Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Aulich, Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra, University of Canberra

Our “state of the states” series takes stock of the key issues, seats and policies affecting the vote in each of Australia’s states.

We’ll check in with our expert political analysts around the country every week of the campaign for updates on how it is playing out.

New South Wales

Chris Aulich, Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra

The Liberals proclaim their party is a “broad church”, embracing a spectrum of views. But like most churches, there is always the potential for schism. These schisms were played out in the 45th parliament, culminating in the removal of a prime minister. They also caused policy paralysis on matters such as climate change mitigation, immigration, water management and broad based taxation reform.

Simmering tension between moderates and conservatives are evident in a number of urban seats, where centre-right independents are challenging conservatives. It’s also evident in several regional seats, where the challenge to Coalition seats is coming from nonaligned, but generally right-leaning independents.

In the NSW seat of Farrer, former Coalition minister Sussan Ley is being challenged by Albury Mayor, Kevin Mack. At this stage, Mack is being priced by the bookies for a win, overcoming a 20% buffer enjoyed by Ley. Given that the federal electorate takes in two state seats that fell to the Shooters Fishers and Farmers at the recent state election, Farrer can now be described as marginal.

As with many other rural seats, especially in the irrigation areas, there is palpable anger with the Coalition’s handling of water management. Barnaby Joyce, the former Minister for Agriculture and Water, further alienated locals with his explosive interview with the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas last week. In this environment, the stocks of rural independents have risen.

Read more: Facebook videos, targeted texts and Clive Palmer memes: how digital advertising is shaping this election campaign

In the Northern NSW seat of Page, sitting Nationals MP Kevin Hogan has suggested that he might sit on the crossbench if Labor forms government (as he did in 2018 in protest against the dumping of Malcolm Turnbull). Early internal polling suggests that Hogan is slightly ahead of Labor’s Patrick Deegan. Hogan may well find himself sitting with other regional independents, perhaps even holding the balance of power.

In Gilmore, on the south coast, Ann Sudmalis decided not to recontest the seat, resigning amid complaints of “bullying, betrayal and backstabbing” by local colleagues. The Liberals nominated Grant Schultz, but this nomination was overturned after the prime minister using a “captain’s call” to nominate former ALP President Warren Mundine. Schultz has since resigned from the party and is standing as an independent.

To add to this complexity, former Nationals member Katrina Hodgkinson has also nominated, and has enlisted as her campaign coordinator for Gilmore former Liberal member Joanna Gash. Labor and the Nationals are likely to be advantaged by Schultz’s decision not to preference any party, and this may be sufficient for Labor’s Fiona Phillips to secure the 0.7% of votes needed to win the seat.

Victoria

Nick Economou, Senior Lecturer in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University

Nothing in the campaign so far suggests that Victoria will not be really difficult for the government, with Liberal seats such as Chisholm, La Trobe and Michael Sukkar’s seat of Deakin under threat. The Liberal cause has been further undermined by the disendorsement of candidates in unwinnable seats who had been exposed as having made bigoted utterances. Labor triumphalism over this has been tempered by one of its candidates being accused of having made light of sexual violence against women.

Matters of substance to arise in Victoria over the last few weeks (during which time pre-polling commenced) relate to preference deals for both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

In the seat of Flinders, held by health minister Greg Hunt with a 7.0% margin, high profile independent candidate Julia Banks – formerly the Liberal member for Chisholm – announced that her how-to-vote card would be advising supporters to direct their preferences to Labor ahead of the Liberal candidate. While Hunt is on a fairly significant margin, reports have suggested that the local Liberal campaign has become very concerned about this development.

Senate how-to-vote cards have also appeared in time for the pre-polling period. Of significance here is the Labor party decision to advise its supporters to give preferences to the Derryn Hinch Justice Party ticket. Not only does this boost Derryn Hinch’s chances of being reelected, the Labor how-to-vote card is a potential blow to the Greens’ Janet Rice if the Green ticket’s primary vote was to fall well short of the quota. The Greens will doubtlessly benefit from a flow of Animal Justice Party preferences, but in a half-Senate election, the combined vote may not achieve the 14.4% required for Rice’s re-election.

The Liberal-National ticket, meanwhile, directs preferences to Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party. One wonders if this might not be the basis on which Palmer’s party secures a seat in Victoria, particularly if, as seems very likely, the Liberal-National primary vote falls below three quota (43.2%).

Read more: Now for the $55 million question: what does Clive Palmer actually want?

Queensland

Maxine Newlands, Senior Lecturer in Political Science at James Cook University

Herbert was always to going to be a tight race for the minor parties. The biggest battle should have been between One Nation and United Australia Party. In the 2016 election, One Nation gained in Palmer’s absence. This time around, One Nation could struggle to gain a foothold thanks to the Liberals’ legitimisation of Clive Palmer’s Canberra bid via preference deals. One Nation’s own implosion, and the fact that its Herbert candidate comes from outside the electorate compound its problems.

While minor parties traditionally rely on protest votes, this year pre-polling could scupper any last minute announcements. Smaller parties tend to spend big in the last few weeks of a campaign, but that might be in vain if large numbers of people have already voted.

Pre-polling is going to play an important role in this election. Pre-poll votes within the first 24 hours are almost double the number at the same stage in 2016. The Queensland electorates of McPherson, Lilley and Herbert recorded the highest numbers of pre-pollers in the first 24 hours.

Herbert’s Hyde Park booth was the third highest in Queensland to pre-poll in the first 24 hours. At 1,414, it is more than double the previous election. By Wednesday, Hyde Park had 3,175 votes lodged – the highest in Queensland.

Both Herbert and Dickson were in the top ten electorates for pre-polling in 2016. Dickson pre-polled at 1,343 in the first 24 hours. This week’s housing market announcement could affect those pre-polling in Dickson, with house prices and negative gearing a key election issue.

GetUp! has ramped up the pressure in Dickson this week with its “Ditch Dutton” campaign, which involves door knocking, calling voters, media stunts, testimony of disenfranchised Dickson voters, and plastering the electorate with Ditch Dutton signs.

Western Australia

Ian Cook, Senior Lecturer of Australian Politics at Murdoch University

The leaders’ debate may have returned Western Australia to the political spotlight, but less attention was being paid to what important players in WA’s 2017 state election were saying about a Liberal preference deal with Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

In 2017, a desperate Liberal Party did a preference deal with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation to try to save the election. The results were not what the Liberals had hoped for. It might have helped them to hold Geraldton, but the general damage to the party was considerable.

Both important players in WA’s 2017 state election worried about the Chinese government’s reaction to a preference deal with Palmer’s UAP. Former Premier, Colin Barnett, and current Premier, Mark McGowan, called attention to Palmer’s ongoing spat with Chinese officials and warned that any deal with Palmer would upset Australia’s most important trading partner. Palmer responded by accusing WA Labor of sucking up to the Chinese.

More importantly, at least when it comes to the current election result, Barnett warned of a backlash from more progressive Liberal voters, for whom a deal to swap preferences with a populist party is offensive. Barnett should know. That’s what happened to him when party officials made the deal with One Nation. It didn’t help that soon after the deal, Hanson said that voters hated Barnett, and One Nation candidates said they weren’t going to preference the Liberals. But the general effect of some Liberal voters rejecting the deal and the party was real.

This brings us to the blue-riband seat of Curtin, which the Liberals hold by a 20% margin. While it’s an ultra-safe seat, like Wentworth, it contains the kind of progressive Liberal voters who helped to elect independent Kerryn Phelps.

Curtin’s gotten a little curious, though. The former Member for Curtin and Liberal star Julie Bishop’s first choice to replace her lost in the preselection process. This was yet another moment of rejection by a party that Bishop had served with great distinction for two decades. It also meant that a conservative was preselected to a seat where there are likely to be plenty of progressive Liberal voters.

Then former Fremantle MP and Minister for International Development in the Rudd government, Melissa Parkes, nominated for the seat and soon resigned as Labor candidate after comments she made that were critical of Israel returned to haunt her.

Finally, and even more bizarrely, the independent candidate who might have done a Phelps and snatched a blue-riband seat from the Liberals passed “results” from what turned out to be a fake opinion poll to the West Australian, which led the paper to publish a headline story about the Liberals losing the seat. So, we even had fake news!

South Australia

Rob Manwaring, Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy at Flinders University

The election campaign is steadily cranking up in South Australia, and we just are beginning to see some frays and cracks at the local level of campaigning. The past week has been dotted with a number of incidents – none of which in and of themselves may prove decisive – but certainly add to the colour of the campaign.

Rather unfortunately, Shaun Osborn, the Liberal candidate for Adelaide, sent out a letter with his first name misspelled on the header. This gaffe followed an apology to a local café owner, after Osborn had invited local members to an event where he had not sought prior permission.

A more serious incident took place in the much more tense battle for the seat of Mayo, held by Centre Alliance MP Rebekha Sharkie. One of Sharkie’s volunteers was charged by the police with stalking high-profile Liberal candidate Georgina Downer. The volunteer in question now faces the magistrates court in mid-May, and Sharkie has ordered that the man takes no further part in her campaigning in a seat she holds by just 2.9%.

Finally, racist graffiti was scrawled over a campaign poster for the Greens Senate candidate, and Ngarrindjeri elder Major “Moogy” Sumner. While these events have added some drama, it has distracted from a focus on local issues.

South Australia’s key, distinctive, policy contributions to the overall campaign are likely to remain water policy and energy policy.

The water issue was given fresh impetus when Labor Senator Penny Wong took a swipe at the Liberals’ preference deal with Clive Palmer’s UAP. Senator Wong argued strongly that the UAP water policy was to scrap the current Murray Darling Basin plan. Energy is a key issue, and has remained prominently associated with South Australia since the 2016 blackout. Bill Shorten is trying to pivot this into his campaign agenda, with his announcement to create a new “renewable energy zone” in the Spencer Gulf.

Read more: How the major parties’ Indigenous health election commitments stack up

Tasmania

Lachlan Johnson, PhD Candidate in Politics and International Relations and Research Assistant at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of Tasmania

This week has seen Tasmania emerge as an important battleground with polls narrowing across the country. Reporting from the past week that the Coalition is confident of Gavin Pearce’s chances in Braddon has been bolstered by new uComms polling now giving the Liberal candidate a slim lead in the rural North-Western electorate.

While Braddon was always expected to be close, perhaps the bigger news from recent polling is a Coalition resurgence in Bass, which covers Launceston and the state’s North-East. That poll, also by uComms, gave the coalition a two-party preferred lead of 54-46%.

This suggests the disproportionately large amount of time spent by Scott Morrison and Michael McCormack in northern Tasmania, relative to some other marginal areas, may be paying dividends.

Bill Shorten also visited Tasmania on Saturday, unveiling new funding commitments in Hobart and Launceston. The opposition leader promised A$120 million in federal tourism funding, plus A$25 million towards a Tasmanian AFL team should it win office on May 18. Of that tourism funding, A$50 million would support the development of a new hotel and theatre at MONA. Interestingly, neither MONA nor AFL funding have been well received in the state’s two crucial northern electorates.

Unsurprisingly, the MONA announcement has generated significant interest and controversy. Also, given that Labor is in little danger of losing Lyons, and even less danger of winning Clark – held by independent Andrew Wilkie – the strategy behind the MONA proposal is puzzling. Millionaire proprietor David Walsh has suggested that the funding wouldn’t change even his vote, adding that Wilkie remains a safe bet. Now that Liberal Lyons candidate Jessica Whelan has resigned (following discovery of anti-Muslim social media posts in her name) these south-eastern electorates are unlikely to need much further intervention from Labor, who will instead redouble their efforts in Bass and Braddon.

It may therefore be the case that this tourism funding boost to the state’s major population areas is an attempt to garner upper house votes in what will surely be a very tight contest for a third Senate quota between the two major parties. Despite the government currently having four more Senators than the ALP nationally, a 2016 below-the-line voting campaign for Lisa Singh means that Tasmania is the only state in which Labor has more senators up for reelection than the Coalition this time around.

With both Bass and Braddon now in play, and a Senate challenge from the Coalition, Greens, and high-profile independents, this week has seen Labor looking increasingly vulnerable in Tasmania.

– ref. State of the states: more preference deals as pre-polling begins – http://theconversation.com/state-of-the-states-more-preference-deals-as-pre-polling-begins-116364

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Annette Greenhow, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Bond University

On May 1 the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) issued a highly anticipated ruling involving athlete Caster Semenya and Athletics South Africa as claimants, and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).

The ruling upheld the IAAF’s eligibility regulation that restricted female athletes, including Semenya, with “differences of sex development” – broadly taken to mean high levels of testosterone – from entering certain international athletic events.

It means Semenya will have to take medication to lower her testosterone levels if she wishes to continue competing internationally in running events.

This decision is within the sports law decision-making framework. But what about Semenya’s human rights? Recent publications from the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) criticise the “discriminatory regulations” relating to lowering testosterone in female athletes.

Read more: Caster Semenya: how much testosterone is too much for a female athlete?

Semenya’s case shows the challenges in balancing a range of interests in maintaining fair competition. On the one hand, the IAAF’s claim of a “legitimate, necessary and proportionate” method to ensure a level playing field in competitive sport. On the other, the rights of those with hyperandrogenism (a condition where the body produces relatively high levels of testosterone) in competing against females with so-called “normal” testosterone levels.

Who is Caster Semenya?

As an athlete competing in IAAF events, 28-year-old Semenya is well known for her athletic prowess in her chosen sport.

The public scrutiny Semenya endured in 2009 when subject to gender testing increased public attention on her physical attributes.

After being cleared to run again, Semenya’s domination continued to raise controversy about perceived unfairness of being included in female classified events. Others described her physical advantage akin to an adult competing against a child in the same competition.

Read more: Testosterone: why defining a ‘normal’ level is hard to do

The IAAF sets the rules

The IAAF is the legitimate rule-maker in the world of athletics. Athletes agree to be bound by the IAAF rules if they want to compete.

In April 2018 the “Eligibility Regulations for Female Classification (Athletes with Differences of Sex Development)” – known as the DSD regulations – were set out.

These established the criteria for women to compete in the female classification of the 400m, 800m and 1500m races and apply to athletes who are female (or have intersex characteristics) with naturally occurring testosterone levels of above 5 nanomole/L (a measure of concentration) and who experience a “material androgenising effect” (that is, the testosterone has a biological effect).

Affected female athletes are required to reduce natural testosterone levels to within the normal female range (i.e. to a level below 5 nanomole/L) by using medication, and maintain that reduced level for at least six months to remain eligible to compete.

Read more: What makes you a man or a woman? Geneticist Jenny Graves explains

The role of CAS

The CAS determines sports-related disputes and bases its rulings on the evidence presented to it and the submissions presented by the parties. The authority of the CAS operates via a series of interlocking arrangements that cascade down through the global governance of sport, and are binding on athletes.

In June 2018, Semenya and Athletics South Africa filed arbitration proceedings challenging the validity of the DSD Regulations as “discriminatory, unnecessary, unreliable and disproportionate”. They claimed that the DSD regulations would cause “grave unjustified and irreparable harm” and questioned the scientific soundness, a concern raised by others.

The IAAF disagreed and claimed the DSD regulations were necessary to pursue “the legitimate aim of safeguarding fair competition and protecting the ability of female athletes to compete on a level playing field”. It claimed the DSD regulations were based on the “best available science” and did not discriminate.

On May 1 the CAS Panel upheld the validity of the DSD regulations and considered the DSD Regulations as a “necessary, reasonable and proportionate means of achieving the IAAF’s aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics”

Semenya and Athletics South Africa have thirty days to appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal. The IAAF issued a media release advising the DSD Regulations effective on 8 May 2019, and calling on affected athletes to consult their medical teams and initiate suppressive treatment.

It’s also about human rights

So what are the wider implications of the Semenya case?

In March 2019, the IAAF was criticised by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) over concerns that their “discriminatory regulations […] to medically reduce blood testosterone levels contravene international human rights […] including the right to equality and non-discrimination…and full respect for the dignity, bodily integrity and bodily autonomy of the person”.

With specific reference to the IAAF’s DSD Regulations, the UNHRC called upon states to “ensure that sporting associations […] refrain from developing and enforcing policies […] that force, coerce or otherwise pressure […] athletes into undergoing unnecessary, humiliating and harmful medical procedures”.

The UNHRC also requested the UN High Commissioner to prepare a report on the intersection of gender discrimination in sports and human rights to present to the Human Rights Council at its forty-fourth session (likely to be held June 2020).

Sport is a special domain, but it is not that special to be immune from the law and human rights. Indeed, Sport Australia promotes inclusive sport based on the principle that “every Australian […] should be able to participate in sport […] in a welcoming and inclusive way”.

So the questions remain whether states will take heed of the UNHRC call to action, and how to reconcile this with the IAAF’s stand on gender characteristics falling outside the “normal” range.

– ref. It’s not clear where human rights fit in the legal ruling on athlete Caster Semenya – http://theconversation.com/its-not-clear-where-human-rights-fit-in-the-legal-ruling-on-athlete-caster-semenya-116417

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dale Stephens, Professor of Law, University of Adelaide

The anti-satellite missile test carried out by India last month was a display of military capability.

It told the world that India – like China, the United States and Russia before it – was now capable of high precision targeting objects in space.

It also highlighted a growing realisation that we lack the appropriate rules and regulations to deal with weapons in space in 2019 and beyond.

Read more: India destroys its own satellite with a test missile, still says space is for peace

But what exactly are we missing in terms of regulatory capacity? What does existing space law cover right now, and how can we best update this to reflect current and future activities?

We’re working on a solution to ensure everyone around the world is on the same page. The Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Operations is a document that aims to spell out the manner in which international law controls and regulates military operations in outer space. It’s an initiative led by universities in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdm, and will be released in 2021.

Here’s what you need to know so far.

The existing treaties

We’ve had a global space agreement in place for more than 50 years. But the terms of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) provide little practical guidance in assessing the lawfulness of potentially destructive space activities.

The OST does not ban the use of conventional weapons in space. Nor does it provide any concrete rules that states must abide by in testing conventional weapons (other than general obligations such as taking “due regard” of the interests of other states).

Following its recent missile test, India argued its obligation was met by destroying an asset – one of its own satellites – in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) test. India said the debris resulting from the test was rendered harmless to other items in space by both decay (break up in space) and falling back to earth.

But modelling conducted by other states and organisations concludes the opposite. Namely, that the debris from this specific test does represent a genuine threat, including to the International Space Station and commercial space operations.

We’ve got a problem when varied states see the same issue so differently.

Read more: Ten essential reads to catch up on Australian Space Agency news

Exploration over military action

The international legal regime relating to outer space is contained in five principal treaties that were negotiated in the late 1960s and 1970s. They provide an excellent snapshot of what states recognised as humanity’s capabilities and aspirations at the time.

Emphasis was given to scientific exploration of space, along with general references to the desirability of international cooperation in space activity.

Limited attention was given to military activity, other than broad prohibitions such as:

• no placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit around the Earth
• no military bases or military manoeuvres on the Moon and other celestial bodies
• no testing of weapons on the Moon and other celestial bodies.

The focus on banning weapons of mass destruction in space was driven largely by tests such as the US Starfish Prime Test of 1962, a high-altitude nuclear detonation. This altered the radiation of the Van Allen belts that girdle the Earth. It was also said to have caused the failure of the US Telstar 1 communications satellite and feared to pose a radiation hazard to future Apollo missions.

But these treaties do not reflect military capabilities in space that have developed in recent years, including those in India, China, the United States and Russia.

Read more: It’s not clear where Trump’s ‘Space Force’ fits within international agreement on peaceful use of space

No law-free zone in space

While there is very little direct regulation of military space operations contained within the existing space treaty regime, that does not mean that such activity exists in a law free zone.

The OST states that general international law applies to space activities, including military space activities.

Today, military forces rely heavily on space-based assets for numerous critical security and war fighting functions. These include communications, intelligence collection, surveillance and reconnaissance, weapons verification and also for targeting in a time of armed conflict.

These space-based assets usually perform key civilian functions as well, such as GPS services. This all helps in transport, banking, medicine, agriculture and even the internet itself.

This means understanding what the legal limits relevant to these space assets is critical to civilian and military use alike. Increasing tensions on Earth have also created the belief in an impending “space war”.

Read more: I’ve Always Wondered: could someone take ownership of a planet or a moon?

The Woomera Manual

The Woomera Manual aims to set out a complete framework of legal controls relevant to military space operations.

Its development includes input from numerous space, military and general international law experts from universities and organisations around the world, such as the Secure World Foundation and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

It also involves a number of international military officers, acting strictly in their personal capacity, along with representation from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The project is divided in three conceptual phases, looking at:

1. military space activities in peacetime under existing international law
2. the application of specialised principles of international law in a time of rising tension, and
3. the manner in which the Law of Armed Conflict (also known as International Humanitarian Law) would apply to the conduct of armed conflict to, from or in outer space.

We hope to get the manual completed by 2021.

Read more: We’re drafting a legal guide to war in space. Hopefully we’ll never need to use it

How it works

Through the Woomera Manual we aim to capture the law as it is right now – and not what is should or ought to be.

We examine what states have said and done in relation to military space operations under the law (and what the reaction of other states have been). The views of academics and others whose contributions can only ever be regarded as having a secondary priority are not included.

The final draft version of the Woomera Manual will be subject to a process of state engagement.

Read more: India destroys its own satellite with a test missile, still says space is for peace

In reaction to the recent India ASAT test, the US Strategic Command Commander, General John Hyten, advocated for the establishment of a framework that could fill gaps in the lawful conduct of military space operations.

The Woomera Manual seeks to fulfil that challenge by playing a constructive role in articulating that framework. It’s something we need now, more than ever.

– ref. A guide to ensure everyone plays by the same military rules in space: the Woomera Manual – http://theconversation.com/a-guide-to-ensure-everyone-plays-by-the-same-military-rules-in-space-the-woomera-manual-115146

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Robie, Professor of Pacific Journalism, Director of the Pacific Media Centre, Auckland University of Technology

When Pacific countries reflect on the state of their media today, marking World Press Freedom Day, they know the reality is much worse than the ticks they got from a global media freedom watchdog last month.

Five of the seven Oceania nations scoped in the Asia-Pacific region scored with apparently significant improvements in the 2019 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom index. Papua New Guinea rose by 15 points to 38th in the global table of 180 countries.

But media freedom advocates know the rankings can be deceptive.

Read more: Press freedom under attack: why Filipino journalist Maria Ressa’s arrest should matter to all of us

Threats of media regulation

New Zealand rose one place to seventh (to remain in the top 10) and Australia dropped two places to 21st, just one spot above Samoa, which was unchanged but described as “losing its status as a regional press freedom model”. Fiji (52), Timor-Leste (84) and Tonga (45) all “improved”.

West Papua is the worst situation in the Pacific, but this Melanesian territory is hidden within the Indonesian statistics.

The RSF index has a robust methodology, and the algorithms reflect that global media freedom has been declining, with growing hostility towards journalists since the last index survey. The situation in the Pacific has also been deteriorating.

While there might not be assassinations, murders, gagging, torture and “disappearances” of journalists in Pacific island states, threats, censorship and a climate of self-censorship are commonplace.

Take Papua New Guinea as an example again. Last week, amid what appeared to be the unravelling of Prime Minister Peter O’Neill’s coalition government, described by many critics as a de facto “dictatorship”, an opposition leader made an extraordinary threat against the country’s two foreign-owned newspapers.

Vanimo-Green MP Belden Namah, leader of the PNG Party which is one of two major groups in the opposition, put the Australian-owned Post-Courier and Malaysian-owned National newspapers “on notice” that an incoming new government would “deal” to the media.

Angered by the two dailies for not running his news conference stories, he threatened to regulate the print media should a new government be installed after the vote of no-confidence due on May 7.

Pressure on journalists

Last November, one of Papua New Guinea’s leading journalists, EMTV’s award-winning Lae bureau chief Scott Waide, was suspended by his company. It had been under pressure from the O’Neill government to have him sacked.

Why? Because he exposed the “inside story” of a diplomatic Chinese tantrum and a scandal over the purchase of luxury Maserati cars during the Asia Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) hosted by Port Moresby.

Columnist Vincent Moses wrote on Pacific Media Watch:

Peter O’Neill is acting like another Chinese dictator in Papua New Guinea by exerting control over both state-owned and private media to not report truths and facts that expose his government and their corrupt acts to PNG and the world.

The strong condemnation that followed forced EMTV to reverse its decision and the network reinstated Waide.

Chiefs demand expulsion of journalist

In the North Pacific, a Pacific Island Times magazine editorial last week blasted traditional chiefs on Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia for demanding the expulsion of a probing US reporter.

The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Mar-Vic Cagurangan, strongly defended her Yap correspondent, Joyce McClure, who has been living on the island for the past three years. She said declaring the correspondent a persona non grata would set a “dangerous precedent”.

Joyce McClure’s reporting provided transparency, which was “vital to every democratic society”, Cagurangan wrote.

Cagurangan has had to defend her team’s journalism before. Last September, she wrote an editorial stressing the tough times Pacific publishers and editors of small publications face dealing with threats from advertisers in tiny markets.

Given the small market, where there is a thin line between business and government, operating a media outlet is much more challenging locally.

Media intimidated in Fiji

In Fiji, the independent New Zealand website Newsroom last month investigated a major environmental development disaster inflicted by the Chinese company Freesoul Real Estate on the remote tourism island of Malolo. The website exposed how Fijian news media had been effectively gagged by 13 years of draconian media legislation and a climate of fear since the 2006 military coup.

Although democracy has returned and two post-coup elections have been held in 2014 and last year, journalists are often intimidated into silence.

Opposition leader Sitiveni Rabuka, the man who staged Fiji’s first two coups in 1987, said the “rot and culture of fear” in the civil service and the “intimidated and cowed media” were now so ingrained in the country that it had taken foreign journalists to break the story.

Read more: NZ journalists arrested in Fiji have been released but a new era of press freedom is yet to arrive

The RSF media watchdog warned in its 2019 report about totalitarian propaganda, censorship, intimidation, physical violence and cyber-harassment in the Asia-Pacific region. The pressures meant it now took a “lot of courage … to work independently as a journalist” in the region where democracies were struggling to resist various forms of disinformation.

The watchdog singled out China and Vietnam, which both dropped one place to 177th and 178th respectively on the global list of 180 countries, as the worst culprits.

About 30 journalists and media workers are detained in Vietnam, with nearly twice as many being detained in China. The latter country is of major concern to the Pacific in view of its growing economic, aid, trade and strategic influence in the region.

The report says:

China’s anti-democratic model, based on Orwellian high-tech information surveillance and manipulation, is all the more alarming because Beijing is now promoting its adoption internationally.

Read more: New Zealand’s Pacific reset: strategic anxieties about rising China

China has embarked on “soft power” strategies of seducing key journalists in the Pacific region with junkets to Beijing where they can be introduced to Chinese media manipulation.

The RSF index sees the growing raft of cyberlaws in the Pacific as an example of this Chinese-inspired media manipulation.

In spite of the pressures, Pacific journalists and publishers like Mar-Vic Cagurangan vow to fight on.

We will continue telling the story and exploring the truth. We are not your enemy. We are your neighbours committed to upholding the principles of democracy.

– ref. Pacific countries score well in media freedom index, but reality is far worse – http://theconversation.com/pacific-countries-score-well-in-media-freedom-index-but-reality-is-far-worse-116373

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sue Lynn Lau, Endocrinologist, Western Sydney University

This article is the first part in a series, Where culture meets health.

The holy month of Ramadan, which sees Muslims all over the world fast during daylight hours, begins this weekend. Does having type 2 diabetes exclude a person from fasting? Not necessarily. The decision belongs to the person, but getting some advice from health professionals can help.

Diabetes is the fastest growing chronic condition in Australia. About 6% of Australian adults report they have diabetes, although this is likely an underestimate of the true prevalence.

Type 2 diabetes, which constitutes the majority of diabetes cases, occurs when the body becomes resistant to the actions of insulin, or loses the capacity to produce sufficient insulin from the pancreas. Insulin keeps the body’s blood glucose levels within a healthy range.

People with type 2 diabetes can manage the condition by maintaining a healthy lifestyle, including doing exercise and keeping a healthy diet. In more serious cases, people with type 2 diabetes may need to take medications such as metformin, sulfonylureas, or other glucose-lowering tablets, or self-administer insulin injections.

Type 2 diabetes affects some ethnicities more than others. It’s more common in people of Middle Eastern, north African and south/south-east Asian backgrounds. Many Muslim Australians are from these ethnic backgrounds.

Using 2016 census data, and conservatively estimating an adult diabetes prevalence of 10% among people of Muslim background (the exact prevalence is unknown), as many as 40,000 Muslims may be living with diabetes in Australia. And this number is likely to be increasing.

Read more: How Australians Die: cause #5 – diabetes

We’re about to begin the month of Ramadan

Dietary practices such as fasting, feasting, and consumption of special foods are an essential component of many religious and cultural celebrations.

For Muslims, fasting during the month of Ramadan is obligatory for all healthy adults, who must refrain from eating, drinking and taking oral medications between dawn and sunset.

During Ramadan, most people have two meals per day, at sunset and before sunrise. This can be risky for people with type 2 diabetes – particularly those who use insulin or certain oral diabetes medications – for a couple of reasons.

First, fasting during the day can increase the risk of low blood glucose levels in people who usually take insulin or other blood glucose-lowering medications.

And conversely, the evening meal to break the fast, called “Iftar,” often involves eating large amounts of calorie-rich foods in a relatively short space of time. This can put people with diabetes at risk of high blood glucose levels overnight.

Omission or changes in the timing of medications may also contribute to instability of blood glucose levels.

Low blood glucose levels can cause symptoms of sweating, shakiness and confusion. If severe, they can lead to seizures, coma, or even death. High blood glucose levels make people feel tired and generally unwell and can lead to dehydration and poor concentration. Extremely high levels are a medical emergency.

There are guidelines

According to Islamic teachings, the elderly, pregnant, or those with illnesses requiring regular medication – like diabetes – can be exempted from fasting on medical grounds. They do not need to seek special permission from a religious leader.

Certain groups of people with type 2 diabetes who do not use insulin or particular oral medications can safely fast during Ramadan under the guidance of their health-care professional.

But as diet, lifestyle and medication use are key factors in maintaining stable blood glucose levels and minimising diabetes complications, many people with type 2 diabetes can also be considered medically exempt from fasting.

Read more: Know your disease: education is key to living well with diabetes

Practical guidelines established by the International Diabetes Federation-Diabetes and Ramadan (IDF-DAR) International Alliance assist health professionals to assess patients’ level of risk.

Low risk patients can safely enjoy fasting, while those at moderate to high risk are advised against fasting.

These guidelines have been endorsed by religious authorities in Australia and overseas and are a valuable reference for health professionals and their Muslim patients.

But it’s not quite that simple

The month of Ramadan is a special time for Muslim people, where fasting and feasting are integral to religious life, social interaction and communal celebration.

Because fasting is one of the five pillars of Islam, there is a strong desire to participate, even among those who could be exempt for medical reasons.

Those who cannot fast for medical reasons may feel alienated by their diabetes and develop negative attitudes towards it, possibly resulting in impaired self-management of their condition.

Some people with diabetes may be reluctant to raise the topic themselves, fearing a lack of understanding from non-Muslim health providers. They may conceal their intentions to fast to avoid any perceived conflict with the health professional.

Understanding the spiritual significance of this month to Muslims as well as the practical aspects can put health practitioners in a much stronger position to gain patient trust and facilitate communication.

Read more: Health Check: will intermittent fasting diets help you lose weight?

Culturally sensitive discussion allows people with diabetes to make informed choices

The month of Ramadan is determined according to the Islamic lunar year and varies annually in the western calendar. Professionals caring for people who observe Ramadan should be aware of its timing and start the conversation in advance.

Muslims with diabetes wanting to observe Ramadan should be counselled on the risks of fasting. Drawing on the guidelines, health providers can reassure their patients that those who do not fast for medical reasons also receive spiritual rewards and should not feel guilty.

Health-care professionals may suggest donations of food or money to the poor could be considered as an alternative, if it’s within the person’s means.

Discussion about Ramadan must occur in a culturally sensitive and non-judgemental way, appreciating a person’s right to evaluate the risks and benefits of fasting – both spiritual and physical – for themselves, and determine from an individual perspective whether fasting is the right decision.

Doctors might also advise their patient to discuss any concerns with their local religious leader.

For those who choose to fast despite their exemption, discussions about glucose monitoring, nutrition, exercise and potential medication changes can ensure they fast as safely as possible.

The diabetes health care team (which can include GPs, endocrinologists, diabetes educators, dietitians and diabetes nurse practitioners) can also develop an individualised Ramadan-specific management plan.

Read more: Friday essay: how Western attitudes towards Islam have changed

Understanding people’s different cultural backgrounds, lifestyles and religious practices plays an important role in their health care. A lack of understanding might lead to poorer health outcomes and disengagement with health services, while research shows culturally appropriate diabetes education and prevention programs improve outcomes for people from different backgrounds.

Health-care professionals should educate themselves about their cultural setting and local patient population to maintain effective therapeutic relationships and achieve the best patient-focused outcomes.

– ref. Between health and faith: managing type 2 diabetes during Ramadan – http://theconversation.com/between-health-and-faith-managing-type-2-diabetes-during-ramadan-115469

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick Walker, Adjunct Research Associate, Monash University

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a highly stigmatised and misunderstood condition. Australians with BPD face considerable barriers to accessing high-quality and affordable care, according to new research published today.

For every 100 patients we treat in inpatient psychiatric wards, 43 will have BPD. People with this condition are vulnerable, impulsive, and highly susceptible to criticism – yet they continue to face stigma and discrimination when seeking care.

We have come a long way since the days of viewing mental illness as a sign of weakness, but we are lagging behind in our attitude towards BPD. At least part of this stems from the way we frame the condition, and from the name itself.

Rather than as a personality disorder, BPD is better thought of as a complex response to trauma. It’s time we changed its name.

How common is BPD?

BPD is strikingly common, affecting between 1% and 4% of Australians. It is characterised by emotional dysregulation, an unstable sense of self, difficulty forming relationships, and repeated self-harming behaviours.

Most people who suffer from BPD have a history of major trauma, often sustained in childhood. This includes sexual and physical abuse, extreme neglect, and separation from parents and loved ones.

This link with trauma – particularly physical and sexual abuse – has been studied extensively and has been shown to be near-ubiquitous in patients with BPD.

People with BPD who have a history of serious abuse have poorer outcomes than the few who don’t, and are more likely to self-harm and attempt suicide. Around 75% of BPD patients attempt suicide at some point in their life. One in ten eventually take their own life.

Read more: Borderline personality disorder is a hurtful label for real suffering – time we changed it

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) does not mention trauma as a diagnostic factor in BPD, despite the inextricable link between BPD and trauma. This adds to viewing BPD as what its name suggests it is – a personality disorder.

Instead, BPD is better thought of as a trauma-spectrum disorder – similar to chronic or complex PTSD.

The similarities between complex PTSD and BPD are numerous. Patients with both conditions have difficulty regulating their emotions; they experience persistent feelings of emptiness, shame, and guilt; and they have a significantly elevated risk of suicide.

Why the label is such a problem

Labelling people with BPD as having a personality disorder can exacerbate their poor self-esteem. “Personality disorder” translates in many people’s minds as a personality flaw, and this can lead to or exacerbate an ingrained sense of worthlessness and self-loathing.

This means people with BPD may view themselves more negatively, but can also lead other people – including those closest to them – to do the same.

Read more: Mood and personality disorders are often misconceived: here’s what you need to know

Clinicians, too, often harbour negative attitudes towards people with BPD, viewing them as manipulative or unwilling to help themselves. Because they can be hard to deal with and may not engage with initial treatment, doctors, nurses and other staff members often react with frustration or contempt.

These attitudes are much less frequently seen from clinicians working with people suffering from complex PTSD or other trauma-spectrum disorders.

What could a name change do?

Explicitly linking BPD to trauma could alleviate some of the stigma and associated harm that goes with the diagnosis, leading to better treatment engagement, and better outcomes.

When people with BPD sense that people are distancing themselves or treating them with disdain, they may respond by self-harming or refusing treatment. Clinicians may in turn react by further distancing themselves or becoming frustrated, which perpetuates these same negative behaviours.

Eventually, this may lead to what US psychiatric researcher Ron Aviram and colleagues call a “self-fulfilling prophecy and a cycle of stigmatisation to which both patient and therapist contribute”.

Read more: Biology is partly to blame for high rates of mental illness in women – the rest is social

Thinking about BPD in terms of its underlying cause would help us treat its cause rather than its symptoms and would reinforce the importance of preventing child abuse and neglect in the first place.

If we started thinking about it as a trauma-spectrum condition, patients might start being viewed as victims of past injustice, rather than perpetrators of their own misfortune.

BPD is a difficult condition to treat, and the last thing we need to do is to make it harder for patients and their families.

– ref. We need to treat borderline personality disorder for what it really is – a response to trauma – http://theconversation.com/we-need-to-treat-borderline-personality-disorder-for-what-it-really-is-a-response-to-trauma-115549

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathryn Daley, Lecturer, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, RMIT University

I Need to Know is an ongoing series for teens in search of reliable, confidential advice about life’s tricky questions. If you’re a teen, send us your questions about sex, drugs, health and relationships and we’ll ask an expert to answer it for you.

As someone who has never touched drugs before, how hard is it really to say no to illicit substances?

Anonymous, 17, Newington

Key points

• The easiest way to say “no” is by explaining why you don’t want to take drugs (while at the same time not sounding judgemental)
• alcohol is the most commonly used drug
• most young people don’t use illicit drugs.

Hi and thanks for the question. Can young people really “just say no” to illicit drugs? There are a few things to consider, so let’s talk them through.

1. Are all teenagers trying drugs?

It might feel as though your friends are going to go through a phase of experimenting with illicit drugs. But in fact, most young people don’t take illicit drugs.

Alcohol is by far the most commonly used drug, though rates of alcohol use are generally decreasing. A national survey of secondary students found 46% of 12-17 year olds had tried alcohol in the past year, but only 25% had in the past month. Similarly, another survey found young people were trying alcohol for the first time later (about age 16) and more were abstaining than ever before (82%).

Cannabis is often the first illicit drug young people are exposed to (about 7% of 12-17 year-olds have tried it). Later on, generally in your early 20s, you’ll start to encounter people trying harder drugs such as ecstasy and amphetamines (see in the graph above how this number dramatically increases between the two age groups). Even then, the majority of people don’t regularly use these drugs.

Read more: Three Charts on who uses illicit drugs in Australia

2. Will people actually offer me drugs?

There is a widespread assumption that drugs are frequently offered to people your age. This isn’t always the case. Drug use is an illegal activity, so people who have them and who sell them tend to be a little cautious who they talk to about it. You might not ever be offered them directly.

But if most of your peer group are experimenting with substances, you almost certainly will be offered them. So…

3. How to say ‘no’ without it being a big deal

Although most young people don’t use drugs, some studies point out they’re open to other people doing so. This is referred to as the “normalisation” of illicit substance use: in simple terms, it’s being OK with your friends drinking alcohol or doing drugs even if you choose not to.

If you don’t want to drink or take drugs, you’ll find yourself in a position where you have to explain why. It might be useful to say something like:

It’s not my thing, but I don’t care if you’re into it.

Or if you feel like you need to give a reason, perhaps,

I always react badly when I drink alcohol/smoke joints, so I just don’t like it.

I have a game tomorrow and don’t want to feel bad.

I have bad come downs, so the high’s just not worth it for me.

I have a family thing tomorrow and don’t want to be hungover / coming down.

Hot tip: try not to make the other people feel like you you are judging them, but don’t feel like you need to justify why you don’t want to use drugs either.

4. Can you be the only one in the group who doesn’t use them?

When you do something you don’t want to do, you won’t feel good about it or about yourself. So you might have your friends, but you might not be happy – that’s not a great trade-off!

Make a point of being around people and friends who make you feel good. You might not enjoy hanging out with people when they’re affected by drugs, so don’t! Spend time with people who don’t pressure you to do things, and perhaps skip the parties, meet-ups and hangouts where you think there’s a good chance you won’t have fun.

If your friends are using drugs a lot and it’s impacting their lives in other ways, you might want to help them get some help – here are some tips on how to do that.

Read more: I Need to Know: ‘My friend is using ice and smoking pot. What do I do?’

If you’re the only person in your group not using drugs, you might want to find some other like-minded friends – perhaps through school, a part-time job or sport.

If you’re a teenager and have a question you’d like answered by an expert, you can:

• email us at intk@theconversation.edu.au
• submit your question anonymously through Incogneato, or
• DM us on Instagram.

Please tell us your name (you can use a fake name if you don’t want to be identified), age and which city you live in. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

– ref. How hard is it to say ‘no’ to drugs? – http://theconversation.com/how-hard-is-it-to-say-no-to-drugs-111536

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Levinson, Professor of Transport, University of Sydney

Train riders have to get to stations somehow. This is often referred to as the “first mile” or “last mile” problem. There are many technical solutions to help travellers get from home to the station and back, ranging from cars to electronic scooters, but most people use a much older technology, their feet, to get from A to B. What is seldom considered is access to the train platform itself.

Stations are not points but places. They occupy a large area. A person walking at average speed takes about two minutes to walk from one end of a full-length eight-car train to the other.

Read more: $500m for station car parks? Other transport solutions could do much more for the money

Often platforms have a single access point on one side of the station, which makes it more difficult for people on the other side of the station to get to the platform. Passengers may need to almost circumnavigate the station to get to the platform. At an average walking speed, the extra distance they must backtrack adds up to six minutes per trip each way, our research has found.

Imagine being so unlucky to have an extra 12 minutes of travel time every day if you take the train. You might be tempted to drive instead.

The table below shows the extra travel time in minutes depending on platform locations and access points for a traveller’s origin and destination. The average time for such a one-sided configuration of train stations is 3.25 minutes each way.

While this example is hypothetical, it is drawn from experience in Sydney, where 44 of 178 train stations have only a single side entrance.

So what impact will a second entrance have?

We examined those stations and access to their platforms: how many people lived within 5, 10 and 15 minutes of the station platform, considering actual entrance location, and how many jobs were within 5, 10 and 15 minutes of the platform. Using existing ridership data from Opal cards, we estimated a model that related the passenger entry and exit flows at each station to that station’s accessibility.

We sketched a second entrance at those 44 stations and measured accessibility again. It’s now higher, as having two entrances instead of one means more people can reach the platform in the same time. We then estimated the increase in ridership from the model due to the improved accessibility, assuming no change in population or employment.

Over all 44 stations, total morning peak period entries increased by 5%. But some stations benefit a lot, and others not at all, so prioritisation of investments matters.

Read more: Which lines are priorities for Sydney Metro conversion? Hint: it’s not Bankstown

It will be no surprise to locals that Erskineville station comes out on top with a nearly 35% increase. While many of the new apartment-dwelling residents west of the station make the extra hike every day, even more would catch the train if there were a convenient entrance.

Other top 10 stations include: Bankstown, Newtown, Villawood, Redfern, Burwood, Sydneham, Caringbah, Meadowbank and Penshurst. Planning is already under way to improve Redfern station.

While this result considers existing development, adding a second entrance can make new transit-oriented development that much more valuable. This is because it will likely increase activity on the previously less accessible side of the station, as the example of Erskineville shows below.

Read more: Make housing affordable and cut road congestion all at once? Here’s a way

Other considerations include accessibility for people who cannot use staircases, as many of the stations are older and will require lifts. The prospects of park-and-ride lots, the costs of construction, the presence of nearby stations, and site feasibility also play into final decisions.

Our formal findings and detailed methods are written up in this report: Catchment if you can: The effect of station entrance and exit locations on accessibility.

– ref. How to increase train use by up to 35% with one simple trick – http://theconversation.com/how-to-increase-train-use-by-up-to-35-with-one-simple-trick-115222

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Coates, Fellow, Grattan Institute

Stagnant wages are a huge issue in this election campaign.

So it is odd that both major parties are hanging onto a policy that will take more out of workers’ pockets.

Lifting compulsory superannuation contributions from 9.5% to 12% in five annual steps between and 2021 and 2025, as Labor insists on and the Coalition says it supports, will take up to an extra 0.5% out of wages each year for five years.

If wage growth would otherwise be 2.3% per year, as it is now, instead wages growth for five years would be closer to 1.8%. After the five years, wages would be up to 2.5% lower than otherwise.

And it would cost the budget, which is one of the reasons neither side is anxious to do it until 2021. Super contributions are taxed more lightly than wages.

In return, workers will get more super, which won’t help them much.

More super means lower wages

Australia’s superannuation system requires employers to make compulsory contributions on behalf of their workers.

Right now that contribution is set at 9.5% of wages and is scheduled to increase incrementally to 12% by July 2025. Federal Labor recently recommitted to increasing compulsory super to 12% of wages. It’s also Coalition policy.

Although the government requires employers to pay super on top of salary, it doesn’t usually come out of their pockets.

The overwhelming evidence is that higher super contributions are paid for by lower wages.

The Henry Tax Review and others have found this is exactly what happens.

The Parliamentary Budget Office came to the same conclusion in April this year: if compulsory super contributions go up, wages will be lower than they would be otherwise.

And the cut to wages from raising compulsory super from 9.5% to 12% will be big. Really big. Our calculations show that by the time it is fully implemented in 2025-26, a 12% Super Guarantee will strip up to an extra A$20 billion from workers’ wages each year, or close to 1% of Australia’s gross domestic product.

Most workers don’t need more super

Nor are higher super contributions actually needed.

Grattan Institute’s latest retirement income projections show that most Australians are already on track for adequate retirement incomes.

Most workers today can expect a retirement income of at least 87% of their pre-retirement income if compulsory super contributions are left at 9.5%.

That’s well above the 70% benchmark endorsed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and more than enough to maintain pre-retirement living standards.

Modelling commissioned by the super industry that suggests otherwise is based on flawed assumptions.

Even workers in their 40s and 50s today – many of whom didn’t benefit from the present high rate of compulsory super contributions for their entire working lives – can expect a retirement income of more than 70% of their pre-retirement incomes.

Right now, at the present rate of super contributions, many low-income Australians are on track to get a pay rise when they retire, through a combination of the age pension and their compulsory superannuation savings. A full-time worker on the minimum wage can expect a retirement income almost 20% higher than their present after-tax wage.

Forcing low-income workers to save even more for retirement while reducing their incomes while working will leave them worse off overall.

And more super won’t help much in retirement

Superannuation lobby groups are pushing the major parties to lift compulsory super contributions to 12% as soon as possible.

They point to the higher super balances workers will have at retirement if compulsory super contributions are increased.

But it’s a misleading story. More super at retirement is only useful if it actually translates to higher incomes in retirement. And for most low and middle income earners, it won’t do it much.

For most Australian workers, lower age pension payments would largely offset the increase in their retirement income from super savings, leading to little or no change.

There’s more. The age pension is indexed to wages. Boosting super contributions would suppress wages growth, making the age pension climb more slowly, hurting both retirees in future and retirees today.

Australians receiving the age pension today should be the most fervent opponents of a lift in compulsory super contributions.

And for many Australian workers, sacrificing a greater share of their wages in exchange for little or no increase in their retirement incomes will leave them with lower lifetime incomes than they would otherwise have.

Instead increasing compulsory super would primarily boost the retirement incomes of the top 20% of Australians who gain access to extra super tax breaks, while costing those of us working up to $20 billion per year in lost wage rises, and the budget more than $2 billion per year in lost tax.

Read more: Why we should worry less about retirement – and leave super at 9.5%

And it would be a long time before the tax revenue lost through super tax concessions saved the budget enough money on pensions to pay its way. Our projections put the break-even point at 2060 — by which time there will be 80 years of budget costs to pay back before the whole exercise has saved the government money.

The benefits of increasing compulsory super to 12% are tiny. The costs, at a time of unusually low wage growth, would be keenly felt, and at a time of unusually low economic growth, could have broader consequences.

Both Labor and the Coalition should think again.

The Productivity Commission has begged for an independent inquiry into whether 12% is needed, before the increases start.

At the very least, both sides should commit to postponing or varying the planned increases if there is a fair chance that they will lead to further wage stagnation. That’s how it is today, and may well be in four years time.

Read more: Frydenberg should call a no-holds-barred inquiry into superannuation, now, because Labor won’t

– ref. $20 billion per year. That’s how much higher superannuation could take from wages – http://theconversation.com/20-billion-per-year-thats-how-much-higher-superannuation-could-take-from-wages-116353

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

There’s an election on. Half a million of us have already voted. There’s just two weeks to go.

With that comes more intense scrutiny of different policies (which is good) and disingenuous claims by those with vested interests (which is not so good).

And perhaps the most contentious policy Labor is taking to the election is its proposal to eliminate dividend imputation cheques for people with excess franking credits.

Peter Martin has provided an excellent explanation of what franking credits are and how dividend imputation works which I won’t recapitulate.

What’s relevant here is that Labor wants to undo a Howard government innovation that sends cheques to people fortunate enough to receive income from shares and not pay tax. It exists nowhere else in the world.

Read more: Words that matter. What’s a franking credit? What’s dividend imputation? And what’s ‘retiree tax’?

Naturally retirees who don’t pay tax and have become used to “franking credit” cheques” along with dividend payments are unhappy.

Take this example, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday.

Alan and Bev are in their eighties, own their own home, and have A$800,000 in shares. Those shares pay them dividends of $32,000 a year. Along with those dividend cheques they get a $13,000 cheque from the government, which takes their annual income to $45,000.

Alan and Bev don’t want to spend what they’ve got

The thought of having to exist on only $32,000, leaves them “wondering how they can reduce their already tight budget”.

Alan and Bev might have realised that could draw down on their $800,000 a little each year.

If, for example, they took out $15,000 a year and earned 4% (their current rate) on what was left they would

• have more post-tax income than they do now, and

• still have about $400,000 saved in 20 years time, by which time they would be over 100 years old and, statistically speaking, rare.

I understand that they mightn’t want to do that, and I can understand that their adult children mightn’t want them to do it either, because if the parents don’t use the money they have saved, the children will be in line to inherit it.

Why should we subsidise their desire not to?

The position of the “independent financial expert” who wrote the article is a little odd. She doesn’t seem to want it to happen either.

The Future of Financial Advice Act requires her to put the best interests of her clients ahead of her own.

Perhaps she did, and advised them to run down some of their savings. Perhaps they told her that in their view it was in their best interests not to, and to leave them all to their children.

Read more: The newest election faultline isn’t left versus right, it’s young versus old — and it’s hardening

However, I as a taxpayer don’t like paying them a subsidy that allows them to do that when they could (should) be using their own money to pay for things they can well afford.

The payment of dividend cheques to people who pay insufficient tax costs $6 billion a year – soon to be $8 billion.

I don’t think we should be taxing inheritances through a death duty or an estate tax. Not at all. But right now we have what amounts to as an estate subsidy, one for which it is hard to see the economic rationale.

Labor wants to wind back an unusual subsidy

Dividend imputation is an important principle and a was a good policy when Paul Keating introduced it as treasurer in 1987.

It prevents the double taxation of company profits – where the company pays, say, 30% tax on profits and then an individual pays another as much as another 49% on the dividends. That kind of double taxation was unprincipled, deterred capital formation and investment and harmed employment and economic growth.

Dividend imputation paid to the shareholder the company tax paid in return for the shareholder paying tax.

In 2001, the Howard government extended it to shareholders who didn’t pay tax, in their cases turning “no double taxation” of company profits into “no taxation” of company profits.

Then in 2007 he changed the tax rules so that many more retirees didn’t pay tax.

Read more: Who are the wealthy retirees targeted in Labor’s plans?

Labor’s policy reverses the first (international unique) extension, in part because it has become extraordinarily expensive.

It’s understandable that retirees such as Alan and Bev feel that they are losing something. They are. But the main thing they are losing is a government subsidy that would enable them to hand all of their savings on to their children without dipping into them to look after themselves.

That’s the “gift” the opposition leader Bill Shorten says he wants to wind back.

– ref. Vital Signs: policies come and policies go, but surely we shouldn’t be subsidising inheritances – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-policies-come-and-policies-go-but-surely-we-shouldnt-be-subsidising-inheritances-116415

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Davis, Associate Professor, Media and Communications, University of Melbourne

This is an edited extract of an essay in The New Disruptors, the 64th edition of Griffith Review.

Every era is defined by its sustaining myths. Among ours is surely “disruption”. The book that seeded the mythology, Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, is only a little more than 20 years old, yet its “technological disruption” thesis has become an article of faith for business and government, trafficked like narcotics from TEDx to trading floor to ministerial report.

Established companies often fail, so the thesis argues, not because they make bad decisions but because they make good ones. They stick with “sustaining technologies” because they are too successful to risk otherwise. Meanwhile, minnows with little to lose bring new technologies to market that initially may not be as good as seemingly entrenched “sustaining technologies”, but are cheaper and more accessible: think mainframe computers versus PCs, high-res CDs versus low-res MP3s, SLR cameras versus phone cameras, encyclopaedia versus Wikipedia. This is how Apple became a music company, Amazon became the world’s biggest bookstore and Facebook became your news feed.

But as with most mythologies there’s something a little too convenient about “disruption”. Christensen’s thesis emerged just as Silicon Valley venture capitalists – whose reverence for Christensen has helped make him a perennial keynote – were looking for new justifications for cutthroat business models and a rationale to gloss up their claims to “innovation”.

Behind their glitzy mission statements, many tech companies are little more than middlemen with a point-and-click front end: “intermediaries” in tech speak, “aggregators” of other people’s content that deliver product based on someone’s else’s property and/or labour to consumers, and then deliver those same consumers to advertisers.

The “technological disruption” mythology has provided cover for downsizing, lay-offs, the theft of intellectual property, the casualisation of labour and normalisation of precarity, the exploitation of free labour by users of digital platforms (as in when, say, Facebook users create content for free), the normalisation of totalitarian levels of surveillance, and what is no doubt the greatest misappropriation of personal information in human history.

As the historian Jill Lepore showed in a devastating takedown in The New Yorker in 2013, Christensen’s thesis is based on dodgy premises. Yet the “disruption” myth prospers. It sits all too comfortably alongside other myths of neoliberal times. As Christensen acknowledges, his theory reprises Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” thesis, published in 1942 and since corralled by free-market ideologues to justify the wholesale destruction of jobs, industries and ways of life in the name of economic “efficiency”.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting technological disruption doesn’t happen. What I am questioning is the magical transformative powers attributed to the process. The disruption myth ties our notions of progress to the concept of destruction. It does so under the technologically determinist assumption that such progress is inevitable and good, and skips past the possibility that as well as being liberating, technology can have devastating social impacts.

What happens, then, when the thing being “disrupted” is the fabric of democratic culture itself?

Proto-fascism

In mid 2018, I was walking through an Australian airport when I spotted several mini billboards for Facebook’s “Here Together” campaign. “Fake news is not our friend” said one. “Data misuse is not our friend” said another. The campaign was launched in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which more than 50 million people had their Facebook data improperly shared with the right-wing polling company. This happened amid ongoing scandals about fake news and fake accounts on the platform.

At the time I had just spent four weeks trawling the Facebook pages of eight Australian far-right groups to gather data for a research project. I’ll spare you the full details, but suffice to say that Australia’s Islamic population isn’t popular with the far right. Nor are refugees, feminists or environmentalists.

As I read posts from the pages, two trends stood out. The first was their pointed incivility. Not only were they uncivil, they revelled in their incivility. Their attacks on perceived opponents were not merely intended to rebut or disagree, but to undermine their credibility and delegitimise their humanity using any possible means. Incivility was being used in lieu of debate as a weapon to shut people down.

Much of the material that I analysed met the formal criteria for hate speech. It was clearly intended to incite animosity and hatred against target groups, to intentionally inflict emotional distress, and to threaten or incite violence. It defamed entire groups and used slurs and insults in an attempt to marginalise and silence their perceived opponents.

Many posts advocated strong-arm tactics without due process to target minority groups. In these angry calls for the demolition of longstanding human rights conventions and the subversion of law to suit the interests of the dominant (white, male) group, a form of proto-fascism could be heard.

Inspired by the US alt-right

The second trend is that Australian far-right Facebook pages increasingly model themselves on the US alt-right. Whereas old-school, far-right groups stick to white nationalism, the sites I looked at mixed race, gender, sexuality and a smattering of science issues. This mirrors the way in which the US alt-right has built links between white supremacists and so-called “men’s rights” groups as well as a growing emphasis on climate science among the far right in the US and Europe. Figures associated with the alt-right such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Lauren Southern, Steve Bannon and Gavin McInnes are revered on the Facebook pages I surveyed.

News of their proposed Australian tours is greeted with glee and multiple repostings. Also common are alt-right memes such as “cultural Marxist”, “social justice warrior”, talk of “white decline” and the idea that the “white race” is being subject to a form of “genocide”, crowded out by minorities and multiculturalism, a myth long nurtured by US white supremacist Bob Whitaker. There was considerable support for absolute “freedom of speech”, an alt-right meme that functions as cover for open racism and the public spread of hatred. These memes were often intermingled with imagery featuring alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog, Donald Trump, on occasion imaginatively mashed with images of Pauline Hanson or Sonia Kruger (celebrated for publicly questioning Islam).

The popularity of the sites was also notable. Between them they had over 400,000 followers. A much greater number of people are likely to have viewed the sites but not signed up. Most postings had been liked and/or shared hundreds of times, some thousands.

These sites are part of a global trend towards the networked industrialisation of hatred. Cambridge Analytica wanted those millions of Facebook profiles so they could target users with divisive messages to influence the 2016 Brexit vote and US election. According to Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix, “It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed”.

A leading entrepreneur of industrialised hatred is Steve Bannon, a former Cambridge Analytica board member, former Trump campaign adviser and then White House strategist, and before that editor of the right-wing Breitbart News. Bannon has lately become a globetrotting activist for white nationalism, offering advice to far-right figures such as Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán, and parties such as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and Italy’s the League and Five Star Movement, as part of a project to build support for his idea of a far-right populist “supergroup” to win seats in the European Parliament.

Fox News has positioned itself at the forefront of developing the hate business model, via the work of commentators such as Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter. In Australia, Sky News “after dark” does similar work. The fostering of division has long been ingrained and normalised in tabloid news business models, as seen in a column by Andrew Bolt in August 2018 that singled out Jews, Chinese, Cambodians and Indians as part of a “tidal wave of immigrants that sweeps away what’s left of our national identity”.

Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are also complicit. Conflict creates clicks. A few weeks after the Facebook “Here Together” campaign was over I checked the sites mentioned above again. All survived intact.

Decline of the public sphere

The hate business model uses incivility as a weapon to forestall public discussion about bigotry and to attack opponents. It is not enough to sow division; it must be done with unapologetic aggression and an open contempt for ideological enemies. The aim, ultimately, is to move norms of acceptable public discussion far to the right.

When Lauren Southern touched down in Australia in July 2018, she disembarked wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the alt-right meme “it’s okay to be white”, a statement first promoted by white supremacists on 4chan to “trigger” progressives and to underpin the idea that whites are somehow under threat. The following month Australian parliamentarian Fraser Anning unapologetically gave his race-baiting first speech to parliament. Two months later Pauline Hanson tabled a motion that asked the Senate to acknowledge “anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation” and that “it’s okay to be white”, which was supported by the Coalition government.

It took less than a year for a meme concocted to sow racialised division to find its way from an internet bulletin board to a parliamentary vote in a major Western democracy.

The electoral harvest of the new incivility can be seen in the Brexit vote and the rise of UKIP, the 2017 electoral success of AfD in Germany, the impact of Marine Le Pen’s Front National in the 2017 French presidential elections, and the 2018 formation of a populist government in Italy comprised of ministers from the League and Five Star Movement.

It can be seen, too, Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory and presidency, and the persistent use of Indigenous peoples, Muslims and asylum seekers as political scapegoats in Australia. It can also be seen in the return of “strongman” politics: Duterte in the Philippines, Erdoğan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Putin in Russia, Trump in the US. All fomented social division to gain power, and have since waged war on “elites” and attacked and diminished democratic institutions.

This industrialisation of hate exploits two revolutions. The first is the centrality of economic and human mobility to modern life and the anxieties it has created at a time of uncertainty, precarity and hardship for many. Growing public resentment at the failures of economic globalisation has created an audience ripe for harvest by the reactionary machinery of the culture wars. The second is the relative openness of the internet. Just as Bill Gates famously commented in the early optimistic days of the internet that it offered a “frictionless” environment for commerce, so it was no less available as a “frictionless” environment for the circulation of hate.

The white supremacist site Stormfront was one of the earliest online communities, even if, amid the hype for the economic and democratic possibilities of online communities, no one paid much attention at the time. As traditional intermediaries and the “managerial class” that presided over old-time democratic culture – editors, publishers, journalists, academics, civic leaders – were bypassed, and as the traditional journalism business model was weakened by the loss of print advertising revenues and the growing domination of click-based online models, so new space was created for figures such as Bannon, quick to understand the new media dynamics and leverage them to build audiences for publications such as Breitbart News with a business model based on division.

This hate-based business model enacts a sobering version of Christensen’s theories. Democracy is being “disrupted”. Low-quality, easily trafficked disinformation produced cheaply by “new entrants” is crowding out higher-quality information produced by established incumbents (journalists, civic leaders, academics), who accumulated power through older technologies and institutions (print media, broadcast television, the university).

The old expensive-to-maintain public sphere, supported by comprehensive education systems, robust journalism and informed critique, is giving way to a cheap-to-run, “near good” public sphere corralled in privatised platforms. But there is no magic attached to this process, only the malodorous waft of divisiveness, hatred and encroaching authoritarianism.

What to defend?

Right now, the story of the new incivility is only partway told. The reactionary right has not yet achieved its aims, and in Australia is currently on the defensive. But the struggle over the future of democracy is global and the forces of reaction are playing a long game. Power is gradually being ceded away from liberal democratic norms towards populism and proto-fascism. Should this trend continue then the prospects for freedom, social justice and the environmental viability of the planet are bleak. Those on the left who for a long time have derided liberalism and been deeply suspicious of the Enlightenment culture that produced it, are thus forced to make a difficult decision: what to defend?

In the 1930s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously wrote from his prison cell: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Morbid symptoms of our moment of interregnum are everywhere now.

Refugees of failed modernity roam the seas in leaky boats, hunt for gaps in fences on European borders, form caravans to walk the “route of death” through Mexico in the hope of getting to the US, rot in the asylum centres of Manus and Christmas Island, take indentured jobs sweeping floors in the penthouses of Singapore or walk girders on the construction sites of Abu Dhabi, searching for the wealth, freedom and security that Enlightenment did not give them.

They are met, when they get to those borders, with the forces of a new counter-Enlightenment: concrete walls and razor wire, white nationalism, militarised policing, curtailed human rights. Other refugees are within: casualties of deindustrialisation, casualisation and the winding back of welfare, who make up a new precariat.

Young people have felt the effects of this most brutally. Too often denied meaningful careers and kicked off the wealth-accumulation ladder, many hear the siren call of 4chan or are drawn to figures such as anti-“social justice warrior” celebrity psychologist Jordan Peterson, with his paeans against feminism and bestselling tips on how young men can recover their masculinity; or to reactionary activists like Southern, whose racist pitch to disaffected youth is summed up by the title of her book: Barbarians: How Baby Boomers, Immigrants, and Islam Screwed My Generation .

Intellectual refugees are everywhere also. A displaced managerial elite searches for relevance: journalists with their Twitter accounts, academics with their online opinion pieces, public intellectuals declaiming at festivals and in the “serious” media. As the refugees of modernity spread out from its decaying outposts, so the logic of interregnum becomes almost irresistible.

The trouble with this logic is that people tend to fixate on what is ending rather than grapple with sparking new beginnings. Displaced progressive intellectuals, in particular, like conservatives, routinely complain that the world is about to end, but unlike conservatives are frozen into inaction rather than galvanised into action. For those who believe in democracy there is pressing work to do. Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, civility, universalism, cosmopolitanism and the social contract must necessarily inform any rebirth.

But new conditions of possibility mean that to succeed they can’t be simply a redux of enlightenments past. There are as yet no emancipatory leaders for the age of disintermediated knowledge. For want of messiahs, it is incumbent on those who possess educational, cultural and intellectual resources to understand their new roles as toolmakers of ideas, talking across rather than down, embedded at every social and cultural level, who can bring a variety of skills to civic culture and start telling new, productive stories about how democracy works in an age of dystopic disruption.

Imagining such a democracy will no doubt require a rethink of the oppositions that structure our world. It is essential, now, to think commonality without universality, citizenship beyond public versus private, growth and profits without inequality and externalities, nationalism without chauvinist particularism, and to think cosmopolitanism and particularism, and collectivity and individuality, in tandem. That is, to refashion Enlightenment oppositions for new times.

First, though, a more practical reckoning is no doubt required.

The underlying issue with democracy is that national and global social contracts have failed to deliver. The democratic connections between work, freedom, citizenship, rights and fairness have been lost, jettisoned in the name of liberalising markets and making labour more flexible with a promised pay-off that for many never came. Privilege has replaced citizenship as the arbiter of human destiny.

There can be no revitalised democracy without skewing economics away from the rich, emptying their apologists from parliamentary hallways and offices, scrapping the divisive politics of scapegoating, acting on planetary health and remembering what mutuality and social generosity look like. Without the dynamics of inclusion and trust that derive from a healthy social contract, why would anyone bother with civility?

– ref. Friday essay: networked hatred – new technology and the rise of the right – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-networked-hatred-new-technology-and-the-rise-of-the-right-115837

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martijn Boersma, Lecturer, University of Technology Sydney

There’s a good chance the device on which you are reading this contains cobalt. It’s an essential metal for batteries in phones and laptops. There’s also a chance the cobalt was mined by slaves.

Almost two-thirds of the cobalt mined around the world comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The central African country has a notorious recent history of human rights abuses, including slave labour.

Right now it is all but impossible to know if cobalt from the country is slave-free. It’s the same around the world for many other commodities, from tuna to coffee.

Some businesses see a solution in blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, to verify global supply chains.

It is the latest promise for a technology that is touted as a solution for unregulated prison economies, climate change and counterfeiting. Maybe it will prove part of the solution. But we can’t put all our hopes on any technology solving a complex social problem.

Modern slavery in supply chains

Figuring out if goods are sourced and produced ethically gets increasingly difficult as supply chains become more complex.

In the case of cobalt, the supply chain can consist of countless middlemen who buy and mix cobalt from countless different mines. This means it is almost impossible for a cobalt buyer such as a battery maker to trace where the metal comes from.

The DRC’s cobalt industry encompasses a wide range of working conditions. Some miners are paid relatively well and work in safe conditions.

But around a fifth of the cobalt is dug up by about 110,000 to 150,000 workers in small “artisanal” mines. Those who work in this unregulated sector often earn a pittance and work in unsafe conditions.

Working in such mines includes descending into small hand-dug holes that defy even basic safety precautions. Poor construction and ventilation have led to injuries and deaths.

As sales of electric cars swells demand for cobalt, these conditions are worsening.

It is difficult to know exactly what proportion of the DRC’s cobalt industry uses slave labour. But a 2013 investigation by the Washington-based organisation Free the Slaves, found 866 of the 931 individuals interviewed in three mining communities were slaves.

The report identified seven types of slavery, including forced labour and debt bondage.

Almost one in four slaves was under 18 years of age. A 2014 report by UNICEF estimated 40,000 children were working in mines in DRC’s south, most of them digging cobalt.

Blockchain’s promise

It is not just cobalt. The same is true of everything from copper to cocoa. It is hard to know how products are made or where they are sourced from.

So how can we ensure supply chains are not tainted by modern slavery?

This is where companies are experimenting with blockchain technology. To understand their interest, let’s recap the basics of this technology.

Think of blockchain as an online public ledger. Once a transaction occurs, a permanent and unchangeable record of that transaction is created and has to be validated by others in the blockchain. These records are called “blocks” and are chained together chronologically.

Blockchain technology can therefore be used to create a verified and tamper-proof record of supply chains from source to end user.

The World Wildlife Fund is working with technology partners and a tuna fishing company to use blockchain technology to track tuna from “bait to plate”. A consumer will be able to find out when and where the tuna was caught by scanning a code on the packaging.

Read more: Almost every brand of tuna on supermarket shelves shows why modern slavery laws are needed

BHP wants to use it to verify copper supplies. Blockchain is also being used to track cotton, fashion, coffee and organically farmed products.

Ford and IBM are part of the consortium looking to use the technology to monitor cobalt supplies. It would mean the ability to track the metal from mine to battery. Ethically mined cobalt can be recorded in the blockchain and followed as it moves around the supply chain.

Challenges remain

While blockchain is promising, we need to address several challenges if it is going to work.

A crucial element in any blockchain is the “consensus protocol”. This determines who gets to validate a transaction, whether it be all participants, a majority, a select few or a random selection. In a blockchain dedicated to ethical sourcing it is crucial that workers can attest to their working conditions. There is no guarantee this will happen, especially for marginalised or oppressed workers.

Second, it is important to know what standard for ethical sourcing a blockchain upholds. There are several blockchain platforms, so different, potentially less robust, standards could easily develop. This is an issue for other areas of ethical certification, where competing schemes for goods such as coffee exist.

Third, we should always question the link between a “block” and its material reality. Finding a way to insert goods made using slave labour into the blockchain would be highly lucrative. Since the integrity of blockchain data depends on humans, it is vulnerable to inaccuracies or fraud.

Fourth, blockchain may create a “digital divide”. Larger suppliers with technical experience will have less trouble using this technology, while smaller suppliers may be left out. We need to guard against blockchain becoming a barrier to small suppliers entering the market.

No technological fix

As a transparency tool blockchain can – in theory – give insights into where goods came from. But no technology on its own can solve a complex social problem.

Ultimately, as with any other technology, the saying “garbage in, garbage out” applies. If humans want to undermine accountability systems, they will find ways of doing so.

Just recording transactions is not enough. As part of a comprehensive agenda to tackle the myriad factors underlying modern slavery, though, it may prove a useful tool.

– ref. Blockchain can help break the chains of modern slavery, but it is not a complete solution – http://theconversation.com/blockchain-can-help-break-the-chains-of-modern-slavery-but-it-is-not-a-complete-solution-115358

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Turney, Professor of Earth Science and Climate Change, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, UNSW

On Wednesday night a bipartisan UK Parliament passed an extraordinary measure: a national declaration of an Environment and Climate Emergency.

The UK is the first national government to declare such an emergency. The decision marks a renewed sense of urgency in tackling climate change, following a visit to Parliament by teenage activist Greta Thunberg , the broadcast of David Attenborough’s documentary Climate Change: The Facts and 11 days of protest by environmental group Extinction Rebellion that paralysed parts of London.

Read more: Extinction Rebellion: disruption and arrests can bring social change

There are now some 49 million people living under national, city and local declarations of a climate emergency around the world.

What is a climate emergency?

While there is no precise definition of what constitutes action to meet such an emergency, the move has been likened to putting the country on a “war footing”, with climate and the environment at the very centre of all government policy, rather than being on the fringe of political decisions.

The UK are legally committed to a 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 (relative to their 1990 levels) and was recently recognised as one of just 18 developed economies that have driven down carbon dioxide emissions over the last decade.

Some city and local councils have set out their climate emergency policies to become carbon zero by 2030 built around renewable energy supplies, more energy-efficient housing and a host of other measures. Yesterday’s decision in Parliament implies further national reductions and investment in this space.

Read more: The terror of climate change is transforming young people’s identity

Counting down to 2030

The year 2030 is an important target. In spite of what climate contrarians might voice very loudly, five of our planet’s warmest years on record have occurred since 2010, whilst 2018 experienced all manner of climate extremes that broke numerous global records.

It’s sobering to realise that, because the oceans are a major sink of heat, the estimated 40-year delay in the release of this energy back into the atmosphere means the conditions of the last decade are in part a consequence of our pollution from the 1970s.

With the planet to experience further warming from the heat held by the oceans, there is increasing international focus on meeting the United Nation’s Paris Agreement which was signed by 197 countries in 2016. This ground-breaking agreement has the ambitious global aim of preventing global temperatures from reaching 2˚C above pre-industrial levels (the late nineteenth century) by 2100, and ideally should be no more than 1.5˚C.

A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) has suggested that meeting this target means annual global carbon emissions must effectively halve between now and 2030, and then fall to zero by 2050. This is a target the UK opposition party Labour are now calling for.

More recent studies suggest even more ambitious cuts may be required.

The cost of inaction

Research in Australia has investigated the cost to the global economy if the Paris Agreement is not met and the world hits 4˚C warmer.

The values are eye-watering: an estimated US$23 trillion a year over the long-term. This has been likened to the world experiencing four to six global financial crises on the scale of 2008 every year.

In Australia, the cost would be on the order of A$159 billion a year, with most of the losses caused by drought-driven collapses in agricultural productivity and sea level rise. The expense to each Australian household has been put at the order of A$14,000.

The declaration of climate emergency by the UK comes at a crucial time in Australia, just two weeks out from a federal election. While the major parties have made public statements of support for the Paris Agreement, it remains unclear whether current and former leaders are fully aware of their obligations.

Read more: Climate change forced these Fijian communities to move – and with 80 more at risk, here’s what they learned

At a time when politicians discuss the need to “live within our means” when it comes to national finances, this does not appear to translate to the environment when we’re considering future generations.

Instead we seem to be caught in a debate surrounding the costs of action rather than inaction. The next generation of Australian voters certainly don’t seem confident about political commitments to their future as they hold their third national school strike tomorrow.

The welcome announcement from the UK is a major step in the right direction and potentially a watershed moment for a more sustainable global future. Is it too much to hope Australia could follow next?

– ref. UK becomes first country to declare a ‘climate emergency’ – http://theconversation.com/uk-becomes-first-country-to-declare-a-climate-emergency-116428

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Feldman, PhD Researcher in Science Communication, Australian National University

Today young Australians will hit the streets for the second Climate Strike of 2019.

Youths are often brushed off as being politically disengaged, but the Australian Electoral Commission has reported record high numbers of youth enrolment, and climate change will be at the forefront of their minds when many take to the polls for the first time.

Read more: School climate strikes: why adults no longer have the right to object to their children taking radical action

But unlike older generations, who develop and stick to lifelong party allegiances, we’re seeing dramatic shifts in the way young people vote, choosing sides based on issues and specific policies instead.

Slowly, we’re beginning see governments respond to climate change protests. Yesterday the UK Parliament declared a climate emergency, one of the demands from the Extinction Rebellion group who marched for ten days across London.

But there’s still much more to do. And the youth Climate Strike movement shows us loud and clear that young people not only care about climate change, but that it needs to be brought to the table to cement their vote.

Changing of the guard on party politics

The classification of “political engagement” around the world has traditionally had a strong citizenry focus: campaigning for a political party, joining unions, writing letters to MPs, and many other activities that would seem positively archaic to youth today.

Generation Z doesn’t need a town hall meeting or front bar at the Union Pub to get up to date information on their communities. Online communities mean they can find their tribe and pinpoint the political issues they care about, like climate change.

Read more: Students striking for climate action are showing the exact skills employers look for

As a result, they’re more likely to focus their political attention on specific causes. For those voting for the first time on May 18, being politically active can mean product boycotts or endorsements, signing petitions and, as with Climate Strike, protest movements.

While protests are an ancient tradition, Climate Strike is being led entirely by school students. Greta Thunberg, now aged 16, began the School Strike for Climate movement after attracting press to a then solitary protest at Swedish parliament in 2018.

By March 15, 2019, the movement had grown to over 1.4 million students in more than 300 cities worldwide.

This movement forces adults to acknowledge climate change is not only impacting the futures of an unknown, unborn generation, but also of those protesting here and now.

Climate change, then, is not only an important issue for under 24-year-olds, but also a deeply personal one. Discussion of climate change often elicits intense emotions like fear and anxiety for their futures.

In a speech earlier this year in Davos, Switzerland, Thunberg said:

adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

Read more: Greta Thunberg at Davos: why Gen Z has real power to influence business on climate change

But despite their concern and focus on climate change as a political issue, very few young people have felt they could influence anything on a large scale. With Climate Strike, this may be changing.

Today’s issues, tomorrow’s voters

Young Australians have felt helpless and frustrated when it comes to curtailing climate change for several decades. This has flow-on effects that see youth hesitant to take action, especially considering no one likes to get involved in political issues they don’t feel like they can affect.

What’s more, Millennials and Generation Z are often labelled “lazy” or “entitled” free loaders in public discourse. This leads to a further retreat from political issues, and young people living up to the low expectation already set for them. It’s a cruel cycle.

But in 2017, young people were presented with a perfect opportunity to effect change in on a single issue: the same-sex marriage postal survey.

During this time, 100,000 Australians registered to vote for the first time, with 65% under the age of 24. These newly enrolled voters will also be stepping up to their first federal election in 2019, and they’re now feeling empowered to bring climate change to the table.

Read more: Marriage survey: two-thirds of new voters are aged 18-24

High profile protest movements such as Climate Strike don’t just help to make changes in the political arena. Participants are left feeling confident about the change they can make to a cause.

The result: we have a young generation more engaged with climate change policy than ever before.

After 150,000 young Australians attended Climate Strike in March 2019, one can’t help but to sit up and take notice of this vocal group of people.

As with any demographic, there will be those who continue to vote impulsively, without much consideration for their choice. But there will also be a considerable portion that vote on the issues that matter to them.

All told, climate change needs to be addressed in a real and meaningful way to win over these new voters. Those who can’t vote this election will soon be charging at the next.

– ref. Young people won’t accept inaction on climate change, and they’ll be voting in droves – http://theconversation.com/young-people-wont-accept-inaction-on-climate-change-and-theyll-be-voting-in-droves-116361

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

As head of the United Australia Party, Clive Palmer is no classic right-winger nor crotchety conservative. He is no angel either. He is often wrongly lumped in with Pauline Hanson and One Nation, and maybe even with the more recent retreads like Fraser Anning and Cory Bernardi.

But he is not like them. He is a big-spending, eccentric, brusque businessman espousing a strange mixture of populist musings. He is also eager to end the strangulation the major parties exert over policy options. On some issues he is more progressive than Labor (asylum seekers); on others he is more adventurous than the Coalition (taxation) – he is a protectionist nationalist without the xenophobic baggage.

So, just what is Palmer up to in this election campaign? After a fairly desultory campaign in 2013 when he won a single lower house seat and initially three senators, he sat out the 2016 federal election. Now, he’s back in full force, spending upwards of A$55 million before the election comes to an end. He’s standing candidates in every electorate and running a team in every senate constituency. Polling is showing him “influential” in many swing seats with support running into the mid-teens in some electorates.

Read more: View from The Hill: Can $55 million get Clive Palmer back into parliamentary game?

Why is he spending so much of his own money on what looks like a pyrrhic campaign, even if he is elected to the Senate for Queensland?

Many people say Palmer has no policies, he stands for nothing except himself, and is just fanning a protest vote.

It’s true that Palmer tends to campaign with hackneyed slogans: “Make Australia Great”, “Aussies aren’t going to cop it any more” and “Let’s get something done for a change”, being the main three. He also authorises crass advertising – his prominent billboards and full-page poster-style advertisements feature himself, curtained in canary yellow, with the implicit message that the Liberals and Labor “don’t fight for you”. He is partial to hyperbole, and in the media often lives in a world of denial.

At the 2013 federal election, Palmer’s United Party released a slender raft of policy proposals. He opposed the carbon tax and supported tax reductions, but he also proposed a more compassionate policy towards asylum seekers, a conscience vote on same-sex marriage, free university places for residents, tax relief for mortgagees, regional wealth retention, and smaller government. Many of his 2013 policies reappear in recycled form in 2019.

He claims as his achievements to have stopped many of the “zombie” measures Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey tried to impose in the 2014 budget. These include: stopping GP co-payments of $7 per visit, opposing cuts to universities, preventing more social security cuts, opposing an increase in the eligible age for the age pension to 70 years, supporting climate change and renewable energy proposals, and supporting a ban on lobbyists and the removal of boat-arrival children from offshore detention. He also claimed credit for supporting the abolition of the carbon tax and the mining tax, and for bringing down Campbell Newman’s LNP government in Queensland.

This election, the UAP is proposing to increase pensions by 20% immediately (or $4,000 a year for each pensioner). It is advocating an extra $80 billion spending on health and a further $20 billion for education over the next parliament. Palmer continues to support mining development (with more onshore processing of commodities) and a zonal taxation system, with wealth generated in regions remaining in regions. He wants immediate investment in very fast trains.

The UAP is also fiercely criticising other mainstream party policies. For instance, Palmer opposes the “sell-off” of agricultural land to foreign buyers, targeting in particular Chinese government-owned companies for their aggressive purchasing strategies. His position is not xenophobic: he detests Chinese Communist Party business practices because of first-hand experience, but he is not against people of Chinese descent coming here or doing well.

He opposes the ALP’s tax policy, regarding it as insufficient and mostly deferred until after 2024. He wants all income tax rates reduced by 15% now, and for companies and small businesses to pay their tax bill at the end of the financial year once their earnings are finalised (thus abolishing the pernicious provisional tax paid quarterly in advance).

He also wants mortgagees to be able to get a tax offset for the first $10,000 of repayments to help first-home buyers. Furthermore, the UAP is campaigning for the abolition of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and ending the public profligacy of water buy-backs. Palmer claims that spending on the national broadband network has “wasted” $55 billion “and it still doesn’t work”.

Palmer’s revival in his electoral stocks has occurred despite him being embroiled in many controversies and untrustworthy business practices. These include the debacle over the Coolum Resort, which closed under his management, costing 600 jobs and leaving over 300 investors without their assets.

He was widely blamed for the collapse of his nickel refinery in Townsville (which he took on to “save”) and for not paying workers their redundancy entitlements. He has also been linked to a stalled Titanic II project, killed off a Gold Coast A-League soccer team, complains of Rupert Murdoch’s influence over the Australian media, and been charged by ASIC with violating the Corporation Act. He has also transferred some of his business interests to the tax haven of Singapore.

Read more: How much influence will independents and minor parties have this election? Please explain

Many commentators who highlight Palmer’s record believe the preference deal with the Liberals and LNP could perhaps damage the Coalition vote. But although Labor will whinge to the closing of the polls on May 18, I expect the cross-preferencing arrangement to benefit both the LNP and the UAP.

Palmer may not win any lower house seats, but his preferences might determine who does in up to 20 seats. If his electoral support continues to grow, he may well secure two or three senate positions, almost back to where he was in 2013.

But he is coming under widespread attack as an illegitimate player by many commentators and media outlets as well as his political opponents. Most of the major papers and TV news outlets regularly slam his antics (Google “Clive Palmer’s Criticism”).

The key perhaps to understanding Palmer’s gravity-defying electoral support is that he is a “positive populist” rather than a largely negative populist along the lines of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, who has based her own protectionist stance much more explicitly on race and xenophobia. Indeed, Palmer eschews the racist policies and dog-whistling his rival right-of-centre competitors have delivered, including One Nation and Fraser Anning’s Conservatives.

Palmer carefully tailors his positive populist messages to appreciative audiences: his line that “something must be done” has resonated.

Certainly, some of Palmer’s electoral support at the ballot box will be simply a protest vote (and he will be aware of that). But perhaps some greater proportion will be voting for more genuine diversity from what the cartelised major parties are offering. Australia seems ripe for a more serious positive populism offered by Palmer and his UAP. The ultimate question will be whether the wheels will again fall of the wagon.

And what after the election? Palmer’s boast that he will form government is fanciful. He has long been anti-Labor and in this election is not directing preferences their way, so he may be well and truly ostracised by Labor if it wins office.

Alternatively, if the Coalition scrapes back in it will be partly obligated to his preferences and will have to accommodate whoever the UAP manages to get into parliament.

The last time Palmer held this power his influence quickly waned as his “team” mostly abandoned him. We will soon see if he has learnt from bitter experience.

This article is adapted from an earlier piece published in The Machinery of Government.

– ref. Now for the $55 million question: what does Clive Palmer actually want? – http://theconversation.com/now-for-the-55-million-question-what-does-clive-palmer-actually-want-116350

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deb Lee-Talbot, PhD candidate, History, Deakin University

When visitors first enter the exhibition Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits at Bendigo Art Gallery, they are greeted with soaring sounds of coronation anthems. These genteel songs entice patrons into an exhibition that is ultimately conservative in both content and style.

The exhibition opens with portraits of Henry VIII, whose long-term legacy is difficult to deny. Printed on the first main wall is the memorable, yet reductive, children’s rhyme “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived”. Viewers are quickly drawn into the Crown and court’s power, and the brutality and risk that was associated with being married to Henry VIII.

Best viewed by standing between the portraits of his wives Anne Boleyn and Katherine of Aragon is the first of many two-sided timelines, linking significant moments in the United Kingdom’s history to world events. This suggests that the British monarchy should be understood as a politically powerful force.

It soon becomes clear that this is an exhibition seeking to represent the Empire as a “Great Power”. The two and a half metre “Ditchley Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) illustrates a towering, divine force.

In this highly symbolic work, Elizabeth stands on a world map, her feet firmly planted on Oxfordshire. We see that she was the great hope of her people at the time – a stormy sky is swept away into oblivion by the sunshine that only this Queen can bring.

A romantic narrative

The sections on the Stuarts (1603 to 1714),and the Georgian period (1714-1837) are dominated by similar formal portraits, but the curators are obviously wary of contemporary viewer fatigue. The chamber music fades and extravagant portraits disappear as patrons enter the 18th century era of “Empire and Exploration”. It is here that we see this is truly an exhibition adhering to an romanticised narrative of monarchy.

An introductory note explains that The Crown supported three expeditions led by Captain James Cook during the 1760’s and 1770’s “in search of an undiscovered continent in the Pacific Ocean”. It is a great disappointment to see this choice of wording, which erases the significant political issues of Australia’s colonisation.

Had the exhibition acknowledged contemporary historical discussions in Australia, delivering on the curator’s promise to illuminate “key figures and important historical moments”, there might have been a more inclusive and engaging narrative.

Instead, we move on to a new era of portraiture and monarchy. The advent of photography during Queen Victoria’s (1819-1901) reign provided a new style of intimacy, and a substantial series illustrates her life as both a woman and the British Queen that “reigned but never ruled”.

Critical examination of these images disrupts the romantic representation of this family. Most striking is a carbon print produced by John Jabez Edwin Mayall (1863) illustrating the Queen with her daughter, Queen Alexandra, on the latter’s wedding day. Here, Queen Alexandra stands over the seated and heavily cloaked Queen Victoria.

Rejecting the demands of the photographer’s lens, her audience, and her daughter, Victoria instead gazes at a marble bust of her late husband. The idealised representation of a unified family is somewhat disrupted as we are offered the stark black and white image of a mother literally turning her back on her child on her wedding day, no less.

Reaching the age of the Windsor family, beginning with George V in 1917 and continuing today, patrons are invited to walk under a glorious chandelier to peruse photographs, film clips, paintings and display cases containing riding gloves and dresses.

These items are enchanting, but there is no sense of the glorious political or military power as displayed in the rooms of the Tudors, Stuarts and Georgians.

Rather, we see the continuing evolution of the monarchy’s “soft power”: images from popular women’s magazines adorn the walls, illustrating a monarchy with significant popular culture influence, but little else.

The complexity of this position is superbly indicated in portraits concerning Queen Elizabeth II. A 1971 print by Patrick Lichfield shows a delighted regent relaxed, clapping, after a formal dinner. This rests in sharp juxtaposition with Chris Levine’s (2007) holographic portrait, “Lightness of Being”, of a crowned Elizabeth II. In this image, artist Levine states, there is “an aura about it, a power”.

Perhaps this moment captured a monarch working hard to continue a long tradition of conveying, through art, a sense of remote authority to an adoring public.

In Tudors to Windsors, through various forms of portraiture, visitors see the monarchy’s transition from a male dominated, politically powerful institution to the celebrity status of more recent female reigns. An unexpected highlight of the exhibition is the history concerning artistic technologies relative to portraiture.

Yet patrons should be aware this is an exhibition that does not apply a critical gaze to the British monarchy. Consequently, idolised images reign.

Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits is at Bendigo Art Gallery until July 14.

– ref. The exhibition Tudors to Windsors is an uncritical glorification of empire – http://theconversation.com/the-exhibition-tudors-to-windsors-is-an-uncritical-glorification-of-empire-115908

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Woodley, PhD candidate, School of History, Australian National University

With taxes, health care and climate change emerging as key issues in the upcoming federal election, we’re running a series this week looking at the main issues that swung elections in the past, from agricultural workers’ wages to the Vietnam War. Read other stories in the series here.

One of the forthcoming federal election’s many questions is how rural Australians will vote. On issues such as climate change, coal seam gas extraction, water management and basic decency in politics, voters in regional Australia are disillusioned. The old certainties of rural politics seem to be breaking down, and there is a heightened sense that the long-established structures amplifying country voices are no longer working.

More than a century ago, rural Australia was in a similar state of flux over how farmers should engage with state and federal politics. The 1913 federal election was a pivotal moment in the contest of ideas about what sort of polity and society rural Australians wanted. The alliances that emerged from the election led to the formation of the Country Party, the precursor to today’s National Party.

The 1913 election was called by the Labor prime minister, Andrew Fisher, a former coal miner and avid trade unionist. Fisher first served as PM in 1908-09, leading a minority government. When he attained a comfortable majority in both houses of the parliament at the 1910 election, he initiated an ambitious reform program that included liberalising disability and old age pensions, introducing maternity allowances and workers’ compensation, and enacting a progressive land tax on the unimproved value of the largest rural properties.

It was a considerable record on which to seek another term of government, but also contained elements that would galvanise resistance in rural Australia.

Developments in rural Australia

At the time, the New South Wales Farmers and Settlers Association (FSA) was emerging as a powerful and effective voice, claiming to represent farmers, both large and small. By 1914, it would boast 430 branches across the state.

The FSA executive opposed any form of land tax, even on the largest landholders, on suspicion that a Labor government would one day impose it on all farmers. However, farmers still struggling to acquire a “living area” were sympathetic to the Labor Party’s agenda, as many were once shearers or rural labourers.

When a resolution was proposed at the FSA conference in 1907 that would bar members of the Labor Party from joining the organisation, a Jerilderie delegate objected that such a motion would “cause disastrous splits in families the members of which included supporters of both organisations”. During that same period, senior members of the FSA executive resigned rather than renounce Labor sympathies.

Read more: Issues that swung elections: the ‘credit squeeze’ that nearly swept Menzies from power in 1961

By 1913, another issue had intensified the FSA executive’s antagonism towards Labor: the increasingly active Rural Workers Union (RWU).

The conservative government of George Reid, which held power in Australia from August 1904 to July 1905, had excluded large numbers of rural labourers from the federal Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1904, arguing that the seasonal and unstructured nature of agricultural work made formal schedules of pay and conditions impractical.

The Labor Party contested this view, and in 1910, Fisher’s government amended the act to include rural workers. The RWU then sought registration with the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration as a first step towards achieving an industrial award mandating minimum wages and conditions of employment.

Then, in early 1913, the RWU began negotiating with the powerful Australian Workers Union, which represented shearers and shearing shed hands, with the aim of amalgamating into one big rural union.

This provoked significant disquiet in FSA branches. The FSA executive, led by the articulate and politically astute farmer Robert Patten, redoubled its efforts to energise and expand its membership among small-scale farmers and their families, encouraging them to align themselves firmly on the side of capital.

The 1913 election

In the midst of these developments, Fisher called an election for the middle of 1913. He was opposed by Joseph Cook who, like Fisher, was a British migrant with a coal mining background.

Cook entered the new federal parliament in 1901, and by 1909, had become deputy leader in Alfred Deakin’s Commonwealth Liberal Party – a new, anti-Labor coalition, or “fusion,” of members formerly associated with Free Trade and Protectonist alliances. (It was also a predecessor of the modern Liberal Party.) Cook then became leader of the opposition when Deakin resigned in January 1913.

Read more: Cultivating a nation: why the mythos of the Australian farmer is problematic

Fisher presented six referendum questions to the electorate to coincide with the 1913 election. Each was designed to extend Commonwealth powers in light of the High Court’s unsympathetic rulings on aspects of his reform agenda. All six proposals were rejected by a slim margin – a sign the electorate was perhaps wary of the pace and breadth of Fisher’s reform agenda.

In the election itself, the country vote would prove to be crucial.

Like the referendums, the House of Representatives election was tight. The main parties were separated by only 9,000 of the 1.85 million total votes cast.

Labor entered the election holding nine more seats than the opposition, picking up seats in the big cities and Victorian regional centres of Bendigo and Ballarat. But in rural areas, the Liberal Party prevailed, picking up four Labor seats alone in Victoria.

In New South Wales, the FSA endorsed supporters of its platform running as opposition candidates in seven seats. Four of them deposed sitting Labor Party members, including Patten, who defeated the pro-Labor independent William Lyne in Hume. It was the last seat declared, and Cook won government with a majority of one.

But Cook’s victory was short-lived. By the time he had selected a speaker, his majority had disappeared, and Australians would be back at the polls by mid-1914, just as war broke out in Europe.

The election would have a longer-lasting legacy with the organisation of rural voters into a sizeable – and powerful – voting bloc with a dedicated, conservative presence in federal politics. The Country Party emerged as an independent and distinctly rural voice during the war and held the federal balance of power by 1922.

Australia’s population was already drifting to the cities when the Country Party formed, but that has not prevented the rural vote from continuing to exert a strong, often disproportionate, influence on Australian politics.

As in 1913, the 2019 election could prove to be a decisive moment in shifting rural political alliances, with broader consequences.

– ref. Issues that swung elections: rural voters get a voice and topple a government in 1913 – http://theconversation.com/issues-that-swung-elections-rural-voters-get-a-voice-and-topple-a-government-in-1913-115154

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Morey, Senior Lecturer, Department of Languages and Linguistics, La Trobe University

At the May 18 federal election, voters in every electorate of Australia’s House of Representatives will have a choice of multiple candidates. Preferential voting means that we rank candidates in the order that we prefer them.

So, how does preferential voting work?

Voters must number every box on the ballot paper. You can number them in any order, but you must number each of them. So if there are eight candidates, you must number one to eight inclusive.

Read more: How much influence will independents and minor parties have this election? Please explain

You don’t have to follow how-to-vote cards

Supporters of political parties hand out “how-to-vote” cards that advise voters how to fill out their preferences, but you certainly don’t have to follow them. You can still vote “1” for that party’s candidate, but change the order of your later preferences.

For example, suppose you want to vote for the candidate of the Liberal Party, and it recommends that you vote “1” Liberal and “2” for the candidate of the United Australia Party (UAP), led by Clive Palmer. If you don’t like the UAP, you can still vote Liberal “1”, and mark your other preferences in any order you choose.

As long as each candidate receives a different preference, your vote is formal (valid). And as long as you vote “1” for the Liberal party candidate, your vote is still a full vote for the Liberals.

What a valid vote looks like

Let’s take an imaginary electorate that has the following candidates.

Below are a number of possible ballots:

• in column A we show a ballot for the Liberal Party candidate that next preferences the National Party, then the United Australia (Clive Palmer’s party), and then the Christian Democrats. Note that all eight boxes must be marked

• in Column B we show a ballot for the ALP candidate

• in Column C a ballot for the Greens candidate that next preferences the Animal Justice candidate, and then the Liberal candidate.

All those ballots are formal, because they mark all the numbers on the ballot paper in sequence.

If a ballot paper repeats a number or does not number each of the boxes, then it is informal and cannot be counted. So all voters are advised to be careful, and number each of the boxes on the ballot.

Read more: More grey tsunami than youthquake: despite record youth enrolments, Australia’s voter base is ageing

Key mistakes to avoid

Here are some examples of informal ballot papers that cannot be counted.

• in Column D, the numeral “5” is repeated, so the ballot is informal

• in Column E, two boxes are unmarked, so that ballot is also informal

• in Column F, there is gap in what should be a sequence of consecutive numerals, so that ballot is also informal.

Why do we have preferential voting?

The basis for preferential voting is that the winning candidate must receive at least 50%, plus one vote, to be elected. In other words, the winning candidate is supported by at least half the voters.

The candidate who has the highest number of votes at the first stage of the count (first preferences) does not necessarily win. It can happen that a candidate with fewer first preferences, nevertheless goes on to win. The most notable case was at the 1972 election in the federal division of McMillan, in rural Victoria:

Although the Labor candidate had received the highest number of first preference votes, he did not reach 50% and was not elected.

Because of that, the candidate with the smallest number of votes, Buchanan, was excluded from the count, and the second preference of each of his ballot papers was transferred, with the same effect as first preferences, to the candidate marked “2”.

This left four candidates in the count. If, at this point in the count, the cumulative total of one of the candidates continuing in the count had exceeded 50% of all ballots, that candidate would be declared elected.

That did not happen, so the continuing candidate with the fewest votes, Houlihan, was excluded. That led to the transfer of Houlihan’s ballots to the candidates marked as the next available preference.

Read more: A matter of (mis)trust: why this election is posing problems for the media

When both Buchanan and Houlihan had been excluded and their ballots transferred, the third count was as follows:

Because Barrie Armitage was now the lowest-polling candidate, he was excluded from the count, and his ballots were transferred to the two continuing candidates, according to the next available preference on each ballot. The final result was:

Note that the winning candidate is not necessarily the same as the candidate that received the most first preference votes. The preferential system ensures that the candidate elected is the one preferred by the majority in each electorate.

In the case of McMillan in 1972, Henry Hewson was the candidate preferred by the majority. The full details of this count can be found on the excellent Psephos website

In Australia, thanks to preferential voting, our House of Representatives members are each elected by an absolute majority of the voters in the electorate they represent.

– ref. Explainer: how does preferential voting work in the House of Representatives? – http://theconversation.com/explainer-how-does-preferential-voting-work-in-the-house-of-representatives-116348

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Morey, Senior Lecturer, Department of Languages and Linguistics, La Trobe University

Editor’s note: This is an updated version on an article that was published in 2016 when the new Senate voting rules were first introduced.

The voting system for the Australian Senate combines both preferential voting and proportional representation counting.

This system produces an upper house comprised of eight electorates (six states and two territories), each represented by multiple senators. As a group, these senators much more fairly represent the diversity of opinions in their electorates than the system in the lower house, where each of 151 electorates is represented by only a single member.

The election for the Senate on May 18 will be the world’s largest-ever election using this system, known technically as “proportional representation using the single transferable vote”. We will elect six senators in each of the states, and two senators in each territory.

Read more: How the major parties’ Indigenous health election commitments stack up

The key features of Senate voting

• you have one vote

• you can express preferences for candidates in the order you prefer them, writing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on

• if the candidate for whom you vote “1” is elected with more first preference votes than the quota needed for election, the surplus votes received are transferred to the next chosen candidate at a value that ensures as much as possible of your voting power of one vote counts towards electing a senator

• a quota is the number of votes a candidate requires to be elected. In each of the states, in this half Senate election, the quota is 1/7 of all the formal votes plus 1

• if the candidate for whom you vote “1” fails to be elected, the full value of your vote passes to the candidate to whom you gave your “2”. And if that candidate fails to be elected, to your “3” and so on

• the number of candidates elected for each party is, as closely as possible, directly proportional to the support that party’s candidates receive after preferences

• a big majority of voters will be represented by either a senator they voted “1” for, or a senator they gave an early preference to.

Read more: A matter of (mis)trust: why this election is posing problems for the media

So, what do Australians need to know when they go to vote to choose their senators in this year’s federal election?

The ballot paper requires you to choose from one of two ways of marking it. Voting above-the-line means that you let your vote support parties’ candidates in the order on the ballot paper, whereas voting below-the-line means that you decide the order in which you support candidates.

The order is important because the chance of a candidate being elected decreases the later his or her name appears in that order of priority.

Voting above-the-line

The instructions on the ballot papers will tell you that a valid above-the-line ballot will show at least six party boxes, numbered 1 to 6, for at least six party groupings. However, your vote will have potentially more effect if you number more boxes.

In the example below, if you put a “1” in the Liberal box, the first Liberal to gain from your vote will be Malcolm Turnbull, then secondly Alexander Downer, then Tony Abbott, and so on. If you are a Liberal voter that wants to put Tony Abbott first, you can do this, but you have to vote below-the-line (read on for how to do that).

The example we show here is a formal (valid) vote that places the major parties last. This voter supported first the “Climate Sceptics”, but then ranked other minor parties and then the larger parties in the order: Liberal, Labor, Green.

It could happen that when this voter’s preferences are finally transferred, all the candidates for the first six parties chosen had been elected or excluded. Their vote is then used to help decide the final contest, between Labor and the Greens – in this case favouring Labor. But if the voter had not numbered all the boxes, their vote would have become exhausted: in other words, not further counted towards the election of a candidate.

An above-the-line “vote savings provision” means that even if you mark only one box, your ballot will still be counted. But (for example) if you had marked “1” in the square for Climate Sceptics – and only that square – and the Climate Sceptics candidates had failed to get enough votes to remain in the count, your ballot would have become exhausted, meaning your vote did not count towards electing a senator.

That is why it is best to number as many squares as possible.

Voting below-the-line

Below-the-line voters rank individual candidates in the order such voters prefer. You will be instructed to number at least 12 boxes below-the-line.

Suppose you are a Liberal voter, but you don’t like the order of the Liberal candidates on the ballot paper. You may number the boxes of the six Liberal candidates in any order – provided the numbers are sequential and each numeral is different.

If you then want to preference the Shooters and Fishers candidates (numbering 7 to 12), then Palmer United candidates (numbering 13 to 18), but dislike the remaining parties, you may leave their candidates’ squares blank. Your ballot is still formal and will be counted – as in the mock voting paper below.

Suppose you want to support particular candidates from different parties – and want to rank Penny Wong, Sarah Hanson-Young and Jacqui Lambie ahead of all the other candidates. You may certainly do that – again provided your ballot includes 1 to 12 and those preferences are sequential.

You might want to rank everyone except the main parties first. Let’s say that you also prefer the Hemp Party and Socialist Alternative first, but then want to vote for the Shooters and Fishers. If you then think Labor is the least bad of the main parties, the best way to use your ballot is to preference all of the small parties’ candidates and then Labor’s. That way, even if all the smaller parties’ candidates are excluded from the count, your next choice gains the value of your vote.

Note that you can rank the candidates of a particular party in any order. In the example below, the voter prefers Donald Trump to the other Shooters and Fishers candidates.

The more genuine preferences you express, the more likely a candidate you favour will be elected rather than one you disfavour.

The rules allow a vote to be counted provided that the first six consecutive numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. If you omit or repeat a number, the ballot will still be counted. So a ballot that has the preferences 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13 would be formal – but only preferences one to nine would count.

Your vote is most effective when you express as many preferences as you can or want to – either below or above the line.

– ref. Explainer: how does preferential voting work in the Senate? – http://theconversation.com/explainer-how-does-preferential-voting-work-in-the-senate-116347

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

Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

What’s the point of nits?! – Connie, age 9, Nambour, Queensland.

Great question, Connie. I often find myself scratching my head trying to figure out the answer to that question too!

What we commonly call “nits” are actually the eggs of very small insects known as head lice. And head lice are found nowhere else on the planet except in human hair.

Head lice have adapted perfectly to life on us. They have specially designed claws at the ends of each of their six legs that are perfect for scuttling up and down the shafts of hair.

In fact, they’re so perfectly designed for life on our hair that once they come off they’re incredibly clumsy and have a tough time getting around at all. That’s why they’re most commonly spread between children through direct head-to-head contact. Lice are tricky enough to navigate the tangle of two people’s hair.

Once lice have infested someone, they will climb down the hair to the scalp and bite. They need our blood to live and lay eggs. While we’ll sometimes get a reaction to their bites, that reaction is rarely as bad as they type we get from mosquitoes or ticks. Importantly, head lice don’t transmit the germs that make us sick like those other pests. At worst, we’ll just get a little itchy.

Read more: Curious Kids: When we get bitten by a mosquito, why does it itch so much?

So, what is the point of head lice? Perhaps they don’t have a “point” at all. We like to think that all creatures play a role in the local ecosystem. We’re especially interested in insects that provide a benefit for people too. A great example are the bees and other insects that pollinate our crops that are crucial in providing food.

But perhaps head lice don’t play what we would traditionally see as an important role in the ecosystem. They don’t pollinate plants, they’re not food for other animals, and they don’t exactly bring joy to our lives in the way other, cuter animals do. When it comes to charismatic insects, head lice aren’t quite up there with butterflies or dragonflies!

I think lice see us as playing a role – providing them with food – but the reverse may not be true.

Read more: Curious Kids: why do we have two kidneys when we can live with only one?

Perhaps we need to take a different perspective when thinking about the “point” of head lice. We marvel at the ability of plants and animals around the world to adapt to all the weird and wonderful cracks and crevices in the environment. Why shouldn’t we take inspiration from head lice being able to adapt to life on the human body?

Like many of the other insect pests that impact our lives, it can be hard to be sympathetic to head lice. As concern is growing about global insect declines, I’m sure parents and carers trying to wrangle lice-infested children aren’t thinking about insect conservation!

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au

_Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best

– ref. Curious Kids: what’s the point of nits?! – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-whats-the-point-of-nits-116158

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Langley, ARC DECRA Research Fellow, Griffith University

Making fake jewels isn’t a modern phenomenon – it’s a human behaviour that dates back thousands of years.

New research published today suggests that traders 2,000 years ago were producing imitation amber beads, coating them with pine tree resin to make them appear to be the real deal.

Six beads found in two Bronze Age (around 3-2,000-years-ago) burial sites – La Molina and Cova del Gegant, both located in Spain – were not what they seemed to be.

High-tech analysis of the beads found that people had carved the beads from shell and seeds before coating them in layers of gold-coloured resin from a pine tree. This resin coating would have made them appear to be legitimate amber beads.

Amber was relatively rare and of high value at the time. While appreciated as a decorative stone, amber is actually the fossilised resin of coniferous trees – which is why we sometimes find insects and other small things preserved within it.

Read more: How ‘bling’ makes us human

A history of fakes

As astonishing as this 2,000 to 3,000-year-old Spanish scam might seem, the manufacture of imitation jewels is actually much older.

The earliest examples go all the way back to the Aurignacian culture, some 43,000 to 37,000-years-ago. At this time, the first modern humans (Homo sapiens) were moving into Western Europe and had very particular aesthetic tastes. These tastes revolved around shiny white seashells and animal teeth which were made into necklaces and sewn onto clothing.

In some cases, getting a hold of seashells wasn’t easy. If you lived inland you had to either travel there (a trek of hundreds or even thousands of kilometres) and collect them yourself or trade for them with someone who had – which made them rare, and therefore, expensive.

Some wouldn’t have had the resources to get these sought after shell and teeth beads – but they still wanted the look, so replicas were made out of common local raw materials.

We know this because archaeologists have found replica seashells as well as red deer, fox and horse teeth carefully carved out of mammoth ivory and soft white stone at a number of sites throughout Europe and the Near East.

Manufacturing imitation beads became a widespread practice over the following 20,000 or so years, with rare or exotic jewellery items copied in shape and colour in numerous prehistoric and later cultures around the globe.

Read more: Ice age art and ‘jewellery’ found in an Indonesian cave reveal an ancient symbolic culture

There’s something about amber

People have loved amber for a long time.

The earliest beads in this warm, honey-coloured material date back to the arrival of modern humans into Europe (that is, around 40,000 years ago).

And it’s not just beads we have used amber for – but also artworks. One particularly gorgeous example is a 14,000-year-old carving of a female elk found in a Federmessergroupen (Epi-Palaeolithic) site in northern Germany.

Written records surviving from the ancient Romans and Greeks discuss the various theories peoples across Europe had for the origin of this mysterious golden material – ranging from the tears of goddesses, tears of birds, fallen drops of sunlight, and even the urine of a Lynx!

Also surviving are accounts of how these ancient peoples believed that amber had a medicinal or magical quality which protected and helped heal the human body. This belief is something that has survived into the modern era – most recently in the trend to adorn infants with amber beaded necklaces to treat the pain of teething.

While the effectiveness of amber to treat pain, inflammation, or ability to protect you from harm is debated – its beauty remains undisputed and will no doubt continue to support its popularity worldwide.

– ref. Psst… wanna buy a necklace? Humans have been faking jewellery for thousands of years – http://theconversation.com/psst-wanna-buy-a-necklace-humans-have-been-faking-jewellery-for-thousands-of-years-116268

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Hughes, Lecturer, Research School of Management, Australian National University

This year’s election will be the first in Australia where the parties will be advertising more on social and digital platforms than traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers and magazines).

There are a few key reasons for this. First, cost-wise, social media is far cheaper, sometimes as low as a few cents per click. Unlike heritage media, digital and social is extremely targeted, and can be done in the “dark,” so your opponents may not even be aware of the message you are pushing out.

Digital and social advertising can also be shared or even created by users themselves, further increasing the reach of a party’s messaging. This gets around the Australian Electoral Commission rules on advertising – technically they are not ads since no party is paying for them to be shared on people’s feeds.

Throw into the mix laws on political advertising – which allow parties to advertise up to and on election day on social media, but not traditional media – and we are likely seeing the first largely digitally driven election campaign in Australian political history.

Read more: Election explainer: what are the rules governing political advertising?

Here are a few ways the parties are using advertising in the campaign so far and what makes this election unique:

What you can do with A$30 million

Among all the candidates running this year, perhaps no one has used political advertising as prolifically as Clive Palmer. This shows what money can buy.

The most recent Nielsen figures put the cost of Palmer’s ads since September at around A$30 million, though Palmer says himself he’s spent at least A$50 million. This compares to just A$16 million spent in total advertising during the last federal election, with Labor and the Coalition accounting for more than 90% of that.

From a campaign perspective, Palmer is ticking many of the right boxes: a mix of different platforms on digital and social; heritage media ads for mass market awareness featuring candidates selected from the middle; the use of memes and user-generated content; and even text messaging.

Despite the ubiquity of his ads, though, Palmer is still struggling to connect with most voters. This demonstrates a very important aspect to any advertising campaign: the actual brand still needs to be seen as offering real value to voters.

The UAP has used text messaging like this one below, for example, to try to change its negative perception with voters by delivering positive campaign promises.

The ‘Grim Reaper’ strategy and micro-targeting

One of the most effective ads ever done in Australia was the “Grim Reaper” AIDS awareness campaign in 1987, which showed how well “scare campaigns” and negative messaging can work, given the right context and framing. The ad’s micro-messaging was another aspect that worked so well: it personalised the issue and made it tangible to anyone sexually active.

Basically, negative messaging works on the theory that what you fear, you will avoid – or the “fight or flight response”. Negative political ads highlight the level of risk and consequence of a certain party’s policies – and then emphasise how to avoid this by not voting for them.

Read more: Why scare campaigns like ‘Mediscare’ work – even if voters hate them

Trouble is, most ads on TV are losing their potency. As attitudes towards political messaging and brands become increasingly negative, voters are less likely to watch ads in their entirety. Many people also don’t see them as being personally relevant.

Social media, though, provides an excellent delivery mechanism for these types of messages. Digital ads can be personalised and focused on issues that voters have already expressed an interest in and therefore find relevant to their lives.

Social media ads can also be altered to be even more targeted as the campaign goes on, based on voter responses. And their speed of production – only taking a matter of hours to produce and place online – allows digital advertising to do what heritage no longer can and provide a more fluid, grassroots dynamic to campaigning.

This ad by Labor featuring Prime Minister Scott Morrison in bed with Palmer, for example, was released on social media within 24 hours of the preference deal struck between the Coalition and Palmer’s UAP.

That said, even on social media, negative advertising is not as effective if it just comes from the party itself. But when combined with information from third-party sources, such as from the media, this can increase the effectiveness. For example, the Liberal Party used the 10 Network image in this ad to support its claims on Labor’s tax policies.

Youth engagement

Youth voter enrolment is at an all-time high in Australia, driven, in part, by engagement and participation in the marriage equality plebiscite in 2017.

The major parties are aware of this and are creating ads specifically targeting this demographic on Snapchat, WhatsApp and Instagram. Some of these are “dark social” ads (meaning they can only be seen by the target market) or are user-made so not to be subject to disclosure rules.

For more general audiences, Labor has created ads like this one on Facebook that highlight issues young voters are concerned about, such as wage increases and penalty rates. Ads like this also attempt to engage with these voters by asking them to sign petitions – a form of experiential marketing that’s proved highly effective with young audiences, as seen through platforms such as Change.org.

Groups like the Australian Youth Climate Coalition are tapping into experiential marketing by combining online advertising with a call for offline action on issues that appeal to young voters, such as climate change. Part-rock concert, part-protest, these events might remind some of the rallies that proved so popular during the Gough Whitlam era.

The increasing influence of lobbying groups

One of the more interesting developments of this election so far is the increasing sophistication, knowledge and strategies of political lobbying groups, or Australia’s equivalent to America’s PACs.

GetUp! is one such group, collecting A$12.8 million in donations in the last 12 months alone. Among the group’s tactics are direct phone calls to voters, partly achieved through “phone parties” where volunteers freely offer their time, phones and other resources to call people in targeted electorates. GetUp! has a goal of making 1 million phone calls in the lead-up to the election.

Other well-funded groups, such as the right-aligned Advance Australia, are also seeking to influence the narrative in the election, particularly in electorates like Warringah, where it has released ads against Tony Abbott’s challenger, Zali Steggall.

In part to counter the influence of lobbying groups, the Australian Council of Trade Unions has launched its own advertising campaign featuring working Australians describing how hard it is to make ends meet.

The rise of these groups in Australian politics opens a Pandora’s Box on just who can influence elections without even standing a single candidate – an issue that’s becoming part of politics now in many Western democracies. As many in politics would know, where there is money, there is power, and where there is power, there are those who are seeking to influence it.

– ref. Facebook videos, targeted texts and Clive Palmer memes: how digital advertising is shaping this election campaign – http://theconversation.com/facebook-videos-targeted-texts-and-clive-palmer-memes-how-digital-advertising-is-shaping-this-election-campaign-115629

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Collins, Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle

As more Australians opt for meat-free diets, some are cutting out animal products altogether and going vegan. But is this safe for pregnant women and babies?

It is possible to meet the specific nutrient requirements of pregnancy, breastfeeding and infancy while following a vegan diet, but there is a catch: it must be well-planned.

Researchers have developed four criteria to guide vegan food choices during the crucial life stages of pregnancy, lactation, infancy and early childhood. These four criteria will help form the nutritional foundation of a healthy vegan diet:

1) Meet your total kilojoule needs by eating large amounts and a wide variety of plant foods.

Plant food groups include grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, vegetables and fruit, with an emphasis on whole foods and those that are minimally processed.

Take care to ensure your fibre intake is not excessive during pregnancy, infancy and early childhood. Too much fibre means you will fill up before you have eaten enough food to meet all your nutrient needs.

2) Choose your vegetable fat sources and quantities carefully.

Don’t limit total fat intake during infancy. Many high-fibre vegan foods are low in kilojoules and need a lot of chewing. By including higher-fat choices you can boost the number of kilojoules in each meal or snack so infants get enough kilojoules to grow properly.

To ensure the omega-3 fats are well metabolised, consume plenty of food that are rich in omega-3 fats, such as ground chia seeds, flaxseed oil and walnuts; and fat sources high monounsaturated like olive oil.

Avoid foods rich in omega-6 fats, such as sunflower and safflower margarine and oil, and tropical fats including coconut and palm oils, as they can compete with the omega-3 fats to be metabolised. You can give omega-3s a competitive advantage by reducing the other fat types.

3) Ensure you’re getting enough calcium and vitamin D.

Consume plant foods rich in calcium, including calcium-fortified soy and nut beverages, some breakfast cereals, tofu, nuts and seeds.

Vitamin D status depends on sun exposure and supplements rather than diet. You can download the SunSmart app to find out how much sun exposure is OK and when you do and don’t need sun protection, based on where you live.

4) Take vitamin B12 supplements and/or use foods fortified with vitamin B12.

Vitamin B12 is needed to make red blood cells, to make myelin which insulates nerves, for some neurotransmitters that help the brain function, and to make DNA.

Fortified foods include some dairy-free soy and nut milks and soy “meats”. Check the nutrition information panel on the label.

Read more: Have you gone vegan? Keep an eye on these 4 nutrients

Vegan diets in pregnancy and lactation

Vegan and vegetarian women can be at risk of vitamin B12 and iron deficiencies during pregnancy and while breastfeeding.

A systematic review of nine studies of pregnant vegan and vegetarian women found no increase in health problems for the mothers, nor major infant malformations.

One study in vegetarian mothers reported an increased risk of male babies being born with hypospadias, an abnormality of the penis where the urethra, which is the tube that carries urine from the bladder to the tip of the penis, opens in the wrong place.

While some studies reported lower birth weights or higher birth weights compared with non-vegetarian mothers, many of the studies had limitations. But the review highlights the importance of optimising nutrient intakes so birthweights are in the normal range.

Vegan diets in infancy

Australia’s guidelines recommend exclusive breastfeeding for around six months and then continued breastfeeding while complementary foods are introduced, up until 12 months or for as long as the mother and infant desire.

Breastmilk, or commercial infant formula, supplies major quantities of nutrients for infants during their first year. These nutrients are needed for optimal development, especially of the brain, so deficiencies can compromise intellectual capacity.

The vitamin B12, iodine and omega-3 fat content of breastmilk depends on the mother’s intake, so mothers need to make sure they’re getting enough.

Read more: Breastmilk alone is best for the first six months – here’s what to do next

Infants have small stomachs, which can make it difficult for them to eat the volume of plant foods needed to meet their energy requirements. Lowering the fibre intake can help. You can do this by using refined or lower-fibre versions of grains, peeling some beans and legumes, cooking well and pushing them through a sieve.

Regularly measuring the baby’s length and weight and plotting on infant growth charts is the best way to monitor growth.

Ensure foods are offered in forms that don’t pose a choking hazard, for example nut butters but not nuts.

Having different sources of plant proteins – including legumes, dried beans, grains, nut and seed butter and oils – helps meet needs for specific amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein.

Sources of iron include iron-fortified infant cereals, mashed and peeled cooked (from dried) beans and legumes. Consuming vegetables, fruit or juice rich in vitamin C with meals helps convert plant sources of iron and zinc into the form that can be absorbed.

Read more: Why iron is such an important part of your diet

Putting it all together

While some vitamin and mineral supplements may be needed to optimise micronutrient and omega-3 fat intakes, how can this information be translated into actual meals?

Check out these menus adapted from the VegPlate.

Pregnancy sample menu

For pregnancy, a sample day’s menu could look like this:

Breakfast ¼ cup calcium fortified soy yoghurt with 1 cup (60g) mixed grain cereal, 25 raisins (15g) and 14 almonds (15g).

Mid-meal One apple plus a tablespoon of sesame butter.

Lunch ½ cup cooked quinoa with 1 small can kidney beans, 1 cup (100g) red capsicum, 100g baby spinach, 8-10 walnuts (30g), 2 dried figs (30g), with balsamic dressing + 1 tsp olive oil, coriander and 2 slices wholemeal bread (60g).

Mid-meal 3-4 cups home popped popcorn (30g) with added nutritional yeast, with a juice made with 1/3 cup orange juice and ½ cup celery, kale and carrot juice.

Dinner 200g pumpkin and ½ cup cooked chickpeas stir fried or made into soup, with 1/3 cup (60g) cooked buckwheat, 1.5 tablespoons sunflower seeds (15g), 5g flaxseed oil, 80g roasted tempeh, 100g broccoli and 5g olive oil and 1-2 slices of wholemeal bread (45g).

Supper 10 Cashews (15g).

Queensland Health also has a factsheet for vegan and vegetarian pregnant women.

Read more: Five ways to boost your nutrition before pregnancy

Infant sample menu

For infants, a sample day’s menu for a nine-month-old who does not have any nut allergies could look like this: (Note: this assumes the infant’s mother has adequate nutritional status and dietary intake.)

Breakfast

2 tablespoon (10g dry) iron fortified infant cereal mixed with calcium fortified soy yoghurt or infant formula, plus a breastfeed.

Mid-meal

½ medium pureed banana (80g) plus 2 tsp almond butter (10g), plus a breastfeed.

Lunch

½ cup cooked white/refined rice (25g dry weight) well-cooked in unsalted vegetable stock with 2 dessert spoons (15g dry weight) hulled red lentils plus 1 tablespoon strained pumpkin, 2 tsp tahini (10g), 1 tsp olive oil (5g) and 1 tsp flaxseed oil (5g).

Mid-meal

⅓ cup calcium fortified soy yoghurt plus 1 tablespoon pureed apple and a breastfeed.

Dinner

25g dry iron-fortified infant pasta (½ cup cooked) cooked in unsalted vegetable stock with 1 tablespoon of tomato puree or pasta sauce, 2 dessert spoons (15g dry weight) split peas, 2 tsp cashew butter (10g), 1 tsp olive oil (5g) and 1 tsp flaxseed oil (5g).

Supper

Breastfeed.

More guidance is available at VegPlate Junior.

Read more: Why vegan diets for babies come with significant risks

Keep in mind that nutrient deficiencies can occur if vegan diets aren’t carefully planned.

If a full nutrient analysis of your usual dietary patterns is needed, an accredited practising dietitian could assist, along with providing strategies to optimise nutrient intakes.

Your GP can advise on the need for blood tests to monitor nutrients such as iron and vitamin B12.

– ref. Pregnant women and babies can be vegans but careful nutrition planning is essential – http://theconversation.com/pregnant-women-and-babies-can-be-vegans-but-careful-nutrition-planning-is-essential-107709

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul McGreevy, Professor of Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare Science, University of Sydney

Labor has released a six-point plan intended to re-establish national leadership on animal welfare.

This plan would reverse the direction set by the Abbot government, which withdrew funding from the Australian Animal Welfare Strategy (AAWS) and disbanded the entire Animal Welfare Unit within the Department of Agriculture. These moves made animal welfare chiefly the responsibility of the states and territories.

Read more: Can live animal export ever be humane?

Since then, the Coalition government has slightly redeemed itself, largely focusing on heat stress in live export, introducing new regulations around temperature. This renewed attention to livestock welfare could have far-reaching consequences if rolled out to other sectors of animal husbandry, such as land transport.

Labor has argued creating an independent office overseeing livestock welfare and a nationally consistent welfare strategy can improve Australia’s poor record on animal well-being.

A brand new office

Labor’s plan would create an independent office overseeing livestock welfare and pursue a nationally consistent welfare strategy. The first point of the plan commits Labor to establishing an independent Inspector-General of Animal Welfare (IGAW) and Live Animal Exports. Labor has pledged A$1 million a year to establish the IGAW as a statutory position operating independently within the federal Department of Agriculture.

The IGAW would report directly to the agriculture minister and advise on the protection of animals in all Commonwealth-regulated activities (which notably excludes racing and companion animals) with a focus on live exports and welfare standards and guidelines.

The Inspector-General would also work with the states and territories to establish an independent Office of Animal Welfare to oversee animal protection and welfare nationally.

The independence of this office is particularly significant in light of the recent government-funded Futureye report on Australia’s shifting mindset on farm animal welfare, the Moss Review and the Productivity Commission report, all of which questioned whether the government has a conflict of interest when both supporting the agricultural industry and promoting good animal welfare standards.

The return of cooperation

Secondly, it has pledged to re-establish state and territory cooperation on animal welfare matters (as was the case under the former Labor government). This system saw the Commonwealth, states and territories cooperating on animal welfare matters to grant them a consistent national approach.

Thirdly, Labor will collaborate with state and territory governments, industry and animal welfare groups to “update and renew” (and hopefully fund) the Australian Animal Welfare Strategy, which has been in mothballs since September 2013.

Read more: Live sheep exporters get longer ‘grace’ period for sub-standard ships

The strategy facilitates round-table discussions among industry, governments, professional associations, service providers, researchers and welfare organisations, all volunteering their time to assess welfare problems and possible solutions.

Those of us who have contributed to AAWS meetings in the past generally agree that face-to-face collaborations with such a broad range of stakeholders were invaluable. The Animal Welfare League Australia has described the the AAWS as worth “tens of millions [to Australia], given the huge amount of pro bono and in-kind support the working groups provided.”

Transparency and change in live exports

Fourthly, Labor has pledged to conduct a review of the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System (ESCAS). Introduced in May 2011, in response to an ABC Four Corners program that exposed horrific scenes of cruelty in Indonesian abattoirs, the ESCAS is designed to protect animal welfare from the farm gate to slaughter.

The need for close scrutiny of such assurance schemes was highlighted last month when hundreds of Australian and New Zealand cattle died after being exported to Sri Lanka. This has led RSPCA Australia to repeat previous calls to extend ESCAS protections to breeding and dairy cattle.

On the other hand, it is unclear why there is any need to review ESCAS top to bottom as another point in Labor’s plan is to immediately ban the northern summer live sheep trade, and phase out live sheep trade entirely within five years.

Given 58% of Australians surveyed on the ABC’s Vote Compass wanted to see an end to live export, Labor may be accused of not going far enough in planning an end to all live exports and failing to support growth in on-shore meat processing, particularly in the north of Australia.

Regular farm reports

Finally, Labour has committed to more transparency and accountability in farm animal welfare matters by ensuring the Minister for Agriculture provides quarterly reports to the Parliament on:

• new and emerging markets
• the numbers of livestock exported
• allegations of breaches of animal welfare standards and investigations undertaken
• any actions taken for breaches of Australia’s animal welfare standards.

These would feed into the emerging calls for industries that use animals to maintain a social license to do so.

Read more: Why horse-racing in Australia needs a social licence to operate

Catching-up to do

Labor’s claim their plan will “confirm Australia as a leader in our region for the care and protection of animals” is a lofty goal – especially given how poorly Australia ranks in World Animal Protection’s international listing of animal welfare performance.

Under this scheme, countries are scored on, among other attributes, recognition of animal sentience, the importance of animal protection as a social value within the country and government regulation against cruelty. On a scale from A to G, Australia currently has a C rating, on a par with China.

Currently, the costs of Australia’s dropping the ball on animal welfare issues are difficult to pin down. Monitoring animal welfare science and meeting community expectations, as proposed in the Labor plan, may prove critical for the next government, regardless of its leaning.

The cost of picking up the ball as animal welfare matures as a political issue may make Labor’s welcome, but modest pledges look like great value for money.

Read more: Stop the sheep trade in the northern summer, veterinarians say

– ref. Can Labor’s animal welfare plan improve Australia’s lacklustre record? – http://theconversation.com/can-labors-animal-welfare-plan-improve-australias-lacklustre-record-116261

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Norton, Higher Education Program Director, Grattan Institute

Labor says it will bring back demand-driven funding for universities if it wins this month’s election. Put simply, this means instead of the government providing each university with a fixed sum of money for teaching (which is what happens now), it would instead provide funds based on how many students have actually enrolled.

The Australian government operated a demand-driven funding system for public universities between 2012 and 2017. During these years, universities could enrol unlimited numbers of bachelor-degree students into any discipline other than medicine and be paid for every one of them.

Although universities did not have to meet demand from prospective students, they had much more freedom to do so. Moving to a demand-driven system is also referred to as scrapping the “cap” on government funding of university places.

Labor’s policy wouldn’t only give universities a funding boost, it would help universities adapt to and plan for future needs. Here’s what happened last time demand-driven funding was introduced, and why the policy changed.

What’s supply-driven, or block-grant funding?

Until 2012, the Commonwealth government had a supply-driven policy, also known as a block-grant system. This is because the government would decide on a block amount of funding it would provide to universities, and how many places the universities would have to deliver.

The government then divided the places and money between universities, which selected students based on the availability of places. The total number of places was always below demand.

Aside from limiting entry to university, the old block-grant system was criticised for being too bureaucratic and inflexible. In a much-quoted phrase, the economist Max Corden described it as “Moscow on the Molonglo” – a reference to Soviet-era central planning and a river in Canberra.

In most years, numbers of places allocated to universities were similar to the year before. This was the case regardless of student preferences, labour market trends, or a university’s strategy or performance.

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

The supply-driven policy’s limit on student places was a major constraint, but otherwise the system was only moderately prescriptive. There were some controls, such as limits on medical students. But generally universities could distribute their block funding between courses according to their own priorities.

A version of this block-grant system has continuously been used for government-funded diploma, associate degree and postgraduate student places. But fixed student-place allocations and money for bachelor-degree students were abolished for a demand-driven system in 2012.

Why was demand-driven funding introduced?

The 2008 Bradley higher education policy review recommended demand-driven funding. Julia Gillard announced the policy in 2009 when she was education minister, and it was phased in while she was prime minister.

The Bradley report argued a demand-driven system would let universities adapt more readily to student and labour-market needs. The government agreed, saying it wanted to move away from “dictating and rationing the supply of university places”.

One major reason the government gave for introducing demand-driven funding was to increase higher education participation and attainment rates. The government set a target of 40% of all 25-34-year-olds to have a bachelor degree by 2025, up from 32% at the time.

Without previous controls on student numbers the higher education system entered a transformational phase. Three universities – Australian Catholic University, Swinburne and Sunshine Coast – more than doubled their domestic bachelor-degree enrolments between 2008 and 2017. Another six increased their enrolments by more than half.

Domestic student bachelor-degree enrolments in 2017 were up by 45% from 2008, reaching nearly one-quarter of a million.

This enrolment growth put us on track to meet the original 40% attainment target. In 2017, nearly 42% of 19-year-olds were enrolled in higher education, up more than 10 percentage points from 2008.

The government particularly wanted more students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The official equity statistics are based on geographic measures that provide only a rough guide to progress, although they show some, with students from areas of low socioeconomic status increasing from 16% to 19% of undergraduate enrolments.

A Grattan Institute analysis found that, in 2016, 25% of children of machinery operators, drivers and labourers were at university or already had a degree in their early 20s. That was up 9 percentage points from the decade before, but still well below the rate (61%) of children of managers and professionals.

In line with Bradley’s hopes, enrolments rose in courses teaching areas of skills shortage, such as engineering and health. Health courses expanded the most – up by 73% in 2017 from 2008.

Read more: Many Australian universities may be in surplus, but does that mean there’s fat to cut?

Although demand-driven funding met employer needs, graduates did not do so well. Increased course completions coincided with an end-of-the-mining boom crash in jobs for young graduates. And 2014 was the worst year ever for recent graduate employment, with a third of those looking for full-time work unable to find it four months after finishing their course.

Job numbers have since fully recovered, but recent graduate full-time employment rates remain below their historical average. But this wasn’t why the government scrapped the demand-driven model in December 2017.

Why did it end?

The policy ended because of cost. By 2017, demand-driven funding had caused spending to increase by more than 50% in real terms since 2008. From 2013 to 2017, every federal budget included an attempt to curb higher education spending, while keeping the demand-driven system.

But when the last of these attempts failed in the Senate in late 2017, the Coalition government used a fiscal emergency provision and froze bachelor-degree spending for two years, with population-linked adjustments from 2020 for universities that met certain performance criteria.

Effectively, this means we’re back to the block-grant system, except universities don’t have enrolment targets and can decide to reduce student places.

Read more: Margaret Gardner: freezing university funding is out of step with the views of most Australians

In the short term, the freeze shouldn’t affect students too much. Demand has been soft since 2015 and fell in 2018, mainly because fewer older people wanted to study. Early indications are that demand fell again in 2019.

Over the medium to long run, however, current policies would cause significant problems. In the mid-2020s, Australia’s school-leaver population will be larger than at any time in our history. And a shrinking higher education system would be unable to meet their educational needs.

Demand-driven funding is not just about total student numbers. Even when total domestic enrolments are going down, as they might be now, demand for some specific courses and universities will be going up. The capacity of demand-driven funding to manage these micro-level changes, as well as bigger population trends, make it superior to a block-grant system.

– ref. Labor wants to restore ‘demand driven’ funding to universities: what does this mean? – http://theconversation.com/labor-wants-to-restore-demand-driven-funding-to-universities-what-does-this-mean-116060

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wendy Steele, Associate Professor, Centre of Urban Research and Urban Futures Enabling Capability Platform, RMIT University

The announcement that President Joko Widodo’s government will move Indonesia’s capital to another location, due to the severity of human-induced degradation in Jakarta, highlights a key tension for cities today. In the face of increasingly unsustainable urban environments, do we retrofit existing cities, or relocate and build new cities to achieve greater sustainability?

The answer is both. But each has its challenges.

Read more: New cities? It’s an idea worth thinking about for Australia

Creating new cities

The goal of turning cities from sustainability problems to solutions is driving a suite of “future city” innovations. These include the planning and development of whole new cities.

An increasing number of countries are planning to build cities from scratch using technological innovation to achieve more sustainable urban development. Forest City in Malaysia, Belmont smart city in the United States and the Sino-Oman Industrial City are just some of the examples.

The urban ambition includes creating carless and walkable cities, green cities able to produce oxygen through eco-skyscrapers, high-speed internet embedded in the urban fabric, the capacity to convert waste into energy, and reclaiming land to create new strategic trade opportunities.

However, striking the right balance between innovative ideas and democratic expectations, including the public right to the city, remains a challenge.

Read more: Will Habitat III defend the human right to the city?

The Minnesota Experimental City offers a cautionary tale. The aim was to solve urban problems by creating a new city. It would use the latest technology including nuclear energy, automated cars and a domed roof enclosure.

Despite significant government and financial backing, including its own state agency, the Minnesota project failed due to a lack of public understanding and local support for a top-down futuristic project.

Who gets left behind?

In 1960, Brazil moved its capital from Rio de Janeiro to the futuristic city of Brasilia. While the city was designed to accommodate both rich and poor, it quickly became unaffordable for the average family. Half a century on, it was reported:

The poor have been shunted out to satellite cities, which range from proper well-built cities to something more like a shanty town.

In Indonesia, more than 30 million people – a fifth of the nation’s urban residents and more than a tenth of the 269 million population – live in Greater Jakarta. The capital city Jakarta is just one part of a larger mega-city agglomeration, the world’s second-largest after Greater Tokyo. This vast connected urban meta-region is known as Jabodetabek, from the initials of the cities within it: Jakarta (with a population of 10 million), Bogor (1 million), Depok (2.1 million), Tangerang (2 million), South Tangerang (1.5 million) and Bekasi (2.7 million).

A key reason for moving the capital is that Jakarta is prone to serious flooding and is rapidly sinking. Jakarta also suffers overpopulation, severe traffic gridlock, slums and a lack of critical urban infrastructure such as drainage and sanitation.

Read more: The sea isn’t actually ‘level’: why rising oceans will hit some cities more than others

Relocating the capital away from the crowded main island of Java offers the opportunity to better plan the political and administrative centre using the latest urban design features and technology.

Two key questions arise. If environmental degradation and overpopulation are the key issues, what will become of the largely remaining population of Greater Jakarta? At a national scale, how will this relocation help overcome the socio-economic and spatial disparities that exist in Indonesia?

Egypt, for example, is building a new capital city to overcome severe urban congestion and overcrowding in Greater Cairo. But there is no guarantee the new capital will resolve these issues if the emphasis is solely on technological innovation, without adequate attention to urban equity and fairness.

More of the same in Australia

The Australian population is projected to grow to 36 million in the next 30 years. This is focusing political, policy and public attention on what this means for the future of the nation’s cities.

Despite all the advances that have occurred in technology, the arts, architecture, design and the sciences, there is surprisingly little innovation or public discussion about what might be possible for 21st-century Australian settlements beyond the capital cities.

Future Australian city planning and development focuses largely on enlarging and intensifying the footprints of existing major cities. The current urban policy trajectory is in-fill development and expansion of the existing state capital mega-city regions, where two-thirds of the population live. But what is lost through this approach?

In Australia only two ambitious “new city” plans have been put forward in the last 50 years: the Multifunction Polis (MFP) and the CLARA Plan.

In the late 1980s the MFP was envisaged as a high-tech city of the future with nuclear power, modern communication and Asian investment. It failed to gain the necessary political, investment and public support and was never built.

The current CLARA Plan proposes building up to eight new regional smart cities connected by a high-speed rail system linking Sydney and Melbourne via Canberra. Each of these cities is designed to be compact, environmentally sustainable and just a quick train trip away from the capital cities.

CLARA has outlined a “value capture” business model based on private city land development, not “government coffer” funding. How these new cities propose to function within the constitutional framework of Australia is as yet unclear and untested.

Read more: High speed rail plan still needs to prove economic benefits will outweigh costs

A bipartisan challenge

Are we thinking too narrowly when we talk about future Australian cities?

The “future city” prompts us to rethink and re-imagine the complex nature and make-up of our urban settlements, and the role of critical infrastructure and planning within them.

Read more: What’s critical about critical infrastructure?

The future of Australian cities will require creativity, vision (even courage) to respond effectively to the challenges and opportunities of sustainable development.

This will not be the remit of any one political party, but a bipartisan national urban settlement agenda that affects and involves all Australians.

– ref. Indonesia isn’t the only country planning new cities. Why not Australia? – http://theconversation.com/indonesia-isnt-the-only-country-planning-new-cities-why-not-australia-116266

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mike Salvaris, Project Manager, Australian National Development Index, Senior Research Fellow, University of Melbourne

As the federal election approaches, we’re expected to drown in slogans like “lower taxes”, “wage growth”, “franking credit reform” or “negative gearing reforms”. These mostly assume voters are as obsessed as the politicians with economic and financial issues, rather than, say, the kind of Australia they want their grandchildren to live in.

There’s no doubt we value a healthy economy and it can be argued Australia has enjoyed a “remarkable run” over the past 50 years. But Australians also understand and care about the costs of economic growth, and some other issues that our politicians seem less concerned with.

Polling consistently shows citizens care more than their politicians about some quite important issues: action on climate and energy, on housing and inequality, on corporate donations and the corruption of democracy

Read more: The vomit principle, the dead bat, the freeze: how political spin doctors’ tactics aim to shape the news

So why doesn’t our political system allow us to discuss and decide on the things we really care about, like the future well-being of our society and even the role of values like kindness, fairness and compassion in directing our policies?

This is the kind of future NZ Jacinda Ardern described to a startled Davos World Economic Forum earlier this year.

This kind of change requires intergenerational policies and a clear vision for the Australia we want; we don’t seem to have either.

They just don’t fit in the three-year election cycle. But the more immediate reason – the elephant in the room – is the widely held view in the political classes and the media that continuous economic growth means the same as societal progress.

Yet ironically, it is our very over-reliance on gross domestic product (GDP) as a singular driver of economic and social policy that has led to many societal problems, such as inequity, over-consumption and climate change.

Alternatives to GDP?

Historically, GDP was never intended as a measure of societal progress and many have questioned its dominance. But it’s only quite recently that alternative measures of societal progress have been developed and a global “beyond GDP” movement has emerged.

Internationally, this has led to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the OECD Better Life Index and the Canadian Index of Wellbeing. These allow countries to track their progress towards aspirational goals like “good health and well-being” and “quality education”.

Some countries are going further. They are developing wider models of societal progress where equitable, sustainable well-being is government’s ultimate goal. They are seeking to build this goal into their economies, budgets, political systems and long-term planning, even in some cases their constitution. Many of these models are firmly anchored in a process of citizen engagement and democratic renewal.

Read more: Money, Capitalism and the Slow Death of Social Democracy

Countries like New Zealand, Wales, Italy, Scotland, Slovenia and some in Latin America are leading this movement.

Most are members of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, where governments and community groups are combining to construct “an economy that delivers human and ecological wellbeing”.

In July, Ardern will launch the world’s first well-being budget. This will require ministers to demonstrate the well-being impacts of their budget proposals (rather than the impacts on marginal seats, as we do here). Ministers will also need to show the trade-offs between natural, social, human, financial and physical capital.

What should Australian politicians make of this?

All of this should raise a few questions. Do citizens want an alternative model of societal progress to guide our political agenda? What do they consider the most important priorities for the kind of Australia they want? What would an Australian well-being economy look like?

As part of the national ANDI (Australian National Development Index) project, a long term community-research collaboration based at the University of Melbourne, we recently asked some of these questions.

In a national survey of 1,850 people, only 43% of respondents felt Australia was “heading in the right direction”. But nearly 87% thought that in charting our national progress, health, social and environmental measures were as important as economic ones.

When asked about priorities for national progress, people rated highly issues like child and youth well-being, health, education, democracy and governance, communities and infrastructure, fairness, work and work-life, general well-being, environment and sustainability, Indigenous well-being and culture and recreation. Economic life and prosperity were certainly considered important, but at a mid-level in this list.

Encouragingly, a healthy majority (76%) said they would be interested to participate in a national community program to express their views on national progress goals and measures.

Time to have your say

ANDI is planning a large-scale community program to engage Australians around the nation over the next three years, with the aim of producing ongoing “status” reports on progress in 12 key community priority areas each year.

Such a model in Australia could lead to more insightful policy and more mature political debate. It would encourage citizens to think beyond political slogans and tribalism and politicians to plan beyond three-year cycles.

In the longer term, extensive citizen engagement, underpinned with high quality research and evidence, could help to build a shared vision and restore trust and democracy. And perhaps then we could vote on the Australia we want.

– ref. It’s time to vote for happiness and well-being, not mere economic growth. Here’s why: – http://theconversation.com/its-time-to-vote-for-happiness-and-well-being-not-mere-economic-growth-heres-why-116061

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter van Duyn, Maritime Logistics Expert, Centre for Supply Chain and Logistics (CSCL), Deakin University

In movies about ships, a crew feverishly changing their vessel’s name and flag to avoid detection is a common tactic. Nothing so simple could work in reality, right?

In a sense, though, running up a different flag is still as useful a corporate tactic as it was to Captain Jack Aubrey disguising the HMS Surprise to defeat the Acheron.

Changing flags largely explains the disappearance of Australian merchant ships. Three decades ago the national merchant fleet numbered about 100. Now it’s just 14.

That’s despite being an island continent where 99% of imports and exports are transported by sea, with thousands of large commercial ships operating in Australian waters.

The decline has many people bothered. The Australian Labor Party is promising to create a “strategic fleet” of up to a dozen ships – oil tankers, gas carriers and container ships – that can be relied on to deliver essential fuel supplies. The ships will be privately owned but could be requisitioned by the government in times of national need.

“It is a national disgrace that an island nation like Australia only has 14 flagged vessels, and it’s in our national interest to fix this,” said the Opposition leader, Bill Shorten.

But the prime minister, Scott Morrison, has dismissed the plan as simply an attempt to protect union jobs.

So who’s right? Does having an Australian merchant fleet matter?

Flying foreign flags

To appreciate what this issue is about, let’s recap what it means to be an “Australian” ship. It’s not necessarily about being Australian-owned.

Mostly it’s about flags.

The flag under which a ship sails determines the conditions the ship and its crew operate.

Australian-flagged ships must abide by Australian laws regarding employment conditions, safety, taxation and environmental regulation. A foreign-flagged ship operates under the rules of the country where it is registered.

About 40% the world’s commercial ships (by tonnage) are registered in just three countries: Panama, Liberia and Marshall Islands. These and other so-called Flags of Convenience countries attract registrations by foreign ship owners looking to avoid the costs of more stringent regulations and tax regimes in their home countries.

Ships registered under flags of convenience are more likely to have unscrupulous owners with crews working under unsafe, exploitative conditions.

Over the past 20-30 years, many Australian companies have made the decision to phase out Australian flagged and crewed ships and replace them with those owned by foreign companies and run by foreign crews, resulting in a dramatic decline in the fleet.

Costs and benefits

In January BHP and BlueScope Steel announced the end of their last two locally operated bulk carriers transporting iron ore from Port Hedland in northwest Western Australia to Port Kembla. The ships, MV Mariloula and MV Lowlands Brilliance, were not Australian-flagged (the former is registered in the Marshall Islands, the latter in Singapore), but were operated by an Australian company (Teekay Australia) employing almost 70 Australian crew.

Technically there are rules to impose Australian standards on all ships operating in Australian waters. Only Australian-flagged (and crewed) ships are able to gain a general licence to operate between Australian ports. But over the years laws granting “temporary” licences to foreign ships have been relaxed.

The rationale for allowing them is that their lower costs help local companies stay competitive in global markets. Most inquiries held into Australian shipping have been scathing of the industry’s inefficiencies and high cost. It’s one of the reasons shipping’s share of domestic freight has been falling.

But there are big potential negatives in replacing Australian-flagged ships with foreign-flagged ones.

If we allow foreign-flagged ships in our waters there needs to be adequate oversight by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority) to ensure ships do not pose a greater threat to our precious maritime environment. This is a distinct possibility if crews are not well-trained or do not have proper working conditions.

A stark illustration of such risks was the grounding of the Chinese coal carrier Shen Neng I in 2010. It ran aground on a shoal of the Great Barrier Reef just north of the port of Gladstone, spilling oil and damaging more than 40 hectares of marine park over 10 days. The damage has yet to be repaired.

A government investigation found the ship’s chief mate had only two-and-a-half hours’ sleep in the 38 hours before the accident and made a succession of errors.

Need for bipartisanship

History has shown the importance of a merchant navy in times of conflict or natural disasters. So the Labor Party has a point in arguing government should do more to ensure local shipping remains a viable alternative to road and rail transport.

But it remains to be seen how Labor, should it win the federal election, will counter the trend of several decades and revive the fortunes of Australian shipping. Right now its policy is light on detail, with its only commitment being to establish a “task force”.

Shipping and associated infrastructure require a long investment horizon, so a bipartisan approach to shipping policy is essential. Shipping lines, ship owners, port authorities and unions will all need to cooperate.

Right now that looks optimistic. But other developed nations with high labour costs, such as Britain, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark, have faced similar problems to Australia and overcome them.

So let’s not wave the white flag quite yet.

– ref. How ‘flags of convenience’ have shrunk Australia’s merchant fleet – http://theconversation.com/how-flags-of-convenience-have-shrunk-australias-merchant-fleet-115059

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Woollard, Head of Theatre and Performance, Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, University of Tasmania

In this series, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.

In December 1882, Eliza O’Flaherty died of “diabetes and exhaustion” at her lodgings in Sydney. Aged 64, Eliza lived in a brick cottage behind a dyeworks, where she had been employed as manager for two years. Her demise might seem unremarkable: a widowed, childless woman of the 19th century who had been worn out by work. But O’Flaherty was actually Eliza Winstanley, the first woman to play Richard III in an Australian theatre, and an early star of the colonial stage.

Winstanley was born in Wigan, Lancashire in 1818. With her parents William and Elizabeth and her five younger brothers and sisters, she emigrated to Sydney in 1833. Family stories recall that the Winstanleys went to the Liverpool port intending to emigrate to America but finding no ships bound for America at the docks, they boarded one for Sydney instead.

On arrival in Sydney the family rented a cottage in Kent Street and soon after William found employment as a scenic artist at Sydney’s first licensed theatre, Barnett Levey’s Theatre Royal in George Street.

In 1834, Eliza, then 16, and her sister Anne, then 9, made their acting debut at this theatre. Eliza performed the role of Clari in The Maid of Milan, a forgotten musical play known for its sentimental song, Home Sweet Home. She received positive reviews, with The Australian’s critic praising, “the rich intonation of her voice, and the expression of unfeigned grief which her countenance occasionally assumed”.

Surviving hissing from the mob

Early in her career, Winstanley endured the organised attacks of rowdy sections of the audience. The Cabbage Tree mob, named after their distinctive hats made from the leaves of the cabbage tree palm, were fans of the young actress Mathilda Jones, who, unlike the Winstanley sisters, was Australian born. The mob would hiss like geese whenever Eliza and Anne appeared on stage. But over the next 12 years Eliza refined her craft, becoming one of the most confident, reliable performers on the Sydney stage.

Many reviews describe Winstanley’s physical animation and emotional connection to her roles. She often enacted characters that demanded dynamic vocal and physical transformation, such as hags, maniacs and villains, which she played, as one critic put it, “with all the powers of tragic acting”.

Winstanley’s interest in physical transformation reached its zenith when she was advertised to play the title role in Shakespeare’s Richard III at Sydney’s Australian Olympic Theatre. This was a tent theatre she and her husband, Henry O’Flaherty, briefly managed in 1842.

Shakespeare’s villainous Duke of Gloucester was widely regarded as the ultimate test of an actor’s skill. The character had been played a number of times in Sydney by men, with varying success. Winstanley’s decision to play Richard III indicates she was prepared to take on male theatrical rivals and unafraid of provocative programming.

‘Unsexly and indelicate’

Theatre historian Yvonne Shafer suggests that 19th century actresses played male roles because of “natural inclination, a wish to display ability, and novelty”, and also to “take the lead and compete with men in a very direct way”.

One 19th century critic was appalled by Winstanley’s decision. Although he chose not to attend her performance, he opined, “that the interests of any company of performers would be advanced, by such an exhibition, appears to us to be a most preposterous notion … such an attempt is unsexly and indelicate.”

Unfortunately, a review of Winstanley’s portrayal of Richard III has not yet been discovered. This lack of reviews could indicate that the production was boycotted by the Sydney critics.

In 1846, Winstanley and her husband left Sydney for London. For the next 20 years she carved out a career under her maiden name, and had consistent acting engagements in New York, Philadelphia and London.

Her days of cross-dressing and physical transformation were now over, and her repertoire consisted mainly of attractive widows, cheerful landladies and stock theatrical characters known as “heavy ladies”.

After the death of her husband, Winstanley had to rely on her own resources. She cemented her professional success as a member of Charles and Ellen Kean’s company at London’s Princess Theatre, and performed many times in the Kean’s command performances for Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle.

In an 1853 letter to Charles Kean, Winstanley accepts his offer to play Queen Elinor in the Keans’ production of Shakespeare’s King John.

The short note reveals Winstanley’s anxiety about her widening figure, her literary sense of humour and delight in word play. “With pleasure I secede to your request. Though in attempting the part of Queen Elinor I certainly shall fail to represent A leaner Queen.”

Reinvention as a writer

Although she maintained her acting career until the mid 1860s, Winstanley reinvented herself for a second successful career. Her first novel Shifting Scenes in Theatrical Life was published in 1859, and this marked the beginning of her professional life as “Mrs Winstanley” a writer and editor for popular “penny weekly” magazines.

Many of her novels are set in the world of the theatre, and reveal her insider’s knowledge of acting craft. Some of her novels, including the 1864 convict story Twenty Straws, were adapted and performed at London theatres in the 1860s and 70s.

In 1880, Winstanley returned to Sydney, perhaps to be near her brother Robert and his family. As Mrs O’Flaherty, she found employment as manager of Eldridge’s Dyeworks.

Sydney had transformed from the rough, colonial town she had known three decades earlier. Did any of the older customers of the dyeworks remember her as a skilled performer of tragedy and melodrama in the early days of the city’s first theatres?

Living as a widow for most of her life, without the material support of a husband, Winstanley adapted to her circumstances. As an actress she saw employment opportunities dwindle as she aged, and so remade herself as an editor and writer. As her health declined, she again put her shoulder to the wheel at the dyeworks.

Winstanley’s three careers are proof of her indefatigable inventiveness in her professional life, and an ability to endure. As a leading artist on Australia’s earliest stages and our first female Richard III, Winstanley deserves a prominent place in our theatrical histories.

– ref. Hidden women of history: Eliza Winstanley, colonial stage star and our first female Richard III – http://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-eliza-winstanley-colonial-stage-star-and-our-first-female-richard-iii-114732

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

Whether or not it’s some sort of record, the Liberals’ loss of two Victorian candidates in a single day is way beyond what Oscar Wilde would have dubbed carelessness.

Already struggling in that state, the Victorian Liberals managed to select one candidate who, judged on his words, was an appalling Islamophobe and another who was an out-and-out homophobe.

The comments that have brought them down weren’t made in the distant past – they date from last year.

Jeremy Hearn was disendorsed as the party’s candidate for the Labor seat of Isaacs, after it came to light that he had written, among other things, that a Muslim was someone who subscribed to an ideology requiring “killing or enslavement of the citizens of Australia if they do not become Muslim”. This was posted in February 2018.

Peter Killin withdrew over a comment (in reply to another commenter) he posted in December that included suggesting Liberal MP Tim Wilson should not have been preselected because he’s gay.

Scott Morrison rather quaintly explained the unfortunate choice of Killin by saying “he was a very recent candidate who came in because we weren’t able to continue with the other candidate because of section 44 issues”.

Oops and oops again. First the Victorian Liberals pick someone who didn’t qualify legally and then they replaced that candidate with one who didn’t qualify under any reasonable test of community standards.

Read more: Politics with Michelle Grattan: Tim Colebatch on the battle in Victoria – and the Senate

It’s not just the Liberals with problems of candidates with unacceptable views, or bad behaviour.

Labor’s Northern Territory number 2 Senate candidate Wayne Kurnoth, who shared anti-Semitic material on social media, recently stood down. Bill Shorten embarrassed himself on Wednesday by saying he hadn’t met the man, despite having been filmed with him.

Then there’s the case of Luke Creasey, the Labor candidate running in Melbourne, which is held by Greens Adam Bandt, who shared rape jokes and pornographic material on social media. He has done a mea culpa, saying his actions happened “a number of years ago” and “in no way reflect the views I hold today”. Creasey still has his endorsement. Labor Senate leader Penny Wong has defended him, including by distinguishing between a “mistake” and “prejudice”.

It should be remembered that, given the timing, these latest candidates unloaded by their parties have not lost their spots or their party designations on the ballot paper.

As Antony Green wrote when a NSW Liberal candidate had to withdraw during the state election (after a previous association with an online forum which reportedly engaged in unsavoury jokes) “the election goes ahead as if nothing had happened”.

It won’t occur this time, but recall the Pauline Hanson experience. In 1996, the Liberals disendorsed Hanson for racist remarks but she remained on the ballot with the party moniker. She was duly elected – and no doubt quite a few voters had thought she was the official Liberal candidate.

What goes around comes around – sort of.

This week Hanson’s number 2 Queensland Senate candidate, Steve Dickson, quit all his party positions after footage emerged of his groping and denigrating language at a Washington strip club. But Dickson is still on the Senate ticket.

While the latest major party candidates have been dumped for their views, this election has produced a large number of candidates who clearly appear to be legally unviable.

Their presence is despite the fact that, after the horrors of the constitution’s section 44 during the last parliament, candidates now have to provide extensive details for the Australian Electoral Commission about their eligibility.

Although the AEC does not have any role of enforcing eligibility, the availability of this data makes it easier in many cases to spot candidates who have legal question marks.

Most of the legally-dubious candidates have come from minor parties, and these parties, especially One Nation, Palmer’s United Australia Party and Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party are getting close media attention.

When the major parties discovered prospective candidates who would hit a section 44 hurdle – and there have been several – they quickly replaced them.

But the minor parties don’t seem too worried about eligibility. While most of these people wouldn’t have a hope in hell of being elected, on one legal view there is a danger of a High Court challenge if someone was elected on the preferences of an ineligible candidate.

The section 44 problems reinforce the need to properly fix the constitution, as I have argued before. It will be a miracle if it doesn’t cause issues in the next parliament, because in more obscure cases a problem may not be easy to spot.

Read more: View from The Hill: Section 44 remains a constitutional trip wire that should be addressed

But what of those with beyond-the-pale views?

At one level the fate of the two Victorian Liberal candidates carries the obvious lesson for aspirants: be careful what you post on social media, and delete old posts.

That’s the expedient point. These candidates were caught out by what they put, and left, online.

But there is a deeper issue. Surely vetting of candidates standing for major parties must properly require a very thorough examination of their views and character.

Admittedly sometimes decisions will not be easy – judgements have to be made, and a certain allowance made in the case of things said or done a long time before (not applicable with the two in question).

But whether it is the factional nature of the Victorian division to blame for allowing these candidates to get through, or the inattention of the party’s powers-that-be (or likely a combination of both) it’s obvious that something went badly wrong.

That they were in unwinnable seats (despite Isaacs being on a small margin) should be irrelevant. All those who carry the banner of the Liberal party should be espousing values in line with the party, which does after all claim to put “values” at the heart of its philosophy.

– ref. View from The Hill: Victorian Liberal candidates find social media footprints lethal – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-victorian-liberal-candidates-find-social-media-footprints-lethal-116383

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

Bill Shorten has rebuffed overtures by the Greens leader Richard Di Natale to work closely with a Labor government to promote a strong policy on climate.

Shorten accused the Greens of “trailing their coat and saying, ‘Look at me’”.

“The fact of the matter is that if we get elected we’ll be making decisions in a Labor cabinet and the decisions will be made by members of parliament of the Labor party,” Shorten said, in anticipation of Di Natale’s Wednesday’s address to the National Press Club.

“What we will do is we will implement the policies we’ve put forward,” Shorten said.

In fact a Labor government, which would be in a minority in the Senate, would probably have to negotiate with the Greens to get its climate policy through the Senate.

After the backlash against the formal Labor-Greens alliance under the Gillard government – in which the two parties worked in conjunction on the carbon pricing scheme – Shorten is anxious to keep maximum distance between the ALP and the minor party.

For its part the government paints Labor and the Greens as “joined at the hip”. Scott Morrison said on Wednesday: “We know who holds the chain – if it’s not the Greens it’s the militant unions”.

Read more: How the major parties’ Indigenous health election commitments stack up

In his Press Club appearance Di Natale ran a double line – attacking Labor policies on climate and the environment as inadequate, while stressing the need for co-operation in government.

The Greens were “deeply concerned that Labor has taken a weaker climate policy in 2019 than what they proposed in 2016, which was weaker still than what they took to the 2013 election”.

Di Natale said he was not seeking a formal alliance between the Greens and Labor as in 2010 – rather “we want to work constructively. We want to negotiate”.

He was “not surprised to hear the response from Bill Shorten today […] we hear that time and time again in the lead-up to an election.

“But we need the Greens in the Senate working with the Labor party and other voices to ensure that the policy that’s delivered meets the science and that is up to the challenge of transitioning our economy”.

Read more: How much influence will independents and minor parties have this election? Please explain

A Shorten government “will have two pathways open to them after the election, ” he said.

“They can either pursue a climate and energy policy designed to pass through a divided Coalition party room […] or they can negotiate a comprehensive response, based on science, with the Greens.

“My message to Bill Shorten is that you can’t achieve bipartisanship with the Liberals because they can’t even agree among themselves,” he said.

“The decision for Bill Shorten is whether he follows the take-it-or-leave-it approach of Kevin Rudd in 2009, or negotiates with the Greens, just like Julia Gillard did in 2011, to deliver a climate policy that gives future generations a chance”.

Di Natale would not be drawn on what approach the Greens would take if negotiating climate policy with Labor. “The key part of any negotiation is not to conduct it publicly through the media.”

The Greens leader defended his party against criticism over its refusal to support the Rudd government’s scheme, saying Rudd’s policy “would have locked in failure”.

Read more: A matter of (mis)trust: why this election is posing problems for the media

Meanwhile a number of independent MPs and candidates have signed a statement initiated by the Australian Conservation Foundation committing, if elected, to work with each other and other parliamentarians to promote initiatives on climate.

“We recognise that to be a true servant of our communities and our national parliament, we must demonstrate and deliver strong leadership on climate change,” they say.

Among the objectives they commit to are:

• opposing the development of the Adani mine

• ensuring Kyoto Protocol carryover credits are not used to meet Australia’s 2030 emissions education target

• developing a roadmap to power Australia from 100% renewable energy, aiming to achieve at least 50% by 2030

• opposing attempts to commit public money to new or existing coal or other fossil fuel operations, including any government underwriting of coal or gas power plants.

Those signing the statement are Andrew Wilkie, member for Clark; Kerryn Phelps, member for Wentworth; Julia Banks, member for Chisholm who is running as an independent candidate in Flinders; Dr Helen Haines, independent candidate for Indi Zali Steggall, independent candidate for Warringah; Rob Oakeshott, independent candidate for Cowper, and Oliver Yates, independent candidate for Kooyong.

– ref. Shorten distances himself from Green overtures on climate policy – http://theconversation.com/shorten-distances-himself-from-green-overtures-on-climate-policy-116360

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

Last week the federal government approved the Yeelirrie uraniam mine in Western Australia in the face of vigorous protest from traditional owners.

This Canadian-owned uranium mine is the newest instalment in Australia’s long tradition of ignoring the dignity and welfare of Aboriginal communities in the pursuit of nuclear fuel.

For decades, Australia’s desert regions have experienced uranium prospecting, mining, waste dumping and nuclear weapons testing. Settler-colonial perceptions that these lands were “uninhabited” led to widespread environmental degradation at the hands of the nuclear industry.

Read more: It’s not worth wiping out a species for the Yeelirrie uranium mine

As early as 1906, South Australia’s Radium Hill was mined for radium. Amateur prospectors mined haphazardly, damaging Ngadjuri and Wilyakali lands. And an estimated 100,000 tonnes of toxic mine residue (tailings) remain at Radium Hill with the potential to leach radioactive material into the environment.

Uranium mines across Australia have similar legacies, with decades of activism from the Mirarr people against the Ranger and Jabiluka mine sites in Kakadu National Park.

In the 36 years since it began operating, the Ranger mine has produced over 125,000 tonnes of uranium and experienced more than 200 accidents. In 2013, a reported one million litres of contaminated material spilt into the surrounding environment.

Read more: Ranger’s toxic spill highlights the perils of self-regulation

Aboriginal communities remain at a disproportionate risk because large uranium deposits exist in lands deemed sacred and significant, while the testing and dumping of nuclear material is rarely undertaken in areas inhabited by settlers.

The federal government’s ambivalence toward these impacts has most recently culminated in their decision to give Cameco the go-ahead for the Yeelirrle uranium mine, a blow to the traditional owners of Tjiwarl country.

Native title fails to protect traditional owners from the mining industry

The Tjiwarl people have fought the Yeelirrie mine alongside the Conservation Council of WA for more than two years. They now must grapple with the government’s decision to ignore their resistance.

Read more: Traditional owners still stand in Adani’s way

But the Tjiwarl people are not alone. Aboriginal communities across Australia continue to engage with and mobilise against government decisions to ignore native title claimants.

As set out in Australian law, native title is the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights to the land and waters, guided by traditional law and customs.

Aboriginal communities have an opportunity to object to a mining application, 35 days before the outcome of the application is determined. A complex appeals process follows.

But even in the face of significant complaints, mining applications are more often than not approved. This has led to people mobilising internationally.

And in 2017, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) negotiated with the United Nations to create a treaty banning nuclear weapons. The treaty, adopted on July 7, 2017, recognised the disproportionate impact nuclear material has on Indigenous communities around the world. It includes the mining and milling of uranium.

The treaty warns that parties should be:

mindful of the unacceptable suffering of and harm caused to the victims of the use of nuclear weapons (hibakusha), as well as of those affected by the testing of nuclear weapons, [and recognise] the disproportionate impact of nuclear-weapon activities on indigenous peoples.

Nuclear weapons sourced from Aboriginal lands

The toxic legacy of uranium mining is not isolated to the contamination of ecosystems.

Radium Hill provided uranium for weapons for the United Kingdom and United States, including the nuclear weapons tested at Maralinga and Emu Field in the 1950s and 1960s.

These weapons spread radioactive contamination and dispossessed Aboriginal communities in and around the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands.

Uranium from the Ranger mine in Northern Territory found its way into the Fukushima Reactor, a reality that plagues the Mirrar people. In 2011, traditional owner Yvonne Margarula expressed her sorrow for those affected by the Fukushima meltdown:

it is likely that the radiation problems at Fukushima are, at least in part, fuelled by uranium derived from our traditional lands. This makes us feel very sad.

These legacies are felt acutely by those who continue to struggle with the lack of protection from native title and other government policies apparently designed to prevent the exploitation of Aboriginal communities by various industries.

Read more: It’s time for Indigenous nationhood to replace a failing colonial authority

In the 1970s, when the Ranger mine opened, the Mirarr people felt largely powerless in negotiations between mining companies and the federal government.

Last week, the Tjiwarl experienced similar disempowerment. Yet both communities are recognised by the government as traditional owners.

Unsurprisingly, Australia is yet to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, continuing the persistently toxic legacy of Australia’s nuclear industry.

– ref. Uranium mines harm Indigenous people – so why have we approved a new one? – http://theconversation.com/uranium-mines-harm-indigenous-people-so-why-have-we-approved-a-new-one-116262

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Associate Professor, Art & Design: UNSW Australia. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, UNSW

In 1912, a young Cubist painter, Marcel Duchamp, entered his painting, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. This was the preferred venue for exhibiting radical art, as it never rejected anything submitted for display.

Nude Descending a Staircase is a masterly study in tonality and geometry, its edgy movements layering into multiple versions of the androgynous form in rapid motion.

Read more: Explainer: cubism

The dogmatic Cubists saw nudes as being horizontal and passive, not vertical and mobile. They were disconcerted by the way Duchamp had painted a circular pattern of dots to indicate rhythmic movement and saw the large printed title at the bottom of the front of the painting as vulgar.

Having negotiated the previous year to run their own hanging committee, they demanded that Duchamp change the painting. He refused and withdrew it from the exhibition.

Although Nude Descending a Staircase was subsequently exhibited elsewhere, the scandal of this historic rejection marked him as an artist who would clash with established beliefs, whatever the situation.

This and many other works are currently on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in The essential Duchamp, a comprehensive survey of the artist who, more than any other, changed the direction of art in the 20th century – and beyond.

With the exception of his paintings they are not the first originals, nor are they unique. They are however from the largest single collection of Duchamp’s work in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, much of which was donated by his longstanding patrons Louise and Walter Arensberg.

There is nothing unusual about artists stretching the barriers of received wisdom and moving across different styles. However Duchamp did more than this – he rejected the profession of artist. He subsequently trained as a librarian and worked in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which fed his passion for archives.

As Duchamp explained in a 1956 interview with the curator James Johnson Sweeney: “There are two kinds of artists: the artist that deals with society, is integrated into society, and the other artist, the completely freelance artist, who has no obligations.” Duchamp relished his lack of obligation.

In 1913, on a whim and for the pleasure of seeing the moving spokes, he screwed a large bicycle wheel onto a kitchen stool. At about the same time he also bought a metal rack for drying bottles.

Two years later, having relocated from wartime Paris to New York “to escape from leading the artistic life”, he asked his sister, Suzanne Duchamp, to send these items as, “I have bought various objects in the same taste and I treat them as ‘ready-mades’.”

Suzanne had already cleared his Paris studio of such detritus, but as the concept of ready-made denied the existence of an “original”, this was no problem. Her brother saw these works as “a consequence from the dehumanisation of the work of art”.

Read more: Here’s looking at: Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel 1913

Presenting mass produced works as art seemed a logical act to undertake in the USA, which had pioneered mass production. Duchamp’s status as an exotic radical meant that his first ready-mades, exhibited in New York in 1916, did not cause a sensation.

In April 1917 a new group, The Society of Independent Artists, held its first exhibition in New York. Walter Arensberg was the fledgling society’s managing director and Duchamp became chairman of the hanging committee. In the spirit of openness it was agreed that any artist who paid the membership fee could exhibit two works, to be hung alphabetically.

Duchamp arranged to have a ready-made, Fountain, submitted by “R. Mutt”. The name was a play on the J. L. Mott Iron Works where Duchamp had purchased the urinal.

The committee rejected Fountain, claiming it was not art. Duchamp and Arensberg resigned in protest. They took Fountain to Alfred Steiglitz, whose photograph of the work was then reproduced on the cover of the avant garde magazine, The Blind Man.

Beatrice Wood, a friend of Duchamp, wrote that the maker of Fountain was irrelevant: “[Duchamp] CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a thought for that object.” Fountain became the most notorious ready-made in the history of art.

Art and logic

The artist did not differentiate between completed work and the ideas, notes and associated ephemera, so these too are on display in the exhibition. The many mechanical reproductions of Nude Descending a Staircase, always in a slightly different context, are a reminder that Duchamp remained fascinated by mechanical processes.

A video of the work that became a major obsession, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), is screened onto the wall, a conceit the artist would have appreciated.

This complex exploration of art and logic, which uses a window-like frame to draw viewers into its complexity, continues to mystify and intrigue viewers. It is in Philadelphia as a permanent installation, embedded in concrete. In 1923 after declaring it to be “definitively unfinished”, Duchamp announced he was abandoning art for chess. Some years later, after the work’s glass panels were broken in transit, he put the shattered pieces together, and declared it complete.

He said, “I didn’t want to pin myself down to one little circle, and I tried at least to be as universal as I could. That is why I took up chess.” Chess was to remain a lifelong obsession but Duchamp’s claim to have abandoned art was, of course, untrue.

He reappeared in drag as the poet and artist Rrose Sélavy who created word games, puzzles, poetry and a distinctively designed perfume bottle, Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette. The artist would not be confined.

Duchamp’s art and iconoclasm echoes throughout the generations. It triggered the self-mockery of Pop art, the harsh purity of Op art, the intellectual rigour of Conceptualism. In 1967 the Auckland City Art Gallery negotiated an exhibition by Duchamp from a private collection. This exhibition empowered a new generation of artists, critics and curators in both New Zealand and Australia.

When he considered the nature of art and fame, Duchamp told the curator Sweeney of how his dentist had failed to bank a cheque used to pay his account, preferring instead to collect the artefact with its famous signature.

Duchamp bought the cheque back from the dentist and added it to his own collection. In the end, an artist’s reputation depends more on those who see the art than those who make it.

The essential Duchamp, organised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until August 11.

– ref. The essential Duchamp: an exotic radical who rejected the establishment – http://theconversation.com/the-essential-duchamp-an-exotic-radical-who-rejected-the-establishment-116157