Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Lucas, Senior Research Scientist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Summer might be more than six weeks away, but out-of-control bushfires have already torn across parts of eastern Australia in recent days, destroying homes and threatening lives.

As of Wednesday afternoon, up to 30 homes were feared lost or badly damaged by bushfires burning in northern New South Wales. About 40 fires burned across the state.

This did not come as a surprise to meteorologists and fire agencies. Record-breaking heat and windy conditions were forecast for parts of NSW and Queensland this week, prompting severe fire danger ratings.

We’re often told the Australian bushfire season is starting earlier. This year it began in September on the eastern seaboard. Last year and in 2013, significant spring fires hit NSW and in 2015 they affected much of the nation’s southeast.

But what lies behind this phenomenon? We examined seasonal fire weather history for 44 years at 39 weather stations to find the precise answer.

This analysis is the most comprehensive ever conducted in Australia. It confirms the strength of the relationship between climate drivers such as El Niño, climate change, and the Australian bushfire season. It also demonstrates that a few milder bushfire seasons do not mean climate change isn’t happening.

Hot, dry, windy conditions spell fire trouble

The prerequisites for a severe bushfire season are high temperatures, low humidity, and strong winds that coincide with long periods of low rainfall.

These weather ingredients are used to calculate an area’s fire danger rating, using the Forest Fire Danger Index. The index produces a score reflecting the severity of fire weather on a given day, where zero represents minimal fire danger, 50 represents conditions where a fire ban may be issued, and 100 is considered potentially catastrophic.

Read more: Climate change is bringing a new world of bushfires

Loss of human lives and property most often occurs on days when the index is high in a particular area. But strong seasonal fire weather doesn’t always translate to high-impact fires. Other factors in play include terrain, vegetation, ignition and the weather on the day.

In our research, we analysed the strength of the worst fire weather conditions to understand the relative severity of fire weather during different seasons and years, in relation to various climate drivers.

Why is fire weather so different every year?

In Australia, the year-to-year changes in climatic conditions are largely driven by three factors: the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Indian Ocean Dipole, and the Southern Annular Mode.

Each of these climate drivers involves either changes to sea surface temperatures, wind movements, or both. They can all can affect temperature and rainfall patterns across the Southern Hemisphere, including Australia.

Our research confirmed that across the continent over more than four decades, climate drivers have affected the variability of Australia’s fire weather.

Read more: The phoenix factor: what home gardeners can learn from nature’s rebirth after fire

Of these drivers, the El Niño Southern Oscillation is the most influential. Weather during an El Niño phase is typically hot and dry, leading to worse seasonal bushfire conditions.

The positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole often coincides with El Niño and exacerbates its effects. This phase generally results in lower than average rainfall across southern Australia.

But when these two climate modes are in a negative phase, our research confirms that Australia often experiences more rain and milder bushfire conditions.

The modes evolve over many months and their effects on fire weather persist for several seasons. Their state during winter and spring is a strong indicator for the rest of the fire season for much of Australia.

The Southern Annular Mode refers to the north-south movement of strong westerly winds in parts of the Southern Hemisphere. When the mode is in a prolonged negative phase, fire weather conditions in Australia are worse – particularly in NSW. This effect is pronounced in winter and spring and means less rainfall and strong westerly winds.

The 2019 winter saw a persistent negative Southern Annular Mode, as did the 2013 and 2018 winter and spring seasons. There was a strong El Niño event and positive Indian Ocean Dipole in 2015. Australia’s bushfire season started earlier than usual in each of these years.

The converse is also true. In 2011 a strong La Niña (the opposite of an El Niño) resulted in milder bushfire seasons, as did the negative Indian Ocean Dipole of 2016.

Climate change is a culprit too

Long-term climate change in Australia is an undeniable reality. The State of the Climate 2018 report for Australia notes strong land surface temperature increases and a 10-20% decline in cool season rainfall across southern Australia since the 1970s. These changes are closely associated with increasing human greenhouse gas emissions, as well as natural variability.

The changed conditions has led to an average increase in the severity of seasonal bushfire weather across Australia – especially in southern parts of the continent. The increased severity affects all seasons but in particular spring, which means that, on average, the bushfire season is starting earlier.

Pulling it all together

Our research has made clear that climate modes bring large and rapid swings to the fire weather, while human-induced climate change gradually increases background fire weather conditions. The trend generally means an earlier start to the bushfire seasons than in the past.

Read more: Grim fire season looms but many Australians remain unprepared

Climate change is definitely playing a role in producing the earlier start to bushfire seasons and overall more extreme seasons, particularly in southeastern Australia. However, the natural variations in climate modes continue to play a key role, meaning we should not expect every bushfire season to be worse than the last as a result of climate change.

Similarly, a few milder bushfire seasons among a string of record high seasons does not mean that climate change should be dismissed.

– ref. It’s only October, so what’s with all these bushfires? New research explains it – http://theconversation.com/its-only-october-so-whats-with-all-these-bushfires-new-research-explains-it-124091

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Forsyth, Professor of Workplace Law, RMIT University

What have Scott Morrison and and Attorney General Christian Porter got in mind for unions?

The answer seems to be more of the same, more use of coercive power to make it harder for unions to fulfil their democratic functions of protecting workers and fighting inequality.

The newly-reintroduced Ensuring Integrity Bill was rejected in 2017, but the government thinks it’s got a better chance now, with the support of at least four of the six senate crossbenchers.

In part that’s because of the behaviour of John Setka, head of the Victorian branch of the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining Energy Union who has been convicted of using a carriage service to harass a woman.

Read more: View from The Hill: Now the senators are taking on John Setka

The Bill does not actually address Setka or his conduct, but the Government is using that negative impression to justify these new laws.

And it’s because of words like these, used by Justice Dyson Heydon, the royal commissioner tasked with examining trade union governance and corruption by the Abbott government:

it is clear that in many parts of the world constituted by Australian trade union officials, there is room for louts, thugs, bullies, thieves, perjurers, those who threaten violence, errant fiduciaries and organisers of boycotts

It’s also what the government wants people to believe about trade unions; that they are ugly, violent, law-breaking and self-interested.

In truth the most unionised occupation is teaching, the next most unionised is health care, and the third is protective services.

Why make it harder for teachers and nurses?

My research finds that there was a problem with union corruption the best part of a decade ago, most starkly apparent in the Health Services Union scandal, but for the most part unions have cleaned up their act.

I told the Senate inquiry into the Ensuring Integrity Bill that a proportionate response to the Royal Commission’s findings was warranted.

It included legislation imposing higher standards of financial management accountability on union officers, higher penalties for serious breaches of the Registered Organisations Act, criminal penalties for “corrupting benefits” and requirements for disclosure of benefits passing to a union under an enterprise agreement, clearer governance standards for separate entities and union funds such as election funds, and a specialist regulator for registered organisations.

Read more: Fall-out from Setka affair could give Coalition easier passage of union bill

Almost all of these measures have now been implemented. So what are we to make of the reheated Bill? It looks like an opportunistic attempt to take down unions.

Morrison needs an agenda

The government didn’t expect to be re-elected. Its business mates are demanding industrial relations reform. They want to shut down powerful unions like the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union. The government tried to stop it merging with the Maritime Union to become the CFMMEU rather than the CFMEU, but the Bill didn’t get through parliament in time.

With that objective frustrated, business wants new weapons to take on unions.

Hence the provisions in the Bill enabling employers, the minister and the Registered Organisations Commission to seek the disqualification of union officials and the deregistration of unions; provisions that could prove very handy in an industrial dispute, adding to the already extensive range of weapons employers already have access to.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Morrison government solid on industrial relations reform but bootlicks One Nation on family law

The Bill massively over-reaches. The government claims it’s simply applying to unions the same regulatory standards that apply to corporations. But its application of the corporate model is highly selective.

So it’s one rule for unions

Schedule 1 would allow court-ordered disqualification to be sought against a union official on much wider grounds than those available for company directors.

An employer could seek to have an official removed because they have been involved in a technical breach of the protected industrial action rules under the Fair Work Act, but a union could not seek disqualification of a company director who had breached the same legislation by, for instance, presiding over the underpayment of workers.

Disqualification could also be sought because a union official had breached the proposed “fit and proper person” test.

There is no fit and proper test for company directors, although there is for people providing financial advice and running businesses including labour hire businesses in Victoria.

The purpose of the latter test is to impose barriers to entry on dodgy and exploitative managers. There is no equivalent justification for prefventing someone becoming a union official.

Read more: Fall-out from Setka affair could give Coalition easier passage of union bill

Schedule 2 proposes new grounds for deregistering unions that partly mirror some of the grounds for court-ordered wind-ups of companyies under the Corporations Act.

Another rule for employers

But the addition of new grounds relating to a union’s (or members’) non-compliance with a wide range of laws has no equivalent in the Corporations Act.

Among the proposed grounds is “obstructive industrial action” – unprotected action that hinders of interferes with the activities of an employer or a public service, or that has a substantial adverse effect on community safety, health or welfare. Only a single instance would be needed.

The target of Schedule 2 seems to be the CFMMEU. But Commissioner Heydon neither recommended deregistration of the CFMEU nor proposed any change to the deregistration provisions.

The government already has the ability to seek deregistration of the CFMMEU under the Registered Organisations Act. Some of its grounds, including repeated breaches of court orders, would be sufficient in my view.

Instead of testing the existing law, the government has chosen to seek much wider grounds for deregistration and to give more parties, including employers, access to the mechanism, creating a threat to all unions, not just the CFMMEU.

And confusion about what unions do

The Coalition and employers can’t seem to make up their minds about unions.

They present them as both:

• a relic of the past, facing imminent demise, representing only 15% of the workforce

• a threat to the economy, with the merged CFMMEU threatening one part of the economy, and the proposed amalgamation of the National Union of Workers and United Voice threatening another.

The Ensuring Integrity Bill tells us it’s this second view that’s predominant, notwithstanding the reality that most unions play a valuable role in protecting vulnerable workers from exploitation, challenging managerial power in the workplace, and enhancing our democracy.

– ref. ‘Louts, thugs, bullies’: the myth that’s driving Morrison’s anti-union push – http://theconversation.com/louts-thugs-bullies-the-myth-thats-driving-morrisons-anti-union-push-123688

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lucyna Kedziora-Chudczer, Program Manager / Adjunct Research Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology

With the discovery of 20 more moons orbiting Saturn, the ringed planet has overtaken Jupiter as host to the most moons in the Solar system. Saturn now has 82 known moons, whereas Jupiter has a paltry 79.

Announced at the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Centre by a team of astronomers from the Carnegie Institute for Science led by Scott S. Sheppard, the discovery is the latest advance in the 400-year history of our understanding of the satellites of our neighbouring planets.

As technology has improved, we have observed more and more of these tiny, distant worlds – and we can be reasonably confident there are still plenty waiting to be discovered.

How do we even know Saturn has moons?

Although the planets of the Solar system are all visible to the naked eye and have been known to humans since antiquity, it wasn’t until Galileo Galilei turned a telescope on Jupiter in 1610 that we discovered Earth was not alone in having an orbiting companion.

Galileo saw Jupiter’s four largest moons and could make out what we now know are Saturn’s rings. Decades later, with better telescopes, Christian Huygens and Giovanni Domenico Cassini observed Saturn’s moons.

Read more: Curious Kids: why does Saturn have rings?

It became clear that the giant planets are surrounded by multitudes of satellites, resembling smaller versions of the Solar system. By the middle of the 19th century, telescopes had improved enough that the first eight moons of Saturn – including Titan, the largest – had been viewed directly.

The introduction of photographic plates, which enabled the detection of fainter objects with long-exposure observations, helped astronomers increase their count of Saturn’s moons to 14.

Closer inspections

It was a long journey (literally) to the next big improvement in our view of Saturn’s moons. Many of the smaller moons were not discovered until the Voyager fly-by missions in the 1980s and the more recent 13-year stopover of the Cassini spacecraft in Saturn’s orbit.

Until these closer visits, we knew little about the moons aside from the fact that they existed.

One of Cassini’s goals was to explore Titan, which is the only moon in the Solar system with a thick, smoggy atmosphere. Another was to take a look at Saturn’s other mid-sized moons, including frozen Enceladus, which may hold an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust.

Read more: A look back at Cassini’s incredible mission to Saturn before its final plunge into the planet

Cassini also discovered much smaller moons, so-called “shepherd moons” that interact with Saturn’s rings by carving gaps and wavy patterns as they pass through a rubble of rocks and snowballs.

Bigger telescopes, more moons

These close-up observations from space advanced our understanding of individual moons that stay near to Saturn. Recently, many more moons have been found in orbits much further from the planet.

These more distant moons could only be detected with large optical telescopes such as the Subaru telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The telescope is equipped with sensitive cameras that can detect some of the faint objects separated by millions of kilometres from Saturn.

To confirm that these objects are indeed associated with Saturn, astronomers have to observe them over days or even months to reconstruct the shape and size of the moon’s orbit.

Many small moons are fragments of shattered large moons

Such observations revealed a population of moons that are often described as “irregular” moons. They are split into three distinct groups: Inuit, Gallic, and Norse. They all have large, elliptical orbits at an angle to those of moons closer to the planet.

Each group is thought to have formed from a collision or fragmentation of a larger moon. The Norse group consists of some of the most distant moons of Saturn, which orbit in the opposite direction to the rotation of the planet. This suggests they could have formed elsewhere and were later captured by the gravitational force of Saturn.

Of the 20 new moons, 17 belong to the Norse group including the furthest known moon from the planet. Their estimated sizes are of the order of 5km in diameter.

Have we found all the moons now?

Are we likely to find even more moons around Saturn? Absolutely.

Some of the newly discovered moons are very faint and at the limit of detection with currently available instruments. New, bigger telescopes such as Giant Magellan Telescope will allow us to observe even fainter objects.

In the meantime, the 20 new moons need names. Carnegie Science has invited everyone to help.

– ref. Saturn has more moons than Jupiter – but why are we only finding out about them now? – http://theconversation.com/saturn-has-more-moons-than-jupiter-but-why-are-we-only-finding-out-about-them-now-124888

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wendy Walls, Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, University of Melbourne

Two seemingly unrelated but important things happened in Melbourne last week. One was a memorial service for David Yencken AO; the other was the exhibition opening of the Future Park Design Ideas Competition. The connection between the two is that both gave us radical ideas for Melbourne’s open space.

David Yencken was a visionary man who had a profound impact on Victoria and Melbourne. He was responsible, among many things, for the transformation of Southbank and co-founding Merchant Builders. But one of his wildest ideas was the 1985 Greening of Swanston Street, when vehicle traffic was closed and a weekend street party was held right in the middle of Melbourne.

Read more: How a three-decade remaking of the city revived the buzz of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’

As the secretary (chief executive) of the Ministry for Planning and Environment, Yencken had been charged with changing perceptions of the city by rethinking its public spaces. At a time before pop-up parks and guerrilla gardening, his radical idea demonstrated what was possible for the inner city and sowed the seed of the idea of closing Swanston Street to traffic.

The project was not without controversy – it was costly and came in for political criticism as a stunt. But looking back to a time when inner Melbourne was underutilised and dominated by traffic, we can see how that radical idea sparked the imagination about what was possible for the city centre.

Read more: A day for turning parking spaces into pop-up parks

Future Park fires imaginations and debate

This is just what the Future Park competition needs to achieve. The open competition held by the University of Melbourne and the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects has attracted global interest, with 123 entries from 20 countries.

The brief was simple but provocative. Designers were to find space within 10 kilometres of the city centre and design a future park that responds to the challenges of Melbourne today. The design responses from the 31 shortlisted entries ranged from manufactured lagoons to urban wildlife corridors and street transformation parks that Yencken would be proud of.

The first wave of media coverage on the competition inspired a range of public comments about Melbourne’s open space. For example, from the online comments in The Age:

Royal Park is a massive area of underutilised space. Driving down Elliott Av it’s just an open wasteland. Grassland and scattered gum trees does not make a welcoming “park”.

How about bulldozing the eyesore known as Federation Square and putting a park in its place?

These designs forget to include the things that make it a Melbourne park, graffiti, vandalism, weeds and the homeless.

Architects and landscapers rarely, if ever, have a grasp on what will work for people … they are too busy trying to be creative, and not busy enough trying to make people happy.

What the public comments show us is that there is no single or obvious solution to our parks and public spaces. Some people like it busy, some people like the quiet. Some want European trees and others desire native plantings. It’s complicated, and each of these opinions make valid points.

Just like Yencken’s Greening of Swanston, there will always be debate about what makes good public space. And that is exactly why we need more radical ideas – some might call them “crazy” – for our cities.

We know the future of our cities will be complicated. Like it or not, there will be more people, a changing climate and increasing pressure on infrastructure and services.

Read more: If we want liveable cities in 2060 we’ll have to work together to transform urban systems

Wicked problems call for radical thinking

These messy issues are often described as wicked problems. Popular in public policy and management, the term is used to explain problems with debatable cause and effect. Critically, the lack of agreement about wicked problems produces conflicting goals towards resolution.

Obviously, we need science, governance and planning, but finding solutions to wicked problems will also require creativity and collaboration. We need debate and we need ideas that can expand our imagination about what our cities can be. This is why it is so important that the competition entries for the Future Park explore new and outrageous possibilities.

Ideas throughout the shortlisted entries include plans for a new NBN: the National Biodiversity Network, which creates ecological corridors across the country. Others propose transforming schools into parkland; parks designed for bees; designs that return darkness to our urban landscapes; and sculpting new islands as rising sea levels engulf our coastline.

As design solutions, these ideas reflect the challenges of our world today. While many of these schemes are technically, socially or economically unfeasible, they remind us of the power of thinking outside of the box. Importantly, the competition format puts all of these ideas together in one place for us to think about and discuss.

In Australia, we have a limited culture of “open design competitions” for either built projects or speculative solutions. But design competitions provide opportunities for new voices and discovering unexpected solutions within these wild ideas.

Radical ideas are important and so is having the freedom to voice them. Especially as a way of expanding the discussions we need to have about the challenging future.

Read more: Reshaping Sydney by design – few know about the mandatory competitions, but we all see the results

The Future Park competition winners will be announced on Friday, October 11, at the 2019 International Festival of Landscape Architecture in Melbourne. The Future Park exhibition is at Dulux Gallery, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, from October 4 to November 1.

– ref. Why we need ‘crazy’ ideas for new city parks – http://theconversation.com/why-we-need-crazy-ideas-for-new-city-parks-124772

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

Opposition resources spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon has had his proposal to bring Labor’s climate change target into line with the government’s immediately torpedoed by the party’s climate spokesman Mark Butler.

In a speech to the Sydney Institute made public ahead of its Wednesday evening delivery Fitzgibbon suggested the ALP offer “a political and policy settlement” to match the higher end of the government’s 26-28% target for reducing emissions on 2005 levels by 2030.

Labor’s controversial election policy was for an ambitious 45% reduction.

Fitzgibbon said the change he advocated would mean “the focus would then be all about actual outcomes, and the government would finally be held to account and forced to act.

“A political settlement would also restore investment confidence and for the first time in six years, we could have some downward pressure on energy prices,” Fitzgibbon said.

But Butler rejected the proposal saying the government’s target “is fundamentally inconsistent with the Paris agreement and would lead to global warming of 3℃.

“Labor remains committed to implementing the principles of the Paris Agreement, which are to keep global warming well below 2℃ and pursue efforts around 1.5℃,” he said.

“Labor’s commitment to action on climate change is unshakeable. We will have a 2050 target of net zero emissions and medium-term targets which are consistent with the agreement,” Butler said.

Despite dismissing Fitzgibbon’s idea, Butler has acknowledged that Labor’s climate change policy must be up for grabs in the party’s review of all its policies between now and the 2022 election.

But revising the climate policy will be one of its major challenges, because the party is caught between its inner city progressive constituency and its traditional blue collar voters. Its ambivalent position on the planned Adani coal mine cost it votes in Queensland at the election.

Apart from the politics, the 45% target for 2030 would be more unrealistic at the next election because emissions at the moment are increasing, meaning ground is being lost.

Fitzgibbon, who takes a more pro-coal attitude than many of his colleagues, had a big swing against him in his NSW coal seat of Hunter.

He said in his speech that a 28% reduction would be a “meaningful achievement” and could be built on later. He also pointed out bluntly that Labor couldn’t achieve anything if perpetually in opposition.

“If we could get to 28% by 2030, and also demonstrate that we could do so without destroying blue collar jobs or damaging the economy, then we would have a great foundation from which to argue the case for being more ambitious on the road to 2050,” he said.

Shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers, who is from Queensland, refused to be pinned down when pressed on Fitzgibbon’s proposal.

“My view is we can take real action on climate change without abandoning our traditional strengths, including in regional Queensland,” he said.

The Victorian minister for energy, environment and climate change, Lily D’Ambrosio, asked at the Australian Financial Review’s national energy summit about Fitzgibbon’s comments, said she wasn’t much interested in what a federal opposition did.

“We have a very strong and ambitious policy and we took that to the last state election, and we all know the result of that election, so we will continue to implement our policies and get them done,” she said.

Federal energy minister Angus Taylor pointed to the divisions in the opposition but welcomed that there were “people in Labor who are making sensible suggestions about dropping their policies from the last election.

“What we saw happen there was Labor went to the election with policies – 45% emissions reduction target, 50% renewable energy target – where they weren’t able to or willing to detail the costs and impacts of those policies,” he said.

– ref. Labor’s climate and resources spokesmen at odds over future policy – http://theconversation.com/labors-climate-and-resources-spokesmen-at-odds-over-future-policy-124991

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Iain Walker, Professor of Psychology, University of Canberra

Last week, amid the cacophony of reactions to Greta Thunberg’s appearance before the United Nations Climate Action Summit, a group of self-proclaimed “prominent scientists” sent a registered letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres. The letter, headed “There is no climate emergency”, urged Guterres to follow:

…a climate policy based on sound science, realistic economics and genuine concern for those harmed by costly but unnecessary attempts at mitigation.

The group, supported by 75 Australian business and industry figures, along with others around the world, obviously rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. But this missive displays remarkably different tactics to those previously used to stymie climate action.

Read more: Climate explained: why some people still think climate change isn’t real

The language of climate change denial and inaction has transformed. Outright science denial has been replaced by efforts to reframe climate change as natural, and climate action as unwarranted.

However, this is just another way of rejecting the facts, and their implications for us. Denial can take many forms.

Shades of denial

The twin phenomena of denial and inaction are related to one another, at least in the context of climate change. They are also complex, both in the general sense of “complicated and intricate”, and in the technical psychological sense of “a group of repressed feelings and anxieties which together result in abnormal behaviour”.

In his book States of Denial, the late psychoanalytic sociologist Stanley Cohen described three forms of denial. Although his framework was developed from analysing genocide and other atrocities, it applies just as well to our individual and collective inaction in the face of the overwhelming scientific evidence of human-induced climate change.

The first form of denial is literal denial. It is the simple, conscious, outright rejection that something happened or is happening – that is, lying. One Nation senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts, among others, have at one time or another maintained this position – outright denial that climate change is happening (though Senator Hanson now might accept climate change but denies any human contribution to it).

Interestingly, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday blamed “climate change deniers” in his own government for blocking any attempt to deal with climate change, resulting paradoxically in higher energy prices today.

Read more: Misogyny, male rage and the words men use to describe Greta Thunberg

It is tempting to attribute outright denial to individual malice or stupidity, and that may occasionally be the case. More worrying and more insidious, though, is the social organisation of literal denial of climate change. There is plenty of evidence of clandestine, orchestrated lying by vested interests in industry. If anyone is looking for a conspiracy in climate change, this is it – not a collusion of thousands of scientists and major science organisations.

The second form of denial is interpretive denial. Here, people do not contest the facts, but interpret them in ways that distort their meaning or importance. For example, one might say climate change is just a natural fluctuation or greenhouse gas accumulation is a consequence, not a cause, of rising temperatures. This is what we saw in last week’s letter to the UN.

The most insidious form of denial

The third and most insidious form is implicatory denial. The facts of climate change are not denied, nor are they interpreted to be something else. What is denied or minimised are the psychological, political, and moral implications of the facts for us. We fail to accept responsibility for responding; we fail to act when the information says we should.

Of course, some are unable to respond, financially or otherwise, but for many, implicatory denial is a kind of dissociation. Ignoring the moral imperative to act is as damning a form of denial as any other, and arguably is much worse.

The treatment of Thunberg, and the vigour with which people push away reminders of that which they would rather not deal with, illustrate implicatory denial. We are almost all guilty, to some extent, of engaging in implicatory denial. In the case of climate change, implicatory denial allows us to use a reusable coffee cup, recycle our plastic or sometimes catch a bus, and thus to pretend to ourselves that we are doing our bit.

Almost none of us individually, or we as a nation, has acted as we ought on the science of climate change. But that does not mean we can’t change how we act in the future. Indeed, there are some recent indications that, as with literal denial, implicatory denial is becoming an increasingly untenable psychological position.

While it is tempting, and even cathartic, to mock the shrill responses to Thunberg from literal and interpretive deniers, we would do well to ponder our own inherent biases and irrational responses to climate change.

For instance, we tend to think we are doing more for the planet than those around us (and we can’t all be right). We also tend to think literal deniers are much more common in our society than they in fact are.

Read more: Extinction Rebellion protesters might be annoying. But they have a point

These are just two examples of common strategies we use to deny our own responsibility and culpability. They make us feel better about what little we actually do, or congratulate us for accepting the science. But they are ultimately self-defeating delusions. Instead of congratulating ourselves on agreeing with the basic scientific facts of climate change, we need to push ourselves to action.

– ref. There are three types of climate change denier, and most of us are at least one – http://theconversation.com/there-are-three-types-of-climate-change-denier-and-most-of-us-are-at-least-one-124574

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rodney Sinclair, Professor of Dermatology, University of Melbourne

Have you ever wondered who buys those huge boxes of antihistamines prominently displayed all year round in your local pharmacy? If antihistamines were just used for hay fever, you’d think sales would be good in spring, but pretty mediocre for the rest of the year.

Many of the antihistamines sold in Australia are actually for hives, or what doctors call urticaria. Hives produces multiple red, raised bumps (or wheals) that are incredibly itchy. Hives occurs all year round.

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

The condition is really common, with a Korean study showing around 22% of people can expect to have it at some time in their life.

Some people also get angioedema, where small blood vessels leak fluid into the tissues, causing spectacular swelling. If the swelling affects your throat and airways you can suffocate.

Fortunately, for the vast majority of people, hives comes and goes in a couple of weeks. While you can feel pretty miserable when you have it, antihistamines work well to control the rash and itch. Suffocation is exceptionally rare.

When hives won’t go away

If you are unlucky enough to still have hives after six weeks, it’s likely to persist six months, six years or even 26 years later.

This is what dermatologists call chronic urticaria, which affects about 1% of the population (around 250,000 Australians). The itch, sleep disturbance, swelling and rash associated with it severely impair people’s quality of life. Of all skin diseases, chronic urticaria seems to worsen your mood and disrupt day-to-day living the most.

One antihistamine tablet is usually enough to control hay fever. But people with chronic urticaria may need two, three or sometimes four tablets a day to control their itch. Even that may not be enough to stop the wheals.

What causes hives?

So what causes hives? If your hives go away within six weeks, you probably had them because of a delayed reaction to a viral infection. Sometimes this acute condition is caused by an allergic reaction to a medication; an antibiotic allergy is a common cause. Occasionally a food allergy causes hives.

What about chronic urticaria, when hives last more than six weeks? Doctors don’t know the exact cause. While patients often suspect a food allergy, doctors rarely find a food trigger.

But we know autoimmunity is involved, when the body’s immune system targets itself.

Most patients with chronic urticaria have antibodies against their own immune system. In particular, these antibodies target molecules critical to a normal allergic response (immunoglobulin E, or IgE, and its receptor).

Read more: Explainer: what are autoimmune diseases?

When antihistamines don’t work

If antihistamines don’t help, there are other options.

Medications that specifically target IgE and get to the root cause of urticaria autoimmunity are now available, provided you meet all the special criteria. Only dermatologists are allowed to prescribe this medicine on the PBS.

To date, omalizumab has been the most effective treatment for chronic urticaria patients who don’t respond to antihistamines. It’s given as an injection under the skin every four weeks. Unfortunately symptoms in fewer than 50% of patients are completely controlled.

A new drug ligelizumab, which is still in clinical trials, is showing promise, according to international research we were involved with published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. However, this experimental drug, which also targets IgE autoimmunity, is only available in Australia as part of a clinical trial.

Read more: Randomised control trials: what makes them the gold standard in medical research?

– ref. What are hives, the common skin condition that gives you itchy, red bumps? – http://theconversation.com/what-are-hives-the-common-skin-condition-that-gives-you-itchy-red-bumps-121693

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amelia Walker, Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of South Australia

Why do we tell stories, and how are they crafted? In this series, we unpick the work of the writer on both page and screen.

We live hyperlinked lives, expected to be switched on and logged in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Time is a dwindling resource, multitasking is our default setting. We’re constantly reading: online articles, emails, social media posts. But for many of us, this dip-in, dip-out reading feels dissatisfying. We crave deeper engagement.

Enter the short story cycle — a hybrid of a novel and a short story collection. In her collection, Barking Dogs, Rebekah Clarkson offers a superbly constructed creative feat into the form, giving us a strong insight into how short story cycles operate and what they can offer to readers and writers.

A long history

Short story cycles are by no means new. Notable twentieth century examples include James Joyce’s Dubliners, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.

However, until recently, short story cycles have received less attention and have been harder to get published than novels. This appears to be changing. Twenty-first century American authors Elizabeth Strout and Jennifer Eagan have had significant success with the form.

Recent Australian contributions to the re-emerging short story cycle tradition include The Turning by Tim Winton (2004), Shadowboxing by Tony Birch (2006), The Boat by Nam Lee (2009), Transactions by Ali Alizideh (2013), Plane Tree Drive by Lynette Washington (2017) and Barking Dogs by Rebekah Clarkson (2017).

Barking Dogs was penned by Clarkson as part of her PhD in creative writing through the University of Adelaide. It represents the product of her extensive research into short story cycles and related literary practices.

Clarkson describes the short story cycle as a form in which each individual story can stand alone as an independent work of art, but when arranged with other stories, generates interconnection and perhaps interdependence. The 13 stories in her Barking Dogs can all be read and enjoyed in themselves, but are enhanced when read and appreciated in context. The book as a whole offers something else yet again — a greater tapestry, to which each story adds different threads.

Connections, recurring roles

Of the many links between separate yet connecting episodes in Barking Dogs, the most obvious is place. The book’s setting is Mount Barker, an Adelaide Hills town, portrayed at a moment of major change as housing developers carve the formerly idyllic, quiet community into a bustling outpost of aspirational suburbia.

Issues of this transformation — social, environmental, and economic — are considered from multiple points of view, through the voices of characters whose attitudes differ. This reflects Clarkson’s desire (expressed via email) to “represent a real place through fiction without privileging any particular perspective”.

Character provides another crucial set of interconnections in Barking Dogs. In several cases, major characters from particular stories reappear as minor characters or visitors in others. Elsewhere, this means revisiting the same main character at a different time and in a different situation. In the story Raising Boys, for example, Malcolm Wheeler is a suburban father dealing with relatively mundane albeit relatable everyday issues including marriage tensions, a child struggling at school, and complaints from neighbours about his son’s dog, which barks noisily.

A later story, The Five Truths of Manhood, reintroduces Malcolm as he learns that he has cancer. The diagnosis pushes Malcolm’s underlying frailties and reveals different aspects to the characters of his wife and son. This casts new light on how all three characters behave in the story. The references both stories’ titles make to Steve Biddulph’s books on manhood guide the reader to reflect on how social constructions of masculinity matter for families and individuals.

Another recurring character is Sophie Barlow, a missing schoolgirl who, though not directly present in any story, figures in the memories, thoughts and dreams of other characters.

We first encounter Sophie in Something Special, Something Rare, in which she has left her family home early in the morning but has not yet officially disappeared. Sophie’s father, Graham, reflects on how Sophie didn’t want to go bird watching with the family, and thus slowly recognises his own emotional disconnection from his daughter. Her tragic disappearance is foreshadowed towards the end of the story, when Graham realises:

He missed her. He really missed her. He’d been missing her for a couple years.

In contrast to this deeply personal view of Sophie, the story World Peace concerns Janice, a 12-year-old schoolgirl who cannot remember Sophie’s surname but remembers liking the sound of it:

Sophie Someone. It was the name of a girl you’d want to be friends with. It had a feel to it […] like a good song.

Sophie is remembered differently yet again in two other stories, and thereby hovers, ghost-like, throughout the collection. Her tragic demise falls between the cracks of the community, which is mirrored by how she falls between the cracks of stories.

The hidden tale of Sophie, among other recurrent themes and motifs of Barking Dogs, means each story in the book can be read again and again, with new levels of meaning gained each time. The book therefore meets Clarkson’s own key criterion for a successful short story cycle.

In email interview, Clarkson declares “the best response a reader can have is the desire to flip back to the beginning and read again”. Barking Dogs certainly provokes this desire, demonstrating the multifarious potentials of the short story cycle as a form that readers, writers and publishers will continue to develop and embrace in the coming years.

– ref. Stories for hyperlinked times: the short story cycle and Rebekah Clarkson’s Barking Dogs – http://theconversation.com/stories-for-hyperlinked-times-the-short-story-cycle-and-rebekah-clarksons-barking-dogs-123166

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy McKenry, Professor of Music, Australian Catholic University

How could one of the best pianists Australia has ever produced die lonely, neglected and impoverished in a dilapidated house in suburban Melbourne?

The Eulogy, a documentary written and directed by Janine Hosking examines the life, career and tragic death of Australian concert pianist Geoffrey Tozer, who passed away aged 54 from liver disease.

The film begins with Paul Keating reading the now-infamous eulogy he delivered at Tozer’s memorial almost exactly a decade ago. The speech, which starts out as a celebration of the pianist’s life and achievements, culminates in an attack on Australia’s cultural establishment.

Keating speaks of the arts in Australia as riven with “bitchiness and preference” and “inverted snobbery”. He accuses the Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras of treating Tozer with “indifference and contempt” and suggests the people “who had charge in the selection of artists during this period should hang their heads in shame”.

The late conductor and music educator Richard Gill (who never saw Tozer perform) acts as a first-person narrator for the film as he tries to make sense of Tozer’s legacy and evaluate Keating’s claims.

Gill’s discovery of Tozer is intercut with archival footage of performances and the film’s soundtrack makes extensive use of Tozer’s many recordings. Discussions with friends, family and colleagues together with readings of Tozer’s diary and correspondence draw a sympathetic portrait of the virtuoso musician.

Charming animations guide the film’s audience around the diverse locales of Tozer’s life story. These places range from pre-partition India, Tasmania, Melbourne, London, Canberra (where he first met Paul Keating) to a disastrous misadventure in Queanbeyan in NSW where Tozer tried unsuccessfully to convert a convent building into a music conservatory.

Suburban Melbourne becomes a visual metaphor for Tozer’s ignominy, with images and descriptions of his final dilapidated house intercut with explorations of the Tozer archive – a repository lovingly curated, but nevertheless located in little more than a converted shed.

Video footage of Tozer being interviewed reveals a softly spoken and clearly insular man who struggled with the burden of expectation placed on child prodigies. The film offsets a sense of indignation at the purported neglect Tozer suffered with a compassionate account of his personal struggles and alcoholism. Keating’s claims are not allowed to stand untested and a picture emerges of a talented musical genius with limited life skills.

The film raises important questions about the significance of Tozer in our cultural canon, the duty of care held by Australia’s cultural institutions, and the precarious and vexing nature of talent.

The audience is left in no doubt Tozer was indeed a world-class musician. Gill’s journey comes to a climax when – by candlelight in that Queanbeyan convent building – he listens for the first time to Tozer’s performance of a concerto by the Russian composer Nikolai Medtner.

Tozer’s advocacy for and recordings of this previously almost unknown Russian master are widely praised and stand as one of his greatest achievements. The film’s presentation of this recording highlights Tozer’s extraordinary artistry. By staging the scene at the convent, the filmmakers juxtapose a musical triumph with his personal failure.

In its interrogation of Keating’s accusations against the Australian arts establishment, the film delves into the tragedy of Tozer’s personal life. It argues Tozer’s mother – with a combination of hot-housing, impossible expectations and lifelong codependency – denied him a normal childhood. This meant the pianist, following his mother’s death, could not deal with the adult world and used alcohol to cope.

A compassionate examination of what appears to be Tozer’s only romantic relationship – albeit a short one – gives the audience insight into the extent of his personal dysfunction.

The neglect Tozer suffered from Australia’s leading orchestras in the last 15 years of his life comes across less as “inverted snobbery” or the Tall Poppy Syndrome, but the stark reality of the requirements of working in any creative profession.

Orchestras schedule concerts two years in advance and must necessarily work with musicians they can rely on. Though clearly a genius, Tozer ultimately lacked the personal stability essential to success in the arts.

In searching for an antagonist and settling on Tozer’s mother, the film misses an opportunity to interrogate Western culture’s awkward relationship with notions of talent.

Although educationalists tout ideas of a growth mindset and the notion talent is not fixed, research into musical prodigies affirms genetics, a singular focus and a specialised educational environment are often a prerequisite to a talent like Tozer’s.

We can’t reasonably laud Tozer as a prodigy and musical genius while also casting his mother (who was also his first piano teacher) as a villain.

The Eulogy is an engaging and ultimately evenhanded evaluation of the life of a great Australian musician and a complex personality. As one of Richard Gill’s many former students myself, the death of the film’s narrator in October last year made the film still more poignant.

The Eulogy opens in cinemas today.

– ref. The Eulogy review: the life and lonely death of one of Australia’s greatest pianists – http://theconversation.com/the-eulogy-review-the-life-and-lonely-death-of-one-of-australias-greatest-pianists-124164

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Cowley, Astrophysics Research and Teaching Associate, Queensland University of Technology

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three researchers for their contributions to two unique fields.

Half of the 9 million Swedish krona (A$1.34 million) award goes to James Peebles, a Canadian cosmologist at Princeton University, “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology”.

Read more: Nobel Prize in Physics: James Peebles, master of the universe, shares award

The other half is split between two Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva, and Didier Queloz from the University of Geneva and University of Cambridge, “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star”.

Göran Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said that together, these contributions provide us with an “understanding of the evolution of the Universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos”.

Cosmology

Peebles’ theoretical calculations have allowed cosmologists to interpret the cosmic microwave background (CMB), leftover radiation from the aftermath of the Universe’s birth 13.8 billion years ago. Discovered by accident more than 50 years ago, the CMB represents a goldmine for cosmologists, containing secrets to the Universe’s origins, age, and composition.

While Peebles’ theoretical framework has provided the key to unlocking the secrets of the CMB, it has also left cosmologists with an even bigger question – one that revolves around the composition of the Universe.

Currently, regular matter – the stuff that makes up the stars, the planets, and everything on Earth – is believed to comprise only 5% of the total mass and energy in the Universe. The remainder includes a mixture of dark matter (25%), a mysterious form of matter that is invisible to traditional observational techniques, and dark energy (70%), which is thought to be the reason for the Universe’s expansion.

Read more: From dark gravity to phantom energy: what’s driving the expansion of the universe?

While these “dark” components remain mostly elusive, the pioneering work of US astronomer Vera Rubin proved almost beyond doubt that dark matter exists. Rubin’s ideas revolutionised cosmology, but sadly she never won a Nobel Prize and passed away in 2016.

Exoplanets

Mayor and Queloz were honoured for their 1995 discovery of an exoplanet – a planet outside our Solar system – orbiting a Sun-like star.

Using custom-made instruments on the Observatoire de Haute-Provence telescope in France, Mayor and Queloz observed a distant star in the constellation Pegasus, called 51 Pegasi, and found it to be wobbling.

This wobble is caused by the gravitational effects of a planet tugging on its host star and is observable via the changing nature of the star’s light. When viewed by a distant observer, the wobble affects the star’s light spectrum. If the star is moving towards an observer, its spectrum appears slightly shifted towards the blue end, but if it is moving away, it is shifted towards the red end.

By looking at these “Doppler shifts” using an observational method known as radial velocity, astronomers can not only detect the presence of a planet, but also estimate its mass and orbital period (the length of the planet’s “year”).

Mayor and Queloz discovered a Jupiter-mass planet, dubbed 51 Pegasi b. Its orbital period was just 4.2 days, compared with Earth’s 365-day journey around the Sun. This itself was a surprise, as astronomers didn’t expect such a massive planet to orbit so quickly and closely around its host star. The discovery gave rise to the nickname “hot Jupiter” for these types of planets, and heralded a new era of exoplanet research.

Read more: Nobel Prize in Physics for two breakthroughs: Evidence for the Big Bang and a way to find exoplanets

Today, more than 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered in the Milky Way galaxy, with many more expected in the years to come. Besides giving astronomers new insights into how our Solar system and its planets formed and evolved, exoplanet research may also answer the ultimate question of whether we are alone in the Universe.

– ref. Cosmic theorist and planet-hunters share physics prize as Nobels reward otherworldly discoveries – http://theconversation.com/cosmic-theorist-and-planet-hunters-share-physics-prize-as-nobels-reward-otherworldly-discoveries-124973

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wang-Sheng Lee, Associate professor, Deakin University

Married couples make a number of important decisions together, such as where to live, what type of house to buy, how many children to have and how to educate them. And the extent to which a person believes in powerful forces – like fate, luck or destiny – is among the personality characteristics that influence the way these decisions are made.

Read more: Have you found ‘the one’? How mindsets about destiny affect our romantic relationships

This is known as “locus of control”, a psychological term referring to how much a person thinks they have control over the outcomes of their lives, rather than feeling like their lives are influenced by external forces.

For example, having an “internal orientation” means you’d expect you could solve problems on your own. On the other hand, an external orientation means you think luck, fate, destiny, a higher power, or other outside influences will be more important to help resolve issues.

Our new published research, which crunched survey data from thousands of Australian heterosexual couples, showed those who felt a strong sense of control over their lives (internal locus of control) were far more satisfied in their marriage than those who put a greater emphasis on outside forces (external locus of control).

Marriage satisfaction

We tested the impact of “locus of control” on marriage satisfaction with a nationally representative group of married couples. Data was taken from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) project, collected from more than 7600 households between 2001 and 2017.

And we analysed questions such as whether your own locus of control, or that of your spouse, has a greater impact on how happy you are in your marriage.

Read more: All you need is love: the psychology of romance

There were four key findings.

First, we found having an internal locus of control and a partner who is also internally oriented is associated with higher marriage satisfaction. In other words, if neither you nor your partner believe in powerful external forces like fate, you’re more likely to be in a happy marriage.

We also found that for both men and women, your own locus of control is more important for how happy you are in a marriage, rather than your partner’s locus of control.

And spouses sharing a similar level of locus of control is beneficial to a marriage because they’d typically have similar views about how problems can be solved. But having a similar locus of control is still less important for your own marriage satisfaction than you having an internal locus of control.

Finally, we found heterosexual couples with a more externally oriented husband experience a greater decline in marriage satisfaction over time, compared with couples where the husband is more internally oriented. We did not find a corresponding effect for wives.

Locus of control is important because it affects couple interactions. It could lead to disagreements and misaligned perceptions regarding how household decisions are made.

For example, one variable we looked at was financial decisions. And we found externally oriented husbands married to more internal wives were more likely to report financial decisions were usually made by the wife, and less likely to report financial decisions were shared equally. However, internal wives perceive matters differently and view they aren’t solely making these decisions.

Our findings are particularly pertinent for couples considering marriage, because locus of control doesn’t generally change much over time, unless you make an active effort to do so – for example, through couples therapy.

Quiz: what’s your locus of control?

So before deciding to get married, couples could take this test determining your individual locus of control. This will offer a better idea of what to expect, based on the orientation of their partner and their own locus of control.

Read more: This trait could be key to a lasting romance

You can answer a few questions to determine your own locus of control. How much do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements?

It is important to note locus of control is a continuum. Most people lie somewhere between the two extremes.

Broadly speaking, a score of 13 or lower implies you have an internal orientation, while a score of 21 or higher implies you have an external orientation. A score in-between 14 to 20 implies you have a midlevel orientation.

Now get your partner to do the test and have a chat!

– ref. Quiz: Does destiny shape your decisions? Your answer could affect your marriage satisfaction – http://theconversation.com/quiz-does-destiny-shape-your-decisions-your-answer-could-affect-your-marriage-satisfaction-123345

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marian-Andrei Rizoiu, Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney

This is the first article in a series looking at the attention economy and how online content gets in front of your eyeballs.

You may have read about – or already seen, depending on where you are – the latest tweak to Facebook’s interface: the disappearance of the likes counter.

Like Instagram (which it owns), Facebook is experimenting with hiding the number of likes that posts receive for users in some areas (Australia for Facebook, and Canada for Instagram).

In the new design, the number of likes is no longer shown. But with a simple click you can see who liked the post and even count them.

It seems like Facebook is going to a lot of trouble to hide a seemingly innocuous signal, especially when it is relatively easy to retrieve.

Facebook’s goal is reportedly to make people comfortable expressing themselves and to increase the quality of the content they share.

There are also claims about ameliorating user insecurity when posting, perceived liberty of expression, and circumventing the herd mentality.

But are there any scientific grounds for this change?

The MusicLab model

In 2006, US researchers Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts set out to investigate the intriguing disconnect between quality and popularity observed in cultural markets.

They created the MusicLab experiments, in which users were presented with a choice of songs from unknown bands. Users would listen online and could choose to download songs they liked.

The users were divided into two groups: for one group, the songs were shown at random with no other information; for the other group, songs were ordered according to a social signal – the number of times each had already been downloaded – and this number was shown next to them.

Read more: Users (and their bias) are key to fighting fake news on Facebook – AI isn’t smart enough yet

A song’s number of downloads is a measure of its popularity, akin to the number of likes for Facebook posts.

The results were fascinating: when the number of downloads was shown, the song market would evolve to be highly unequal (with one song becoming vastly more popular than all the others) and unpredictable (the winning song would not be the same if the experiment were repeated).

Based on these results, Australian researchers proposed the first model (dubbed the MusicLab model) to explain how content becomes popular in cultural markets, why a few things get all the popularity and most get nothing, and (most important for us) why showing the number of downloads is so detrimental.

They theorised that the consumption of an online product (such as a song) is a two-step process: first the user clicks on it based on its appeal, then they download it based on its quality.

As it turns out, a song’s appeal is largely determined by its current popularity. If other people like something, we tend to think it’s worth taking a look at.

So how often a song will be downloaded in future depends on its current appeal, which in turn depends on its current number of downloads.

This leads to the well-known result that future popularity of a product or idea is highly dependent on its past popularity. This is also known as the “rich get richer” effect.

What does this have to do with Facebook likes?

The parallel between Facebook and the MusicLab experiment is straightforward: the songs correspond to posts, whereas downloads correspond to likes.

For a market of products such as songs, the MusicLab model implies that showing popularity means fewer cultural products of varying quality are consumed overall, and some high-quality products may go unnoticed.

But the effects are even more severe for a market of ideas, such as Facebook. The “rich get richer” effect compounds over time like interest on a mortgage. The total popularity of one idea can increase exponentially and quickly dominate the entire market.

As a result, the first idea on the market has more time to grow and has increased chances of dominating regardless of its quality (a strong first-mover advantage).

Read more: We made deceptive robots to see why fake news spreads, and found a weakness

This first-mover advantage partially explains why fake news items so often dominate their debunking, and why it is so hard to replace wrong and detrimental beliefs with correct or healthier alternatives that arrive later in the game.

Despite what is sometimes claimed, the “marketplace of ideas” is no guarantee that high-quality content will become popular.

Other lines of research suggest that while quality ideas do make it to the top, it is next to impossible to predict early which ones. In other words, quality appears disconnected from popularity.

Is there any way the game can be fixed?

This seems to paint a bleak picture of online society, in which misinformation, populist ideas, and unhealthy teen challenges can freely flow through online media and capture the public’s attention.

However, the other group in the MusicLab experiment – the group who were not shown a popularity indicator – can give us hope for a solution, or at least some improvement.

The researchers reported that hiding the number of downloads led to a much fairer and more predictable market, in which popularity is more evenly distributed among a greater number of competitors and more closely correlated to quality.

So it appears that Facebook’s decision to hide the number of likes on posts could be better for everyone.

In addition to limiting pressure on post creators and reducing their levels of anxiety and envy, it might also help to create a fairer information exchange environment.

And if posters spend less time on optimising post timing and other tricks for gaming the system, we might even notice an increase in content quality.

– ref. Can hiding likes make Facebook fairer and rein in fake news? The science says maybe – http://theconversation.com/can-hiding-likes-make-facebook-fairer-and-rein-in-fake-news-the-science-says-maybe-124671

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Beckett, Lecturer (Food Science and Human Nutrition), School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle

The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating sets out how much we should eat from each of the food groups. If we eat the recommended number of “standard serves” from each food group for our age and sex, it puts us in a good position to have a healthy, balanced diet.

But what is a standard serve? And does it match what’s on our food labels?

Standard serves

Despite the name, standard serves are not very standard, even in the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating. Serves can be described by energy (kilojoules or kJ for short) contained in a serve, units of food such as “one medium apple”, or “one slice of bread”, by weight, or by volumes like a cup.

Read more: Food as medicine: why do we need to eat so many vegetables and what does a serve actually look like?

A “serve” is also different between each of the food groups and even within the food groups.

One serve of grains is about 500kJ. That’s one English muffin but only half a bread roll. Or it could be half a cup of porridge, one-quarter of a cup of muesli, or three-quarters of a cup of wheat cereal flakes.

One serve of dairy is 500-600kJ, which could be one cup of milk, but is only three-quarters of a cup of yoghurt, or a half cup of ricotta cheese. Hard cheeses are defined by slices, with two slices to a serve, assuming each slice is about 20g.

Serves on food labels

Nearly all packaged foods in Australia have nutrition information panels. These include information meant to help us make better food choices.

The exact information depends on the food. But they have to at least include how much energy (kJ), protein, fat (total and saturated), carbohydrates (total and sugars) and salt (sodium) is in the product. These contents are always listed twice, per 100g (100mL for liquids) and per serving.

But the serving on the label has nothing to do with the standard serves in the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating. The serving size on the label is not a recommendation on how much you should eat – it is decided by the manufacturer. It’s based on how much they expect a person to typically eat, or the unit size the product is eaten in.

This could be very different to a standard serve. For example, the labelled serving size on a chocolate bar might be “one bar” – 53g of chocolate containing 1,020kJ. But the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating says a serve is half a small bar (25g) or about 600kJ, and it’s recommended we limit discretionary food (junk food) to one serve per day.

Comparing serving sizes between brand and package sizes

In Australia, there are no rules about how these serving sizes are set. A serving might not be the same in similar products, or in different brands of the same product.

This can make products hard to compare. The serving size of a soy sauce in one brand, for example, could be one-tenth of a soy sauce made by another company.

Read more: Fat free and 100% natural: seven food labelling tricks exposed

To add to the confusion, a serving also doesn’t necessarily reflect portion size: how much a person consumes in a meal or sitting.

A 250g packet of microwave white rice, for example, might be labelled as having two 125g servings. This is because the manufacturer expects it to serve two people. But one of those labelled servings is almost two standard serves of grains.

To make it even more confusing, in the same brand of rice, a 450g family pack could be labelled as having four serves, with each serve 112g. That’s 10% smaller than the serving size in the smaller packet. But it assumes a family of four could split the pack between them in a meal. So, in this package, one labelled serving size would be the equivalent of about 1.7 standard serves of grains.

How serves on labels impact our food choices

Even though labelled serving sizes are not related to standard serves or the recommended amounts that should be eaten, research shows consumers often interpret the labelled servings as being recommendations for portion size or for following dietary guidelines.

Studies show the listed serving size impacts how much people choose to eat. Larger serving sizes on labels can make it appear that a large serve is recommended, leading to people eating or serving themselves more. This has been shown with several foods, including cookies, cereal, lasagne and cheese crackers.

But for some foods, like lollies, larger serving sizes can make them look less healthy, leading to reduced consumption or smaller portion sizes. This is likely because the large number of kilojoules stands out in the per serving data.

So what should you do?

Because serving sizes can vary by product and manufacturer, it’s easiest to use the per 100g or 100mL information, instead of the per serve information when comparing products. But think about the actual weight or volume you will consumer when you consider how it fits your daily intakes.

The recommended diet for the average adult is based on eating 8,700kJ of energy per day. To get this much energy from a balanced diet, that’s 50g protein, 70g fat and 310g carbohydrates. We also want to aim for 24g or less of saturated fats, and 30g or more of fibre.

But needs will differ by life stage, activity level, sex, your current weight and your weight goals. There are online calculators to estimate your requirements.

Memorising serving sizes and guidelines can be hard. To make it easy, you can print a copy of the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating food groups and serving sizes to keep where you can see them when preparing food.

Read more: Health Check: how to work out how much food you should eat

– ref. No, serving sizes on food labels don’t tell us how much we should eat – http://theconversation.com/no-serving-sizes-on-food-labels-dont-tell-us-how-much-we-should-eat-123755

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Hall, Senior Researcher in Politics, Auckland University of Technology

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

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

Why do people still think climate change isn’t real?

At its heart, climate change denial is a conflict between facts and values. People deny the climate crisis because, to them, it just feels wrong.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, acknowledging climate change involves accepting certain facts. But being concerned about climate change involves connecting these facts to values. It involves building bridges between the science of climate change and peoples’ various causes, commitments and convictions.

Denial happens when climate science rubs us up the wrong way. Instead of making us want to arrest the climate crisis, it makes us resist the very thought of it, because the facts of anthropogenic global heating clash with our personal projects.

It could be that the idea of climate change is a threat to our worldview. Or it could be that we fear society’s response to climate change, the disruption created by the transition to a low-emissions economy. Either way, climate change becomes such an “inconvenient truth” that, instead of living with and acting upon our worries, we suppress the truth instead.

Read more: Five climate change science misconceptions – debunked

Negating reality

Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna were the great chroniclers of denial. Sigmund described this negation of reality as an active mental process, as “a way of taking cognisance of what is repressed”. This fleeting comprehension is what distinguishes denial from ignorance, misunderstanding or sheer disbelief. Climate change denial involves glimpsing the horrible reality, but defending oneself against it.

Contemporary social psychologists tend to talk about this in terms of “motivated reasoning”. Because the facts of climate science are in conflict with people’s existing beliefs and values, they reason around the facts.

When this happens – as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt memorably put it – they aren’t reasoning in the careful manner of a judge who impartially weighs up all the evidence. Instead, they’re reasoning in the manner of a defence lawyer who clutches for post hoc rationalisations to defend an initial gut instinct. This is why brow-beating deniers with further climate science is unlikely to succeed: their faculty of reason is motivated to defend itself from revising its beliefs.

A large and growing empirical literature is exploring what drives denial. Personality is a factor: people are more likely to deny climate change if they’re inclined toward hierarchy and against changes to the status quo. Demographic factors also show an effect. Internationally, people who are less educated, older and more religious tend to discount climate change, with sex and income having a smaller effect.

Read more: Climate explained: Why are climate change skeptics often right-wing conservatives?

But the strongest predictor is one’s politics. An international synthesis of existing studies found that values, ideologies and political allegiances overshadowed other factors. In Western societies, political affiliation is the key factor, with conservative voters more likely to discount climate change. Globally, a person’s commitment to democratic values – or not in the case of deniers – is more significant.

This sheds light on another side of the story. Psychology can contribute to explaining a person’s politics, but politics cannot be entirely explained by psychology. So too for denial.

The politics of denial

As the sociologist Stanley Cohen noted in his classic study of denial, there is an important distinction between denial that is personal and psychological, and denial that is institutional and organised. The former involves people who deny the facts to themselves, but the latter involves the denial of facts to others, even when these “merchants of doubt” know the truth very well.

It is well established that fossil fuel companies have long known about climate change, yet sought to frustrate wider public understanding. A comprehensive analysis of documentations from ExxonMobil found that, since 1977, the company has internally acknowledged climate change through the publications of its scientists, even while it publicly promoted doubt through paid advertorials. The fossil fuel industry has also invested heavily in conservative foundations and think tanks that promote contrarian scientists and improbable spins on the science.

All this is rich manure for personal denial. When a person’s motivated reasoning is on the hunt for excuses, there is an industry ready to supply them. Social media offers further opportunities for spreading disinformation. For example, a recent analysis of anonymised YouTube searches found that videos supporting the scientific consensus on climate change were outnumbered by those that didn’t.

Undoing denial

In sum, denial is repressed knowledge. For climate change, this repression occurs at both the psychological level and social level, with the latter providing fodder for the former. This is a dismal scenario, but it shines some light on the way forward.

On the one hand, it reminds us that deniers are capable of acknowledging the science – at some level, they already do – even though they struggle to embrace the practical and ethical implications. Consequently, climate communications may do well to appeal to more diverse values, particularly those values held by the deniers themselves.

Experiments have shown that, if the risks and realities of climate change are reframed as opportunities for community relationship building and societal development, then deniers can shift their views. Similarly, in the US context, appealing to conservative values like patriotism, obeying authority and defending the purity of nature can encourage conservatives to support pro-environmental actions.

On the other hand, not all deniers will be convinced. Some downplay and discount climate change precisely because they recognise that the low-emissions transition will adversely impact their interests. A bombardment of further facts and framings is unlikely to move them.

What will make a difference is the power of the people – through regulation, divestment, consumer choice and public protest. Public surveys emphasise that, throughout the world, deniers are in the minority. The worried majority doesn’t need to win over everyone in order to win on climate change.

– ref. Climate explained: why some people still think climate change isn’t real – http://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-some-people-still-think-climate-change-isnt-real-124763

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick O’Connor, Associate Professor, University of Adelaide

Protected land, including national parks, are a cornerstone of conservation. Once an area is legally protected, it is tempting to assume that it is shielded from further degradation.

However, our research, published in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation, has found Australia’s national parks are under serious threat of overgrazing. Significantly, native kangaroos are major contributors to the problem.

In some places we looked at, the effect of overgrazing in protected areas was just as pronounced as on private land with no legal protection at all.

In the public debate over culling and otherwise managing kangaroo populations, attention is typically divided between their economic impact on people versus welfare concerns. But there’s a third unwilling participant in this dilemma: the thousands of other native species affected when native grazer populations grow out of control.

Protected from what?

National parks and other protected areas can be safeguarded in a variety of legal ways. Activities such as grazing of domestic stock, building, cropping and some recreational activities (hunting, fishing, dogs) are usually restricted in protected areas. However, previous research has found protected areas continue to face intense pressure from agriculture, urbanisation, mining, road construction, and climate change.

Less conspicuously, the loss of predators from many Australian ecosystems has let herbivore populations grow wildly. Overgrazing, or grazing that leads to changes in habitat, is now a key threat to biodiversity.

Overgrazing by herbivores affects native species such as the diamond firetail, which is declining in southeastern Australia due to loss of habitat and the replacement of native grasses with exotic species after overgrazing and fire. Overgrazing has also been shown to reduce the abundance and diversity of ground-dwelling reptiles.

In the face of a global extinction crisis, we need good evidence that national parks and reserves are serving their purpose.

Read more: The alpine grazing debate was never about science

To determine whether protected areas are being overgrazed, we assessed grazing impact on native vegetation at 1,192 sites across the entire agricultural region of South Australia. We looked at more than 600 plant species in woodlands, forests, shrublands, and grasslands.

The data were collected by monitoring programs, some of which included citizen scientists, aimed at tracking change in the condition of native vegetation.

We found that grazing pressure was already high on unprotected land when we began monitoring around 2005, and grazing impact has grown since then. On protected land, three things are happening as a consequence of inadequate management of grazing by native and introduced animals:

1. grazing impact in protected areas has substantially increased,

2. protected areas in some regions now show equally severe effects from grazing as seen on private land without any conservation protections, and

3. the character of our landscapes, including national parks, is set to change as the next generation of edible seedlings is lost from protected and unprotected ecosystems.

The increased severity of grazing in protected areas paints a dire picture. This threat adds to the rising pressure on protected areas for recreational access (and other uses).

The grass is not greener

It’s well accepted that introduced species such as deer, goats, horses, camels and rabbits badly affect Australia’s native vegetation. There are a variety of control measures to keep their populations in check, including culls and strong incentives for control on farmland. Control of feral animals is normally less contentious than control of endemic species like kangaroos, because we feel a custodial responsibility for native species.

But the numbers of native kangaroos and wallabies has also increased dramatically since 2011 as populations across Australia responded to an increase in feed at the end of the Millennium drought and reduced culling in settled areas due to changes in regulation and growing opposition to culls on animal welfare grounds.

Read more: Plants are going extinct up to 350 times faster than the historical norm

Managing kangaroo populations, on the other hand, is a polarising issue. Arguments about culling kangaroos can be bitter and personal, and create perceptions of an urban-rural divide.

However, a few species – even if they are native – should not be allowed to compromise the existence of other native plants and animals, especially not where we have dedicated the land to holistic protection of biodiversity.

Extinction rates in Australia are extremely high, especially among plants. Research has also found conservation funding is disproportionately aimed at individual species rather than crucial ecosystems. We must address our reluctance to manage threats to biodiversity at the scale on which they operate.

Protected areas must be managed to meet clear biodiversity targets and control overgrazing, including from native species.

Read more: Fixing Australia’s extinction crisis means thinking bigger than individual species

Welfare concerns for conspicuous native species need to be weighed against the concern for the many other less obvious native plant and animal species. If our national parks and reserves are not managed properly, they will fail to meet the conservation need for which they were established.

– ref. Kangaroos (and other herbivores) are eating away at national parks across Australia – http://theconversation.com/kangaroos-and-other-herbivores-are-eating-away-at-national-parks-across-australia-122953

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denise Jackson, Associate Professor / Coordinator of Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) programs, ECU School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

From 2020, universities will receive a certain amount of government funding based on four performance measures: student drop-out rates; participation of Indigenous, lower socioeconomic status and regional and remote students; student satisfaction with the university experience; and employment outcomes.

The government finalised the funding model in recent days and announced:

Graduate employment outcomes will be the most important factor under the performance-based funding model for universities[…]

This model will determine more than A$80 million of extra university funding (on top of the A$7 billion annual government subsidies), which is based on population growth estimates in the Commonwealth Grant Scheme.

Graduate employment outcomes will account for 40% of this money. That’s double the weighting of the other three funding criteria.

Read more: Government funding will be tied to uni performance from 2020: what does this mean, and what are the challenges?

Universities can do some things to improve graduate employment prospects, but their power over this aspect of “performance” is limited. Employment opportunities and outcomes are dictated mainly by the labour market.

And focusing on churning out employable graduates could, in fact, lead universities to discriminate against students who statistically have lower employment outcomes, such as those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

Here are three reasons giving employment outcomes twice the weight of other performance measures is a problem.

1. The labour market determines employment outcomes

Universities can make a difference to how employable a student is. They can do so through curriculum initiatives such as work-integrated learning, where students engage with industry and the community as part of their degree.

Research shows internships during study were a key reason for graduates’ ability to secure a quality job.

But it’s the wider market factors that ultimately account for how many graduates find work. Figures show employment outcomes for graduates steadily improved for the last three years, in line with the falling rate of overall unemployment in Australia.

Between 2016 and 2018 – when the unemployment rate fell from 5.8% to 5% – the overall graduate employment rate rose from 86.4% to 87%.

Read more: Graduate employment is up, but finding a job can still take a while

External factors determine the availability of graduate job roles, recruitment bias (such as institution status), as well as wider domestic economic conditions (such as economic uncertainty and business confidence) and globalisation (including trends in outsourcing labour).

2. It’s a blunt measure

The government-commissioned final report on performance-based funding, released in August 2019, recommends employment outcomes be measured by “overall graduate employment rates for domestic bachelor students”.

These are tracked in the Graduate Outcomes Survey. Graduates complete this survey four months after they finish their course.

Using “overall rates” is a blunt measure that doesn’t take into account the type of employment the graduate is in. It applies to any kind of employment – including full-time, part-time or casual work – as a percentage of graduates available for employment.

Nor does this measure give any insight into whether the work is related to the graduates’ degrees or is meaningful and satisfying for them.

Read more: Should university funding be tied to student performance?

Rising graduate underemployment means graduates are increasingly overqualified in their roles and not drawing on the skills acquired at university. This is particularly problematic for those in more general degrees such as humanities, creative arts and social sciences.

Because the survey is conducted four months after course completion, the data represent graduates’ transition to the workforce, rather than giving much insight into their actual labour market achievements.

3. It could lead to discrimination

Some people are more employable than others. This means a university’s graduate employment outcomes will depend on its cohort of graduates.

One of the performance-based measures encourages universities to engage with equity groups – Indigenous, lower socioeconomic status and regional and remote students. But evidence shows low socioeconomic status students are less likely to find work than their peers.

Giving “employment outcomes” double the weight of “participation by equity groups” may lead universities to prioritise enrolling students who are more likely to help them score better on the first measure.

What could the government do instead?

The measure of “overall employment” does acknowledge not all graduates can, or want to, work full-time. Yet, whether they have a job or not doesn’t give any insight into quality. In a recent study, graduates rated enjoyment and interest in their job higher than job security when it came to defining career success.

It’s important for universities to support their graduates in finding quality roles. But whether or not this is happening can only be realistically gauged over a longer period than four months.

The United Kingdom now includes measures for satisfaction and well-being in its own graduate outcomes survey, which it has shifted from six to 15 months after course completion. The UK has done this in recognition of the importance of intrinsic measures, such as career satisfaction, and the need to give graduates time to find their feet in the labour market.

Read more: Surveys are not the best way to measure the performance of Australian universities

The purpose of education is not just about getting a job. It’s also about empowering students to achieve meaningful and sustainable careers for social and economic good. If the government wants to link universities’ performance to graduate outcomes, it needs an outcomes-based performance measure that universities have greater control over and that is related to students’ career readiness.

Universities could have some control of this by gauging the professional capabilities of students that employers consider important. These include teamwork, communication, critical thinking and problem solving.

Students complete the Student Experience Survey when they start and complete their studies. These data on self-reported capability development could also be linked to later post-graduation responses on career success. This could be done with a more meaningful measure, such as career satisfaction.

– ref. Universities don’t control the labour market: we shouldn’t fund them like they do – http://theconversation.com/universities-dont-control-the-labour-market-we-shouldnt-fund-them-like-they-do-124780

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bronwyn Bate, PhD Candidate, Urban Research Program, Western Sydney University

Two-thirds of tenants in Australia rent through a real estate agent. A national shortage of private rental housing forces these tenants to impress the real estate agent to secure a property – their application needs to stand out from other applications.

An analysis of articles on leading online real estate sites www.realestate.com.au and www.domain.com.au identifies six aspects of interactions between the real estate agent and tenant that affect a tenant’s ability to secure a rental property. My research reveals the power of the agent over the tenant. Agents strongly stigmatise certain tenant characteristics during the property search.

These real estate articles typically fail to recognise the systemic issues of housing shortages in Australia. As owner-occupied housing becomes more unaffordable and public housing becomes less available, a variety of household types are competing in a high-demand private rental market.

Read more: Affordable housing lessons from Sydney, Hong Kong and Singapore: 3 keys to getting the policy mix right

Households have differing economic, cultural and social capital. This puts some applicants for a rental property at a disadvantage. But real estate sites present the issue of secure rental housing as an individual problem that can easily be overcome once a tenant understands how to highlight their desirable characteristics when applying for a rental property.

How do agents assess tenants?

When assessing a rental application, the two most important qualities a real estate agent looks for are a tenant’s ability to pay the rent on time and their ability and/or willingness to care for the rental property.

In addition, a tenant’s ability to impress the real estate agent matters. My research identifies six aspects of interactions between agent and tenant that affect the ability to secure a rental property:

1. responsibility – positive reference/s from previous agents and/or landlords help demonstrate this
2. making an impression – dress appropriately and be on time for inspections, engage with the agent and present an easy-to-read, error-free application form
3. established relationships – a previously established relationship with the agent or landlord improves the tenant’s chances
4. honesty – tenants are encouraged to be honest with their agent about their lifestyle
5. flexibility – be flexible about lease length and the cost of rent
6. creative thinking – for example, bringing cupcakes to a rental inspection.

Through these interactions, tenants can highlight their desirable characteristics while downplaying their undesirable characteristics.

Selection process reinforces disadvantage

The ability to make a good impression on the agent, however, is largely based on a variety of factors that place some tenants at a disadvantage.

For example, tenants are advised that several lifestyle factors may hamper their ability to secure a property. These include pets, dependent children, age, a negative rental history and other potential housemates.

These findings match those of an Australian survey of private renters, commissioned by Choice, National Shelter and the National Association of Tenant Organisations. It found 50% of renters have experienced discrimination in the private rental sector. This includes discrimination on the basis of: pets (23%), receiving government payments (17%), age (14%), having young children (10%), being a single parent (7%), race (6%), needing to use a bond loan (5%), gender (5%), disability (5%) and sexuality (2%).

Read more: A white face can be a big help in a discriminatory housing market

Further, when it comes to making an impression, some tenants are at a significant advantage. For example, factors such as English proficiency and the ability to “dress to impress” are often a reflection of economic and cultural capital.

The articles assume that presenting an application form with no spelling and grammatical errors is simply a matter of taking a little extra care. However, a newly arrived migrant may find this difficult, not because of laziness but because they may not yet be proficient in English.

The articles also highlight a tenant’s willingness to be flexible as important. Flexibility is presented in the following ways:

• where demand for properties is high, tenants are advised to offer more rent
• when a tenant has no rental history, they are advised to offer to pay rent in advance
• tenants are also advised to cater to the needs of the real estate agent and landlord by being flexible about the length of the lease.

Tenants’ ability to be flexible in these ways varies greatly. For example, not all tenants have the means to offer more rent or pay rent in advance. The ability to be flexible about lease length also differs depending on individual circumstances.

My research shows the process of securing a rental property could reinforce the disadvantage of some tenants. This raises an important question. When private rental housing is the only option, what happens to those tenants who fail to impress the real estate agent?

Read more: Informal and illegal housing on the rise as our cities fail to offer affordable places to live

– ref. Looking to rent a home? 6 things that will help or hinder you – http://theconversation.com/looking-to-rent-a-home-6-things-that-will-help-or-hinder-you-123753

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Wright, Research Fellow, Centre for Workforce Futures, Macquarie University

Alan Joyce is Australia’s highest-paid chief executive.

Alan Joyce is one of the Financial Review’s ten most covertly powerful people.

Alan Joyce writes heartwarming notes to children.

Alan Joyce is getting married.

And he is apparently some sort of superhero.

Something about chief executives brings forth testimonials like this, published in the News Corporation tabloids last month, which followed the revelation that Joyce was Australia’s highest paid corporate chief (taking home A$24 million in 2018-19).

Penned by Angela Mollard, a journalist specialising in celebrities, it said he had

turned around a failing company, put thousands of dollars in shareholders’ pockets, boosted the superannuation of Mr and Mrs Average and prevented thousands from losing their jobs.

Joyce, and all the best chief executives, she argued, were

alchemists, strategists, innovators and geniuses. They have the sort of agile brains that produce solutions to problems which seem intractable. They lead not from a textbook but from an internal well of brilliance that seems constantly replenished.

Further, executives like Joyce deserved to be rewarded for

the risks they take, the entrepreneurship they exhibit, the education they’ve invested in and the particular brand of brilliance that comes along all too rarely.

It’s been said before

I’ve been examining the language used to describe Australia’s elite executives over the past 100 years, and what’s being said about Joyce is familiar – right down to the use of the word “genius”.

This kind of talk, repeated for more than a century now, leads us astray if we keep repeating it. It creates misunderstandings about how large companies work. Chief executives aren’t superhuman, their characteristics are not those of their companies, they don’t single-handedly determine the fate of those companies or personally employ their workers, they aren’t necessarily selfless or patriotic, and they don’t necessarily have the best interests of the nation at heart.

Read more: CEOs who take a political stand are seen as a bonus by job applicants

Sir Charles Mackellar, chairman of the Mutual Life & Citizens’ Assurance Company and a director of a host of other companies including the Colonial Sugar Refining Company was labelled a “genius” when he died in 1914.

FA Govett, the London-based head of Australia’s Zinc Corporation was labelled as a “man of exceptional ability” in 1926.

Often they had higher ideals.

Sir William Lennon Raws, a director of four of Australia’s biggest companies including BHP and Elder Smith, was a “well-meaning capitalist with a dream”.

Like Joyce and his contemporaries that work their “butts off to do the right thing”, Raws was

palpably rich and could be richer; but I doubt if the making of another million would be as much to him as the achievement of one of his cherished hopes.

It’s their own work

Executives have long been seen as the sole reason for their company’s success. In 2019, Joyce single-handedly “took a beleaguered company and transformed it”.

Similarly, in the late 1800s, BHP director William Jamieson was solely responsible for the development of the Broken Hill region.

Robert Philp of Burns Philp and Company was an Australian patriot who “controlled her destinies during a critical period”.

Industrialist and car manufacturer Edward Holden worked tirelessly to “benefit the state and the company”.

Corporate director and university chancellor Sir Normand Maclaurin was “endowed with talents of a very high order […] having at heart the welfare of the nation”.

They’re exceptional

Joyce’s success might be due to his “big dick energy”, but he wasn’t the first. In the early 1900s, Joseph Pratt – director of the National Bank of Australasia, the Land Mortgage Bank, the Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company and Metropolitan Gas Company – was described in the most masculine of terms as a big man

tall, erect, well-made and muscular. He has a pleasant, manly face, indicative of straightforwardness and goodness of disposition, and upon which grows a russet beard, containing a few grey hairs…

Sir Mark Sheldon – chairman of the Waterloo Glass Bottle Works, a director of the Australian Bank of Commerce, and vice president of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce – also also big ,

big in his outlook, his ideas, and his accomplishments. Perhaps his height (6 feet, 1.5 inches) enables him to look a bit farther ahead than the ordinary man

Painting corporate chiefs like this gives corporations a human face. It helps convince customers and investors that their money is in safe hands. If Alan Joyce is a ‘good man’, then the Qantas Group is seen as a good company.

Read more: Swollen executive pay packets reveal the limits of corporate activism

It also makes executives untouchable. After all, if they are blessed with unique or exceptional abilities, and if their company is doing well (whatever the reason), it is hard to argue with the millions being spent on them.

Even if it’s $24 million, even if it’s more.

– ref. Painting Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce as a superhero is part of a long Australian tradition – http://theconversation.com/painting-qantas-chief-executive-alan-joyce-as-a-superhero-is-part-of-a-long-australian-tradition-124167

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Luke Brook, Lecturer – Games & Interactivity, Edith Cowan University

A new comedic video game about a mischievous goose has become a viral sensation – reaching the top of the digital sales charts, inspiring a steadily increasing stream of memes and fan-art, and earning celebrity endorsements from the likes of Blink 182 and Chrissy Teigen.

Untitled Goose Game is the latest release by Melbourne-based indie developer House House.

The game takes place in a quiet and unsuspecting English village and tasks the player – a mischievous goose – with making life unpleasant for the townsfolk. “It’s a lovely morning in the village and you are a horrible goose,” reads the promo text.

Funded through Film Victoria, Untitled Goose Game is an indication of what the Australian games industry is capable of with funding and support.

A funded success

Untitled Goose Game is the latest in a long line of globally successful video games developed by small-team indie developers in Australia, joining the likes of HalfBrick’s Fruit Ninja, Hipster Whale’s Crossy Road, and Black Lab Games’ Battlestar Galactica Deadlock.

These developers all received funding and backing from various government support programs.

The same cannot be said for vast majority of independent game development studios across Australia, which continue to operate and succeed despite practically no recognition or support, and the discontinuation of many federal and state government support and funding schemes. The federal government’s Interactive Games Fund was axed in 2014.

Read more: No country for new videogames: Brandis and Abbott are playing with our creative future

In 2018, Australians spent in excess of A$4 billion on video games, and the income generated by Australian game development studios totalled A$118 million, 80% from overseas sales.

The global industry generated revenue of almost US$138 billion (A$205 billion) in 2018 and is estimated to reach US$180 billion (A$267 billion) by 2021.

An evolving industry

Australia was once home to several big studios, including 2K Australia, Blue Tongue, Pandemic, THQ Australia, and Team Bondi.

Over the last decade, one-by-one the studios closed their doors due to excessive operating costs, the global financial crisis, and changes to production and distribution pathways.

The closure of large studios has paved the way for a new era of development, reminiscent of the golden age of video game design.

During the mid-1970s and early-1980s, game developers often funded and developed video games in their homes and distributed software independently.

As the industry grew, it was increasingly dominated by corporations. Publishers provided financial support to studios and took over the manufacturing, marketing and distribution of games. The market grew too fast, and became over-saturated with poor quality games. In 1983, the industry crashed.

The industry started to recover following the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985. Previous systems, such as Atari, gave unrestricted freedom to third-party developers. The NES introduced strict quality control measures and controlled what games were available on the system. With quality control came additional costs, and many independent developers were unable to operate without a publisher.

Publishing terms became progressively worse, with development studios having to sacrifice creative control and intellectual property to publishers. It hasn’t been uncommon for developers to be run into the ground.

But since 2012, independent video game development has been on the rise, and the game industry is now in an “indie game renaissance”.

The rise of the internet has enabled developers to use alternative, low-cost methods to develop, market and distribute their games. Independent studios can now reach customers directly with reduced costs for production and distribution.

However, reduced costs do not mean no costs: small-scale studios would benefit greatly from grants and funding schemes.

A model for success

The popularity of Untitled Goose Game comes from a perfect confluence of factors: a stylistic and playful art style, slapstick humour, an adaptive soundtrack, logical puzzle solving, and the high level of accessibility and short learning curve due to the simplistic control scheme.

Read more: Music that you help make: composition for video gaming draws on tradition and tech

The game’s success shows great things can come from investing in small, independent teams.

Canada’s media strategy, where video games are an industry of focus, shows us what the right levels of support and financial investment can help to achieve.

Due to the collaborative support of the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service and Canada Media Fund, Canada’s video game industry is booming. Canada’s video game industry ranks among the largest of any country in the world, with over 21,000 full-time employees and contributing C$3.7 billion (A$4.1 billion) to the country’s economy.

Despite these success stories and recommendations, the Australian government appears reluctant to provide any assistance to support the industry.

For now, we can only imagine what we could achieve if we invested more in our indie creators.

– ref. Honk if you love Untitled Goose Game: why we should invest more in our indie game creators – http://theconversation.com/honk-if-you-love-untitled-goose-game-why-we-should-invest-more-in-our-indie-game-creators-124508

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

Sometimes birthdays are best let pass quietly. The Liberals are finding the 75th anniversary of their founding another occasion for the blood sport they thought they’d put behind them.

Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull are out of parliament – for which Scott Morrison is much thankful – but their passions are unabated. Each has let fly in interviews with The Australian’s Troy Bramston to mark the anniversary.

Abbott repeated that it was Turnbull’s undermining which did him in (only the partial truth) and indicated he wouldn’t mind returning to parliament but didn’t think the Liberal party would ask him (absolutely true).

Turnbull’s was the more pertinent and, from where the government stands, pointed interview because it fed very directly into central issues of the moment, climate change and energy policy.

“The Liberal Party has just proved itself incapable of dealing with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in any sort of systematic way,” Turnbull said.

“The consequence … is without question that we are paying higher prices for electricity and having higher emissions.”

Read more: Morrison has led the Coalition to a ‘miracle’ win, but how do they govern from here?

He knows what he’s talking about. These issues were critical (though not the only factor) in Turnbull losing the leadership twice – first in opposition and then in government. And that was despite doing deals and trade offs to try to satisfy the right in his party.

He still frets about the battles which cost him so much for so little gain. He told the Australian, amid boasts about what his government had done, that his biggest regret as PM was not settling a new energy policy.

What Scott Morrison really thinks on the climate challenge, or what he would do if he were just driven by policy concerns without regard to party considerations or electoral judgements are in that category of known unknowns.

In few areas can Morrison’s beliefs be divined free of political context.

But we do know two things.

Firstly, we don’t have a satisfactory energy policy: emissions are rising; power prices are too high; investment is being discouraged. An analysis released by the Grattan Institute this week was damning about how federal government policies were discouraging investment including by “bashing big companies” (the so-called “big stick” legislation, allowing for divestment when an energy company is recalcitrant, is still before parliament).

Secondly, climate change is again resonating strongly in the community.

Read more: Can the Liberal Party hold its ‘broad church’ of liberals and conservatives together?

Critics dismiss the attention young activist Greta Thunberg has received internationally, and this week’s “Extinction Rebellion” demonstrations, and many in the government would point to the election result to note that climate change did not carry the day with the “quiet Australians”.

The Morrison win, however, doesn’t mean the issue lacks cut through, or won’t have potency in the future. And although the Liberals like to talk about the miracle victory, it should be remembered the win was by a sliver, not by 30 seats. What made it so notable was that it defied expectations.

Turnbull said in his interview the Liberal party had been influenced by a group that was denialist and reactionary on climate change.

It still is, but this group is not giving trouble at the moment because Morrison, unlike his predecessor, is not provoking them.

The problem for Morrison is that keeping his party calm doesn’t solve the policy problem. Unless that is more effectively tackled, it could come back to bite him, regardless of the positive tale he tries to spin, such as in his United Nations speech.

Turnbull also said in his interview that, among much else, in government he had been “very focused on innovation” which, as we remember, was his catch cry in his early days as PM.

And, if we take information from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for International Development, reported in Tuesday’s Australian Financial Review, Australia needs innovation to be a much higher priority.

Australia fell from 57th to 93rd between 1995 and 2017 on the index of economic complexity, which measures the diversity and sophistication of countries’ exports. Our wealth comes from the minerals and energy that form the bulk of our exports but “Australia⁩ is ⁨less complex than expected⁩ for its income level. As a result, its economy is projected to grow ⁨slowly.⁩ The Growth Lab’s ⁨2027⁩ Growth Projections foresee growth in ⁨Australia⁩ of ⁨2.2%⁩ annually over the coming decade, ranking in the ⁨bottom half⁩ of countries globally,” the data says.

“Economic growth is driven by diversification into new products that are incrementally more complex. … ⁨⁨Australia⁩ has diversified into too few products to contribute to substantial income growth.⁩”

Read more: The Turnbull government is all but finished, and the Liberals will now need to work out who they are

Turnbull’s talk of innovation, agility, and the like was seen by many in his ranks, particularly in hindsight, as too high falutin’. It certainly went down badly in regional areas, which is why in 2016 the Nationals sharply differentiated themselves in the election campaign.

The Harvard work suggests Turnbull’s innovation ambition was on the right track. But the political evidence showed he was a bad salesman for this (and a lot else).

Morrison is a good marketing man. But the test of his prime ministership will be whether he can use his marketing skills to sell policies that the country needs, rather just what he thinks will go over easily with his constituency.

The most effective leaders (and that excludes both Abbott and Turnbull) can both identify what the nation requires and persuade enough of the voters to embrace it, even when it’s difficult. They operate not on the principle of the lowest common electoral denominator, or simplistic descriptions of their supporters – rather they pursue the highest achievable goals.

– ref. View from The Hill: Malcolm Turnbull delivers the unpalatable truth to Scott Morrison on climate and energy – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-malcolm-turnbull-delivers-the-unpalatable-truth-to-scott-morrison-on-climate-and-energy-124889

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

Sometimes birthdays are best let pass quietly. The Liberals are finding the 75th anniversary of their founding another occasion for the blood sport they thought they’d put behind them.

Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull are out of parliament – for which Scott Morrison is much thankful – but their passions are unabated. Each has let fly in interviews with The Australian’s Troy Bramston to mark the anniversary.

Abbott repeated that it was Turnbull’s undermining which did him in (only the partial truth) and indicated he wouldn’t mind returning to parliament but didn’t think the Liberal party would ask him (absolutely true).

Turnbull’s was the more pertinent and, from the government’s point of view, pointed interview because it fed very directly into central issues of the moment, climate change and energy policy.

“The Liberal Party has just proved itself incapable of dealing with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in any sort of systematic way,” Turnbull said.

“The consequence … is without question that we are paying higher prices for electricity and having higher emissions.”

Read more: Morrison has led the Coalition to a ‘miracle’ win, but how do they govern from here?

He knows what he’s talking about. These issues were critical (though not the only factor) in Turnbull losing the leadership twice – first in opposition and then in government. And that was despite doing deals and trade offs to try to satisfy the right in his party.

He still frets about the battles which cost him so much for so little gain. He told the Australian, amid boasts about what his government had done, that his biggest regret as PM was not settling a new energy policy.

What Scott Morrison really thinks on the climate challenge, or what he would do if he were just driven by policy concerns without regard to party consideration or electoral judgements are in that category of known unknowns.

In few areas can Morrison’s beliefs be divined free of political context.

But we do know two things.

Firstly, we don’t have a satisfactory energy policy: emissions are rising; power prices are too high; investment is being discouraged. An analysis released by the Grattan Institute this week was damning about how federal government policies were discouraging investment including by “bashing big companies” (the so-called “big stick” legislation, allowing for divestment when an energy company is recalcitrant, is still before parliament).

Secondly, climate change is again resonating strongly in the community.

Read more: Can the Liberal Party hold its ‘broad church’ of liberals and conservatives together?

Critics dismiss the attention young activist Greta Thunberg has received internationally, and this week’s “Extinction Rebellion” demonstrations, and many in the government would point to the election result to note that climate change did not carry the day with the “quiet Australians”.

The Morrison win however, doesn’t mean the issue lacks cut through, or won’t have potency in the future. And although the Liberals like to talk about the miracle victory, it should be remembered the win was by a sliver, not by 30 seats. What made it so notable was that it a result that defied expectations.

Turnbull said in his interview the Liberal party had been influenced by a group that was denialist and reactionary on climate change.

It still is, but this group is not giving trouble at the moment because Morrison, unlike his predecessor, is not provoking them.

The problem for Morrison is that keeping his party calm doesn’t solve the policy issue. Unless that is more effectively tackled, it could come back to bite him, regardless of the positive tale he tries to spin, such as in his United Nations speech.

Turnbull also said in his interview that, among much else, in government he had been “very focused on innovation” which, as we remember, was his catch cry in his early days as PM.

And, if we take information from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for International Development, reported in Tuesday’s Australian Financial Review, Australia needs innovation to be a much higher priority.

Australia fell from 57 to 93 between 1995 and 2017 on the index of economic complexity, which measures the diversity and sophistication of exports. Our wealth comes from the minerals and energy that form the bulk of our exports but “Australia⁩ is ⁨less complex than expected⁩ for its income level. As a result, its economy is projected to grow ⁨slowly.⁩ The Growth Lab’s ⁨2027⁩ Growth Projections foresee growth in ⁨Australia⁩ of ⁨2.2%⁩ annually over the coming decade, ranking in the ⁨bottom half⁩ of countries globally,” the data says.

“Economic growth is driven by diversification into new products that are incrementally more complex. … ⁨⁨Australia⁩ has diversified into too few products to contribute to substantial income growth.⁩”

Read more: The Turnbull government is all but finished, and the Liberals will now need to work out who they are

Turnbull’s talk of innovation, agility, and the like was seen by many in his ranks, particularly in hindsight, as too high falutin’. It certainly went down badly in regional areas, which is why in 2016 the Nationals sharply differentiated themselves in that campaign.

The Harvard work suggests Turnbull’s innovation ambition was on the right track. But the political evidence showed he was a bad salesman for this (and a lot else).

Morrison is a good marketing man. But the test of his prime ministership will be whether he can use his marketing skills to sell policies that the country needs, rather just what he thinks will go over easily with his constituency.

The most effective leaders (and that excludes both Abbott and Turnbull) can both identify what the nation requires and persuade enough of the voters to embrace it, even when it’s difficult. They operate not on the principle of the lowest common electoral denominator, or simplistic descriptions of their supporters – rather they pursue the highest achievable goals.

– ref. Malcolm Turnbull delivers the unpalatable truth to Scott Morrison on climate and energy – http://theconversation.com/malcolm-turnbull-delivers-the-unpalatable-truth-to-scott-morrison-on-climate-and-energy-124889

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University

US President Donald Trump’s precipitate announcement he was withdrawing American forces from northeast Syria to enable Turkey to assert its authority along the border risks wider regional bloodshed – and further destabilisation of one of the world’s most volatile corners.

If implemented against a furious pushback from his own side of politics, the Trump decision threatens a region-wide conflagration. These are the stakes.

Trump has given contradictory signals before on the same issue. It remains to be seen whether he gives ground again after what appears to have been a hasty, certainly ill-considered, decision following a phone conversation with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Now under enormous stress from his own side, Trump is resorting to bombast. He tweeted:

Leading the charge against the Trump decision is his close ally, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. He has threatened to introduce a Senate resolution opposing the administration’s decision, describing the move as a “stain on America’s honour”.

Like plucking a thread from a finely woven Turkish rug, the administration’s announcement effectively to abandon a Kurdish militia could lead to a complete unravelling of that part of the Middle East in which various forces have collided since the Syrian civil war broke out in March 2011.

Read more: Iran and US refusing to budge as tit-for-tat ship seizures in Middle East raise the temperature

America’s Kurdish allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia arm (known as the YPG), would be at the mercy of a Turkish thrust across the Syrian border into territory the Kurds now control.

Turkey has made no secret of its intention to create what it is calling “safe zones” up to 30 kilometres inside the border in northeast Syria. This would enable it to relocate tens of thousands of Syrian refugees among the 3.6 million on Turkish soil.

In the face of such a Turkish move, the YPG would be hard put to hold sway against both Turkey’s military and Islamic State fighters seeking to take advantage of militia weakness in the absence of US support on the ground and in the air.

The ABC reports that something like 70,000 members of Islamic State or their supporters are being held in camps in SDF-controlled territory. Around 60 people of Australian origin, including children, are in this situation.

Thousands of IS militants are being held in prison camps in SDF-controlled territory. These fighters have already sought to stage mass breakouts from prison facilities.

Turkey views the YPG militia as cross-border allies of Kurdish separatists – and it regards the Kurdish separatists as terrorists.

The situation along the Turkish-Syria border is, by any standards, an explosive mix.

At the same time, Syrian forces of Bashar al-Assad, backed by Iran and Russia, would inevitably be poised to take advantage of chaos and regain territory lost in the civil war. This is a highly destabilising scenario.

In other words, Trump’s announcement could hardly portend a more worrisome outcome in a part of the world riven by years of conflict.

The US announcement also sends a disturbing signal to the wider Middle East that the Trump administration is intent on pulling back from its commitments in an unstable region.

Confidence in American steadfastness is already precarious due to Trump’s repeated statement that America wants to remove itself from “endless” wars in the Middle East.

In a Twitter message early this week that amplified a White House announcement, Trump said it was time for the US to withdraw from “these ridiculous Endless Wars”.

Trump also attacked European allies over their failure to take back their nationals among IS fighters held in SDF-run detention centres in northeast Syria. Some 10,000 prisoners are being detained.

This is a situation ripe for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The latter is seeking to reassert itself in a region it regards as its own sphere of influence. Moscow’s support for Damascus is part of this regional power play.

Read more: Twenty-five years after the Oslo Accords, the prospect of peace in the Middle East remains bleak

These are telling moments. Signs of an apparent American lack of commitment might well encourage Iran and Russia, as well as Islamic militants such as IS and al-Qaeda. These groups have been biding their time.

None of America’s regional friends, including Gulf states and Israel, will draw any comfort at all from the Trump decision – if implemented – to head for the exit.

By any standards, this is a mess of Trump’s own making.

– ref. Trump decision to withdraw troops from Syria opens way for dangerous Middle East power play – http://theconversation.com/trump-decision-to-withdraw-troops-from-syria-opens-way-for-dangerous-middle-east-power-play-124784

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Faith Gordon, Lecturer in Criminology, Monash University

Last month, Australia appeared before the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva for a five-year assessment of the government’s progress in protecting the rights of children. The hearing included submissions from the Australian government, the Australian Human Rights Commission and civil society organisations on everything from youth justice issues to children’s health and well-being.

Among those who spoke at the hearing was 12-year-old Dujuan Hoosan from Arrernte and Garrwa country in central Australia, who called on the Australian government to stop imprisoning 10-year-olds, support Aboriginal-led education programs, and respect the culture and rights of all children in Australia.

I came here to speak with you because the Australian government is not listening. Adults never listen to kids like me. But we have important things to say.

He is believed to be the youngest person ever to address the UN Human Rights Council.

On Friday, the UN committee handed down its report – and it paints a gloomy picture.

Read more: Australia must do better at protecting children’s rights

The committee was extremely critical of the Australian government on a range of issues. These included the high numbers of children in care and the criminal justice system, the continued forced sterilisation of children with disabilities, the government’s treatment of refugee and asylum-seeking children, and the lack of meaningful opportunities for children to participate in decision-making on policies that affect their lives.

Many of the recommendations go to the heart of the ingrained political, cultural and legal inferiority of children in Australia.

Children and the criminal justice system

The Australian government played a major role in the drafting and passage of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child nearly 30 years ago and was among its first signatories. The convention is one of the most ratified human rights treaties in history. It plays an important role in defining and upholding the rights of children.

Despite this, Australia still does not have a national strategy to ensure the implementation of appropriate protections of children’s rights.

The youth justice system in Australia, for example, has been described for some time as being in crisis.

In 2017, the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory shone a light onto some of the most serious violations in Australia’s youth justice system. It found that over the past decade, children in the NT were frequently mistreated, abused, humiliated and left alone for long periods. The local government has done little to address the issues since then.

Read more: One year on from Royal Commission findings on Northern Territory child detention: what has changed?

Queensland’s youth justice system is now under scrutiny, after media reports earlier this year found that children as young as 10 were being housed in adult watch houses.

Nationally, media reports and official statistics show the rising numbers of children being remanded in prison rather than being granted bail. This is contrary to international guidelines, which say that prison should only be used as a “last resort”.

The UN committee report made a number of major recommendations on criminal justice issues, including urging the Australian government

• to immediately raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 to an internationally acceptable age of 14

• to immediately implement the 2018 recommendations of the Australian Law Reform Commission to reduce the high rates of Indigenous children who are imprisoned

• to prohibit the use of isolation and force against children in detention, including the use of restraints, and immediately investigate all cases of abuse and mistreatment of children in detention

• to urge the Northern Territory and Western Australia to review and repeal mandatory minimum sentences for children.

Some of these recommendations were tabled over a year ago by the royal commission, but no major steps have been taken since.

The committee also urged Australia to explicitly prohibit corporal punishment of children in all settings, including homes, schools, detention centres and alternative care. It also called for laws in states and territories that permit “reasonable chastisement” to be repealed.

These laws currently allow adults to physically discipline children as long as it is “reasonable” in the circumstances. As campaigners against the practice rightly argue, “reasonable” is a vague term and open to interpretation. The UN committee wants it banned, as has recently taken place in Scotland.

Mental health and suicide

The committee also said it was “seriously concerned” that the number of Australian children with mental health problems was on the rise. This is particularly so for children in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities or alternative care, those who are homeless, living in rural and remote areas or asylum-seekers, those from culturally diverse backgrounds and LGBTI children.

The report noted that

almost one in seven children were assessed with mental health problems, with suicide being the leading cause of death for those aged 15-24.

Read more: How we can help refugee kids to thrive in Australia

Among its recommendations to the government were

• prioritising mental health service delivery to children in vulnerable situations, such as those groups listed above

• strengthening measures to ensure the side effects of certain drugs for ADHD are fully communicated to parents/guardians and children and that they are prescribed “as a measure of last resort”

• continuing to provide children with education on sexual and reproductive health as part of the mandatory school curriculum.

Political attitudes toward children

Finally, the committee also addressed the ways in which Australian politicians responded to children who took part in recent climate strikes.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison brushed off children’s demands for climate action, while others made patronising comments about them being better off in the classroom than on the streets protesting.

The committee emphasised that the effects of climate change have an undeniable impact on children’s rights and expressed “its concern and disappointment” that the children’s climate change protests

received a strongly worded negative response from those in authority, which demonstrates disrespect for their right to express their views on this important issue.

Time for change

None of these changes will happen without political will. Civil society, human rights groups and state children’s commissioners have crucial roles to play in continuing to advocate on behalf of children and speak up when they are being mistreated and their rights are being infringed.

The committee’s report card is not a badge of honour, and it puts Australia on a list of countries that have the necessary resources to support their next generation, but are failing to do so.

– ref. ‘The Australian government is not listening’: how our country is failing to protect its children – http://theconversation.com/the-australian-government-is-not-listening-how-our-country-is-failing-to-protect-its-children-124779

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chrisanthi Giotis, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Communication, University of Technology Sydney

One evening last month, the young man from Afghanistan, of Hazara ethnicity, arrived in Jakarta. His people-smuggler dropped him at the UNHCR entrance reserved for refugees, where he was told to wait.

The next day, mid-morning, he was still outside waiting to speak to someone. He was too afraid to give me his name or even his age, but he appeared to be in his early 20s.

He had been fleeing for 20 days, ten days hiding in wait in Kabul, then another ten days in transit through three countries. His choice to come to Indonesia was based solely on escaping immediately.

Through a translator he said:

I needed to get out quick. I just wanted to come as soon as possible so I came through an agent. My agent brought me here, I have no shelter so I am just waiting for the UNHCR for information.

Read more: Refugee-run school in Indonesia a model for governments to emulate

I’ve been working with a refugee-run school in Indonesia for the past year. There, refugees aren’t allowed access to education or work, and asylum seekers can be arrested at the whim of authorities. This, compounded with chronic waiting, has led to a straining relationship with the UNHCR, the key institution in their lives.

Only 509 of 14,016 people (3.5%) were resettled in Indonesia last year. Of those , only 84 came to Australia. And so far this year, the number of people resettled from Indonesia to Australia is just eight.

Figures like these explain why, for many months now, the UNHCR office in Jakarta has been the subject of ongoing protests made up of street protests outside the building in the city centre and civil disobedience in the upscale suburb of Kalideres. Refugees and asylum seekers have refused to vacate a disused military building temporarily allocated to them.

Like false advertising

Refugees argue the very existence of the UNHCR Jakarta office is a kind of false advertising.

Twenty-four-year-old Ali Jawad Haidari has been in Indonesia for over seven years. He said:

If you cannot support refugees you should close your office. You should say we cannot support refugees, announce in the media we cannot do anything.

At Kalideres, the broken trust is visceral. People question the staff’s willingness to prosecute cases, and why they visited Kalideres with security guards when there was never a hint of violence in the months of protest (and for that matter, why they were not allowed to enter the main UNHCR building through the front door).

They also questioned the ethics of the UNHCR, when the institution offered a one-off payment of roughly a month’s living expenses to the refugees in exchange for leaving the Kalideres site. The refugees initially thought this would be the beginning of ongoing UNHCR support.

And they questioned why the agency supposed to protect them would turn off their electricity and water.

Read more: Over a month on in post-election Australia: No mercy for refugees in Indonesia

In fact, “The UNHCR is making me sick” is a refrain I heard multiple times during interviews.

Hassan Ramazan, a spokesperson for the Hazara refugees at Kalideres, said the sit-in protests exist because their community and the relatives who support them by sending cash, are at breaking point. He said:

There are people here since 2009, 10, 11, 12, 13, their supporters can not support them any more.

The refugees who wait

Ramazan also points to the seeming arbitrariness of resettlement. Interview wait times to determine refugee status vary, with some who arrived more recently resettled than those who’ve been waiting for years.

What’s more, single men believe they are treated with suspicion in western countries. Twenty-eight-year-old Muhammad Hanif is one of those single men, who received his refugee registration in 2013. He said:

Lots of singles have been here seven or eight years, we also pray for families to be resettled, but also for us, it should be fair.

And Haidari points out people may have arrived alone but are still family members – brothers, sons, fathers.

My friend arrived alone and is still waiting. Recently his 13-year-old son was injured in a bomb blast in Afghanistan, spent two months in hospital, and still the UNHCR said they can’t do anything.

My friend when he came here his son was six, now he’s 13-years-old and injured.

Work rights could alleviate chronic waiting

Waiting is a contemporary strategy of migration management.

But chronic waiting must be taken into account in refugee policy, as it causes and prolongs psycho-social damage and changes the nature of societal and institutional relationships.

Read more: The right to work can empower refugees in Malaysia

For the majority of refugees, chronic waiting is unlikely to result in effective protection unless a refugee’s country of origin becomes safe to return to. This is unlikely in the foreseeable future for the major refugee producing countries.

Even in countries with major refugee populations, their plight is mostly ignored.

But not always. In Malaysia – where the refugee population is ten times that of Indonesia and work has been informally accessed for years – there are moves to make work legal for refugees.

Work could help alleviate economic pressures and restore agency and dignity lost in waiting. But the refugees are keenly aware of Indonesia’s local poverty and insecure work conditions. And because Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, it is not obliged to look after refugees.

Nevertheless, ways for refugees to sustain themselves are supposedly being discussed in Indonesia.

For Haidari, a martial arts champion, work would solve many of his problems. But the authorities have stopped him from competing. He said:

If I could just fight I would never knock on the UNHCR door again.

Refugee spokesperson Ramazan doesn’t see work rights as the ultimate solution, but he does ask what sort of generation is being created. They’re living on the streets, without access to education or the example of seeing their parents work.

Thirty-seven-year-old Masooma, who is in the Kalideres complex with her husband and two-year-old daughter, has another, pointed, question.

They say the first priority is for people with critical problems, who are sick, and that’s the reason resettlement is slow.

Since they don’t give us support and assistance of course we will get sick, and then what should we do with that process? What will we do if we get sick and then go to another country?

Essentially, there is no point in breaking people, then helping them.

– ref. ‘Stop playing politics’: refugees stuck in Indonesia rally against UNHCR for chronic waiting – http://theconversation.com/stop-playing-politics-refugees-stuck-in-indonesia-rally-against-unhcr-for-chronic-waiting-124176

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dominic O’Sullivan, Associate Professor of Political Science, Charles Sturt University

Last week, posters appeared at the University of Auckland inviting young white men to “assume the mantle of re-taking control of our own country” and to confront “anti-racism ideology”.

The group was obviously unaware of the significance of the British High Commissioner’s expression of regret, in the same week, for the killing of several Māori people during their first encounter with the English explorer James Cook in 1769.

At least 1,300 academics and students signed an open letter, arguing that racism and white supremacy have no place at the university and challenging the Vice Chancellor’s initial position that there is no justification for removing the posters.

This week, the Vice Chancellor changed his position, telling staff that a debate about free speech should be put to one side for now, as the most important matter was the “real hurt and sense of threat that some people in our university community feel in response to these expressions of white supremacist views”.

Read more: Academic freedom is under threat around the world – here’s how to defend it

Free speech vs academic freedom

Neither the Vice Chancellor nor the signatories to the open letter bring academic freedom into the debate. But minister of justice Andrew Little, a former president of the New Zealand University Students’ Association, argued that there is “no principle of academic freedom” that says white supremacy ought to be protected.

Free speech, hate speech and academic freedom are related but different. And the differences matter.

Free speech is the right to say whatever one likes. It is unconstrained by the disciplines of reason and objectivity. It doesn’t require factual accuracy. As with academic freedom, it doesn’t matter if one’s opinion is unpopular. Both free speech and academic freedom are essential to democracy.

Free speech belongs in universities as much as anywhere else. It is the right to hold opinions and to challenge the opinions of others. A Chinese student in New Zealand once asked me if it was alright to criticise the prime minister in an essay. This underscores the importance of free speech, but also the need for great caution in setting its limits.

Academic freedom protects free speech on the one hand, but conditions it on the other. Universities cannot support the unrestricted pursuit of knowledge if one cannot think freely. But knowledge cannot be tested and doesn’t advance if there isn’t also a duty to be well informed and reasoned – and willing to have one’s ideas scrutinised by others.

In a university, the test of a reasonable opinion is higher. One cannot say whatever one likes and call it academic freedom.

Hate speech as a limit

Both free speech and academic freedom are limited by hate speech.

According to the United Nations, hate speech is:

any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.

When people say that they want to “reclaim” a country as their own and contest “anti-racism” they are saying overtly and unapologetically that they don’t want others to have a democratic presence. They are saying that they don’t want others to have free speech. Nor do they want academics who are not “young white men” to have academic freedom.

These aren’t democratically legitimate differences of opinion because “toleration is not the solution to intolerance”.

There are differences between what is wrong and what is intolerably wrong. There are some views that a free society can’t tolerate.

Racism is intolerably wrong because it denies some people human equality. It creates a hierarchy of human worth and causes serious harm to its targets.

Read more: Friday essay: networked hatred – new technology and the rise of the right

A ‘right to be bigots’

In Australia, free speech is restricted under the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 which provides that:

It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if: (a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and (b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.

There are significant qualifications to these restrictions. But, in spite of these, in 2014 the attorney general told parliament that the act imposed unreasonable constraints on people’s “right to be bigots”.

The conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs claimed in 2018 that university policies curtailing free speech had dramatically increased in the preceding two years. The University of Sydney’s Vice Chancellor argued that robust processes “ensure that freedom of speech from all parts of the spectrum is alive and well on our campuses”.

But earlier this year, a government-commissioned inquiry found that “claims of a freedom of speech crisis on Australian campuses are not substantiated”. The review also found that universities should not allow visitors to use their premises to “advance theories or propositions … which fall below scholarly standards to such an extent as to be detrimental to the university’s character as an institution of higher learning”.

Defending a right to bigotry, or to express hate speech, trivialises what the denial of both free speech and academic freedom can really look like. In China, for example, the state has warned against the presence of “mistaken views” in universities, including the study of constitutional democracy, civil society, economic liberalisation, freedom of the press, challenges to socialism with Chinese characteristics and discussion of universal values including academic freedom.

In the case of the white supremacy posters, it would seem that University of Auckland academics, not the Vice Chancellor, had the stronger argument.

– ref. There are differences between free speech, hate speech and academic freedom – and they matter – http://theconversation.com/there-are-differences-between-free-speech-hate-speech-and-academic-freedom-and-they-matter-124764

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Morrison, Senior Lecturer, Business School, Auckland University of Technology

A key reason many organisations want to move their employees to open-plan workspaces is to encourage collaboration and improve communication. The assumption is that the increased visibility and access workers have to one another will ease the flow of information and enhance learning, well-being, and collegiality.

Research suggests that, in some circumstances, this can indeed be the outcome. But another study recently found found exactly the opposite, with workers engaging in 73% fewer face-to-face interactions, along with a 67% increase in electronic communication.

Read more: A new study should be the final nail for open-plan offices

It is not just face-to-face communication that becomes worse in open-plan offices. There are findings that satisfaction decreases, well-being is impacted, privacy decreases, and people become less friendly.

One undeniable aspect of open-plan offices is the increased exposure and access to others they offer. This is sometimes deemed a benefit – particularly because it increases opportunities to learn from, and network with, high-status colleagues. But our research suggests that being more visible may not be good for everyone.

Read more: Get out of my face! We’re more antisocial in a shared office space

Gender differences

Our study in a large open-plan law firm in Auckland found that, although occupants generally liked this well designed work environment, there was a gender difference in the responses. Every survey respondent who specifically mentioned being visible, watched, observed, exposed or more accountable was a woman. The male occupants, it seems, were oblivious to their increased exposure. This difference in responses was especially striking since we did not set out to explore the gender effects of open-plan work spaces.

It wasn’t that all the women especially disliked being so exposed. In fact, being visible came up several times when they were describing positive aspects of the space, outlining how the open office improved their productivity. One lawyer said:

Overall the effect on my productivity is positive – can always be seen, so always working unless nobody is around.

Another woman commented:

Knowing that other people can see what I am doing also motivates me to be productive.

But this female lawyer was keenly aware of the downside of being so visible:

I don’t like that sometimes it feels like people are judging you for not giving enough face time as everything is so visible. Back at [previous office] there was more of a motto of getting the work done in the time needed and then go home. Now, with open space, it feels more like a fish bowl and I have noticed more subtle pressure to stay later even if you don’t technically need to – based on looks some seniors, even from entirely different teams, give you.

Other research looking at the effect of working in a glass open-plan, largely transparent office, revealed the unexpected outcome of women becoming hyper-aware of being continually observed and evaluated, just as we found. Women (but not men) in this study reported becoming more image conscious, changing the way they dressed, how and where they walked, and feeling exposed.

Why is this? Are women really being looked at more than their male colleagues?

Research into the male gaze and surveillance behaviour on nudist beaches suggests they are. But, whether they are or not, women are socialised, practically from birth, to believe they are being looked at.

Evaluated on appearance

Through their life experiences and their exposure to media, women and girls learn that they are almost constantly being evaluated and appraised. Women are aware of being observed in a way that men are not, simply because their life experiences have routinely included instances of being looked at.

Every time a girl is told she is cute or pretty, or even described in gender-neutral, objective terms such as being tall, she is actually being told she is being looked at and assessed on her appearance. Boys are far more likely to have their behaviour or personality commented on by adults, rather than their appearance – being brave, adventurous or clever.

Even more insidious is the notion that appearance evaluations genuinely matter in numerous situations. The benefits that attractive women receive include everything from social mobility and college admissions to educational attainment and job offers. Women rated as being unattractive or unfeminine are more negatively evaluated than comparably unattractive men.

Better office designs

Given that women’s outcomes are, at least in part, determined by their appearance, it is not surprising that, compared to their male colleagues, female workers are comparatively more aware of their visibility.

Research suggests we should question the notion that, just because we can see and hear our colleagues, we will have more and better in-person conversations. The communication benefits of increased exposure to others afforded by open-plan space may be overstated, and the downside of being so visible may disproportionately impact women in the workplace.

The idea that female and male employees differ in their perceptions of being observed should be acknowledged and incorporated into office design.

How? By ensuring that, within open-plan environments, female workers are afforded opportunities for privacy. This includes allowing them to work with their backs to the wall or to be seated away from busy thoroughfares, and by positioning desks so that women are not forced to walk past numerous colleagues on their way to amenities such as the kitchen or the bathroom.

Or, best of all, allowing people to work remotely (and in total privacy) for at least part of the week.

– ref. How women’s life-long experiences of being judged by their appearance affect how they feel in open-plan offices – http://theconversation.com/how-womens-life-long-experiences-of-being-judged-by-their-appearance-affect-how-they-feel-in-open-plan-offices-124765

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samuel Alexander, Research fellow, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne

If you live in a major Australian city, expect your daily routine to be disrupted this week. Protest group Extinction Rebellion is carrying out week of flash mobs, sit-ins and marches to block traffic and bring more attention to the pressing problems of climate change and biodiversity loss. Many arrests are expected.

Extinction Rebellion protesters say peaceful civil disobedience is an important social and political strategy for achieving a just and sustainable world.

Their protest actions may make us feel uncomfortable, annoyed or worse. But it is important that the general public understands the reasoning that underpins civil disobedience and why this radical strategy is being deployed this week.

Resistance movements are no stranger to law-breaking

The Extinction Rebellion movement has three bold demands of governments. First, government should declare a climate and ecological “emergency”. Second, by 2025 governments should decarbonise the economy and halt biodiversity loss. Third, citizens’ assemblies should be established to work with scientists to inform environmental policy-making.

Many aspects of Extinction Rebellion deserve, and have received, critical analysis, including whether its decarbonisation timeframe is unrealistic and whether their disruption tactics will alienate rather than inspire the general public.

The movement’s civil disobedience strategy is one of its most controversial. Civil disobedience is defined as public, non-violent and conscientious breaches of law which aim to change government policies.

Read more: As conservation scientists, we are compelled to rebel against extinction – and researchers across the world should join us

Law-abiding citizens are right to be concerned about others deliberately breaking the law to advance their social, political or environmental goals. But many of the most significant social and political advances over the past century owe much to social movements that relied on this tactic. Think of Gandhi’s independence movement against British rule in India, the suffragette fight for the right of women to vote and the US civil rights movement.

These precedents raise the question: might future societal advances also demand peaceful acts of civil disobedience?

Civil disobedience: the case for and against

Imperfect though it is, the basic theory of democracy is that we vote on who represents us in government. In this way, democratic societies are said to have created the institutions and processes needed for their own peaceful improvement.

So critics of civil disobedience argue that people shouldn’t just break the law because they disagree with it. They say if you do not like a policy or law, you are free to campaign for change, including for the election of a new government.

But proponents of civil disobedience argue that democracy is flawed and in some cases, non-violent breaches of law can be justified.

First, they say laws and policies can be shaped undemocratically by powerful mass media, corporate lobby groups, or billionaires. Proponents say citizens do not always owe political allegiance to laws and policies that are not produced through fair, robust, and representative democratic processes.

Read more: Extinction Rebellion: how to craft a protest brand

Second, many political and legal theorists say just because something is enshrined in law, that does not mean it is necessarily just. This was the view advanced by American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, which inspired both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Throughout history, many laws and policies produced in democracies were grossly unjust. These include laws which institutionalised slavery, legally entrenched racial segregation, criminalised homosexuality or particular religious practices, or prohibited women and people of colour from voting.

When a law or policy is clearly unfair, a case can be made that there is a place for civil disobedience. We must accept that even laws produced in a democracy get it wrong sometimes.

Will Extinction Rebellion fall on the right side of history?

The Extinction Rebellion is promoting civil disobedience because it says across the world, governments have failed to respond adequately to the climate crisis and the steep decline in wildlife populations. It argues that the political system underpinning this failure must be resisted, even if this causes inconvenience to the general public.

The movement’s supporters include 250 Australian academics who signed an open letter saying they feel a “moral duty” to rebel and “defend life itself”.

It could be argued that the activists should wait until governments take action. But judging by recent history – including a lack of substantial progress at last month’s UN climate summit – an adequate, timely global response to the climate crisis seems highly unlikely. In this case, waiting for government action means being complicit in an unjust system.

Read more: A landmark report confirms Australia is girt by hotter, higher seas. But there’s still time to act

Some people will inevitably dismiss Extinction Rebellion protesters as troublemakers and criminals. But their actions must be assessed against the big picture. The world’s best climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that if global warming is not kept below the 1.5℃ limit, Earth’s natural and human systems will suffer dire consequences. The legitimacy of Extinction Rebellion’s disobedience must be weighed against the wrongs that triggered it.

As Extinction Rebellion causes chaos in our cities, we must avoid superficial, kneejerk reactions. Whatever your views on civil disobedience, the climate emergency would be far less serious if governments had taken action decades ago. Further inaction will only lead to more numerous and active social movements, driven by the same mixture of love and rage that provoked Extinction Rebellion.

– ref. Extinction Rebellion protesters might be annoying. But they have a point – http://theconversation.com/extinction-rebellion-protesters-might-be-annoying-but-they-have-a-point-124490

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Morrison, Senior Lecturer, Business School, Auckland University of Technology

A key reason many organisations want to move their employees to open-plan workspaces is to encourage collaboration and improve communication. The assumption is that the increased visibility and access workers have to one another will ease the flow of information and enhance learning, well-being, and collegiality.

Research suggests that, in some circumstances, this can indeed be the outcome. But another study recently found found exactly the opposite, with workers engaging in 73% fewer face-to-face interactions, along with a 67% increase in electronic communication.

Read more: A new study should be the final nail for open-plan offices

It is not just face-to-face communication that becomes worse in open-plan offices. There are findings that satisfaction decreases, well-being is impacted, privacy decreases, and people become less friendly.

One undeniable aspect of open-plan offices is the increased exposure and access to others they offer. This is sometimes deemed a benefit – particularly because it increases opportunities to learn from, and network with, high-status colleagues. But our research suggests that being more visible may not be good for everyone.

Read more: Get out of my face! We’re more antisocial in a shared office space

Gender differences

Our study in a large open-plan law firm in Auckland found that, although occupants generally liked this well designed work environment, there was a gender difference in the responses. Every survey respondent who specifically mentioned being visible, watched, observed, exposed or more accountable was a woman. The male occupants, it seems, were oblivious to their increased exposure. This difference in responses was especially striking since we did not set out to explore the gender effects of open-plan work spaces.

It wasn’t that all the women especially disliked being so exposed. In fact, being visible came up several times when they were describing positive aspects of the space, outlining how the open office improved their productivity. One lawyer said:

Overall the effect on my productivity is positive – can always be seen, so always working unless nobody is around.

Another woman commented:

Knowing that other people can see what I am doing also motivates me to be productive.

But this female lawyer was keenly aware of the downside of being so visible:

I don’t like that sometimes it feels like people are judging you for not giving enough face time as everything is so visible. Back at [previous office] there was more of a motto of getting the work done in the time needed and then go home. Now, with open space, it feels more like a fish bowl and I have noticed more subtle pressure to stay later even if you don’t technically need to – based on looks some seniors, even from entirely different teams, give you.

Other research looking at the effect of working in a glass open-plan, largely transparent office, revealed the unexpected outcome of women becoming hyper-aware of being continually observed and evaluated, just as we found. Women (but not men) in this study reported becoming more image conscious, changing the way they dressed, how and where they walked, and feeling exposed.

Why is this? Are women really being looked at more than their male colleagues?

Research into the male gaze and surveillance behaviour on nudist beaches suggests they are. But, whether they are or not, women are socialised, practically from birth, to believe they are being looked at.

Evaluated on appearance

Through their life experiences and their exposure to media, women and girls learn that they are almost constantly being evaluated and appraised. Women are aware of being observed in a way that men are not, simply because their life experiences have routinely included instances of being looked at.

Every time a girl is told she is cute or pretty, or even described in gender-neutral, objective terms such as being tall, she is actually being told she is being looked at and assessed on her appearance. Boys are far more likely to have their behaviour or personality commented on by adults, rather than their appearance – being brave, adventurous or clever.

Even more insidious is the notion that appearance evaluations genuinely matter in numerous situations. The benefits that attractive women receive include everything from social mobility and college admissions to educational attainment and job offers. Women rated as being unattractive or unfeminine are more negatively evaluated than comparably unattractive men.

Better office designs

Given that women’s outcomes are, at least in part, determined by their appearance, it is not surprising that, compared to their male colleagues, female workers are comparatively more aware of their visibility.

Research suggests we should question the notion that, just because we can see and hear our colleagues, we will have more and better in-person conversations. The communication benefits of increased exposure to others afforded by open-plan space may be overstated, and the downside of being so visible may disproportionately impact women in the workplace.

The idea that female and male employees differ in their perceptions of being observed should be acknowledged and incorporated into office design.

How? By ensuring that, within open-plan environments, female workers are afforded opportunities for privacy. This includes allowing them to work with their backs to the wall or to be seated away from busy thoroughfares, and by positioning desks so that women are not forced to walk past numerous colleagues on their way to amenities such as the kitchen or the bathroom.

Or, best of all, allowing people to work remotely (and in total privacy) for at least part of the week.

– ref. Do women’s life-long experiences of being judged on appearance change how they feel in open-plan offices? – http://theconversation.com/do-womens-life-long-experiences-of-being-judged-on-appearance-change-how-they-feel-in-open-plan-offices-124765

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sandra D’urso, Researcher, The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne

Anthem, directed by Susie Dee, Arts Centre Melbourne for Melbourne International Arts Festival

What does it mean to be an “ordinary” Australian in an atomising and globalised world economy?

Anthem brings together the writers behind the celebrated 1998 Melbourne Workers’ Theatre production of Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?, revisiting core themes of the earlier play in a distinctly post-Trump, post-Global Financial Crisis setting.

Twenty years separate these productions and the socio-political contexts in which they are produced. Economic rationalism under then Prime Minister John Howard has reached its zenith, with welfare recipients and those on disability and age pensions absorbing the hardest hits.

Read more: It’s Newstart pay rise day. You’re in line for 24 cents, which is peanuts

We’ve witnessed the advance of military forces as part of the Northern Territory Intervention; the divisive same-sex marriage plebiscite; and the return of openly xenophobic senators to parliament.

Meanwhile, every aspect of private life is governed, mined and mediated by the ubiquitous presence and seductiveness of social media.

Writers Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, and Christos Tsiolkas, with composer Irine Vela, drill down into the lives of commuters. Loosely interconnected stories are braided together and presented as vignettes, supported by a continuous live musical score and punctuated with eruptions of choreography.

Directed by Susie Dee, Anthem is a parable of Australian democracy.

A local play

On Melbourne’s railway network from the Pakenham line to the Mernda, Anthem is unapologetic in addressing its local audience, touching on our fondness and frustration for Melbourne’s public transportation system.

Railway stations are liminal spaces where people wait to journey from one place to another among the ebb and flow of bodies. There are personal stories here: struggles, tensions, expressions of kindness, outbreaks of violence.

The set (Marg Horwell) is three identical train platforms nestled against what could be the foot of the iconic escalators at Parliament station. It is a simple but effective design, with moveable parts operated by the actors themselves.

Two strangers (Thuso Lekwape and Eryn Jean Norvill) sit opposite each other on a Eurostar train, discussing Brexit, austerity, Trump; then on to populism, racism, the gilet jaunes (the yellow vest protesters in France) and the conditions for a revolution.

Set high above the rest of the action, this scene provides a counterpoint to the rest of the play, which takes place literally down under. We are offered a broad frame of reference to consider our collective position as Australians – and perhaps our political apathy.

Charity (Ruci Kaisila) walks the platforms and carriages belting out anthemic tunes while shaking a can. An argument erupts about whether to give her money. Elaine (Maude Davey) offers the singer a single coin. “I want you to promise me that you won’t buy cigarettes or alcohol or any other substance of abuse”, she says.

Loki (Sahil Saluja) holds up his old boss at 7-Eleven, demanding unpaid wages. His girlfriend Lisa (Norvill), an employee of Chemist Warehouse, is turned on by the idea of hunting down the corporate bosses. A comical revenge plot ensues, with Norvill nailing her rendition of a selfie-obsessed, endearingly narcissistic check-out operator.

An unemployed single mother (Eva Seymour) struggles to get her troubled five-year-old son to his father on time. She will contravene a court order if late. She is apprehended by the transit police, and fined for unauthorised travel.

Chi (Amanda Ma) recognises Elaine, who she used to clean for. She demands unpaid wages from her well-dressed ex-employer. The once middle-class woman, now divorced and destitute, begs for forgiveness and friendship.

Three siblings – “one black, one white, and one brown” – share a mother, who has recently died. They are physically exuberant, jumping from platform to platform. They use expletives freely; they menace “the Asians” and “the wogs”. Choreographed sequences between the siblings are a highlight of the production.

This trio are to reunite with their brother Jamie (Lekwape) who left the family to pursue a life Lyon. Unlike Australia, he says, France is a place where he can breathe.

Themes of breathing or not being able to breathe, recur, threaded into sequences where the cast perform as a chorus. We might see here a reference to police violence against people of colour in the US, and as having parallels to Indigenous deaths in custody and political fear mongering about “African gangs” – both being attributable to institutionalised racism.

Read more: Deaths in custody: 25 years after the royal commission, we’ve gone backwards

The siblings resent and reject their brother, who offers them money on the condition they return to study. This is a domestic drama: the story of a blended family locked in a cycle of poverty while one sibling escapes and thrives. It is also a story about Australia as a nation. Do we invite our “brothers” in, or remain small and parochial? Isn’t there a kind of dignity in parochialism and in not accepting friendship or charity from outsiders who feel superior to us?

Panorama, not minutiae

The trouble with the panoramic view is we miss out on exploring the granular tension that arises when the personal intersects with politics writ large. Sometimes the production is lacking in the kind of intimacy that might generate the ratcheting racial tension of Norm and Ahmed, or the gender-based violence so acutely present in Cornelius’s Shit.

The tone of the production skews towards the light-hearted, with comedic delivery tempering heavy themes. We lose out on a sense of theatrical risk, on the opportunity to show the eviscerating pressure of neoliberalism, structural racism, class disparity, and gender inequality.

In Anthem, the Melbourne public transportation system behaves as a microcosm of larger political tensions and anxieties. This team of writers haven’t shied away from a complex intersectional inspection of racism, gender and class as they see it in Australia today.

This is not a small play in any sense of the word: not its political objectives, its feelings, themes, aesthetics, content or cast. It has a lot of heart, energy, and fire.

– ref. Anthem review: a portrait of Melbourne’s working class – http://theconversation.com/anthem-review-a-portrait-of-melbournes-working-class-124767

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Director, Sydney Institute for Astronomy, University of Sydney

The supermassive black hole at the heart of our Galaxy spat out an enormous flare of radiation 3.5 million years ago that would have been clearly visible from Earth.

In new research that will soon be published in the Astrophysical Journal my colleagues and I found that the flare left traces in a trail of gas called the Magellanic Stream that lies some 200,000 light years away and encircles the Milky Way.

The team includes Ralph Sutherland and Brent Groves at the Australian National University and ASTRO-3D; Magda Guglielmo, Wen Hao Li and Andrew Curzons at the University of Sydney; Philip Maloney at the University of Colorado; Gerald Cecil at the University of Carolina; and Andrew J. Fox at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

The discovery changes our view of our galaxy’s central black hole, which has appeared dormant throughout recorded human history. Astronomers are coming to realise that it has been hugely active, even explosive, in the relatively recent past in galactic terms (measured in millions of years).

This activity has been flickering on and off for billions of years. We don’t understand why this activity is intermittent, but it has something to do with how material gets dumped onto the black hole. It might be like water droplets on a hot plate that sputter and explode chaotically, depending on their size.

Our situation on Earth resembles living near a largely dormant volcano like Mount Vesuvius that is known to have been explosively active in the past, with disastrous consequences for Pompeii.

Despite this, there’s no need to be alarmed: as far as we can tell, we are safe here in orbit about a cool dwarf star far from the centre of the Milky Way.

Why is there a black hole at the centre of the galaxy?

If you look along the Milky Way in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, you will see the dense agglomeration of stars around the centre of the galaxy. The galactic centre is marked by a very dense, very massive cluster of stars orbiting the supermassive black hole.

Earlier this year, the ESO Gravity team found a star close to the black hole travelling at up to 10,000 km per second, a few percent of the speed of light. This let them weigh the black hole to a precision of 1%, arriving at a number of about 4 million times the Sun’s mass.

Read more: Einstein’s theory of gravity tested by a star speeding past a supermassive black hole

As galactic supermassive black holes go, this is a featherweight. For example, our neighbouring galaxy Andromeda also has a supermassive black hole, but it is 50 times heavier than ours.

Essentially all large galaxies have central massive black holes. We don’t know exactly why this is so, but we know it’s important and that the growth phases of these monsters are likely to have affected the galaxy as a whole.

Understanding the effect of interactions between black holes and host galaxies is one of the hottest topics in modern astrophysics.

Some black holes are more active than others

But if we look out across the Universe, we see only a few percent of galaxies appear to have “active” black holes. By active, we mean that gas and stars spiralling into the black hole form an extremely hot ring of gas.

This ring, called an accretion disc, gets so hot that it drives jets, winds and radiating beams of light out across the galaxy. The effects of these explosions are particularly impressive in more massive galaxies.

Read more: Sizes matters for black hole formation, but there’s something missing in the middle ground

For decades, Australian radio telescopes have mapped out jet flows that are far larger than the visible galaxy in the middle.

The radio jets in the galaxy Centaurus A extend more than 10 degrees across the sky – that’s the size of 20 full moons next to each other. This is remarkable given Centaurus A is 10 million light years away.

The Milky Way explosion

Some three million years ago, our direct ancestor Australopithecus afarensis walked the Earth. They may well have looked up towards Sagittarius and seen cones of light shooting sideways from the Milky Way, brighter than any star in the night sky.

The lightshow would have appeared as static beams on a human timescale, only flickering on timescales of thousands of years. Today, the only visible remnant of that immensely powerful event is the cooling gas along the distant Magellanic Stream.

So how would life on Earth have fared if the explosive jet was directed straight at us? This is a valid question, because we believe that the spin axis of the accretion disc flops around wildly in lightweight supermassive black holes.

If the beam was pointing at the Solar System, the jet would have to plough through the Milky Way disc, and it would take about ten million years to reach us.

So it’s possible that a more ancient explosion could have produced a powerful jet that is yet to reach us.

But we need not worry – at its peak, the intensity of the jet when it reaches us is unlikely to exceed the most energetic solar flares. These are known to knock out satellites, and pose a threat to space-walking astronauts, but our own atmosphere largely protects us on Earth.

– ref. A dormant volcano: the black hole at the heart of our galaxy is more explosive than we thought – http://theconversation.com/a-dormant-volcano-the-black-hole-at-the-heart-of-our-galaxy-is-more-explosive-than-we-thought-124696

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

A report from The Australia Institute rejects government claims new dams are not being built, saying at least 20 to 30 large private dams have been constructed in the Murray-Darling basin in recent years.

While information on the number of private dams and the cost of their taxpayer subsidy is limited, the report says “it appears that just two of these dams cost taxpayers nearly $30 million”.

“Over $200 million was spent on dam-related projects [in the Murray-Darling Basin] according to official data, although not all of this will have been specifically on dams,” it says,

Maryanne Slattery, senior water researcher at the institute, said politicians don’t want to talk about these dams because “they do nothing for drought-stricken communities, the health of the river or struggling farmers”.

“These dams have been built on private land and are for the exclusive use of corporate agribusiness, such as Webster Limited,” she said.

“Politicians are reluctant to talk about why millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent subsidising dams that make the problems of the Murray Darling Basin worse”.

Water Minister David Littleproud has repeatedly berated the states for not building new dams. He said recently that of the 20 dams completed since 2003, 16 were in Tasmania.

“If NSW, Queensland and Victoria don’t start building dams, their water storage capacity will fall by more than 30% by 2030,” he said. “We put $1.3 billion on the table in through the national water infrastructure development fund in 2015 and have still had to drag most states kicking and screaming to build new dams.”

The report says new public dams would require public consultation, including with stakeholders who had environmental and economic concerns.

But private dams involved “minimal public consultation and can be approved and constructed based on environmental assessments commissioned from private consultants by dam proponents”.

The report looked at three dams in detail, on properties in the Murrumbidgee Valley owned by Webster Ltd – Glenmea, Bringagee and Kooba Station. The dams were funded out of the federal government’s $4 billion water efficiency program.

The report argues such dams are not the best way to save water. It points to the department of agriculture and water resources saying new dams can save water where they replace shallower ones (which have more evaporation), or where they collect recycled irrigation water.

“However, none of the three case-study dams in this report save water in this way. They are new dams, not replacing smaller, shallower dams. Water stored behind their approximately eight metre high walls would otherwise be stored in public headwater dams around 100 metres deep.”

These dams are designed to divert normal irrigation water and “supplementary water” – not to simply recycle irrigation water, the report says. Thus “they increase both evaporation and irrigation water use”.

Supplementary water is water that is surplus to consumptive needs. It is important environmentally and to downstream users, historically making up almost all the water flowing from the Murrumbidgee into the Murray, the report says.

“With major dams now targeting this water, the Murrumbidgee could be disconnected from the Murray in most years. This has implications for all NSW Basin water users, who are already grappling with how to meet downstream obligations within the Murray’s constraints and with no water coming down the Darling.”

The report says a Canadian pension fund had just been reported as “swooping” on Webster, “with specific mention of a property with one of these new dams”.

“The new dams that Australian taxpayers helped build appear to be highly valued by international investors,” the report says.

– ref. Dams are being built, but they are private: Australia Institute – http://theconversation.com/dams-are-being-built-but-they-are-private-australia-institute-124807

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joshua Zadro, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Sydney

When people visit a GP clinic or hospital in Australia or the United States, they receive the recommended care around 55-57% of the time.

Recommended care means they get the tests or treatments that evidence-based guidelines say a patient should receive for their condition. This is usually because they’re the most effective or cost-effective option. The recommended care for people with knee osteoarthritis, for example, is exercise and weight loss.

Clinicians may not provide recommended care for several reasons. These include wishes of the patient, lack of trust in the evidence or guidelines, or experience providing certain types of care.

Read more: Man v mountain: how to overcome the evidence overload

Doctors often refer patients with musculoskeletal problems such as back pain and osteoarthritis for physical therapy. But until now, it has been unclear how often physiotherapists provide the recommended care for these patients.

Our review of the international evidence, published today in BMJ Open, found 63% of physiotherapists provided recommended treatments. But 27% provided treatments that weren’t based on evidence and which the guidelines recommended against.

Fortunately, failing to provide recommended care is unlikely to harm patients. Nevertheless, ditching non-recommended treatments could result in more efficient care and fewer resources being wasted.

Our study

We reviewed 94 studies from 19 countries, including Australia, to investigate the treatments physiotherapists provided for a range of musculoskeletal conditions. These included back pain, knee osteoarhtirits, neck pain, whiplash, foot or ankle pain and shoulder pain.

We used physiotherapists’ clinical notes to determine which treatments they provided. We then compared their treatment choices with recommendations from evidence-based guidelines, or guidelines that were considered most credible for each condition.

Overall, we found 63% of physiotherapists provided recommended treatments, which appears higher than in hospitals and GP clinics overall. A 2012 Australian audit, for example, found 57% of patients surveyed received recommended care.

But in our study, almost half of physiotherapists (45%) provided treatments that guidelines didn’t mention because there wasn’t enough evidence to say if they worked or not.

And one in four (27%) provided treatments the guidelines recommend against. This was usually because the evidence showed they’re ineffective.

Physiotherapists can provide a range of treatments, some recommended and others not, so these percentages don’t add up to 100. Of the 63% who provide recommended care, for instance, some might also be providing treatments that are not recommended or that are not mentioned in guidelines.

Why does it matter?

Back pain, neck pain, osteoarthritis and other musculoskeletal conditions can have a substantial impact on people’s lives, and often cause disability.

Traditionally, these conditions were managed with medication and surgery. However, medications such as opioids cause harm and there is growing evidence some common surgical procedures are ineffective. This has prompted a shift in what is recommended for musculoskeletal conditions.

Read more: The guidelines on low back pain are clear: drugs and surgery should be the last resort

Today, clinical practice guidelines recommend treatments provided by physiotherapists over medication and surgery.

There is, however, a range of treatments physiotherapists can provide. Some treatments are effective, such as exercise for knee osteoarthritis. Other treatments are not, such as acupuncture for low back pain.

To ensure patients receive the right care, physiotherapists are expected to follow recommendations from clinical practice guidelines. These guidelines are often multidisciplinary and intended to be used by GPs, physiotherapists, and surgeons.

Physios manage some pain better than other pain

When it comes to following clinical guidelines, we found physiotherapists manage some conditions better than others.

For shoulder pain, up to 76% of physiotherapists provided recommended treatments (such as strengthening exercises and massage). Only 8% provided treatments that were not recommended (such as magnetic field therapy, which uses an electrical current to alleviate pain).

There is room for physiotherapists to improve their use of recommended treatments for knee osteoarthritis and low back pain.

For knee osteoarthritis, 65% of physiotherapists provided recommended treatments (to advise patients to stay active, undertake aerobic and strength exercises and lose weight). One in five (21%) provided treatments that were not recommended (such as acupuncture and advice to reduce activity levels).

For low back pain, half provided recommended treatments (advice to stay active and reassure patients that most people recover from back pain without formal treatment); while 18% provided treatments that were not recommended (acupuncture, lumbar braces, or advice to rest in bed until the pain goes).

Read more: Pain drain: the economic and social costs of chronic pain

Physiotherapists have a lot to offer patients with musculoskeletal conditions. But it’s important they don’t dilute appropriate care with inappropriate care.

Better adhering to clinical practice guidelines could increase the efficiency of physiotherapy services and ensure patients only receive care that is truly necessary.

– ref. Only 2 in 3 physios provide ‘recommended care’, but that’s still higher than medicine – http://theconversation.com/only-2-in-3-physios-provide-recommended-care-but-thats-still-higher-than-medicine-122931

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Guy Dundas, Energy Fellow, Grattan Institute

More than two years on from the sudden closure of Victoria’s Hazelwood coal power station, quite a mess remains. It is clear the federal government’s market interventions have not worked. Electricity prices are higher and supply is tight. Consumers are not happy.

In the face of this, federal and state governments have felt pressured to act – especially after several severe blackouts attracted fever-pitch media coverage and prompted a national debate about electricity reliability. But their approach has been ad hoc and has made things worse in the long run.

Australia is in the midst of a great energy transition. The nation’s entire coal fleet will close over the next few decades, and the government must urgently improve its policy response or electricity consumers will continue to suffer. We propose a solution that ensures coal plants close in an orderly way.

We can’t afford a repeat of the Hazelwood mess

The aftermath of the sudden Hazelwood closure is a good case study in failed government intervention.

Hazelwood closed in March 2017 after supplying Victoria with cheap brown coal-fired electricity for more than half a century. The plant’s owner, French energy company Engie, gave only five months’ notice of the shutdown. This left no time to build replacement electricity generation, so prices rose and supplies became less reliable.

In the years since Hazelwood’s closure, the federal government failed to clear up more than a decade of uncertainty around national climate and energy policy – including last year when it dumped the National Energy Guarantee. This has left investors wondering when a framework to cut emissions in the electricity sector will be imposed.

Instead of creating investor certainty, the federal government has adopted a “picking winners” approach. It plans to build new generation assets such as the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project, and subsidise others through a program of underwriting investments. Alongside this, the government’s proposed “big stick” laws would give it vast powers including those to break up big energy companies. Our research has confirmed this has a chilling effect on investment.

The sudden closure of large coal power stations is challenging enough without being made worse by ill-conceived policy responses. Hazelwood will be the first of many closures. Australia’s entire coal fleet is expected to retire over coming decades as it ages and gets displaced by low-cost solar and wind energy.

Flogging the life out of coal plants is not the answer

The crucial lesson from Hazelwood is that Australia needs adequate notice of impending coal plant closures. This allows timely replacement investment to occur, minimising the price and reliability impacts on consumers.

New South Wales’ Liddell power station is due to close next and its owner AGL has given plenty of notice. In 2015 it announced a 2022 closure, and this year firmed up its plans for full closure by 2023. One unit of four will close in 2022.

Read more: When it comes to climate change, Australia’s mining giants are an accessory to the crime

Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor is so concerned at Liddell’s closure he set up a taskforce to examine how to manage it, including extending its life or replacing the lost generation like-for-like.

But his concerns are misplaced. The Australian Energy Market Operator’s 2019 reliability projection for New South Wales is that the outlook is improving more rapidly than it was in 2018. About 2.3 gigawatts of solar and wind energy has been committed in NSW since the start of 2017 – and more is planned.

The best way to maintain reliability is through investment – not by trying to keep an ageing power station running on hot summer days.

Laws on coal plant closures must grow teeth

Liddell’s closure is very likely to prove manageable. But this cannot be taken for granted in all future cases.

A new rule introduced late last year requires generators to give at least three years’ notice of closure. It’s a step in the right direction, but the rule lacks teeth. The penalties for non-compliance are small, and the mechanism could be gamed by generators nominating a closure date and then continuously delaying closure. We need better insurance to avoid future disruptive closures.

Past Australian experience gives some lessons on what not to do. In 2011 the Gillard Labor government proposed paying coal generators to close, on the grounds that otherwise they might continue operating indefinitely. Four of the five short-listed generators have since closed – without being paid a cent of government money. We are now dealing with the opposite problem, but the lesson holds – taxpayers will be taken for a ride if government money is used to delay or otherwise “manage” coal closures.

International experience is not likely to translate well to Australia. Germany’s coal closure commission built on deep cooperation between business, unions and governments that is not present here. The UK and Canada legislated coal phase-outs, but they did so at a time when coal provided only 10% of their power, compared to more than 60% in Australia today.

Make coal plants guarantee orderly closure

The Grattan Institute’s latest report, Power play: how governments can better direct Australia’s electricity market, proposes a new approach. Coal generators should be required to put money – indicatively several hundreds of millions of dollars each – into a fund, managed by an independent third party, to be held as security. Generators would be allowed to nominate their own closure window, but would get these funds back only if they closed within this window – providing a strong financial incentive for predictable and orderly closure.

Circumstances change and generators cannot reasonably fix closure decades in advance. To balance flexibility and certainty, younger generators would be allowed to nominate relatively long windows, but they would need to tighten these windows as they age.

Read more: How to transition from coal: 4 lessons for Australia from around the world

Limited exemptions would be available if early closure did not harm the reliability of the market, or conversely if continued operation of the coal plant in question was absolutely necessary to maintain reliability.

This policy would come with costs. Collectively generators would need to place several billions of dollars into the fund. As generators have a higher cost of capital than would be earned on the held funds, this would cost them, collectively, several hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But the measure would provide low-cost insurance against the destabilising effect of poorly managed coal closures on the A$18 billion National Electricity Market.

The policy would give a clear signal for investment in new, clean power supply before – not after – coal closures, and better manage Australia’s energy transition.

– ref. Governments took the hard road on clean energy – and consumers are feeling the bumps – http://theconversation.com/governments-took-the-hard-road-on-clean-energy-and-consumers-are-feeling-the-bumps-124575

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Ford, Lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Newcastle

It’s 1963. Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey) is a college-bound teenager staying at Kellerman’s Mountain Lodge with her family. Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) is a dance instructor at the resort – and Baby’s love interest.

Dirty Dancing is one of those films almost everyone has at least some knowledge of, even if only second-hand. It is therefore not surprising it has inspired a reality TV show: The Real Dirty Dancing.

At the “real Kellerman’s” resort in Virginia, B-list Australian celebrities take dancing lessons, visit set locations, and reminisce about the movie.

It is a predictable, bland and heteronormative reality TV show, with low stakes and little to say about the film beyond “how romantic” it is.

But the 1987 film has a lot to say about Jewish identity, class stratification, shifting gender expectations, and the importance of access to legal and safe abortions.

The reality show emphasises authenticity through locations, costumes and choreography – but by isolating the musical numbers, the film’s complex politics are erased.

You don’t own me

The premise of the film – “dirty” dancing – is unavoidably tied to black culture and the history of “race music.”

In the early 20th century, music by black artists was specifically marketed towards African-American audiences with its own record companies, radio stations and music stores.

This changed as white fans starting listening to African-American music in the 1950s and 1960s.

Read more: Fats Domino: rock’n’roll’s quiet rebel who defied US segregation

There were (and continue to be) issues of cultural appropriation when white musicians performed covers of songs by black artists. Black bodies and black music is repeatedly presented as sexualised, exotic and erotic in much American media, even today.

In the film, Johnny teaches upper-class Jewish-American families “classical” dances: the foxtrot and the waltz. The lower-class resort workers partake in “dirty” dancing. These after-hours parties are coded as fun and illicit – with dancing too erotic for tight-laced holidaymakers.

In the first iconic dirty dancing party scene, Baby is shocked to see the Kellerman’s staff grinding and twisting against each other.

We watch interracial couples dancing and grinding in a scene set four years before Loving v. Virginia made interracial marriage legal in 1967.

Two songs by African American artists play: The Countour’s Do You Love Me (1962) and Otis Redding’s Love Man (1969). These songs were hits on the R&B charts in the 1960s, but neither made the Billboard year-end Hot 100 list.

Be my baby

Part of a cluster of Hollywood dance-based teen-films, Dirty Dancing featured a mix of 1960s pop tunes by big names like The Shirelles and Frankie Valli, as well as original songs – including (I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life.

The soundtrack’s nostalgic pastiche went on to become a huge commercial success, shooting to number one on the charts and becoming one of the best-selling soundtrack albums of all time.

The movie’s musical numbers have become stand-alone properties, famous in their own right. But when these numbers are considered in isolation (as in The Real Dirty Dancing, in wedding videos on YouTube, and in films like Crazy Stupid Love), the original film’s messy class, race and gender politics are sidelined.

Will you love me tomorrow

Much of the film’s plot revolves around an illegal abortion.

Dirty Dancing is set ten years before Roe v. Wade protected a woman’s right to abortion in America. When Johnny’s dance partner Penny needs an abortion, Baby loans the money to pay for the procedure and steps in to learn the routine to ensure the dancers’ employment the following summer.

But when Baby asks her father, a doctor, to help Penny after the botched abortion, he bans her from seeing “those people.”

The film makes explicit the class distinction between those who holiday at Kellerman’s and those who work there: the romance centres on overcoming class differences. But there is also the added barrier of culture, as Baby is Jewish-American and Johnny is of Irish heritage.

Baby and her sister Lisa represent two different models of Jewish-American femininity prized in the 1980s. Baby is going to, in her father’s words, “change the world,” while her sister is going “to decorate it.” Baby is socially conscious and book-smart, while Lisa is a Jewish American Princess.

Big girls don’t cry

The Real Dirty Dancing elides the gender and racial issues by focusing simply on learning the intimate dance moves.

It does, however, raise some interesting questions about sexuality and erotic dancing. Many of the female contestants express their discomfort with the intimacy and vulnerability needed to “be Baby.”

As Jessica Rowe says in the second episode, “The scariest thing about Dirty Dancing is the ‘dirty’ dancing.”

Much of The Real Dirty Dancing’s promo material features Jessica Rowe’s struggles with her body image, sexuality, and conflicting feelings about being sexy as a mum. A scene where the female contestants are trying on revealing costumes, is used as an opportunity to highlight the women’s insecurities about their bodies.

In a straight to camera interview, Jessica Rowe breaks down saying, “When you become a mum, you almost feel sometimes like a part of yourself shuts down. That part of you that is just for you.”

It is an interesting and powerful moment that betrays the show’s fluffy low-stakes premise.

We’d like to think the parameters of ideal femininity have shifted since the 1960s when Dirty Dancing was set, or the 1980s when the film was made. As Rowe’s comments reveal, there are still strict rules about how women are expected to best perform motherhood, sexiness and wifedom.

The appeal of reality television is watching ordinary people achieve extraordinary things like a difficult dance lift. By focusing on just the dance moves The Real Dirty Dancing ignores the difficult politics of the film and keeps Baby in the corner.

– ref. The Real Dirty Dancing reduces a political film to little more than coy dance numbers – http://theconversation.com/the-real-dirty-dancing-reduces-a-political-film-to-little-more-than-coy-dance-numbers-124483

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mohiuddin Ahmed, Lecturer of Computing & Security, Edith Cowan University

Unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly called drones, are now a fundamental part of defence force capability, from intelligence gathering to unmanned engagement in military operations. But what happens if our own technology is turned against us?

Between 2015 and 2022, the global commercial drone market is expected to grow from A$5.95 billion to A$7.47 billion.

Drones are now being used in a host of applications, including agriculture, media, parcel delivery, and defence.

However, as with all IT technology, manufacturers and users may leave the digital doors unlocked. This potentially leaves opportunities for cyber-criminals and perhaps even cyber-warfare.

Read more: Police drones: can we trust the eyes in the skies?

Imagine a defence operation in which a drone is sent out to spy on enemy territory. The enemy identifies the drone but instead of disabling it, compromises the sensors (vision, sonar, and so on) to inject false data. Acting upon such data could then result in inappropriate tactics and, in a worst case scenario, may even lead to avoidable casualties.

UK cybersecurity consultant James Dale warned earlier this year that “equipment is now available to hack drones so they can bypass technology controls”.

Drones are relatively cheap technologies for military use – certainly cheaper than the use of satellites for surveillance. Off-the-shelf drones can be used to gather intelligence, without any significant development effort.

Meanwhile, governments have cracked down on illegal civilian drone use, and imposed no-fly zones around secure infrastructure such as airports. Drone manufacturers have been forced to provide “geofencing” software to avoid situations such as the recent drone strike in a Saudi oil field. However, cyber criminals are smart enough to bypass such controls and openly provide services to help consumers get past government and military-enforced no-fly zones.

Russian software company Coptersafe sells such modifications for a few hundred dollars. Anyone can buy a drone from a retail store, purchase the modifications, and then send their drone into no-fly zones such as military bases and airports. Ironically, Russia’s military base in Syria came under attack from drones last year.

Australia on the frontline

Australia is at the frontier of the military drone revolution, equipping itself with a fleet of hundreds of new drones. Lieutenant Colonel Keirin Joyce, discussing the program in a recent defence podcast, declared Australia will soon be “the most unmanned [air vehicle] army in the world per capita”.

It will be essential to safeguard every single component of this sophisticated unmanned aerial fleet from cyber attack.

When drones were developed, cyber security was not a priority. Let’s explore a few potential threats to drone technology:

• drone navigation is based on the Global Positioning System (GPS). It’s possible an attacker can break the encryption of this communication channel. Fake signals can be fed to the targeted drone and the drone effectively gets lost. This type of attack can be launched without being in close physical proximity

• with knowledge of the flight controller systems, hackers can gain access using “brute force” attacks. Then, the captured video footage can be manipulated to mislead the operator and influence ground operations

• a drone fitted with sensors could be manipulated by injecting rogue signals. For example, the gyroscopes on a drone can be misled using an external source of audio energy. Cyber criminals may take advantage of this design characteristic to create false sensor readings

• drones’ onboard control systems are effectively small computers. Drone control systems (onboard and ground-based controllers) are also vulnerable to malicious software or Maldrone (malware for drones). The founder and CTO of CloudSEK, Rahul Sasi discovered a backdoor in the Parrot AR.Drone. Using malicious software, an attacker can establish remote communication and can take control of the drone. Attackers can also inject false data to mislead the operators. This type of malware can be installed silently without any visible sign to the operators. The consequences are significant if the drones are used for military operations.

Read more: Eye in the Sky and the moral dilemmas of modern warfare

As with traditional cyber-crime, it’s likely 2019 will see a sharp rise in drone-related incidents. However, these security breaches should not discourage the use of drones for personal, industrial or military applications. Drones are great tools in the era of smart cities, for instance.

But we should not forget the potential for cyber crime – and nowhere are the stakes higher than in military drone use. Clearly, the use of drones needs to be carefully regulated. And the first step is for the government and the Australian Defence Force to be fully aware of the risks.

– ref. Aerial threat: why drone hacking could be bad news for the military – http://theconversation.com/aerial-threat-why-drone-hacking-could-be-bad-news-for-the-military-124588

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Barrie, Honorary Professor, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

This is part of a new series looking at the national security challenges facing Australia, how our leaders are responding to them through legislation and how these measures are impacting society. Read the rest of the series here.

It is evident from Australia’s increasingly severe droughts and record-breaking heatwaves that time is running out to take action on climate change.

Yet, despite persistent calls from eminent scientists to reduce global dependence on fossil fuels, a call to action has gone unanswered by our political leaders.

And we aren’t just facing an environmental threat alone in Australia – there are significant implications for our national security and defence capabilities that we haven’t fully reckoned with either.

This point was made abundantly clear in a speech prepared for Defence Force Chief Angus Campbell at an event in June, excerpts of which have been recently published by the media. It noted that Australia is in

the most natural disaster-prone region in the world … [and] climate change is predicted to make disasters more extreme and more common.

If the predictions are correct, [climate change] will have serious ramifications for global security and serious ramifications for the ADF [Australian Defence Force].

What kinds of security risks do we face?

Climate change works as a threat multiplier – it exacerbates the drivers of conflict by deepening existing fragilities within societies, straining weak institutions, reshaping power balances and undermining post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding.

This year’s IISS Armed Conflict Survey noted how

climate-related drivers for armed violence and conflict will increase as climate change progresses.

The survey points out that the 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that escalated into civil war was preceded by the country’s deepest and most prolonged drought on record. One study has found the drought was two to three times more likely to happen due to climate change, and that it helped fuel migration to large cities, which in turn exacerbated the social issues that caused the unrest.

In May 2018, I was among numerous experts who provided evidence to a Senate committee examining the potential impacts of climate change on Australia’s national security.

Increased climate migration and disasters

One of the biggest threats I identified was the possibility of mass migration driven by climate change.

There will be nearly 6 billion people in the Asia-Pacific region by 2050. And if the region has become increasingly destabilised due to climate change, many people will likely be affected by rising sea levels, water and food shortages, armed conflicts and natural disasters, and desperate to find more secure homes.

This is already happening now. Since 2008, it’s estimated that an average of 22.5 million to 24 million people have been displaced globally each year due to catastrophic weather events and climate-related disasters.

Read more: US military strategists warn that climate is a ‘catalyst for conflict’

And a new World Bank report estimates that 143 million people in three developing regions alone – sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America – could become climate migrants by 2050.

They will migrate from less viable areas with lower water availability and crop productivity and from areas affected by rising sea level and storm surges. The poorest and most climate-vulnerable areas will be hardest hit.

Australia, with its very low population density, will likely be an attractive place for climate migrants to attempt to resettle. The World Bank has called on Australia to allow open migration from climate-affected Pacific islands, but successive governments haven’t exactly been open to refugees and asylum seekers in recent years.

Read more: Refuge City, a new kind of city for our times

If we don’t have a plan in place, our estimated 2050 population of 37.6 million could be overwhelmed by the scale of the national security problem.

Other experts agreed. American climate security expert Sherri Goodman described climate change as a “direct threat to the national security of Australia”, saying the region is

most likely to see increasing waves of migration from small island states or storm-affected, highly populated areas in Asia that can’t accommodate people when a very strong storm hits.

Australia would also struggle to respond to worsening natural disasters in our region either caused by or exacerbated by climate change.

As part of the Senate inquiry, the Department of Defence noted an “upwards trend” in both disaster-related events in the Asia-Pacific region and disaster-related defence operations in the past 20 years.

As alluded to in the speech prepared for Campbell in June, we could easily find ourselves overwhelmed by disaster relief missions due to the severity and scale of future weather events, or due to a series of events that occur concurrently in dispersed locations.

This would stretch our available first responder forces – defence, police, ambulance, firefighters and other emergency services – even in the absence of any other higher priority peacekeeping missions around the world.

Recommendations for a way forward

The Senate report listed 11 recommendations for action by national security agencies and the government.

Among these were calls for:

• the government to develop a climate security white paper to guide a coordinated government response to climate change risks

• the Department of Defence to consider releasing an unclassified version of the work it has undertaken already to identify climate risks to the country

• the government to consider a dedicated climate security leadership position in Home Affairs to coordinate climate resilience issues

• and the Department of Defence to create a dedicated senior leadership position to oversee the delivery of domestic and international humanitarian assistance and disaster relief as climate pressures increase over time.

Some of these findings were contested. In their comments, the Coalition senators made a point of saying how well the government has been doing on climate change in the defence and foreign affairs portfolios. Sufficient strategies are in place

to ensure Australia’s response to the implications of climate change on national security is well understood and consistent across the whole of government.

They also considered that a separate recommendation on defence emissions reduction targets fell outside the spirit of the inquiry. They did not support it.

A lack of urgency and response

The findings in the report are a cause for concern. The recommendations lack timetables for action and a sense of urgency.

The Senate committee also admitted its own shortcomings. For instance, it couldn’t adequately examine the potential impacts of climate change on Australia’s economy, infrastructure and community health and well-being due to a lack of substantial evidence on these issues.

Read more: Senate report: climate change is a clear and present danger to Australia’s security

Furthermore, and most worryingly, it seems the government just doesn’t care enough. It has yet to table a response to the report more than a year later.

A welcome development would be if the government announced a climate change security white paper that clearly spells out where ministers stand on the issue and the specific measures we need to take to prepare for the threats ahead. It would also dispel the concerns of many Australians about our future readiness.

But the Coalition’s response to the Senate report is breathtakingly complacent and smacks of reckless negligence since Australia is on the front line when it comes to climate change and our national security faces undeniably serious risks.

Climate change is already presenting significant challenges to governance, our institutions and the fabric of our societies. It’s time we recognise the potential threats to security in our region, as well.

– ref. Climate change poses a ‘direct threat’ to Australia’s national security. It must be a political priority – http://theconversation.com/climate-change-poses-a-direct-threat-to-australias-national-security-it-must-be-a-political-priority-123264