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

Malcolm Turnbull was correct, in policy terms, when this week he called out Scott Morrison’s ill-judged plan for Australia to consider moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The inevitable political consequence, however, is that the ex-prime minister has highlighted that his successor is expedient and a foreign affairs amateur.

Morrison sent Turnbull to Indonesia as head of Australia’s delegation to a conference about ocean sustainability. The trip was in the former PM’s diary when he was deposed; at the time Morrison decided to stick by the arrangement, the “Jerusalem” issue hadn’t arisen.

That announcement only came in the final week of the Wentworth byelection, with Morrison desperately trying to shore up the Jewish vote for the Liberals.

As Turnbull is personally close to President Joko Widodo, when the announcement ruffled Indonesian feathers, it was apparently hoped that Turnbull could do some smoothing.

If this were the thinking it was naïve, to the extent it ignored the inevitable consequences of putting Turnbull centre stage.

The trip might have been unremarkable if Turnbull’s activities had been confined to the oceans conference. But it looks very strange to have a recently-sacked PM conducting top-level talks with the Indonesian government about a highly controversial Australian initiative – with which he personally disagrees.

An observer – or the Indonesians – might ask: would the real prime minister please stand up?

After his Monday meeting with the President, Turnbull made it clear how off-the-cuff the Morrison announcement looked – in contrast to his own administration’s policy.

He said the conclusion he and his government had taken “after very careful and considered advice was that a policy that is well over 40 years old, 50 years old, should remain exactly the same as it is”.

Turnbull said Widodo had told him, as he had Morrison, of the very serious concern held in Indonesia about the prospect of the embassy being moved.

“There is no question, were that move to occur, it would be met with a very negative reaction”, in the heavily Muslim Indonesia, Turnbull said.

The hasty nature of Morrison’s announcement had already been exposed. At Senate estimates last week it was revealed that Foreign Minister Marise Payne had been informed only on the Sunday before the Tuesday announcement. The secretary of her department, Frances Adamson wasn’t told until the Monday, the same day officials of the Prime Minister’s department and the Defence department also learned of it.

There’d been no proper public service process sitting behind such a consequential proposal.

Morrison early on tried to fudge the immediate Indonesian blowback, although it was obvious via leaking. Turnbull has not just reiterated that criticism directly from the Indonesian President, but backed it up with his own support for making no change.

Forced to respond on Tuesday to Turnbull’s remarks, Morrison said a decision has not yet been taken, and “we will follow a proper process” – which seems rather late in the piece. He also stressed that “Australia decides what our foreign policy is and only Australia”.

Morrison is in an awkward situation. An outcome has been promised by year’s end. If the government opts against moving the embassy, it will disappoint Israel, which welcomed the rethink, as well as making even more obvious what a sham the original announcement was.

If it endorses the move, there will be a fresh reaction from Indonesia and others. And Turnbull’s critique will be already on the record.

The rightwingers inside the Liberal Party and among the commentariat opposed Turnbull being sent to the oceans conference, and they will feel vindicated following his remarks about the embassy.

Turnbull must know his comments are damaging to his successor. But like his refusal to help with a robo call or a letter in Wentworth, he’s going to do things his way now. Whether this will mean further interventions before the election remains to be seen. He has declared himself “retired” from politics but he’s also said “I’ll continue to have things to say about important matters of public interest”.

From another ex-prime ministerial corner Tony Abbott, without a blush, has started calling for party unity, an appeal that’s hard to take seriously given the disunity he’s caused.

Writing in Monday’s Australian Abbott argued: “Scott Morrison won’t have the problems that I had as PM because no one is stalking him for his job.

“He won’t have the problems Turnbull had as PM because he is a much more tribal Liberal, and because he’s done the best he could, under the circumstances, to acknowledge the two biggest personalities on his backbench”. (A rather immodest reference to himself and Barnaby Joyce, and their “envoy” jobs.)

Now that Abbott has seen the fall of the man who brought him down, he is apparently willing to behave better, despite Morrison declining to meet the hard right’s agenda on such matters as quitting the Paris climate agreement.

As he talks togetherness, some believe Abbott has his eye on post-election opposition leadership. More immediately, possibly he’s looking to his seat, where his wrecker image could be a liability if he faces a credible independent.

Whatever the motive, many Liberals will be cynical about the unity pitch, though the Prime Minister might be relieved. Given Abbott’s bitterness about Morrison after the 2015 coup, relations between the two are always delicate.

The continuing federal government shenanigans can only be causing despair in the Liberals’ Victorian division, as the state campaign begins, with the Coalition opposition trailing 46-54% in the latest Newspoll.

Read more: Poll wrap: Morrison’s ratings slump in Newspoll; Wentworth’s huge difference in on-the-day and early voting

Although people do distinguish between state and federal when they vote, there is also overlap and the dumping of Turnbull was unhelpful for the Victorian Liberals. In the Newspoll, three in ten people said the federal leadership change had made them less likely to vote for the state Liberals.

If the state Liberals are trounced, some of the blame is likely to be tossed Canberra’s way, adding to Morrison’s pre-Christmas woes.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Iftekhar Ahmad, Associate Professor, Edith Cowan University

Perhaps buoyed by a 67% increase in the sale of electric cars in Australia last year – albeit coming off a low base – the federal government this month announced a A$6 million funding injection for a network of ultra-fast electric vehicle recharging stations.

Eighteen stations will be located no more than 200km apart on the main highway linking Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide. A further three stations will be built near Perth. All will be powered by renewable energy.

The network will address the issue of “range anxiety” – the fear that your car will run out of puff before reaching its destination – that particularly concerns motorists in a country as big as Australia. If your electric vehicle needs charging every 200km or so, that’s a lot of stopping between Sydney and Melbourne – and what if you can’t find a charging station?

The newest electric vehicles can cover up to 594km on a single charge. That improvement, together with the new charging network, will do much to address range anxiety. But as is often the case, the devil may be in the detail.

Read more: Australia’s ‘electric car revolution’ won’t happen automatically

We don’t yet know how many fast-charging ports will be available at each station, but the number of ports is often limited due to high infrastructure costs. Even a fast charge takes about 15 minutes, so queues are likely. If a 10-minute wait at your local petrol station irritates you, imagine waiting an hour or more at an electric recharge station.

But the new network is undoubtedly a step forward, and such progress is necessary to keep electric-curious prospective motorists in the game. Of that 67% increase in electric vehicles sales mentioned earlier, the vast majority are business fleet vehicles. Private car buyers are still slow to take the plunge.

Australia is in the midst of a classic chicken-and-egg situation when it comes to growing the electric vehicle market, with the result that we’re well behind where we should be. Buyers want to see more infrastructure and perhaps some government-funded incentives (just look what a A$2,000 subsidy scheme did for the LPG market). But governments need to be confident that people will definitely buy electric cars before taking the plunge.

The power you’re supplying… it’s electrifying

Now that there’s some movement afoot from both parties, there’s a third player to consider: the electricity utilities.

If most electric vehicle owners plug in their vehicle when they get home from work of an evening – just as many of us let our phone run down during the day and then throw it on the kitchen-bench charger when we walk in the door – this could pose significant problems for the electricity grid.

According to one British estimate, as few as six cars charging at the same time on a street at peak times could lead to local brownouts (a drop in voltage supply). That might sound extreme, but it’s fair to say that daily electric car charging collectively shortens the life of electricity infrastructure such as transformers.

For this reason, my colleagues and I have researched smart charging strategies aimed at preventing the peak load period for electric car charging from overlapping with the residential peak.

The issue is even more acute when using domestic renewable energy, because of the “duck curve” – which shows the timing imbalance between peak demand and peak renewable energy production. As the name suggests, the graph is shaped like a duck.

Read more: Slash Australians’ power bills by beheading a duck at night

The duck curve can be smoothed out with the help of power storage technologies such as batteries, and by behavioural change on the part of consumers (such as temporal load shifting).

The right network

Our model can also help electric vehicle owners find a nearby charging station with the least estimated waiting time and cost, in real time. This also opens up a new avenue for the electric utilities, which can work with charging service providers to adjust the prices at different charging locations so as to to distribute the load evenly across the charging network, and reduce waiting times into the bargain.

Unfortunately the utility companies don’t seem particularly interested yet, perhaps because it’s not an immediate problem. But it soon will be if the take-up of electric vehicles continues on its current trajectory.

Read more: Negative charge: why is Australia so slow at adopting electric cars?

It’s unfortunate that Australia is lagging behind other developed countries when it comes to electric vehicle adoption. But this can work in our favour if we learn from other countries and take a more systematic approach. A lot can be achieved through proper planning.

In Australia we’ll need to see continued and better marketing of both the advantages of reducing emissions (electric vehicles are essential for the long-term decarbonisation of the electricity and transport sectors), as well as clearer cost-benefit analysis of the economic savings that can be made through personal and government investment in electric vehicles.

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

Jonathan Biggins, who has been sending up politicians as part of The Wharf Revue for almost two decades, has some sharp words about social media – “the enemy of democracy, not its ally” – and a warning on political correctness.

“We are entering an age of a new puritanism that is actually not only driven by the censorious right but by the equally censorious left who are saying this is no longer acceptable,” he tells The Conversation.

“We’ve always had a free rein at the wharf but I can see shadows looming at the door”.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Dornan, Research Fellow, Australian National University

This week, Opposition leader Bill Shorten used a major foreign policy speech at the Lowy Institute to announce that, if elected, a future Labor government would establish an infrastructure investment bank for the Pacific islands.

The announcement comes at a time of increased public scrutiny of Australian aid to the Pacific, driven by concerns over China’s heightened presence in the region. Many have argued that Australia’s “benign neglect” of the region has led Pacific governments to seek more assistance from China.

Read more: Soft power goes hard: China’s economic interest in the Pacific comes with strings attached

Nowhere is this more evident than in infrastructure. China is believed to have a comparative advantage over Australia in infrastructure lending in the region, given its own rapid development in recent years. Infrastructure lending is also at the heart of the new China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, or AIIB.

Australian aid, by comparison, has been criticised for focusing too heavily on governance projects instead of infrastructure investments. The Vanuatu government, for instance, has justified the construction of a China-funded wharf and roads by saying:

No donor was willing [to] help provide assistance on these projects although the economic benefits [are] huge.

A shift in Labor policy

Though not entirely a surprise, Shorten’s announcement does represent a change in Labor’s approach to aid. In February, Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong gave a speech outlining Labor’s future aid policy that focused on health, education, gender and climate change, but made no mention of infrastructure. Then, in July, she shifted tone, calling for greater emphasis on infrastructure in the Pacific.

The Coalition has also responded to rising Chinese influence in the region, committing to the construction of underseas internet cables to the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea to head off earlier bids by Chinese companies.

Australia has for many years effectively delegated infrastructure lending to multinational development banks: the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB). Shorten is now flagging that under a Labor government, Australia will itself provide concessional loans for projects like this on a bilateral basis.

Read more: For Pacific Island nations, rising sea levels are a bigger security concern than rising Chinese influence

None of this is to suggest that Australia has been completely absent from the infrastructure sector in the past, though its focus has traditionally been stronger in other areas, such as education and disability projects.

Australia has also invested heavily in “soft” infrastructure in the Pacific, or the technical and managerial expertise and institutions needed to manage new infrastructure projects, such as bridges, roads and ports.

Such support is important, even if outcomes are difficult to measure. Without managerial or technical expertise, as well as appropriate institutions, infrastructure projects often fall into disrepair. A stark example is the tragic account of the decline of a village in Papua New Guinea following the deterioration of its airstrip.

A new reliance on concessional loans

Australian aid has been used on occasion for infrastructure projects in the Pacific, mainly through grants to complement World Bank and ADB loans. But Australia has not been in the business of providing its own loans for infrastructure development. That much is clear. And in this respect, Shorten’s announcement is significant.

If Australia is determined to move more firmly into the infrastructure game to counter Chinese lending in the region, it makes sense to fund such projects with loans.

Grants are ill-suited for infrastructure projects for which there is a strong commercial case (such as the Solomon Islands internet cable). They distort market incentives and divert scarce aid resources away from other priorities.

Read more: Pacific nations aren’t cash-hungry, minister, they just want action on climate change

There are clearly potential benefits for the region from a new infrastructure bank. The Pacific suffers from an enormous infrastructure deficit, particularly in remote rural areas. There is also considerable evidence that points to the importance of infrastructure for economic development and poverty alleviation.

China Exim Bank loans, though concessional, are generally not great value for money, with higher interest rates and shorter repayment periods than those offered by other lenders, including presumably any new Australian infrastructure bank.

A large number of unanswered questions

Having said that, we should put the hubris in Shorten’s speech to one side. It makes no sense to aspire, as he said, for Australia to become the Pacific’s “partner of choice” for infrastructure projects. We can only finance a small fraction of the region’s needs, and Pacific nations will have good reason to look to other infrastructure providers, such as China. We’re not that special.

Turning from rhetoric to policy, more detail is needed before we can determine conclusively whether such a bank would be positive for the region. Shorten’s speech only indicated that Labor would:

…actively facilitate concessional loans and financing for investment in these vital, nation-building projects through a government-backed infrastructure investment bank.

That leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

Should the new bank lend to governments or the private sector, or both? To what extent will projects be selected on the basis of rigorous benefit cost analysis? How will “bankable” projects be identified? Will loans be available to all Pacific island countries, including those currently in debt distress? Will concessional loans come at the expense of existing aid priorities, including Australian funding for “soft” infrastructure?

The answers to such questions are important. After all, it is Australia’s overall approach towards infrastructure that will ultimately drive long-term impacts.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eric Parisot, Lecturer in English, Flinders University

Ever since Colin “Wet-Shirt” Firth got hearts racing across the globe in Andrew Davies’ BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1995), the cult of Mr Darcy has been in full swing. To many Austen fans, he is a dreamboat — brooding, handsome, not to mention filthy rich.

For others, as heard recently at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Darcy’s behaviour is ghastly, bullish, and emotionally manipulative, while his mythic romantic status has had an “insidious effect on dating culture”. But these two responses aren’t mutually exclusive, especially given the recent literary incarnation of Mr Darcy as a blood-sucking vampire.

This post-Twilight merging of two of the most popular literary cults helps to focus on what modern readers value in both Austen and the vampire tradition: undying love. Together, they promise an eternal love of a different sort, not one that persists beyond death and into an incorporeal afterlife, but one that can be enjoyed physically forever.

Read more: Friday essay: the revolutionary vision of Jane Austen

Riding on the wild success of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), fan fiction writers have rewritten Emma Woodhouse (from Austen’s Emma) as a proto-Buffy vampire slayer, and even transformed Austen herself into a vampire. But in modern, vampiric depictions of Darcy we have a new idealisation of the romantic lover, staking a claim (bad pun intended) alongside Lord Byron, Dracula and Edward Cullen as literature’s sexiest monster— but a monster, nevertheless.

In Susan Krinard’s novella Blood and Prejudice (published in the 2010 collection Bespelling Jane Austen), Darcy is a business executive who flies into modern-day Manhattan to investigate a potential new acquisition, Bennet Laboratories. But when Darcy meets Lizzy, he becomes less interested in a corporate takeover and more interested in a corporeal one.

When Lizzy notices Darcy “staring at me with his piercing indigo eyes as if we were the only two people in the room and he was about to eat me for lunch,” the simultaneous vampiric pun and sexual innuendo of being “eaten” by Darcy becomes obvious.

The vampire’s bloody, penetrative bite has long been associated with coitus, and it is no different here — much to Lizzie’s tortured delight. But after resisting vampire Wickham’s predatory advances, and warding off an indecent proposal from a vampiric Mr Collins — let’s face it, he would suck the life out of anyone, so why not make him a vampire? — Lizzy is finally convinced that she is not being enthralled by Darcy’s preternatural charms, but is indeed falling in love.

The association of feeding with sex suggests that while this might be an undying love, it is one that Lizzy will have to physically share with others, or risk being consumed to death. “It’s all right, Darcy. I know you can’t live on me alone. I won’t be jealous… Well, maybe just a little.” The solution? Lizzie’s conversion into a vampire, and a polyamorous marriage; after all, Lizzie doesn’t want to have Darcy for “a lifetime,” but “for an eternity.”

Read more: Older than Dracula: in search of the English vampire

Saucier and saucier

Colette L. Saucier’s Darcy, in Pulse and Prejudice (2015), is a post-Twilight vampire set in Regency England. Excruciatingly honourable throughout, he is a rather tortured Byronic being, unable to conceal his growing desire for Elizabeth. As measure of his integrity he almost exclusively sustains himself on the blood of animals—served in fine chalices, of course. And as he falls for Elizabeth, he works hard to separate Darcy the man from Darcy the monster.

But Colette is Saucier by name, and saucier by nature. In a finale detailing the pre-marital beginnings of Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s sex life, Darcy takes Elizabeth’s virginity. The “sweet metallic taste of blood, her blood, on both their lips” becomes an “exquisitely erotic” one for Elizabeth.

Here, she resembles the young Anastasia of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey — itself a rewriting of Twilight — who also tastes “the faint metallic taste” of her own hymeneal blood during her first sexual encounter. It would appear that Lizzie’s desires can only be satisfied by a combination of Darcy the man and monster, the upstanding gentleman of society, and the demon in the sack.

Marrying a hyper-masculine monster, however, carries great risk, as the image of Lizzie with swollen and bloodied lips might suggest; in a different context, this might just as well be an image of domestic violence. Darcy also horrifyingly admits that all sexual restraint had been washed away, to the point that “had she not invited him in, he would’ve taken her still.”

While the novel presents vampire Darcy as a romantic ideal, a perfect combination of integrity, restraint and libidinous passion, the malevolent and deep-seated literary roots of the vampire, as a sexual fiend, cannot be entirely repressed.

Amanda Grange offers instead a sequel to Pride and Prejudice in Mr Darcy, Vampyre (2009), a Continental honeymoon adventure that is part Dracula, part Twilight, part Da Vinci Code and part Indiana Jones. This Darcy even transforms into a bat at one point, loitering outside Elizabeth’s bedroom window.

But Elizabeth, puzzled as to why they have not yet consummated their marriage, cannot see her husband for what he truly is until an ancient vampire comes to claim his right to primae noctis. Protecting Elizabeth with all his super-human strength from this brute, Darcy also reveals that his abstinence comes from a place of love, fearing he too might hurt her. A conversion, it would appear, is needed before he consummates their marriage.

This time, it is Darcy who wishes to be converted back into a human, by way of the only force that can effect his transformation: true love. (Awww!) The vampire is extinguished, and the mortal man restored, as they set their course towards Pemberley, England. This Elizabeth’s wildest desires are met by normality — a physically mortal, but spiritually eternal, love, enjoyed in a comfortable, domestic setting.

So while the fantasy of Mr Darcy as a vampire — handsome, protective, virile, noble, affluent, and most notably, immortal — might be a titillating one, these incarnations serve to remind us that as hard as we might try, the monster always lurks within.

(Mr Darcy Halloween costume, anyone?)

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Director, Health Program, Grattan Institute

This week we’re exploring nine different policy areas across Australia’s states, as detailed in Grattan Institute’s State Orange Book 2018. Read the other articles in the series here.

Australia has a good health system by international standards, but it has to get better. Half of all patients across Australia wait more than a month for an elective hospital procedure, such as a hip replacement. This is in addition to waiting for an outpatient visit so they can be added to the elective procedure wait list.

“Elective” here doesn’t mean the patient can do without the procedure – they may be in pain or having trouble moving around while waiting. Elective simply means it doesn’t have to be done immediately and can be scheduled.

Read more: To keep patients safe in hospitals, the accreditation system needs an overhaul

About 9% of people in New South Wales and about 25% in South Australia wait more than a year for public dental services, such as fillings, extractions and root canals.

Physicians report nearly one-third of patients with an acute mental illness wait more than eight hours in hospital emergency departments.

The Grattan Institute’s State Orange Book 2018 charts the performance, maps a route to improvement, and recommends penalties for states that fail to meet waiting list targets.

Why hospitals are always key state election issues

Health is the largest single component of state government expenditure in every state of Australia, and has been growing rapidly. About two-thirds of state government health spending – excluding transfers from the Commonwealth – is on public hospitals.

Just over half the population does not have health insurance and so relies on public hospitals for all their care. Even for people with private insurance, public hospitals are their principal source of emergency care.

State governments are responsible for public hospitals, so hospital care is always a key issue in state elections. It is therefore no surprise state governments love to tell us how much they are doing for public hospitals, and election campaigns are often jam-packed with promises of new or expanded hospitals.

The politicians, at least in states with growing populations, are right that more beds are needed. What matters for the public, though, is not how many beds there are, but whether there are enough. One way of measuring that is waiting times, and here the picture isn’t as rosy as campaigning politicians would like us to believe.

Waiting for elective hospital procedures

It’s bad enough half of all patients across Australia wait more than a month for an elective procedure from the time they were booked. What’s worse is that about 10% wait more than six months.

In our smallest state, Tasmania, 10% of patients wait about a year. In the biggest state, NSW, the situation is almost as bad.

This graph shows the waiting time (days) for elective procedures, 2012-13 to 2016-17, for the 10% of patients who wait longest (orange) and the median (maroon):

Publicly reported data focus on elective procedure or elective surgery waiting times, but there is another important wait: from the time a patient is referred to the hospital to the time they are seen in an outpatient clinic. This is sometimes called the “hidden waiting list”.

Read more: Getting an initial specialists’ appointment is the hidden waitlist

For the patient, the wait for an appointment with an outpatient clinic matters – it delays diagnosis and treatment. Yet these waits are not publicly reported in NSW, Western Australia, the Australian Capital Territory or the Northern Territory. And the states that do report outpatient clinic wait times do not use consistent measures.

Our state and territory governments should strengthen hospital accountability to reduce combined outpatient and inpatient waiting times. There should be clear consequences and penalties for failure to meet targets.

Waiting for public dental care

The COAG Health Council (made up of Commonwealth, state and territory health officials) says current funding for public dental services allows for treatment of only about 20% of the eligible population.

The remaining 80% have to wait for long periods, pay for relatively expensive care in the private sector, or go without care entirely.

Waiting times vary significantly among states. And in several states, notably Vic and SA, waiting times have got longer in recent years.

Boosting public dental services will improve people’s health and reduce the strain on hospitals.

In 2015-16, there were 67,266 hospital admissions for potentially preventable dental conditions – more than one-fifth of all hospital admissions for potentially preventable acute conditions.

Read more: Poor and elderly Australians let down by ailing primary health system

Unforgivably, our state governments have not delivered on a 2012 commitment to monitor waiting times for public dental care through a National Healthcare Agreement performance indicator. Data inconsistencies mean it is not possible to reliably compare public dental waiting lists across states and territories.

NSW does not provide data on public dental waiting lists at all, citing concerns about the potential for misleading comparisons. The only comparable data we have is from an Australian Bureau of Statistics sample survey, which shows more than 10% of patients across the country wait more than a year for public dental care.

This graph shows the proportion of people who waited more than a year for public dental services:

Waiting for mental health care

Campaigners say Australia has reached a “tipping point” on access to mental health care. Physicians report nearly one-third of patients with an acute mental illness wait more than eight hours in emergency departments.

We know this does damage: long waits for access to community mental health services can result in poorer outcomes for patients, as a condition may be harder to control the longer it persists. Long waits may also place additional pressure on families or friends who face the consequences of their friend or family member’s behaviour.

Yet there is no information about the adequacy of community mental health services in Australia. The 2017 National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Plan only tracks the use of services, not their adequacy.

Read more: More Australians can stay healthier and out of hospital – here’s how

In contrast, Canadian governments have agreed that a wide range of mental health and addictions indicators will be collected and reported from 2019.

Australian voters should demand their state governments do the same thing. We should wait no longer for a better health system.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elizabeth Mahony, Research Scientist, CSIRO

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are just that – enormous blasts of radio waves from space that only last for a fraction of a second. This makes pinpointing their source a huge challenge.

Our team recently discovered 20 new FRBs using CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder in the Western Australian outback, almost doubling the known number of FRBs.

In follow-up research, published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, we have taken one of these new detections – known as FRB 171020 (the day the radio waves arrived at Earth: October 20, 2017) – and narrowed down the location to a galaxy close to our own.

Read more: More ‘bright’ fast radio bursts revealed, but where do they all come from?

This is the closest FRB detected (so far) but we still don’t know what causes these mysterious radio bursts that can contain more energy than our Sun produces in decades.

Waves in space

As radio waves travel through the universe they pass through other galaxies and our own Milky Way before arriving at our telescopes.

The longer radio wavelengths are slowed down more than the shorter wavelengths, meaning that there is a slight delay in the arrival time of longer wavelengths.

This difference in arrival times is called the dispersion measure and indicates the amount of matter the radio emission has travelled through.

FRB 171020 has the lowest dispersion measure of any FRB detected to date, meaning that it hasn’t travelled from half way across the universe like most of the other FRBs detected so far. That means it originated from relatively nearby (by astronomical standards).

By using models of the distribution of matter in the universe we can put a hard limit on how far the radio signal has travelled. For this particular FRB, we estimate that it could not have originated from further than a billion light years away, and likely occurred much closer. (Our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.)

This distance limit, combined with the sky area we know the FRB came from (an area half a square degree – or roughly two full Moons across) enormously narrows down the search volume to look for the host galaxy.

Closing in

A region of the sky this size typically contains hundreds of galaxies. We used giant optical telescopes in Chile – including the appropriately named Very Large Telescope and Gemini South – to derive distances to these galaxies by either measuring their redshifts directly, or by using their optical colours to estimate their distance.

This allowed us to drastically reduce the number of possible galaxies within the distance limit to just 16.

By far the closest, and we believe most likely to host the FRB, is a nearby spiral galaxy called ESO 601-G036. This is 120 million light years away – making this FRB host almost our next door neighbour.

What is particularly striking about this galaxy is that it shares many similar features to the only galaxy known to produce FRBs: FRB 121102.

This FRB is also known as the repeating FRB due to its – so far unique – property of producing multiple bursts. This helped astronomers locate it to a small galaxy about more than 3 billion light years away.

ESO 601-G036 is similar in size, and forming new stars at about the same rate, as the host galaxy of the repeating FRB.

But there is one intriguing feature of the repeating FRB that we don’t see in ESO 601-G036.

Other emissions

In addition to repeat bursts of radio emission, the repeating FRB emits lower energy radio emission continuously.

Using CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) in Narrabri, NSW, we have searched for this persistent radio emission in ESO 601-G036. If it was anything like the repeater’s galaxy, it should have a boomingly bright radio source in it. We saw nothing.

Not only did we find that ESO 601-G036 doesn’t have any persistent radio emission, but there are no other galaxies in our search volume that show similar properties to that seen in the repeating FRB.

This points to the possibility that there are different types of fast radio bursts that may even have different origins.

Finding the galaxies that FRBs originate from is a big step towards solving the mystery of what produces these extreme bursts. Most FRBs travel much further distances so finding one so close to Earth allows us to study the environments of FRBs in unprecedented detail.

The hunt for more

Unfortunately, we can’t say with absolute certainty that ESO 601-G036 is the galaxy that FRB 171020 came from.

Read more: A Goblin could guide us to a mystery planet thought to exist in the Solar system

The next big hurdle in understanding what causes FRBs is to pinpoint more of them. If we can do that we’ll be able to work out not only exactly which galaxy an FRB occurred in, but even where within the galaxy it occurred.

If FRBs occur within the central nuclei of galaxies, this could perhaps point to black holes as their source. Or do they prefer the outskirts of galaxies? Or regions where a lot of new stars have recently formed? There are still so many unknowns about FRBs.

Several radio telescopes around the world are commissioning systems to pinpoint bursts. Our study has shown that by combining observations from radio and optical telescopes we’ll be able to paint a complete picture of FRB host galaxies, and be able to finally determine what causes these FRBs.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steve Georgakis, Senior Lecturer of Pedagogy and Sports Studies, University of Sydney

On the face of it, there is much to celebrate about Australian cricket right now. The sport has money to burn thanks to recent large pay-TV deals, the Big Bash has strong TV ratings; the women’s cricket team is one of the most successful and highly regarded Australian sporting teams. There has been a surge in junior participation, and many Australians still regard it as our national sport – it is certainly the dominant sport of the summer.

By contrast, cricket in the media is lurching from one crisis to another, with the fallout from the now-infamous ball-tampering episode still reverberating. Yesterday, the sport was dealt another blow.

An independent review of Cricket Australia’s culture was released, concluding that “winning without counting the costs” was largely responsible for the recent ball-tampering scandal and sledging – the on-field verbal abuse and taunting – that has been an entrenched habit of the Australian team for decades.

Read more: Just not cricket: why ball tampering is cheating

The review found the sport was riddled with cultural problems that exerted so much exerted pressure to win that it manifested in cheating and sledging, covertly sanctioned by the administrators. With 42 recommendations, it is clear Cricket Australia needs to change.

The biggest cultural issue for the sport at the moment is sledging, and one of the recommendations calls for cricket’s anti-harrassment code to address abusive behaviour.

While niggling a player might have been an acceptable part of the game, sledging has reached a point where a strict code of ethics needs to be drawn up and adhered to. While this may take away some of the unique nature of the sport, in the long run it will bring the focus back to the play.

Sledging matters because it is a type of cheating. The rise in cheating, whether it be via match-fixing or sledging, is linked to the rise in commercialisation and gambling in sport.

Australian cricket has formed commercial relationships with major sport betting agencies and an official partnership with Bet365. There have been numerous accusations regarding international match-fixers. And the ball-tampering scandal has confirmed that Australians no longer hold the moral high ground.

The relentless pressure to win has infected the sport at all levels. Sledging is but one of the symptoms.

Why does this matter so much to Australians? A clue may lie in what else is going on: a recent bank inquiry, fears related to immigration, contempt for politicians, growing distrust of public institutions, poor performance and declines in international educational testing, wage stagnation and declines (despite a world record run on economic growth), concern over high house prices and power bills. In 2018, Australians have much to be anxious and angry about.

Read more: Can the cricketers banned for ball tampering ever regain their hero status? It’s happened before

Cricket has always been held above everyday concerns, and has been a source of national pride and a salve in times of fear. Throughout the history of colonial Australia, cricket has been a source of inspiration, an institution that has provided strong links to our communities (school, geographical district, state and territories) and helped define Australian identity.

Modern Australians’ first organised sport in both schools and the community setting was cricket. Our first sporting wins against the “home country” – England – were in cricket Test matches. Cricket was responsible for giving us legitimacy.

Our best cricketers became heroes. Generations looked upon Don Bradman, Dennis Lillee, Steve Waugh and Mark Taylor as role models. It was the hegemonic sport and the cricketers best represented what Australian masculinity was about. If you played the sport, you played in a tough way (even though it is not a contact sport) within the highly revered rules; cricket could help you learn that gracious defeat is as admirable as victory.

Also, especially from about 1990 onwards, the Australian men’s team was outstanding. They won Test series and one-dayers with continued all-round brilliance, producing some of the greatest players the game has ever seen.

But, in the past few years, Australian cricket’s legitimacy has waned. Many of us who love the sport and all it represents have felt disillusioned by recent events at the elite level. This was confirmed to us yesterday with the report – which, thankfully, did not sugar-coat the diagnosis.

So what is the cure? A revised, strict and well-policed ethical code for staff and players will not be enough. Cricket needs to work with commercial partners, or abandon them if they can’t meet high ethical standards too.

Commercial and betting agendas create pressures to cheat, yet Sport 2030, our national plan for sport, under the banner “strengthening the sector’s integrity” suggests:

organisations… adopt a more efficient, model of governance which can best position sports to be able to drive greater commercial outcomes, reduce reliance on funding, increase autonomy and support innovation.

And there is the dilemma.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeff Borland, Professor of Economics, University of Melbourne

Right now, it seems as if everyone’s talking about casual work.

Claims about what is (or is not) happening to casual employment are at the fore in debates about working conditions. Claims about what should (or should not) be the entitlements of casual workers have become the focus of a major Federal Court case in which the government has decided to intervene.

In the midst of these debates, it’s useful to take a step back and ask what is really happening to casual work and what we know about the consequences of casual work.

1. What is casual employment?

It may come as a surprise that there is no standard definition of a casual employee. The Fair Work Act 2009 (Cwth), for example, doesn’t include a definition.

Nevertheless, there is general agreement that a worker is a casual employee if their employer doesn’t make any advance commitment to ongoing employment or the amount or timing of work they will be asked to do.

Read more: FactCheck: has the level of casual employment in Australia stayed steady for the past 18 years?

An extra dimension comes from awards. Employees classified as casual in awards do not have a legal entitlement to many types of paid leave (mainly annual leave and sick leave) and other benefits such as severance pay. Instead, they get a 25% premium on their hourly wage.

Ambiguity about the definition has caused ambiguity in the data. The most commonly cited statistics on casual work, from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, classify workers as casual if they report not having entitlements to paid leave.

The main alternative approach is for casual workers to self-identify. With each approach there is some doubt about whether what is being measured corresponds to what most people think of as casual work.

2. Why are there competing claims about trends?

Is the proportion of the workforce in casual employment increasing, as trade unions and some workplace commentators would have you believe, or is it unchanging, as the government claims?

The answer is both, depending on the time period you look at.

In the graph below I have used ABS data to show the proportions of male and female employees in casual work (more precisely, work without paid leave entitlements) from the early 1980s onwards.

For about 20 years, from the early 1980s to early 2000s, casual employment was on the rise for both men and women.

Then from the early 2000s to the present, there was little change, for both men and women.

So the time period matters. If you begin in the early 1980s and compare it to the present, the incidence of casual work has certainly increased.
But if you start in the early 2000s, there’s no evident long-run increase.

There is, however, an interesting pattern within the period from the early 2000s to the present.

Until the early 2010s the proportion of casual employees was actually in decline, falling from about 25.5% to 23.5%.

In the past few years the proportion has climbed back to its previous level of about 25.5%. It’s too early to tell whether this is the start of a new trend.

3. Who is working casually?

We know quite a bit about who works casually. Women are more likely to be in casual jobs than men, although the gap is narrowing. More than half of all part-time employees are in casual jobs, but only about 10% of full-time employees.

Workers on regular daytime shifts are less likely to be in casual jobs than those who work in the evening or at night.

Read more: Precarious employment is rising rapidly among men: new research

Casual employment being concentrated in part-time jobs means it accounts for a larger share of the number of people employed than it does of hours worked.

For example, in August 2018 more than one-quarter of employees were in casual jobs, but only 17% of the hours worked were in casual jobs.

As can be seen from the graphs below (each from the most recent year for which figures are available) casual employment is highest among the youngest workers and those in the least skilled occupations.

4. What comes after casual work?

Uncertainty over job security and hours of work and the absence of entitlements in casual jobs mean that some casual workers would prefer to be in permanent jobs.

Certainly, a variety of studies using data from the Melbourne Institute’s Household Income and Labour Dynamics (HILDA) Survey find that casual employees report lower levels of job satisfaction than comparable employees in other types of jobs.

As a result, a concern that is often expressed is that workers might get trapped in casual jobs.

To see if this is the case, I have summarised the findings of a recent study by Inga Lass and Mark Wooden.

They use HILDA Survey data from 2001 to 2015 to determine how workers move between types of employment over time.

It is apparent that workers in casual jobs do move on to permanent jobs, but it can take time.

From one year to the next about half of all casual workers remain in casual employment, with 30% moving to other types of work and 15% no longer working.

Pushing the time horizon out to five years shows more mobility. More than half move to other types of employment, although around one-quarter still remain casual.

Read more: Eviction from the middle class: how tenuous jobs penalise women

A potential counter to concerns about being trapped in casual work is that casual employment can be an important entry point to paid work.

The same study by Lass and Wooden shows that of people who a year ago had been unemployed or out of the labour force, and who 12 months later had been able to move into work, almost half had taken casual jobs.

5. Does ‘casual’ tell us what we need to know?

In recent public commentary, the word “casual” has come to be a catch-all term – used to encapsulate everything we need to know about work conditions.

That’s unfortunate for several reasons.

First, while casual employment might create the scope for workers to be more easily terminated or to have less stable hours of work or earnings, for many casual workers that doesn’t happen.

It’s more useful to study the outcomes we care about, such as job security and earnings stability.

Read more: Self-employment and casual work aren’t increasing but so many jobs are insecure – what’s going on?

Second, casual employment doesn’t tell us how many workers are in other – less stable – forms of employment where there might be concerns about conditions, such as independent contracting or the gig economy.

Third, we can’t be entirely sure what types of jobs are captured by existing measures of casual employment.

A Productivity Commission study in the late 1990s found that about one-third of all employees identified as casual by the criterion of not having paid leave entitlements were in fact owner-managers or permanent employees.

“Casual” means less than we might think.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Chapple, Director, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington

In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding former MP Jami-Lee Ross and opposition National party leader Simon Bridges, discussions have focused on possible reforms of political donations in New Zealand.

My colleagues Bryce Edwards and Michael Macaulay have raised the issue of taxpayer funding of political parties. So too has Minister of Justice Andrew Little.

Green Party MP Marama Davidson has suggested the donation threshold for the disclosure of a donor’s name and address be lowered from NZ$15,000 to NZ$1,000. She has also proposed banning foreign donations outright and capping individual donations at NZ$35,000.

Several of these proposals warrant further discussion and contextualisation.

Read more: New Zealand politics: foreign donations and political influence

Donations and foreign money

Foreign interference in domestic politics is an increasing phenomenon worldwide.

Currently in New Zealand foreign donations to a party of up to NZ$1,500 are permissible. Moreover, foreign donations below this amount are not individually or collectively disclosed.

It would be easy for a foreign state or corporate body seeking political influence to channel a large number of donations into the system just under the threshold via numerous proxies. Whether such interference has been happening is unclear, since New Zealanders do not know how much money currently comes in to political parties via foreign actors.

Even if foreign donations are not a problem now, one could rapidly develop. A strong argument can be made that foreign money has no place in democracy, including New Zealand’s.

New Zealand would not be going out on an international limb by banning foreign donations. Foreign donations to political parties are not permissible in the [United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States. They are also banned in Canada but unfortunately a significant loophole exists. Australia is currently in the process of banning foreign donations.

Lowering threshold for anonymous donations

As noted, the threshold below which political donations can be anonymous could be lowered. A lower threshold would make it more difficult to evade name disclosure rules by splitting donations and attributing each part to a different donor.

Splitting may be what happened to the alleged NZ$100,000 Yikun Zhang donation. The NZ$1,000 threshold proposed by the Greens would be a huge improvement on the status quo. A donor of NZ$100,000 seeking to evade legislation and to remain anonymous would have to coordinate 100 individual donors, rather than seven.

But New Zealand could go lower still, to NZ$200, without being radical. Giving NZ$200 to a political party is huge for an ordinary New Zealander, and the reality is only a very small minority would need to disclose their names under such a law.

There is international precedent for setting much lower thresholds for anonymity than the Greens propose. For example, in Canada, the maximum amount of an anonymous donation was set at C$200 in 2015, while in Ireland it is currently €100.

Donor privacy versus transparency

One concern with non-anonymity is that it delivers public transparency at the cost of private donor privacy. Currently the Electoral Act 1993 contains a mechanism for anyone wanting to donate to a political party and not wanting their identity disclosed to either the public or to the party receiving the donation. To obtain such anonymity, the donation needs to be more than NZ$1,500.

The Electoral Commission aggregates all such donations. It passes them on to parties at regular intervals. It does not identify the dollar amount of individual donations, or the number or names of donors.

Not many donors use this protected disclosure avenue. For example, between September 2015 and June 2018, the commission passed on only NZ$150,000 in anonymised money to parties via this channel. At the same time amounts well in excess of NZ$10 million were passed on by donors identifiable to political parties (but not necessarily to the public).

A preference for identifiable channels suggests current donors get value from non-anonymity. It implies most donors feel they are buying something. The fact that donors feel they are buying something should be cause for concern.

Capping donations and individualising donors

The Greens have suggested NZ$35,000 as a maximum cap on donations. Again, New Zealand could go much lower without being out of step with other countries. For example, in Canada donations to each political party are capped at C$1500 a year. Like Canada, Ireland has a maximum annual cap of €2500.

However, Geoff Simmons, leader of the Opportunities Party, has argued that a cap would make it difficult for small parties to get started. Simmons’ party was kick-started by large donations from multi-millionaire Gareth Morgan, who was also the party’s first leader.

Another possibility for the reform agenda is the Canadian approach of only permitting donations from individual people. Corporate and trade union donations are banned. However this proposal is unlikely to be popular with neither National, which receives considerable corporate donations, nor Labour, which traditionally gets significant trade union funding.

All these proposals, inevitably, have pros and cons and possible unintended consequences. They are deserving of wide public debate. One hopes that the current government can provide the public with a credible forum for such discussions, and a clear pathway to sensible future reform.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Professor of Asian History , Victoria University of Wellington

More than half a million people of Indian descent live in Australia and New Zealand. The history of the Indian diaspora in these countries is older than many might imagine, going back 250 years.

Indians are today widely acknowledged as a successful ethnic community that makes significant contributions to their host societies and economies. Yet, although Indian migration to North America and the United Kingdom has been studied extensively, the Australian and New Zealand stories have rarely been told.

Read more: Who are the Sikhs and what are their beliefs?

From lascars to migrant workers

We are co-editors of Indians and the Antipodes: Networks, Boundaries and Circulation, a book in which scholars from both sides of the Tasman and beyond trace the development of Indian involvement in New Zealand and Australia, from 18th-century sepoys and lascars (soldiers and sailors) aboard visiting European ships, through 19th-century migrant labourers and the 20th century’s hostile policies to the new generation of skilled professional migrants of the 21st century.

Indians and the Antipodes juxtaposes Australian and New Zealand stories to underline that the trajectories of migration and experiences of settlement of these two southern-most outposts of the Indian diaspora have certain connections.

The story of Indians in New Zealand dates back to December 1769, just two months after the first European landing in the country by Captain James Cook. Todd Nachowitz draws on previously published muster rolls and ships logs to trace Indians’ early part in New Zealand nation building, thereby complicating the traditional bicultural European-Māori historical narrative.

Historian John Dunmore’s translations of early ship’s logs, along with additional archival sources, have allowed Nachowitz to identify the first Indians to set foot on New Zealand soil. They were the sole survivors of a crew of more than 50 Indians. The rest died of scurvy or other conditions before their ship, the Saint Jean Baptiste, reached New Zealand.

Nachowitz can even put names to two of the Indians:

The first is recorded as Mamouth Cassem in the original log, whose real name was probably Mahmud Qāsim, born in Pondicherry about 1755. The second is listed as a Bengali named Nasrin, aged about sixteen or seventeen years, on the muster roll. Given their names, it can be assumed that both were Muslims. Both are recorded as dying in Peru on 14 April 1770, where the ship sailed after leaving Aotearoa under duress.

Early settlers

Nineteenth and early 20th-century Indian settlement in Australia and New Zealand was the culmination of complex journeys. From the British-Indian empire, Indians were moving to Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, British Guyana and the Caribbean. From parts of French India, such as Pondicherry, they were travelling to New Caledonia in the French Pacific.

Read more: Oceans as empty spaces? Redrafting our knowledge by dropping the colonial lens

Some of them eventually migrated from these initial destinations to settle in Australia and New Zealand. Many also migrated directly from India. This circulation of people of Indian origin occurred both through and because of the imperial networks set up by the various East India companies.

In the later 19th and early 20th centuries, the labour demands of sugar plantations in the Pacific and Caribbean provided further incentives for migration. The indenture system was an early migration driver. After its abolition, opportunities for free passage offered avenues for work and hopes of citizenship.

Racial barriers

In Australia and New Zealand, along with other self-governing dominions such as South Africa and Canada, conflict evolved between the demand for cheap labour by the colonial economies and the racial prejudice and moral panic of their white settlers.

The term Australasia was used as an identifier for the region not to signify its geographical proximity to Asia but to distinguish it from Asia, the much despised other.

A shared perception of the threat of being swamped by “unwanted” Asians led to Australia and New Zealand raising immigration barriers to ensure their exclusion. Once the barriers were complete – in 1901 in Australia and 1920 in New Zealand – the racial ring fences remained in place until the onset of decolonisation in the aftermath of the second world war. In some cases, this took even longer.

Although the rules did not stop Indian migration totally, they did mean that very few Indians lived in “White Australia” and “White New Zealand”. In 1921, there were only 2,000 in Australia and 671 in New Zealand.

New migrants

As immigration restrictions were gradually lifted in the post-war period, the number of Indian migrants rose. The relaxation was partly in response to the increasing demand for English-educated, technologically skilled white-collar workers who could contribute to the countries’ rapidly globalising economies.

In both countries, India became the largest source of skilled migrants in the 21st century. According to the 2011 Australian census, 390,894 people of Indian origin lived in the country. The 2013 New Zealand census recorded 155,178 people of Indian origin.

Previous Indian professional migrants were middle class, highly educated and settlers. The migrants of the past decade or so have been younger, less educated, from the lower rungs of the Indian social ladder and often on temporary work or student visas. They are more often single, male and from district towns and villages. They also remain more closely connected to their families at home and in many cases go back after their studies or employment contracts finish.

The new migrants bring fresh challenges for the diaspora community. It is now more diverse, not only culturally and economically, but also in its histories of migration.

In Auckland, for instance, as recorded by Alison Booth, the majority of recent Indian migrants are young professionals and students from the Punjab and north India. Their cultural preferences are different from those of earlier generations of settlers, who are more conservative in their social attitudes.

As a result, there are divergent views on what constitutes authentic Indian culture. This clash between “traditional” and “pop” cultures is reflected in debates over publicly funded events such as the city’s Diwali festival.

Such debates highlight the inner pluralism of the Indian diaspora and the need for multiculturalist policies in both Australia and New Zealand to avoid outdated assumptions of homogeneity. The Indian community in the two countries is big and broad-ranging — just like its story over the past 250 years.