Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eleanor Malbon, Research Fellow, UNSW

While the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has made incredible improvements to the lives of many Australians living with disabilities, not everyone is benefiting from the scheme in the same way.

Our review, published recently in journal BMC Public Health, found the structure of the NDIS may be exacerbating existing social inequities. Women, rural and regional Australians, and those from poor households are more likely to miss out on disability care than their peers.

In a survey of of economically disadvantaged people with a disability, 31% were not even aware of the NDIS. A further 41% had heard of the NDIS and were eligible but had not applied due to bureaucratic complexities.

Read more: Understanding the NDIS: how does the scheme work and am I eligible for funding?

Women make up 49% of Australians with a disability but just 37% of NDIS participants. Further research is underway to help us understand why this is the case but it’s likely a reflection of broader gender inequities.

Men are also more likely to successfully secure NDIS services than women, which allows them to negotiate better deals and services from their allocated funds.

Accommodating the diversity of people’s circumstances is essential for the NDIS to achieve its goal of improving the lives of Australians with disability.

Market-based policies can exacerbate inequities

A 2018 Senate inquiry into NDIS readiness found there were often too few providers equipped to deliver disability support services, especially in remote and regional areas.

Without enough good-quality providers with space to take on more clients, people may miss out on services. Our review found this was more likely to occur for women, people with lower education levels, and those in remote and regional areas.

Where markets are failing or thin, those who are most equipped to get in early and establish service contracts are at an advantage over those who cannot.

A local service provider can only take on so many customers before it hits limits on staffing and resources. Those who get in early manage to secure services for themselves. Those who don’t may miss out on services entirely, especially where there are only a few specialist providers.

There are many reasons why someone might not get in early, such as having other care duties, living remotely, living in unstable housing, or not having the energy to work through the complicated system.

Self-managers get better services

Every NDIS participant is allocated a personal budget that matches their needs and goals. There are three ways for participants to manage NDIS budgets:

1. administered by the participant (self-managed)
2. chosen by the participant but administrated through a plan manager who pays invoices on behalf of the participant (plan-managed)
3. NDIA managed, where services are chosen by the participant from registered NDIS providers only.

Or the participant may opt for a combination of these options.

The 24% of self-managed participants carry the most administrative burden. They manage contracts and invoices themselves. But they also have the most flexibility to secure services, negotiate with service providers on price and access tailored services.

Read more: Here’s what needs to happen to get the NDIS back on track

Many service providers are declining to take on contracts with people who do not self-manage, because these participants take more time and pay less. This leaves those least able to manage their services without access to the most flexible and boutique services.

Up to 40% of NDIS participants with an intellectual disability would like more training on NDIS tasks so they can better self-manage or choose services. In particular, they want to develop their skills in looking after money, using computers, finding the right service, making choices and ensuring they’re heard.

The system privileges an ‘ideal norm’

The NDIS system is bureaucratically complex, and many people find it difficult to navigate. In this way, it seems be catering to a concept of an “ideal norm”: a person who can navigate the NDIS bureaucracy and take on complex additional administrative burdens.

The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA, the agency charged with implementing the NDIS), for example, has been sending letters to blind people in formats they cannot read, such as printed letters without braille and PDF files that are incompatible with screen readers. This is due to to be rectified this month.

Control over services may also be limited for people who are geographically or socially isolated, or do not have the skills to navigate NDIS systems to access plans, run budgets and find services.

What can be done?

Addressing market failures and a scarcity of providers is essential to ensuring the benefits of the NDIS are equitable.

Supporting people to navigate bureaucratic complexity in the scheme will level the playing field.

The recent pricing changes for service providers to travel to remote and regional areas may help address provider shortfalls. Further, plans to maintain critical supports for essential services such as feeding and bathing in areas with too few providers will help address market failure.

Read more: The NDIS is delivering ‘reasonable and necessary’ supports for some, but others are missing out

Greater funding support is needed for advocacy groups to help NDIS participants, including those economically disadvantaged and homeless, to access and navigate the NDIS bureaucracy.

Finally, to allow better assessment of equity in the NDIS, we need better data. We need a large-scale evaluation of the performance of the NDIS, similar to the previous evaluation of NDIS trials. Existing data held within government on NDIS access should be reported publicly.

We need such actions to bridge the gap between Australians who are socially and financially equipped to navigate the NDIS and those who are not, or else people with critical needs may go without services and support.

– ref. Women, rural and disadvantaged Australians may be missing out on care in the NDIS – http://theconversation.com/women-rural-and-disadvantaged-australians-may-be-missing-out-on-care-in-the-ndis-120081

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig Batty, Professor of Creative Writing, University of Technology Sydney

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.

One of the major considerations when creating an ongoing television series is its “story world”, made up by its place, people, themes, style and tone. Central to this world is the setting, known in television writing as the “hub” or “precinct”, which serves the need for constant generation of characters and storylines.

Well-known examples of a hub or precinct include Ramsay Street (Neighbours), Sun Hill Police Station (The Bill), the White House (West Wing) and the eponymous Happy Valley.

With its high turnover of criminals, and the pressure-cooker effect of locking up many characters within the same walls, a prison is a particularly useful story hub for a TV drama series. The Melbourne-set and produced series Wentworth, now in its seventh season on Foxtel in Australia, is a good example of how this can work.

Wentworth reimagines cult show Prisoner, bringing together cold killers, pretty criminals and correctional officers – some of them also corrupt – in the one space. With a series of “top dogs” ruling the roost – from fiery mum Bea Smith (Danielle Cormack) to vigilante leader Kaz Proctor (Tammy Macintosh) – personalities clash, friendships and relationships evolve, and death threats, set-ups and escape attempts are frequently made.

TV series are often called “returning series”, usually because the setting plays such a vital role in structuring the story. Each week we come back to the same village, hospital, police station or school to see how the characters react to new challenges.

For prison dramas such as Wentworth, mostly the characters do not so much return as remain. Confined within cells, rec rooms, canteens and exercise yards, characters find themselves creating their own dramas, defining their own hierarchies, and of course dreaming up ways to get out (legally or otherwise).

Writers can introduce new characters at any time – for any crime – and mainstay characters can be dispatched with little narrative contrivance, because the prisoners’ lack of control over their own movement is a given.

Many TV series creators have explored the possibilities of detention as a story hub, generating shows such as Porridge (1974-77), Prison Break (2005-17) and most recently Orange is the New Black (2013-present). Mostly shot in a few indoor spaces, prison stories are cheaper to produce than many other scripted television series.

Characters in Wentworth have much at stake in each encounter. From eating breakfast to exercising in the yard, they may lose their freedom, social position, familial ties and even their lives. The prison corridor can readily become a place for compassion or conflict, solidarity or rioting.

Queueing to use the public telephone, where we typically see teary connections with loved ones, can easily slip into hierarchical games among the inmates, and sometimes violence. Because of the setting, the extreme stakes and emotional power of melodrama are never far from the surface.

Female-focused storytelling

Wentworth’s story hub is distinctive, because it brims with women. Wentworth Correctional Centre is a (fictional) social space constructed primarily by and for women. This allows for a variety of female identities and experiences to be played out.

As part of a global movement to better represent women on screens (and behind the scenes), including Screen Australia’s Gender Matters program, this show is very timely. Not only does it increase representation of women on screen, it also demands a greater breadth of female characters simply because all of the inmates – and the majority of the staff – identify as female. Women are Governors and “Top Dogs”, the brutalised and the perpetrators.

All of these character types, backgrounds and motivations come together within the powerful female world of Wentworth. In the first season, the prison functions as a magnetic narrative force, drawing the characters towards their incarcerated state. The causes of their custodial sentences are dramatised via flashbacks, so we see their various positions in society before they become levelled as prisoners.

In later seasons, the prison functions as a kind of decentralising force as the narrative follows selected characters trying to establish new lives on parole. For example, Liz Birdsworth (Celia Ireland) is released to a halfway house, where she must deal with violence and theft; and inmate Franky’s (Nicole da Silva) attempt to establish a legal career after her release is told over two seasons.

The sheer number of female characters also demands diversity: there are women of various ages, ethnicities, social classes, body shapes, genders, religions and sexualities. This creates a world in which social norms, power dynamics and gender categories can be disrupted and challenged.

Many of the central characters in Wentworth are lesbian or bisexual. When Franky and her psychologist Bridget develop a strong relationship in season three, for example, the forbidden couple became a fan favourite tagged “Fridget”.

The frequency of representing taboo and marginalised sexualities is a major contributing factor in the enduring appeal of women-in-prison stories.

But the prison of this television series is still an imaginary world, where characters and stories are played for the tastes and thrills of mainstream audiences, rather than to compassionately illuminate the experiences of the 43,000 Australians who live in our prisons. Although Wentworth features more major Indigenous characters than the average Australian television series (the current season features two Indigenous Australian main characters in an ensemble of ten), it still fails to adequately represent or address the horrifically high rate of Indigenous incarceration here.

Wentworth has been praised elsewhere as “a striking example of how to make strongly dramatic, addictive TV using a confined setting”, in a series that is “dark, tense and fully female-centric”.

Inbuilt with drama, rivalries, collusions, hierarchies and forced interactions between characters, Wentworth epitomises how a TV series is not just haphazardly set somewhere, but rather how its precinct can be pivotal in supplying all the necessary elements of drama.

By placing women at the centre of the narrative, Wentworth’s female-centric world also creates opportunities for real industry change.

– ref. Inside the story: writing the powerful female world of Wentworth – http://theconversation.com/inside-the-story-writing-the-powerful-female-world-of-wentworth-119878

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

The first Indigenous minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, says on the government’s proposal to constitutionally recognise Indigenous Australians: “I’m optimistic about achieving the outcome because if the words are simple, but meaningful, then Australians will generally accept an opportunity to include Aboriginal people in the Constitution.”

But he concedes Indigenous leaders would not take the same minimalist approach he is advocating for, but says it is “pragmatic”.

What I want to see us make some gains. Later on as we mature as a nation, then we can have another debate of what the next phase is.

He admits getting support for the constitutional referendum in his home state of Western Australia would be difficult but he would be looking to the big mining companies – which have been supportive of the Uluru Statement of the Heart – to help make the case there.

As for issues affecting Indigenous communities, such as high youth suicide rates, he says there is “a sense of futility for some young people. The issue of broken relationships. The way in which young people have expressed the need for their culture to be valued”.

On the way forward, he is looking into “support structures that need to go into place on the ground” and thinks “there is a way that we can have some of this with existing resources”.

New to podcasts?

Podcasts are often best enjoyed using a podcast app. All iPhones come with the Apple Podcasts app already installed, or you may want to listen and subscribe on another app such as Pocket Casts (click here to listen to Politics with Michelle Grattan on Pocket Casts).

You can also hear it on Stitcher, Spotify or any of the apps below. Just pick a service from one of those listed below and click on the icon to find Politics with Michelle Grattan.

Additional audio

A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

Image:

Rohan Thomson/AAP

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Ken Wyatt on constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians – http://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-ken-wyatt-on-constitutional-recognition-for-indigenous-australians-120167

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Smith, Research Fellow, Department of Pacific Affairs, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University

As China grows more powerful and influential, our New Superpower series looks at what this means for the world – how China maintains its power, how it wields its power and how its power might be threatened. Read the rest of the series here.

One of the earliest guests I had on The Little Red Podcast, the podcast I co-host with former China correspondent Louisa Lim, said something that stuck with me about the view of China in the rest of the world. John Fitzgerald, a well-known historian of China’s diaspora, confidently declared that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “couldn’t care less” about what non-Chinese Australians thought of it and its actions.

Looking through the results of the recent Lowy Institute Poll on Australians’ attitudes toward China, this is probably a good thing for the party.

The Australian public’s confidence in China’s ability to act as a responsible power has fallen off a cliff. In just one year, it dropped from more than half of Australians to just 32%. That’s a dire number.

That wasn’t the only surprise in the poll. Four-fifths of respondents agreed with the proposition “China’s infrastructure investment projects across Asia are part of China’s plans for regional domination”, and 73% believed Australia should try to prevent China from expanding its influence in the Pacific.

The poll was released in late June, at a time when China’s image was taking a hit internationally. Millions of people took to the streets in Hong Kong to protest a now-defeated extradition bill that could have seen Hong Kong residents sent to China on suspicion of crimes.

Then came news in Australia that the wife of an Australian writer who has been detained since January was herself interrogated by Chinese officials and blocked from leaving the country.

Even for a country that purportedly doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks, trust is hard to come by these days.

A matter of trust

It’s not entirely clear why so many Australians now distrust the Chinese state to the point where they believe our government should actively counter it (although perhaps not go to war with it).

There’s little evidence to suggest that one issue alone has caused this sharp decline in trust. For instance, the Communist Party’s most egregious recent violation of human rights, the detention of up to 1.5 million Uyghurs simply for being, well, Uyghurs has touched relatively few Australians.

Nor has the Australian government felt the need to act – it has said little on the matter.

Read more: Xi Jinping’s grip on power is absolute, but there are new threats to his ‘Chinese dream’

Rather, the decline in trust seems to be the result of an accumulation of negative news on China — some well-informed, some half-baked (such as the 60 Minutes expose on a Chinese “military base” in Vanuatu). And for some, it’s based on personal experiences.

Last month, for instance, Australian National University revealed a massive data breach in the school’s computer system, including tax file numbers, bank accounts and passport details. The sophistication of the attack, which came after multiple attempts, meant there was only possible one suspect, according to senior intelligence officials: China.

Stealing people’s bank details might be profitable for the hacking team, but it doesn’t win hearts and minds for the Chinese state. Actions like this do more to damage China’s image than the words of noted China critics Clive Hamilton and Clive Palmer.

This sort of intimidation has been on the rise under Xi’s leadership in recent years. Academics who are critical of China now expect to be targeted by the CCP.

A podcast like mine, banned in China, doesn’t help. In the wake of an episode about China’s real-time censorship of its own historical record, I was hit by a denial-of-service attack that our university’s IT service struggled to fix. I gave up doing research inside China a while ago, after it became clear that my former colleagues and friends in rural China were increasingly at risk.

Even colleagues who have signed petitions calling on the Australian government take an evidence-based approach to China policy have been warned off continuing their in-country research by their Chinese research partners, ending collaborations which often stretched back decades.

To the outside world, this obsession with control looks like weakness rather than strength. A sanitised image of life inside China will do nothing to build trust in China as a responsible power.

Misplaced attempts at soft power

So how does China go about winning back a 20-point drop in trust?

To answer this question, I have to borrow a famous line from the film, The Princess Bride:

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

When it comes to the concept of soft power, the Chinese state misses the basic point that it doesn’t work particularly well. Money can’t buy you love, or in Joseph Nye’s terms, if your ideology and your culture have no appeal, cash won’t fix that.

Yet, the Communist Party is now a firm believer in soft power, built around its confidence that China’s ancient culture can return it to its legitimate status as the preeminent civilisation in the world. This confidence may be misplaced, as anyone who sat through the ponderous, state-backed, blockbuster film The Great Wall can testify.

To date, the target of China’s soft power push appears to be a largely Chinese audience. The purpose of its designated soft power tools, from Confucius Institutes to the English-language news service CGTN, is to impress on both the domestic constituency and Chinese communities abroad that China now looks and acts like a rejuvenated great power.

Read more: Explainer: what are Confucius Institutes and do they teach Chinese propaganda?

This officially approved cultural soft power package might not sell to non-Chinese audiences in Australia or, well, anywhere. But China has recently been trying another tactic – economic soft power. This is specifically aimed at the developing world: China positions itself as a nation that overcame colonial oppression to emerge from grinding poverty and become an economic powerhouse.

Under former President Hu Jintao, the party tiptoed away from the notion that China would pursue a “peaceful rise”, because they worried the word “rise” sounded threatening, even preceded by “peaceful.”

Now, under Xi’s watch, there is a new catchphrase to describe China’s rise. Anchors on CGTN happily ask European and African interlocutors about the merits of “the China model” for economic development, in which the state acts as chess master, guiding the economy and society at every turn.

Some nations are buying into this. Last weekend, a taskforce of Solomon Islands MPs and bureaucrats presented their recommendation to parliament over whether to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. While many Solomon Islanders, including Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, are reluctant to switch, the country’s close economic ties with China make such a move feel inevitable.

A Chinese development model that promises an escape from poverty has appeal across the Pacific – and beyond.

Trust on both sides of the wall

Whether Beijing is able to turn around this trust problem depends, in part, on how much China begins to trust itself in the rest of the world.

Forthcoming research my ANU colleagues and I are conducting with Hong Kong-based researchers examines attempts by Chinese state actors to influence the 2019 Australian federal election.

Read more: With China’s swift rise as naval power, Australia needs to rethink how it defends itself

Preliminary results indicate that the Communist Party didn’t give a hoot which party won. The goal of Chinese propaganda during the election, rather, was to create a sense of distrust among Australian-Chinese communities by depicting Australia as a racist, unwelcoming place.

We should be mindful of attempts by elements of the Communist Party to influence our political processes. Yet it’s crucial to remember the CCP targets many groups in Australia, including private businesses run by former Chinese citizens, religious groups and student organisations, not because they are all loyal party stooges, but because the party does not trust them.

The challenge for China, if it wants to be trusted by the rest of the world, is how to move beyond Mao Zedong’s famous dictum:

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the utmost importance for the revolution.

This thinking should have no place in a globalised world, but in CCP circles, it’s back in vogue.

The challenge for Australia’s leaders is to recognise China’s current political reality, but not be drawn into the same binary, simplistic thinking. There’s enough of that going around.

– ref. The world has a hard time trusting China. But does it really care? – http://theconversation.com/the-world-has-a-hard-time-trusting-china-but-does-it-really-care-119807

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milovan Savic, PhD Candidate, Swinburne University of Technology

TikTok is one of the fastest growing social media platforms on the planet, with more than 500 million active users. Only YouTube, Facebook and Instagram boast more.

TikTok allows users to create short videos with music, filters and other features. But while it’s now used globally by young people, many adult social media users have never heard of it. That’s by design.

In 2016, we conducted an ethnographic study on social media use among families with preteen children in Melbourne. Although most young participants in the study were considered by their parents to be “too young” for social media, some had accounts on a new platform called Musical.ly – now known as TikTok.

We soon realised that the preteen demographic was central to Musical.ly’s success – and to its evolution. The rapid increase of smartphone ownership among preteens presented a relatively uncaptured potential user base for social media.

Many big players have made recent attempts to capture this particular audience. Snapchat’s SnapKidz, YouTube Kids and most recently Facebook’s Messenger Kids all focused on creating a “child-friendly” version of the main app.

The creators of Musical.ly did their homework. They not only identified potential future users of the app, but also non-users that might hamper their success. In order to reach preteen audiences, social media apps need to get past the gatekeepers of preteen online engagement: the parents.

Read more: TikTok is popular, but Chinese apps still have a lot to learn about global markets

Billing itself as a tool for creativity

From the beginning, Musical.ly presented itself as a tool for creativity and play rather than a social media platform. This tactic enabled Musical.ly to alleviate parental concerns associated with childrens’ use of social media. The app store description reads: “the world’s largest creative platform.”

Childrens’ engagement with digital devices is often driven by their desire for creative expression, entertainment and social interaction. Musical.ly successfully engineered playfulness and performativity as its key features.

For example, its cleverly coined “best fan forever” feature mimics elements of popular teen culture allowing users to establish a special connection with features like duet videos. “BFFs” individually record their videos of the same song, which the app then combines into a duet. In this way, users are incentivised to spend more time interacting together on the app.

Everything you can do on Instagram

While TikTok still bills itself a “community of global creators”, it’s more than just a toy for children. TikTok allows users to follow and interact with “public” profiles. They can follow each other (reciprocity not required), like and comment on videos, and send direct messages to each other.

In other words, TikTok meets all elements of a social networking site. In fact, the app’s infrastructure largely resembles Instagram.

Read more: How Tencent became the world’s most valuable social network firm – with barely any advertising

From Musical.ly to TikTok

The user base is the most valuable asset of any social media platform. During 2016 and 2017, Musical.ly, a social media start-up from China, was trending among most downloaded apps on both Apple and Google’s app stores.

This led to its acquisition by the Chinese media giant ByteDance for US$1 billion. We have seen similar scenarios before, when a successful start-up is acquired by a bigger player on the market.

When it acquired Musical.ly, ByteDance was mostly focused on news and was largely absent from social media landscape. But it did own a short-video sharing platform branded as Douyin. At the time, Douyin was not well known outside of China.

In 2018, ByteDance decided to merge Douyin and Musical.ly under the name TikTok. While the merger brought some new features, the process was virtually undetectable to users, who kept their accounts and all preexisting content and followers.

In other words, overnight the Musical.ly user database became the TikTok user database. While Musical.ly was more popular among global north, TikTok dominated the Asian market, positioning the newly merged app for a wider global audience reach.

Unwanted attention

In its early days TikTok managed to fly under the radar, but its rapid growth and growing user base has brought the app unwanted public scrutiny.

In 2018 the Indonesian government temporarily banned the app amid accusations it was disseminating pornography and blasphemy. In February 2019, India’s High court requested both Google and Apple remove TikTok from Indian app stores following accusations the platform was spreading pornographic and violent content.

Possibly the largest hit came earlier this year when US Federal Trade Commission fined TikTok a record-setting US$5.7 million (A$8.2 million) for collecting and storing the personal information of people under the age of 13 without obtaining parental consent (as required by law).

As TikTok has come to the public’s attention, parents and commentators have increasingly expressed concerns regarding potential predatory behaviour, bullying and exposure to the age-inappropriate content on the app.

Read more: Thinking of taking up WeChat? Here’s what you need to know

Challenging US social media dominance

Some may see TikTok as just another social media platform that will soon disappear, but it’s more than that. It’s the first social media platform based in China that commands unparalleled popularity in both Asian and Western markets.

This undermines the dominance of US companies on the global social media market. TikTok’s challenge going forward will be to live up to the promise of networked play and creativity, while ensuring the personal safety and data security of its users.

– ref. Most adults have never heard of TikTok. That’s by design – http://theconversation.com/most-adults-have-never-heard-of-tiktok-thats-by-design-119815

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Smith, Research Fellow, Department of Pacific Affairs, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University

As China grows more powerful and influential, our New Superpower series looks at what this means for the world – how China maintains its power, how it wields its power and how its power might be threatened. Read the rest of the series here.

One of the earliest guests I had on The Little Red Podcast, the podcast I co-host with former China correspondent Louisa Lim, said something that stuck with me about the view of China in the rest of the world. John Fitzgerald, a well-known historian of China’s diaspora, confidently declared that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “couldn’t care less” about what non-Chinese Australians thought of it and its actions.

Looking through the results of the recent Lowy Institute Poll on Australians’ attitudes toward China, this is probably a good thing for the party.

The Australian public’s confidence in China’s ability to act as a responsible power has fallen off a cliff. In just one year, it dropped from more than half of Australians to just 32%. That’s a dire number.

That wasn’t the only surprise in the poll. Four-fifths of respondents agreed with the proposition “China’s infrastructure investment projects across Asia are part of China’s plans for regional domination”, and 73% believed Australia should try to prevent China from expanding its influence in the Pacific.

The poll was released in late June, at a time when China’s image was taking a hit internationally. Millions of people took to the streets in Hong Kong to protest a now-defeated extradition bill that could have seen Hong Kong residents sent to China on suspicion of crimes.

Then came news in Australia that the wife of an Australian writer who has been detained since January was herself interrogated by Chinese officials and blocked from leaving the country.

Even for a country that purportedly doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks, trust is hard to come by these days.

A matter of trust

It’s not entirely clear why so many Australians now distrust the Chinese state to the point where they believe our government should actively counter it (although perhaps not go to war with it).

There’s little evidence to suggest that one issue alone has caused this sharp decline in trust. For instance, the Communist Party’s most egregious recent violation of human rights, the detention of up to 1.5 million Uyghurs simply for being, well, Uyghurs has touched relatively few Australians.

Nor has the Australian government felt the need to act – it has said little on the matter.

Read more: Xi Jinping’s grip on power is absolute, but there are new threats to his ‘Chinese dream’

Rather, the decline in trust seems to be the result of an accumulation of negative news on China — some well-informed, some half-baked (such as the 60 Minutes expose on a Chinese “military base” in Vanuatu). And for some, it’s based on personal experiences.

Last month, for instance, Australian National University revealed a massive data breach in the school’s computer system, including tax file numbers, bank accounts and passport details. The sophistication of the attack, which came after multiple attempts, meant there was only possible one suspect, according to senior intelligence officials: China.

Stealing people’s bank details might be profitable for the hacking team, but it doesn’t win hearts and minds for the Chinese state. Actions like this do more to damage China’s image than the words of noted China critics Clive Hamilton and Clive Palmer.

This sort of intimidation has been on the rise under Xi’s leadership in recent years. Academics who are critical of China now expect to be targeted by the CCP.

A podcast like mine, banned in China, doesn’t help. In the wake of an episode about China’s real-time censorship of its own historical record, I was hit by a denial-of-service attack that our university’s IT service struggled to fix. I gave up doing research inside China a while ago, after it became clear that my former colleagues and friends in rural China were increasingly at risk.

Even colleagues who have signed petitions calling on the Australian government take an evidence-based approach to China policy have been warned off continuing their in-country research by their Chinese research partners, ending collaborations which often stretched back decades.

To the outside world, this obsession with control looks like weakness rather than strength. A sanitised image of life inside China will do nothing to build trust in China as a responsible power.

Misplaced attempts at soft power

So how does China go about winning back a 20-point drop in trust?

To answer this question, I have to borrow a famous line from the film, The Princess Bride:

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

When it comes to the concept of soft power, the Chinese state misses the basic point that it doesn’t work particularly well. Money can’t buy you love, or in Joseph Nye’s terms, if your ideology and your culture have no appeal, cash won’t fix that.

Yet, the Communist Party is now a firm believer in soft power, built around its confidence that China’s ancient culture can return it to its legitimate status as the preeminent civilisation in the world. This confidence may be misplaced, as anyone who sat through the ponderous, state-backed, blockbuster film The Great Wall can testify.

To date, the target of China’s soft power push appears to be a largely Chinese audience. The purpose of its designated soft power tools, from Confucius Institutes to the English-language news service CGTN, is to impress on both the domestic constituency and Chinese communities abroad that China now looks and acts like a rejuvenated great power.

Read more: Explainer: what are Confucius Institutes and do they teach Chinese propaganda?

This officially approved cultural soft power package might not sell to non-Chinese audiences in Australia or, well, anywhere. But China has recently been trying another tactic – economic soft power. This is specifically aimed at the developing world: China positions itself as a nation that overcame colonial oppression to emerge from grinding poverty and become an economic powerhouse.

Under former President Hu Jintao, the party tiptoed away from the notion that China would pursue a “peaceful rise”, because they worried the word “rise” sounded threatening, even preceded by “peaceful.”

Now, under Xi’s watch, there is a new catchphrase to describe China’s rise. Anchors on CGTN happily ask European and African interlocutors about the merits of “the China model” for economic development, in which the state acts as chess master, guiding the economy and society at every turn.

Some nations are buying into this. Last weekend, a taskforce of Solomon Islands MPs and bureaucrats presented their recommendation to parliament over whether to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. While many Solomon Islanders, including Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, are reluctant to switch, the country’s close economic ties with China make such a move feel inevitable.

A Chinese development model that promises an escape from poverty has appeal across the Pacific – and beyond.

Trust on both sides of the wall

Whether Beijing is able to turn around this trust problem depends, in part, on how much China begins to trust itself in the rest of the world.

Forthcoming research my ANU colleagues and I are conducting with Hong Kong-based researchers examines attempts by Chinese state actors to influence the 2019 Australian federal election.

Read more: With China’s swift rise as naval power, Australia needs to rethink how it defends itself

Preliminary results indicate that the Communist Party didn’t give a hoot which party won. The goal of Chinese propaganda during the election, rather, was to create a sense of distrust among Australian-Chinese communities by depicting Australia as a racist, unwelcoming place.

We should be mindful of attempts by elements of the Communist Party to influence our political processes. Yet it’s crucial to remember the CCP targets many groups in Australia, including private businesses run by former Chinese citizens, religious groups and student organisations, not because they are all loyal party stooges, but because the party does not trust them.

The challenge for China, if it wants to be trusted by the rest of the world, is how to move beyond Mao Zedong’s famous dictum:

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the utmost importance for the revolution.

This thinking should have no place in a globalised world, but in CCP circles, it’s back in vogue.

The challenge for Australia’s leaders is to recognise China’s current political reality, but not be drawn into the same binary, simplistic thinking. There’s enough of that going around.

– ref. The world has a hard time trusting China. But does it care? – http://theconversation.com/the-world-has-a-hard-time-trusting-china-but-does-it-care-119807

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Trevor Thornton, Lecturer, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

Indonesia has returned a container load of recyclables back to Australia, because the material did not meet stringent import requirements.

It is the latest Southeast Asian country to refuse Australia’s recycling waste. In January 2018, China stopped buying our recyclables until contamination was reduced significantly.

To achieve this, Australia needed to reduce contamination in commercial and household recycling, and improve our sorting facilities so they can identify and remove the types of materials causing concern.

Read more: Here’s what happens to our plastic recycling when it goes offshore

This should have been a wake-up call that we need to improve our recycling industry and take urgent steps to reduce our reliance on overseas destinations for our recyclables. But did we? Clearly, the answer is no.

Dealing with difficult waste

In July the Philippines turned away 69 containers (about 1,500 tonnes), of materials incorrectly labelled as plastic and containing unacceptable contaminants. Malaysia has also threatened to send recyclables back to the originating country if the loads contain contaminants.

Looking at photos of the material rejected by Indonesia, it is clearly a typical load of baled recyclables that could have come from any sorting facility in Australia. It contains recyclables, but also contamination like used nappies, clothing, food scraps, paper and cardboard in the plastic recycling, metals and plastic in the paper recycling and some containers that once had motor oil or detergents in them.

While I personally suspect it’s slightly over the top to call this “hazardous” material, as some news reports have – the same loads are shipped to some facilities in Australia – it is a moot point. Indonesia can set whatever rules they deem necessary to protect the health of their communities and environment.

This continues after strong warnings that unless we provide clean recyclables, we will not have access to these overseas markets.

So what is contamination?

Recycling is basically divided into “streams”. Mostly these streams contain one or two types of materials. For example, we have a cardboard stream, plastic stream or in some instances commingled stream which contains plastic, aluminium, steel and glass containers.

“Contamination” refers to materials that are not wanted in that stream because they interfere with the proper treatment of a given load. Plastic in a load of cardboard and paper is contamination; so are clothes in a plastic load. It does not necessarily need to be toxic chemicals or other things that come to mind when we think of “contamination”.

However, containers used for detergents, disinfectants, and the broad range of household chemicals do contain residues. While some of these fluids and powders do get removed (often while materials are being baled), some residues remain and this can also cause issues for those wishing to use the recyclables as their raw materials.

Read more: Recycling: why you can’t just throw anything in the collection bin

So it is no wonder Australian businesses are reluctant to use what we currently sort and send out as their raw materials. If the recyclables materials contain contaminants at a high level, then the business who could have used them would have to expend resources to clean up the loads. Apart from that cost, they then have to dispose of the unwanted materials to landfill.

Additionally, due to some uncertainty in the quality of the recyclables, manufacturers are concerned whether their products will be of the required standard and if not, will that affect the customer base. Remember, when recycled paper was first on the market there was some concern about inferior “whitness” and this affected sales. (Ironically, now most business use recycled paper this situation is somewhat reversed.)

How can we fix it?

Ultimately, the issue is not how we can get other countries to accept our waste. Australia needs to improve our capacity and willingness to use recycled materials ourselves.

We have seen progress recently with Australian companies using recycled materials in new and innovative ways. Plastics used in road construction or in building materials is just one example.

But unless our recycling is better sorted, it won’t be used by domestic companies. Even products made with recycled material need to be clean, safe and reliable.

Read more: Why you’re almost certainly wasting time rinsing your recycling

So what can we do about it? Of course, the obvious first step is to invest more into recycling facilities so they can sort more efficiently. However, we all need to take responsibility for what we put into the recycling at home or work. Many contaminants can easily be avoided with a little more care, so familiarise yourself with what can be recycled by your home council.

Finally, recycling is not a panacea. We need to seriously reduce the amount of waste we create, as individuals and a society. Without this, the problem will only continue to grow.

Read more: We can’t recycle our way to ‘zero waste’

– ref. Indonesia has sent Australia’s recycling home – it’s time to clean up our act – http://theconversation.com/indonesia-has-sent-australias-recycling-home-its-time-to-clean-up-our-act-120159

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Gardiner, PhD Student, University of Southern Queensland

Chess has long been an important part of school culture. Many people believe chess has a range of cognitive benefits including improved memory, IQ, problem solving skills and concentration.

But there is very little evidence supporting these conclusions. We conducted two studies (still unpublished) that found educators and parents believe chess has many educational benefits. But children in our study who played chess did not show significant improvements in standardised test scores compared to children who didn’t play.

Read more: If machines can beat us at games, does it make them more intelligent than us?

Most people think chess improves learning

The first study looked at the perceptions of educators and parents regarding the benefits of playing chess.

In 2016, 314 participants – which included school principals, teachers, chess-coordinators and parents in parts of Queensland and NSW – filled out an anonymous, online survey.

Participants were asked to state how much they agreed or disagreed with 34 statements about the benefits of playing chess, such as: learning chess helps children develop critical thinking abilities.

Most participants either agreed or strongly agreed with most of the statements for chess benefits. For instance, almost 80% (249 out of 313) strongly agreed learning chess had educational benefits for children.

Another 87% (269 out of 310) strongly agreed learning chess helps children develop problem solving abilities. And 59% (184 out of 314) strongly agreed learning chess has benefits for Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Children.

The survey also included a space for comments. Some comments from participants included:

Chess is a great activity for all children to be involved in. It is one of a number of activities that schools can offer that assist in the academic, social and emotional development of children.

One parent said:

Since starting classes [my son] has become a full-time student and is managing social situations a lot better than before. Chess has pushed him to think in different ways.​

But does it?

Previous studies that explored whether chess improves children’s cognitive abilities have had mixed results.

Some studies have found playing chess was linked to better thinking abilities. For instance, a significant 2012 New York study found that children in a group that had learnt either chess or music performed slightly better than children in the group who learnt neither.

But the study also noted the improvement in the chess group was not statistically significant.

Read more: How to use music to fine tune your child for school

A 2017 trial of more than 4,000 children in England found no evidence that chess instruction had any effect on children’s mathematics, reading or science test scores.

We wanted to test if there was, in fact, a positive correlation between learning to play chess and learners’ verbal, numerical and abstract (visual) reasoning skills. The study explored this in Year 1 to Year 5 students in a private school in Queensland.

In particular, the study examined whether a range of chess-related and non-chess related variables affected the standardised test scores of the chess group as compared to the control groups.

The study consisted of 203 students (with approval of their parents) who opted into the study. They made up four groups (based on the same approach as the 2012 New York study mentioned above). The groups were made of:

• 46 students who learnt to play chess
• 48 students who learnt to play music
• 37 students who learnt to play chess and music
• 72 students who neither learnt chess nor music

Weekly chess lessons were given to 83 students for six months: 24 from Year 1, 20 from Year 2, 8 from Year 3, 18 from Year 4 and 13 from year 5.

Weekly music lessons were given to 85 students for six months: 16 from year 1, 15 from year 2, 12 from year 3, 23 from year 4 and 19 from year 5.

We used standardised tests to measure whether there was any significant change in the scores of the different groups.

Year 1 and 2 students were tested using the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM) tests, which are multiple-choice intelligence tests of abstract reasoning.

Grade 3, 4 and 5 students were tested using the ACER (Australian Council of Educational Research) General Ability Tests (AGAT), used to assess learners’ reasoning skills in three areas: verbal, numerical and abstract (visual).

There were small improvements in the standardised test scores of the chess and music groups but these were not statistically significant.

Read more: A good move to master maths? Check out these chess puzzles

Our findings don’t mean learning to play chess has no benefits for cognitive skills. There are many different types of thinking and measures of intelligence we do not yet fully understand. This is especially relevant in a world where conceptual thinking has become such a vital skill.

The different ways of thinking associated with the benefits of chess may include creative thinking, critical thinking, logical thinking, intuition, logical reasoning, systemic thinking, strategic thinking, foresight, convergent thinking, analytical thinking, problem solving and concentration.

Further research should aim to explore which type of thinking chess may improve, if we are to agree with the positive views of academics, educators, parents and players.

– ref. Most people think playing chess makes you ‘smarter’, but the evidence isn’t clear on that – http://theconversation.com/most-people-think-playing-chess-makes-you-smarter-but-the-evidence-isnt-clear-on-that-119469

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Dalton, Emeritus Professor, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University

People experiencing homelessness and poor mental health are among Australia’s most vulnerable citizens. Without secure housing and an accessible mental healthcare system, recovery from mental illness is seriously compromised.

And the upcoming Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System will be judged by how it responds to this crisis of mental health and housing.

Read more: When it’s easier to get meds than therapy: how poverty makes it hard to escape mental illness

In recent weeks, we conducted a census of data from the Melbourne-based community agency, Launch Housing, and found 44% of the 2,023 clients were experiencing mental illness. Only half of these clients were receiving support from a mental health service.

Our interviews with these clients show how the Victorian mental health system repeatedly fails this group. Without exception, these clients emphasised the significance of safe and long-term housing to mental health stability and recovery.

One person told us:

you’re homeless and that’s the most important thing […] your mental state, it’s just got to be put on hold […] you don’t want to go and see anybody about your mental state because you need housing and that’s all you’re really concentrating on: where am I going to sleep tonight?

People often cycle through the mental healthcare system. This system includes primary health care services, and specialist community based and inpatient services in hospitals. Many then exit this system into homelessness, only to return repeatedly to hospital-based care, and sometimes the prison system.

Read more: To tackle our mental health crisis, career guidance could be surprisingly important

In Victoria, for instance, more than 500 people are being discharged from acute mental healthcare each year into rooming houses, motels and other forms of homelessness. And discharging someone into homelessness is unacceptable.

Tragic consequences

These failures of the mental health and housing systems sometimes lead to tragic consequences.

A review of Launch Housing’s client death register shows there were 45 known deaths of current or former clients for the period of June 2018 to June 2019.

Not all deaths are directly attributable to mental health. But of the 45 people who died of different causes in this period, mental health was a contributing factor to many of them. Thirty-seven people had a self-disclosed mental illness and 18 were in contact with mental health services at the time of their death.

These are not new problems, and past reviews of Australia’s mental health system have resulted in missed opportunities for action. Fortunately, there are known solutions.

Read more: Australia’s social housing policy needs stronger leadership and an investment overhaul

Here are three steps Australia can take to significantly improve the mental health of people experiencing homelessness.

1. Sustain rental tenancies

Programs such as those sustaining a rental tenancy when someone has a mental health episode are immensely valuable.

They help households with people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness by providing financial and practical assistance to establish and maintain their private rental tenancies.

With a persistent shortage of affordable private rentals and a gross under-supply of social housing in Victoria, sustaining tenancies is critical.

2. Improve support from hospital with appropriate housing

During the transition away from hospital after a mental health episode, people should be supported with appropriate housing.

It’s common for adults experiencing homelessness and mental illness to be hospitalised and then discharged without a safe place to live, such as the hundreds of Victorians who left mental healthcare and landed into a form of homelessness.

What’s more, American research from 2013 into intermediate care for people experiencing homelessness showed that medical respite programs reduce future hospital admissions, inpatient days, and hospital readmissions. They also result in improved housing outcomes.

Read more: ‘I didn’t want to be homeless with a baby’: young women share their stories of homelessness

Medical respite programs provide a supportive, home-like environment and services to people who are at risk of or experiencing homelessness, such as The Sister Francesca Healy Cottage (The Cottage) in Melbourne. Sadly in Australia, such important services are in short supply.

3. Provide permanent supportive housing

Currently, people’s housing needs are “invisible” to the mental health system and there’s a presumption that patients are adequately housed.

So it’s important to boost the number of permanent supportive housing for people experiencing episodes of mental illness, and who are also heavy users of health and criminal justice services, crisis-related homelessness services and emergency housing services.

It also makes financial sense for the Victorian government to evaluate the need for permanent supportive housing.

This was recently shown by the Brisbane Common Ground initiative. They found that each year, governments can save more than A$13,000 per person if the chronically homeless had access to secure, long term housing and relevant support services.

Launch Housing provides a Common Ground service in Melbourne, but it warrants expansion, as promised by Lord Mayor Sally Capp in 2018.

Read more: What a difference a month makes, but Victoria can still do more to get housing and planning right

The Royal Commission has the opportunity to recognise the research evidence showing homelessness and poor mental health outcomes are connected, and to recommend to the state government solutions that are known to work.

Such recognition will provide the Victorian state government with policies to make housing a feature of a reformed mental health system.

Without a place to live it’s nearly impossible to take care of your mental health needs.

– ref. From hospital to homeless: Victoria’s mental health system fails the most vulnerable – http://theconversation.com/from-hospital-to-homeless-victorias-mental-health-system-fails-the-most-vulnerable-119883

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Now it’s the Coalition that’s being accused of a “retiree tax”.

As interest rates have come down over the past four years, the rate that retirees are “deemed” to have earned for the purpose of the pension income test hasn’t budged, meaning that although retirees have been earning less (in some cases a good deal less), they haven’t been getting more access to the pension.

Depending on how you look at it, it’s either been making a mockery of the idea of an income test, or making the test more restrictive.

So how did it happen? Why is income “deemed” rather than actually measured when determining eligibility for government benefits, and is the system hopelessly compromised?

It’s important to understand what deeming is and where it came from if we are to understand the debate that will ensue when the government completes its review of the deeming rate in the next few weeks.

Where did deeming come from?

Modern day deeming was introduced by former prime minister Paul Keating in his final budget as treasuer in 1990.

As he explained in that budget speech:

many pensioners still disadvantage themselves by holding their savings in accounts that pay little or no interest

He was being diplomatic. It was widely believed that many retirees deliberately earned low rates on their savings in order to qualify for the pension or get a bigger pension. It cost the government money (while making the banks money) and it cost many of the pensioners money, because they lost more in interest than they gained in pension – although for those that used low earnings to ensure they at least got some pension, the associated benefits cards made it worth it.

From March 1991 cash and deposits were to assumed to be earning at least 10%, whatever they actually earned. If they earned more than 10% they were treated as earning more.

Except for the first A$2000. That was treated as earning only what it did, because many pensioners held small savings in low interest accounts for day to day purchases.

How has it changed?

Deeming is different today. It applies to more assets, including gold,
managed investments, superannuation account-based income streams and listed shares; and it is used to assess eligibility for more benefits, including veterans and disability pensions.

And it’s no longer a win-win for the government. If someone earns more than the deeming rate, their income is assessed at only the deeming rate.

In the words of the department of human services:

if your investment return is higher than the deemed rates, the extra amount doesn’t count as your income

There are two rates: one for the first $51,800 of financial assets (for a couple, the first $86,200) which is currently 1.75%, and the other for those assets in excess of that amount, which is currently 3.25%.

The threshold climbs in line with the consumer price index each July.

(In its first budget in 2014 the Abbott government tried to cut the threshold to $30,000 for singles and $50,000 for couples but was thwarted by the Senate.)

We deem by whim…

But there’s nothing automatic about setting the rates. It’s up to the government (specifically the minister for families and social services) to adjust them, or not, as it sees fit.

Both the high and low deeming rate used to be below the Reserve Bank’s cash rate (with the low rate typically 1.5 to 2 percentage points below the high rate), but after the cash rate dived in 2016 they have been left above it, in the case of the low rate, for the first time ever.

The high deeming rates have meant applicants have been means tested on income they haven’t received.

Deeming rates versus RBA cash rate, 1996 – 2019, per cent

…leaving rates curiously out of whack

Back when the deeming rates were lower relative to deposit rates, each of the big four banks offered “deeming accounts” that paid the deeming rates.

Today none of them do. They are not allowed to call accounts deeming accounts unless they pay the deeming rate, so instead they have retitled them “retirement accounts”.

The National Australia Bank’s retirement account (closed to new customers) pays just 0.20% for the first $10,000, well below the lowest deeming rate of 1.75%. The ANZ and the Commonwealth pay 0.25%. Westpac pays 0.3%. If you have more than $250,000 on deposit it pays 1.5% on the part above $250,000, which is still lower than the lowest of the two deeming rates.

Read more: Why pensioners are cruising their way around budget changes

Labor believes that not cutting deeming rates since 2015 has saved the government more than $1 billion per year in pension payments. It’s a significant portion of the $7.1 billion surplus it has forecast for 2019-20.

That is probably why the government has said it will take its decision about rates to its expenditure review committee, in what amounts to an admission that those decisions have as much to do with government finances as they do with treating applicants for pensions fairly.

There’s actually a case for extending deeming

As unrealistic as deeming rates have become, there’s a case for extending their use.

At the moment applicants for the pension face two means tests: one for assets and one for income.

Both the Henry Tax Review and the Abbott government’s National Commission of Audit recommended replacing them with a “merged means test” of the kind Australia had up until the 1970s.

Instead of an assets test, all assets would be deemed to earn a prudent rate of return; among them cars, holiday homes, investment properties, and high-value family homes.

The Commission put the case this way:

Exempting the principal residence from the means test is inequitable as it allows for high levels of wealth to be sheltered from means testing. For example, under current rules a single person who owns a $400,000 house and has $750,000 in shares ($1.15 million in total assets) would not be eligible for the pension, while a similar person with a principal residence worth $2 million and $100,000 in shares ($2.1 million in total assets) would be able to claim a pension at the full rate.

It’s a worthwhile idea whose time might come, but it is unlikely to come while deeming rates are seen to be unfair and capriciously set.

The government has an opportunity to restore confidence in deeming and pensions. The decisions it is about to make will show how important it thinks that is.

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

– ref. Deeming rates explained. What is deeming, how does it cut pensions, and why do we have it? – http://theconversation.com/deeming-rates-explained-what-is-deeming-how-does-it-cut-pensions-and-why-do-we-have-it-120089

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thalia Anthony, Associate Professor in Law, University of Technology Sydney

The Queensland government’s in-principle agreement to pay A$190 million in compensation for the wages withheld from more than 10,000 Indigenous workers is a watershed moment for the stolen wages movement.

Indigenous people across Australia have been fighting for their denied and withheld wages for decades, both on the streets and in the courts. There have been some victories along the way and many setbacks.

The significance of the Queensland settlement (to settle a class action) is that it marks the first recognition these claims have legal as well as moral and political merit. Its ramifications are potentially limited, however, given the full injustice of how Indigenous wages were stolen.

A significant contribution

Historically Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women found work in farming, mining, roadbuilding, irrigation, fencing, gardening, pearling, sealing, fishing and domestic duties. But they were most concentrated in the cattle industry of northern Australia, from Western Australia to Queensland.

Tens of thousands worked on cattle stations from the 1880s to 1970s. The beef industry could not have survived without them. In 1913, the federal government’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, Baldwin Spencer, noted that “under present conditions, the majority of cattle stations are largely dependent on the work done by black “boys”. In the 1930s, when the rest of the economy floundered in the Great Depression, Indigenous labour helped keep the industry profitable.

Systemic stealing

Indigenous workers were entitled to be paid two-thirds of other workers, but even then employers often paid them less. Sometimes the low value of their wages was disguised by being paid in food and clothing rations. Sometimes workers were provided “store credit”, which could only be used to buy exorbitantly priced items.

Read more: Friday essay: the untold story behind the 1966 Wave Hill Walk-Off

Station managers may have justified under-payment on the basis they were “caring” for workers through providing scant food, clothing and accommodation.

Governments, meanwhile, “withheld” income – often putting money into trust funds that Indigenous people were unable to access. The Queensland government’s $190 million offer is to settle a class action claim for it misappropriating such trust funds.

The fact Indigenous people were vulnerable to such exploitation for decades was made possible by an intricate legislative regime that gave the state expansive powers over their lives. In all states and territories, Aboriginal Protection Acts gave the government officials the power to control the money earned by Indigenous workers.

In Queensland, historian Rosalind Kidd has estimated that 4,500 to 5,500 Indigenous pastoral workers may have lost wage entitlements worth more than $500 million between 1920 and 1968.

Redress schemes

There have been redress schemes in Western Australia, Queensland and New South Wales.

The Queensland government set up the first redress scheme in 2002. It set aside $55.6 million to compensate any individuals who could supply documentary evidence their wages or savings were taken by the Queensland government. If they could do so – and there was a deadline of 2006 on claims – the scheme provided an ex gratia payment of $2,000 to $4,000.

These conditions set a high bar, and $21 million went unclaimed.

Western Australia established its scheme in 2012. It also involved a small ex gratia payment ($2,000) with a limited window to make claims. Claimants called the scheme insulting and mean-spirited. The ABC reported a source that said state treasury officials agreed individuals were owed as much as $78,000, and the government kept the work of its stolen wages taskforce quiet for years, waiting for potential claimants to die.

In distinction to these two schemes, the NSW Trust Funds Repayment Scheme (2006 and 2010) matched the wages withheld in trust funds between 1900 and 1969. It paid $3,521 for every $100 owed, or an $11,000 lump sum where the amount could not be established. This was the closest model to a reparations scheme, though also inhibited by bureaucratic requirements and time limitations.

Due to the limitations of all these state redress schemes, in 2006 a Senate Inquiry into Stolen Wages recommended a national scheme. But no federal government since has acted on this recommendation.

Legal claims

Stolen wages claimants have taken their cases to court in Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland – but it is only in Queensland that they have had some success.

Read more: Australia’s stolen wages: one woman’s quest for compensation

One of those is the case of James Stanley Baird, who sued the Queensland government for withheld wages on the basis that paying under-award wages to Indigenous workers was in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. The state government compensated Baird and other plaintiffs the difference owed to them in damages and provided an apology.

Implications

The current settlement is based on a legal claim that the Queensland government breached its duty as a trustee and fiduciary in not paying out wages that were held in trust. The outcome is the most significant repayment for stolen wages plaintiffs in Australian history. Yet the benefits may be confined.

First, in Queensland there is a rich archive of documents (substantially unearthed and analysed by historian Rosalind Kidd) to prove the government misappropriated funds. Such a record may not exist elsewhere.

Second, the settlement only applies to wages placed in “trust accounts”. It has no implications for wages denied to Indigenous workers in other ways, such as by private employers who booked down wages or otherwise refused to pay.

For justice for all wronged Indigenous workers, there needs to be broad-based reparations for stolen wages. This requires truth commissions and a commitment by governments and anyone else that profited from that theft to restore what is owed.

– ref. The new Mabo? $190 million stolen wages settlement is unprecedented, but still limited – http://theconversation.com/the-new-mabo-190-million-stolen-wages-settlement-is-unprecedented-but-still-limited-120162

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mitch Goodwin, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne

When the 22-year-old David Bowie penned Space Oddity, a song that would ultimately become a recognised classic, he was a burgeoning pop artist without a record deal. A folk singer without a gig, a sometime mime, and a purveyor of ice creams. His first serious relationship, with the actress Hermione Farthingale, was in free fall.

It was December 1968, and Bowie’s manager Kenneth Pitt was collating a promotional film to pimp his client’s wares to London television and film producers. He requested Bowie pen a “special piece of new material” to contemporise the otherwise retrospective nature of the film.

And then, on Christmas Eve, astronaut Bill Anders captured his iconic photograph of Earth from the Apollo 8 spacecraft while circumnavigating the Moon.

The Earthrise image was still resonating in the public’s imagination when Bowie retreated to his room in Clareville Grove, London to write his space cabaret. Composing on a 12-string Hagstrom guitar with a little sonic weirdness from a Stylophone given to him by Marc Bolan, he came up with Space Oddity.

A blatant commercial object, a “pragmatic” turn by a fledgling artist, the song would become an anthem for space exploration for decades (and for TV news obituaries on the occasion of Bowie’s death in 2016).

Space Oddity tells of an astronaut Major Tom, launched into space in a manner akin to the Apollo missions. Yet in this instance all does not go according to plan and he is left adrift in the abyss of space, “floating ‘round my tin can, far above the Moon.”

At the time it was considered a “novelty song” to hang alongside other opportunists riding the vapor trails of the Saturn V. (Omega watches, Tang, Space Food Sticks etc). Bowie was acutely aware of the commercialisation of the space exploration story, of course. “You have really made the grade, and the papers want to know whose shirts you wear,” exalts ground control as Tom hurtles towards the heavens.

Eschewing the typical pop song template, Bowie designed the piece as if it was a dramatic play. “I think I wanted to write a new kind of musical,” he reflected in 2002, “and that’s how I saw my future at the time.”

The song – one of his earliest and perhaps most outrageous musical assemblages – is also indicative of the artist he would become, a restless creative magpie perched by the wireless, plucking phrases and vocal stylings from the inbound radio waves.

The definitive version, recorded in late June 1969 at Trident Studios, was pressed and released as a single within three weeks – on July 11 – to leverage the hype of the impending Apollo moon landing. It also sealed a new recording deal with Mercury Records. Bowie was back.

However, his long-time producing partner Tony Visconti refused to work on the song, citing it as a distasteful departure from the singer’s hippie folk leanings. Visconti’s unease led him to recommend Gus Dudgeon (who would later work with Elton John) as producer. The song’s adventurous orchestration and unsettling harmonics owe much to Dudgeon’s ambition.

Through resonance, tone and unexpected harmonic shifts Bowie and Dudgeon achieved a meta-pop song full of cultural and musical references. There are lyrical and tonal references to the Bee Gees’ New York Mining Disaster 1941 while an acoustic passage signposts Old Friends by Simon & Garfunkel. Even the metallic chimes of the Stylophone recall the pulsating intro of the Beatles’ I Am The Walrus. This was music for space, both inside and out, an experimental sonic palette that would open up a whole new genre of musical art direction.

Of course, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey hangs heavily over proceedings. The two works are not only linked by name, but by their respective critiques of the cultural zeitgeist of “space fever”.

A sense of melancholia and detachment permeates Bowie’s recording. Yet, Major Tom’s predicament – floating in a tin can far above the world – is perhaps not the perilous event we might suspect. He seems quite OK with it all. Even his observation that there is “nothing I can do” comes across as somewhat of a relief.

We are never really sure whether the communication breakdown with ground control was accidental or by design. In Norman Mailer’s Apollo 11 chronicle Of a Fire on the Moon, he notes that the “obvious pleasure” of the astronaut, “was to be alone in the sky.

Rushing towards the stars

Still, in a 1980 interview, Bowie revealed Major Tom’s dilemma was a comment on what he saw at the time as the limits of American exceptionalism:

Here we had the great blast of American technological know-how shoving this guy up into space, but once he gets there, he’s not quite sure why he’s there. And that’s where I left him.

For such a challenging work, the press reaction in Britain to Space Oddity was largely positive, Tony Palmer, writing in the Observer, appreciated the song’s cynical air at a time when “we cling pathetically to every moonman’s dribbling joke, when we admire unquestioningly the so-called achievement of our helmeted heroes.”

Music journalist Penny Valentine’s review for the ensuing album, which would feature Space Oddity as the lead track, observed that Bowie had captured “the rather frightening atmosphere we all live in as the backdrop to his songs.”

Indeed, come July 1969, the promise of the sixties and the hippy trip of the free love movement were a few festivals and a bunch of ghoulish murders away from coming to an end. The sense of being adrift like Major Tom was not just a fantasy construction any more.

The song’s television debut would be on July 20 when the BBC aired the track during the Apollo broadcast, albeit after the Lunar Module had safely touched down. A scenario that even surprised Bowie – “of course, I was overjoyed that they did”.

Despite its contrived beginnings, Bowie designed a cultural touchstone for a historic moment of human engineering and blind courage. Even 50 years hence, he appears to us fully formed on Space Oddity as a moonstruck balladeer and completely in synch with the times.

The immaculately dressed changeling who would go on to hit the glam rock jackpot with his alien stage persona Ziggy Stardust. A character who captured the abrasive temperament of the moment as he straddled the jet-trails of our collective rushing towards the stars.

– ref. Space Oddity at 50: the ‘novelty song’ that became a cultural touchstone – http://theconversation.com/space-oddity-at-50-the-novelty-song-that-became-a-cultural-touchstone-120071

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Bloomfield, Lecturer, School of Medical and Health Sciences, Edith Cowan University

Over recent months, reports of “a horror flu season” causing serious illness and death have dominated the headlines.

The high number of cases has led some people to question the effectiveness of the flu vaccine, and whether it’s worth getting if it doesn’t guarantee you won’t get the flu.

The flu vaccine is designed to cover the strains of the flu anticipated to circulate during the season. But even with the most sophisticated scientific processes, determining the right strains to include in the vaccine isn’t 100% foolproof.

Read more: When’s the best time to get your flu shot?

Sometimes the virus undergoes major genetic changes or “mutations” in a relatively short space of time. Reports of a “mutant strain” this year means there’s concern some people might catch a strain the vaccine hasn’t protected against.

It’s too soon to tell the full extent of the effects of this mutation on how well the vaccine has worked. But the 2019 vaccine is showing early signs of being a good match for the common strains of the flu circulating this season.

What’s in a name?

Influenza or “flu” isn’t just one virus; different strains circulate each season.

Flu viruses that cause seasonal epidemics in humans fit under one of two major groups: influenza A or B.

Influenza A is further broken down into strains or subtypes based on surface proteins called hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).

We’re currently concerned about two subtypes which cause outbreaks in humans: A/H1N1pdm09 and A/H3N2.

Influenza B viruses are similarly categorised into strains based on two distinct lineages: B/Yamagata and B/Victoria.

Understanding the circulating strains is important because it gives us clues as to which age groups will likely be worst affected. Influenza A/H3, for example, has historically been associated with higher rates of disease in people aged 65 and over.

But the circulating strains are also important because they inform how the vaccine will be developed. A good match between the vaccine strains and what is circulating will mean the vaccine offers the best possible protection.

So how do we decide which flu strains are covered by the vaccine?

Every year, a new vaccine is produced to cover the strains that are predicted to be circulating in the northern and southern hemispheres. The World Health Organisation (WHO) uses a range of measures to determine which strains should be included in the vaccine.

Many of us who were vaccinated this year would have received a quadrivalent vaccine. This means it covered four strains in total: two strains of influenza A, and two strains of influenza B.

People aged 65 and over are offered a “high-dose” trivalent vaccine, which covers both A strains, and one B strain.

Read more: High-dose, immune-boosting or four-strain? A guide to flu vaccines for over-65s

The Australian Influenza Vaccine Committee (AIVC) reviews the results and makes recommendations for the Australian vaccine, which in 2019 covered the following strains:

• an A/Michigan/45/2015 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus
• an A/Switzerland/8060/2017 (H3N2)-like virus
• a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus (Victoria lineage) – not included in the trivalent vaccine recommendation
• a B/Phuket/3073/2013-like virus (Yamagata lineage).

Do we always get it right?

The basic premise of forecasting is that it’s a “best guess”. It’s a highly educated guess, based on analysis and evaluation, but it’s not a guarantee.

The effectiveness of a vaccine depends on a number of factors, only some of which are within our control. While the choice for the vaccine is made on the best evidence available at the time, the viruses circulating in the population undergo changes as they replicate, known as antigenic “drift” and “shift”.

If the changes are only small, we can still get good cross-protection.

Less frequently, a big genetic “shift” happens. If this occurs after vaccine development has started and the strains have been chosen, we are dealing with a so-called “mutant flu” and the vaccine will likely not be a good match.

So is this year’s vaccine is working?

Data available for this year are showing the majority of influenza cases in Australia have been influenza A – with some states reporting more H3N2 than H1N1, and others reporting a more even mix of both.

The WHO Collaborating Centre in Victoria is also reporting that the majority of specimens of all four strains they’ve tested this year appear to be similar to the vaccine strains.

Read more: We can’t predict how bad this year’s flu season will be but here’s what we know so far

While early indications are that the vaccine has been a good match in the 2019 season, the WHO Collaborating Centre has also recently confirmed there has been a mutation in the A/H3N2 strain this season.

It’s not clear yet if this mutation will have a significant impact on vaccine effectiveness, but it may at least partially explain the high case numbers we’ve seen so far.

Large vaccine effectiveness studies done at the end of the flu season will help assess the impact of this mutation. In the meantime, a mismatch on only one strain means the vaccine will still provide reasonable protection against other circulating strains.

It’s still worth being vaccinated

In the same way wearing a seat belt is no guarantee we won’t be injured in a car accident, a flu vaccine is no guarantee we won’t develop influenza this season.

A person’s underlying susceptibility, due to factors such as their age and health, will also influence how well a vaccine works.

Read more: Kids are more vulnerable to the flu – here’s what to look out for this winter

But the flu shot remains a safe and reasonably effective strategy to reduce your risk of serious illness.

While flu epidemics remain complex, advice to prevent flu transmission remains simple. Regularly washing our hands, covering our mouth when we cough or sneeze, and staying home when we’re unwell are things we can all do to help stop the spread.

– ref. The 2019 flu shot isn’t perfect – but it’s still our best defence against influenza – http://theconversation.com/the-2019-flu-shot-isnt-perfect-but-its-still-our-best-defence-against-influenza-120088

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gillian Oliver, Associate Professor and Director, Centre for Organisational & Social Informatics, Monash University

The recent case of paper medical files from a Brisbane hospital found on a busy street highlights the need for secure, controlled disposal of medical records.

The files were said to be from out-patient clinics and contained patient names and their appointments, but not medical details. Now Queensland Health is investigating the circumstances of how the files came to be found in public, rather than being safely destroyed by a contractor.

So how are hospitals and clinics handling their old paper records as they move to electronic systems? How are they dealing with the tsunami of files that need to be safely disposed of?

Read more: The Cabinet Files show that we need to change the nature of record-keeping

Your medical records, whether paper or electronic, need to be kept while they’re relevant to your care, with restricted access to protect your privacy. But who decides when medical records are no longer needed? What happens then?

Governments at all levels have legislation for this. For instance, the Queensland health department specifies what is destroyed and when, according to a schedule from Queensland State Archives. This covers medical records in the public health care system in physical form (paper, photographs, film), in electronic form or a mixture of the two.

This, for example, says “records displaying evidence of clinical care to an individual or groups of adult patients/clients” should be kept “for ten years after last patient/client service provision or medico-legal action”. There are a number of exceptions relating to, for example, clinical trials, mental health and communicable diseases. For each exception, there is a specific time period of how long the file needs to be kept.

Queensland State Archives also advises on how records are to be securely destroyed, either by shredding, pulping or burning.

Read more: Our healthcare records outlive us – it’s time to decide what happens to the data once we’re gone

Hospitals can contract commercial services to destroy paper files. But the document owner, in this case the hospital, is ultimately responsible for ensuring this is carried out legally.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has established practice standards for GP clinics. These require the secure destruction (for instance, by shredding) of paper records before disposal.

So, hospitals and GP clinics need to develop and implement policies and procedures that state explicitly when and how medical records should be disposed of, and also keep a record of when that happens.

However, to determine whether an individual medical record among the vast quantities held has passed its “use by date” can be extremely resource-intensive for administrative staff.

This means the ultimate driver of paper record destruction is more likely to be the need to free up expensive office or storage space. It’s this sort of scenario that might eventually play out into records being accidentally or deliberately dumped wherever, whenever.

The move towards digital records

The Brisbane situation highlights the limitations of “business as usual” in relation to medical records, which includes paper records held in multiple locations, in hospitals, in GP clinics and with specialists.

Consider your own medical record “paper trail”, which may include files from hospital admissions, records held by your local doctor or other specialist, and results of blood tests and x-rays performed elsewhere.

At both a personal and whole-of-population level, there are clearly numerous opportunities for unintended access to these physical documents. Centrally and securely stored electronic records can address this risk, and also carry a number of other advantages.

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

Privacy breaches relating to paper medical records are in part a function of a worldwide transition from a trusted familiar environment of paper records to electronic medical records.

This dramatically multiplies the volume of paper records needing to be destroyed — from only those that are “out of date” to every record that is scanned and made redundant.

The Brisbane case also highlights the sensitivity of medical records in all their forms, a factor also playing out in the My Health Record debate.

Read more: My Health Record: the case for opting out

Who do we trust to keep our sensitive medical records safe? Should our trust be placed in the old paper records (part of the the status quo) or a centralised electronic medical record?

The Brisbane situation, by highlighting the limitations of paper records, certainly challenges notions of trusting the familiar and favouring the status quo.

Read more: My Health Record: the case for opting in

So, what can we expect?

Like all transitions of this scale, there are a range of costs involved in moving from paper to electronic medical records, one of which is the prospect of further paper record data breaches as mountains of redundant records are destroyed. However these transition costs need to be balanced against the ultimate benefit of electronic records.

Even accepting these benefits doesn’t necessarily mean people will automatically become more comfortable with electronic medical records, like My Health Record. For that to occur, people also have to overcome a general lack of trust in government.

However, our research shows it is possible to encourage people to use online government services. By harnessing behavioural science, we have shown that providing customer support and promoting the benefits and ease of online services helps the transition from queuing and paper forms to using online services.

Hope for the future

In the rush to drag people to shiny new online platforms, this illustrates the simple act of talking people through the advantages and supporting their transition can address many of the psychological barriers to change.

Then, hopefully, we can see the end of paper medical records and services, and fewer paper records being dumped on the side of the road. As long as paper records exist they will be vulnerable to unauthorised access – either within a storage facility or in transit to destruction. However, each case of unauthorised access is dwarfed by the number of paper records successfully and securely destroyed, never able to be physically accessed again.

– ref. Paper tsunami: how the move to digital medical records is leaving us drowning in old paper files – http://theconversation.com/paper-tsunami-how-the-move-to-digital-medical-records-is-leaving-us-drowning-in-old-paper-files-119534

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elizabeth Sinclair, Senior Research Fellow, School of Biological Sciences and The UWA Oceans Institute, University of Western Australia

What did we use before single-use plastics became ingrained in our everyday lives? Before the 1980s, plastic bags were a rarity in our supermarkets. In 2019, excessive plastic use feels not just normal, but necessary to sustain our hectic lifestyles. From takeaway containers and supermarket packaging to cheap, low-quality goods, plastic permeates our daily lives.

However, with every passing year the scale tips further against the immediate convenience of single-use plastics, and towards the extreme inconvenience of piles of waste. The true cost to society and the environment of a “disposal economy” is becoming increasingly stark.

Read more: Will the discovery of another plastic-trashed island finally spark meaningful change?

Finding solutions to eliminate plastic waste in everyday life presents challenges, particularly during large events such as professional conferences. At some time during our careers as academics, scientists, researchers, or industry professionals, we may be part of a conference organising committee. Back in the 1990s, conferences proudly tallied how many coffee cups they used – how times have changed.

As organisers of this week’s national conference of the Australian Marine Sciences Association, we took on the challenge to walk the walk rather than just talk the talk – by holding a plastic-free conference for 570 marine science professionals, academics, and students. But how do you cater for so many people while limiting waste and using no plastic at all?

Turning the tide – be part of the solution

We started this journey 12 months ago, once we knew the challenge we were facing: a marine conference, themed around the blue economy, during July, in the Western Australian port city of Fremantle – the birthplace of the Plastic Free July movement.

From day 1, we were clear we wanted to eliminate plastic and reduce overall waste – everything from day-to-day rubbish to plastic take-home novelties that feature at so many conferences but inevitably make their way into landfill.

Recycling is only a small part of the solution. We need to “refuse, reduce, and recycle” to really tackle plastic.

What we did

We began by selecting a like-minded event organiser to work with us. Then we looked for non-plastic alternatives for obvious conference items. Here’s what we came up with:

• stiff cardboard name badges with no plastic pockets

• bamboo lanyards with metal clips

• 100% natural conference tote bags

• no printed envelopes for registration packs, and no printed conference abstracts

• all necessary printing was done on sustainably sourced paper, by a company using a solar-powered printer

• delegates were asked to bring their own reusable water bottles and coffee cups, or pre-register to buy a reusable coffee cup at the conference

• coffee carts with returnable cups that can be washed and reused

• water jugs with glassware (or to refill personal water bottles) at the back of each presentation room

• no packaged mints or lollies

• sustainably sourced pencils instead of pens (with sharpening stations provided!)

• plates, silverware and glassware for all meal breaks

• vegetarian catering for tea breaks

• all exhibitors, workshop organisers and additional functions (such as the student night and public lecture) were committed to reducing plastic waste for free giveaway products and catering.

Most importantly, we delivered these changes without increasing the budget or impacting the bottom line.

What we learned

Plan early. Going against the grain can take a bit of work, but there are usually plastic-free options available. Take the extra time and file the solution away for your next event.

Work with everyone. Create a shared goal with your whole team: event organisers, venue, exhibitors, caterers – more ideas make for better solutions. This creates a ripple effect, not only for the event, but in developing more sustainable practice for other events.

Do a site visit. Identify potential problems and devise solutions ahead of time. Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, founder and executive director of Plastic Free July, visited our conference venue and provided valuable insights.

Don’t assume. At another marine conference we attended, plastic water bottles were replaced by jugs of water (great!) and polystyrene cups (not so great!). Not all suppliers are knowledgeable about sustainable materials, so make the effort to talk through what plastic-free and zero-waste really mean.

Removing ‘hidden’ plastics

No matter how much planning you do, there will always be “hidden plastics” in the supply chain. It is impossible to control every aspect of operation of the conference venue, their suppliers (food, linen services, waste removal), and the other hotels used by delegates (who may provide guests with water bottles, drinks, and personal hygiene products in rooms).

Read more: Climate change: seeing the planet break down is depressing – here’s how to turn your pain into action

Early buy-in by all service providers can help reduce this, but remember the goal is to change people’s attitudes towards waste, not to reinvent the entire events industry in one conference.

But if we can do it for 570 people, then everyone can start making similar changes at their own home and workplace too.

AMSA will host its annual public lecture, sponsored by the UWA Oceans Institute, in Fremantle on Wednesday July 10 at 6.30pm. It addresses the issue of plastic pollution and what can be done about it, both globally and locally.

– ref. We organised a conference for 570 people without using plastic. Here’s how it went – http://theconversation.com/we-organised-a-conference-for-570-people-without-using-plastic-heres-how-it-went-120157

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Thomas Henry Wright, PhD Candidate, Murdoch University

These days all text is digital. From writing an email to publishing a new edition of War and Peace, text nearly always exists on a computer first. Yet there are writers who take full advantage of the computer’s possibilities, utilising new technologies to broach complex subject matter.

Electronic or digital literature does not refer to e-books, but to works that depend on electronic “code” to exist. Put simply, you can print an e-book, but you cannot print electronic literature.

Within the field there is emphasis on experimentation. Many works are the result of authors simply trying new things out and seeing what happens. Here, then, are ten significant works of electronic literature you should know about.

Read more: When books go digital: The Kills and the future of the novel

A digital love story

Alan Bigelow’s How to Rob a Bank reinvents Bonnie and Clyde for the digital age. It can be viewed on a smart phone or in-browser. Users swipe the touchscreen or hit the space bar to reveal a narrative told through iPhone web searches, text messages, and app activities.

Critiquing a classic

Digital poet Benjamin Laird wrote Core Values in response to Dorothea Mackellar’s classic Australian poem My Country. Laird’s work is displayed in a three-dimensional box, viewed in-browser or using a virtual reality headset.

Text is broken, animated, and infused with geographical coordinates and data. Unlike Mackellar’s “sweeping plains”, “mountain ranges”, and “flooding rains”, Laird’s poem evokes claustrophobia. It critiques Mackellar’s poem, creating an Australia where the reader feels trapped.

Rewriting AI

Montréal-based David Jhave Johnston produced ReRites, using artificial intelligence trained to imitate contemporary poetry. The AI generates text which is then edited by Jhave. Recordings show this process in real time.

Twitterbots

Piotr Marecki’s Cenzobot is a Twitter “bot” (an automatically generated Twitter account) that tweets fragments from real Polish censors’ reviews of publications from the communist era.

Marecki conceived of this project following the Twitter Bot Purge of February 2018. He suspects Cenzobot will also be purged. Indeed, it is the goal of his work.

An environmental statement

T⁠h⁠e⁠ ⁠t⁠e⁠r⁠m⁠ “c⁠l⁠o⁠u⁠d⁠”⁠ computing ⁠emerged⁠ ⁠b⁠e⁠c⁠a⁠u⁠s⁠e⁠ ⁠⁠c⁠l⁠o⁠u⁠d⁠s⁠⁠ ⁠a⁠r⁠e⁠ ⁠p⁠e⁠r⁠c⁠e⁠i⁠v⁠e⁠d⁠ ⁠t⁠o⁠ ⁠b⁠e⁠ ⁠i⁠n⁠f⁠i⁠n⁠i⁠t⁠e⁠ ⁠r⁠e⁠s⁠o⁠u⁠r⁠c⁠e⁠s⁠. However, neither type of cloud is infinite, and few people acknowledge the energy used by large data centres. J.R. Carpenter’s The Gathering Cloud tackles the environmental impact of “cloud” computing by calling attention to the clouds above us.

Fragments from Luke Howard’s 1803 Essay on the Modifications of Clouds are pared down to produce Carpenter’s poetic verses with hypertext links that users can interact with.

The poetry is accompanied by animations of animals, which bridge the link between clouds in the sky and “cloud” computing. A cumulus cloud weighs as much as 100 elephants. By indicating 100 elephants in animation, the full weight of “cloud” computing’s environmental impact is evoked.

Political speech

A Dictionary of the Revolution by Amira Hanafi is an experiment in multi-vocal storytelling. Hanafi created a vocabulary box containing colloquial Egyptian words. Hundreds of voices were then asked to define the evolving language of the Egyptian revolution.

Choosing cards from the box, subjects discussed what the words meant to them and how the words’ meanings had changed. This research informed the project that includes woven imagined dialogues around each term.

Users click on the word to learn the story behind its meaning. Each word is connected to several others, forming a linguistic maze users are encouraged to get lost in. A Dictionary of the Revolution is available in both Arabic and English.

A novel idea

novelling by Will Luers, Hazel Smith, and Roger Dean is a novel combining text, video, and audio, available to read on a computer.

The work arranges media fragments in six-minute cycles to suggest a narrative between four characters. The interface changes every 30 seconds, or whenever the user clicks the screen, creating an ever-evolving story.

Robot interaction

The Listeners by John Cayley is a third-party app that creates a work of spoken, interactive literature. It builds on the infrastructure of the domestic robot “Alexa” (it is also possible to experience The Listeners using a smartphone and the Alexa app).

The user begins by addressing Alexa, saying: “Alexa, ask The Listeners.” The Listeners responds, listening and speaking in its own way. The user may extend the performance by saying “Continue” or “Go on” or “I am filled with anger”. This work explores themes of surveillance, and the very notion of allowing a domestic robot such as Alexa into one’s home.

Poetry/fiction hybrids

Jason Nelson’s Nine Billion Branches is a poetic narrative accessed online. Each page has numerous arrows, poems, and highlighted areas to read, play, and explore.

Nine Billion Branches is preoccupied with the poetry of the immediate world. Poetry exists beside photographs of escalators, garbage bins, and bedside tables. Much of Nelson’s recent work exists beyond the web, sometimes projected onto real buildings or landscapes.

Virtual reality

In the past decade, Mez Breeze has merged digital literature with virtual reality. In 2017, she created the virtual reality Poem/Experience Our Cupidity Coda, which can be viewed online or with a virtual reality headset.

This work emulates the conventions of early cinema. Just as early motion picture devices had the viewer look through a peephole window, the viewer (or reader) of Our Cupidity Coda is encouraged to treat the virtual reality headset in the same way.

– ref. From Twitterbots to VR: 10 of the best examples of digital literature – http://theconversation.com/from-twitterbots-to-vr-10-of-the-best-examples-of-digital-literature-110099

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hanika Rizo, Assistant Professor, Carleton University

Earth’s magnetic field protects and makes our planet habitable by stopping harmful high-energy particles from space, including from the Sun. The source of this magnetic field is the core at the centre of our planet.

But the core is very difficult to study, partly because it starts at a depth of about 2,900 kilometres, making it too deep to sample and directly investigate.

Yet we are part of a research team that found a way to get information about Earth’s core, with details published recently in Geochemical Perspective Letters.

Read more: We made a moving tectonic map of the Game of Thrones landscape

It’s hot down there

The core is the hottest part of our planet with the outer core reaching temperatures of more than 5,000℃. This has to affect the overlying mantle and it is estimated that 50% of volcanic heat comes from the core.

Volcanic activity is the planet’s main cooling mechanism. Certain volcanism, such as that which is still forming volcanic islands of Hawaii and Iceland, might be linked to the core by mantle plumes that transfer heat from the core to Earth’s surface.

Yet whether there is any exchange of physical material between the core and the mantle has been a subject of debate for decades.

Our findings suggest some core material does transfer into the base of these mantle plumes, and the core has been leaking this material for the past 2.5 billion years.

We discovered this by looking at very small variations in the ratio of isotopes of the element tungsten (isotopes are basically versions of the same element that just contain different numbers of neutrons).

To study Earth’s core, we need to search for chemical tracers of core material in volcanic rocks derived from the deep mantle.

We know the core has a very distinct chemistry, dominated by iron and nickel together with elements such as tungsten, platinum and gold that dissolve in iron-nickel alloy. Therefore, the metal alloy-loving elements are a good choice to investigate for traces of the core.

The search for tungsten isotopes

Tungsten (chemical symbol W) as the base element has 74 protons. Tungsten has several isotopes, including ¹⁸²W (with 108 neutrons) and ¹⁸⁴W (with 110 neutrons).

These isotopes of tungsten have potential to be the most conclusive tracers of core material, because the mantle is expected to have much higher ¹⁸²W/¹⁸⁴W ratios than the core.

This is because of another element, Hafnium (Hf), which does not dissolve in iron-nickel alloy and is enriched in the mantle, and had a now-extinct isotope (¹⁸²Hf) that decayed to ¹⁸²W. This gives the mantle extra ¹⁸²W relative to the tungsten in the core.

But the analysis required to detect variations in tungsten isotopes is incredibly challenging, as we are looking at variations in the ¹⁸²W/¹⁸⁴W ratio in parts per million and the concentration of tungsten in rocks is as low as tens of parts per billion. Fewer than five laboratories in the world can do this type of analysis.

Evidence of a leak

Our study shows a substantial change in the ¹⁸²W/¹⁸⁴W ratio of the mantle over Earth’s lifetime. Earth’s oldest rocks have significantly higher ¹⁸²W/¹⁸⁴W than than most rocks of the modern-day Earth.

The change in the ¹⁸²W/¹⁸⁴W ratio of the mantle indicates that tungsten from the core has been leaking into the mantle for a long time.

Interestingly, in Earth’s oldest volcanic rocks, over a time frame of 1.8 billion years there is no significant change in the mantle’s tungsten isotopes. This indicates that from 4.3 billion to 2.7 billion years ago, little or no material from the core was transferred into the upper mantle.

But in the subsequent 2.5 billion years, the tungsten isotope composition of the mantle has significantly changed. We infer that a change in plate tectonics, towards the end of the Archean Eon from about 2.6 billion years ago triggered large enough convective currents in the mantle to change the tungsten isotopes of all modern rocks.

Why the leak?

If mantle plumes are ascending from the core-mantle boundary to the surface, it follows that material from Earth’s surface must also descend into the deep mantle.

Subduction, the term used for rocks from Earth’s surface descending into the mantle, takes oxygen-rich material from the surface into the deep mantle as an integral component of plate tectonics.

Experiments show that increase in oxygen concentration at the core-mantle boundary could cause tungsten to separate out of the core and into the mantle.

Read more: The ‘pulse’ of a volcano can be used to help predict its next eruption

Alternatively, inner core solidification would also increase the oxygen concentration of the outer core. In this case, our new results could tell us something about the evolution of the core, including the origin of Earth’s magnetic field.

Earth’s core started as entirely liquid metal and has been cooling and partially solidifying over time. The magnetic field is generated by the spin of the inner solid core. The time of inner core crystallisation is one of the most difficult questions to answer in Earth and planetary sciences.

Our study gives us a tracer that can be used to investigate core-mantle interaction and the change in the internal dynamics of our planet, and which can boost our understanding of how and when the magnetic field was turned on.

– ref. Earth’s core has been leaking for billions of years – http://theconversation.com/earths-core-has-been-leaking-for-billions-of-years-119395

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

The Morrison government plans to hold a referendum in the next three years on whether to enshrine constitutional recognition of Australia’s Indigenous people.

Announcing the commitment on Wednesday, the minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, said he would

develop and bring forward a consensus option for constitutional recognition to be put to a referendum during the current parliamentary term.

He said he had begun seeking the counsel of Indigenous leaders on the best way forward.

Wyatt stressed the importance of bipartisanship, and will establish a cross-party parliamentary working group to assist with engagement to develop a “community model” for the referendum. The referendum’s chances of passage will depend on achieving a high degree of consensus with Indigenous communities and MPs in both major parties.

Labor’s shadow minister for Indigenous affairs, Linda Burney “will be integral to this process”, Wyatt told the National Press Club in a major speech outlining the Morrison government’s approach to Indigenous affairs. Both Wyatt and Burney are Indigenous.

Read more: Ken Wyatt faces challenges – and opportunities – as minister for Indigenous Australians

Wyatt did not indicate how he envisioned changing the constitution, which has been highly controversial in the last few years.

The May 2017 “Uluru Statement from the Heart” called for “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the constitution”.

The Referendum Council proposed a national Indigenous representative assembly be added to the constitution, but this was rejected by the Turnbull government.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has recently shifted course and begun speaking with Labor leader Anthony Albanese about a bipartisan approach to constitutional recognition. Without bipartisanship, any referendum is doomed to failure; passage is difficult enough even with agreement of the major parties. The last successful referendum of any sort was in 1977.

Changing the constitution through a referendum requires an overall majority of votes and a majority in a majority of states. When Prime Minister Tony Abbott wanted to hold a referendum on Indigenous recognition, the plan slipped away amid arguments over its content and doubts about getting the necessary support.

Read more: Listening but not hearing: process has trumped substance in Indigenous affairs

Wyatt also promised the development of “a local, regional and national voice”. He did not spell out the detail of a national “voice”.

He said the concept of the “voice” in the Uluru Statement from the Heart “is not a singular voice”.

It is a cry to all tiers of government to stop and listen to the voices of Indigenous Australians at all levels.

All they want is for governments to hear their issues, stories of their land and their local history.

He said Indigenous communities are asking the three tiers of government to stop and take the time to listen to their voices.

The national interest requires a new relationship with Indigenous Australians based on their participation and establishing entrenched partnerships at the community and regional levels.

Wyatt also said he would work on “progressing how we address truth telling.

Without the truth of the past, there can be no agreement on where and who we are in the present, how we arrived here and where we want to go in the future.

Read more: Treaty talk is only one problem for Indigenous recognition referendum

On the treaty issue, he said it was was important for states and territories to take the lead.

Wyatt said the significance of symbolism must never be forgotten but “it must be balanced with pragmatism that results in change for Indigenous Australians”. He highlighted the new National Indigenous Australians Agency, which was set up by Morrison to oversee Indigenous affairs policy.

With the establishment of the agency on 1 July, we began a new era for the government to work in partnership with Indigenous Australians. It will provide opportunities for growth and advancement in education, employment, suicide prevention, community safety, health and constitutional recognition.

The most important thing that I and the agency will do is to listen – with our ears and with our eyes.

I intend to have genuine conversations, not only with Indigenous leaders and peak bodies, but with families, individuals and community organisations so that I can hear their voices and work together to agree to a way forward for a better future for our children.

He also wanted businesses “to sit with me around boardroom tables – and around campfires – and discuss how they can contribute”.

– ref. The Morrison government proposes an Indigenous recognition referendum this term – http://theconversation.com/the-morrison-government-proposes-an-indigenous-recognition-referendum-this-term-119998

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shahram Akbarzadeh, Professor of Middle East & Central Asian Politics, Deputy Director (International), Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University

Iran’s announcement last Sunday that it would break the limit on uranium enrichment agreed to in the nuclear deal with world powers was not a surprise. It came hot on the heels of another breach only a few days earlier on the 300-kilogram limit agreed to in the deal on stockpiles of low-enriched uranium.

Iran had warned Europe that it would start dismantling the nuclear accord if the promised economic benefits of the agreement did not materialise. A year after the US withdrew from the nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, and imposed very strict sanctions on Iran, the Iranian leadership appears ready to give up on finding a diplomatic solution to this deadlock.

Read more: Iran’s nuclear program breaches limits for uranium enrichment: 4 key questions answered

This bodes ill for the future of President Hassan Rouhani and regional security. A weakened Rouhani will find it difficult to fend off his hard-line critics in Iran and keep the nuclear deal alive.

With every step away from diplomacy, the hard-liners have taken a step forward and appear to be now setting the political agenda in Iran.

Rouhani’s riskiest gamble

The JCPOA was signed in 2015 between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany.

This was Rouhani’s greatest achievement and riskiest gamble. He faced the ire of hard-liners in Iran who continue to have a formidable presence in the parliament, as well as the security and judicial system.

They accused Rouhani of selling out Iranian sovereignty and betraying the ideals of the Islamic revolution by scaling back Iran’s nuclear program and subjecting it to an unprecedented international monitoring regime.

Rouhani nonetheless pushed through his agenda of finding a diplomatic solution to Iran’s isolation because he believed that years of sanctions and mismanagement had pushed the Iranian economy to the brink of collapse.

He staked his political fortunes on bringing Iran out of isolation.

The JCPOA was the compromise deal to assure the international community that Iran would not pursue a nuclear weapons program in return for sanctions relief to revive the Iranian economy.

But US President Donald Trump never liked the deal. He campaigned against it and often questioned Iran’s commitment to it, though the UN International Atomic Energy Agency consistently reported on Iran’s compliance with the terms of the agreement.

Read more: Why Donald Trump is backing the US into a corner on Iran

Despite much lobbying by European powers, Trump withdrew from the deal in May 2018 and reimposed severe unilateral sanctions on Iran, and anyone dealing with Iran.

Losing control to the hard-liners

Trump’s decision to tear up the nuclear deal was seen by the conservatives in Iran as a vindication of their feelings towards the United States. They lambasted Rouhani for putting his trust in the US.

In May 2019, the situation got even more tense after Trump announced that US warships were sailing to the Persian Gulf to counter potential Iranian hostility. No intelligence regarding a suspected Iranian threat was shared.

The escalation of tensions following the alleged Iranian attack on two oil tankers last month, and the downing of a US reconnaissance drone by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards has made it very hard to find a diplomatic solution. Drums of war are silencing voices of diplomacy.

While Rouhani came to office with an olive branch, he realises that he has effectively lost the political contest against his hard-line critics. He has another two years in office, but is at risk of losing the presidency if the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who yields ultimate power in Iran, is disillusioned with his performance.

This realisation has seriously undermined Rouhani, who appears to have adopted the language and posture of the hard-liners in relation to the US. It is unclear if this can save him in office, or embolden his critics who seem to be gaining significant momentum.

In May, the Supreme Leader appointed General Qasem Soleimani as the commander of the Basij paramilitary force, an arm of the Revolutionary Guards that suppresses domestic dissent.

Read more: Iran nuclear deal is hanging by a thread – so will Islamic Republic now develop a bomb?

This was a significant development for the hard-liners in case they seek to assert political control. Basij has been a ruthless security force inside Iran, and under Soleimani, could provide the necessary street support for a potential coup against Rouhani.

Soleimani has enjoyed a meteoric rise in Iran due to his performance as commander of Quds Force, the Revolutionary Guards’ international arm operating mostly in Iraq and Syria to defeat the Islamic State.

He is considered a war hero by the public and now has the confidence of the Supreme Leader. This is an ominous development for Rouhani.

Breaking with the tenets of the nuclear deal was also clearly not Rouhani’s objective, as it would reverse his hard-won diplomatic gains and discredit his legacy.

Iran’s recent breaches on uranium enrichment and stockpiles were incremental steps to exert pressure on European leaders to adhere to their promises of sanctions relief. This strategy was predicated on the assumption that Europe has more to lose with the collapse of JCPOA than a rift with the United States. It can only be described as a desperate move, showing that Rouhani is fast running out of options.

The window of opportunity for a diplomatic solution is fast closing and the alternative scenario of the return of a combative government in Tehran is looking more and more unavoidable. This would shut the doors to diplomacy and increase the chance of confrontation with the West.

Trump accused Iran of not wanting to sit at the table. He may be fulfilling his own prophecy.

– ref. Iran’s leader is losing his grasp on power. Does this mean diplomacy is doomed? – http://theconversation.com/irans-leader-is-losing-his-grasp-on-power-does-this-mean-diplomacy-is-doomed-119997

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alice Gorman, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

Alice Gorman is a space archaeologist working on space junk in Earth orbit, deep space probes, and planetary landing sites. She explores what we can learn from these items and places as material objects, and also their heritage significance – what they actually mean for people and communities on Earth.

Alice features in The Conversation’s podcast series To the Moon and beyond, published to mark the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing of July 1969. This is an edited extract from Alice’s interview with The Conversation’s Sarah Keenihan, published as part of our occasional series Zoom Out.

There is a lot of documentation about what’s been left on the Moon – but it’s amazing how much we don’t know.

There are things that have gone missing, like part of a thermal blanket that got ripped off a landing module. There are things that may have gone up there that we didn’t know about. An Apollo test module went walkabout in solar orbit and has only recently been found again.

Read more: Friday essay: shadows on the Moon – a tale of ephemeral beauty, humans and hubris

This is actually where archaeology becomes interesting. I don’t believe, for example, that anyone has ever fully documented the position of all of the boot prints of the Apollo astronauts on the Moon.

We know what they look like. We know that they’re there. They’re reproduced in countless photographs of the Apollo sites.

But has anyone ever actually catalogued them? Has anyone studied them for what they can tell us about how these human bodies moved across the lunar landscape, how they adapted to this environment so different to that of Earth?

What archaeology does is look at the difference between what people say they do, and what they actually do. Those footprints may reveal that astronauts were doing things that they didn’t even consciously recognise, since they didn’t speak about them or record them.

If you did an archaeological study of those footprints, we would expect to see differences from Apollo 11 through to Apollo 17.

We ought to be able to see the evidence of how each astronaut crew incorporated the knowledge of the previous one, and how the design of the suits and the equipment was changed or adapted from each previous mission. We should be able to actually chart this using physical evidence.

Protecting the Moon’s heritage

We must be strategic in how we protect our heritage on the Moon.

In 1969 the Apollo 12 mission landed just 180 metres away from Surveyor 3 – a robotic landing craft the US sent to the Moon in 1967. The astronauts approached Surveyor 3 and removed a camera and some other bits and pieces to take back to Earth.

When NASA analysed the materials, they found that the landing of Surveyor 3 itself plus the landing of Apollo 12 just on the edge of the crater had blown up lunar dust, which had abraded surfaces.

This gave us an idea of the dangers of lunar dust for human-manufactured materials.

A lot of the new missions being planned at the moment are talking about going to the Apollo and other sites, and removing samples for analysis that they can use to to gauge the impact of the lunar environment on human materials.

This is obviously extremely useful for planning missions further into the future, but at the moment there isn’t any sort of systematic way to do this. They could approach the Apollo sites and in the process completely erase all of those footprints and cause further damage by stirring up the lunar dust again.

There is an archaeological principle that you never excavate all of a site. You always leave an unexcavated deposit, or you leave rock art on the walls. You leave material for future scientists to sample because we don’t know what techniques will be available in the future.

Read more: Australian archaeologists dropped the term ‘Stone Age’ decades ago, and so should you

If we look at this from an archaeological perspective first of all, we ought to be sitting down and thinking: OK, what materials do we really need to collect? We’ve got the baseline from Surveyor 3 – what are the best materials to compare to that?

Perhaps we don’t need to take physical samples. We may have techniques we can use to remotely gather data from these sites without being destructive.

We also need to consider access to data. Let’s just say a Space X lunar mission visits a previous landing site – maybe one of the Apollo ones, and removes samples, studies them now. These objects are the property of the US government under the Outer Space Treaty. But SpaceX is a private company. Are they required to share the results of this analysis with their competitors?

This is something I haven’t seen much discussion about yet, but it needs to be worked out as everybody’s planning to go back to the Moon.

Cemeteries in space

It’s 50 years since humans went to the Moon – and now people are so focused on getting to Mars.

But what happens when another planet becomes home, when the first generations are born, live, and just as importantly, die in space?

Read more: Looking up a century ago, a vision of the future of space exploration

I often think the first death in space is going to be a big turning point for how we relate to it. There haven’t really been any so far. There was the unfortunate USSR Soyuz 11 mission to Earth orbit, where three cosmonauts died when they left the spacecraft – but they were recovered on Earth. [The crew died on their descent back to Earth after a technical fault caused their Soyuz capsule to depressurise.]

There have been other deaths, for example on the tragic Space Shuttle accidents, but they haven’t actually been in space.

It’s something people often overlook when talking about the prospect of settling on Mars. The risks are so great. People are going to die. They’re probably going to die if there’s any human settlement on the Moon as well.

So how will that impact how we look at space?

The first living things have already died on the Moon. The recent experiment in the rover deployed by China had little seeds inside that sprouted and then died.

Death is already “off Earth”, and we can expect more deaths in the future.

This is going to have to change how we feel about space. When we look at those planets in the sky and think there are cemeteries there; perhaps there are human bodies being incorporated into the lunar regolith or into the red Martian dust.

How does that make these places feel to us if they become cemeteries?

The Moon in 2069

In terms of sites on the Moon right now, there are around 50 different places where human culture has landed, and they’re quite diverse. A huge amount of USSR stuff, a huge amount of US stuff – but also Japanese and Indian and Chinese.

If we look 50 years into the future I expect that landscape will be even more diverse. We will have many countries who maybe at the moment are not considered to be spacefaring, but who will have sent their own missions to the Moon. Or maybe they’ve had experiments that are part of other people’s missions. Maybe they’ve sent their own astronauts.

I think the Moon is going to be culturally very diverse, with an archaeological record that reflects all of those different cultures as well.

Read more: Trash or treasure? A lot of space debris is junk, but some is precious heritage

We can also expect there will be mining installations. It’s likely these will be focused on the lunar poles, in craters where the Sun has not shone for 2 billion years. They’ve been in deep shadow all this time. They’re filled with this valuable resource people can use for fuel: water ice. So the craters might be the industrial centres of future lunar industries.

We may not see all of this from the surface of the Earth – but there will be satellites constantly streaming back footage of the surface, so we can see what’s going on there.

We might have our particular astronauts we like to follow. There might be constant updates on social media streams about what what they’re doing on the Moon.

We may be very intimately involved in the daily lives of these astronauts.

It’s likely there will be a form of lunar tourism, which involves us projecting ourselves into robots and going for a little jaunts across the lunar surface.

But I suspect the lunar tourism industry may not completely take off in the way people are imagining – simply because there will be too much at stake in protecting proprietary information about technologies and resources on the Moon.

In the future it won’t be rare anymore to think about being an astronaut. At the moment, over 500 people have been in space. Only those very few Apollo astronauts have been to the Moon.

Looking forwards, there’ll be hundreds of people who’ve been to the Moon and back, maybe even thousands. These experiences may not be rare and extraordinary anymore.

We might get sick of hearing people tell their stories about the work they did on the Moon. Maybe this will be commonplace. The Moon will just be like thinking about Antarctica. It’s remote, but still part of our world.

– ref. Footprints on the Moon and cemeteries on Mars: interview with space archaeologist Alice Gorman – http://theconversation.com/footprints-on-the-moon-and-cemeteries-on-mars-interview-with-space-archaeologist-alice-gorman-118911

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Heiko Timmers, Associate Professor of Physics, UNSW

In his latest book, strategist and defence analyst Hugh White has gone nuclear, triggering a debate about whether Australia should develop and maintain its own nuclear arsenal.

But developing and sustaining modern nuclear weapons requires a certain combination of technologies and industries that Australia simply does not have. In fact, it may be safely estimated on the basis of approval and construction times for nuclear power reactors in other western countries that it would take some 20 years to establish such capabilities in the present legal and economic environment.

Opting for nuclear weapons also fails to consider the global implications of Australia abandoning its almost 50-year stance against nuclear proliferation.

The first step: nuclear power generation

White argues quite rightly that China may eventually overtake the US in terms of its industrial production and military reach. Speculating that this could entail a strategic withdrawal of the US from the western Pacific, he suggests Australia might find itself without the American defence umbrella to deter Chinese influence, or worse.

Read more: With China’s swift rise as naval power, Australia needs to rethink how it defends itself

But Australia would struggle to replace its long and successful alliance with the US with a limited nuclear deterrence capability. Even ignoring the issues generally involved in adopting new defence capabilities – evident in the many problems hindering Australia’s efforts to replace its ageing submarine fleet – the idea is fanciful given our current stance on nuclear energy.

Nuclear power reactors, uranium enrichment plants, missile technology and high-tech electronics manufacturing would all be essential to support truly independent efforts to develop a compact nuclear weapon that could be delivered by missile from a submarine and kept in a permanent state of readiness.

Neither power reactors nor enrichment facilities exist in Australia today, despite some pioneering research in both areas in the past.

Australia’s missile development and high-tech electronics sectors, meanwhile, are in catch-up mode or in their infancy due to years of economic reliance on mining, tourism and services. Advancing and establishing nuclear industries for the sole purpose of developing a nuclear weapons program would neither be practically nor economically viable.

Political will for nuclear energy?

The only way such industries could be developed realistically would be if Australia added nuclear power to its suite of power generation technologies.

Of course, Australia has large uranium deposits and a well-established uranium mining and export industry. And there appears to be increasing public support for nuclear power. A recent survey found that 44% of Australians support nuclear power plants, up four points since the question was last asked in 2015. Other polls indicate support might even be higher.

A well-developed nuclear power industry would eventually give Australia almost all the necessary technologies, personnel and materials to make and maintain a nuclear weapon. This includes, in particular, the ability to enrich uranium and breed plutonium.

Read more: A short history of Australia’s love/hate relationship with uranium

But herein lies the problem. Even if the public did eventually support a nuclear energy program, it remains unclear whether the necessary political will would be there.

Legally, the Howard government banned domestic nuclear power plants in the late 1990s – an act that would now need to be overturned by parliament.

In 2006, the federal government commissioned an inquiry led by Ziggy Switkowski into the future feasibility of nuclear power generation in Australia. The final report found that nuclear energy would be 20-50% more expensive than coal without carbon pricing. It also said a nuclear power industry would take between 10 and 15 years to establish.

Recently, Energy Minister Angus Taylor said the Morrison government was open to reversing the country’s nuclear energy ban, but only if there was a “clear business case” to do so. With the current widespread availability of cheaper, renewable energies in Australia, this makes the economics of nuclear power generation less convincing.

Lastly, in order to ensure true self-reliance, a delivery option for a nuclear weapon would have to be developed without purchasing technologies from other countries, such as the US. This would be incredibly costly and difficult to do.

When it comes to this sort of missile technology and high-tech electronics manufacturing, Australia is currently not leading in research and development.

Australia’s long-time stance against nuclear weapons

Even though Australia is not in a position to contemplate nuclear weapons due to its technological and industrial limitations, there are moral arguments against pursuing such a goal that should be considered carefully.

The country has been at the forefront of the international non-proliferation movement, ratifying both the UN Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1973 and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1998.

A 2018 poll also showed that 78.9% of Australians supported joining the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, while only 7.7% were opposed.

Australians should remind themselves that these treaties have greatly contributed to peace and security in the world. Abandoning such longstanding principles of its foreign policy, which are aimed at creating a better, more peaceful world, would be an implosion of Australian character of massive proportions.

– ref. Why developing nuclear weapons is an unrealistic option for Australia – http://theconversation.com/why-developing-nuclear-weapons-is-an-unrealistic-option-for-australia-120075

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gery Karantzas, Associate professor in Social Psychology / Relationship Science, Deakin University

If you listen to any number of love songs, dating “experts”, or plunge head first into a romance novel, you’re likely to think it’s in our destiny to find that special someone – your soul-mate.

But how do you know if you’ve found “the one”? Will the birds sing? Will you see fireworks or a shooting star?

And for those who are yet to find “the one”, should you keep searching, or is it a misguided quest?

Research into the science of relationships spanning the last two decades shows maintaining a “destiny” mindset – that we are all meant to find that ideal person who completes us in every way – can be problematic for our love lives.

Read more: We all want the same things in a partner, but why?

Destiny mindsets affect how we evaluate romantic partners, as well as how we maintain lasting relationships.

For some, this mindset can even include a mental picture as to what that person should look like.

What are the costs of a mindset?

A destiny mindset may make a person less open to developing a relationship with someone who possesses many excellent qualities, but does not match an individual’s mental picture of “the one”.

A person who holds a destiny mindset may be more likely to focus on the potential faults or inadequacies of another, for example, rather than centre on their good qualities.

On the other hand, a person may not pursue a potential love interest in the hope that something better comes along that matches their vision of destiny. By maintaining a destiny mindset, they may reject real opportunities at finding love.

For those in an existing relationship, maintaining a destiny mindset can be associated with relationship satisfaction, if the current relationship closely (if not perfectly) matches one’s idea.

Read more: Mind the gap – does age difference in relationships matter?

But if the relationship is not in line with one’s vision of destiny, or if the relationship is evaluated as no longer matching one’s destiny, dissatisfaction can ensue.

Research suggests people who hold a destiny mindset don’t work as hard at their relationships because they have a very fixed view of their partner and relationship. They tend to accept things the way they are – either a relationship is meant to be or it is not – rather than putting in time and effort to make relationships things work and deal with relationship problems.

Is there a better alternative?

In contrast to a destiny mindset, some people hold a “growth relationship” mindset. This includes beliefs and expectations that a partner and relationship has the capacity to develop and change over time, and that problems or challenges can be overcome.

Research to date suggests a growth mindset is associated with more effective ways of coping with relationship challenges and using more problem-solving to deal with relationship difficulties.

People with a growth mindset experience various positives such as greater relationship and sexual satisfaction and have a better, more constructive way of handling conflict. A growth mindset has also been found to reduce the risk of a relationship ending.

Can you have both?

Some people recount meeting their partner and knowing they were “the one”. But when describing how their relationship has progressed over time, it’s clear they put time and effort into it and work on problems when they arise.

These people may hold beliefs about destiny, but overall, hold more of a growth mindset about their relationship.

These couples often acknowledge their partner and relationship has changed, for example, and often note that they’ve helped each other develop and grow over time.

Read more: ‘I’m not a mind reader’: understanding your partner’s thoughts can be both good and bad

So if you work hard at your relationship, and you and your partner help one another develop and grow, you may get to know each other so well that you feel as if you share one soul. Maybe that’s what is meant by a true soul-mate.

– ref. Have you found ‘the one’? How mindsets about destiny affect our romantic relationships – http://theconversation.com/have-you-found-the-one-how-mindsets-about-destiny-affect-our-romantic-relationships-117177

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Petty, Honorary Fellow in Criminology, University of Melbourne

Last week, Victoria Police arrested seven people who were alleged members of a professional begging “syndicate”. They were flown in from China on tourist visas.

In reporting this story, Australian media generated a considerable amount of public outrage. The idea that people who beg are somehow “faking” homelessness or poverty is one often used in tabloid media. Add an element of foreignness, and this story appears especially scandalous.

Most of the time, accusations of so-called “professional” begging are misleading, intended to demonise those who beg as deceitful and to legitimise the vilification of people who beg and/or are homeless.

Read more: Carelessly linking crime to being homeless adds to the harmful stigma

But in this case, it appears the label is accurate, or, more accurate than usual anyway. And given the commonalities shared by those arrested, such as age, nationality, and that they were reportedly living together in Melbourne’s CBD, there does appear to be a level of coordination involved.

Still, this doesn’t make their poverty and desperation any less legitimate, nor their exploitation more acceptable, and the use of criminal charges does not seem appropriate.

And given homelessness and begging are emotive issues prone to hyperbole and misinformation, this story highlights a few misconceptions worth addressing.

There’s no such thing as ‘professional begging’ in the law

In state law, there is no such thing as “professional begging”. Begging is a crime under Victoria’s Summary Offences Act, which makes no mention of “professionalism” or coordination other than to prohibit the procuring of a child to beg.

The people in this case have also been charged with possessing proceeds of crime. But this is only possible because begging, controversially, remains a criminal offence in Victoria, whereas other states have decriminalised the activity.

Read more: ‘I didn’t want to be homeless with a baby’: young women share their stories of homelessness

What’s more, it has been alleged in the past, but denied by the police, that Victoria Police has confiscated money from people begging in Melbourne.

Being homeless has a broad definition

Acting Inspector John Travaglini from Victoria Police stated that because those arrested were residing together, their claims of homelessness were “false” and “deceitful”.

But the majority of people experiencing homelessness in Australia do have access to some shelter – only a small proportion of the homeless sleep rough.

As well as rough sleeping, homelessness in Australia involves being in situations that fall below the minimum standard of housing, such as couchsurfing, staying in bedsits, hostels or boarding houses, or in living arrangements that are unsafe or overcrowded.

Given those arrested were reportedly sharing the same accommodation, they may very well meet definitional criteria for homelessness.

Read more: What’s in the name ‘homeless’? How people see themselves and the labels we apply matter

You don’t need to be rough sleeping to beg

Begging and rough sleeping are not the same thing. Some homeless people beg, others don’t. Some people who have somewhere to sleep engage in begging, because they are very poor or otherwise marginalised.

Those arrested had somewhere to sleep, but it doesn’t mean they are not extremely poor.

Travaglini also claimed these people were not vulnerable, unlike others who beg. But the arrested individuals were aged in their late 60s and 70s, and allegedly flew to another country for the purpose of begging on the streets: they look pretty vulnerable to us.

So if the allegations are true, these people seem especially vulnerable. Think of the older Australians you know: how many would agree to be flown to China to beg on the streets there?

Were criminal charges appropriate?

Ten years ago, the idea of people flying to Australia to beg as a scheme to make money might have seemed unlikely. But in an increasingly globalised and connected world, poverty and vulnerability have fewer geographic limitations.

It’s likely that Australia, given its enviable standard of living and economic standing, will see more examples of these kinds of activities, not fewer. And how we respond to these kinds of events will have increasing importance in the years to come.

Read more: Homelessness soars in our biggest cities, driven by rising inequality since 2001

In this case, we certainly support an intervention into this seemingly exploitative situation. But we question the appropriateness of criminal charges for those deployed on the streets to beg.

Charges may be appropriate for those coordinating this apparent scheme. But, like society’s responses to illegal drug use, levelling criminal charges at those on the bottom rungs of the hierarchy is unlikely to address anything in a meaningful way.

There is often debate about whether you should give to people who beg, and people will likely come to their own conclusions on this.

What worries us is that stories such as these further entrench public perceptions of the homeless as criminal, and of the vulnerable as exploitative and, worse, potentially dangerous.

We urge that people, should they wish, continue to give donations to those who seek them, and, more crucially, to demand action on homelessness and poverty from their politicians. Because continued inaction on these issues, whatever form they take, is the true crime.

– ref. Begging ‘professionally’ doesn’t make their poverty and vulnerability any less legitimate – http://theconversation.com/begging-professionally-doesnt-make-their-poverty-and-vulnerability-any-less-legitimate-120010

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anir Kumar Upadhyay, Lecturer in Built Environment, UNSW

Australian houses use significantly more electricity to stay warm or cool than estimated during the design stage.

To design a new house in Australia, the building needs to meet the national construction code. One way to do this is by using software to simulate the building’s thermal efficiency, to see if it meets the minimum requirements of the national house energy scheme. The scheme divides Australia geographically into 69 different climate zones and requires new houses to be thermally appropriate for their environment.

Read more: Are heatwaves ‘worsening’ and have ‘hot days’ doubled in Australia in the last 50 years?

Unfortunately, this software does not properly take into account our warming weather. Our recent report found the climate assumptions used by the government drastically underestimate the length and heat of summers in the near future.

In fact, buildings that perform best for heat waves predicted by 2030 are actually banned by the government’s building code. We urgently need to update our building codes to cope with our changing climate.

Understand the future local climate

We took Richmond in New South Wales as an example to understand the effect a changing climate might have on building performance. By taking predictions from CSIRO’s medium greenhouse gas emissions scenario, we analysed Richmond’s likely weather for every week of 2030.

The future outlook, shown below, is strikingly different from the weather files used to determine whether houses meet the minimum thermal performance requirement of the National Construction Code. In 2030, Richmond will experience a warm period almost four times longer than predicted by the official weather file.

Design for the future

Based on the future climate scenario, the design strategy for buildings in Richmond should focus on well shaded and insulated buildings to avoid any heat gain in the warm period, but should also harness sunlight to warm up the indoors in the cool period.

The warm period will last from December to March, when keeping the house cool is the priority. Passive solar heating, such as northern windows and well-insulated walls, floor and ceilings, are important during the May to September cool months, while direct ventilation is largely all that’s needed during the mostly comfortable April and October to November.

To test how houses will perform in a hotter future, we modelled a house in Richmond using AccuRate software. We found a design and construction solution that performed well (achieving 7.6 stars out of 10) for the 2030 scenario failed to meet a heating threshold that is legally required in NSW. In effect, the house that makes the most sense for the immediate future, could not be built.

These thresholds for heating and cooling are based on assumptions that are out of step with current conditions, let alone the future. Between 2016 and 2018 Richmond’s annual average temperature was 17.8℃, whereas the NatHERS weather file assumes it to be 16.7℃. This difference is set to increase.

In a 2019 amendment, the National Construction Code adopted NSW’s approach to heating and cooling thresholds to other climate zones in other states. The heating threshold puts a restraint on designing buildings that are optimised to mitigate extreme heat events.

This highlights the limitation of out-of-date climate files, and the current regulation that acts as a barrier to developing energy efficient designs for a future warmer climate.

Build to perform

A 2013 CSIRO study found that houses with higher star ratings using more energy in summer.

One of the reasons is the trade-offs on the thermal performance of one building component against another in the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) software. For example, a window without shading on the western façade is acceptable in a NatHERS simulation, whereas the same window would not be allowed if a glazing calculator developed by the National Construction Code were used to demonstrate the thermal performance of a house.

Other issues are trade workmanship, such whether a building is airtight. Airtightness in residential buildings is ignored in the national construction code. However, considerable energy savings can be achieved if a house can be made airtight.

Similarly, missing or displaced insulation in the ceiling, as shown above, can cause significant discomfort and additional heating and cooling costs. We all, from builders to homeowners, need to understand insulation must be carefully installed and cannot be moved later, or even well designed buildings will become inefficient.

Windows are the main option for ventilating most houses. However, if you live in a high-pollution or noisy area, or in a place with very little wind, open windows might not be desirable or practical. Consequently, households may not be getting enough fresh air to maintain a healthy indoor environment. A mechanical ventilation system, which uses little energy, is an ideal alternative.

Read more: Too many Australians have to choose between heating or eating this winter

The current weather files and heating thresholds used to develop minimum building standards are inadequate for our warming climate. Our report presents a framework for designing and building houses that consider climate change. We hope to see further research on other Australian population centres, so we can develop a comprehensive overview to help us build energy efficient and healthy houses for the future.

– ref. Houses for a warmer future are currently restricted by Australia’s building code – http://theconversation.com/houses-for-a-warmer-future-are-currently-restricted-by-australias-building-code-120072

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeff Wilks, Adjunct Professor, Southern Cross University

Australia prides itself on being a safe travel destination. And feeling safe is one of the leading considerations for international students when choosing to study here.

So, a spate of robberies and physical attacks targeting international students in Melbourne in recent weeks is particularly concerning. This is especially so on the tail of media accusations that Australian universities are treating international students as “cash cows” .

Admittedly, international education is huge business. In the 2017-18 financial year, more than 500,000 international students injected nearly A$32 billion into Australia’s economy. The majority of these were university students.

International education is also Australia’s third-largest export earner. As Universities Australia’s Deputy Chief Executive Anne-Marie Lansdown said last year

Australians should be fiercely proud of this incredibly important industry. They should also be fiercely protective of it.

And this means being protective of its customers.

Federal education minister Dan Tehan responded quickly to the Melbourne attacks. He said the government was working with education providers to “ensure Australia is a safe and welcoming country for international students”.

Many safety frameworks already exist. The 2018 National Code of Practice for Providers of Education and Training to Overseas Students requires education providers to give overseas students information about safety on campus and while living in Australia.

It also states universities should have staff and support mechanisms in place to assist students. Mechanisms include health and counselling services, and immediate response to critical incidents such as severe verbal or psychological aggression, violence and physical or sexual abuse.

Universities generally do a good job on campus. Universities already have CCTV camera coverage, emergency phone points and active security services patrolling. Crisis counselling is also available at all campuses.

But it’s a huge challenge to protect international students travelling to and from the university, and in day-to-day living in local communities.

Safety outside university

University students are often victimised on public transport. In one Melbourne study of all students (local and international) nearly 80% of female students surveyed and an equivalent proportion of LGBTI+ students, said they had been the victims of unwanted sexual gestures, comments, advances, exposed genitals, groping, or being followed on public transport in the previous three years. More than half of men reported having been victimised.

Read more: Students don’t feel safe on public transport but many have no choice but to use it

Women said they adopted a range of behaviours, from avoiding certain lines and stops to ensuring they are met at a stop. They said they were on constant alert to mitigate their risk of victimisation. A concerning finding was that only 5.7% of those who had been victimised reported this to anyone in authority.

The recent rape and murder of 21-year-old international student Aiia Maasarwe in Melbourne highlights the danger of travelling alone at night and use of public transport. Ms Maasarwe was walking home at night after getting off a tram near La Trobe University in Bundoora.

Another study on the community safety of international students in Melbourne found international students were more likely than domestic students to report that, when their safety was threatened, there was a racial, religious or cultural element to the threat.

Violence can also be opportunistic, with environmental factors such as travelling at night and the use of public transport heightening the risk.

What universities can do

Orientation programs are a good start and an opportunity to offer safety information to international students. This can be done through videos and presentations by police and other service providers, along with online resources that can be accessed 24/7.

Personal safety tips include leaving valuables at home when going out and not carrying large amounts of money, knowing the 000 (triple zero) national emergency number and how to interact with the operator. Many universities now have mobile apps that provide access to emergency and security resources.

But orientation programs, two or three times a year, are intense periods of information overload where personal safety is one of many topics to be covered in a limited amount of time. They are not enough by themselves.

Universities can address some public safety issues through measures such as thoughtful timetabling that reduces night travel to and from campus, working directly with transport authorities to enhance safety on buses and trains and establishing a close working relationship with local police.

These strategies are part of a growing international approach called Healthy Universities that promotes health, safety and well-being for staff and students.

As part of its Safe Campuses It’s On All of Us program, Griffith University offers self-defence classes to staff and students. The focus is not just on protecting oneself but also understanding when and where you might be vulnerable and how to develop strategies to avoid personal injury.

Most universities have a MATES (Mentoring and Transition Equals Success) or equivalent mentoring program for new students to help connect with other students and learn about university life. This existing network could be mobilised to promote international student safety if the mentors were appropriately trained, resourced and supported by their universities.

Read more: Meet me at the bar! How uni students interact on a campus, and why chocolate can help

Australian universities have proactively addressed sexual assault and sexual harassment through the Respect. Now. Always. initiative. This means a broad framework for international student safety is already in place to run the necessary face-to-face workshops and training programs, liaise with police and encourage reporting of incidents.

Of course this will require more dedicated staff and resources in the international offices so programs are sustainable.

There is already enough policy and general advice in place about the safety of international students. What we need is more operational programs with the police and other key stakeholders, leading to evidence-based practice.

In particular, evaluation of real world initiatives is needed to know what works and what does not. This way we can confidently reassure international students and their families that personal safety is a priority.

Mid-year orientation is occurring right now. This provides a timely opportunity to focus on international student safety.

– ref. Recent campus attacks show universities need to do more to protect international students – http://theconversation.com/recent-campus-attacks-show-universities-need-to-do-more-to-protect-international-students-120082

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Coates, Program Director, Household Finances, Grattan Institute

Compulsory superannuation was sold to Australians on the basis that it would make us better off.

But as the government prepares for an independent inquiry into retirement incomes, new Grattan Institute research finds that increasing compulsory contributions from 9.5% of wages to 12%, as has been legislated, would leave many Australian workers poorer over their entire lifetimes.

They would sacrifice a significantly increased share of their lifetime wage in exchange for little or no increase in their retirement income.

The typical worker would lose about A$30,000 over her or his lifetime.

More compulsory super means lower wages

Superannuation delivers higher incomes in retirement at the expense of lower incomes while working.

Yet the superannuation lobby usually presents only one side of the pact, urging an increase in compulsory super to get the higher retirement incomes while ignoring the income that workers have to forgo to get them.

Compulsory super contributions are paid by employers. But they appear to come out of funds the employers would otherwise have spent on wages.

This means increases in compulsory super come at the expense of wage increases – something that was acknowledged when compulsory super was set up (indeed, it was part of the reason it was set up) and has been acknowledged by advocates of higher contributions, including the former opposition leader Bill Shorten).

Read more: Productivity Commission finds super a bad deal. And yes, it comes out of wages

Grattan Institute calculations suggest that lifting compulsory super to 12% by 2025 will take up to A$20 billion a year from workers’ pockets. For most, the trade-off isn’t worth it.

The reality is that most Australians can already look forward to a better living standard in retirement than they had while working – even if they interrupt their careers to care for children. Workers with interrupted employment histories lose super in retirement, but get larger part-pensions.

The poorest Australians get a clear pay rise when they retire: the age pension is worth more than their after-tax income while working.

Other Grattan Institute research finds retirees are more comfortable financially than any other group of Australians and are much less likely to suffer financial stress than working-age Australians.

It needn’t lead to better retirement

So what about Middle Australia?

Despite the “magic” of compound returns, just about all of the extra income from a higher super balance at retirement would be offset by lower pension payments, due to the pension assets test.

It is always possible the pension rules will change, but it isn’t usually regarded as wise to assess proposals on the basis of changes that haven’t happened and aren’t being suggested.

Pension payments themselves would also be lower under a 12% superannuation regime. They are benchmarked to wages, which would be lower if employers have to put more into super.

The graph below shows that the big winners from higher compulsory super would be the wealthiest 20% of Australian earners, who would benefit from extra super tax breaks and would be unlikely to receive the age pension anyway.

Higher compulsory super redistributes income from the middle to the top. Middle earners would be no better off.

Over a lifetime, it could be a net loss

As higher compulsory super would leave Middle Australians no better off in retirement, but poorer while working, it follows that it would make them poorer over their entire lives.

How much poorer? We calculate that, after adjusting for inflation, the typical (median) 30-year-old Australian worker earning A$58,000 today would lose about 2.5% of wages each year and get less than a 1% boost to retirement income.

As a result, that person’s lifetime income would be almost 1% lower – about A$30,000 lower.

A post published on the Grattan Blog today gives more detail on the method we used to calculate the impact of higher compulsory super on lifetime incomes.

And it would cost the budget

Higher compulsory super might be justified if it saved the budget money on the pension – because those savings could be used to compensate middle-income earners via lower taxes or more services.

But in fact, higher super would cost the budget.

Our modelling shows that lifting compulsory super to 12% of wages would cost taxpayers an extra A$2 billion to A$2.5 billion per year in super tax breaks, overwhelmingly directed at high-income earners.

Read more: Myth busted. Boosting super would cost the budget more than it saved on age pensions

Those extra super tax breaks would dwarf any budget savings on the age pension until about 2060 – by which time there would be 80 years of budget costs from compulsory super to pay back before the whole exercise saved the government money.

Here’s the bottom line, worth keeping in mind in the lead-up to the independent inquiry: it’s hard to think of a policy less in the interests of working Australians than more compulsory super.

– ref. Super shock: more compulsory super would make Middle Australia poorer, not richer – http://theconversation.com/super-shock-more-compulsory-super-would-make-middle-australia-poorer-not-richer-120002

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caitlin Vincent, Lecturer in Creative Industries, University of Melbourne

In the first act of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical A Little Night Music, the long-suffering Countess Charlotte Malcolm mentions her younger sister, noting, “Dear Marta has renounced men and is teaching gymnastics in a school for retarded girls in Bettleheim”.

When first written for the show’s Broadway premiere in 1973, this was intended as a laugh line that transitions into the famous duet, Every Day a Little Death. But nearly 50 years later, it stands out for all the wrong reasons.

During Victorian Opera’s recent production of the musical in Melbourne, the use of the pejorative term “retarded” prompted an audible intake of breath from the audience, with many visibly shifting in their seats.

When the performers began the duet, the audience’s discomfort was largely forgotten. Yet the moment highlights one of the most significant challenges facing opera companies in the 21st century: an ever-widening gap between a repertoire that is frozen in time and an audience that is continuing to evolve.

This issue is increasingly coming to the fore in opera circles, as the stories presented on stage seem more and more removed from the modern realities of #MeToo and efforts to achieve racial and gender equality. In Australia recently, more than 190 composers, directors, and musicians signed a call to action to remove sexism and gendered violence from operatic works.

But the problem is deep-rooted and stems from opera’s nature as a historical art form.

The problem of the canon

The music and text of an opera are largely fixed, but stage interpretations can vary wildly depending on the performers, stage direction, design, venue, and budget.

This tension between score and stage has existed since opera’s emergence in 17th century Venice. With the turn of the 20th century, however, the operatic canon became codified as a collection of Greatest Hits, in which long dead composers like Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, and Rossini still reign supreme.

Opera companies are diversifying their programming with musical theatre, 20th century offerings (for example, works by British composer Benjamin Britten), and newly-commissioned works. Still, consider the five most performed operas in the world in 2018-2019: La Traviata, The Magic Flute, La bohème, Carmen, and The Barber of Seville. The most recent of these? La bohème, which premiered in 1896.

It’s not surprising that some of opera’s most canonical works struggle to find relevance with a modern-day audience. But this tension reaches a boiling point when it comes to operas that contain racist and misogynistic elements.

See, for example, the ethnic exoticism deployed in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Delibes’ Lakmé; the Chinese stereotypes in Puccini’s Turandot, the lightly-veiled anti-Semitism in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the Muslim caricatures in Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, and the gendered violence in Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s Tosca, to name just a few.

Read more: Why we must keep talking about Wagner and antisemitism

Many of these works have become even more problematic because of longstanding production conventions. Up until 2015, white tenors were still wearing “blackface” makeup when performing the titular role in Otello at The Metropolitan Opera. Productions of Madama Butterfly, Turandot, and The Mikado regularly put non-Asian performers in “yellowface” makeup.

Russian soprano Anna Netrebko recently caused a firestorm on social media after posting a selfie of herself wearing “brownface” makeup for a production of Aida.

Opera Australia prompted a similar backlash after casting a non-Hispanic performer as Maria for its 2019 production of West Side Story, a work with its own lengthy tradition of white performers playing Puerto Rican characters.

Opera traditionalists have long clung to the view that opera productions should function as historical artefacts, adhering to the intentions of the original composer and librettist as well as the way a work has “always” been done. The Facebook page Against Modern Opera Productions, which boasts more than 59,000 followers, is an online bastion of this viewpoint.

But when a work’s score and staging traditions are at odds with modern-day cultural norms, traditionalists may find themselves defending aspects of works that, in any other context, would be classified as racist and/or sexist.

Strategies for change

As opera audiences continue to dwindle, companies need to find a way forward that doesn’t alienate either traditionalists or the younger, more socially-minded generation.

One strategy used by the Canadian Opera Company was to rewrite the dialogue for Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio in order to remove racist language. Companies such as Seattle Opera have endeavoured to foster dialogue around troubling works like Madama Butterfly by scheduling accompanying events on diversity and representation.

Another common strategy is to commission new translations or use modernised supertitles (the opera equivalent of subtitles) that revise outdated language. In the case of Victorian Opera’s A Little Night Music, a minor edit to replace “retarded” with an alternate term might have been appropriate.

More generally, arts organisations are facing broader calls to diversify their casts and creative teams. The US-based organisation Final Bow for Yellow Face actively lobbies companies to “replace caricature with character” in productions across ballet, opera, and theatre.

These goals are difficult to achieve, particularly when traditional productions of works like Madama Butterfly and Turandot regularly pack in audiences worldwide. As audiences continue to evolve, however, the opera industry will soon need to grapple with larger questions about which works still belong in the “canon”.

In the meantime, perhaps the best option is to imagine what the original composer and librettist would really want. Would they rather have an audience that is wholly engrossed in the narrative unfolding on stage … or one that is uncomfortably shifting in their seats?

– ref. Opera is stuck in a racist, sexist past, while many in the audience have moved on – http://theconversation.com/opera-is-stuck-in-a-racist-sexist-past-while-many-in-the-audience-have-moved-on-120073

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martin Sevior, Associate Professor of Physics, University of Melbourne

Iranian officials this week revealed that the country’s nuclear program will break the limit for uranium enrichment, set under the terms of the deal struck in 2015 between Iran and world powers including the United States under former president Barack Obama.

Read more: Uranium, plutonium, heavy water … why Iran’s nuclear deal matters

What is uranium enrichment?

The nucleus of a uranium atom is a very rich source of energy. The splitting of a uranium atomic nucleus – a process called nuclear fission – produces more than 20 million times more energy than a strong chemical reaction such as burning a molecule of natural gas.

Atomic nuclei are made of two types of subatomic particles: protons and neutrons. All uranium atoms contain 92 protons, but can contain varying numbers of neutrons. Each specific combination of neutrons and protons is called an isotope. Isotopes are named according to the total number of protons and neutrons – hence, uranium-238 (U-238) contains 92 protons and 146 neutrons, whereas U-235 contains three fewer neutrons.

U-235 undergoes nuclear fission more readily than U-238, making it more valuable as a source of nuclear energy. What’s more, only U-235 can sustain a “nuclear chain reaction”, in which enough neutrons are released during nuclear fission to trigger fission in neighbouring atomic nuclei. This process is necessary to efficiently release large amounts of energy – either in a controlled way, such as in a nuclear power station, or in an uncontrolled explosion such as in a nuclear bomb.

Natural uranium, however, contains just 0.7% U-235, and 99.3% U-238. Commercial nuclear reactors designs generally require uranium fuel with U-235 concentrations of between 3.5% and 5%.

Uranium enrichment is the process of artificially increasing the proportion of U-235 in a sample of uranium to meet this requirement.

What does the process involve?

The technical details of uranium enrichment technology are highly classified, but we know the most efficient technique uses a process called centrifuge enrichment.

This involves reacting the uranium with fluorine to form a gas called uranium hexafluoride (UF₆). This is then spun at very high speeds in a series of centrifuges.

UF₆ molecules containing the heavier U-238 isotope are forced to the outside of the centrifuge, where they are removed. The remaining gas is thus richer in U-235, hence the term “enrichment”.

By feeding the mixture through a succession of centrifuges, the uranium becomes successively more enriched. Higher levels of uranium enrichment are therefore more expensive and time-consuming.

A typical 1-gigawatt commercial nuclear reactor contains one reactor and uses around 27 tonnes of enriched uranium fuel per year, although this depends on the quality of the nuclear fuel used. In a commercial market this costs around US$40 million, which is a small fraction of the US$450 million revenue that would be generated if we assume an electricity price of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Does it inevitably lead to weapons?

The technical details of nuclear weapons development are more closely guarded still. But we know that a uranium fission weapon requires tens of kilograms of highly enriched uranium, with U-235 concentrations of around 90%.

While the level of enrichment is much higher, there is no difference in the equipment used to make weapons-grade uranium, as opposed to nuclear fuel.

The same facilities used to produce 27 tonnes of 3.6% U-235 fuel for a commercial reactor could conceivably also be used to make one tonne of U-235 enriched to 90% – roughly enough for 20 nuclear weapons.

However, the post-processing of the UF₆ to make nuclear fuel is considerably different to that required for a weapon. In the case of nuclear fuel, it is formed into uranium oxide pellets and encased in zirconium alloy tubes. Weapons require pure uranium metal.

What limit has Iran breached, and what does it stand to gain?

Under the treaty, Iran agreed to enrich uranium to no more than 3.6%, and to only stockpile enough fuel to run its single commercial nuclear reactor for one year.

It has already breached the stockpiling limit, and has now broken the enrichment limit.

Read more: The Iran nuclear deal could still be saved, experts say

In theory, these breaches could allow Iran’s nuclear reactor to run more economically and for a longer time before the fuel needs to be replaced. However, these higher-enrichment fuels require very specialised processing, and only a handful of companies worldwide have the technology to do this. The waste handling required for the spent fuel is also more sophisticated.

Whatever Iran’s ultimate aim, and despite the diplomatic tensions, its uranium enrichment levels are not yet near those required for nuclear weapons.

– ref. Iran’s nuclear program breaches limits for uranium enrichment: 4 key questions answered – http://theconversation.com/irans-nuclear-program-breaches-limits-for-uranium-enrichment-4-key-questions-answered-119992

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robin Daly, Professor of Exercise and Ageing, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Deakin University, Deakin University

As we grow older, the size and strength of our muscles progressively deteriorates. This can affect our capacity to perform everyday activities like standing up from a chair, climbing stairs or carrying groceries.

For some people, muscle wasting becomes more severe, leading to falls, frailty, immobility and a loss of autonomy.

People who experience a marked loss in their muscle mass, strength and function may be suffering from a major but poorly recognised muscle-wasting condition called sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is to our muscles what osteoporosis is to our bones.

Sarcopenia is now recognised as a disease after being added to Australia’s formal list of diseases, called the (ICD-10-AM).

Read more: I’ve Always Wondered: why do our muscles stiffen as we age?

Given the condition may affect almost one-third of older adults in the community, it’s high time its impact is recognised and talked about.

The good news is that people with sarcopenia can rebuild their muscle mass and strength via strength or resistance training and some diet modifications. In fact, these are things we can all do to protect ourselves.

What causes sarcopenia?

Ageing disrupts the body’s ability to produce the proteins needed to grow or maintain muscles. As we age, fewer signals are also sent from the brain to the muscles, leading to a loss in the mass and size of our muscles.

Other causes of sarcopenia can include:

• Physical inactivity
• Malnutrition
• Changes in hormones like testosterone and growth hormones
• Increased inflammation
• The presence of other age-related diseases

Read more: Diseases through the decades – here’s what to look out for in your 40s, 60s, 80s and beyond

Who gets sarcopenia?

It’s been estimated that sarcopenia affects 10-30% of older adults living in the community, varying by age and ethnicity. This increases to around 40-50% in those aged over 80 or living in nursing homes, and up to 75% in older hospital inpatients.

Sarcopenia is most common in older people, but can also occur earlier in life. In our 40s, muscle mass and strength begin to decline, and without intervention such as regular exercise, this loss accelerates with age. By the age of 70, up to half of muscle mass is lost and this is often replaced with fat and fibrous tissue, particularly in people who are inactive.

Sarcopenia is common in people with other diseases such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Many of the drugs used to treat these conditions can contribute to sarcopenia, as they can cause an imbalance in muscle metabolism and disrupt the pathways that control muscle mass.

Yet because many health professionals have little knowledge of sarcopenia and its consequences, they don’t necessarily consider or treat age-, diet– or drug-related muscle wasting.

Consequences of sarcopenia

Skeletal muscle is the largest organ in the body, making up around 40% of body weight. It’s essential for both movement and metabolic functions such as regulating blood glucose levels. So it’s not surprising that sarcopenia is linked to many adverse health outcomes.

Sarcopenia has been associated with impaired mobility, osteoporosis, falls, fractures, frailty, poor outcomes after surgery, institutionalisation, hospital admissions, impaired quality of life and premature death.

Treating sarcopenia

There are currently no approved medications to treat sarcopenia, and research to identify new drugs has been inconclusive. The most effective approach we have is resistance or strength training, which should be done at least twice a week in combination with a nutritional (protein-enriched) intervention.

Skeletal muscle has a remarkable ability to adapt and regenerate in response to loading. Gains in muscle mass of 5-10% and improvements in muscle strength or power of 30-150% have been observed after 12 weeks of resistance training, even in older nursing home and hospitalised patients and the very old. This is equivalent to regaining the muscle mass lost over a decade.

Read more: Why hip fractures in the elderly are often a death sentence

Everyone will respond to resistance-type exercise if it’s appropriately prescribed, but fewer than 15% of older Australians participate in twice-weekly resistance training.

Accredited exercise physiologists are best positioned to prescribe and deliver evidence-based exercise programs for older people and those with chronic diseases including sarcopenia.

Nutritional factors, such as protein, are also important for maintaining muscle, particularly in older patients who may be malnourished. To ensure an adequate intake of protein each day, most people should aim for one to three serves of lean meat, poultry, fish/seafood, eggs, nuts/seeds, or legumes.

Low vitamin D has also been linked to muscle weakness and falls. Sunlight exposure is the main way to get vitamin D, but where appropriate, a doctor may recommend a vitamin D supplement.

Moving forward

Recognition of sarcopenia as a distinct disease in Australia is critical to raise awareness of the condition among health professionals and the wider community.

Improved awareness will lead to better routine treatment for people with sarcopenia. For example, a GP who identifies a patient with sarcopenia can refer them to an exercise physiologist under a chronic disease management plan, which includes up to five Medicare-rebated sessions with an allied health professional over a calendar year.

Read more: Do you even lift? Why lifting weights is more important for your health than you think

More broadly, recognition is an essential step if we’re going to see any changes to public health policy. It will enable the collection of more rigorous data on the prevalence of sarcopenia, and pave the way for additional resources to be targeted towards prevention.

Right now, the biggest challenge in the field is accurately and consistently diagnosing the condition. The type of assessments for muscle mass, strength and function used to diagnose sarcopenia continue to be debated. We need to progress towards a single international definition that includes region- and ethnic- specific criteria.

– ref. The muscle-wasting condition ‘sarcopenia’ is now a recognised disease. But we can all protect ourselves – http://theconversation.com/the-muscle-wasting-condition-sarcopenia-is-now-a-recognised-disease-but-we-can-all-protect-ourselves-119458

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Harris Rimmer, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Griffith Law School, Griffith University

The Lowy Institute has launched a three-year study on gender representation in Australia’s diplomatic, defence and intelligence services, and the findings are critical: gender diversity lags significantly behind Australia’s public service and corporate sector, as well as other countries’ foreign services.

In a field which has long ignored research on gender or feminist approaches to understanding international relations, this report is welcome and sets forth an important research agenda within Australia.

Gender diversity is an important issue for all who value the pursuit of Australia’s national interests overseas. Attracting and retaining the best talent is more important now than ever before.

As then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in June 2017:

The economic, political and strategic currents that have carried us for generations are increasingly difficult to navigate.

The report’s most significant findings

The Lowy Institute found that of all the fields in international relations, women are least represented in Australia’s intelligence communities.

As the funding and resources of the intelligence sector continue to grow, this is a serious problem with little transparency. The sector appears to be struggling with a “pipeline” and “ladder” problem: women are both joining at lower rates and progressing at far slower rates than their male counterparts.

Another important finding is that the presence of female trailblazers in these fields, such as foreign ministers Julie Bishop and Marise Payne and Labor’s shadow foreign minister, Penny Wong, may be masking more systemic issues. This may be leading some agencies to becoming complacent, rather than proactive, on gender diversity.

Read more: In the bid for more female leaders, ‘mansplaining’ probably won’t help

Women’s pathways to leadership continue to be impeded by institutional obstacles, such as unconscious bias and discrimination built into the cultures of these sectors, as well as difficulties in supporting staff on overseas postings. For instance, the report notes that in 2017 the government cut assistance packages for overseas officers, including government childcare subsidies. This has gendered ramifications given that women continue to do the bulk of domestic labour.

As such, the most important and high-prestige international postings are still largely dominated by men. DFAT’s Women in Leadership Strategy has proved successful in meeting initial targets for improving women’s representation, however the industry as a whole has not yet followed suit.

Further, it is not enough to just consider how many women there are, but what roles they occupy, given that women have often been siloed into “soft policy” or corporate areas and out of key operational roles needed for career progression.

The report also draws attention to the marginalisation of women from key policy-shaping activities.

From the study’s research on declared authorship, a woman is yet to be selected to lead on any major foreign policy, defence, intelligence, or trade white paper, inquiry or independent review.

Read more: Women in combat: the battle is over but the war against prejudice grinds on

We would mention a few exceptions of women in other high-profile foreign policy roles – Heather Smith’s stewardship of the G20 during Australia’s presidency and Harinder Sidhu’s leadership in the crucial India High Commission. We would also note the contribution of Jane Duke to the ASEAN Summit in Sydney.

Rebecca Skinner has served as associate defence secretary since 2017 and Justine Grieg was appointed deputy secretary defence people in 2018. Major General Cheryl Pearce was also appointed commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus – the first Australian woman to command a UN peacekeeping mission.

While the under-representation of women in international affairs remains a core concern, we would argue the report could have taken a broader look at gender representation in foreign affairs-focused academic communities, think tanks and publishing industries, as well.

Many of these organisations have similarly woeful records when it comes to gender diversity. For instance, Australian Foreign Affairs magazine has been criticised for the lack of women authors it publishes. We know that it is not for lack of credible voices, but rather seems indicative of a systematic form of marginalisation of women within the wider foreign affairs community.

Bright spots for gender diversity

However, there is some cause for optimism. For instance, our current PhD project is documenting the gender make-up of leaders and internationally deployed representatives in the departments of foreign affairs and trade, defence and home affairs, as well as the Australian Federal Police. As of this January, women represented 39.5% of those in the senior executive service in DFAT, and 41.4% of those employed as heads of Australian embassies and high commissions globally.

Further, we’ve found an increase recently in the number of women who work in diplomatic defence roles. While the Lowy report notes that women held just 11% of international roles in defence in 2016 (it is unclear exactly what international roles they are talking about), we found a slightly higher percentage of women (19%) currently employed in defence attaché roles.

Read more: Australia’s performance on gender equality – are we fair dinkum?

The achievements made in this sphere are not just limited to gender either, with women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds forming an important and growing part of representation.

In fact, a more in-depth analysis of the Lowy report’s data would have produced some very interesting, and more nuanced, findings. For instance, foreign affairs has long been the preserve of men, however it has also been the preserve of certain types of men. Diplomacy remains a bastion of prestige, social class, heteronormativity, and in Australia, Anglo-Saxon privilege. It was only last year, for example, that Australia’s first Indigenous woman, Julie-Ann Guivarra, was appointed ambassador (to Spain).

Overall, as the report outlines, gender equality is not just nice to have, nor is it a marginal issue in foreign policy. Rather, the findings are clear: addressing the continued gender gaps are imperative to Australian foreign policy, national security and stability.

We can, and must, do better. Australian foreign policy needs good ideas, and it needs a lot of them. We cannot assume they will all come from the same place.

– ref. Diplomacy and defence remain a boys’ club, but women are making inroads – http://theconversation.com/diplomacy-and-defence-remain-a-boys-club-but-women-are-making-inroads-119984

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig Stewart, Marine Physicist, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research

The ocean that surrounds Antarctica plays a crucial role in regulating the mass balance of the continent’s ice cover. We now know that the thinning of ice that affects nearly a quarter of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is clearly linked to the ocean.

The connection between the Southern Ocean and Antarctica’s ice sheet lies in ice shelves – massive slabs of glacial ice, many hundreds of metres thick, that float on the ocean. Ice shelves grind against coastlines and islands and buttress the outflow of grounded ice. When the ocean erodes ice shelves from below, this buttressing action is reduced.

While some ice shelves are thinning rapidly, others remain stable, and the key to understanding these differences lies within the hidden oceans beneath ice shelves. Our recently published research explores the ocean processes that drive melting of the world’s largest ice shelf. It shows that a frequently overlooked process is driving rapid melting of a key part of the shelf.

Read more: Ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica predicted to bring more frequent extreme weather

Ocean fingerprints on ice sheet melt

Rapid ice loss from Antarctica is frequently linked to Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW). This relatively warm (+1C) and salty water mass, which is found at depths below 300 metres around Antarctica, can drive rapid melting. For example, in the south-east Pacific, along West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea coast, CDW crosses the continental shelf in deep channels and enters ice shelf cavities, driving rapid melting and thinning.

Interestingly, not all ice shelves are melting quickly. The largest ice shelves, including the vast Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves, appear close to equilibrium. They are largely isolated from CDW by the cold waters that surround them.

The contrasting effects of CDW and cold shelf waters, combined with their distribution, explain much of the variability in the melting we observe around Antarctica today. But despite ongoing efforts to probe the ice shelf cavities, these hidden seas remain among the least explored parts of Earth’s oceans.

Read more: Climate scientists explore hidden ocean beneath Antarctica’s largest ice shelf

It is within this context that our research explores a new and hard-won dataset of oceanographic observations and melt rates from the world’s largest ice shelf.

Beneath the Ross Ice Shelf

In 2011, we used a 260 metre deep borehole that had been melted through the north-western corner of the Ross Ice Shelf, seven kilometres from the open ocean, to deploy instruments that monitor ocean conditions and melt rates beneath the ice. The instruments remained in place for four years.

The observations showed that far from being a quiet back water, conditions beneath the ice shelf are constantly changing. Water temperature, salinity and currents follow a strong seasonal cycle, which suggests that warm surface water from north of the ice front is drawn southward into the cavity during summer.

Melt rates at the mooring site average 1.8 metres per year. While this rate is much lower than ice shelves impacted by warm CDW, it is ten times higher than the average rate for the Ross Ice Shelf. Strong seasonal variability in the melt rate suggests that this melting hotspot is linked to the summer inflow.

To assess the scale of this effect, we used a high-precision radar to map basal melt rates across a region of about 8,000 square kilometres around the mooring site. Careful observations at around 80 sites allowed us to measure the vertical movement of the ice base and internal layers within the ice shelf over a one-year interval. We could then determine how much of the thinning was caused by basal melting.

Melting was fastest near the ice front where we observed short-term melt rates of up to 15 centimetres per day – several orders of magnitude higher than the ice shelf average rate. Melt rates reduced with distance from the ice front, but rapid melting extended far beyond the mooring site. Melting from the survey region accounted for some 20% of the total from the entire ice shelf.

The bigger picture

Why is this region of the shelf melting so much more quickly than elsewhere? As is so often the case in the ocean, it appears that winds play a key role.

During winter and spring, strong katabatic winds sweep across the western Ross Ice Shelf and drive sea ice from the coast. This leads to the formation of an area that is free of sea ice, a polynya, where the ocean is exposed to the atmosphere. During winter, this area of open ocean cools rapidly and sea ice grows. But during spring and summer, the dark ocean surface absorbs heat from the sun and warms, forming a warm surface pool with enough heat to drive the observed melting.

Although the melt rates we observe are far lower than those seen on ice shelves influenced by CDW, the observations suggest that for the Ross Ice Shelf, surface heat is important.

Given this heat is closely linked to surface climate, it is likely that the predicted reductions in sea ice within the coming century will increase basal melt rates. While the rapid melting we observed is currently balanced by ice inflow, glacier models show that this is a structurally critical region where the ice shelf is pinned against Ross Island. Any increase in melt rates could reduce buttressing from Ross Island, increasing the discharge of land-based ice, and ultimately add to sea levels.

While there is still much to learn about these processes, and further surprises are certain, one thing is clear. The ocean plays a key role in the dynamics of Antarctica’s ice sheet and to understand the stability of the ice sheet we must look to the ocean.

– ref. How solar heat drives rapid melting of parts of Antarctica’s largest ice shelf – http://theconversation.com/how-solar-heat-drives-rapid-melting-of-parts-of-antarcticas-largest-ice-shelf-118835

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sherif Abbas, Research Fellow, RMIT University

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

How does electricity work? – Edie, age 5.

Electricity is all around us. Maybe some of the toys you play with run on batteries, which have electricity stored in them. You or your parents are reading this article on a computer, phone or tablet, all of which use electricity. The light bulbs, the television, the traffic lights, cars, aeroplanes – they all run on electricity. Electricity is exciting and important, so I am glad you asked this excellent question.

Everything is made from atoms

Everything is made from little tiny things called atoms. They are so small we cannot see them. They are much smaller than chickpeas, rice, ants, and ant eggs.

Because atoms are so small, we need a lot of them to make things. For example, a grain of rice has billions and billions and billions of atoms. Those atoms make up the rice, in the way LEGO pieces make up a LEGO car or house. They atoms click together and hold onto each other.

Even though an atom is extremely small, it is also made from even smaller things.

One of the things that make up the atom is called an “electron”. Electrons have many jobs. Some electrons help the atoms hold onto each other. Scientists call these electrons the “bonding electrons”. Bond means to stick together.

Other electrons just keep running around in the atoms. They are free electrons and they’re always on the move. Sometimes, they can move from one atom to another.

Electricity happens when electrons move from one atom to another.

Electricity in the power cable

So, the story so far: we know there are billions and billions and billions of atoms. There are also billions and billions and billions of electrons in everything around you. A leaf, a plastic cup, your pet – they all have electrons. Some things, like metals, have more free electrons than other things. A plastic cup, for example, doesn’t have as many free electrons.

You probably have a lot of power cables at home. They might be plugged into the TV or computer or a phone charger. Power cables have a huge number of free electrons.

When the free electrons in a power cable move from one atom to another, almost all in the same direction, you get something called an “electric current” running through the power cable.

How do we push the electrons through the cable? Adults do that by plugging the cable into a wall socket.

Remember, electricity can be very dangerous and can even kill people, so it’s important that kids just let adults handle the cables and wall sockets.

The socket makes a thing called “voltage”, which is like an invisible force that pushes all the electrons in the same direction down the cable.

Once the cable is plugged into the socket, the socket pushes the electrons inside the cable, like cars moving down lots of lanes in a highway. The electrons inside the cable then keep pushing each other forward (and sometimes back and forth depending on the type of electricity). This creates an electric current inside the cable.

The cables have a kind of jacket (which we call “insulation”) on the outside to keep the electrons moving along the metal safely. These jackets make it safe for us to use electricity by keeping them in the metal.

But where does electricity come from?

Electricity comes from power stations – great, big places that can make electricity in different ways.

One way is by burning coal. But this way is bad for our environment. Some power stations use the light from the Sun to make electricity, using large solar panels. Or they might use wind, or water to make electricity. These methods are not as bad for our environment.

If you’re interested in learning more about how electricity is made, check out this Curious Kids article over here.

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

– ref. Curious Kids: how does electricity work? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-does-electricity-work-118686