Palestinian history is “deliberately ignored” and is being effectively “erased” as part of Western news media narratives, while establishment forces work to shut down anyone speaking out against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, academics have told a university conference of legal and Middle East experts.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Fiji National University and the University of Auckland have formalised their partnership through a memorandum of understanding that encourages academic cooperation between the two institutions.

FNU acting vice-chancellor Dr William May said the collaboration was another opportunity to strengthen the longstanding relationship between the two universities in education and capacity building.

“I’m pleased to note that as per our action plan over the course of our five-year Strategic Plan (2021-2026), FNU intends to conduct research on national issues and priorities and build teaching and research partnerships with regional universities,” he said.

“This aligns with one of our key pillars of conducting research with real-world impact, and … regarding our regional outlook and engagement.”

“I am happy to learn that this MOU has been long-time coming … discussions regarding the partnership were initiated almost three years ago, a time before covid-19. This was spearheaded by our College of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences’, [which] were driven by the need for staff capacity-building.”

Dr May said that as the engagement and cooperation between the two tertiary bodies developed, the need for an official agreement was evident.

“We have both committed to at least four areas of collaboration, which are the exchange of materials, publications and information; cooperation between professors and research staff; student mobility; and joint research and meetings for research,” he said.

Exchange of knowledge
“Through this academic cooperation, we look forward to the exchange of knowledge and skills between our students and staff and their Kiwi counterparts. FNU stands ready to provide the necessary support to ensure that both parties equally benefit from this official collaboration for many years to come.”

University of Auckland Department of Paediatrics associate professor Stephen Howie said they were excited to extend and enhance the partnership between both universities.

“The MOU is a way to formalise all of the work that the University of Auckland and FNU will do together moving forward,” he said.

“It also opens the door for wider relationship-building as it is an institution to institution agreement rather than faculty to faculty, so it brings with it huge potential.”

“This is a concrete expression of the university’s Taumata Teitei vision for partnership in the Pacific region.”

As an alumni of the former Fiji School of Medicine, University of Auckland associate dean Pacific Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, associate professor Collin Tukuitonga spoke via Zoom and said he was also excited about what the partnership meant for the region and for both universities.

“Fiji School of Medicine has been producing doctors and health workers for the region and is an icon, so to be able to align to share and support each other is fantastic,” Dr Tukuitonga said.

• FNU now has campuses and centres at 40 locations throughout the country, running a total of about 300 different courses and programmes with a staff complement of 2000 and a student enrolment of around 26,000.

Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

In practice, democratic political reforms are usually incremental, though typically seen as part of a process leading to wider and more embedded improvement. Reforms are ‘evolutionary’ – indeed, in a technical sense – in that they improve the ‘fitness’ of democratic society.

Unlike biological evolution, which is a fully blind process, the process of democratic evolution is only partially blind. There is an inchoate sense of ‘destination’ about political reform – or at least the idea that reforms take societies to better places, if not the best place.

The Problem of the Local Optimum

Important concepts in evolutionary theory are those of fitness landscape and local optimum. We can think of a contour map, with better places (eg with respect to democracy) being those at higher altitude, and the best place being the highest attainable altitude. Whereas a local optimum may be a hill, the actual optimum is somewhere else, a mountain.

In a blind process, a local optimum can be thought of as the endpoint of a sub-optimal trail randomly followed. In a process with vision, however, it is possible to ‘know’ that you – or your society – are at or approaching a local optimum, and therefore to know that you could have taken a better path. A part of that knowledge is that, to get on the best path – or even simply a better path than the one you are on – you first have to retrace at least some of your steps.

The more vision you have when you make a choice that takes you on an improvement pathway, the less likely you are to make a suboptimal choice. If you can see that the path you are contemplating takes you up a hill – or even a mere hillock – while another path takes you up the mountain that best represents the optimal policy outcome, then that sightedness minimises the chance that you will make the wrong choice.

Sometimes the difference between a hill and a mountain is subjective. A sighted person with one set of beliefs may consider ‘Object A’ to be the mountain, and another sighted person with a different set of beliefs may consider ‘Object B’ to be the mountain. Object A upholds the benefits of one belief-system; Object B the benefits of another belief system. There is conflict.

In other situations, the mountain fully incorporates all the benefits of the hill, while having some benefits that the hill does not have. In this case, all rational sighted persons – regardless of their differing values –  would choose the path to the mountain (‘Object M’) over the path to the hill (‘Object H’).

There may however be sequencing issues. The mountain M may offer benefits X, Y , and Z. (These three should be understood as uncontested benefits; as agreed benefits, though the relative importance of each benefit may be subject to disagreement.) The hill H may offer benefits X or Y; or both. A person whose narrow or impatient vision is particularly focussed on benefit X or Y may choose the hill over the mountain, despite the fact that both choices give both benefits.

(In posing this set of binary choices – Option M versus Option H – each choice involves comparable cost; the choice is based on the ‘seeing’ of the benefits. However, choosing H and then reversing that choice involves additional cost; it’s cheaper to make the better choice first up. Having noted that, it is also costly to delay making a choice; an inferior choice might be better than making no choice. The opportunity cost of choosing H over M – and then settling on H  – is Z. The opportunity to have Z in addition to X and Y is lost.)

Democratic Benefits X, Y, and Z

In what follows, X is reducing the voting age to 16, Y is making the income tax scale more progressive, and Z is the simple adoption of the Universal Income Flat Tax mechanism (UIFT). Before looking at these benefits together, it is necessary to comment on them individually. In doing so, I make the claim that all three represent objective enhancements to democracy. I also understand that – in today’s querulous social environment – there will be initial objections to all three of these suggested benefits. Nevertheless, I am sure that a substantial majority of people believe that democracy is a desirable system of social organisation, and that more democracy is better than less democracy. I believe that the arguments in favour of these benefits are persuasive, at least through a democratic lens.

Last month, the matter of the voting age was in the news: eg Teenagers ask court to lower the voting age, and note this 2018 petition. As I see it, there are three major democratic benefits associated with this reform. First there is a simple extension to the franchise. While this is a valid argument, it is the least persuasive reason because this argument becomes problematic if extended to even younger ages.

The second benefit (Y) is that it makes sense to have a single age that defines adult responsibility; and I am inclined to believe that the arguments in favour of 16 are stronger than 18 or 20 or 21. (Having a single age defining legal adulthood does not refute the fact that there is a life stage from around 16 to under 25 in which older people – especially parents – continue to have duty of care towards their young people. Nor does it suggest that organisations – such as the police force – cannot set their own age limits for recruitment.)

The third benefit is that, at age 16, people for the most part are still at school and living with their parents; and are still relatively open to civic guidance from their elders (including grandparents). So, 16 or 17 is a good age for young people to enter the world of democratic participation, facilitating a cultural bias towards participation over abstention.

On the matter of progressive taxation, the central issue is conceptually simple. It is that, for higher incomes, a person’s disposable income (ie income after taxes and public benefits) should be lower as a percentage of their gross market income (ie income before taxes and public benefits). Essentially, it means that taxes should rise as a percentage of market income as market income increases. This commitment to ‘progressivity’ is one of the core principles of the ‘liberal democratic’ tradition that was forged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The particular measure which is widely advocated on the political left in New Zealand is that New Zealand’s income tax scale should be extended with the inclusion of an additional tax bracket; something like a tax rate of 40 percent that would kick in at an annual income threshold of about $150,000. Australia has such a tax bracket, as do many other countries. It would in principle increase the progressivity of New Zealand’s income tax scale; and New Zealand has one of the least progressive income tax scales among developed liberal democracies. As in case X (the voting age), there are limits. While a new income tax like this may enhance democracy, further extensions of the ‘taxing the rich more’ concept become democratically (and otherwise) problematic.

On the matter of the simple adoption of the Universal Income Flat Tax mechanism (UIFT), there is no contest to the argument that this is an extension of democracy. By reimagining the existing progressive tax  scale, and filling in the few ‘cracks’ so that no adult is economically disadvantaged, this is a wholly desirable democratic reform that enables every economic citizen to receive a weekly public equity dividend (of $175) in exchange for an income tax rate of 33 percent. (All people earning over $70,000 per year already gain the full $175 weekly benefit; they can calculate their disposable incomes by reducing their gross weekly incomes by 33%, and then adding $175.)

(Note that existing critiques of proposals for a Universal Basic Income are critiques of policies that have substantial differences or add-ons compared to the simple UIFT proposal. Right-wing critiques of ‘big-bang’ UBI proposals mainly focus on financial costs, financial priorities, and labour supply disincentives. Left-wing critiques of these UBI proposals mainly focus on financial priorities, income inadequacy for the most disadvantaged, and the lack of help for people with special needs that exists in some UBI proposals.)

This simple reimagination proposal (UIFT; Benefit Z) has a small financial cost – the cost of filling the few cracks that inevitably exist in present bureaucratised income support regimes – and many financial and non-financial benefits.

The problem I am concerned about here is that, if either of the other proposals (Benefits X or Y) is implemented first then, then the subsequent costs of Benefit Z are raised. Both Benefits X and Y – on their own – reflect sup-optimal pathways towards the greater goal of democratic reform.

The Young Person Problem

Most of the ‘cracks’ in the present ‘bureaucratic regime’ are people aged 18 to 24. While a few are in secondary school, most are either in tertiary education or low-wage (often casual) employment. Of those in tertiary education, most do not qualify for a student allowance on account of their parents’ incomes. (Instead they have the option of a nine-month student loan ‘living allowance’.) Of those in low-waged employment, they get nothing like the unconditional $175 per week that many of their parents receive.

This means that the financial cost of the simple UIFT proposal relates mostly to people under 25 years old.

The natural age to treat as the age of adulthood at present is 18, given that it is the age of enfranchisement, and that 18 is the age for which income-tested ‘Working for Families’ ‘tax credits’ are no longer payable, on children’s behalf, to their parents.

By decreasing the age of enfranchisement from 18 to 16, that would require the UIFT mechanism to displace Working for Families at age 16 instead of at age 18. All 16 and 17 year-olds would qualify for the larger benefit. Thus, the financial cost of a subsequent UIFT would be raised by the cost of paying public equity dividends to 16 and 17 year-olds. This in turn increases the chance of the UIFT – Benefit Z – being rejected on the grounds of financial cost.

It means that it would be better to introduce the UIFT before reducing the age of adulthood to 16. Once a UIFT (Benefit Z) is in place and seen to be neither too expensive nor employment-discouraging, then the later argument for reducing the age of democratic entitlement to 16 should be unproblematic.

To get onto the optimum pathway – the trail to mountain M rather than the trail to hill H – Benefit Z should come into force before Benefit X.

The Progressive Tax Problem

In 2020, it would be simpler and less costly to implement simple UIFT – Benefit Z – than in Australia. In Australia, the tax rate would have to be 37 percent (rather than 33 percent), but that’s not the problem. Australian economic citizens would get a public equity dividend of $240 per week, and pay 37 percent tax on all their income. The bigger problem is Australia’s top tax rate of 45 percent levied on annual income in excessive of $180,000. Australia already has Benefit Y.

If the 45% tax was to be retained upon introducing UIFT, then Australia would have a two-rate rather than a single-rate tax scale. It would mean that people with declared earnings of more than $180,000 per year would experience a clawback on their public equity dividend. That would be undemocratic – to deny a rich person a public equity dividend would be as undemocratic as to deny them the vote. Yes, rich people too have rights.

The more sensible thing to do in Australia would be to simply wipe the 45% tax rate, as redundant and inefficient. That could be politically unpopular though, especially with voters on the left whose principal policy ethos is to transfer (redistribute) money in a targeted way from the rich to the poor.

So, if New Zealand introduces, in 2021, an Australian-style top tax rate, then the pathway to a simple UIFT would be impeded by the practical requirement to abolish that new top rate. It means that, if the second-mentioned of the democratic reforms – Benefit Y – was introduced first then we would be on Pathway H, climbing the sub-optimal hill rather than the more-optimal mountain.

Pathway M – to the mountain – is reached with least cost by implementing Benefit Z first; and X soon after, once any fear of Z has been dispelled. What of Benefit Y? Well, a natural part of the UIFT mechanism is to raise the tax rate and to raise the public equity dividend, under circumstances that economic productivity is increasing or that the income distribution is too unequal. If we properly understand the definition of progressivity, then it turns out that UIFT gives us an efficient way to achieve Benefit Y. The requirement is that simple UIFT is implemented first, and that its underlying capability to counter inequality is employed.

Summary

In our eagerness to make small changes that enhance our democracy, we may be encouraged to make small ad hoc reforms that subsequently make the more important reforms more politically difficult and more financially expensive to implement. So long as we choose to not be blind – so long as we reject wilful blindness – we can see both the mountain and the hill which represent socio-economic improvements. If we start climbing the hill rather than the mountain, then the mountain becomes further away and more difficult to reach. That’s why vision is an important decision-making tool, and why we should understand ‘vision’ to be ‘seeing’ rather than ‘believing’.

University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini speaks with Michelle Grattan about the week in politics. They discuss the messaging and tactics of the leaders on the campaign trail, the resurrection of the issue of water buybacks, and the impact of Clive Palmer’s political advertising on his election chances and what his popularity means for preference deals.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on week two of the campaign #AusVotes – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-week-two-of-the-campaign-ausvotes-116068

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

There is a clear fault line in the Coalition between conservatives and moderates, reflected in the number of centre-right women challenging more conservative members.

Some sitting moderates have chosen not to renominate – Ann Sudmalis in NSW won’t recontest, while Julia Banks in Victoria has resigned from the Coalition to challenge Greg Hunt in Flinders. Other moderate women are standing as independents (Kerryn Phelps and Zali Steggall in NSW, and Helen Haines in Victoria) or as candidates for other centre-right parties (Rebekha Sharkie in SA).

What typically unites these women is a rejection of conservative social policies – and perhaps also a rejection of the alleged culture of bullying within the Coalition parties. These candidates are modernists in that they support progressive policy issues. As independents they can also sidestep the Coalition’s internal fracas about quotas and targets for women.

In NSW, independent Zali Steggall is challenging Tony Abbott in Warringah. Front and centre of her campaign is action on climate change, refugee policy and foreign aid. Her views on marriage equality contrast dramatically with Abbott’s in an electorate that overwhelmingly voted “yes” in the marriage equality postal vote.

Similarly, independent MP Kerryn Phelps, contesting Wentworth, was a significant player in the marriage equality debates and has argued forcibly for a more humane treatment of asylum seekers.

Both Steggall and Phelps have complained about “dirty tricks” and the negative campaigns being mounted against them. Billboards linking Steggall to Labor, allegations that she is receiving funds from GetUp! (she is not), the renting of premises next to her office that were then plastered with anti-Steggall advertising, and the sexualising of Steggall posters all appear to be an attempt to intimidate and demean her.

A number of articles critical of Steggall have been published by the Daily Telegraph, with free copies delivered to residents who are not subscribers to the paper. This includes a front page story in which Steggall’s ex-husband and his current wife described her as “opportunistic” and “lacking the temperament of a leader”. The couple have since declared that the Telegraph article does not reflect how they feel about Steggall’s candidature.

Kerryn Phelps says dirty tricks were behind the removal of hundreds of her election posters in her campaign to retain the seat of Wentworth. Labor’s Tim Murray has also complained that his posters had been removed and replaced by Liberal posters. Liberal challenger, Dave Sharma, rejects any allegation that this activity has been sanctioned by him or the Liberal Party. Today it was reported that Sharma’s posters have also been defaced.

The seats of Wentworth and Warringah are critical to the reelection of the Morrison government and it’s clear that some supporters of the conservative wing of the Coalition have “taken off the gloves”. We can only speculate if it’s because the independents are women or because they are moderates.

Read more: Lies, obfuscation and fake news make for a dispiriting – and dangerous – election campaign

Queensland

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

Labor leader Bill Shorten’s first hustings in Herbert coincided with reports of a deal that the Coalition will preference Palmer’s United Australia Party (UAP) over other populist parties.

UAP’s candidate, former NRL player Greg Dowling, will run for the lower house, while Palmer has his sights on the Senate. Palmer’s big cash splash announcement may cause more of a ripple than a bounce, considering former Queensland Nickel workers will have to wait until after the election to get their money back.

With One Nation and Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party (FACN) also throwing their hats into the ring, there’s now four right-leaning minor parties vying for votes.

Herbert’s 2019 election is shaping up to be a rerun of 2013. Six years ago, preferences played a huge role in deciding 97 of the 150 seats nationally. 40% of Queensland seats were decided on preference votes in 2013.

The latest polling shows UAP at 14% – almost the same as 2013 after preferences (15.52%), but this was before Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (PHON) confirmed their candidate. In 2016, One Nation preferences helped push the incumbent, Labor’s Cathy O’Toole, over the line. With a preference deal between LNP and UAP, Palmer’s chance of a seat in the Senate is a good bet, but it’s now a four-way spilt for the lower house.

UAP and Katter’s Australian Party (KAP) will be the benefactors in the Herbert electorate, placed ahead of Liberals and Labor on the how-to-vote cards. In a battle between UAP, PHON and FACN, it’s the Greens that could benefit the most.

With UAP aligned with LNP, the Greens candidate Sam Blackadder has a chance of picking up protest votes against Labor. The Greens could also take votes from latecomers, the Animal Justice Party, thanks to its clear policy on climate change – something that has eluded the major parties.

There’s a similar picture in Dickson, with One Nation, Fraser Anning and the Animal Justice Party all putting up candidates. Plus there’s former Palmer United Party, now independent candidate, Thor Prohaska running on a democracy ticket.

Like Herbert, PHON and FACN will have to fight for votes from UAP in Dickson. In 2013, Palmer’s party polled 9.8% of the vote in Dickson. With UAP favouring LNP over ALP like it did in 2013, it could help Dutton to retain his marginal seat this time around.

Western Australia

Ian Cook, Senior Lecturer of Australian Politics at Murdoch University

Attention was on Bill Shorten and Clive Palmer in WA election news this week.

Bill Shorten came under scrutiny when it was revealed that three WA Labor candidates had been forced to include him in their election advertising after they were found distributing pamphlets that made no reference to the Labor leader.

Polls consistently show that Australian voters prefer Scott Morrison to Bill Shorten as prime minister. But Shorten is a bigger problem for Labor in WA than he is elsewhere – although it’s not clear by how much.

A poll last month by Crosby Textor showed that Shorten had a minus 26 favourability in the Perth seat of Cowan, which is held by Labor’s Anne Aly by a margin of just 0.7%. That makes Shorten more unpopular in Cowan than he is in other marginal seats across the country. And it’s the reason that candidates would rather put Premier Mark McGowan in their campaign material.

Like the rest of Australia, many West Australians will vote Labor even though they don’t particularly like or trust Bill Shorten. So, we can expect more ads attacking Shorten as the Liberals look to capitalise on one of the few positives (or should that be negatives) they have to work with in WA.

Clive Palmer was in WA news for the same reason he was in everyone’s news: the Newspoll that showed that his United Australia Party would change the result in some marginal seats. That includes one of one of ours: Pearce.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: All is forgiven in the Liberal embrace of Palmer

Pearce is held by Christian Porter and this election is a big moment for him. Porter was Attorney-General in Scott Morrison’s government, and he has a high profile in WA. He was also on the way to becoming premier when he took a detour into federal politics. Porter undoubtedly has ambitions and is one of the bright young(ish) things in the WA Liberal Party, so his future is important to his party’s fate in the West.

After One Nation’s disastrous campaign in the last state election, WA voters are obviously looking elsewhere and Palmer has spent a lot of money on the UAP campaign. Christian Porter and the WA Liberals will be hoping that it isn’t enough to make the difference in Pearce.

South Australia

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

It would be ironic, to say the least, if former Labor state Premier Jay Weatherill’s legacy will be to have delivered the final nail in the coffin of the Turnbull-Morrison governments.

Last week, water policy dominated the political and campaign agenda, with the issue of water buybacks causing significant problems for the Coalition, and the Nationals in particular. Yet the groundwork for this poisonous issue was laid when the Weatherill government set up a state royal commission into alleged water theft by the upstream states.

Since then, the issue has been a lingering problem, exacerbated by the dead fish in the Menindee. Since the revelations of the water buybacks story, this has proved a problematic issue, culminating with a remarkable interview on the ABC with the former Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources Barnaby Joyce.

he Darling River and the Menindee Lakes are under pressure from low water flow as a result of the continuing drought affecting more than 98% of New South Wales. Dean Lewins/AAP

While elections are rarely ever decided in key marginal South Australian seats, this issue could be the exception. It’s striking how it has unified South Australians. When the original allegations of water fraud were revealed by the ABC, there was a press conference with all key South Australian senators, including Sarah Hanson-Young, Cory Bernadi, Nick Xenophon and Penny Wong. Commonwealth governments rarely benefit from this issue in the state where the Murray ends.

The Nationals have no presence in South Australia, and the electoral damage is likely to be limited to the Liberals in the seat of Mayo, where Centre Alliance MP Rebekah Sharkie has been strong on water policy. But this issue, so close to South Australian politics, could prove problematic on the national stage.

Tasmania

Michael Lester, researcher and PhD student at the Institute for the Study of Social Change

The Tasmanian North West Coast seat of Braddon is sitting on a knife-edge. Braddon is notoriously fickle, having changed hands five times since 1998, and margins are always tight.

Labor’s Justine Keay won the seat from the Liberal’s Brett Whitely in 2016. She retained the seat after having to resign and recontest it in the July 2018 citizenship byelections, but failed to make any electoral gains. She is now defending a very slim 1.7% margin.

In 2018, Keay had seven opponents. This election she is up against eight:

• Karen Wendy Spaulding from the United Australia Party
• independents Craig Brakey and Brett Michael Smith
• Shane Allan from Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party
• Liberal Gavin Pearce
• The National’s Sally Milbourne
• Phill Parsons from The Greens
• Graham Gallaher from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

Braddon is hard to call. In the absence of polling, local commentators are looking to the betting odds which presently place Keay as clear favourite at $1.45, with Pearce at $2.65. Despite that, some see Braddon as Liberal Party’s best chance of winning a seat in Tasmania – especially since an electoral boundary redistribution in 2017 added the more affluent Port Sorell area.

Read more: Labor’s crackdown on temporary visa requirements won’t much help Australian workers

There is no single electorate-wide issue here. Braddon is a diverse mix of regional centres and agricultural districts extending from Devonport and Latrobe in the east, through Ulverstone, Burnie, Wynyard, Stanley, Smithton and Waratah, then down the west coast to the mining towns of Rosebery, Zeehan, Queenstown and the tourism and fishing village of Strahan. It also includes King Island in Bass Strait.

Tasmania’s recent economic renaissance has been slow to reach many areas of this electorate. So, candidates are aiming their promises at people’s concerns over economic development, jobs, youth training, health services and education. And both major parties have been careful to match almost anything the other side offers up.

Labor’s commitment of a A$25 million grant to support a Tasmanian AFL team has emerged as one big point of difference in the strongly pro-football Braddon, while the Liberals run a campaign on what better uses that money could be put to.

Victoria

We’ll be back with an update on Victoria next week.

– ref. State of the states: Palmer’s preference deal and watergate woes – http://theconversation.com/state-of-the-states-palmers-preference-deal-and-watergate-woes-115910

During his two-day royal visit this week, Prince William has met with survivors of the Christchurch mosque shootings and has praised New Zealand’s response to the attacks.

To the people of New Zealand and the people of Christchurch, to our Muslim community and all those who have rallied by your side, I stand with you in gratitude to what you have taught the world in these past weeks.

Earlier, Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan described New Zealanders as “citizens of the future”.

Globally, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the attacks is seen as a new way of reacting to violent extremism. With an emphasis on what unites people, communities in different countries were motivated to express solidarity across religious and cultural divides.

In contrast, the opportunistic linking of the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks in Colombo, Sri Lanka, with Christchurch will once again serve to divide humanity.

Read more: Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Sri Lanka terror attack. Here’s what that means

Solidarity at home

Domestically, the terrorist attack on Muslim worshippers in Christchurch was met by a display of unity. A heartfelt exchange of respect between the country’s leadership and the minority Muslim community characterised the days and weeks following the attack.

Read more: From Mahometan to Kiwi Muslim: history of NZ’s Muslim population

A renewed rejection of racism in all its forms, including Islamophobia, led to a public discussion of the Crusaders rugby team’s name. The government took decisive action by tightening gun laws and instituting a royal commission of inquiry into New Zealand’s security and intelligence agencies.

But the question now is whether New Zealand can translate its new-found domestic cohesion and goodwill into foreign policy.

Support for Palestinian sovereignty

The Israel-Palestine conflict is a good place to start. If solidarity at home is to influence global understanding and cooperation across cultures, Palestinian sovereignty must be a foreign policy priority.

The international community’s failure over the past 72 years to find a just and sustainable solution to the “Palestine question” is an ongoing source of discord between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Shortly after its establishment, the UN Alliance of Civilisations (UNAOC) noted:

The Israeli military occupation of Palestine has been perceived in the Muslim world as a form of colonialism and has led many to believe, rightly or wrongly, that Israel is in collusion with the “West”.

Palestinian casualties, dispossession and suffering due to the occupation fuel resentment and radicalisation in the Muslim world. The impunity an American veto allows Israel further enhances the perception of Western hypocrisy. The US and Israel’s disregard for the legal status of Jerusalem as corpus separatum undermines both the potential for peace between Israelis and Palestinians and an international rules-based system.

New Zealand needs to be more vocal in international forums in criticising Israel’s occupation policies.

Challenging Islamophobia

Islamophobia, or an anti-Muslim bias that incorrectly presents Muslims as a dangerous monolithic group, is both a domestic and global concern. The real danger is that Islamophobia becomes the norm.

Politicians, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, promote the notion of a clash of civilisations when they present Muslims as a threat to Christian Europe. The United Kingdom’s security strategy in response to the terrorist attacks in London on July 7 2005, called Prevent, is an example of anti-radicalisation policies that target people based on their faith, specifically Muslims.

Read more: Terror, Muslims, and a culture of fear: challenging the media messages

Islamophobia also finds expression in conflating radical and moderate Islamists. These groups may share the pursuit of an ideal state, based on Islamic teachings, but they differ drastically in their methods and interpretation of Islam. Autocratic governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region fuel Islamophobia when they dismiss these differences in order to demonise their moderate Islamist opposition.

This can be explained by the fact that moderate Islamism offers an authentic alternative to authoritarianism. For example, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and his late father, Hafez al-Assad, have a history of demonising and repressing the moderate Islamist Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) to ensure the regime’s political survival. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation in the wake of the 2010-11 Arab uprisings, which threatened autocrats across the MENA region.

Read more: Competing foreign interests trump Syrian aspirations for political change

A rules-based international system

The UAE and Saudi Arabia are key markets for New Zealand. They are also members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), our eighth-largest trading partner. In equating moderate Islamism with terrorism to contain domestic dissent, these states contribute to international disunity and hate.

New Zealand needs to resist pressure from these partners as well as from some other member countries in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance to view Islamists as monolithic. It also needs to enhance support for initiatives that strengthen global understanding and cooperation between non-Muslim and Muslim-majority countries such as the UNAOC.

At the UN General Assembly in September 2018, Ardern signalled a clear direction for foreign policy by calling for kindness, collectivism and an international rules-based system. This is in stark contrast to US President Donald Trump’s portentious rejection of globalism.

New Zealand’s response to the Christchurch terrorist attack showed the world values that, in Ardern’s words, “represent the very best of us”. The expectation remains that our foreign policy will follow through.

– ref. Why New Zealand needs to translate its response to Christchurch attacks into foreign policy – http://theconversation.com/why-new-zealand-needs-to-translate-its-response-to-christchurch-attacks-into-foreign-policy-115556

Bill Shorten is holding out the prospect of protecting Australian workers from foreign ones.

He has pledged to tighten the visa system for short-term skilled migrants, ensuring they have to be paid more so that “it isn’t cheaper to pay an overseas worker than pay a local worker”.

But the evidence does not support his claim that his policy proposal will boost local jobs and wages. He said

There are more than 1 million underemployed Australians wanting more work and youth unemployment is at 11.7%

At the same time, there are almost 1.6 million temporary visa holders with work rights in Australia, with the top end of town turning to temporary work visas to undercut local jobs, wages and conditions

Requirements have already been toughened

The first point to note is that Shorten’s policy relates only to short-term visas for skilled migrants. Up until 2017, these were known as 457 visas. Their number peaked at 126,000 in 2012-13.

Parliamentary Library

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull replaced the 457 visa with the 482 visa, partly in response to evidence that some employers had exploited the 457 to employ foreign workers on low wages.

The new visa required

• applicants to demonstrate work experience (minimum two years) and English language proficiency

• the sponsoring employer to demonstrate lack of success in finding a local worker to do the job

• the salary level to be at the market level for the role, and above what is known as the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold. This is now about A$54,000.

Since August 2018, employers of workers with 482 visas have also had to pay a fee to the Department of Education and Training to subsidise apprenticeships. Known as the Skilling Australians Fund Levy, it ranges from $2,400 to $7,200, depending on the length of the visa and the employer’s annual turnover.

The core of Labor’s policy is to increase the income threshold to $65,000, a figure that will be indexed annually. The skilling levy would be 3% of the income threshold, a level that for some businesses would be an increase of 63%.

Skilled migrants are not the problem

The most recent statistics published by the federal government (for 2017-18) show a total of 83,470 people on temporary skilled worker visas (both 482 visas and residual 457 visas).

This means Shorten’s reference to the almost 1.6 million temporary visa holders with work rights in Australia – such as backpackers and international students (who we know are often exploited by unscrupulous employers) – is something of a red herring. Labor’s proposal won’t make any difference to them.

Read more: Crackdown on foreign workers is part of Shorten’s wages campaign

Even if the 83,470 workers that the policy would affect were being employed to undercut local wage expectations, their number – less than 1% of Australia’s 10 million total employees – is simply not enough to influence market wages. In no occupation are visa holders more than 1% of total employees.

But there’s scant evidence to suggest the 482 visas are routinely used to employ cheaper workers. The average base nominated salary for visas in 2017-18 was $94,800, well above the average full-time wage (about $85,000) and even higher than the $54,000 or Labor’s proposed $65,000 minimum.

Admittedly, averages don’t tell the full story. But in only one sector – food and accommodation, accounting for 10.7% of visas granted – was the average wage lower than $65,000.

It suggests that raising the income threshold won’t have much impact.

Labor’s proposals would be felt in the regions

There is one possible exception to this: regional and remote Australia, which has benefited the most from temporary skilled worker visas. If the market wage for say, an early career chef, is below $65,000 (which it could be for some places in Australia), a restaurant or café employer in a small town would no longer be able to employ a migrant worker at the going rate, and it might also struggle to find would be be a $7,800 levy.

Labor’s proposal would impose higher relative costs on regional employers.

Claims about the impact of temporary work visas on employment and wages have been heard but seldom subject to rigorous analysis.

A significant inquiry into short-term migrant work visas in Australia was conducted by a Senate select committee in 2015-16. It noted an inverse relationship between 457 visas granted and the unemployment rate. In other words, the visas were associated with low, rather than high unemployment rates.

This suggests visas are meeting genuine skills shortages rather than displacing Australian workers.

Migrants create as well as fill jobs

Migrant workers are also consumers. They spend their income, contributing to demand for goods and services from local businesses, which adds to the demand for workers generally.

The same dynamics apply as those involving all migrants. As peer-reviewed research by researchers at the Australian National University has shown, migration has had “no detectable effect on employment or wages of all workers who have lived in Australia for more than five years”.

These findings are essentially supported by the Productivity Commission.

In sum, there’s little evidence that Australia’s current visa program for temporary skilled migrants has a negative effect on local jobs or wages.

Labor’s plans are unlikely to achieve anything positive. They might even hurt.

Read more: Dog whistles, regional visas and wage theft – immigration policy is again an election issue

– ref. Labor’s crackdown on temporary visa requirements won’t much help Australian workers – http://theconversation.com/labors-crackdown-on-temporary-visa-requirements-wont-much-help-australian-workers-115844

The latest statistics on childhood poverty in New Zealand suggest that, on some key measures, things are worse than previously estimated.

About one in six children (16% or 183,000) live below a before-housing-cost relative poverty measure, but that figure jumps to almost one in four (23% or 254,000) once housing costs are accounted for. And 13% (148,000) are living in households that experience material hardship – 6% in severe hardship. These children don’t have such basic things as two good pairs of shoes. Their families regularly have to cut back on fresh fruit and veggies, put up with feeling cold and postpone visits to the doctor.

The data show that the government will need to do much more to reach its targets for reducing childhood poverty.

Read more: One in five NSW high school kids suffers “severe” deprivation of life’s essentials

Measuring child poverty

New Zealand introduced the Child Poverty Reduction Act at the end of last year. It was a bold move reflecting the Ardern government’s commitment to do something about New Zealand’s dismal child poverty statistics. Earlier this month, Stats NZ released the first set of baseline statistics required under the act.

Previous governments, both National and Labour, may have talked about child poverty but shied away from binding targets. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who has also made herself minister for child poverty reduction, has put through clear legislation, eventually winning cross-party support for it.

The act does two main things. First, it requires the government statistician to report annually on a set of four “primary” and six “supplementary” measures of child poverty. (One primary measure, poverty persistence, does not come into force until 2025.)

Second, it requires governments to set three-year and ten-year targets for each of the primary measures and to report on progress to parliament. Any failures to meet targets must be explained.

The three primary measures are:

1. Relative poverty, before housing costs: the proportion of children living in households whose equivalised disposable income before housing costs is less than 50% of the median. This measure compares a household’s income for the previous 12 months to the current median for all households. The median will move from year to year due to inflation and economic changes. A low-income household will improve its situation if its income moves by more than the median.
2. Constant value poverty after housing costs: the proportion of children living in households whose equivalised disposable income after housing costs is less than 50% of the base-year median. This measure gives an indication of the spending power households have after paying either rent or mortgage repayments, rates and insurance.
3. Material hardship: the proportion of children living in households that are experiencing material hardship, defined as having a score of six or more on the DEP-17 deprivation index.

The government’s targets

Well before the act was finalised, the prime minister had announced the government’s ten-year targets: 5% on the first measure, 10% on the second and 7% on the third.

These are ambitious targets, which would put New Zealand near the top of the OECD rankings. That said, they still imply a significant number of children in poverty.

During the evolution of the legislation, the government also decided to bring forward the starting year for measurement of the targets to 2018-19, therefore making the baseline year 2017-18. This has the advantage of ensuring the impact of its Families Package contributes to achieving the targets, but the disadvantage that targets had to be set before the official Stats NZ baseline measures were available.

The three-year targets were therefore expressed in percentage-point decreases, rather than in absolute terms (reductions of 6, 4 and 3 percentage points respectively).

Ironically, the worse-than-expected figures make the government’s short-term targets slightly easier to reach. Taking six percentage points off a larger number is easier to achieve than if the baseline had turned out lower than expected. Nonetheless, it must still lift 72,000 children over the first line, 42,000 over the after-housing-cost measure, and 37,000 out of the material hardship category.

How to reduce childhood poverty

The Families Package, announced before the 2017 election, will go part of the way. Its increases in the Working for Families tax credits and, to a lesser extent, the changes to the Accommodation Supplement will reduce child poverty, especially against the first before-housing-cost measure. Treasury has estimated that the Families Package will reduce the number of children below this measure by 64,000 by 2021.

The impact on the after-housing-cost measure is likely to be smaller because of rising rental costs, which grew by an average of 5.2% during 2018. The reduction in the number of children living under material hardship is also likely to be less substantial.

Other changes might have some effect. The government is committed to increasing the statutory minimum wage to $20 per hour by 2021. It was $15.75 for most of the baseline year, rising to $16.50 on April 1 2018. Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment analysis, however, suggests minimum wage increases will have a “relatively limited impact” on poverty among households with children because most poor kids are not living in households with a minimum-wage earner.

Housing initiatives, especially more state housing, will help eventually but will take too long to have any impact on the three-year poverty targets. The 2018 budget extensions to free and low-cost doctors’ visits for children and the broadening of access to the Community Services Card can be expected to help families experiencing material hardship, as will other changes such as the banning of tenancy letting fees. But these can only be expected to have marginal impacts.

Read more: NZ budget 2018: gains for health, housing and education in fiscally conservative budget

Substantial further initiatives will be needed over the next two years. The size of the task is illustrated here.

Michael Fletcher, CC BY-ND

The after-housing-costs measure must come down the most but has been heading in the right direction following the global financial crisis. This reflects the fact that it is adjusted only for price inflation and the incomes of some poor households have been rising more quickly than prices. The material hardship measure has also been trending down, probably for similar reasons.

The most challenging target will be the relative poverty measure. Recent good economic growth and a strong labour market have done nothing to reduce this measure. Indeed, it has been more or less constant for over a decade.

Cutting poverty on this measure requires bringing poor households nearer to the median, reducing inequality between the poor and those in the middle. A rising tide that lifts all boats equally will do nothing to reduce relative poverty.

The government will also need to ensure its policies help the poorest of the poor. Reaching the three primary targets but not cutting the numbers below the lowest poverty line would be a hollow achievement. Most of these children are in families reliant on benefit incomes. Part of any successful strategy to reduce child poverty must involve increasing the level of assistance to families on benefits.

– ref. New Zealand’s dismal record on child poverty and the government’s challenge to turn it around – http://theconversation.com/new-zealands-dismal-record-on-child-poverty-and-the-governments-challenge-to-turn-it-around-115366

This article is an edited extract from an essay, The search for ET, in The New Disruptors, the 64th edition of Griffith Review.

We’re publishing it as part of our occasional series Zoom Out, where authors explore key ideas in science and technology in the broader context of society and humanity.

Extraterrestrial life, that familiar science-fiction trope, that kitschy fantasy, that CGI nightmare, has become a matter of serious discussion, a “risk factor”, a “scenario”.

How has ET gone from sci-fi fairytale to a serious scientific endeavour modelled by macroeconomists, funded by fiscal conservatives and discussed by theologians?

Because, following a string of remarkable discoveries over the past two decades, the idea of alien life is not as far-fetched as it used to seem.

Discovery now seems inevitable and possibly imminent.

It’s just chemistry

While life is a special kind of complex chemistry, the elements involved are nothing special: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on are among the most abundant elements in the universe. Complex organic chemistry is surprisingly common.

Amino acids, just like those that make up every protein in our bodies, have been found in the tails of comets. There are other organic compounds in Martian soil.

And 6,500 light years away a giant cloud of space alcohol floats among the stars.

Habitable planets seem to be common too. The first planet beyond our Solar System was discovered in 1995. Since then astronomers have catalogued thousands.

Based on this catalogue, astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley worked out there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized exoplanets in the so-called “habitable zone” around their star, where temperatures are mild enough for liquid water to exist on the surface.

There’s even a potentially Earth-like world orbiting our nearest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri. At just four light years away, that system might be close enough for us to reach using current technology. With the Breakthrough Starshot project launched by Stephen Hawking in 2016, plans for this are already afoot.

Life is robust

It seems inevitable other life is out there, especially considering that life appeared on Earth so soon after the planet was formed.

The oldest fossils ever found here are 3.5 billion years old, while clues in our DNA suggest life could have started as far back as 4 billion years ago, just when giant asteroids stopped crashing into the surface.

Our planet was inhabited as soon as it was habitable – and the definition of “habitable” has proven to be a rather flexible concept too.

Life survives in all manner of environments that seem hellish to us:

Tantalisingly, some of these conditions seem to be duplicated elsewhere in the Solar System.

Snippets of promise

Mars was once warm and wet, and was probably a fertile ground for life before the Earth.

Today, Mars still has liquid water underground. One gas strongly associated with life on Earth, methane, has already been found in the Martian atmosphere, and at levels that mysteriously rise and fall with the seasons. (However, the methane result is under debate, with one Mars orbiter recently confirming the methane detection and another detecting nothing.)

Martian bugs might turn up as soon as 2021 when the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin will hunt for them with a two-metre drill.

Besides Earth and Mars, at least two other places in our Solar System might be inhabited. Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus are both frozen ice worlds, but the gravity of their colossal planets is enough to churn up their insides, melting water to create vast subglacial seas.

In 2017, specialists in sea ice from the University of Tasmania concluded that some Antarctic microbes could feasibly survive on these worlds. Both Europa and Enceladus have undersea hydrothermal vents, just like those on Earth where life may have originated.

When a NASA probe tasted the material geysered into space out of Enceladus last June it found large organic molecules. Possibly there was something living among the spray; the probe just didn’t have the right tools to detect it.

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has been so enthused by this prospect, he wants to help fund a return mission.

A second genesis?

A discovery, if it came, could turn the world of biology upside down.

All life on Earth is related, descended ultimately from the first living cell to emerge some 4 billion years ago.

Bacteria, fungus, cacti and cockroaches are all our cousins and we all share the same basic molecular machinery: DNA that makes RNA, and RNA that makes protein.

A second sample of life, though, might represent a “second genesis” – totally unrelated to us. Perhaps it would use a different coding system in its DNA. Or it might not have DNA at all, but some other method of passing on genetic information.

By studying a second example of life, we could begin to figure out which parts of the machinery of life are universal, and which are just the particular accidents of our primordial soup.

Perhaps amino acids are always used as essential building blocks, perhaps not.

We might even be able to work out some universal laws of biology, the same way we have for physics – not to mention new angles on the question of the origin of life itself.

A second independent “tree of life” would mean that the rapid appearance of life on Earth was no fluke; life must abound in the universe.

It would greatly increase the chances that, somewhere among those billions of habitable planets in our galaxy, there could be something we could talk to.

Perhaps life is infectious

If, on the other hand, the discovered microbes were indeed related to us that would be a bombshell of a different kind: it would mean life is infectious.

When a large meteorite hits a planet, the impact can splash pulverised rock right out into space, and this rock can then fall onto other planets as meteorites.

Life from Earth has probably already been taken to other planets – perhaps even to the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Microbes might well survive the trip.

In 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts retrieved an old probe that had sat on the Moon for three years in extreme cold and vacuum – there were viable bacteria still inside.

As Mars was probably habitable before Earth, it’s possible life originated there before hitchhiking on a space rock to here. Perhaps we’re all Martians.

Even if we never find other life in our Solar System, we might still detect it on any one of thousands of known exoplanets.

It is already possible to look at starlight filtered through an exoplanet and tell something about the composition of its atmosphere; an abundance of oxygen could be a telltale sign of life.

A testable hypothesis

The James Webb Space Telescope, planned for a 2021 launch, will be able to take these measurements for some of the Earth-like worlds already discovered.

Just a few years later will come space-based telescopes that will take pictures of these planets directly.

Using a trick a bit like the sun visor in your car, planet-snapping telescopes will be paired with giant parasols called starshades that will fly in tandem 50,000 kilometres away in just the right spot to block the blinding light of the star, allowing the faint speck of a planet to be captured.

The colour and the variability of that point of light could tell us the length of the planet’s day, whether it has seasons, whether it has clouds, whether it has oceans, possibly even the colour of its plants.

The ancient question “Are we alone?” has graduated from being a philosophical musing to a testable hypothesis. We should be prepared for an answer.

– ref. Why the idea of alien life now seems inevitable and possibly imminent – http://theconversation.com/why-the-idea-of-alien-life-now-seems-inevitable-and-possibly-imminent-115643

The integrity of Australia’s electoral processes is under unprecedented challenge in this federal election.

The campaign has already been marred by fake news, political exploitation of social media falsehoods and amplification by mainstream media of crude slurs made on Facebook under the cover of anonymity.

We have seen our first recorded instance of Facebook running Australian fake news.

It was a false post about the Labor Party’s tax policies, wrongly saying Labor intended to introduce a 40% inheritance tax.

It was interesting to trace how this fakery was created.

The false post had a link to a press release issued in January by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

It said Labor’s assistant treasury spokesman, Andrew Leigh, had written an article 13 years ago – when he was an academic – that favoured introducing an inheritance tax. Thirteen years ago – before he was even in politics.

Read more: ‘Fake news’ is already spreading online in the election campaign – it’s up to us to stop it

Then to add to the fakery, and seemingly by coincidence, the Liberal Party had a black van driving around city streets with large signs saying “Labor will tax you to death”.

The Liberals have denied being involved in the duplicity and there is no evidence to suggest they were. But the false post had just enough of an impressionistic link to the Liberal attack to make its message plausible: a tincture of “truthiness”.

Then the Coalition made mischief with it.

George Christensen, Nationals MP for the Queensland seat of Dawson, put up a Facebook post three days after the original, saying:

Labor does the bidding of their union bosses [and] the union bosses have demanded Bill Shorten introduce a death tax.

The original post also generated memes from far-right political groups, piling new lies on top of the old.

Labor has demanded Facebook take down the original, but there is no sign it has done so.

The delay is not only unconscionable, but has given the likes of Christensen and others the opportunity to cloak the original falsehood in political commentary, creating the basis for a specious circular argument. It goes like this:

Facebook posts a lie. It generates political reaction. The political reaction absorbs the lie into political speech. Political speech should not be censored. Therefore taking down the original lie would be censorship.

This is yet one more way in which Facebook’s irresponsibility taints the democratic process.

So much for the fine promises made by Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, last year on what became known as his “apology tour” of Washington and Brussels.

He told officials he would stop the spread of fake news and voter manipulation on Facebook.

He told a US Senate committee that every advertiser who wanted to run political ads would need to be authorised, and that would mean confirming their identity and location.

Yet the ABC is reporting that just months after Zuckerberg’s “apology tour”, Facebook was playing ducks and drakes with the Australian Electoral Commission over precisely this question of authorisation.

The ABC reports that it has obtained documents under freedom-of-information that show a prolonged battle last year between the commission and Facebook over unauthorised political ads from a mysterious outfit called Hands Off Our Democracy, which was paying for sponsored posts attacking left-wing groups and political parties.

The posts eventually disappeared, but only after Facebook tried to give the commission the brush-off.

The ABC is also reporting that almost a year after Zuckerberg made his promises to clean up Facebook’s act, and with Australia’s federal election only three weeks away, Facebook still has not brought its new authorisation rules to Australia.

Meanwhile, the Electoral Commission is on the front foot about fake news.

A Google search for “Facebook carries fake news about Labor’s tax policy” brings up as its top item an ad from the commission warning people not to be misled by disinformation.

The commission has set up a special electoral integrity taskforce, which includes the Australian Signals Directorate and ASIO, to try to head off potential threats to the democratic process.

A further threat to the integrity of Australia’s electoral process is the interplay between Facebook and elements of the mainstream media.

A few days ago, the convoy protesting against the Adani coal mine arrived in Queensland, led by environmental activist and former Greens leader Bob Brown.

Simultaneously, a private Facebook group called Stop Adani Convoy posted a number of repugnant messages, including a reference to gas chambers.

Read more: Australian governments have a long history of trying to manipulate the ABC – and it’s unlikely to stop now

The post was anonymous, but it was picked up and amplified by Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper under the heading: “Bob Brown’s mob of revolting protesters liken coal mines to gas chambers”.

Well down in the story, the newspaper said it was not suggesting Brown had anything to do with this statement, an inclusion that was all about avoiding a writ for libel.

Brown said: “Some of the headlines in the Murdoch media are simply disgraceful. They’re a disgrace to journalism”.

This interaction of social media and elements of the mainstream media, in which extremist language and feverish controversy are exploited as a means of dividing the community and of promoting a reactionary political worldview, was a potent feature of the 2016 US presidential campaign and the Brexit referendum the same year.

Where the issue is highly controversial and emotive – as with climate change, immigration or Brexit – the extremism expressed on social media makes headlines in the mainstream media, raising the political temperature and fuelling further partisanship.

There is a lot of research that shows how these effects are damaging democracies around the world. The findings are laid out in books such as those by Cass Sunstein (#republic), Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) and A.C. Grayling (Democracy and Its Crisis).

An important long-term issue in the 2019 federal election is how robust Australia’s democratic institutional arrangements turn out to be in the face of these pressures.

– ref. Lies, obfuscation and fake news make for a dispiriting – and dangerous – election campaign – http://theconversation.com/lies-obfuscation-and-fake-news-make-for-a-dispiriting-and-dangerous-election-campaign-115845

Are you allergic to penicillin? Perhaps you have a friend or relative who is? With about one in ten people reporting a penicillin allergy, that’s not altogether surprising.

Penicillin is the most commonly reported drug allergy. But the key word here is “reported”. Only about 20% of this 10% have a true penicillin allergy – so the figure would be one in 50 rather than one in ten.

People may experience symptoms they think are a result of taking penicillin, but are actually unrelated. If these symptoms are not investigated, they continue with the belief that they should steer clear of penicillin.

Read more: Weekly Dose: penicillin, the mould that saves millions of lives

This can become a problem if a person is sick and needs to be treated with penicillin. Penicillin and related antibiotics are the most common group of drugs used to treat a broad range of infections, from chest or throat, to urinary tract, to skin and soft tissue infections.

The overestimation of penicillin allergies is also not ideal because it means people are being treated with a broader range of antibiotics than necessary, which contributes to the problem of antibiotic resistance.

Yes, penicillin comes from mould

To understand more about why so many people think they’re allergic to penicillin, we need to look at a brief history of the drug.

Penicillin (benzylpenicillin or Penicillin G) was first discovered in 1928 and first used in 1941.

It was grown from a mould, as it is today. The liquid nutrient broth the mould grew in was drained, and the penicillin purified from it.

In the 1930s and 40s, and even through the 1960s and 70s, purification techniques were not as efficient as they are today. So, many early allergic reactions are thought to be due to impurities in the early penicillin products – especially injections.

Penicillin is now more versatile and can kill a wider range of bacteria than in its earlier days. From shutterstock.com

Penicillin and the range of antibiotic compounds that followed it revolutionised how we treat bacterial infections.

This led to widespread, and sometimes inappropriate, use of these medicines. Antibiotics do not work against viruses, but are sometimes prescribed for bacterial infections that occur while people have viral infections such as glandular fever.

We know using penicillin while a person has glandular fever can cause a rash that looks like penicillin allergy but is not related.

People may report symptoms to their health professionals that seem like a reaction to penicillin. Perhaps these symptoms are not fully investigated because it takes time and can be expensive – they’re just put down to the common penicillin allergy.

Further, some people perceive other side effects of a penicillin antibiotic such as nausea or diarrhoea as an allergy, when these are not, in fact, allergy symptoms.

From this point, the penicillin family will not be used to treat these patients.

Read more: We know _why_ bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, but _how_ does this actually happen?

The problem of antibiotic resistance

An allergy to penicillin can also limit the use of some other antibiotics which may cross-react with the allergy.

Cross reaction occurs when the chemical structure of another antibiotic is so similar to the structure of penicillin that the immune system gets confused and recognises it as the same thing.

To avoid this, doctors need to look to antibiotics from other medication classes when prescribing patients with a documented penicillin allergy.

But we need to be careful when drawing on a wider range of antibiotics. This is because the more bacteria are exposed to antibiotics, the more likely they are to develop resistance to these antibiotics.

The range of penicillins we have today came from experimenting with the chemistry of the original penicillin molecule and changing its properties. From shutterstock.com

To address the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, we now try to restrict antibiotics as much as possible to the lowest level one that will kill the specific bacteria.

We don’t kill tiny ants in our gardens with a sledgehammer, so likewise, we use a narrow-spectrum antibiotic wherever possible to keep the broad-spectrum antibiotics for severe and complex infections.

The penicillin family contains both narrow and broad-spectrum antibiotics. Ruling out this family and its “cousins” when we don’t need to can limit the choice of antibiotics and increase the chance of making other antibiotics less useful.

Can I get tested?

Studies show penicillin allergy reduces over time. So even if you did have a true penicillin allergy, it may have gone away over several years.

Under the guidance of your doctor, it is possible to be tested to see if you’re allergic – or still allergic – to penicillin.

A skin “scratch” test involves injecting a small amount of penicillin and monitoring for a reaction. Rescue medications will be on hand in case you do have a severe reaction. Your GP will probably refer you to an allergy specialist to get this done.

Read more: Common skin rashes and what to do about them

If you have been told you’re allergic, you should first try to find out when the reaction occurred and what happened in as much detail as possible.

Let your GP know all this information and he or she can then decide whether a skin test might be appropriate.

Do not try a test dose at home – the risk of a life-threatening reaction is not worth it.

And if you believe you are allergic to penicillin, the most important thing to do is tell each health professional (doctor, pharmacist, nurse, dentist, etc.) you come into contact with.

– ref. Think you’re allergic to penicillin? There’s a good chance you’re wrong – http://theconversation.com/think-youre-allergic-to-penicillin-theres-a-good-chance-youre-wrong-112687

Sign up to the Beating Around the Bush newsletter here, and suggest a plant we should cover at batb@theconversation.edu.au.

Almost 30 years ago, the specimen of a weird tree collected in the southern part of Kakadu National Park was packed in my luggage. It was on its way to the mecca of botanical knowledge in London, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

But what was it?

With unusual inflated winged fruits, it flummoxed local botanists who had not seen anything like it before. To crack the trees identity, it needed more than the limited resources of the Darwin Herbarium.

Later, we discovered a fragmentary specimen hidden in a small box at the end of a little-visited collection vault in the Darwin Herbarium. And it had been sitting there quietly since 1974.

Most of the specimens inside this box just irritate botanists as being somewhat intractable to identify. This is what’s known as the “GOK” box, standing for “God Only Knows”.

Together with the resources of Kew Gardens, the species was finally connected with a genus and recognised as a new species.

A year later, it was named Hildegardia australiensis.

The Conversation

Mysterious global distribution

The species is the only Australian representative for an international genus, Hildegardia. Under Northern Territory legislation, it’s listed as “near threatened”, due to its small numbers and limited distribution.

The genus Hildegardia was named in 1832 by Austrian botanists Schott and Endlicher. They named it after Hildegard, the eleventh-century German abbess and mystic, the “Sybil of the Rhine”.

The genus retains some of this mystical and elusive nature. It’s rare with small isolated populations, traits that seem to dominate for all bar one of the species in the genus.

Twelve species of Hildegardia are recognised: one from Cuba, three from Africa, four from Madagascar and one each from India, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia.

This bizarre global distribution is even more unusual in that almost the entire generic lineage seems to be verging on extinction.

The Australian species fits this pattern of small fragmented populations and, despite being a reasonably sized tree at up to 10 metres tall, remained unknown until 1991.

God only knows what unidentified specimens are in this box. I.D. Cowie, NT Herbarium, Author provided (No reuse)

Rarely seen and hard to find

Generally, Hildegardia species are tall, deciduous trees of well-drained areas, often growing on rocky hills.

Their trunks have a smooth, thin bark which smells unpleasant and exudes a gum when wounded. Most species have heart-shaped leaves and bear a profusion of orange-red flowers when leafless. These are followed by strange, winged fruits with one or two seeds.

Hildegardia australiensis would have to be one of the most rarely seen trees in Australia in its natural habitat. It is native to the margins of the western Arnhem Land Plateau with scattered populations on limestone and sandstone scree slopes.

These are all difficult locations to visit, so if you really want to see it, a helicopter is recommended. Fortunately it is easy to grow and has found its way into limited cultivation.

Several trees have been in the Darwin Botanic Gardens since the early nineties and a few are known to have been planted in some of the urban parks in greater Darwin. The plantings have been more to showcase a rare and odd-looking tree rather than any great ornamental value.

Growing on ‘sickness country’

In the NT the tree is so poorly known that it has no common name other than the default generic name of Hildegardia.

It appears to have no recorded Indigenous uses, which is perhaps not surprising as much of its distribution is in “sickness country”.

Hildegardia australiensis often grows in rocky fields. I.D. Cowie, NT Herbarium, Author provided (No reuse)

This is country with uranium deposits, and was avoided by the traditional owners. Rock art showing figures with swollen joints has been interpreted as showing radiation poisoning.

But it does have one claim to fame. A heated debate between conservationists and miners was sparked during a proposed development of the Coronation Hill gold, platinum and palladium mine in Kakadu National Park.

The main population of H. australiensis is only a stone’s throw from Coronation Hill and the species became one of the key identified biodiversity assets that could have been threatened by development of the mine.

The area around Coronation Hill, or Guratba in the local Jawoyn language, is also of considerable spiritual significance to the Jawoyn traditional landowners and forms part of the identified “sickness country”. A creation deity, Bula, rests and lays dormant under the sickness country and should not be disturbed.

Eventually, these concerns culminated in the Hawke government on June 17, 1991 to no longer allow the mine development.

Read more: The Price of God at Coronation Hill

So are the seeds edible?

While there appears to be no known uses of the Australian species, the tree may have hidden potential.

The closely related trees Sterculia and Brachychiton are well known as bush tucker plants and good sources of fibre. The local Top End species Sterculia quadrifida, for instance, is commonly known as the Peanut Tree and is a highly favoured bush tucker plant.

The fibre potential of H. australiensis is being explored by internationally acclaimed Darwin-based papermaker, Winsome Jobling. Cyclone Marcus whipped through Darwin in 2018 and one of the casualties was a planted tree of H. australiensis in the Darwin Botanic Gardens.

The strange winged fruit of Hildegardia australiensis. I.D. Cowie, NT Herbarium, Author provided (No reuse)

Thankfully, material was salvaged. Winsome has material stored in her freezer awaiting extraction and processing to see what the fibre potential is.

H. barteri, an African species in the Hildegardia genus, has a broad distribution through half a dozen African countries. And the West African locals have a number of uses for it, from eating the seeds to using the bark as fibre for ropes. But we don’t know just yet if the flesh or seed in the Australian species is edible.

Whether the Australian species might also harbour such useful properties still awaits some testing and research. Fortunately, with the creation deity Bula watching over the natural populations the species, unlike many of its close relatives, appears secure in the wild.

Sign up to Beating Around the Bush, a series that profiles native plants: part gardening column, part dispatches from country, entirely Australian.

– ref. Bizarrely distributed and verging on extinction, this ‘mystic’ tree went unidentified for 17 years – http://theconversation.com/bizarrely-distributed-and-verging-on-extinction-this-mystic-tree-went-unidentified-for-17-years-115239

This is an edited extract from The New Disruptors, the 64th edition of Griffith Review. It is a little longer than most published on The Conversation.

It is supposed to be a test of character. An A+ student sits down to the final exam of his degree and is surprised to be presented with a piece of paper with a single question: what is the name of the person who cleans this building?

Walter W. Bettinger II, CEO of a finance giant, the Charles Schwab Corporation, told a version of this story to The New York Times last year, describing the test as “the only one I ever failed” and “a great reminder of what really matters in life”.

I recently tried it out on my eight-year-old, a New South Wales public school student, and she flunked too. This result, though, is less to do with her moral qualities, I suspect, than her state of residence. For NSW, it turns out, is one of the harder states for a kid to pass the “what’s the cleaner’s name?” test.

Kath Haddon, a school cleaner in NSW since 1981, remembers when cleaners’ names started to drop from use in her workplace. It was in early 1994, following the Greiner Coalition government’s decision to dissolve the Government Cleaning Service and tender the work to private companies.

“We went from being employees of the school to being employees of the contractors overnight, and you could physically feel the change,” she says.

She stopped being invited to meetings about school health and safety – that was now the contractors’ job – and face-to-face conversations with the school principal ceased. Instructions were now delivered via a bureaucratic maze of faxes, phone calls, logbook entries and area manager site visits.

Only in some states do children know their cleaner’s name. from shutterstock.com

Passing the “name the cleaner” test is far easier for kids in Tasmania, where cleaners have remained direct employees of the school. In fact, when I spoke to Tasmanian school cleaner Robert Terry about what his job was like, the theme of name-remembering was one of the first subjects to come up.

“I can barely step onto school grounds without hearing ‘Robbo this, Robbo that!’,” he laughs. He has been cleaning primary schools since the 1970s and sees remembering names as a crucial dimension to his work.

“At the start of the year I look at the whole group and pick out the really shy ones, the ones looking like they are left out or the ones who are in trouble,” he twinkles.

“I stand at the front and tell them, ‘I’m Robbo, I’m the cleaner here, don’t worry about what the teacher says, do what I say!’ ”

One kindergarten boy, Julian (not his real name), spent much of first term hiding under his desk, refusing to speak. Robert made great play of walking past him with his drill, an object of fascination to the boy.

He would carry the drill into Julian’s classroom, across his line of sight as he crouched beneath the desk and put a screw in the wall. The next day he did the same, taking the same screw out of the wall.

He repeated the pattern every day until the boy eventually came out from under the desk and allowed him to roll a ball up and down the corridor with him.

A week later, the teacher later got in touch to say that the boy had at last spoken. His first word? Robbo.

A neoliberal experiment

How did we get to be a nation where cleaners’ names ring out across a playground in some states and not others? This peculiar phenomenon is the outcome of an experiment in neoliberal design that was never planned: the privatisation of school cleaning in some states and territories (NSW, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia) and not in others (Tasmania and Queensland) in the 1990s.

Some states have since reversed, wholly or partially, the system (WA, ACT and Victoria), but at 20 years’ distance the story of Australia’s patchwork system of public and privately contracted school cleaning can tell us much about what happens in the long run when the maintenance of school space is transformed from a public service to a private for-profit affair.

Outsourcing cleaners has had the unlikely consequence of alienating children from the consequences of some of their actions. from shutterstock.com

The Victorian case was the first and most dramatic. In 1992, the Kennett government, acting on the professed urge to liberate Victorians from “sterile bureaucracy”, terminated every government-employed school cleaner overnight.

Every school principal was now expected to act like the director of a standalone business. At the same time, the total school cleaning budget was slashed to less than half. Leaflets about “how to get an ABN” were thrust into cleaners’ hands, from which they learnt that, as contractors, their minimum pay (then around A$9 an hour) would fall to precisely zero.

Paperwork proliferated as more than 700 new cleaning companies were established, each one required to bid for individual contracts with 1,750 schools.

School principals, most of whom had little business experience, became overwhelmed with a new set of obligations and tended to choose the cheapest tender for each contract. A system that entrenched the cutting of corners, underquoting, exploitation and spooling bureaucracy was born.

Schools that once had seven cleaners were suddenly cleaned by two. Principals unblocked toilets during the day while teachers cleaned schoolyards. Parents organised working bees to clean pavements and water troughs, which had been excised from the cleaning contracts.

Cleaners bought supplies with their own money, snipped sponges in half to make them go further and took dirty mops home to clean on their own time.

In 2017, the workers’ union United Voice found one cleaner working in a Victorian public school for just A$2.70 an hour.

In NSW, change was slower, with contracts created for just three large cleaning companies, rather than hundreds of small owner-operators, and cleaner numbers falling through attrition, rather than slashed budgets.

Who are the winners?

The losers from privatised school cleaning aren’t very visible.

They are the children, who miss out on the chance to confide in a trusted adult outside the disciplinary teaching hierarchy, someone who is looking out for them when things get difficult, whether that is in school or after hours.

These children do not get the chance to put a name and a face to the person who cleans up their mess, and so to think more carefully about the consequences of their actions.

Who is really paying the cost of outsourcing cleaners? from shutterstock.com

They are the teachers, who have one less resource to draw upon to de-escalate conflict in the classroom. Who do not have the option of sending a potentially disruptive student out to help the cleaner run errands, or to a groundsperson to do some planting, rather than straight to the principal’s office.

They are also the cleaners themselves, most of whom are forced to work in conditions that do not allow them the time and opportunity to do their jobs as well as they would wish to do them, or to know the students they serve.

Who receive wages that give them no possibility of living in, or even remotely close to, the communities they clean. Who must drive for two or more hours in the dark to get to work in the morning, and then sleep in the car between shifts. Who may miss out on the chance to buy a house or have a family of their own.

The winners from the system aren’t easy to spot either. They are the bureaucrats with careers staked to the implementation of a “hollowed out” vision of government. They are the fund managers and shareholders who benefit from adjustments to the balance sheets of multinationals.

They are the executives of the multinationals themselves, such as Rafael del Pino y Calvo Sotelo – executive director of the Spanish multinational Ferrovial, which holds the cleaning contract for a portion of NSW schools – whose annual remuneration in 2017 was more than A$8 million.

The question of how to employ school cleaners is fundamentally not an economic one. It cannot be answered without addressing the more foundational question of what, in essence, a public school is for.

Is it a site for the inculcation of literacy and numeracy skills on the cheapest possible basis? If so, why should marketisation stop with the cleaning staff? Why not tender out the services of teacher aides, administrative staff, teachers themselves?

Further cost savings could be made by incentivising students to stay home and teach themselves using Wikipedia, Siri and a handful of apps. Such “innovation” would surely generate enormous “savings” for the public purse.

We wince at such suggestions because at primary school we want our kids to learn more than reading and writing.

But when my daughter makes a mess at school and it is left to be cleaned up by a person in the early hours of the next morning, whose name she does not know, who are we letting down?

– ref. What’s the school cleaner’s name? How kids, not just cleaners, are paying the price of outsourcing – http://theconversation.com/whats-the-school-cleaners-name-how-kids-not-just-cleaners-are-paying-the-price-of-outsourcing-115443

More and more podcasts about cities are being produced by journalists and academics. They’re being recorded in research labs, urban planning offices, on the streets and in the neighbourhoods of our cities.

Podcasting allows academics to share research across vast geographical distances. And, we argue, podcasters are creating new conversations about who and what the city is for.

Read more: Speaking with: Cameron McAuliffe on NIMBYs, urban planning and making community consultation work

Why are urban podcasts important?

Consider the 99 Percent Invisible episode, Structural Integrity. It starts with a seemingly technical discussion about the engineering challenges of the 279-metre Citicorp building in New York. It has a uniquely engineered stilt-style base and was the seventh-tallest building in the world when constructed in 1977.

The podcast opens with the chief structural engineer, William LeMessurier, recalling: “1978, I’m in my office, I get a call from a student. I do not know the school, I wish he would call me … I think he was an architectural student.”

The student who calculated that the 279-metre Citicorp building was at risk of being blown over turned out to be a woman. Felix Lipov/Shutterstock

According to this student’s research, the Citicorp building could blow over in the wind. LeMessurier re-ran his engineering calculations to find the student was right. There was about a 1-in-16 chance the building would collapse in the middle of New York.

“What I wanted to know,” says LeMessurier, “when is this building going to fall down?”

But this technical discussion is simply a storytelling device to get us to the question of gender. A little later, we hear the podcast host say: “OK, wait for it, wait for this moment, it’s a good one, here it comes.” Then we hear a female voice.

In a masterclass in radio storytelling, we find out the architectural student is Diane Hartley. “It turns out that she was the student in LeMessurier’s story.”

Learning from community radio

As a listener, you’re encouraged to reflect on LeMessurier’s assumption that the smart engineering student was a man, and to call LeMessurier out when it becomes evident the student is a woman.

We’re part of a group of academic community radio makers who want to tell these types of stories, and we’re drawing on the interviewing and storytelling skills of journalists.

2ser community radio in Sydney produces podcasts like City Road (our show) and HistoryLab. These shows combine the rigour of research with academic voices and journalistic storytelling.

In an environment where research papers are buried behind publisher paywalls, podcasting allows academics to communicate their research beyond the university.

Hear more: Trust Me, I’m An Expert

Community radio and university partnerships are blurring the line between academia and journalism to offer new ways of hearing about the latest research.

Podcasting is about power and representation

Podcasting is not just about audio recording equipment, production and distribution. When you tell a story with a podcast, as Chenjerai Kumanyika reminds us,

Power is always present; you’re always commenting on power.

For Kumanyika, podcasting is about shared commitments to social justice, media diversity, democracy and promoting rigorous public debate on issues of social importance.

In post-Ferguson America, for example, African American podcasters recreated “iconic spaces of Black sociality like the barber/beauty shop or the church” by “cocooning” themselves in conversations in their own vernaculars while walking through and experiencing the city.

In South Korea, podcasters engaged in democratic conversations to challenge state control. Black and/or radical voices are often absent in mainstream media in the US and Korea.

In Sydney, the two young Aboriginal radio makers of The Survival Guide provide a (post-)colonial reading of the urban planning process guiding the gentrification of their community in Redfern. The tagline for their Radio Skid Row show is:

There is a black history to your flat white.

Read more: Speaking with: Chris Ho and Edgar Liu about diversity and high density in our cities

We need new voices and stories

One reason podcasts like these matter is that the democratising power of the media is under threat globally. From liberal democracies to authoritarian states, mainstream media get their content from a shrinking number of large commercial media groups.

Australia sits 19th on the World Press Freedom Index, alongside the UK at 40 and the US at 45, as the threats to investigative and public interest journalism mount. Around the world, media organisations are scrambling to adjust as new digital platforms increasingly control the dissemination of news content.

As academic podcasting evolves, it could become an important research dissemination tool within a media environment defined by narrowing content and concentrating ownership.

Podcasts can allow for public discussions that bypass large, commercially driven media monopolies. But the danger is commercial podcasting distributors are stepping in to commercialise and control podcast distribution too.

Read more: Media Files: What does the future newsroom look like?

Listen up!

Podcasting can expand the way we participate in cities. It allows those who are not regularly heard to have new (and old) conversations with listeners.

So next time you listen to a podcast, ask yourself: who is talking and who are they in conversation with? And what commercial and other interests are regulating and limiting these conversations?

The voices that have historically been excluded from traditional media are now speaking. Are you listening?

– ref. Podcasts and cities: ‘you’re always commenting on power’ – http://theconversation.com/podcasts-and-cities-youre-always-commenting-on-power-114176

What do US pizza executive Herman Cain, US conservative commentator Stephen Moore, US Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Australia’s Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe have in common?

More than you might think.

The immediate issue for Lowe is Wednesday’s inflation figures released by the Bureau of Statistics. Inflation for the first quarter of 2019 came in at 0.0%. Zero. Nada.

Taken together, the sum of consumer prices moved not at all between the last quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2019. The annual increase (all of it in the last three quarters of last year) was 1.3%.

However you cut the numbers, inflation is now incredibly low. The Reserve Bank’s measures of so-called underlying inflation (that mute the effects of sharp movements in things such as the prices of fruit and vegetables) are at the same level they were in 2016 when the Reserve Bank cut rates twice – in May and then August.

The Reserve Bank must cut

It has to do it again. The market expects it and is pricing in a cut.

Trading on the Australian Securities Exchange implies that 67% of those wagering real money expect the Reserve Bank to cut its cash rate from its present record low of 1.5% to another uncharted low of 1.25% when it next meets to consider rates on Tuesday May 7, a fortnight before the election.

A day earlier, before the release of Wednesday’s shockingly low inflation figure, only 13% expected a cut on Tuesday week.

ASX Target Rate Tracker

Three days after the Reserve Bank meeting, and just one week before the election, Lowe is due to release his quarterly report on the state of the economy and his stance on interest rates. He’ll find it easier to write if he justifies a cut.

Not only is inflation far lower than he is his aiming for, but economic growth has plummeted to levels that imply annual growth of closer to 1% than the present 2.3% or his forecast of 3% by December. Strong house price growth, that would have once been a reason for caution about cutting rates, is no longer a consideration.

A broad cross-section of market economists expect a cut on Tuesday week.

Westpac’s Bill Evans has long predicted 50 basis points of cuts this year, and on Wednesday ANZ economists Hayden Dimes and David Plank said

The downward surprise to core inflation in the first quarter leaves the RBA with little choice but to cut the cash rate by 25 points at its May meeting, with another basis points likely to follow in August

The Reserve Bank’s inflation target of 2-3% has become a joke. Inflation has rarely even entered that range the entire time Lowe has been governor.

Lowe keeps hoping for lower unemployment to spark wages growth, but despite unemployment being consistently at or near its long term low of 5%, nothing has much happened, for almost a decade.

Most observers think that unemployment would need to be much lower – closer to 4% than 5% – for wages to take off.

Politics makes it urgent

Then factor in the election. Labor is odds-on to win. If it does, then there is a chance of fairly radical industrial relations reform. Think about the wish list of Australian Council of Trade Unions Secretary Sally McManus. That seems unlikely to me because of Labor’s extremely sensible economic team, but it’s possible.

Whether it happens or not, until the industrial relations landscape becomes clear businesses are unlikely to do a lot of hiring. Why hire a bunch of folks if you don’t know what you might have to end up paying them or how easy it will be to let them go or change what they do?

That uncertainty is likely to put more downward pressure on wages than whatever upward pressure comes from Labor heavying the Fair Work Commission Labor into reversing its recent penalty-rates decision.

The Bank is losing credibility

All this suggests that the Reserve Bank has waited far too long for wages to tick up of their own accord.

We’ve had recent lessons from the US about the importance of credibility in central banking.

Donald Trump’s nomination of pizza executive Herman Cain to the board of the US Federal Reserve has been withdrawn after sexual harassment allegations, his nomination of Stephen Moore is in doubt after a series of derogatory public remarks he made about women.

They have political problems. Their nominations are in trouble because they are, to put it bluntly, grossly unqualified to govern the Federal Reserve.

The Reserve Bank’s problem is obviously different. It enjoys an impeccable reputation. But repeatedly seeming to ignore inflation numbers (and its own targets for inflation) is putting that reputation at risk.

Having resolve is important. The Reserve Bank isn’t supposed to just do exactly what the market expects or wants it to do.

But getting way out of whack with informed public sentiment without offering good reasons for doing so is very dangerous.

US Chief Justice Earl Warren – the great liberal reformer who desegregated education, ensured the right to a lawyer in criminal cases, and established the principle of one person one vote – was famously mindful of the Court not getting too far ahead of public opinion.

In Brown v Board of Education, which ruled racially segregated education unlawful, Warren worked hard to ensure a unanimous opinion of the Court. That opinion required desegregation “with all deliberate speeed” – a phrase that was justly criticised as allowed desegregation to proceed far too slowly, but ensured that the court wasn’t too far out ahead of the Southern states and allowed them to adapt rather than defy it.

The Reserve Bank’s problem is not getting too far ahead of public opinion, it is lagging too far behind.

The consequences can be similar, though. If the public and the markets lose faith in the Bank as an institution – if it seems radically out of touch – then it will lose it’s ability to persuade and it will risk forced change from the outside.

Forced change is a possibility. Each new government strikes a new agreement with the Reserve Bank governor setting out what it expects of him.

The present one specifies “inflation between 2% and 3%, on average, over time”. If it can be seen that the governor has paid scant regard to the agreement, the new one might make the target more binding, or replace it with a different target.

Treasurer and Reserve Bank Governor, Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy, September 19, 2016. Reserve Bank of Australia

It’s time to stop waiting

Governor Lowe waiting for wages to tick up without any underlying factor to cause it to happen is like Waiting for Godot. And it’s getting absurd.

He needs a better narrative than “something will turn up”, and he needs to cut rates. Not with all deliberate speed, but fast.

– ref. Vital signs. Zero inflation means the Reserve Bank should cut rates as soon as it can, on Tuesday week – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-zero-inflation-means-the-reserve-bank-should-cut-rates-as-soon-as-it-can-on-tuesday-week-115931