teaching is proven to be critical to improving student outcomes. We also need to support high quality use of data and assessment to tailor teaching to students’ needs, provide feedback and measure progress.

Read more: How to get quality teachers in disadvantaged schools – and keep them there

Government projections show 90% of employment growth in the next four years will require education beyond school. This means we must prepare young people for an economy requiring higher levels of skill than ever. We need to rethink existing models of tertiary education to make it accessible to all students.

Addressing educational inequality is as much about what happens outside the classroom as inside. Nurturing every child’s development and well-being is best achieved through a partnership between schools, families, communities and other support services.

Australia cannot afford education systems that fail so many students. That’s not just in economic terms – because the cost of lost opportunity is even greater down the track – but also in human terms. We know the social and health costs of disengaging in education are significant.

– ref. One quarter of Australian 11-12 year olds don’t have the literacy and numeracy skills they need – https://theconversation.com/one-quarter-of-australian-11-12-year-olds-dont-have-the-literacy-and-numeracy-skills-they-need-148912

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Orr, Professor of Law, The University of Queensland

On October 31, Queensland will become Australia’s first state to go to the polls during the pandemic.

Normally, state elections pass amiably. They matter to the MPs, ministers and senior public servants concerned. But aside from what the tea leaves might imply for national electoral politics, they cast few ripples.

This year is different. State governments matter now, in ways they have not for decades.

Expect a Labor victory

This does not mean the Queensland election will produce any shocks. On the contrary. The pandemic has been good for incumbents.

Leaders, Australia-wide, are enjoying high approval ratings during the pandemic. During the tumult of the first wave, a Liberal National Brisbane City Council was returned with not a single ward changing hands.

In the past two months, Labor governments have been re-elected in the Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory.

Read more: Blunders aside, most Australians believe state premiers have been effective leaders during pandemic

The Palaszczuk government will, I bet, be similarly returned. Whether it deserves to, after five quiet years and given a challenging economic climate, is another matter. But it has one trump card: north of the Tweed, barely one person in a million has died of COVID-19.

This puts Queensland in a select group of democratic jurisdictions of any significant size. Only Taiwan and East Timor have done better on that metric, and they are more communal and less individualistic than Queenslanders.

There has been a fundamental shift

Why then is 2020 different? In all the focus on statistics — health, economic and electoral — we’ve paid little attention to a fundamental shift. State governments, long relegated to second or third order by our escalating focus on international and national politics, have soared back to prominence.

This reminds us that we live within a federal system of government, and this affects our daily lives. Not just in the lofty and indirect sense — how the Commonwealth carves up GST amongst the states, for example — but in an everyday sense.

The cause of all this should be obvious. States have what constitutional lawyers call the “policing power”. Not only can they police individuals under criminal law, they can also make movement and gathering orders.

Read more: Have our governments become too powerful during COVID-19?

States also have the power to license (or limit) businesses and other organised activities. In the pandemic, those powers have been front and centre of the public health response.

Previously, we had come to see state borders as fusty lines from colonial times. Yet right now, the sorest issue in Australian politics involves those lines being taken seriously.

The High Court, at the behest of Clive Palmer, may yet unwind such controls. But it will be years before we return to conceiving of state borders as merely lines on a map.

More than just service providers

Pre-COVID, states had come to be seen as mere service providers, akin to local government in the UK with their local health boards and educational authorities.

Constitutional lawyers have a term for this — “vertical fiscal imbalance”. The federal government collects about 80% of tax revenue, so it can play puppeteer, in everything from education to roads.

Read more: Budget explainer: the federal-state battle for funding

It is not that money is unimportant in the pandemic. Indeed, money has reinforced the Commonwealth government’s focus on macroeconomics and social security during COVID-19. Meanwhile, its other great leitmotif is national security.

So, we came to see the states as service deliverers and the federal government as holding the purse strings and looking after defence. This is even reflected in a more “blokey” politics at national level and a more nurturing one at state level, where female leaders are much more common.

Since a post-industrial Labor Party emerged 40 years ago, Labor has held office almost 60% of the time at state and territory level. Whereas the conservative Coalition has held office 56% of the time at national level.

However, the “social-democratic states”/“conservative nation” contrast can be taken too far. Palaszczuk has positioned herself as a resolute Border Queen. This invokes the ghosts of parochial predecessors, like Peter Beattie and Joh Bjelke-Petersen, as much as it appeals to the trope of the mother figure, worrying about her constituents’ health.

The states are back

In short, the states are back at the forefront. While this may wane as we transcend the pandemic, it will also recur as other natural disasters become more common, thanks to global warming.

Alongside the rebound in the role of the states, national attention has also fallen on the style of leadership that is more common at state level.

Palaszczuk, like her NSW counterpart Gladys Berejiklian, is ideologically centrist but presents a velvet glove over an iron fist.

That style may yet infuse national politics. That will depend on whether a communal spirit, of pulling together, survives from the pandemic to counterbalance interest group warfare.

Meanwhile, Queensland is about to decide whether to endorse Palaszczuk’s leadership, or embrace a different one.

Read more: Remember Quexit? 5 reasons you should not take your eyes off the Queensland election

– ref. Why this Queensland election is different — states are back at the forefront of political attention – https://theconversation.com/why-this-queensland-election-is-different-states-are-back-at-the-forefront-of-political-attention-148260

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

An overarching criticism of the recent federal budget is that it overlooked the workers hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, namely women. However, the budget includes one promising, albeit small, initiative that focuses on this group. The government announced a cadetship program to help women to upskill in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), or to build a STEM career.

As part of the JobMaker scheme, the budget allocates A$25 million over five years to create pathways to STEM careers for up to 500 women through industry-sponsored, advanced apprenticeship-style courses. Collaborations between employers and VET providers and/or universities will deliver these “sandwiched programs” combining study and work. Women will be able to get career experience and a salary while obtaining an industry-relevant, advanced diploma in a STEM field.

Read more: High-viz, narrow vision: the budget overlooks the hardest hit in favour of the hardest hats

This scheme should help increase female participation in STEM-related learning and careers. Because more women than men enrol in higher-level VET qualifications – diplomas or advanced diplomas – it’s expected to be attractive to them.

Why is the gender gap in STEM such a problem?

To be competitive in a world increasingly driven and underpinned by technology, Australia must invest in STEM skills to meet evolving industry workforce needs. STEM jobs are growing nearly twice as fast as non-STEM jobs and the trend is set to continue.

Read more: Jobs are changing, and fast. Here’s what the VET sector (and employers) need to do to keep up

It’s notable that people in STEM occupations hold more qualifications than those in non-STEM occupations. However, difficulties in recruitment for STEM jobs suggest a looming national shortage of qualifications and technical skills. Low female aspiration for, and participation in, STEM education and careers compound this problem.

In 2016, VET qualifications at diploma level or above were most common among women in the areas of commerce, hospitality and human welfare. Numbers in STEM areas such as engineering and IT were very low. Even women with certificate III/IV qualifications in engineering were more likely to work in sales and services than as technicians.

In short, Australia loses female talent at every stage of the STEM pipeline.

Read more: How to keep more women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)

As the recent documentary The Leadership shows, it’s a lost economic opportunity, as well as a serious issue of gender inequity, socioeconomic disadvantage and insecurity. Women are missing out on the many career opportunities in rapidly growing sectors underpinned by STEM, particularly in the digital economy. It’s also a huge waste of talent.

It’s estimated upskilling just 1% of the workforce into STEM roles would add A$57 billion to Australia’s GDP over 20 years.

Read more: There may not be enough skilled workers in Australia’s pipeline for a post-COVID-19 recovery

So what has Australia been doing about it?

Despite many attempts to increase female STEM participation over the years, only in the past few years have structured and co-ordinated plans been drafted.

The Women in STEM Decadal Plan was released in 2019. The Advancing Women in STEM 2020 Action Plan followed this year.

The first Women in STEM Ambassador, Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith, was appointed in 2018. The ambassador works to promote systemic changes that will produce a STEM sector that is diverse, inclusive and contributes to the nation’s competitiveness.

In spite of these efforts, a snapshot of Australia’s STEM workforce reveals women account for 21% of those who completed post-secondary STEM education and only 16% of the STEM-qualified (VET and university) workforce. Australia’s VET STEM-qualified workforce is overwhelmingly concentrated at the certificate level (1-4), with only 19% at the diploma/advanced diploma level. Significantly, only 8% of this VET STEM-qualified workforce is female.

In addition, a pay gap exists. Full-time female workers earn less on average if working in engineering, science and IT fields.

Read more: Women in STEM need your support – and Australia needs women in STEM

Challenges dwarf responses to date

The newly announced cadetships represent a small investment compared to the scale of the challenges to be overcome.

In 2016, women in the workforce with VET STEM qualifications numbered 95,300. Of these, about 35,200 (37%) held a diploma or advanced diploma, a greater proportion than for men. While the addition of 500 female VET advanced diploma holders by 2025 is an improvement, the number is small. This may reflect capacity constraints in higher education and industry.

The cadetship program focuses on the front end of the talent pipeline, namely attracting women into STEM and providing the requisite qualification and skill base. It is unlikely to address the equally important and long-standing problem of retaining women in STEM careers.

The Women in STEM cadetships are budgeted to receive more than three times as much funding as the advanced apprenticeships in digital technologies (Industry 4.0) pilot.

However, there have been indications some educational providers may interpret the program’s scope to include medical and health sciences (or STEMM). These are outside the STEM areas that traditionally struggle to attract women.

In the longer term, unless women upgrade beyond the level of advanced diploma and build deep competencies in technologies relevant to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they will be unable to satisfy industry needs. Industries will then lack the talent needed to meet the challenges of disruptive technologies.

Read more: If you’re preparing students for 21st century jobs, you’re behind the times

The 500 women cadets may also face competition from the products of other initiatives, in particular the government’s A$1.2 billion wage subsidy for 100,000 apprentices.

Overall, the government deserves credit for experimenting with a scheme that involves closer collaboration between industry and education providers to tackle market failure in managing talent. Rapid technological development and major uncertainty have added to the urgency of this challenge. This scheme is a first step in solving the complex problem of attracting women into industries requiring STEM talent and thereby easing skills shortages.

– ref. Industry cadetships: a good but small step to tap the talents of women in STEM – https://theconversation.com/industry-cadetships-a-good-but-small-step-to-tap-the-talents-of-women-in-stem-148170

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stefan Bode, Postdoctoral Research Fellow Decision Neuroscience Laboratory, University of Melbourne

Social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and our own genetics are among the factors influencing us beyond our awareness. This raises an ancient question: do we have control over our own lives? This article is part of The Conversation’s series on the science of free will.

In 1983, American physiologist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment that became a landmark in the field of cognitive sciences. It got psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers either very excited or very concerned.

The study itself was simple. Participants were connected to an apparatus that measured their brain and muscle activity, and were asked to do two basic things. First, they had to flex their wrist whenever they felt like doing so.

Second, they had to note the time when they first became aware of their intention to flex their wrist. They did this by remembering the position of a revolving dot on a clock face. The brain activity Libet was interested in was the “readiness potential”, which is known to ramp up before movements are executed.

Libet then compared the three measures in time: the muscle movement, the brain activity, and the reported time of the conscious intention to move. He found both the reported intention to move and the brain activity came before the actual movement, so no surprises there. But crucially, he also found brain activity preceded the reported intention to move by around half a second.

This seemed to suggest participants’ brains had already “decided” to move, half a second before they felt consciously aware of it.

Had neuroscience just solved the free will problem?

Some researchers have since argued that the intuitive idea that we have a consciousness (or a “self”) that is distinct from our brains — and that can cause things in the real world — might be wrong. Really being the “author” of our actions seemed to suggest, at least for many people, that an “I” is making the decisions, not the brain. However, only brains (or neurons) can really cause us to do things, so should we be surprised to find that an intention is a consequence rather than the origin of brain activity?

Others were less convinced of Libet’s study and have attacked it from all possible angles. For example, it has been questioned whether flexing the wrist is really a decision, as there is no alternative action, and whether we can really judge the moment of our intention so precisely. Perhaps, sceptics suggested, the findings could be a lot of fuss about nothing.

But Libet’s findings have been successfully replicated. By using other neuroimaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in combination with clever new analysis techniques, it has been shown that the outcome of decisions between two alternatives can be predicted [several seconds before the reported conscious intention].

Even Libet himself did not seem comfortable claiming our “will” does not matter at all. What if we could still say “no” to what the brain wants to do? This would at least give us a “free won’t”. To test this, one study asked participants to play a game against a computer that was trained to predict their intentions from their brain activity. The research found participants could cancel their actions if the computer found out quickly what they intended to do, at least up to around 200 milliseconds before the action, after which it was too late.

But is the decision not to do something really so different from a decision to do something?

It depends what you mean by free

Another way to look at Libet’s study is to recognise it might not be as closely related to the “free will” problem as initially thought. We might be mistaken in what we think a truly free decision is. We often think “free will” means: could I have chosen otherwise? In theory, the answer might be no — being transported back in time, and placed into exactly the same circumstances, the outcome of our decision might necessarily be exactly the same. But maybe that doesn’t matter, because what we really mean is: was there no external factor that forced my decision, and did I freely choose to do it? And the answer to that might still be yes.

If you are worried about “free will” just because sometimes there are external factors present that influence us, think about this: there are also always factors inside of us that influence us, from which we can never fully escape — our previous decisions, our memories, desires, wishes and goals, all of which are represented in the brain.

Some people might still maintain that only if nothing influences our decision at all can we be really free. But then there is really no good reason to choose either way, and the outcome might just be due to the random activity of neurons that happen to be active at the time of decision-making. And this means our decisions would also be random rather than “willed”, and that would seem even less free to us.

Most of our decisions require planning because they are more complex than the “spontaneous” decisions investigated in Libet-style studies, like whether to buy a car, or get married, which are what we really care about. And interestingly, we don’t tend to question whether we have free will when making such complex decisions, even though they require a lot more brain activity.

If the emerging brain activity reflects the decision process rather than the outcome, we might not even have a philosophical contradiction on our hands. It matters a lot what we call “the decision” — is it the moment we reach an outcome, or the entire process that leads to reaching it? Brain activity in Libet-style studies might simply reflect the latter, and that suddenly does not sound so mysterious anymore.

Where to from here?

While Libet’s classic study might not have solved the problem of free will, it made a lot of clever people think hard. Generations of students have argued long nights over beer and pizza whether they have free will or not, and researchers have conducted increasingly innovative studies to follow in Libet’s footsteps.

Exciting questions have arisen, such as which brain processes lead to the formation of a voluntary action, how we perceive agency, what freedom of will means for being responsible for our actions, and how we change our mind after making an initial decision.

Researchers had to acknowledge they might not be able to provide a definite answer to the big philosophical question. But the field of cognitive neuroscience and voluntary decisions is more alive, interesting and sophisticated than ever before, thanks to the bold attempts by Libet and his successors to tackle this philosophical problem using science.

– ref. Will I or won’t I? Scientists still haven’t figured out free will, but they’re having fun trying – https://theconversation.com/will-i-or-wont-i-scientists-still-havent-figured-out-free-will-but-theyre-having-fun-trying-132085

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Doust, Clinical Professorial Research Fellow, The University of Queensland

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many have felt anxious about going to the GP and other health facilities, believing these places have had a greater risk of transmission. A lot of us have also had to juggle work, childcare and home-based education.

So it’s not surprising the number of women attending for preventive health checks dropped alarmingly. For example, 145,000 fewer breast cancer screenings were done between January and June this year than in the same period in 2018. It’s important, however, not to let the pandemic lead to avoidable poor health.

Here are some of the main health checks the the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) recommends for women. These checks are advised for women at average risk, but women who have a strong family history of any of these conditions should ask with their GP if they should start screening earlier or seek different types of testing.

Cervical cancer screening

The National Cervical Screening Program recommends cervical cancer screening every five years for women aged between 25 and 74.

In December 2017, a new test was introduced for cervical cancer screening in Australia, and the testing interval changed from two years to five years. The change in testing interval was recommended because the new test is able to detect changes earlier. This means fewer women are tested each month, with the decline starting from December 2019.

Even accounting for this, the number of women tested in April and May 2020 fell sharply. There was some recovery in June, although rates in Victoria remain low. It used to be common practice to do a pelvic examination at the same time as a cervical screening test to look for problems in the uterus and ovaries, but this is no longer recommended due to its poor accuracy.

Breast cancer screening

Breast Screen Australia recommends an x-ray of the breasts, called a mammogram, every two years for women aged 50-74. Breast screening services were paused in April, but are now open again in all states, including Victoria.

Evidence for the benefits and harms of breast screening has been highly contested, so it’s important women make an informed choice. Cancer Australia states that for every 1,000 women screened for 25 years from the age of 50, around eight will avoid dying of breast cancer. On the other hand, eight women in every 1,000 diagnosed by screening will be treated unnecessarily (usually with surgery) for cancers that would never otherwise have been diagnosed.

Screening works by finding a cancer before a woman has any symptoms, but it also finds cancers that grow very slowly or even regress, and that would never have caused symptoms. More sensitive tests, such as MRI, find more of these “overdiagnosed cancers” than other tests.

Breast cancer survival has improved significantly in the past few decades, but most of this seems to be due to improvements in treatment rather than improvements in screening.

Ovarian cancer

Unfortunately, there is no method for early detection of ovarian cancer and the symptoms can be vague, often leading to late diagnosis.

The most common symptoms are abdominal bloating, abdominal or pelvic pain, appetite loss, feeling full quickly, indigestion, urinary frequency or urgency, constipation, unexplained weight loss or gain, and unexplained fatigue.

Women who have any of these symptoms for more than a few weeks should see their GP.

Sexually transmitted disease

About 1 in 20 women in their 20s will have a chlamydia infection and 1 in 200 will have gonorrhoea. These increase the risk of pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility. HIV, Hepatitis B and syphilis are less common, but important to detect early.

There is no formal screening program but the RACGP encourages sexually active women younger than 30 to have regular testing, especially if there has been a change in sexual partner.

Cardiovascular disease and diabetes

The leading causes of death in women in Australia are dementia, heart attacks, strokes, and lung cancer. The risks of these can be reduced with good preventive health.

The RACGP recommends women have their blood pressure checked every two years from age 18, cholesterol every five years from age 45, and checks for diabetes and kidney disease when at risk (for example if you have a family history). GPs recommend a general health check for those aged 45 to 49, or a heart health check for those over 45, or Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people over 30.

Treating high blood pressure and cholesterol and reducing smoking rates has prompted a massive decline in Australian heart disease deaths since their peak in the 1960s. However, women are less likely to have all risk factors for heart disease checked, and younger women are less likely to be put on blood pressure or cholesterol-lowering medication than men with the same risk level.

Bowel cancer

Bowel cancer screening is recommended by the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program for all Australians every two years between ages 50 to 75. This is done by a stool sample test, using a kit mailed by the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program and returned by post. This screening reduces deaths from bowel cancer by 16%.

GPs have worked hard to ensure their patients’ safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s also important the recommended preventive health checks are not delayed unnecessarily.

– ref. Cervical, breast, heart, bowel: here’s what women should be getting screened regularly – https://theconversation.com/cervical-breast-heart-bowel-heres-what-women-should-be-getting-screened-regularly-148575

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Miranda Stewart, Professor, University of Melbourne

Working mothers get something in the budget, but not much, and not for long.

Before the budget the second earner in a couple with young children (usually the mother) lost almost all of the income she made working for the second, third, forth and fifth days per week.

It might be why many mothers work only one or two days per week.

After the budget tax cuts and one-year extension of the low and middle income tax offset that mother will lose slightly less on the third, forth and fifth days.

Our calculations of what will be lost prepared with former Department of Social Services analyst David Plunkett take into account the extra earnings for each extra day worked, the extra childcare costs at the average fee net of subsidy, the extra income tax charged, the imposition of the Medicare levy after the second or third day of paid work, and the family tax benefits lost.

We find that before the budget a second earner on the median female wage of $190 per day with a partner on the median male wage and two children in long day care, lost a hefty 47% of what she earned on the first day per week.

On subsequent days her losses almost doubled.

Read more: Mothers have little to show for extra days of work under new tax changes

She lost 82% of what she earned on second day, 78% of what she earned on the third day, 81% of what she earned on the forth day and an extraordinary 89% of what she earned on the fifth day.

After the budget tax changes, her losses for the first and second days remain unchanged, and her losses for the third, forth and fifth day change little, slipping to 76%, 81% and 83%.

Percentage of additional earnings lost to taxes, transfers and child care costs
Second earner, before and after budget tax cuts and offset extension

The bulk of the modest easing in the penalty for working comes from the extension of low and middle income tax offset.

But the budget extended it for only one year, meaning that after one year the high effective marginal tax rates will spring back to near where they were.

The high penalty makes it less surprising that the proportion of Australian women working full-time has climbed little in four decades.

Proportion of women employed

Expressed in terms of dollars kept by such a worker we find that on the first day she will keep $100.33 of her $190.

On the second day she will keep only $35.65, and by the fifth day only $31.38.

Net gain per day worked by second earner on $190, median female wage

Examining the position of a much-higher earning second worker on the average female wage of $293.82 per day with partner on the average male wage, we find that on the first day she will keep $148.41 and by the fifth day only $48.25.

Net gain per day worked by second earner on $293.82, average female wage

Single parents face extremely high effective tax rates, even though government policy is meant to encourage them to enter the paid workforce.

A single parent on the average female wage of $76,000 actually goes backwards on Day 4 as she loses her parenting payment, wiping out altogether the benefit of moving from three to five days a week.

The tax changes announced in the budget don’t solve the problem.

Net gain per day worked by single parent on $293.82, average female wage

The Minister for Education says out-of-pocket childcare costs are less than $5 per hour per child for the parents of three quarters of children in care, and less than $2 per hour per child for parents of the remaining one quarter.

But set against the hourly wages of second earners and accompanied by the withdrawal of benefits, the costs are substantial – so much so that only 45% of children under the age of five are cared for in childcare centres.

Different families cope in different ways

Facing high effective marginal tax rates of 80% when the statutory marginal tax rate (including the Medicare levy) is meant to top out at 47%, different families cope in different ways.

In some, the mum goes back to work full time and the dad stays at home or works part time, sometimes facing workplace discrimination.

Others rely on grandparents.

In many more, the mother doesn’t work. Fewer than two thirds of mothers with children aged under five are in paid work, compared with 95% of dads.

Read more: New modelling finds investing in childcare and aged care almost pays for itself

Of those who are in paid work, 60% are part-time, compared to only 7% fathers.

When their children get to school, half of these mothers continue to work part-time, and many stay part-time as children grow older.

Yet women account for half of our population and more than half of our University graduates.

Labor promises more, but not enough

Those staying out of the paid workforce lose income, human capital, skills, superannuation, and a connection to the labour market.

Without economic independence they are poorer and more vulnerable to domestic violence.

In his budget reply speech opposition leader Anthony Albanese promised to remove the annual cap on the childcare subsidy, to subsidise up to 90% instead of 85% of the hourly fee and to withdraw the subsidy more gradually as incomes climb.

These measures would help, but they don’t go far enough.

Read more: Forget flowers and chocolates for Mother’s Day: keep free childcare going instead

What would really help is free childcare for children under five and free before-school and after-school care for children up to age 12.

For a short time, the COVID response showed us what could be done.

There’s a precedent for free childcare

For three months from March childcare become free, eliminating much of the financial penalty for work.

If we kept it free and got rid of the exceptionally high penalties for working we could more properly use the skills of women, those women and their families could enjoy more financially secure lives and we might even nudge up the birth rate.

It has fallen to 1.69 children per woman, below replacement. For far too many women, having children and returning to work isn’t paying.

– ref. Blink and you’ll miss it: what the budget did for working mums – https://theconversation.com/blink-and-youll-miss-it-what-the-budget-did-for-working-mums-148264

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ari Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

People often roll their eyes when they hear about a major Hollywood studio re-releasing a film from its back catalogue to cinemas. Director’s cuts, “reduxes” and remastered prints can seem like cynical corporate moves, re-commodifying a long dead vision of the world.

But in the case of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall — a masterpiece of late 20th century Hollywood cinema, being re-released on its 30th anniversary — this cynicism is unwarranted.

As someone born in the 1980s, who was too young to watch this extremely violent film on its cinematic release, I am excited by the prospect of finally being able to see it on the big screen.

Not to mention several of its iconic images: Arnold Schwarzenegger pulling a giant tracking device out of his nose, eyeballs popping out of faces on Mars and the infamous, three-breasted prostitute.

A noirish, pulp narrative

Total Recall marks a rare confluence of extraordinary talents and technologies. The source material is excellent. Phillip K. Dick’s twist-laden, science fiction narrative, interweaving speculation about potential future technologies with the social and psychological interrogation of the present world, is adapted for the screen brilliantly (and wittily) by a group of writers including genre maestro Dan O’Bannon (Dark Star, Alien, Dead and Buried).

Its noirish, pulp narrative, involving double (or triple?) agent Doug Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) following clues to his true identity, is embedded in a rousing sub-plot structured around conflict between the haves and have nots.

The setting — Mars, colonised for its minerals — is beautifully rendered with the expressionistic exterior backdrops reminiscent of the cover illustrations of 1950s pulp sci-fi novels.

Read more: Buried lakes of salty water on Mars may provide conditions for life

Typical of Verhoeven’s films, this is complemented by a detailed, fully developed background media ecology, involving fake advertisements, products, and communications technologies. Added to the mix are the superb cinematography of Oscar nominee (and regular Verhoeven collaborator) Jost Vacano, and editing by Frank J. Urioste, another Oscar nominee.

And of course, Total Recall features the most memorable (and idiosyncratic) action man of the era in the lead role. With his impossibly muscular body, cartoonish, chiselled features and distinctive Austrian accent, Schwarzenegger brings a delightful over-the-top quality to otherwise straitlaced macho roles.

He will probably never be more suited to a role than he was to The Terminator — his intonation and signature wooden delivery are perfectly robotic. But Total Recall captures him at the peak of his acting career, before he became swept up in his own myth, with pointlessly self-referential performances (such as that in The Last Action Hero).

Read more: Why do fans love Schwarzenegger? His terrible one-liners, of course

Schwarzenegger is joined in Total Recall by brilliant character actors Ronny Cox (as main baddie, corporate psychopath Cohaagen) and Michael Ironside (Cohaagen’s vicious right arm, Richter). Sharon Stone, in a relatively low-key role, is amusing as Quaid’s secret agent wife.

It is all brought together under the eye of a master filmmaker. As usual, Verhoeven skilfully endows epic pulp scenarios and settings with an intensity reminiscent of the most viscerally immersive kinds of body-genre cinema (a term coined by film studies professor Linda Williams to describe films that aim chiefly to elicit a physiological reaction on the part of the viewer).

Technological detachment

At the same time, Verhoeven’s images have a kind of technological detachment. His camera floats around, swiftly moving between bodies and things, capturing action with a clinical vision.

In this way, Verhoeven’s images — and films — are relentlessly unsentimental. In his universe, countless bystanders are killed in a bloody, vicious fashion without any lingering lament or consequence. His signature cinematic move (present, of course, in Total Recall) involves characters being lethally pierced by long, sharp objects.

Under the studious eye of Verhoeven’s camera, people appear insect-like. This point was made literal in his 1997 film Starship Troopers (about interplanetary war between humans and giant humanoid insects) when the separation between insect and human becomes more a matter of politics than anything else.

Total Recall, like most Verhoeven films, combines a sense of youthful adventure with explosive moments of violence, underscored by a wry (slightly clownish) sensibility.

Verhoeven won’t win any awards from The World Association of Liberal Humanists, but his films make for fascinating, and viscerally engrossing, viewing. As a biographical aside, it’s worth noting Verhoeven grew up in the Netherlands during the second world war, experiencing the perennial violence of the period — bombs, burning houses, masses of dead bodies — with a small boy’s sense of horror and excitement.

A rare big-budget spectacle

Total Recall is an increasingly rare, big-budget, Hollywood spectacle. Hard-edged and brutal, it is far removed from the “family-friendly” blockbuster film popularised by the Spielberg-Lucas complex in the 1970s (characterised by a wan, often uninteresting, palatability).

With its economical, fast-paced narrative embedded in a spectacular and detailed cinematic world, Total Recall is an example of pulp fodder magnificently realised by one of Europe’s leading auteurs.

Read more: Strippers on film: battlers, showgirls and hustlers

Testament to Verhoeven’s seamless transition from the Dutch arthouse (Spetters, The Fourth Man) to big budget Hollywood (Robocop, Basic Instinct and the much maligned but remarkably entertaining, Showgirls), Total Recall remains one of the most thrilling action films of its time.

A 4K, Ultra High Definition™ version of Total Recall can be seen at select cinemas.

– ref. Total Recall at 30: why this brutal action film remains a classic – https://theconversation.com/total-recall-at-30-why-this-brutal-action-film-remains-a-classic-146755

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samuel Judah Seomeng, Postgraduate student, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

The election of Labour candidate Ibrahim Omer on October 17 makes him New Zealand’s first African MP and one of only two former refugees to sit in the New Zealand parliament.

Omer originally fled Eritrea for Sudan as a teenager, before being accepted by New Zealand. That experience makes him “the real deal”, according to the Labour Party. His election supports the story that, no matter your background, you can join the New Zealand community and become a leader.

The reality for many former refugees from Africa, however, shows this is not easy. There are major structural and societal obstacles, including experiences of racism, and a lack of ongoing support and trauma care.

My research suggests these experiences are shared by many. Between 2018 and 2020 members of the Luo community in Wellington, a diverse group mostly from Uganda and South Sudan, shared their stories. Like Omer, many had fled their countries to escape war, torture, rape and persecution.

Also like Omer, many spent several years in refugee camps before they found refuge in New Zealand. These camps are not easy places — violence is common and food rations are limited, with children in particular at risk of malnutrition. People regularly disappear and die, families are often separated and it may be years before they are reunited, if they ever are.

The refugee experience

New Zealand is one of only 37 countries to commit to the regular resettlement of refugees. Capped at 1,500 per year, New Zealand’s program has taken over 35,000 refugees since the second world war.

But the support offered is limited. After six weeks at the Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre in Auckland, people are sent to settlement areas across New Zealand. Ongoing help is left primarily to volunteer agencies and is patchy at best.

Interviewees reported feeling lost, confused and unsure of their rights and options. Most concerning was the treatment they reported from professional health-care providers, as well as a general sense of exclusion from New Zealand society.

Read more: Why equal health access and outcomes should be a priority for Ardern’s new government

Health and well-being are viewed as vital to successful immigrant integration and overall community health. New Zealand recognises this in the five strategic priorities of its Refugee Resettlement Strategy.

The majority of participants, however, reported experiencing racism from health-care providers. One person was told his skin was too dark for diagnosis, and his skin complaint remained untreated.

People struggled with health-care professionals lacking cultural awareness or sensitivity to the lasting consequences of being a refugee. One commented:

For us Africans, most doctors don’t know what is culturally appropriate and what’s not, and […] no one is interested to ask us before we are given treatment.

The need for cultural competency

The Medical Council of New Zealand acknowledges that cultural competency is a key factor in reducing health inequity. Current accreditation training for doctors includes aspects of cultural safety training. But this varies across district health boards (DHBs) and focuses on Māori and Pasifika communities. There is no training in the specific issues faced by former refugees.

Priority is also given to physical health. While important, this is often not the most significant issue for former refugees. They often suffer from depression and other mental illnesses, as well as alcohol dependency and drug use due to ongoing stress.

Read more: WHO reform: a call for an early-warning protocol for infectious diseases

Many suffer from family breakdown. The causes of this are complicated, but my research found they were compounded by social exclusion from vital sources of support, including health care.

Post-migration experiences have been shown to have a significant impact on people’s ability to recover from traumas suffered before migration. A UK study in 2018 found racial discrimination and harassment of ethnic minorities indirectly affected health outcomes due to exclusion from vital support systems such as education, employment and housing.

The way forward

A 2010 report by the World Health Organisation noted that migrants and ethnic minorities across Europe often suffer social exclusion, resulting in poorer health outcomes. Institutional racism in the health-care system has long been recognised as a factor in health inequities in New Zealand. In the context of a rapidly diversifying population, confronting this becomes more urgent.

Read more: COVID-19 is predicted to make child poverty worse. Should NZ’s next government make temporary safety nets permanent?

Omer has promised to tackle issues facing immigrants, and there are many ways the refugee experience could be improved. These include:

• state commitment to regular support beyond the initial six weeks

• mandatory training for all health-care professionals in cultural safety and holistic approaches to health and well-being

• specific training on the known social and health challenges faced by refugees.

The participants in this research want to feel at home in New Zealand. They are grateful to have found refuge, and all have worked hard to adapt to life here. They are care workers, community leaders, IT specialists. Their children go to school and university here and look forward to playing an active role in society.

Taking steps to provide ongoing support for refugees arriving in New Zealand is one way to make their hoped-for futures viable.

– ref. New MP Ibrahim Omer’s election highlights the challenges refugees from Africa face in New Zealand – https://theconversation.com/new-mp-ibrahim-omers-election-highlights-the-challenges-refugees-from-africa-face-in-new-zealand-148621

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Brand, Adjunct A/Prof of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Monash University

As the US presidential election polling day draws close, it’s worth recapping what we know about how Facebook has been used to influence election results.

The platform is optimised for boosting politically conservative voices calling for fascism, separatism and xenophobia. It’s also these voices that tend to generate the most clicks.

In recent years, Facebook has on several occasions been made to choose between keeping to its community standards or taking a path that avoids the ire of conservatives. Too many times, it has chosen the latter.

The result has been an onslaught of divisive rhetoric that continues to flood the platform and drive political polarisation in society.

How democracy can be subverted online

According to The New York Times, earlier this year US intelligence officials warned Russia was interfering in the 2020 presidential campaign, with the goal of seeing President Donald Trump re-elected.

This was corroborated by findings from the US Brennan Centre for Justice. A research team led by journalism and communications professor Young Mie Kim identified a range of Facebook troll accounts deliberately sowing division “by targeting both the left and right, with posts to foment outrage, fear and hostility”.

Most were linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), the company also behind a 2016 US election influence campaign. Kim wrote the troll accounts seemed to discourage certain people from voting, with a focus on swing states.

Earlier this month, Facebook announced a ban (across both Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook owns) on groups and pages devoted to the far-right conspiracy group QAnon. It also removed a network of fake accounts linked to a conservative US political youth group, for violating rules against “coordinated inauthentic behavior”.

However, despite Facebook’s repeated promises to clamp down harder on such behaviour — and occasional efforts to actually do so — the company has been widely criticised for doing far too little to curb the spread of disinformation, misinformation and election meddling.

According to a University of Oxford study, 70 countries (including Australia) practised either foreign or domestic election meddling in 2019. This was up from 48 in 2018 and 28 in 2017. The study said Facebook was “the platform of choice” for this.

The Conversation approached Facebook for comment regarding the platform’s use by political actors to influence elections, including past US elections. A Facebook spokesperson said:

We’ve hired experts, built teams with experience across different areas, and created new products, policies and partnerships to ensure we’re ready for the unique challenges of the US election.

When Facebook favoured one side

Facebook has drawn widespread criticism for its failure to remove posts that clearly violate its policies on hate speech, including posts by Trump himself.

The company openly exempts politicians from its fact-checking program and knowingly hosts misleading content from politicians, under its “newsworthiness exception”.

When Facebook tried to clamp down on misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential elections, ex-Republican staffer turned Facebook executive Joel Kaplan argued doing so would disproportionately target conservatives, the Washington Post reported.

The Conversation asked Facebook whether Kaplan’s past political affiliations indicated a potential for conservative bias in his current role. The question wasn’t answered.

Facebook’s board also now features a major Trump donor and vocal supporter, Peter Thiel. Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has himself been accused of getting “too close” to Trump.

Moreover, when the US Federal Trade Commission investigated Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it was Republican votes that saved the company from facing antitrust litigation.

Overall, Facebook’s model has shifted towards increasing polarisation. Incendiary and misinformation-laden posts tend to generate clicks.

As Zuckerberg himself notes, “when left unchecked, people on the platform engage disproportionately” with such content.

Over the years, conservatives have accused Facebook of anti-conservative bias, for which the company faced financial penalties by the Republican Party. This is despite research indicating no such bias exists on the platform.

Fanning the flames

Facebook’s addictive news feed rewards us for simply skimming headlines, conditioning us to react viscerally.

Its sharing features have been found to promote falsehoods. They can trick users into attributing news to their friends, causing them to assign trust to unreliable news sources. This provides a breeding ground for conspiracies.

Read more: Netflix’s The Social Dilemma highlights the problem with social media, but what’s the solution?

Studies have also shown social media to be an ideal environment for campaigns aimed at creating mistrust, which explains the increasing erosion of trust in science and expertise.

Worst of all are Facebook’s “echo chambers”, which convince people that only their own opinions are mainstream. This encourages hostile “us versus them” dialogue, which leads to polarisation. This pattern suppresses valuable democratic debate and has been described as an existential threat to democracy itself.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s staff hasn’t been shy about skewing liberal, even suggesting in 2016 that Facebook work to prevent Trump’s election. Around 2017, they proposed a feature called “Common Ground”, which would have encouraged users with different political beliefs to interact in less hostile ways.

Kaplan opposed the proposition, according to The Wall Street Journal, due to fears it could trigger claims of bias against conservatives. The project was eventually shelved in 2018.

Facebook’s track record isn’t good news for those who want to live in a healthy democratic state. Polarisation certainly doesn’t lead to effective political discourse.

While several blog posts from the company outline measures being taken to supposedly protect the integrity of the 2020 US presidential elections, it remains to be seen what this means in reality.

Read more: Seeing is believing: how media mythbusting can actually make false beliefs stronger

– ref. Facebook is tilting the political playing field more than ever, and it’s no accident – https://theconversation.com/facebook-is-tilting-the-political-playing-field-more-than-ever-and-its-no-accident-148314

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lionel Page, Professor in Economics, University of Technology Sydney

Polls highly favour Joe Biden to win the US presidential election.

These polls are not just abstract information. By telling prospective voters who is the most likely to win, can they influence the result of the election by playing a role in the voters’ decision? The evidence says yes, and it most likely favours Biden.

In theory, you could imagine two possible effects of polls. First, a momentum effect. Second, an underdog effect.

A momentum effect could benefit the candidate either leading or gaining in the polls. It can motivate their supporters to vote (the bandwagon effect) and demotivate the supporters of the other candidate (the discouragement effect).

An underdog effect, on the other hand, could penalise the leading candidate. This is because supporters think it’s a done deal and don’t mobilise to vote (resting on their laurels) or because the supporters of the trailing candidate are motivated by the idea of losing (a back-to-the-wall effect).

These different effects tap into some of our intuitive psychology. It is therefore hard to know the net effect of polls.

Some evidence points to the possibility of an underdog effect when a party is just behind. This was the case in 2016, when Trump edged out Hillary Clinton in key states despite her lead in national polls. But the overwhelming message from the relevant research is that positive polls increase a candidate’s chance of winning.

Momentum effect: it helps to be ahead

In laboratory experiments recreating elections in controlled settings, California Institute of Technology economist Marina Agranov and colleagues found polls “lead to more participation by the expected majority and generate more landslide elections”.

A similar effect has been observed in real elections.

Using polling and voting data from French elections, my colleagues and I have looked at how those yet to vote were influenced by early exit polls giving a fairly precise prediction of the result.

France has the longest election day in the world, due to its overseas territories in the Pacific. When the first exit poll is released at 8pm in Paris, for example, it is just 9am in Tahiti, where people are still to decide if they will vote and for whom.

We found that knowledge of polls pointing to a certain outcome meant voters in such territories were less likely to vote. In particular, they were less likely to vote for the losing candidate. It led to a momentum effect for the leading candidate in mainland France, tending to increase their share of the vote in territories voting later.

A similar momentum effect has been discerned in Britain. Before 1918, general elections were held over a two-week period. The side ahead in the first days of the election tended to benefit from an increasing advantage, which peaked on about the eighth day of voting.

The West Coast effect

In the United States the possibility of such an effect of early information has been discussed as the “West Coast effect”, whereby voters in California and other western US states can be influenced by early results from the east coast, three hours ahead.

This issue became very salient in 1980 when NBC released an early prediction at 8pm New York time that Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan would beat Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter.

The polls were still open in many western states at the time. Research found this early call had a discouraging effect on prospective Democrat voters, making them less likely to vote.

Given this converging evidence, it is no surprise partisan organisations tend to use favourable polls to push a winning narrative to their support base.

As a consequence of polls’ possible strategic effect, polling companies are tightly regulated in modern democracies. Polling companies do not tend to produce polls that skew results for partisan reasons. Whatever errors occur tend to be due to flaws in polling methodology, rather than being deliberate.

Read more: How might the campaign’s endgame be disrupted? Here are five scenarios, drawn from the history of election polling

Manipulating betting markets

However, people who want to influence the public narrative about who is winning can influence something: betting markets.

These are used to estimate the candidates’ winning chances. On these markets, people can put their money where their mouth is, and bet on the candidate they think will win.

But what if someone is willing to put a lot of money on a candidate they want to win, in a bid to skew the market predictions?

There is an incentive to manipulate betting markets’ prices, to influence voters by suggesting a candidate’s prospects are better than they actually are.

Research and experiments have shown that, in theory, such markets can be manipulated to move prices in one direction.

To do so in the real world would likely require spending many millions of dollars, But given the huge amounts spent in US campaigns, such expenditure is feasible.

Read more: Vital Signs: for the best election predictions, look to the betting markets, not the opinion polls

Trump’s chances overrated

In 2020, Trump’s chances have been surprisingly high in betting markets given the polls. What does research say about this fact?

In past research, I have found political betting markets tend to be biased toward 50%. That is, they tend to say the race is closer to 50/50 than it is. This bias is larger than on other types of betting markets (such as sports) – and would be expected if manipulators try to influence the prices.

I estimate the 35% chance these betting markets are giving to a Trump win may be skewing the results by 15 percentage points – meaning Trump more accurately has a 20% chance of victory.

For more accurate predictions, therefore, you are better looking at those from professional forecasters, such as Five Thirty Eight and The Economist. In these forecasts Trump has only 5-12% chance of winning. Importantly, Biden’s advantage appears much firmer than what Clinton had in 2016.

But even these predictions may be overestimated. As pointed out by one of the best forecasters in the US, Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman, professional forecasters have an interest in hedging their bets to preserve their reputation. Importantly, the evidence suggest

These low forecasts have a striking implication. Putting money on Biden now is a relatively safe bet. It may also help move the betting market predictions in Biden’s favour.

– ref. Momentum vs underdog status: this time the advantage is with Joe Biden – https://theconversation.com/momentum-vs-underdog-status-this-time-the-advantage-is-with-joe-biden-148631

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mehmet Ozalp, Associate Professor in Islamic Studies, Director of The Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation and Executive Member of Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University

Muslims are a small minority in the United States, but they may have a significant influence on the US elections. Muslim Americans, however, are often torn between the anti-Muslim rhetoric and xenophobia of President Donald Trump and the perception that Democrats undermine public morality on social issues.

According to a 2017 estimate by Pew Research Center, 3.45 million Muslims reside in the US, which is 1.1% of the total population. While this may seem small, Pew estimates Muslims will surpass the Jewish population by 2040 to become the second-largest religious bloc after Christians.

Muslim Americans mainly live in large cities. About 58% were born overseas. Another 18% were born in America to one or more parents who are first-generation migrants. About a quarter (24%) of Muslim Americans are considered native to the US.

Muslim Americans are one of the most ethnically and racially diverse groups in the United States. A large segment (41%) of Muslims identify as white, almost one-third (28%) are Asian (including South Asian), one-fifth (20%) are Black and about 8% are Hispanic.

Muslim voters face a conundrum on policies

The demographic diversity of Muslim Americans translates to a unique profile when it comes to policies. On moral and social issues, Muslims are closer to the conservative Republican Party, but on matters of cultural and religious diversity they are more in tune with the more liberal Democratic Party.

According to a congressional electoral survey, 18% of Muslim Americans identified themselves as conservative, 51% as moderate and the remaining 31% as liberal.

The same survey found 88% of Muslims support tighter controls on guns compared to 96% for Democrat voters as a whole.

A March 2020 poll by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) showed 65% of Muslims support the Black Lives Matter movement, the highest support of all religious groups in US.

The same poll found almost half of Muslim voters supported alliances with religious liberty advocates. Muslim Americans also expect to be treated with respect and be accepted as part and parcel of American nation. The Democratic Party is more likely to meet this expectation.

On the other hand, Muslim Americans do not support LGBTQ activism (55%) and are more likely than Jews and Catholics to support alliances with opponents of abortion. Muslims also see Trump as a better prospect for the economy.

So, Muslims view Republicans as hostile to Muslims on racial grounds, but see Democrats as hostile to Islamic morality and family values.

Such a position causes electoral dissonance in Muslim voters. This conundrum is partly responsible for the lower electoral registration and turnout among Muslim Americans.

As of March 2020, 78% of Muslims eligible for voting were registered to vote. Of those who are registered, 81% said they would show up on the election day. This is significantly lower than for other religious groups, such as evangelicals (92%) and Catholics (91%).

Read more: Trump has changed America by making everything about politics, and politics all about himself

Shifting patterns in Muslim voting

Over the past 20 years, Muslim Americans’ party preferences have shifted markedly. Prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, an estimated 80% of non-African-American Muslims were Republican voters, while the majority of African-American Muslims voted for the Democratic candidate Al Gore.

This voting pattern changed in the post-September 11 era, when George W. Bush’s administration and the Republican Party spearheaded the “war on terror”.

The rhetoric of the war on terror, intrusive surveillance of Muslims under the Patriot Act and military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have created a noticeable anti-Muslim atmosphere in the US. Muslims perceived the war on terror to be a war on Islam and Muslims. As a consequence, the Muslim American vote for Bush plummeted to a mere 7% in the 2004 elections.

A significant shift by Muslim voters to the Democrats culminated in the support for Barack Obama in the 2008 elections. The same trend continued with Muslims overwhelmingly voting for Democrats in the 2016 elections, with 82% of votes going to Hillary Clinton. By 2018, Muslim support for the Republican Party was only 10%.

The March 2020 ISPU poll, however, found Muslim American voter support for Trump had increased to 30%, as Muslim voters believed Trump to be a good manager of the economy and unwilling to take part in Middle East wars.

Interestingly, the same ISPU poll showed 31% of white Muslims supported Trump as opposed to 8% of Black and Arab Muslims and 6% of Asian Muslims.

It is unclear if Trump’s poor handling of the pandemic has caused a decline in Muslim support for Trump. But two other actions of his still concern Muslim voters.

The first is the 2017 Executive Order 13769 that banned Muslims from seven countries – Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Libya and Somalia – from entering the United States on grounds that these states were supporting terrorism. The order also indefinitely suspended entry to the US for all Syrian refugees.

The executive order came to be known as the “Muslim ban” and was criticised for targeting Muslims “because of their faith”. The ban had a huge impact on the freedom of travel for many Muslim Americans who were not citizens.

The second was the 2018 move of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, in effect recognising Jerusalem as a Jewish capital. This infuriated Palestinians and Muslims around the world.

Yet Joe Biden is not a default choice for Muslim voters either. Muslim Americans expect Biden to make promises to review the “the watchlist” if elected. This is the US government’s terrorist screening database, which contains the names of individuals barred from boarding commercial flights. Many Muslims feel the policy unfairly targets innocent Muslims. While George Bush introduced the policy, it was extensively applied under the Obama-Biden administration.

Avoidance by both candidates of Middle East issues in the current campaign and in the presidential debates is another concerning factor for Muslim voters. They have been left unclear where the candidates stand on important foreign policy matters.

These concerns are likely to lead to a significant “Biden or no vote” or choice of a third-party candidate among Muslims voters.

This is important as the Muslim turnout could determine the outcomes in the marginal swing states of Florida, Ohio, Virginia and particularly Michigan. The estimated Muslim population in Michigan is 3%. This margin is enough to determine the result for the state where Trump edged Hillary Clinton by 0.23% of the vote in 2016.

A large Muslim turnout and support for Joe Biden may be enough to switch the colour of swing states such as Michigan to blue and hand the White House to the Democrats in the 2020 presidential election.

Read more: What might a Trump presidency mean for Muslims and the Muslim world?

– ref. Who will Muslim Americans vote for in the US elections? – https://theconversation.com/who-will-muslim-americans-vote-for-in-the-us-elections-146854

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lara Herrero, Research Leader in Virology and Infectious Disease, Griffith University

Last week we heard Queensland-based biotech company Microbio had developed a test that could, according to media reports, tell whether someone is a COVID-19 superspreader.

While this may sound like an exciting prospect, there are a few questions to answer before we know what role this test might have in managing the spread of COVID-19.

First, what is a superspreader?

It’s important to understand there’s no scientific definition of a “superspreader”.

In the context of COVID-19, the term “superspreader” has been used to describe someone who can spread the virus and cause infection in many people with minimal contact.

There are many factors thought to contribute to what makes someone a superspreader. The most talked about is infectious viral load. Put simply, this is the amount of live infectious virus a person carries.

Current thinking is that people with a higher infectious viral load are more likely to infect others, but it may not be that simple.

When a person has a COVID-19 test, the health-care worker uses a swab to collect samples from the back of the person’s nose and throat. These are the areas where the virus likes to live. The swab is then sent to a pathology lab which tests for the presence of viral genomic material.

The test returns as a positive (that is, the virus has been detected) or negative (virus not detected). There’s no indication of how much virus is present, or whether it’s replicating.

Read more: Coronavirus: superspreading events could help make COVID-19 endemic

So, back to the new test

Microbio says the newly developed InfectID-COVID-19-R test can detect “replication-competent virus”. This essentially means the test would detect the amount of active live virus a person is carrying. Researchers believe the patient is most likely to be infectious when the virus is replicating.

Like current COVID-19 tests, the test requires a sample of viral genetic material from a patient swab. The genetic material is “extracted” from the swab (termed RNA extraction). The resulting sample is put through a machine to detect an important part of the virus genome which indicates whether the virus is alive and replicating.

InfectID-COVID-19-R claims to accurately detect a virus concentration as low as 1,500 TCID50 per millilitre with 99% specificity. (TCID50 stands for tissue culture infectious dose 50% — it’s currently the accepted standard to quantify the amount of infectious SARS-CoV-2.)

This equation may be tricky to grasp, but the important part to understand is that below this threshold, the person has a lower amount of replicating virus than the test can guarantee to detect. They can’t say for certain the person has no replicating virus.

If a person records a result above the threshold, that tells scientists the virus is alive and replicating.

The suggestion is the test will be able to quantify the amount of replicating virus present in the swab. But exactly what that means — and how the test will achieve this — is uncertain.

Read more: A few superspreaders transmit the majority of coronavirus cases

Microbio’s media release is tight-lipped on a few key aspects of this test. We still don’t have answers to some questions, including:

• what part of the virus genome it is detecting, and how is this different to our current diagnostic tests?

• how does detecting this part of the virus ensure detection of replicating or “live” virus?

• how will the test results be presented? For example, will the test provide a reference range and guide on how to interpret the result?

• how can they prove that if a test comes back below the limit of detection for replicating virus that the person is not infectious?

In response to queries from The Conversation, Microbio’s chief scientific officer Flavia Huygens said the new test “targets the part of the virus’ genome that is present while it is replicating inside the human cell”, and that this target is different to existing COVID-19 tests. She added: “Our test detects the portion of the virus genome that is only present whilst the virus is replicating and hence is indicative that the virus is “live.”

Huygens also said the test has built-in references and guides for clinical laboratories to interpret the results.

It’s early days yet

Without more detail, it’s too early to tell just how useful this test will be.

Certainly, we need to know whether a low replicating viral load means a person is not infectious before using this test to make any decisions around quarantine. Research is still ongoing in this area.

The test hasn’t yet been approved for use. It has been independently validated by 360 biolabs, a clinical trial laboratory accredited by the Australian National Association of Testing Authorities. Huygens told The Conversation that Microbio is planning further validation of its test using patient samples.

More than a question of viral load

Currently we have no way to know who may be a superspreader. While this test might give us a measure of a person’s replicating viral load, this is only one piece of the puzzle.

As is the case for any virus, spreading SARS-CoV-2 requires more than just high viral load. It requires the right environmental conditions (for example, indoors and lower humidity), proximity to an infected person, and time (more time exposed means more chance of infection).

Therefore it’s more accurate to refer to “superspreading events” rather than to particular people as “superspreaders” more generally. Superspreading events are situations in which one person, aided by the ideal conditions, infects a large number of others.

With this in mind, limiting the time you spend in confined spaces (and wearing a mask if you can’t avoid a closed space), washing your hands and keeping your distance will be your best protection against COVID-19.

Read more: Why do some COVID-19 tests come back with a ‘weak positive’, and why does it matter?

– ref. Could a test really detect if someone is a COVID-19 ‘superspreader’? – https://theconversation.com/could-a-test-really-detect-if-someone-is-a-covid-19-superspreader-148627

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brett Carter, Senior lecturer, RMIT University

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

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

I recently read an article stating the atomic bomb testing in the Pacific destroyed so much of the upper atmosphere that the US could no longer bounce communications off the atmosphere and had to deploy artificial satellites for communication. Is this true? And just how much damage did they do?

The article the question refers to doesn’t mention satellites, so let’s focus on the atmospheric damage part of the question. Indeed, surface and atmospheric (high-altitude) detonations of nuclear weapons can have short-term and long-term effects.

One short-term effect was a temporary blackout of long-distance high-frequency (HF) radio communication over the surrounding area. But this radio communication blackout was not a result of the nuclear explosions destroying the ionosphere.

Read more: Climate explained: Sunspots do affect our weather, a bit, but not as much as other things

On the contrary, the nuclear detonations temporarily increased the natural level of ionisation in the upper atmosphere.

The ionosphere and radio communication

The Earth’s ionosphere is a natural layer of charged particles at approximately 80-1,000km altitude. This ionised portion of the Earth’s upper atmosphere largely owes its existence to solar radiation, which strips electrons from neutral atoms and molecules.

The ionosphere consists of three major layers, known as D, E and F layers. The lower D and E layers typically exist only during daylight hours, while the highest F layer always exists.

These layers have distinct characteristics. The E and F layers are very reflective to HF radio waves. The D layer, on the other hand, is more like a sponge and absorbs HF waves.

In long-distance HF radio communications, the radio waves are bounced back and forth between the ionosphere and the Earth’s surface. This means you don’t need to establish a line of sight for HF radio communication.

Many applications, such as emergency services and aircraft/maritime surveillance, rely on this mode of HF radio propagation.

But this radio communication scheme only works well when there is a reflective E or F layer, and when the absorbing D layer is not dominant.

During regular daytime hours, the D layer often becomes a nuisance because it weakens radio wave intensity in the lower HF spectrum. However, by changing to higher frequencies you can regain broken communication links.

The D layer may become even more dominant when intense X-ray emissions from solar flares or energetic particles are impacting the atmosphere. The absorbing D layer then breaks any HF communication links that traverse it.

Bomb blasts and the ionosphere

Nuclear detonations also produce X-ray radiation, which leads to additional ionisation in all layers of the ionosphere. This makes the F layer more reflective to HF radio waves, but, alas, the D layer also becomes more absorptive.

This makes it difficult to bounce radio waves off the ionosphere for long-distance communication soon after a nuclear explosion, even though the ionosphere stays intact.

Beyond additional ionisation, shock waves from nuclear detonations produce waves and ripples in the upper atmosphere called “atmospheric gravity waves” (AGWs).

These waves travel in all directions, even reaching the ionosphere where they cause what are known as “travelling ionospheric disturbances” (TIDs), which can be observed for thousands of kilometres.

Other atmospheric disturbances

Bomb blasts are not the only things that cause disturbances in the atmosphere.

In September 1979, there were reports of bright flashes of light off the South African coast, igniting theories South Africa had nuclear weapon capabilities.

Analysis of ionospheric data from the Arecibo Observatory, in Puerto Rico, confirmed the presence of waves in the ionosphere that corroborated the theory of an atmospheric detonation. But whether the detonation was artificial or natural could not be determined.

The reason for the ambiguity is that meteor explosions and nuclear detonations in the atmosphere both generate AGWs with similar characteristics.

The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor explosion in Russia generated waves in the ionosphere that were detected all across Europe, and as far away as the United Kingdom.

Volcanic eruptions, such at the 1980 Mount St Helens eruption in the US, and large earthquakes, such as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan, are other examples of energetic processes at the ground impacting the upper atmosphere.

Another well-known source of ionospheric disturbances is the geomagnetic storm, typically caused by coronal mass ejections from the Sun or solar wind disturbances impacting Earth’s magnetosphere.

Satellites as backup

In summary, nuclear detonations can impact the upper atmosphere in many ways, as do many other non-nuclear terrestrial and solar events that carry enormous energy. But the damage (so to speak) isn’t permanent.

Read more: Climate explained: how volcanoes influence climate and how their emissions compare to what we produce

Did the impact of these nuclear tests on the ionosphere specifically lead to the immediate launch of communications satellites? Not directly, because the impacts were temporary.

But in the Cold War setting, the potential for adversaries to even briefly interrupt over-the-horizon communications would certainly have been a motivating factor in developing communications satellites as backup.

– ref. Climate explained: did atomic bomb tests damage our upper atmosphere? – https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-did-atomic-bomb-tests-damage-our-upper-atmosphere-146760

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Mathews, Professor, School of Law, Queensland University of Technology

Book review: Witness, by Louise Milligan (Hachette).

Louise Milligan’s new book, Witness, is an excoriating critique of the failures of the criminal justice system in sexual assault trials.

Informed by Milligan’s two decades of experience as an investigative journalist, including her specialist work as a court reporter and her sustained coverage of the trials of George Pell, her analysis is enriched by in-depth interviews with prosecutors, defence counsel, solicitors, judges and academics.

Witness is both a gripping revelation of rarely-heard experts’ opinions about the realities and flaws of criminal procedure, and a devastating critique of the system.

The book is further inspired by detailed consideration of the experience of complainants in two high-profile cases, which Milligan had previously covered in Sydney and Melbourne.

These include Saxon Mullins, a young woman who was the complainant in a rape case that involved two trials, two appeals, and judicial errors. Her experience influenced a Law Reform Commission inquiry into the law of consent. She is now working with criminologists and advocates to develop minimum standards in rape laws to better define consent.

Read more: Australian law doesn’t go far enough to legislate affirmative consent. NSW now has a chance to get it right

Also examined in detail is the case of former St Kevin’s student Paris Street, who allowed Milligan to reproduce a letter he wrote about his experience of being cross-examined at the age of 15.

Witness is informed, too, by Milligan’s own experience of being cross-examined as a witness in the 2018 committal hearing of Cardinal George Pell. Here Milligan displays courage in divulging the personal toll taken.

“You don’t sleep the night before that first day in court …” she writes. “You vomit … Your mind spins … You cry …”

Her visceral description of the attempted destruction of her own character and credibility in cross-examination testifies to the brutality of many witnesses’ encounters with the criminal trial process.

Read more: Media Files: Investigative reporter Louise Milligan on Cardinal Pell and redactions in the Royal Commission’s report

Victims’ trauma

Witness recognises that for many complainants, their experience of the criminal justice system is traumatic. Through multiple case studies of cross-examination, centring mostly on cases in Victoria and NSW, Milligan demonstrates the best known dimension of this brutality, laying bare the chasm between complainants’ expectations of the system, and the reality of its operation.

Complainants, she shows, are stunned to realise the trial process is not about establishing truth. Often, they feel they are on trial.

Milligan recognises this experience is only partly due to the adversarial criminal justice system being centred neither on the complainant, nor on truth. Our system enables prosecution by the state: the complainant is simply a witness, subject to rules of evidence and procedure.

Core doctrines protecting the accused exist to prevent state abuse of power. This systemic environment is overlaid by features of sexual assault trials, which often turn on the complainant’s credibility and word against that of the accused.

Read more: Pell decision: why sexual offence trials often result in acquittal, even with credible witnesses

Milligan’s book is balanced. Neither she, nor her interviewees object to principles of presumed innocence until proven guilty, or the standard of proof. She accepts counsel’s obligation to strongly defend their client, but focuses on the professional ethic of choice in how this is achieved.

Crucially, Witness emphasises that many defence counsel do treat complainants with dignity and respect, and still defend their client admirably.

But at the book’s core is a justified sense of outrage at those who choose to treat complainants and witnesses with a hostility causing its own trauma; a special kind of systemic abuse.

Tactical shifts and empathy deficits

The interviews in Witness trace fascinating shifts in professional culture. Milligan identifies a change in defence cross-examination tactics from the outright aggression of the past. One interviewee admits “there was a time when you’d just try and eviscerate [the complainant]. And I don’t think juries are impressed by that now.”

Still, Milligan finds much room for improvement. Several defence counsel reveal they changed their approach — not because they have greater understanding about the nature of sexual assault and trauma, or empathy for the complainant, but because it was no longer effective for their client.

Others, still reliant on aggression, rationalise their approach as simply doing their job, to “ask the hard questions”. However, Milligan suggests this is simply a disingenuous cloak for cruelty, starkly contrasting it with defence counsel who do a brilliant job without brutalising victims.

Elsewhere in Witness, she charts the historic male dominance of the legal profession and the limits this places on the capacity for change.

A particularly striking dimension of Witness is its revelation that the adversarial system is brutal for legal practitioners, too.

Milligan’s interviews elicit numerous admissions of excessive drinking to cope with the stress, including the trauma of having to try to break down complainants.

One lawyer describes this activity as requiring “a complete separation of self”.

Milligan’s experience

Milligan’s account of her own cross-examination in the Pell committal by Robert Richter QC is exhaustive and compelling. Reflecting on the experience, she repeatedly references the Evidence Act s 41, which imposes a duty on the court to disallow improper questions and improper questioning, including questions that are intimidating or humiliating, or are asked in an insulting way.

Yet, it is clear she felt insufficiently protected by this section of the Act, and by other laws giving the court control over how witnesses should be questioned.

Virtually every question was asked, she writes, in a belittling or insulting way. By the end of the day, she “had never felt more alone”, despite all her experience, preparation, and team of lawyers. What hope do complainants have, she asks, who lack these resources, and were already traumatised?

An argument for change

Witness eloquently affirms how the criminal justice system is maladapted to meet the needs of complainants.

The system is broken. For sex crimes, rates of complaints, prosecutions, and convictions are persistently low.

Read more: Queensland rape law ‘loophole’ could remain after review ignores concerns about rape myths and consent

Knowing the brutal experience awaiting them, victims often do not complain, or withdraw from proceeding, undermining the rule of law. Because these are qualitatively different kinds of cases, leaders in the field have long argued that sexual assault trials require more fundamental changes.

Yet, even without more radical change, Witness insists a minimum acceptable standard of professional practice – treating witnesses with dignity and respect – is required and achievable, without compromising fair trial rights.

Protections against humiliating treatment of witnesses need to be properly enforced by judges and prosecutors. As one QC admits to Milligan, reforms about judicial directions and improper questioning “don’t mean anything if the prosecutor doesn’t intervene and the judge or magistrate isn’t in control of the courtroom”.

Milligan also suggests complainants would benefit from an expert advisor to assist them in navigating the system, and to protect against unduly intimidatory tactics.

This suggestion is supported by many of her interviewees, including both prosecutors and defence counsel.

Having interviewed so many witnesses, having borne witness to these trials, and having been a witness herself, Milligan is uniquely placed to reflect on the process.

She challenges legal practitioners to be part of the problem, or part of the solution. With Witness, a triumph of intellect and empathy, Milligan has chosen to be part of the solution.

– ref. Review: Louise Milligan’s Witness is a devastating critique of the criminal trial process – https://theconversation.com/review-louise-milligans-witness-is-a-devastating-critique-of-the-criminal-trial-process-148334

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Mathews, Professor Emeritus, Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University

Australia doesn’t yet export renewable energy. But the writing is on the wall: demand for Australia’s fossil fuel exports is likely to dwindle soon, and we must replace it at massive scale.

The proposed Asian Australian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH) will be a huge step forward. It would eventually comprise 26,000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar energy, generated in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. Once complete, it would be Australia’s biggest renewable energy development, and potentially the largest of its type in the world.

Late last week, the federal government granted AREH “major project” status, meaning it will be fast-tracked through the approvals process. And in another significant step, the WA government this month gave environmental approval for the project’s first stage.

The mega-venture still faces sizeable challenges. But it promises to be a game-changer for Australia’s lucrative energy export business and will reshape the local renewables sector.

Writing on the wall

Australia’s coal and gas exports have been growing for decades, and in 2019-20 reached almost A$110 billion. Much of this energy has fuelled Asia’s rapid growth. However, in recent weeks, two of Australia’s largest Asian energy markets announced big moves away from fossil fuels.

China adopted a target of net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2060. Japan will retire its fleet of old coal-fired generation by 2030, and will introduce legally binding targets to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

There are signs other Asian nations are also moving. Singapore has weak climate targets, but on Monday inked a deal with Australia to cooperate on low-emissions technologies.

Export evolution

The Asian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH) would be built across 6,500 square kilometres in the East Pilbara. The first stage involves a 10,000MW wind farm plus 5,000MW of solar generation – which the federal government says would make it the world’s largest wind and solar electricity plant.

The first stage would be capable of generating 100 terawatt-hours of renewable electricity each year. That equates to about 40% of Australia’s total electricity generation in 2019. AREH recently expanded its longer term plans to 26,000MW.

The project is backed by a consortium of global renewables developers. Most energy from AREH will be used to produce green hydrogen and ammonia to be used both domestically, and for shipping to export markets. Some energy from AREH will also be exported as electricity, carried by an undersea electrical cable.

Another Australian project is also seeking to export renewable power to Asia. The 10-gigawatt Sun Cable project, backed by tech entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes, involves a solar farm across 15,000 hectares near Tennant Creek, in the Northern Territory. Power generated will supply Darwin and be exported to Singapore via a 3,800km electrical cable along the sea floor.

Read more: It might sound ‘batshit insane’ but Australia could soon export sunshine to Asia via a 3,800km cable

The export markets for both AREH and Sun Cable are there. For example, both South Korea and Japan have indicated strong interest in Australia’s green hydrogen to decarbonise their economies and secure energy supplies.

But we should not underestimate the obstacles standing in the way of the projects. Both will require massive investment. Sun Cable, for example, will cost an estimated A$20 billion to build. The Asian Renewable Energy Hub will reportedly require as much as A$50 billion.

The projects are also at the cutting edge of technology, in terms of the assembly of the solar array, the wind turbines and batteries. Transport of hydrogen by ship is still at the pilot stage, and commercially unproven. And the projects must navigate complex approvals and regulatory processes, in both Australia and Asia.

But the projects have good strategic leadership, and a clear mission to put Australian green energy exports on the map.

Shifting winds

Together, the AREH and Sun Cable projects do not yet make a trend. But they clearly indicate a shift in mindset on the part of investors.

The projects promise enormous clean development opportunities for Australia’s north, and will create thousands of jobs in Australia – especially in high-tech manufacturing. As we look to rebuild the economy after the COVID-19 pandemic, such stimulus will be key. All up, AREH is expected to support more than 20,000 jobs during a decade of construction, and 3,000 jobs when fully operating.

To make smart policies and investments, the federal government must have a clear view of the future global economy. Patterns of energy consumption in Asia are shifting away from fossil fuels, and Australia’s exports must move with them.

Read more: China just stunned the world with its step-up on climate action – and the implications for Australia may be huge

– ref. Super-charged: Australia’s biggest renewables project will change the energy game – https://theconversation.com/super-charged-australias-biggest-renewables-project-will-change-the-energy-game-148348

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Brady, Research Fellow – Community Resilience, University of Melbourne

The joy Melburnians feel about coming out of lockdown is palpable, but another thread is also emerging: if you don’t live in Melbourne and haven’t experienced what we’ve experienced, you can’t actually understand what we’ve been through.

COVID has affected all Australians, but these last few months have been different for us.

Research on collective trauma and community recovery after disaster and upheaval tells us this is common in groups that have faced terrible or challenging experiences together.

If you’re in Melbourne, there are many ways to help yourself and those near you as we emerge from this gruelling period. If you’re outside Melbourne, you can and should support your Melbourne mates — but there are a few things to avoid.

Was Melbourne lockdown really a case of collective trauma?

Collective trauma events are not just disasters; they also have community-wide effects, and challenge people’s understanding of the way the world works.

Collective trauma events are typically thought of as tragedies such as the Lindt Cafe siege in 2014, the Christchurch Mosque shootings in 2019 or the events at Dream World in 2016. But I’d argue the strain of the last months in Melbourne have been experienced as a type of collective trauma event.

This view is informed by my research into disaster recovery, my work as a senior practitioner at Australian Red Cross, workplace seminars I have conducted during the pandemic, and my own experience living in Melbourne through this.

Collective trauma can have direct and indirect impacts. In the pandemic, direct impacts might be bereavement, the effect on your health, employment, education and access to services. Indirect impacts can be much harder to get your head around. They include changes to your worldview, your relationships, and how you see yourself.

For example in pre-pandemic times you may have been in a very equal relationship where domestic duties were evenly shared — but in lockdown, maybe one partner shouldered a bigger burden of childcare and housework, or was under more pressure at work. These stressors can throw the relationship out of whack and have a long term impact.

People who lived alone during lockdown may have watched their relationships change and might wonder if things can go back to how they were.

Read more: Collective trauma is real, and could hamper Australian communities’ bushfire recovery

In the first wave, there was a sense of “if we just batten down the hatches and get on with it, we will get through this.”

In the second wave, people in Victoria were confronted with a realisation that much in life is outside our control and recovery may not be linear. Instead of thinking “we just need to get through this part and then we’ll get back to how things were”, there was an unsettling day-to-day challenge of thinking, “What if this keeps happening? What if we can’t stop it? What if this changes the way I thought the world worked?”

So you had this disconnect where people outside Victoria kept saying “You’ll get through this! Once you’re on the other side things will be normal!” but, for many of us, those well-meaning cheers of encouragement didn’t line up with our actual experience.

Of course, people in other parts of the country who have been shaken in similar ways, and the restrictions Melburnians have experienced recently are faced by some people all the time. But in Melbourne, the relentlessness has been difficult to escape.

Getting support from others who lived it

We know from research that if a community has been through a challenging experience together — whether that’s bushfire, flood or some local horrific event — getting support from others who experienced it is crucial.

In my work with the Red Cross, we try to encourage people to connect with others after disasters. Just coming together to talk about what happened gives people the opportunity to feel a sense of hope, to normalise their experience and to be able to talk in a “shorthand” with others who will understand, because they went through it too. It’s a relief.

But all the things we’d normally suggest in the early stages of disaster are systemically dismantled by COVID. People have tried to stay connected online but it’s not the same. It’s tiring. It’s been harder to draw on normal points of support, which is crucial to recovery.

If you’re in Melbourne, recognise that we’ve all been through something huge and exhausting. Everyone is going to be in a different place. Try and be as patient and kind as you can with yourself and the people around you.

Dos and don’ts for people outside Melbourne

The research on collective trauma tells us if you haven’t been through the event, you’ll never quite understand. That doesn’t mean people outside Melbourne haven’t had their own experience, or can’t help.

Think about any upsetting personal experience you’ve had, such as miscarriage, divorce or the death of a parent. When someone who hasn’t experienced that specific trauma says “I know how you feel”, you might have felt misunderstood and even resentful or rageful.

You might think, “Not only do I need to explain myself and my feelings to this person — which in itself is exhausting and upsetting — I also have to find the energy to explain why what they said was wrong, even though I know they meant well”.

So over the next few weeks and months, don’t say “I know exactly how you feel” to your Melbourne friends and family. Unless you actually have been through the same thing in another setting, you don’t know how they feel. This experience was very specific.

Instead, ask “What has this been like for you?” and listen to what the person is saying. Say, “That sounds difficult. Tell me why, because I haven’t been in that situation”.

Staying open and empathetic

Research in this field talks a lot about the five mass trauma intervention principles, which are about promoting:

1) a sense of safety

2) a sense of calm

3) a sense of self-efficacy and community efficacy (belief in one’s community or one’s own ability to do something well)

4) connectedness

5) hope.

The lovely thing about these principles is they can be applied in many situations, whether that’s holding a press conference, consoling a friend or socialising with colleagues.

Good leaders promote these five things in times of crisis.

When we talk to each other as friends, try to keep those five principles in mind. Be open and empathetic in your listening.

Don’t be scared to talk to each other about how you’re feeling, and don’t be scared to ask your Melbourne friends about what happened.

But recognise that if you haven’t been through it, a good place to start could be “I can’t imagine what that was like. How can I help?”

– ref. Dear Australia, your sympathy helps, but you can’t quite understand Melbourne’s lockdown experience – https://theconversation.com/dear-australia-your-sympathy-helps-but-you-cant-quite-understand-melbournes-lockdown-experience-148900

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

American presidential elections do not, as a rule, change the calculus much for Australian foreign policy. Elections come and go, American presidents complete their terms and business continues more or less as normal.

Even Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 due to Watergate caused not much more than a ripple in what had been a difficult relationship between Washington and Canberra during the Whitlam era.

Gough Whitlam and his ministers had criticised US bombing campaigns in Hanoi and the North Vietnamese port city of Haiphong.

Importantly from Australia’s perspective, Gerald Ford continued Nixon’s engagement with China. This led to the normalisation of relations under Jimmy Carter in 1978.

While it would be foolish to predict the outcome of presidential elections whose results have confounded pollsters in the recent past, odds favour a change of an administration.

President Donald Trump’s blunders in the management of a pandemic are weighing heavily on both his electoral prospects and those of the Republican Party.

So, with all the caveats attached, it is reasonable to speculate about implications for Australia of a change of administration.

Read more: Trump can’t delay the election, but he can try to delegitimise it

An end to Trump’s “America First” era and its replacement by a traditionalist American foreign policy under Joe Biden, which emphasises friendships and alliances, will create new opportunities.

Importantly, a less abrasive international environment, in which America seeks to rebuild confidence in its global leadership, should be to Australia’s advantage.

Not least of the benefits would be an opportunity for Canberra to reset its relations with Beijing. This is a long-overdue project whose fulfilment has been complicated by Australia’s identification with Washington’s erratic policies coupled with Sinophobic attitudes in Canberra.

None of this is to suggest Australia should drop its legitimate criticisms of China: its human rights abuses; its cyber intrusions; its intellectual property theft; its attempts to interfere in Australian domestic politics; its flagrant disregard for criticisms of its activities in the South China Sea; its unprincipled reneging on its “one country two systems” agreements on Hong Kong, and a host of other issues.

Read more: Hopes of an improvement in Australia-China relations dashed as Beijing ups the ante

Indeed, you could argue Canberra needs to be more forthright in its dealings with China in pursuit of a more distinctive foreign policy.

Early in his tenure, Prime Minister Scott Morrison showed glimmers of promise in this regard. But this proved short-lived.

In an Asialink speech in the lead-up to the 2019 Osaka G20 summit, Morrison sketched out a role for Australia in seeking to defuse tensions in the region and provide some space for itself in its foreign policy. He said:

We should not just sit back and passively await our fate in the wake of a major power contest.

The speech was regarded at the time as promising a nuanced Morrison foreign policy. But since then the Australia has not ventured far from America’s coattails.

Indeed, it might be said to have cleaved even more closely to the US alliance as China’s rise has unsettled the region.

This returns us to implications of a potential Biden administration for Australia.

It would be naive to assume tensions between Washington and Beijing will dissipate under a Biden presidency. Such is the range of issues bedevilling Sino-US relations that some rancour will persist.

Much has changed in the four years since Biden served as vice president under Barack Obama. China is richer, bigger, stronger, more assertive and seemingly more ideological. It is certainly more nationalistic.

In Xi Jinping, it has a leader who is more conspicuously and ruthlessly committed to restoring China’s greatness than his predecessors.

Gone are the days when discussion about China revolved around hopes it would become a responsible international stakeholder willing to accommodate itself to an America-dominated global order. Now the issue is whether China’s assertiveness can be hedged to avoid open conflict.

Read more: Beware the ‘cauldron of paranoia’ as China and the US slide towards a new kind of cold war

If elected, Biden will need to settle on a new formula for dealing with China that provides certainty for an anxious global community. Whether this proves possible remains to be seen.

It should also be noted that Biden’s foreign policy advisory team includes hawkish elements that will resist yielding ground to China. Biden himself has referred to China’s leader Xi as a “thug”, along with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

On the other hand, Biden’s foreign policy realists are not burdened by an “America First” mindset. His team can be expected to take an expansive view of American foreign policy on issues like climate change, arms control and rebuilding a global trading system battered by years of neglect.

A Democrat administration would re-enter the Paris Agreement on climate change. It could also be expected to review Trump’s decision to disengage from the Trans Pacific Partnership trading bloc and it might seek to renegotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.

These would be positive developments from an Australian standpoint.

Unquestionably, re-ordering China policy will be at the top of Biden’s foreign policy priorities, and separate from the absolute domestic imperative of bringing a COVID-19 pandemic under control.

Australia should take advantage of the opportunity to explore possibilities of a less counterproductive relationship with its principal trading partner.

– ref. What would a Biden presidency mean for Australia? – https://theconversation.com/what-would-a-biden-presidency-mean-for-australia-148516

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jennifer Windt, Senior Research Fellow, Monash University

Many feel the coronavirus pandemic has changed not just our everyday lives, but also our inner mental lives. There has been talk of a mental health pandemic, but also of lockdown brain fog when we are awake, as well as reports of more frequent, vivid, and bizarre dreams when we are asleep.

We tend to think of our waking and dream lives as separate. But it is striking how deeply they are linked.

Spontaneous thought, or mind wandering, occupies up to 50% of wakefulness. Our thoughts and attention frequently drift away from what we are doing and what is happening in our immediate surroundings, with one thought following another along an associative trajectory.

Spontaneous thoughts and experiences are also pervasive in sleep. The clearest example is dreaming, which has been described as an intensified form of the mind wandering that happens when we are awake.

Considering dreaming and mind wandering together suggests the fluctuations in spontaneous experience, the natural ebb and flow of attention and somewhat erratic trajectory of thoughts continue throughout waking and sleep.

In normal circumstances, we mostly remain oblivious to the fact our minds have wandered. Most people also only rarely remember their dreams, but when awakened in the sleep laboratory can report multiple dreams per night. Like mind wandering, dreaming is also largely (with the exception of certain lucid dreams) beyond our control.

However, attention to our inner lives may be amplified at a time when control over our everyday lives is elusive.

Paying attention to your dreams when you first wake up in the morning drastically increases dream recall. And attempting to harness our thoughts and attention throughout the day can actually make us more aware of our failures, including lapses in attention. If you have been paying more attention to your spontaneous thoughts during the pandemic, you might have become more aware of what was were there all along.

Read more: Unravelling the mysteries of sleep: how the brain ‘sees’ dreams

Changes in spontaneous thought — for better or worse

If you have been sleeping more during lockdown, you are probably experiencing more early morning REM sleep. Because REM sleep is typically associated with the most vivid and complex dreams, this might lead to an increase in actual dreaming.

If you have also ditched your alarm clock, you are probably awakening directly from REM sleep, which further increases dream recall.

The pandemic has also changed what we daydream and dream about. Waking concerns about the pandemic seem paralleled by more frequent nightmares and dreams about topics such as social distancing, contagion, or personal protective equipment.

Read more: What dreams may come: why you’re having more vivid dreams during the pandemic

Some changes to our spontaneous mental lives can indicate something is amiss. Anxiety and stress are linked to increased repetitive thoughts and rumination; trouble focusing, disturbed sleep, nightmares, and unpleasant dreams, all of which seem to have increased during the pandemic.

These repetitive, sticky and non-progressive thoughts contrast with the free, meandering movement that characterises most dreams and mind wandering.

Spontaneous thought might be beneficial

The restlessness of our minds might also have a silver lining. Mind wandering certainly does compromise how well we perform tasks demanding attention. But because of their associative nature, dreams and mind wandering can also help make new connections and see familiar topics in a new light. When our minds wander, our thoughts are often drawn to the future and personal concerns.

Similarly, dreams have the tendency to weave disparate waking experiences and concerns into new and sometimes bizarre narratives. You might encounter a dream character who is a mixture of different people you have been close to at different times in your life.

Or your initially pleasant dream of visiting friends in a faraway city might morph into a nightmare about getting infected, putting your family at risk, and being pursued by the police because you are breaching lockdown.

Spontaneous thoughts in waking and sleep might help process memories and guide future planning and decision making, for example by enabling us to imagine alternative courses of action; they can also be a source of insight and creativity.

Such thoughts may also contribute to coping and emotional processing. Future-oriented mind wandering is often positive, whereas past-oriented mind wandering tends to be associated with negative moods and emotions.

A great escape

Being in the here and now is often lauded as a virtue we should aim to cultivate through mindfulness. But sometimes, distraction can be useful: Mind wandering can provide a welcome break from boring tasks, allowing us to return with refreshed attention.

Other times, distraction might just be pleasant. In our dreams, we experience alternative realities; we can travel freely and, because dreams are rich in social interactions, we can interact with people we are separated from in waking life.

Given the monotony, restrictions, and social isolation many of us are experiencing, the unruliness and unboundedness of our minds might sometimes be a great escape.

If you are interested in joining a study on mind wandering and dreaming, please email spontaneous.experiences.sr@gmail.com.

– ref. Our minds may be wandering more during the pandemic — and this can be a good thing – https://theconversation.com/our-minds-may-be-wandering-more-during-the-pandemic-and-this-can-be-a-good-thing-145764

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Dempster, Director, Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research; Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, UNSW

Water is more abundant on the Moon than we might have suspected, according to two papers published today in Nature Astronomy that confirm the presence of ice on and near the lunar surface.

It’s a boost for the prospect of extracting water from the Moon, which can help support humans, or be converted to rocket fuel, although the situation is far from simple.

The first paper, led by Casey Honiball of the University of Hawai’i, offers confirmation of the suspected discovery of water on the Moon. In previous studies, researchers had examined frequencies of absorbed radiation and identified the presence of chemicals called hydroxyl ions on the Moon.

Hydroxyl ions (OH-) are part of the water molecule H₂0, meaning water ice was a likely, but not definite, source of the hydroxyls detected. But as hydroxyl ions are found in many other compounds too, it was impossible to be sure.

The new research used a new technique and has shown that a significant proportion of those hydroxyls are indeed found within water ice molecules, possibly bound or suspended in the Moon’s surface rocks. More research is needed to deduce the precise details, but the presence of molecular water is big news.

The second paper, led by Paul Hayne of the University of Colorado, notes there are likely to be more “cold traps” containing water ice than previously estimated.

A “cold trap” is a place in permanent shadow, where ice can survive because it never receives direct sunlight, and where the temperature stays sufficiently low. Elsewhere, sunlight warms the ice, causing it to “sublime”: the Moon’s low atmospheric pressure means solid ice directly transforms into water vapour, which may refreeze somewhere else.

The study showed that at high latitudes, there were potentially very high numbers of these cold traps (possibly billions), some as small as 1cm across.

Read more: Blowin’ in the (solar) wind: how the moon got its water

How much water is on the Moon? Current estimates, based on the previous detection of hydroxyls, range from 100 million tonnes to the more recent 2.9 billion tonnes. According to the new estimate, up to 30% of some areas of the lunar surface could be ice in cold traps.

Even using the conservative price for water offered by launch company ELA of $US3,000 per kg for delivery to low Earth orbit, the water on the Moon could be worth billions of dollars a year, because water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen and used as rocket fuel. Some of our research shows how a business case can be made at low Earth orbit.

The importance of the new findings is there is now far more certainty that the water is there, and there are more widespread opportunities to find it.

Good news for ice miners?

It’s a timely discovery, because there has been a lot of activity recently, including in Australia, developing projects to extract water on the Moon. In the past two weeks alone, NASA has let a contract for an ice-mining drill, and announced the launch aboard NASA’s Space launch System (SLS), designed for deep space missions, of three small satellites looking for water. Meanwhile, the European and Chinese space agencies have announced missions to explore the lunar south pole for water.

Australia is in this game because of the Australian Space Agency’s A$150 million commitment to the Moon to Mars program. Australia also this month signed the Artemis Accords, a series of bilateral agreements between the United States and other partners to develop a legal framework for space resources.

Read more: Artemis Accords: why many countries are refusing to sign Moon exploration agreement

That may sound like great news but Australia is also a signatory of the Moon Agreement, the UN’s approach to peaceful uses of the Moon and other bodies. Some say this is inconsistent with the Artemis Accords. We have called for the Australian Space Agency to provide clarity on this issue, and hosted events to discuss it (including a solid 1.5-hour debate).

Yet Australia is now a signatory to both agreements, with no explanation as to how that is possible under international law. We need the Australian Space Agency to provide clarity about its interpretation of both instruments, as soon as possible. The urgency for this action is pressing — we are now much more certain there is water to extract on the Moon, and that the barriers to entry have been lowered. Australian companies are building capability in space resources and they need certainty to allow those businesses to grow.

– ref. Cool discovery: new studies confirm Moon has icy poles – https://theconversation.com/cool-discovery-new-studies-confirm-moon-has-icy-poles-148639

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Howard Wiseman, Director, Centre for Quantum Dynamics, Griffith University

Lasers were created 60 years ago this year, when three different laser devices were unveiled by independent laboratories in the United States. A few years later, one of these inventors called the unusual light sources “a solution seeking a problem”. Today, the laser has been applied to countless problems in science, medicine and everyday technologies, with a market of more than US$11 billion per year.

A crucial difference between lasers and traditional sources of light is the “temporal coherence” of the light beam, or just coherence. The coherence of a beam can be measured by a number C, which takes into account the fact light is both a wave and a particle.

Read more: Explainer: what is wave-particle duality

From even before lasers were created, physicists thought they knew exactly how coherent a laser could be. Now, two new studies (one by myself and colleagues in Australia, the other by a team of American physicists) have shown C can be much greater than was previously thought possible.

How coherent can a laser get?

The coherence C is roughly the number of photons (particles of light) emitted consecutively into the beam with the same phase (all waving together). For typical lasers, C is very large. Billions of photons are emitted into the beam, all waving together.

This high degree of coherence is what makes lasers suitable for high-precision applications. For example, in many quantum computers, we will need a highly coherent beam of light at a specific frequency to control a large number of qubits over a long period of time. Future quantum computers may need light sources with even greater coherence.

Read more: Explainer: quantum computation and communication technology

Physicists have long thought the maximum possible coherence of a laser was governed by an iron rule known as the Schawlow-Townes limit. It is named after the two American physicists who derived it theoretically in 1958 and went on to win Nobel prizes for their laser research. They stated that the coherence C of the beam cannot be greater than the square of N, the number of energy-excitations inside the laser itself. (These excitations could be photons, or they could be atoms in an excited state, for example.)

Raising the limit

Now, however, two theory papers have appeared that overturn the Schawlow-Townes limit by reimagining the laser. Basically, Schawlow and Townes made assumptions about how energy is added to the laser (gain) and how it is released to form the beam (loss).

The assumptions made sense at the time, and still apply to lasers built today, but they are not required by quantum mechanics. With the amazing advances that have occurred in quantum technology in the past decade or so, our imagination need not be limited by standard assumptions.

The first paper, published this week in Nature Physics, is by my group at Griffith University and a collaborator at Macquarie University. We introduced a new model, which differs from a standard laser in both gain and loss processes, for which the coherence C is as big as N to the fourth power.

In a laser containing as many photons as a regular laser, this would allow C to be much bigger than before. Moreover, we show a laser of this kind could in principle be built using the technology of superconducting qubits and circuits which is used in the currently most successful quantum computers.

Read more: Why are scientists so excited about a recently claimed quantum computing milestone?

The second paper, by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal but recently appeared on the physics preprint archive. These authors use a somewhat different approach, and end up with a model in which C increases like N to the third power. This group also propose building their laser using superconducting devices.

It is important to note that, in both cases, the laser would not produce a beam of visible light, but rather microwaves. But, as the authors of this second paper note explicitly, this is exactly the type of source required for superconducting quantum computing.

Can we get even higher?

The standard limit is that C is proportional to N ², the Pittsburgh group achieved C proportional to N ³, and our model has C proportional to N ⁴. Could some other model achieve an even higher coherence?

No, at least not if the laser beam has the ideal coherence properties we expect from a laser beam. This is another of the results proven in our Nature Physics paper. Coherence proportional to the fourth power of the number of photons is the best that quantum mechanics allows, and we believe it is physically achievable.

An ultimate achievable limit that surpasses what is achievable with standard methods, is known as a Heisenberg limit. This is because it is related to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Read more: Explainer: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

A Heisenberg-limited laser, as we call it, would not be just a revolution in the design and performance of lasers. It also requires a fundamental rethinking of what a laser is: not restricted to the current kinds of devices, but any device which turns inputs with little coherence into an output of very high coherence.

It is the nature of revolutions that it is impossible to tell whether they will succeed when they begin. But if this one does, and standard lasers are supplanted by Heisenberg-limited lasers, at least in some applications, then these two papers will be remembered as the first shots.

– ref. Reimagining the laser: new ideas from quantum theory could herald a revolution – https://theconversation.com/reimagining-the-laser-new-ideas-from-quantum-theory-could-herald-a-revolution-147436

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Damien Cahill, Associate Professor, Department of Political Economy, University of Sydney

The COVID crisis has exposed the destructive consequences of an over-reliance on casual labour across the economy. Australian universities provide one of the clearest examples of this. For the past two decades, universities have leaned into international student fees on the revenue side and casual workers on the expense side.

This approach effectively shifted the risks of the international student fee market onto insecurely employed staff with few entitlements or employment rights. Since the pandemic caused international student fee revenue to dry up, thousands of casual university staff have lost their jobs.

Read more: More than 70% of academics at some universities are casuals. They’re losing work and are cut out of JobKeeper

This is a devastating consequence of the business model of universities intersecting with the federal government’s ideological aversion to universities accessing JobKeeper.

On top of this, the associated problem of wage theft is widespread. In a newly released National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) survey of 2,174 professional and academic staff at every university except Charles Darwin, almost four in five academic respondents claimed one or other form of underpayment.

University managers have been keen to deny the extent of casualisation. They point to figures showing casuals comprise only a small proportion of their workforce on a full-time equivalent (FTE) basis. Universities are only required to report their staffing figures to the Education Department on an FTE basis. This underestimates the actual headcount of casual staff.

The NTEU estimates the proportion of casual employees in Australian public universities is about 45%.

This estimate closely matches the data universities provide to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. It’s the only government agency that requires all Australian universities to report their total staff numbers by employment category. The agency’s data show the proportion of casual staff is as high as 58% at some universities.

Read more: Casual academics aren’t going anywhere, so what can universities do to ensure learning isn’t affected?

Casual work and wage theft go together

University managers typically downplay the problem of wage theft. In a recent submission to the Senate Inquiry into Unlawful Underpayment of Employees’ Remuneration, the Australian Higher Education Industrial Association (AHEIA), an employer group representing universities, claimed wage theft is not a systemic issue in Australian universities.

Yet we now know that in NSW alone seven of the 11 public universities have indicated they are being, or have recently been, audited for underpayment of staff – Sydney, UNSW, Western Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, Charles Sturt and New England. Other Australian universities accused of underpayment include Melbourne, Monash and RMIT in Victoria, the University of Queensland, and UWA and Murdoch in Western Australia.

This is an indication of the scale of the problem. And well-paid vice chancellors value casuals for more than just being able to end their employment at a moment’s notice. Casuals can be paid less than they are owed. Wage theft, normally associated with the hospitality industry, has become rife within universities.

Read more: Shocking yet not surprising: wage theft has become a culturally accepted part of business

How are casuals underpaid?

There are several common forms of underpayment for casual workers.

The first is a semantic sleight of hand where managers classify teaching work in a way that attracts a lower rate of pay. For example, tutorials are regularly classified as “demonstrations”, meaning the casual is paid less for the same type of work.

Last year at Macquarie University the NTEU negotiated about A$50,000 in back payments for casual staff whose tutorials had been reclassified as “small group teaching activities” with a lower rate of pay. Similarly, at the University of Western Australia, tutorials have been classified as “information sessions” that attract a lower rate of pay.

Another frequent source of underpayment is a failure to pay casuals their full entitlements. For example, casual workers are entitled to be paid for a minimum number of hours per engagement, but university payroll systems, which only look at time sheets, might ignore this. This is why auditors have been called into Sydney University where casual workers might have been underpaid as much as A$30 million over six years.

But perhaps the most common and insidious form of wage theft is requiring casuals to work for no pay. Typically, key tasks simply aren’t part of a casual worker’s contract, yet are expected to be completed. This could be consultation with students, class preparation, familiarisation with labyrinthine policies, or being required to complete marking within unrealistic timeframes.

At the University of Melbourne, the Fair Work Ombudsman is investigating underpayments in relation to casual marking based on the improper use of piece rates, rather than payment for the hours worked. About A$1 million has already been paid out. The NTEU is also in dispute with RMIT management over a similar issue.

Why has the problem become so entrenched?

Because of their insecure employment and fear of losing work, casuals are often reluctant to raise underpayments with their supervisors.

Read more: Dependent and vulnerable: the experiences of academics on casual and insecure contracts

A recent survey at UNSW found 42% of casuals reported doing unpaid work. A survey at Sydney Uni reported 82% of casuals working unpaid hours.

Much of the work casual staff do is not actually casual in nature. It is regular, ongoing and stable over time. Student enrolments, for example, which drive teaching work, are quite steady year on year.

The solution is simple: end the over-reliance of universities on casuals. Just a few months ago, such a proposal would have sounded outlandish. But unprecedented times demand new solutions.

Moving casual university work into salaried positions with greater security and employment rights would be good for staff, good for students and good for the broader community.

– ref. Wage theft and casual work are built into university business models – https://theconversation.com/wage-theft-and-casual-work-are-built-into-university-business-models-147555