The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Megan Prictor, Researcher in Law, University of Melbourne

In response to the public outcry against the potential for My Health Record data to be shared with police and other government agencies, Health Minister Greg Hunt recently announced moves to change the legislation.

The laws underpinning the My Health Record as well as records kept by GPs and private hospitals currently allow those records to be shared with the police, Centrelink, the Tax Office and other government departments if it’s “reasonably necessary” for a criminal investigation or to protect tax revenue.

If passed, the policy of the Digital Health Agency (which runs the My Health Record) not to release information without a court order will become law. This would mean the My Health Record has greater privacy protections than other medical records, which doesn’t make much sense.

Read more: Opting out of My Health Records? Here’s what you get with the status quo

Changing the law to increase privacy

Under the proposed new bill, state and federal government departments and agencies would have to apply for a court order to obtain information stored in the My Health Record.

The court would need to be satisfied that sharing the information is “reasonably necessary”, and that there is no other effective way for the person requesting it to access the information. The court would also need to weigh up whether the disclosure would “unreasonably interfere” with the person’s privacy.

If granted, a court order to release the information would require the Digital Health Agency to provide information from a person’s My Health Record without the person’s consent, and even if they objected.

If a warrant is issued for a person’s health records, the police can sift through them as they look for relevant information. They could uncover personally sensitive material that is not relevant to the current proceedings. Since the My Health Record allows the collection of information across health providers, there could be an increased risk of non-relevant information being disclosed.

Read more: Using My Health Record data for research could save lives, but we must ensure it’s ethical

But what about our other medical records?

Although we share all sorts of personal information online, we like to think of our medical records as sacrosanct. But the law underpinning My Health Record came from the wording of the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988, which applies to all medical records held by GPs, specialists and private hospitals.

Under the Act, doctors don’t need to see a warrant before they’re allowed to share health information with enforcement agencies. The Privacy Act principles mean doctors only need a “reasonable belief” that sharing the information is “reasonably necessary” for the enforcement activity.

Although public hospital records do not fall under the Privacy Act, they are covered by state laws that have similar provisions. In Victoria, for instance, the Health Records Act 2001 permits disclosure if the record holder “reasonably believes” that the disclosure is “reasonably necessary” for a law enforcement function and it would not be a breach of confidence.

In practice, health care providers are trained on the utmost importance of protecting the patient’s privacy. Their systems of registration and accreditation mean they must follow a professional code of ethical conduct that includes observing confidentiality and privacy.

Although the law doesn’t require it, it is considered good practice for health professionals to insist on seeing a warrant before disclosing a patient’s health records.

In a 2014 case, the federal court considered whether a psychiatrist had breached the privacy of his patient. The psychiatrist had given some of his patient’s records to Queensland police in response to a warrant. The court said the existence of a warrant was evidence the doctor had acted appropriately.

In a 2015 case, it was decided a doctor had interfered with a patient’s privacy when disclosing the patient’s health information to police. In this case, there no was warrant and no formal criminal investigation.

Read more: What could a My Health Record data breach look like?

Unfortunately, there are recent examples of medical records being shared with government departments in worrying ways. In Australia, it has been alleged the immigration department tried, for political reasons, to obtain access to the medical records of people held in immigration detention.

In the UK, thousands of patient records were shared with the Home Office to trace immigration offenders. As a result, it was feared some people would become too frightened to seek medical care for themselves and children.

We can’t change the fact different laws at state and federal level apply to our paper and electronic medical records stored in different locations. But we can try to change these laws to be consistent in protecting our privacy.

If it’s so important to change the My Health Records Act to ensure our records can only be “unlocked” by a court order, the same should apply to the Privacy Act as well as state-based laws. Doing so might help to address public concerns about privacy and the My Health Record, and further inform decisions about opting out or staying in the system.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cindy Grahame, PhD candidate, University of Newcastle

In June, the New South Wales parliament passed new laws to strengthen protection for children from sexual abuse and enact harsher sentences for their abusers.

The reformed laws were in response to the recommendations of the final report by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, handed down in December 2017.

One of the most significant changes to the NSW laws is in the directions that judges are permitted to give to a jury – one that could impact how victims of sexual assault are viewed by juries.

In a meaningful shift, the amendment allows the trial judge to explain to the jury that it is common for both child and adult victims of sexual assault to forget the details of the trauma they have endured.

Read more: Rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment: what’s the difference?

The judge may also tell the jury it is common for there to be differences in the retelling of accounts of sexual assaults. The judge can explain that trauma affects people differently, including their recall of events. And this could result in differences between pre-court statements and what victims say during a trial.

The judge may also point out that both truthful and untruthful accounts of a sexual offence may contain differences.

It is up to jury members, therefore, to decide the relative importance of the differences in a complainant’s accounts when they are assessing his or her truthfulness and reliability.

However, there remains an important caveat to the revised laws: the new directions by the judges are entirely discretionary. This means that individual judges in individual sexual assault trials will decide whether to invoke the new provision.

The difficulties in prosecuting sexual assault cases

This provision is largely aimed at victims of childhood sexual abuse, as set out plainly in the act’s title . Royal Commission research found that victims of child sexual abuse often experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. This might include the inability to recall important aspects of the traumatic event.

These amendments may prove to be beneficial to women who are the victims of sexual offences, as well.

Read more: How music festivals can change the tune on sexual violence

Of sexual assaults of women reported to the police, prosecution rates remain stubbornly low: fewer than 50% of cases brought to court in NSW result in conviction. At the same time, reports of sexual assault in the state have increased by 12% in the last year, with women representing 82% of complainants. It is estimated that around 70% of all sexual assaults of women in NSW go unreported to the police.

Nationally, just 15% of alleged sexual assaults are reported to police, while only 11% of those incidents result in conviction.

There are complex reasons for this. Women report feelings of humiliation, denial and self-doubt following a sexual assault. They fear other people will disbelieve, shame and judge them. They also fear violations of their privacy throughout the legal process. Women who have pursued justice in the legal system describe it as arduous, combative and exhausting.

Precedent set in Victoria

New South Wales is not alone in its attempts to create more equitable trials for sexual abuse victims. In 2017, the Victorian parliament responded to an interim report by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. This report found that in a sample study of sexual assault trials, defence lawyers raised inconsistencies in the complainant’s evidence in more than 90% of cases.

To address this, parliament amended the laws relating to the directions that judges are permitted to give to juries in sexual assault cases.

Read more: Hazing and sexual violence in Australian universities: we need to address men’s cultures

The Victorian law later became the basis for the NSW provision. However, unlike in NSW, the Victorian statute is mandatory: if judges determine there are inconsistencies that would call into question a complainant’s credibility or reliability, they must direct the jury that this can be consistent with trauma.

Though mandatory, the onus is till on the judge to identify when such directions are needed. There appears to be only one reported case where a judge has done this in Victoria since the law was amended.

These new laws are important steps in the right direction to encourage the reporting of sexual crimes to the police and help juries understand why victims sometimes fail to recall certain aspects of the traumas they’ve endured.

Ensuring a fair trial for all parties to a criminal case is a paramount concern. These new laws go further than previous procedural changes in levelling the field for complainants in sexual assault cases. However, their efficacy will necessarily be limited by giving individual judges the discretion when to act.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Goss, School Education Program Director, Grattan Institute

Dan Tehan’s first major action as federal Education Minister was a deal for Catholic and independent schools. From a policy perspective, the pieces were already in place. Tehan’s predecessor, Simon Birmingham, had moved all schools onto a consistent funding formula. The National Schools Resourcing Board (NSRB) showed how to use household income to gauge how much parents could pay if they chose a non-government school.

The good news from yesterday’s announcement is the government accepted all the recommendations of the NSRB’s Chaney review of how socio-economic score is calculated. By 2029, funding for all non-government schools will be based on the same formula. In my view, this transition process is longer and much more expensive than needed but at least it gets us to the right spot.

Read more: Explaining Australia’s school funding debate: what’s at stake

The bad news is the new deal undercuts itself. Some A$1.2 billion has been set aside to keep school fees “affordable”, among other priorities. But the fund is only available to Catholic and independent schools. In other words, all schools are equal but some are more equal than others.

This A$1.2 billion slush fund seems to be a political fix to the main Catholic sticking point: the claim parents in advantaged Catholic primary schools can’t afford the increased fees implied by the Gonski/Chaney model.

New analysis shows parents at advantaged Catholic schools can afford to pay their way.

Few Catholic primary schools need big fee hikes

There are just over 1,200 Catholic primary schools across Australia. In 2016, all of them had fees below A$4,000.

Under the Gonski/Chaney model, the federal government would reduce funding to schools with high-income parents, meaning fees would need to rise. Fees would not need to rise at schools serving low- to middle-income families because their government funding would continue to grow.

Only about 160 Catholic primary schools (one in eight) would need fee hikes of at least A$2,500 to compensate for their reduced levels of government funding. By contrast, more than 800 (three in five) would need only minimal fee increases or even get more government funding.

Media stories typically focus on Catholic primary schools where fees might need to rise by $4,000 or more. These schools are outliers, but they underpinned the Catholic campaign against the government.

Yet under Chaney – when parental capacity to contribute is based on income rather than where parents live – just 36 schools (one in 30) fall into this category. And the reason their fees would rise so much is because the parents can afford it.

Some Catholic school parents can afford more

Affordability can be a slippery concept. It can also be remarkably simple. If Jane earns twice as much as Dick, she can afford twice the mortgage. Jane’s taxes will also take up more of her income than Dick’s. Earning more but paying a lower rate of tax would be regressive. But that’s exactly how Catholic primary school fees work.

The next chart shows the ratio of school fees to income, and how that ratio changes as households earn more.

In 2016, families on modest incomes (from A$30,000 to A$79,999) had to shell out 2.6% of their pre-tax income to afford one set of Catholic primary school fees. Families on incomes above A$300,000 paid just 1%.

Read more: Catholic schools aren’t all the same, and Gonski 2.0 reflects this

By contrast, school fees at independent primary schools tend to grow in line with household income.

If Catholic primary school fees rose in line with parents’ income, some Catholic schools could afford to charge much higher fees.

Catholic primary fees would still be relatively low

What would happen if Catholic primary school fees were a consistent 2.6% of median family income?

Fees would rise substantially at Catholic schools where incomes are high – to nearly A$8,500 at the small number of schools where the average family earns A$300,000. They would still be much lower than fees at independent schools with similar communities.

This means the fees implied by Gonski/Chaney are realistic.

First, the ten or so Catholic primary schools where family incomes are more than A$300,000 really can afford to charge fees of more than $8,000. After all, their families can afford it equally as much as a family on A$60,000 can afford fees of A$1,600, which is about what they already pay.

Second, this level of fees is still much lower than what independent school families already choose to pay. In fact, independent school families with incomes of A$120-180,000 already pay fees of about $8,200, about the same as the highest capacity to contribute expected under Gonski 2.0.

Some will argue, faced with fees of A$8,000, Catholic school families will send their children to the free government school down the road. That may well occur. But that is a matter of choice and value, not affordability.

Read more: Gonski 2.0: Is this the school funding plan we have been looking for? Finally, yes

Tens of thousands of families of modest means already pay 2.6% of their earnings towards a Catholic primary school education. If families earning four or five times more are unwilling to spend an equivalent fraction of their income, government should take it as a sign they don’t value the education on offer, not that a higher subsidy is needed.

These three charts show few Catholic primary schools need big fee hikes under a fair and needs-based funding model. The parents that would have to pay more can afford it. And their fees would still be less than half what independent-school parents typically pay.

Every government dollar should be spent where it will make most difference. The Coalition’s school funding fix is a good deal for Catholic and independent schools. It’s a bad deal for the rest of us.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Graves, Distinguished Professor of Genetics, La Trobe University

This article is part of our occasional long read series Zoom Out, where authors explore key ideas in science and technology in the broader context of society and humanity.

Jenny Graves – 2017 recipient of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science – explains how key genes active early in life transform the embryo into a woman or a man, and that genes active later control how sex is expressed in physiology and behaviour.

There are many cultural and social factors involved in making a baby into a man or a woman. But biologically speaking, sex starts when you’re just a tiny group of cells in your mother’s uterus.

We have a pretty good general idea of how “maleness” or “femaleness” develops in a human embryo, and how this is translated into the capacity to make eggs or sperm.

We’re also beginning to understand how many other genes contribute to the amazing variation in human sexual development, behaviour and identity.

The early flexibility in this system is fascinating. It reminds me of author Hugh Lofting’s iconic Pushmi-pullyu (“push-me-pull-you”), a two-headed character in the Doctor Dolittle stories, who is in a tizz to decide which way to go.

Read more: X, Y and the genetics of sex: Professor Jenny Graves awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science 2017

Germ cells and gonads

Most cells in our bodies are destined to die. But set aside in an embryo are a few cells that retain their ability to become a whole person. These cells – called “primoridal germ cells” ultimately develop into sperm or eggs.

But they have a long journey to get there. About three weeks after conception, 50 primordial germ cells are set aside in membranes outside the embryo. They multiply and make an epic march into the embryo, moving right through the embryonic gut. These cells arrive in the embryonic gonads by six weeks.

Later they receive signals that direct them to become sperm (that are made in their billions throughout the life of a man), or to become the 20,000 eggs a girl is born with.

Eggs and sperm are unique in that each has half the number of chromosomes as other cells. People have two copies of the human genome in every body cell, one from mum and one from dad. Germ cells need to cut this back to a single genome which is a mixture of the two parents’ genes. This is accomplished by a clever type of cell division called “meiosis” in which the 46 chromosomes replicate once, but the cell divides twice.

The organs in which all this happens are gonads: testes in men, ovaries in women.

Gonads start off as a ridge of cells on either side of the backbone-to-be at about five weeks after conception. This “genital ridge” starts off the same in all embryos.

But in embryos destined to be boys, the genital ridge receives a signal called the “testis determining factor” at ten weeks after conception. This signal kick-starts development of testes and suppresses ovarian development.

If it doesn’t get the testis signal, the genital ridge waits a few more weeks, and becomes an ovary.

Then factors from the testis or ovary push the germ cells one way or the other, into developing as either sperm or eggs.

The gonads don’t just make sperm or eggs. They also pump out hormones that affect the whole development of the embryo. The embryonic testis makes testosterone which directs male development, fashioning a penis and scrotum. Estrogen has the opposite effect – supporting the development of female genitalia, and priming the future breasts.

What and where is the signal that initiates testes?

We know the signal that leads to testis development comes from sex chromosomes.

The human genome is cut up into 23 long DNA molecules that we see as chromosomes under the microscope. All babies have 22 pairs of ordinary chromosomes (one set of 22 from mum, and one set from dad).

But boys and girls differ in the 23rd pair of chromosomes: girls have two copies of a medium-sized chromosome called the X. Boys have a single X and a tiny chromosome called the Y. The names have nothing to do with their shapes but reflect the mystery of their difference (“X” for unknown).

At meiosis in the testis, the X and Y chromosomes get segregated into different sperm – 50% of sperm will carry an X, 50% a Y. All eggs have a single X chromosome.

So on fertilisation, half the embryos start off with XX, and half with XY sex chromosomes.

Read more: Sex, genes, the Y chromosome and the future of men

We know that the Y bears the testis signal, because people with only a single X are female, and people with two X chromosomes and a Y are male.

So the signal must come from a gene on the Y chromosome. In 1990 the signal was pinpointed near the top of the Y chromosome. This section of the Y was present in males and absent in females who had only part of a Y chromosome.

A gene called SRY was identified in this little bit of Y. It was proved to be the “testis determining factor” by analysis of some girls who had a normal looking Y, but a mutant SRY, and by inserting SRY into an XX mouse embryo that developed as a male.

How does SRY work and what can go wrong?

Once the SRY gene was identified we all thought it would be just one or two steps between SRY and the activation of other genes that make a testis.

But it turns out there is a complex web of reactions controlled by at least 30 genes. Some promote testis development. Some promote ovary development. Some antagonise testis formation, others antagonise ovaries. It’s a real push-me-pull-you situation.

There are also genes (one example is DMRT1) that keep gonads on a clear pathway of development. If you knock such genes out, cells in the testis start behaving like ovary cells, or cells in the ovary start acting like testis.

But it doesn’t stop here. Remarkably, this one gene SRY, through its networks and hormonal influences, affects the activity of more than 6,500 genes (of our total 20,000) differently in men and women.

So males and females really are genetically very different both in the genes they have, and how active they are.

Read more: Differences between men and women are more than the sum of their genes

A mutation in any one of the 30 genes involved in the complex web of gonad-differentiating reactions can lead to sex reversal (XY females or XX males), or incomplete gonad differentiation. For instance, some females have a Y chromosome and an intact SRY gene, but lack the protein that receives signals from male hormones.

And some XY females are missing a bit of chromosome 4 that contains the gene DMRT1: you need two copies of this gene to be male, even with an SRY gene.

Other genes control sex characters

There are hundreds of genes needed to make sperm. Some lie on the Y chromosome near SRY, but others are on the X or scattered throughout the genome (but active only in males). The same is probably true of making eggs.

There are also many other genes involved in sexual differentiation, making organs like penises and breasts.

Some gene variants are involved in choice of sexual partner. There are probably hundreds of so-called “gay genes” that I have suggested are really “male-loving” genes, and there may also be hundreds of “female-loving” genes. These gene variants are common because in the other sex they express as especially male-loving females and female-loving males, who seem to mate earlier and have more children.

Read more: Born this way? An evolutionary view of ‘gay genes’

I think the same may be true of genes that affect gender identity. Gene variants that promote a strong male identity might not always go along with a Y chromosome, and genes that promote a female identity may be incongruously partnered with a male-determining Y. Transgender identity may be common because, like “gay genes’, such gene variants would be strongly selected in the other sex – women with a strong female identity and males with a strong male identity might mate more enthusiastically and have more offspring.

It is extraordinary that something so fundamental and critical for species survival as sex should be controlled by such a complicated and variable web of genes.

We have to thank evolution for providing us with such complexity, and learn to celebrate the fantastic variation that nature has ensured.

The winners of the 2018 Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science will be announced on October 17.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Wallace, ARC DECRA Fellow, Australian National University

It is an historic moment for Liberal Party women. Individual complaints of sexist bullying invariably end with the lone complainant being isolated and getting crunched.

But since the Liberal leadership spill, several women have spoken out and two MPs, Julia Banks and Ann Sudmalis, have foreshadowed their exit from parliamentary politics over it. This post-#LibSpill moment holds immense promise – but only if the collective momentum is seized and built upon.

From Prime Minister Scott Morrison down, Liberal Party men are pushing back against women pressing for cultural change within the party. They don’t want to share power for ideological reasons: conservative men like women to know their place, and that place is not in the House of Representatives or the Senate. This ethos is intensifying as fringe and evangelical Christians make ever deeper inroads into Liberal Party branches and preselection processes.

Respected Liberal women like former Liberal Party vice-president Tricia Worth and former Liberal senator Sue Boyce have poured scorn on the internal party mechanisms proposed so far to deal with the problem. They point out the implausibility, for example, of making a bullying complaint to Victorian Liberal Party president Michael Kroger who denies such bullying exists.

Read more: A ‘woman problem’? No, the Liberals have a ‘man problem’, and they need to fix it

Liberal Party women face an immediate choice. They can be cowed by the “quota girl” sledge of hostile male colleagues, and other unsupportive comments by these men’s female enablers such as NSW Liberal Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells.

Alternatively, Liberal women can organise to achieve structural change – the only kind that ever sticks – arguing that if it’s good enough for “quota boys” like Senator Abetz and Michael McCormack, quotas are all right by them too.

Practical politics runs on quotas. They are the tool of last resort when dominant powers refuse to share power fairly or could refuse to in the future. They work.

The most striking example of a quota in Australian politics is that underpinning Federation. The Australian colonies would not agree to federate without agreement to an upper house in which each state, even the smallest, was represented by the same number of senators as the biggest.

That’s why NSW, with a population of 7.9 million, and Tasmania, with a population of 524,000, both send 12 senators to Canberra every election. This makes the ranking Tasmanian Liberal Senator Eric Abetz arguably the biggest beneficiary of quotas currently in the federal parliament.

There are 76 senators. Would anyone seriously suggest that on merit Eric Abetz would make the list of the top 76 Australians elected as senators in Australia’s upper house if they were elected in a single nationwide ballot? The state-based quota system established at Federation ensures he gets there.

The next most striking example is the quota agreement that enables Australia’s two main conservative parties to form government in coalition, since each usually returns too few MPs at federal elections to govern in its own right.

The National Party’s price for supporting the Liberals in forming government is a quota of ministerial positions reserved for National Party MPs, along with the deputy prime ministership. This quota arrangement today underpins the cabinet position and deputy prime ministership of National Party leader Michael McCormack. Does anyone really believe that without this quota McCormack would have naturally risen to become Australia’s second most senior politician? Of course not.

The third most striking example of quotas in Australian politics is their use by the Australian Labor Party to normalise the presence of women in progressive parliamentary politics. Attempts to establish quotas in the early 1980s, backed by then Labor opposition leader Bill Hayden, foundered when ALP conference delegates, including many women, voted them down on factional lines. It was not until 1994 that an enforceable formula guaranteeing women preselection in one-third of winnable seats was established.

In her memoir Catching the Waves, Hawke Government cabinet minister Susan Ryan wrote:

These rules are bitterly resented by many men in the Party, and when they favour a woman from the wrong faction they upset some women as well.

Quotas are “a blunt tool”, Ryan readily conceded, but she supported them after experience showed nothing else could “change the gender balance among Labor members of parliament”. It worked. Labor now has a critical mass of women in caucus making a big contribution, their presence normalised and unremarked on except by misogynistic conservatives across the aisle.

People don’t have to like quotas. But no reasonable person can fail to accept that they are a regular part of political life, not the intrusive tool of progressive pinot noir drinkers pushing their own political barrows. Hundreds of examples beyond Australia’s shores could be cited, but here are just a few.

The United States has a quota of two senators from every state in its upper house, the inspiration for Australia’s state senate quotas. Conservative German chancellor Angela Merkel legislated board quotas for women when German business proved intractable in voluntarily improving board diversity. Singapore set racial quotas in public housing, reflecting the ethnic makeup of the country’s population, in the interests of racial harmony.

Quotas, in short, are management tools to ensure power-sharing where it would not otherwise occur in the interests of a greater good – and they’re used by progressives and conservatives alike. No-one could accuse Angela Merkel or the Singaporean government of being subversive left-wing entities. It has been estimated that half the countries in the world use some kind of gender quota in their electoral system and there is extensive evidence that they work.

Read more: View from The Hill: Morrison’s challenge with women goes beyond simple numbers

There is high level support from Labor for Liberal women to tackle the problem and succeed in the interests of improving Australia’s political culture overall. Labor Senate leader, Penny Wong, told parliament this week that the under-representation of women in the Liberal party room is “not only bad for women, and bad for the Liberal Party, it is bad for democracy”. She urged Liberals to walk the same difficult road to establishing quotas that so successfully fixed what had also been a chronic problem for Labor.

Failure to push on to embrace and establish quotas will see the current burst of bravery by Liberal women dissipate, and the male oligopoly in the Coalition party room become even more entrenched.

Advocates could impress on internal opponents that the only winner from the current extreme and worsening masculinist culture in the Liberal Party will be Labor, whose caucus since quotas for women in winnable seats were adopted has increasingly reflected the communities it represents – something voters very much like and ultimately reward.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Belinda Townsend, Research Fellow, NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in the Social Determinants of Health Equity, School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University

The United States’ withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership and the recent US-China tariff wars have flamed concerns that international trade is becoming unstable.

Trade talks between Australia and the European Union – Australia’s second-largest trading partner – launched in June this year to much fanfare. They’re being promoted as a way to overcome some of the international uncertainty around trade.

But negotiating with the EU means Australia faces pressure once again to extend monopoly protection for foreign pharmaceutical companies. This could mean taxpayers end up paying high prices for medicines for longer.

Extending patents

The EU appears to be asking Australia to agree to extend patent terms, at least for some drugs, although it’s not yet clear for how long. This could mean Australia, through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), pays for more expensive brand-name pharmaceuticals for longer periods before cheaper, generic versions become available.

Read more: Health Check: how do generic medicines compare with the big brands?

The EU’s push is driven by claims that its pharmaceutical firms need longer periods of monopoly in countries like Australia to recoup the costs of developing new drugs before a competitor enters the market.

But the argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Two independent Australian reviews from 2013 and 2016 found no evidence monopolies needed to be extended to recoup development costs. In fact, the reviews found some evidence for reducing pharmaceutical monopolies in Australia.

Increasing costs

Evidence shows that extending monopolies can increase costs to taxpayers.

A 2011 study examined similar EU demands on Canada. It found generics would be delayed by 3.46 years on average, with an annual loss of C$811 million for every year of delayed generic entry. This would result in an additional C$2.8 billion in costs to taxpayers per year.

The EU demands for Australia include longer monopoly terms for medicines where clinical trials have been done with children. These demands would likely place further pressure on the costs of pharmaceuticals in Australia.

Reducing patent terms, in contrast, could elicit substantial savings.

An independent 2012-13 review of Australia’s pharmaceutical patent system found taxpayers would save A$244 million a year by reducing existing patent term extensions.

Data exclusivity

Another concerning EU proposal is for Australia to lengthen monopolies on clinical trial data, known as “data exclusivity”. This is a separate monopoly to a patent and can apply whether or not there is a valid patent on a medicine, and cannot be challenged in court.

During the period of data exclusivity, generic manufacturers can’t rely on the clinical trial data demonstrating the safety and efficacy of the original drug to gain marketing approval for their generic version.

The problem is that it is not only expensive for generic companies to duplicate the trials, it’s also unethical to conduct placebo trials when the outcome is known.

So the EU push for Australia to increase its current period of data exclusivity for medicines from five to eight years (plus an additional two to three years before generics can be placed on the market) will be particularly controversial.

The result is a likely delay to the market entry of generics.

Read more: How trade agreements are locking in a broken patent system

An Oxfam study in Jordan found data exclusivity contributed to “significant delays” in generic entry of 79% of medicines examined. These delays result in paying high prices for longer.

A US study found market exclusivity periods for just three drugs cost Medicaid US$1.5 billion in 2000–2004 alone.

Read more: Explainer: what are biologics and biosimilars?

High price for ‘biologics’ without ‘biosimilars’

“Biologics” are newer and often more expensive medicines produced through biological processes and include treatments for cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. The EU’s definition of medicinal products seems to include biologics so they would be subject to the same expanded monopoly protection.

The complexity of biologics and the way they are made means generics (exact copies) are not possible, but “biosimilars”, which have the same effects in the body, can often be made. Delays in access to less expensive biosimilars could mean a greater proportion of Australia’s health funding is siphoned off to buy costly medicines, leaving fewer resources for other key health needs.

Our study of the cost of biologic drugs in Australia found taxpayers spent more than A$2 billion through the PBS in the year 2015-2016 alone. We also found PBS spending on biologics could be reduced by as much as 24% through the timely availability of biosimilars.

Fortunately, Australia and remaining TPP parties agreed to suspend data exclusivity provisions in the final TPP negotiations after the US withdrew from the agreement.

Read more: Time for costly medicine monopolies to go from TPP trade talks

The task now is for Australia to hold out on extending pharmaceutical monopolies in trade talks with the EU. The economic evidence is on our side, and the stakes too high.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Booth, Professor of Marine Ecology, University of Technology Sydney

The New South Wales government’s decision to back away from establishing no-fishing zones in waters around Sydney leaves significant question marks over the plan, which is open for public consultation until September 27.

Fisheries Minister Niall Blair explained the apparent backflip by saying he was “confident that fishing is not the key threat to the sustainability of our marine environment”, after receiving what he described as “robust” feedback from local communities and anglers.

The originally proposed Sydney Marine Park comprised 17 “sanctuary zones” (totalling 2.4% of the area, including estuaries), 3 “conservation zones” totalling 2.6%, and 21 “special purpose zones”, which would allow (and in some cases protect) fishing.

Sanctuary zones allow no fishing; conservation zones allow taking of lobster and abalone (see below); and special purpose zones have a range of restrictions or allowances, not necessarily of any conservation benefit. For instance, four offshore artificial reefs are classed as special purpose zones.

The plans cover the waters around Sydney, stretching from Newcastle in the north to Wollongong in the south. Formally known as the Hawkesbury Shelf marine bioregion, it is the only bioregion wholly in NSW that does not have a marine park. This is despite Sydney’s magnificent array of underwater and coastal habitats, which are home to more fish species than the entire British Isles.

Read more: Recreational fishing in marine parks: you can’t be serious!

New zones and ranked threats

The original marine park proposal was far from ideal. A good marine park should have a string of closely connected sanctuary zones, but there was a large gap from southern Sydney to Wollongong where no sanctuary zones were proposed.

Instead, there was a new “conservation zone” to allow fishing for lobster and abalone. Yet lobster in particular are important to this ecosystem, because they protect kelp by preying on sea urchins.

The NSW government based its earlier proposal on a principle called TARA, short for “threat and risk assessment”, in which all perceived factors are ranked according to their environmental, social and economic outcomes.

While other major threats such as climate change and pollution are ranked highly, fishing doesn’t appear until number 18 on the government’s list (see page 8 here. One reason for this is that fishing is split into eight categories (such as “recreational fishing by boat – line and trap”), masking its overall impact. Even 4WDs on beaches are ranked as a greater threat to the environment than many types of fishing.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s press release about the marine park public consultation didn’t mention the environmental threat posed by fishing at all. Yet there is clear evidence that fishing directly harms fish stocks.

One recent study shows that stocks of inshore fish species have declined in Australia by 30% in a decade, except in sanctuary zones. Worldwide, sanctuary zones (also called no-take zones) have been shown to help fish grow larger and more abundant. And recent studies in NSW coastal waters have reiterated the benefits of no-take zones for species such as morwong, bream, and snapper.

Partial protection doesn’t work

The latest proposals, which would allow recreational but not commercial fishing, would be much less effective than full protection. One recent study suggested that partial protection is no better than no protection at all.

According to a NSW government estimate, recreational fishing removes more than 3 million fish, crustaceans and molluscs from NSW coastal waters every year. But marine parks are primarily about conservation, and this requires us to face some stark realities. With more than 8 million people likely to call Sydney home in the next 40 years, pressures on our coasts will only increase.

Sanctuary zones are one of the best available conservation tools to guard against these impacts. These zones have also been shown to make wildlife more resilient to climate change.

Even before the government’s decision to rescind the proposed sanctuary zones, the original plan for no-take zones to cover just 2.4% of the region was a severe compromise. By comparison, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park has 30% sanctuary zone coverage, and the rest of NSW has 7-8%. International best practice recommends at least 20%, and even the Commonwealth Marine Reserves Management Plan offers 6% no-take coverage.

But now, with no sanctuary zones, Sydney’s proposed “marine park” is not worthy of the name.

Wrong priorities

A peculiar contradiction is that despite one-quarter of the listed threats being fishing-related, the NSW government’s marine estate management strategy includes an initiative to encourage fishing. Pollution is also a high-priority threat, and fishing is the largest source of subtidal debris.

If local-level threats such as fishing and litter are not dealt with, resilience to climate change suffers as a result. We must tackle all threats – overfishing, pollution, climate change – and not shy away from one because it’s politically unpalatable.

Read more: Marine parks for fish and people: here’s how to do it

It is frustrating that the NSW government has opted to abolish these marine sanctuaries before the public consultation was complete. The wider public understands the value of sanctuary zones, as indicated in recent opinion polls showing clear support for the original plans among Sydneysiders – even many of those who fish.

Some fishers are now calling for sanctuary zones to be scrapped or wound back in other iconic NSW marine parks, such as Lord Howe Island and Solitary Islands. This move would be a defiance of the science. The evidence shows that sanctuary zones are essential for restoring and preserving our marine estate for future generations.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Neil Sipe, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, The University of Queensland

As urban planners, we have not been good at integrating land uses, such as homes, shops and offices, with our transport infrastructure. Thus many people find the nearest train or bus stop is too far too walk and too close to drive (even if they could be sure of finding parking). This has created what is commonly known as the “last mile” problem.

In some Australian cities, hilliness and hot summers add to this problem. The consequences for people’s work commute are obvious. In the end, many people find it’s simplest to drive to and from work.

Over the past 12 months, something new has been promoted as the solution to the last mile problem. Shared e-scooters are reportedly on their way to Australia. Powered by a rechargeable battery, these are dockless, have a range of 20-60 kilometres per charge and a top speed of 24 kilometres per hour.

Read more: Don’t ignore the mobility scooter. It may just be the future of transport

Businesses on the move

The two main e-scooter companies, Lime and Bird, have attracted the most interest. Several other smaller companies have entered the e-scooter market this year, including Scoot, Skip and Spin.

While both are new ventures, Bird and Lime have raised considerable funding in a short time.

Bird, founded by a former Uber executive late last year, has a market valuation of US$2 billion after raising US$400 million in venture capital over the past four months. Bird has e-scooters in 74 US cities, Windsor (Canada), Tel Aviv and Paris, as well as on 22 university campuses.

Lime was founded in January 2017 as a bikeshare business, but has branched out to e-bikes and e-scooters in the past six months. It operates in 49 US cities and seven European cities, as well as on 20 university campuses, although e-scooters have not been deployed at all locations. A group of investors including Uber recently put US$335 million into Lime, which is valued at US$1.1 billion.

Some believe Uber will buy Lime as a step in its quest to build a multi-modal transport platform that provides car, bicycle and scooter sharing services.

Read more: Our new PM wants to ‘bust congestion’ – here are four ways he could do that

What’s the appeal of e-scooters?

Uber is interested in e-scooters and e-bicycles because many of its ridesharing trips are short ones that could be made by e-scooters.

If Uber could shift its short-distance passengers from cars to e-scooters, it would be able to use fewer drivers and reduce operating costs. The remaining drivers would be transporting passengers over longer distances for higher fares.

Shared e-scooters provide a number of advantages over shared e-bikes. The rider can stand up which, for office workers, means no wrinkling of clothes. The posture is also easier for women wearing skirts and dresses.

Scooters are also easier than bicycles to manoeuvre along narrow paths. In some places, e-scooters are not subject to helmet requirements (unlike bicycles).

How to avoid the fate of dockless bikes

E-scooters are not without some disadvantages. Because they are dockless, they tend to litter footpaths, parks and even rivers.

This is similar to the problems presented by dockless share bikes. A number of dockless bike share companies have been forced to withdraw services in Australia because of this.

Read more: Oh no, oBikes are leaving Melbourne! But this doesn’t mean bike sharing schemes are dead

Many communities lack appropriate means of regulating them. The question of whether e-scooters should be allowed on footpaths or only on roads and bike paths remains unanswered. (Given that they have a top speed of 24km/h, e-scooters travelling on footpaths pose a safety concern.)

Lime and Bird have tried to deal with these problems. For example, Bird has committed to a Save our Sidewalks (SOS) pledge and has encouraged other e-scooter share companies to do the same. The pledge has three components:

• daily pick-ups of e-scooters every evening and redeployment the next day
• responsible growth in the number of scooters deployed based on actual usage
• revenue sharing of US$1 per scooter per day with host cities for the purposes of building and maintaining bike lanes and promoting safe riding.

Adopting an Uber idea, Lime pays for people to collect and charge the scooters each night.

While we have no e-scooter share systems in Australia yet, both Lime and Bird are reportedly looking to launch here soon. How will they fare? Are Australian cities prepared for them?

Read more: Electric scooters on collision course with pedestrians and lawmakers

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics and PLuS Alliance Fellow, UNSW

A little more than a decade on from the the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the largest bankruptcy in history, many of the world’s advanced economies are only now beginning to recover fully.

I was on the faculty at the University of Chicago at the time and, like many, followed the events of the 2008 US summer with a combination of interest and outright fear.

It is hard to describe how scary the two months around the Lehman bankruptcy were. Two anecdotes convey some of that fear, however.

The first was when I spoke to an economics official in the Obama administration who said: “Go get cash and bottled water. Automatic teller machines might not be working two days from now.”

Read more: Anniversary of Lehman’s collapse reminds us – booms are often followed by busts

The second reflects just how severely money markets froze up. Goldman Sachs – Wall Street’s most venerable firm – was largely on the good side of trades on credit default swaps, the instruments behind much of the crisis. Yet its stock price was utterly hammered. It wasn’t until legendary investor Warren Buffett sank US$5 billion into Goldman that confidence was restored.

On one day Goldman stock was down by a staggering nearly 50% in intra-day trading. It very nearly went the way of Lehman – all because of what amounted to a modern-day bank run.

The Obama administration responded with spending (including on tax rebates for households and firms), big interest rate cuts and measures to ensure banks had access to funds. Combined, these helped avoid a repeat of the Great Depression.

When Australia splashed cash

Australia, too, spent big: A$10 billion in October 2008 and a further A$42 billion in February 2009. More than half of the second sum, $A26 billion, went on infrastructure. Another $12.7 billion was spent on cash bonuses, including $900 for every Australian on less than $80,000.

And we cut interest rates, massively, and guaranteed bank deposits.

The International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and most good economists think what we did was essential to ensure Australia avoided a severe downturn.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his treasurer, Wayne Swan, deserve a lot of credit.

Yet there are those on the conservative side of politics who claim the stimulus spending was wasteful, not that helpful, and locked in an era of higher government spending.

Wasteful? Not really

As prime minister in 2016, Malcolm Turnbull encapsulated the view that the spending was a waste when he told the ABC’s Leigh Sales: “I think what shepherded Australia through the GFC successfully was the Chinese stimulus and the large amount of cash that John Howard left in the bank.”

Here’s what I think.

The Chinese stimulus helped, but China didn’t do it to help Australia. It did it to help itself, with a happy byproduct being continued demand for Australian resources.

Does Mr Turnbull really think the Chinese government was either mistaken (because stimulus spending doesn’t help) or benevolent (because it wanted to help Australia)? These are not terms normally associated with Beijing.

The “large amount of cash” left by the Howard government was indeed very important. It allowed the Rudd government to spend big without running up huge government debt. As the noted UC Berkeley economists Christina and David Romer have pointed out, using evidence from 24 advanced economies, fiscal and monetary policy “space” is important in ensuring the stimulus programs work.

Read more: Government spending explained in 10 charts; from Howard to Turnbull

So, yes, Howard’s debt-free budget was important, but only because it gave the government room to spend.

There is an important point here. Namely, that prudent fiscal management through ordinary times is essential in order to build up the firepower to respond in extraordinary times.

Australia still enjoys government debt to GDP that is low by OECD standards, but its growth has been very rapid even in post-crisis years because of the structural gap between government revenues and expenditures. Both sides of politics say they are committed to narrowing it. We shall see.

Space matters

“Space” to act with monetary policy (official interest rates) is also important.

It’s the basis for much of the talk about a “new monetary policy framework” that would lift interest rates from their present lows in Australia and overseas to around 5%. It’s a goal articulately and forcefully argued for by former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Getting there would give central banks the firepower they might need.

These lessons have been learned to varying degrees, but are now thankfully at least part of the mainstream debate.

And regulation

One thing that everyone should have learned from the financial crisis in general, and Lehman in particular, is the need for effective regulation of financial institutions.

The combination of massive leverage, opaque financial instruments and radical interconnectedness of financial firms in the US was a disaster waiting to happen.

In many ways it still could be.

Republicans in the US want to dramatically roll back the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act introduced by President Obama in response to the financial crisis.

Although far from perfect, it helped de-risk the US financial system.

In Australia the failings of financial regulators play out every day at the Hayne Royal Commission, in excruciating detail.

Read more: Royal commission scandals are the result of poor financial regulation, not literacy

It entitles us to ask if Australian regulators can’t prevent outright theft by financial institutions, how equipped are they to prevent more complicated transactions that might put the financial system at risk?

The answer is: not very.

We’ve learned some things

A decade after Lehman it’s fair to say we have learned lessons.

We know how to use big and bold fiscal (spending) policy and monetary (interest rate) policy to create a virtuous circle of beliefs that can pull us out of a downturn.

And we know that we need to reload both fiscal and monetary policy in the good times so we are ready for the bad times.

But on financial regulation the US might be about to go backwards, and we never really went forwards.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics, Monash University

This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky! You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

Why does English have so many different spelling rules? – Melania P, age 12, Strathfield.

English spelling has been evolving for over a thousand years and the muddle we’re in today is the fall-out of many different events that have taken place over this time.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do Aussies have a different accent to Canadians, Americans, British people and New Zealanders?

A bad start

It was a rocky beginning for English spelling. Quite simply, the 23-letter Roman alphabet has never been adequate — even Old English (spoken 450-110) had 35 or so sounds, and our sound system is now even bigger.

More spelling problems came in when French scribes introduced new spelling conventions — their own of course, and not always helpful. Using “c” instead of “s” for words like city was messy because “c” also represented the “k” sound in words like cat.

And then printing arrived in the 15th century — and with it more mess. William Caxton (who set up the presses in the first place) liked Dutch spellings and so established the “gh” in ghost and ghastly. Some printers were European and they introduced favourite spellings too from their own languages. Not terribly helpful either!

Those pesky silent letters

One of the biggest problems for English spelling has always been changes in pronunciation. Printing helped to stablise the spelling of words, but then some sounds changed their shape, and others even disappeared altogether. Think of those silent letters in words such as walk, through, write, right, sword, know, gnat — these were once pronounced.

If only the printer Caxton had been born a couple of centuries later, or if these sound changes had occurred a couple of centuries earlier, our spelling would be much truer to pronunciation.

And now comes another little wrinkle in this story – there’s a bunch of silent letters that were never actually pronounced. They appeared because of linguistic busybodies who wanted to make the language look more respectable. This caused some serious mess.

Take how we spell the word rhyme. When we swiped the word from French, it had a much more sensible look — rime. But this was changed to rhyme to give it a more classy classical look (like rhythm) – an interesting idea, but hardly helpful for someone trying to spell the word!

The 16th and 17th centuries saw many extra letters introduced in this way. Think of the “b” added to debt to make a link to Latin debitum. Now, the “b” might be justified in the word debit that we stole directly from Latin, but it was the French who gave us dette.

The “b” consonant was a mistake, and now we accuse poor old debt of having lost it through sloppy pronunciation!

Let’s make spelling more sensible

And so it is from this haphazard evolution that we end up with the spelling system we have.

But you know, there are in fact over 80% of words spelled according to regular patterns. So wholesale change is not what we want. However simple improvements could certainly be made without any major upheaval.

We could iron out inconsistencies such as humOUr versus humOrous. To introduce uniform -or spellings would be a painless reform (well, perhaps not painless, since many people are quite attached to the -our in words like humour)

We could also restore earlier spellings like rime and dette, and while we’re at it give psychology and philosophy a sensible look by spelling them sykology and filosofy.

So now, you can see the problem. No matter how silly spellings are, people get attached to them, and new spellings – even sensible ones – never seem to get a foot in the door.

Read more: Curious Kids: Who made the alphabet song?

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

Strawberries and hay have provided unlikely lenses for an insight into how Scott Morrison will conduct his prime ministership from now to the election.

The needles-in-the-berries contamination has been alarming for consumers and devastating for the industry. Anyone involved deserves the full force of the quite heavy penalties available, and the public should be encouraged to eat (with due care) this delicious fruit.

But when the government rolls out the Prime Minister, the Attorney-General, the Home Affairs Minister, the Australian Federal Police chief and the Border Force Commissioner, and then rushes new legislation through parliament in a single day – well, you know a political point is being made.

A serious crime was turned into a national crisis. MPs donned aprons grabbed knives and started slicing.

The legislation naturally received bipartisan support, with little discussion of whether the changes are actually needed. Its extremely hasty passage was despite the fact it won’t apply retrospectively to this criminal action.

As the strawberry crisis gripped the parliament, we’re reminded how rapidly a government can escalate an issue. In this case, the worst that could be said is that it’s an over-reaction with a political vibe. But you don’t need much imagination to think how a similar drama could be concocted with darker motives.

As for the hay: this was an announcement of liberalised rules for carting fodder so more could be sent faster to drought-affected farmers. Normally you’d expect a ministerial press release. Morrison turned it into a prime ministerial occasion, on Thursday being photographed climbing into a truck somewhere outside Canberra.

Earlier in the week, he’d called a “drought summit” for next month. Dealing with the drought has been one of his central themes, from his first news conference, followed by his interview on Australia All Over, and his visit to see things on the ground in Queensland.

These examples – and the very important one of the weekend announcement of a royal commission into aged care – show Morrison’s style. He will pick up and run with whatever is around – issues he sees as resonating with ordinary people.

“Scott likes to move quickly”, says a colleague. He’s not – if he can help it – going to get caught having to respond to others’ agendas. The royal commission was announced a day before the ABC’s aged care expose.

Morrison is also clearing away irritants as rapidly as possible. Thursday’s $4.6 billion decade-long package for private schools drew a line under the damaging row between the government and the vociferous Catholic sector. Negotiations have been underway for some time, but the deal’s now landed.

Read more: Government unfurls $4.6 billion private schools package, calming Catholic critics

Morrison won’t get bogged down in process. When he recently dumped the commitment to increasing the pension age to 70, he acted before the full cabinet had ratified what was a significant policy shift.

The new PM is tactically quicker than Malcolm Turnbull, just as in his messaging he can cut through with greater sharpness. He’s more attuned to the emotional and knee-jerk drivers of today’s politics, in the age of the continuous news cycle and social media. Malcolm liked to mull over moves.

He is also freer to act than his predecessor, who was hemmed in by enemies as well as allies of convenience, like Peter Dutton, who turned into enemies.

For the Liberals, Morrison is the end of the pre-election leadership line, and that gives him a good deal of latitude to set his own course. He might be displeasing the hard right Liberals by not exiting the Paris climate agreement, but he’s able to stare them down or fob them off. They know he’s in the seat until the election.

Defining your opponent can be critical in our semi-presidential elections. “The Prime Minister is a blank canvass”, says one Labor man. “Both sides are trying to fill in the colours”.

Morrison’s brush strokes on his own portrait are designed to create the image of a leader tuned to the voters’ concerns, rather than the “Canberra bubble”. If sometimes this makes his look more like the mayor of Albury than the prime minister of Australia – well, he just hopes it works. Like the latecomer desperately working the room, he knows he has practically no time.

In his one departure from pragmatism during these first prime ministerial weeks, Morrison has flagged he’s willing to stir the hornets’ nest of religious freedom. Although unclear about the problem, he told Sky on Monday “there’s nothing wrong with a bit of preventative regulation and legislation”. Especially given the time constraints, it’s hard to see that battle is worth the likely costs.

To highlight Morrison’s agility and hyper-activity is not to overlook the government’s parlous situation, with a sour electorate, a still-shocked backbench, divisions in the ranks, all sorts of trouble over the “women problem”, and the uncertainty of the Wentworth byelection.

Read more: View from The Hill: Morrison’s challenge with women goes beyond simple numbers

It’s rather to say, the way the game’s being played has changed. Labor is alert to this, wondering, for instance, whether Morrison will appeal to some of its male “battler” type voters.

The PM said in question time on Thursday that Bill Shorten “isn’t looking as certain as he was two weeks ago.” Despite the political bonuses being handed almost daily to Labor, this is probably true. The opposition is still seeking to get its fix on its new opponent.

However Morrison goes over coming months, this week should give the Liberals cause to reflect that they had a lucky escape when Dutton failed to get the numbers in the coup he started.

The Senate inquiry into the au pair affair, which reported on Wednesday, was dominated by Labor and the Greens, so it was always set to produce a majority report very critical of Dutton. Even allowing for that, a couple of things are clear from the facts of the two cases the inquiry examined.

In assisting these women, Dutton did go above and beyond what would normally have been expected – all stops were pulled out. And he did mislead parliament when he denied any personal connections.

In the case of the woman who landed in Brisbane, he had a past acquaintanceship (via their mutual police service) with her prospective employer.

Read more: Dutton back in spotlight after split Senate report on au pair affair

But misleading parliament is no longer taken seriously. Morrison’s certainly not going to worry that his Home Affairs Minister – who has oversight of the independent agencies of the Australian Federal Police and ASIO – did not tell parliament the truth. Canberra bubble and all that.

Anyway, Morrison has a lot to thank Dutton for. After all, Dutton delivered him the prime ministership.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo McDonald, Director, Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, University of Western Australia

New evidence shows that people have lived inland in Western Australia for more than 50,000 years. That’s 10,000 years earlier than previously known for Australian deserts.

The finding comes from archaeological work performed at the request of the traditional custodians of the land, and published today in PLOS One.

The research took place at the desert rock shelter site of Karnatukul (previously known as Serpent’s Glen), around 800 kilometres southeast of Exmouth – more than 1,000km from where the coastline would have been at this earlier time.

Read more: When did Aboriginal people first arrive in Australia?

It shows that people occupied the sandy deserts of interior Australia very soon after settling the north of the continent more than 50,000 years ago.

The paper reports some of the earliest evidence of people living in deserts, not just in Australia, but anywhere in the world.

Excavations old and new

Karnatukul was first investigated by archaeologists in the 1990s. At that time it became known as the oldest Western Desert site, occupied at least 25,000 years ago.

Our current excavation was undertaken to better understand more recent occupation evidence. We were trying to understand pigment art that was produced at the site during the past 1,000 years.

As well as finding rich evidence for a range of activities in recent times, our investigation doubled the earliest known occupation dates for this site.

Charcoal associated with artefacts was recovered in two squares dug beneath the site’s main rock art panel. Both squares returned similar archaeological sequences – both with their earliest radiocarbon determinations hovering close to the radiocarbon technical dating barrier which is 50,000 years.

Early tool shows technological innovation

More than 25,000 stone artefacts were recovered from the current excavations of Karnatukul, along with pigments, charcoal from many hearths, and a small amount of animal remains – a glimpse into the diet of the site’s occupants. Most of these remains date to the last millennium.

But one of our significant finds shows these early desert peoples were technological innovators. An early backed microlith – a pointed tool with one sharp edge blunted with small flakes, called backing – was found in deposits dated to around 43,000 years ago. Such tools are used as either a spear barb or for processing wood and other organic materials.

This tool is at least 15,000 years older than other known Australian examples. Other specimens have been recovered from the arid zone in South Australia, dated to around 24,000 years ago.

Microscopic analysis of residues and working edges on this tool reveal it was fastened by resin to a composite implement (such as to a wooden handle) and it broke in that haft, presumably while being used.

These technological adaptations – backing and hafting – are much earlier than had been previously demonstrated in Australia.

These types of tools were produced in enormous quantities across most of southern and eastern Australia, in the recent past. Indeed, Karnatukul has a large collection (more than 50) of this tool type dating to the last millennium, when the site was used as a home base.

Adapting to a changed environment

It has been argued previously that these specialised tools became more common as a people responded to increased climatic volatility and less secure food resources, with an intensified El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) regime after 4,000 years ago.

These current findings support the notion that the First Australians adapted with ingenuity and flexibility as they quickly dispersed into every bioregion across the country.

For instance, evidence for the earliest ground-edged axe use in the world comes from the Kimberley.

The very early presence of people in the interior deserts of Australia, as well as their very early use of a backed microlith, changes how we understand the adaptive and technological sophistication of early Aboriginal peoples.

The arid zone has often been characterised as an extreme environment occupied only by transient dwellers. Several European explorers perished in their early attempts to explore and traverse Australia’s arid core.

Cultural connections to the land

The site is in the remote Carnarvon Ranges of the Western Desert. Known as Katjarra, these ranges are at the heart of Mungarlu Ngurrarankatja Rirraunkaja ngurra (country), in the Birriliburu Indigenous Protected Area (IPA). Located in the Little Sandy Desert, this remote IPA covers an area the size of Tasmania.

Katjarra is of very high cultural significance to its traditional custodians.

This archaeological evidence for the earliest desert peoples in Australia was found within 100m of the place where the Federal Court convened in 2008 for the Birriliburu Native Title Determination.

But the site is also only about 40km from the historic Canning Stock Route (CSR), a 1,800km track forged through the sandy deserts by Alfred Canning in 1906-07, reliant on numerous Aboriginal water sources, identified and named for for him by local Aboriginal people.

Because of the CSR, the Carnarvon Ranges have been at risk of unwitting damage from tourists – as modern desert crusaders travel this challenging and remote 4WD track. For example, many of the site’s surface grindstones – used for millennia to process seeds – have been collected and used by tourists to make camp fires, and there is graffiti where some travellers felt it necessary to add their names to rock features.

The Carnarvon Ranges are currently closed to unaccompanied tourists. The custodians have a responsibility for the safety of visitors on their country, intrinsically tied to the duty of ensuring that people do not unknowingly visit restricted and culturally powerful sites.

So the challenge now is how to protect this site of ancient occupation.

Read more: Time to honour a historical legend: 50 years since the discovery of Mungo Lady

The Birriliburu IPA has a management plan for this vast cultural and natural desert estate. Traditional Owners and younger rangers work in this IPA to care for country and to continue their long-held connections to this place.

Guided tours of this highly significant area with traditional custodians would ensure the protection of heritage places and visitors, as well as providing for sustainable tourism opportunities.

That way, people would still be able to experience a place that revolutionises our understanding of the first Australians who made one of the world’s driest continents their home.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Clark, Senior Research Associate in Ecology, UNSW

Millions of people all over the world rely on desalinated water. Closer to home, Australia has desalination plants in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, the Gold Coast, and many remote and regional locations.

But despite the growing size and number of desalination plants, the environmental impacts are little understood. Our six-year study, published recently in the journal Water Research, looked at the health the marine environment before, during and after the Sydney Desalination Plant was operating.

Read more: Fixing cities’ water crises could send our climate targets down the gurgler

Our research tested the effect of pumping and “diffusing” highly concentrated salt water (a byproduct of desalination) back into the ocean.

Contrary to our expectation that high salt levels would impact sea creatures, we found that ecological changes were largely confined to an area within 100m of the discharge point, and reduced shortly after the plant was turned off. We also found the changes were likely a result of strong currents created by the outfall jets, rather than high salinity.

Desalination is growing

We examined six underwater locations at about 25m depth over a six-year period during which the plant was under construction, then operating, and then idle. This let us rigorously monitor impacts to and recovery of marine life from the effects of pumping large volumes of hypersaline water back into the ocean. We tested for impacts and recovery at two distances (30m and 100m) from the outfall.

This study provides the first before-and-after test of ecological impacts of desalination brine on marine communities, and a rare insight into mechanisms behind the potential impacts of a growing form of human disturbance.

About 1% of the world’s population now depends on desalinated water for daily use, supplied by almost 20,000 desalination plants that produce more than 90 million cubic meters of water per day.

Increasingly frequent and severe water shortages are projected to accelerate the growth in desalination around the world. By 2025, more than 2.8 billion people in 48 countries are likely to experience water scarcity, with desalination expected to become an increasingly crucial water source for many coastal populations.

Effect of the diffusers

The diffusers that pump concentrated salt water into the ocean at a high velocity (to increase dilution) are so effective that salinity was almost at background levels within 100m of the outfall. However, the diffusion process increased the speed of currents close to the outfall.

This strong current affects species differently, depending on how they settle and feed. Marine species with strong swimming larvae, such as barnacles, can easily settle in high flow and then benefit from faster delivery of food particles. These animals increased in number and size near the outfall. In contrast, species with slow swimming larvae, such as tubeworms, lace corals and sponges, prefer settling and feeding in low current and became less abundant near the outfall.

Therefore, the high-pressure diffusers designed to reduce hypersalinity may have inadvertently caused impacts due to flow. However, these ecological changes may be less concerning than those caused by hypersalinity, as the currents were still within the range that marine communities experience naturally.

Our findings are important, because as drought conditions around the nation worsen and domestic water supplies are coming under strain, desalination is starting to ramp up in eastern and southern Australia.

For instance, water levels at Sydney’s primary dam at Warragamba have dropped to around 65% and the desalination plant is contracted to start supplying drinking water back into the system when dam levels fall below 60%. This plant can potentially double in capacity if needed.

Read more: Melbourne’s desalination plant is just one part of drought-proofing water supply

There is a rapid expansion of the use of desalination, with global capacity increasing by 57% between 2008 and 2013. Our results will help designers and researchers in this area ensure desalination plants minimise their effect on local coastal systems.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Belgrave, Professor History, Massey University

The current Māori king, Te Arikinui Kiingi Tūheitia, in 2012.Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-ND

New Zealand’s Māori king, Te Arikinui Kiingi Tūheitia, recently celebrated 160 years since the installation of the first Māori monarch, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, at Ngāruawāhia on the Waikato River in 1858.

The movement to establish a Māori monarch, known as kīngitanga, emerged following colonisation to protect Māori land ownership and Māori constitutional autonomy. Since then, it has helped bring otherwise independent tribal communities together to protect their tribal identities and resources.

Read more: Strong sense of cultural identity drives boom in Māori business

Māori resistance

The fact that the movement survived to the present is remarkable in itself. George Grey, one of Queen Victoria’s most able consuls, famously declared in 1861:

I shall not fight against him with the sword, but I shall dig round him till he falls of his own accord.

When his digging failed, he dispatched an imperial army in 1863 to destroy King Pōtatau Tāwhiao, who had succeeded his father in 1860. Māori resistance was far more effective than the Europeans anticipated, but the king and his forces were pushed up the Waikato and Waipā rivers and around 900,000 acres of Māori land was confiscated.

Through war, confiscation, post-war poverty and continued land loss, the kīngitanga movement remained a focus for Māori resistance. In the 20th century, it provided the leadership to reach a number of settlements with the Crown, most significantly over confiscated Maori lands and the management of the Waikato River.

Origins of kīngitanga

The movement has its origins in the dramatic decades that followed the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which led to New Zealand becoming a British colony.

Determined to understand the European world, many Māori leaders rapidly adopted Christianity and literacy. From their appreciation of the Bible and European nationalism, leaders like Wiremu Tamihana promoted the election of a king as a way to protect Māori land ownership, retain constitutional authority over the Māori world and unite the country’s disparate, and often warring, tribal groups.

Europeans initially treated it as some form of childish imitation, but they underestimated the sophistication of the extended debates preceding Te Wherowhero’s election. The tribes that supported him agreed to give up authority over their land to prevent individual rangatira (chiefs) from selling plots and compromising the interests of others. This was unprecedented in Māori tradition. And it worked.

Supported largely by tribes descended from those arriving on the Tainui canoe (one of many which had initially colonised New Zealand), the movement effectively halted land sales by its supporters. It also began to be taken far more seriously in 1860, when some of its members joined Taranaki iwi (tribes) in resisting the military force used to complete a highly disputed land purchase. By July 1863, invasion was the colonial government’s preferred method to contain it.

Despite its losses, the kīngitanga was not defeated and certainly not destroyed. For 20 years following the final battle in April 1864 at Orakau, the king ruled an independent sovereign state in the centre of the North Island. There were no colonial police or military and no courts, roads, surveyors or schools. Europeans ventured into the King Country (Rohe Pōtae) at their own risk.

Main trunk line diplomacy

During the late 1870s, the colonial government needed access to the area to build the main trunk railway. This forced it into diplomatic negotiations with King Tāwhiao, as if he was an independent monarch.

He appealed to European public opinion, with a series of triumphal royal tours across the Waikato and Auckland. In 1884, he went to London to push the British government to recognise Māori grievances. He was the hit of the season there, entertained by the rich and the powerful, and a frequent visitor to the royal boxes of the London theatre.

However, in the end, despite his protests, he had to accept the opening up of the King Country, without achieving the return of the confiscated land.

Through these decades, colonial officials confidently predicted the kīngitanga’s collapse. But it proved surprisingly resilient. Tāwhiao transformed it into a peaceful resistance movement and made it a focus for supporting the material and spiritual needs of its followers.

The movement faced hard times at the beginning of the 20th century, but was revitalised by Te Puea Herangi, who led the movement from behind the throne. She reached an accommodation with the government, and gave the movement new stability and confidence heading in the future.

During the first world war, the movement boycotted the war effort and resisted the conscription of its young men. After the war, a Royal Commission blamed Grey and his government for the land confiscations, and eventually parliament provided an annual compensation payment, but one that fell far short of even the limited recommendations of the commission.

After the second world war, the Tainui Māori Trust Board, set up to administer the settlement funds, gave the movement some degree of financial stability until the annual payments were made largely worthless by galloping inflation during the 1970s. By then, urbanisation and a Māori renaissance provided greater opportunities to promote Māori cultural revival, and once again negotiate a settlement with the government.

Success brings challenges

Waikato, the iwi (tribe) most affected by land confiscations, negotiated a Treaty of Waitangi settlement in 1995. Queen Elizabeth II also personally apologised for the way the iwi had been treated during the 1860s.

In the mid-19th century, Waikato had exported a substantial agricultural surplus to Australia and beyond through the port of Auckland. The NZ$170m settlement aimed to reinstate the tribe as an economic force south of Auckland, and it has been largely successful.

But Waikato were only one of the constituent iwi (tribes) of the kīngitanga. Separate settlements have been reached with other tribes, and will continue.

Success has brought its own challenges. After some initial hiccups, Waikato have dramatically increased their assets to over NZ$1.2 billion. But the kīngitanga has to reconcile its new corporate identity with the relative poverty and disadvantage of a substantial proportion of its members.

A corporate leadership, centred on the king, has created fears at the community level that local hapū (sub-tribal groups) interests may be sacrificed for larger business objectives.

Some of the salaries paid to leading administrators heighten such fears. Settlement resources can be used to reinvigorate the cultural life of a tribal group, but the funding cannot dramatically change the economic status of its members. There’s just not enough money. Nonetheless, having real resources creates novel problems for a movement that has been impoverished for most of its history.

Other tensions are not new. Despite uniting under a king, the constituent tribes remain fiercely independent. As these iwi develop their own strategies and build up their own capital, the role of the kīngitanga will change.

That it is here at all is a testament to its ability in the past to work through these tensions and to remake itself.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Trevor Jones, Lecturer in Musical Theatre, Griffith University

Review: En Masse, Brisbane Festival

According to their artistic director, Yaron Lifschitz, Circa’s En Masse “speaks of fresh starts and old endings, of violence and tenderness, of groups and individuals, of destruction and abundant hope”. This world premiere, as part of the Brisbane Festival, presents these paradoxes to create a work that defies genre and challenges theatrical possibilities.

The first act, titled Endings, combines songs from Austrian composer Franz Schubert’s late song cycles Die Winterreise (The Winter’s Journey) and Schwanengesang (Swansong) with industrial and electronic compositions by Klara Lewis.

Read more: Decoding the music masterpieces: Schubert’s Winterreise

En Masse opens with a projected quote, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (from Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci). The set of the first act is dominated by a large plastic scrim and, subsequently, a translucent plastic cube containing the performers. This cube deflates later in the piece creating a sense of entrapment and claustrophobia that the performers fight against.

The Schubert songs, including Ständchen, Gute Nacht and Der Doppelgänger, are performed with magnificent control and an astonishing range of dynamics by English tenor Robert Murray and pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska. Murray’s soft singing is particularly ravishing.

He is dressed as a vagabond-type character who mostly observes the cataclysmic activity of the acrobats around him, although the occasional interaction with the other performers provides some very moving moments. There seem to be subtle references here to the Wanderer of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle and to the Winter’s Journey of Schubert’s protagonist and he becomes an outsider to the events around him.

Read more: Explainer: Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen

At times, there is a slight disconnect between the frantic movements of the performers and the serenity of the Schubert songs, although this contrast also provides interesting theatrical conflict. Similarly, the contrast between Lewis’ industrial compositions and Schubert’s songs is effective but raises questions of cohesion.

The acrobatic movements of the first act feature extreme writhing, twitching and contortion as the performers fight the end of the world. The ensemble work ranges through duos, trios, solos and group pieces and is sometimes violent and shocking, while also quite tender in contrasting moments.

The incredible physical control of the Circa acrobats, and their ability to make bodies seem weightless, is breathtaking. A particularly notable moment was when a tower of three men slowly toppled forward into a flawless roll. This performance has all of the jaw-dropping features of outstanding circus performance. Yet the theatrical elements and integration of music and narrative transcend these thrills to create arresting physical theatre that sits somewhere between ballet, contemporary dance and circus.

The second half, titled Beginnings, is absolutely the jewel in the crown of this programme. Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s masterwork, The Rite of Spring, originally composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s controversial Ballet Russes in 1913, is presented here in a piano duet version, played by renowned pianists Tamara-Anna Cislowska and Michael Kieran Harvey.

The musical performance of this work alone is extraordinary, with both pianists drawing an enormous range of colours from the score, at once evoking many of the familiar orchestral sounds of the piece while also celebrating the full range of timbral possibilities from the pianos. Particularly impressive was Harvey playing this complex piece from memory, no doubt made even more complex by the separation of the pianists across the stage of the Playhouse.

This first-ever circus setting of The Rite of Spring opens with the quote, “There is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (from German philosopher Walter Benjamin), and the movement certainly explores this theme. The entire ensemble of acrobats performs through most of the second half and a constant theme of rising and falling is evident in the staging, as well as images of circles and growth.

One particularly evocative image was a female performer ascending a “spiral staircase” of hands and bodies formed by the other performers, rising higher and higher as the music swelled. These acrobats constantly seem to defy gravity as the movements become progressively more frantic. Throughout this half, the music and movement is much more closely matched.

Comparisons could be drawn to Pina Bausch’s famous 1975 staging of Stravinsky’s masterpiece, although Lifschitz’ narrative diverges from the original while extending the possibilities of the range of movement possible in a work of this kind.

Special mention must also be made of the evocative lighting design by Yaron Lifschitz and Richard Clark and Libby McDonnell’s simple but effective costume design.

With En Masse, Circa have created a grand masterwork that challenges the boundaries of dance, theatre, music and circus to present a dystopian view of endings and beginnings.

En Masse is being staged as part of the Brisbane Festival until September 22.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Hodgson, Associate Professor, Curtin Law School and Curtin Business School, Curtin University

Women retire with embarrassingly little super compared to men.

In 2015-16 the typical (median) Australian woman retired with A$36,000. The typical male had A$110,000.

When presented as averages, the difference is less stark because a small number of big superannuation accounts push up the average. In 2015-16 the average woman left with A$157,050 compared to A$270,710 for the average man.

On Wednesday the federal Labor Party announced four measures designed to help. In government it would:

• pay superannuation on behalf of people receiving Commonwealth Parental Leave Pay, including dad and partner pay

• phase in a requirement for employers to pay superannuation for workers earning less than A$450 a month

• publish a gender impact statement examining any future changes to superannuation laws

• make it easier for employers to pay extra super into the accounts of women.

The measures ought to be familiar. Each was recommended by the report of a 2016 Senate inquiry entitled A Husband Is Not a Retirement Plan.

In a response tabled last month, the government merely noted the first three and gave qualified support to the fourth: amending the Sex Discrimination Act to put beyond doubt employers’ ability to pay more into women’s super accounts than men’s.

Flawed by design

The measures attempt to address, but cannot overcome, super’s fundamental flaw. Because the system is based on the income workers get while working, and because women, on average, get less than men, they get less super than men.

They interrupt their careers to have children and are far more likely than men to work part-time to care for those children.

Super in maternity leave is a start

When the Productivity Commission recommended government-provided paid parental leave in 2009, it also recommended that super form part of that payment, although it suggested delaying that part of the measure for three years.

Read more: Paid parental leave plan ignores economics of well-functioning families

Three years on, nothing happened, although the then opposition leader, Tony Abbott, announced that super contributions would be paid with maternity leave in the 2013 iteration of his parental leave policy.

Paid parental leave is intended to compensate for the income parents lose in the months immediately after childbirth, so it is only fair that it should extend to all forms of income.

Extending super to low earners could help

At present employers are not required to pay super on wages of less than $450 a month. This is an outdated concession that goes back to the beginning of compulsory super in the early 1990s.

The labour market has changed significantly since then. Jobs have become less secure and many women hold down several part-time jobs to make ends meet.

It is true, as the Productivity Commission has pointed out, that small accounts are eroded through fees. Low earners moving from job to job often find themselves with many of them.

Read more: Superannuation is still mired in the same old issues, and no one is going to fix your nest egg but you

But technology is evolving to address the issue by allowing people to track and consolidate their accounts. The industry funds intend to automatically consolidate industry funds, unless members opt out.

Although the extra amounts a worker would receive if the A$450 per month floor was removed are small, over a lifetime of multiple jobs these payments could add up.

There is a risk that with very little underlying wage pressure, employers of low-wage workers would hand out even lower wage rises in order to find the money for the super payments. It would be up to the legislation, and the Fair Work Commission, to make sure that did not happen.

And sunlight could help

Labor’s third promise is transparency. The effect of budget proposals on women is not always obvious, as the Grattan Institute discovered in 2016 when it noted a measure introduced to help women and carers in fact benefited men with high incomes.

For three decades from 1984 to 2013 the Australian government published an annual Women’s Budget Statement to make explicit the effect of each budget on women.

The practice ended with the first Abbott budget in 2014. Since that time the National Foundation for Australian Women has been trying to fill the gap by publishing its own Gender Lens on the Budget.

As could top-ups for women

Labor’s final promise is to put beyond doubt the acceptability of employers paying higher rates of super to women than men. Some are already doing it. In an example cited by the Human Rights Commission as best practice, Rice Warner Actuaries has found a way to pay its female employees more than men without breaching anti-discrimination laws.

These sort of measures will help, so long as they don’t reduce the take-home pay of women without their consent.

But these measures are not enough

It is impossible to talk about super without talking about the excessive fees identified by the Productivity Commission and exposed in the Financial Services Royal Commission.

The federal government has announced legislation to protect low-balance accounts from excessive fees and insurance costs. When launching its policy package, Labor said it would work constructively in the same direction.

We also need to pay women more. Although the gender pay gap is narrowing, we won’t come anywhere near bridging the superannuation gap until we close the gap that lies behind it.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Phillips, Director of IMPACCT, Professor of Palliative Nursing, University of Technology Sydney

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety is one of more than 20 such inquiries into aged care stemming back to 1997. This latest inquiry, announced on Sunday, will no doubt highlight the systemic problems that have been previously reported.

The Australian aged care sector is one of the most highly regulated complex care environments. It would be fair to say the sector has been working on establishing an optimal care model for the past two decades that is more consumer focused.

Older Australians and their families need to know the facility they have chosen will provide safe, high quality, person-centred care that is grounded in respect, comfort and dignity. However, as revealed on Four Corners on Monday night, this is not always the case. Many stories that were shared reflect wider systems failures, which have been highlighted in the numerous inquiries that have preceded this royal commission.

Read more: Looking for a nursing home place for your parent with dementia? Here’s what to consider

What have previous reviews found?

The sector receives significant funding. In 2017, it received A$11.4 billion in government funding and generated A$21.5 billion in revenue, or A$263.92 per resident per day. It’s estimated care subsidies make up 70% of provider revenue.

The 2017, Aged Care Funding Instrument Review was prompted by the rapid growth in the aged care subsidy budget. Many residential aged care organisations continue to complain about the constraints on care funding that came about from this 2017 review, which limits their capacity to employ staff. Yet some of the 949 providers do manage to provide high quality care within the current funding envelope.

The bulk of care provided by Australia’s 366,000 aged care workers continues to be delivered by unskilled workers. These carers make up 75% of the workforce and have limited training. They are supervised by a small number of registered nurses.

This workforce structure belies the significant medical, nursing and social needs of older Australians living in residential aged care. These concerns were expressed during the senate inquiry held prior to the introduction of the 1997 Commonwealth Aged Care Act.

It was predicted that the removal of the registered nurse to resident ratio would lead to compromised care through deskilling and under-staffing, and that the accreditation process would do little to prevent this from occurring.

The sector has undergone significant reform since the 2011 Productivity Commission report Caring for Older Australians. In 2013, the “Living Longer Living Better” Act was introduced to address many of the recommendations in this report, including increased focus on consumer choice and control and additional funding to increase wages within the aged care sector.

In 2017, the Living Longer Living Better Act was also the subject of a review to assess progress of the first phase of reform and the pathway ahead.

Read more: Australia’s aged care residents are very sick, yet the government doesn’t prioritise medical care

In 2012, a new review – Australian Skills Quality Authority: The training for aged and community care in Australia – identified a number of aged care workforce training gaps. Namely, that carer training programs were too short and there was insufficient time for supervised practical experience to foster skill development.

Registered training organisations delivering high-quality training programs also faced unfair competition from those offering cheap and unrealistically short training programs. A range of compliance issues were identified that had an adverse impact on carer capabilities.

Since then, the 2017 Review of National Aged Care Quality Regulatory Processes has highlighted the need to improve the quality of care and strengthen institutional governance. Meanwhile, the 2017 Aged Care Workforce Strategy Taskforce was convened to address these gaps and to boost workforce supply in residential aged care.

Will the royal commission be any different?

There is no shortage of reviews into aged care, and they all provide rich data to draw on. Royal commissions are good at enabling people’s stories to be heard and evaluated. They are also good at eliciting a broader body of evidence and gaining political and public attention.

Read more: How our residential aged-care system doesn’t care about older people’s emotional needs

But recommendations from previous reviews into aged care have not always been acted on. This may be because they have been conducted to only look at one aspect of the sector, when in reality, aged care financing, regulation, quality of care and workforce planning are all necessary elements in providing high quality aged care.

It’s important this royal commission takes an in-depth examination of all elements underpinning quality care. It will also need to have the scope to make recommendations that go beyond changes to the regulation of safety and quality and the governance of the regulator.

The commission needs to be designed in such a way that consumer choice and control in aged care can be improved. Services need to meet individuals’ needs in a way that is affordable for consumers and sustainable for taxpayers.

And the commission’s terms of reference need to be carefully framed so the recommended reforms improve the quality of life and well-being of the 200,000 older Australians who currently live in residential aged care.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Hamer, Professor of Evidence Law, University of Sydney

Last week, the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal added another chapter to a decades-long story of injustice for the Indigenous community of Bowraville.

The court ruled that a man should not be retried for the murders of two children, putting obstacles in the path of his prosecution for a third child murder.

Background of the case

Between September 1990 and January 1991, three Indigenous children – Colleen Walker, Evelyn Greenup and Clinton Speedy – disappeared from Bowraville township on the mid-north coast of NSW.

When the families reported the disappearances, local police suggested Colleen had gone “walkabout” and were slow to even file a missing person’s report on Evelyn.

After Clinton’s disappearance, an inexperienced detective was appointed to lead the investigation. In the following weeks, Clinton’s remains and then Evelyn’s remains were found nearby. Both had suffered penetrating injuries to their skulls. Colleen Walker’s body has never been found.

Read more: Truth to power: how podcasts are getting political

In time, a man was charged with the murders of Clinton and Evelyn, but potential evidence had been lost as a result of the delayed and flawed investigation. The man, known in court documents as XX, cannot be named for legal reasons.

The prosecution sought to have the two murder charges heard together, relying on similarities between them, and the improbability of XX being innocently implicated in both. However, the trial judge held that similar fact evidence was inadmissible and ordered separate trials.

XX was acquitted of Clinton’s murder in 1994. Despite a thorough police reinvestigation, he was also acquitted of Evelyn’s murder in 2006.

Double jeopardy exemption

NSW is among the states with laws preventing double jeopardy, which means further prosecutions of XX would be barred. But giving greater weight to the interests of victims and the community, exceptions to double jeopardy protection were introduced into the Crimes (Appeal and Review) Act 2001 (NSW) in 2006.

The families of the Bowraville children have also been unrelenting in their efforts to achieve justice. Their cause was boosted by a Four Corners investigation in 2004 and, later, Dan Box’s true-crime podcast, Bowraville, in 2016.

The double jeopardy reforms gave hope that the tragic Bowraville story could be given a just ending. However, for a prosecution application to succeed under the act, it would need “fresh and compelling evidence” of guilt.

In this case, the prosecution had no fresh DNA evidence and no late confession. The most compelling argument would rely on the unlikelihood that XX was innocently implicated in each murder.

Read more: We just Black matter: Australia’s indifference to Aboriginal lives and land

The trial judge rejected similar fact evidence in 1993, but admissibility was broadened in the Evidence Act 1995 (NSW). This raised the question whether evidence that was deemed inadmissible at the original trial, but later became admissible, would be viewed as “fresh evidence”. The NSW director of public prosecutions (DPP) and attorney-general thought not, and rejected police requests to apply to the court to have the acquittals overturned.

In 2014, a parliamentary committee recommended that consideration be given to “broadening” the double jeopardy exception “to enable a retrial where a change in the law renders evidence admissible at a later date”. The Greens then introduced a bill to achieve this, but parliament rejected it.

In December 2016, the attorney-general applied to the court for an order that XX face retrial for the murders of Clinton and Evelyn. But last week, the court rejected this on the grounds that the 1993 coincidence evidence was not fresh, even if it had become freshly admissible since then.

What the latest ruling means

This is quite a blow. Further retrial applications are barred under the law. Also, given XX’s acquittals for Clinton and Evelyn’s murders, double jeopardy protection prevents prosecutors from implicating XX in those murders in order to prove Colleen’s murder.

Parliament should have widened the double jeopardy exceptions in 2015. When the law makes compelling evidence freshly available to the court, this should be considered fresh evidence under double jeopardy reforms.

It is analogous to developments in forensic science making DNA evidence freshly available. There is no “floodgates” problem – this is the Australian first decision on an application for retrial under the double jeopardy reforms. And a similar double jeopardy exception in the UK has only generated a dozen or so applications in 15 years.

If, improbably, the prosecution were to make retrial applications to oppress acquitted defendants, the court could reject them as contrary to the “interests of justice”. The criminal justice system’s repeated failures in Bowraville are indefensible.