Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Baxter, Fellow – Melbourne Law School; Associate – Australian-German Climate and Energy College, University of Melbourne

Let me explain how to see through the spin on Australia’s rising greenhouse emissions figures.

With the release today of Australia’s emissions data for the December 2018 quarter, federal energy and emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor has been more forthcoming than usual about the rising trend in Australia’s emissions.

There’s one small issue, though. Despite Taylor’s comments in which he sought to explain away Australia’s 0.7% year-on-year rise in emissions as a product of increased gas investment, actual emissions in the December quarter were in fact down relative to the September 2018 quarter. This is due mainly to the fact that people use much more energy for heating in the July-September period than they do during the milder spring weather of October-December.

Taylor, meanwhile, was discussing the “adjusted” data, which reveals an 0.8% increase between the two quarters.

This might all sound like minor quibbling. But knowing the difference between quarterly and annual figures, and raw and adjusted data – and knowing what’s ultimately the most important metric – is crucial to understanding Australia’s emissions. And it might come in handy next time you’re listening to a politician discussing our progress (or lack thereof) towards tackling climate change.

Read more: Australia is not on track to reach 2030 Paris target (but the potential is there)

Highlighting the difference between quarters is problematic, because emissions data are what statisticians describe as “noisy”. Emissions levels jump around from period to period, which can obscure the overall trend.

Quarterly data is important for understanding how Australia is tracking more generally towards doing its fair share on reducing its emissions. But too much stock is put on the noise, and not enough on the underlying trend.

The charts below compare our estimated actual emissions on a quarterly basis (top) with the cumulative emissions for the year leading up to that quarter (here described as the “year-to-quarter emissions” and shown in the lower chart).

These charts, both built on today’s data, make a few things clear.

Quarterly emissions are noisy

The first thing to note is that saying that our emissions are down compared with the previous quarter is hardly remarkable, or worth patting ourselves on the back for. This is especially true if we are comparing the December quarter data, released today, with the data for the preceding quarter.

September quarter emissions are almost always higher than the rest of the year. This is because, while September itself is in spring, the September quarter also covers July and August.

Our winter heating needs are generally met using fossil fuels, whether through electric heaters or natural gas, which is why the September quarter has the highest emissions. In the December quarter, which covers most of spring, our need for heating drops, and so do our emissions.

But if you look beyond the difference between quarters, as in the second chart above, you can see the underlying rising trend in our greenhouse gas emissions.

Cherrypicking the best metric

Readers who follow climate politics may remember the spectacular moment in March when Taylor appeared on ABC’s Insiders opposite Barrie Cassidy.

Many journalists, including those on the Insiders panel that day, responded at the time that Taylor’s claim that emissions had dipped over the preceding three months was true but not meaningful, in the context of an annual rising trend.

But it was not even necessarily true. As is visible in the quarterly chart, emissions were not lower in the September quarter of 2018 than they were in the preceding quarter.

Specifically, Taylor claimed that “total emissions are coming down right now”. This is only true if we are talking about “seasonally adjusted, weather-normalised total emissions”. The adjusted data are shown above. While the adjusted data went down between quarters, the actual emissions went up.

The process of adjustment is not unprincipled, and is used to see through the noise of our emissions data. “Seasonal adjustment” and “weather normalisation” are two separate processes.

Seasonal adjustment refers to the process of adjusting the emissions figures to account for the predictable seasonal fluctuations described earlier. Weather normalisation does the same, but takes into account individual temperature extremes, both hot and cold, during any given period, and adjusts accordingly.

Much as a golf handicap lets us compare the performance of golfers of differing abilities, these data adjustments tell us whether our emissions are tracking higher or lower than we might expect.

But if a golfer with a handicap of 10 goes around the course in 82 shots, we don’t declare that they have actually hit the ball only 72 times.

This is essentially what Taylor did in his interview with Cassidy. It is not correct to refer to these adjusted emissions data as our “total emissions”.

What does data adjustment mean?

Building on this, it is important to note that the adjusted data and actual data often disagree on whether emissions have increased between quarters. Since the Coalition took office in 2013, there have been 21 quarterly emissions data releases.

The actual quarterly emissions have increased nine times between quarters. The adjusted data says there have been 12 of these increases. And they have only agreed on whether there was an increase six times.

When one form of the data shows an increase and the other does not, the minister has a choice about which figure to highlight.

In the September quarter, the actual emissions gave bad news (an increase), and the adjusted emissions gave good news (a reduction). Taylor chose to refer to the adjusted data, as did the then environment minister Melissa Price, who had portfolio responsibility for emissions reduction at the time.

Today, this was flipped. The actual emissions showed good news (a reduction) and the adjusted data showed bad news (an increase).

It’s refreshing, then, to see Taylor choose to focus on the adjusted emissions data this time around, when he could have chosen the spin route and focused on the fact that the raw data showed a decrease between quarters.

So what does it all mean?

What we can say without any equivocation at all is that since 2015, in the wake of the carbon price repeal the preceding July, Australia’s greenhouse emissions have increased. On the government’s own projections , this trend is not expected to change.

Even if the government’s Climate Solutions Package delivers the amount of emissions reductions that have been promised (and it is unclear that it will), the overall effect will be to stabilise emissions rather than bring them down. This is because the government intends to use Kyoto carryover credits to help meet its Paris Agreement goal, rather than using fresh carbon reductions to deliver in full.

Read more: Australia has two decades to avoid the most damaging impacts of climate change

Stabilisation is not enough. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made clear in its Special Report on 1.5℃ last year, deep cuts are required to ensure a safe climate. The Paris Agreement, while calling on all nations to do their part, says rich countries such as Australia should take the lead.

The need to reduce emissions is pressing. And while the raw emissions figures may be down this quarter, this is not meaningful progress. Far more meaningful is the fact that Australia has no effective policy to limit our impact on the global climate.

– ref. Whichever way you spin it, Australia’s greenhouse emissions have been climbing since 2015 – http://theconversation.com/whichever-way-you-spin-it-australias-greenhouse-emissions-have-been-climbing-since-2015-118112

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marc C-Scott, Senior lecturer in Screen Media, Victoria University

Apple says it’s replacing iTunes with three dedicated entertainment applications as part of its new Mac operating system, Catalina, for desktop and laptop computers.

A key reason for the change is based around the way we now watch, listen to, download and stream media.

Recent years have seen immense shifts in consumer behaviour, plus new players, new media formats and an abundance of fresh content uploaded every day.

Read more: Facebook is now cleaner, faster and group-focused, but still all about your data

Young media services have quickly established themselves as market leaders, solely focused on a single media format, such as video for Netflix and audio for Spotify.

For Apple, separating music, TV and podcasts allows it to refine each app in a distinct way. The user interface, library and personalised recommendations can all be tailored to each of the particular media formats in the future.

A lot has changed in 18 years

The original iTunes is now clearly outdated.

iTunes was first launched 18 years ago by then Apple CEO and cofounder Steve Jobs. Jobs noted that other tech companies already had media platforms available to users, but they were too complicated.

Jobs said Apple was “late to this party and we are about to do a leapfrog” with a simpler system in iTunes for playing audio and video. Later that same year, Apple announced the missing piece to this puzzle, Apple’s own MP3 player, the iPod.

What Apple is doing now is another potential “leapfrog” in replacing iTunes with three dedicated applications.

This decision follows the company’s strategy for its portable devices, which already have individual applications for music, TV and podcasts.

Apple’s podcast platform

Podcasts are not a new media format, but the latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report says they have become more popular in recent years due to “better content and easier distribution”.

The report’s survey of how people get their news shows:

[…] podcasts tend to perform best in countries like the US (33%) and Australia (33%) where people spend a lot of time in their cars.

In addition, people under 35 listen to twice as many podcasts people over 45. The report says this is due to the younger demographic embracing smart phones and streaming services.

Anchor is a free service that helps people create and distribute podcasts. It named Apple Podcast as the most used application for listening to podcasts on its platform, at more than 50%. Second was Spotify at 19%, and other platforms less than 5%.

This indicates Apple’s dominance in the podcast space. In 2018, a report shows there were more than 525,000 active shows and more than 18.5 million episodes available on Apple’s podcast platform. That same year Apple had reached 50 billion all-time episode downloads and streams, more than a threefold increase on the total downloads as of 2017, 13.7 billion.

But despite Apple being the most used platform for podcast listening, it faces strong competition in the mobile market from companies using rival operating systems such as Android.

Last year Apple dropped to third for smart phone market share globally. Samsung remained the leader, with Huawei gaining a large increase in 2018 to overtake Apple.

The future for video

A major part of Apple’s recent decision to split iTunes is associated with the significant changes in the video-on-demand market, including an influx of new services. There are still more changes to come, and Apple clearly intends to be ready. Apple has announced it will launch its Apple TV+ streaming service later this year in the United States.

Apple will have to compete with streaming giant Netflix, which has 60 million subscribers in the US alone. But it will also be competing with Hulu, which has 28 million US subscribers.

Other new services in the US will also be launched in the near future, including Disney+, NBC Universal, and AT&T’s WarnerMedia.

Read more: Blocking Huawei’s 5G could isolate Australia from future economic opportunities

In Australia, we have seen a distinct change in video viewing behaviour since the launch of Netflix in 2015. Shifts in consumer preferences and the industry itself had immense impact on the Australian media landscape. You can expect this to continue as some of the services launching in the US this year expand to Australia.

It’s not known yet when the Apple TV+ service will launch in Australia, but Apple’s TV app is available to Australians. Through this, it seems clear the company plans to aggregate video content from a range of services, including broadcaster video-on-demand (BVoD) services such as ABC iView and TenPlay.

So Apple is now fighting on several fronts across TV, music and podcasts to sustain or achieve market leadership. By marketing the three media applications separately it can invest in the individual media areas as required, or remove itself entirely.

– ref. The end is nigh for Apple’s iTunes as the tech giant targets separate audio and video markets – http://theconversation.com/the-end-is-nigh-for-apples-itunes-as-the-tech-giant-targets-separate-audio-and-video-markets-118257

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sebastian Fastenrath, Research Fellow in Resilient Cities, University of Melbourne

It was no April fool’s joke when the Rockefeller Foundation announced it will phase out funding for the 100 Resilient Cities network. The foundation’s message was a surprise for many participating cities, including Melbourne and Sydney, and for its partnering non-governmental organisations, businesses and academics.

100 Resilient Cities is a global network designed to increase urban resilience, defined as:

the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.

Read more: Pacific island cities call for a rethink of climate resilience for the most vulnerable

Since 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation has invested more than US$150 million in 100 Resilient Cities to support cities in tackling environmental, social and economic challenges.

Each city receives funding for a chief resilience officer, a position located in councils to lead the city’s resilience efforts, and for drafting a resilience strategy. Member cities also gain access to knowledge and expertise through a network of partners from private, public and non-governmental sectors.

Where are these resilient cities?

The network has grown to 97 cities, including cities from the Global North and South. Prominent members include New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Singapore and London. In Australia, Melbourne and Sydney were among the first two groups of cities that joined in 2013 and 2014 respectively.

Even though the growing number of member cities is a success, representatives of 100 Resilient Cities made clear that the “task is far from complete”. Almost half (47) of the 97 cities are still developing their resilience strategies.

When the program stops in July, it is unclear what will happen to the knowledge gained through city strategy processes, the many positions created in local governments to support the program, and thousands of resilience actions started by cities under this banner.

How has Melbourne benefited?

Melbourne joined on the agreement that it would include all 32 of its metropolitan councils to challenge the divide between inner and outer urban areas.

Read more: Rapid growth is widening Melbourne’s social and economic divide

In 2016, Resilient Melbourne released Australia’s first resilience strategy. It identified shocks and stresses, and outlined strategies in fields such as urban greening, emergency management, transport, housing, social inequality and energy.

One of these is Living Melbourne: our metropolitan urban forest, a newly released strategy to increase vegetation cover in the city. This action links and extends existing urban greening initiatives. The core goals are: increased biodiversity; better air, soil and water quality; heat reduction; and improved physical and mental health.

Read more: How Melbourne’s west was greened

The Nature Conservancy, a non-profit environmental organisation and partner of 100 Resilient Cities, helps to develop this action, particularly with technical expertise.

Living Melbourne showcases how to bring together stakeholders from all levels of government, business, civil society and academia. Our research project found many stakeholders see Resilient Melbourne as a new platform for knowledge exchange and urban innovation.

These findings resonate with an Urban Institute study on the early achievements of 100 Resilient Cities. The study found many cities, after joining the network, show a stronger interest in collaboration across government agencies and between public and private sectors.

It also found ongoing challenges, including a lack of transparency and community participation. These aspects need closer attention in future resilience-building initiatives and city networks.

Read more: Has the 100 Resilient Cities Challenge benefited Melbourne?

What now?

Actions such as Living Melbourne are the result of collaboration and learning processes within and between cities. It shows that resilience actions must be implemented as ongoing and inclusive experiments that test new ways of urban development.

However, it is too early to review the success of the initiative in total. This applies particularly to the impacts of actions aimed at driving institutional and social change that might only become visible in 10 or 20 years.

The immediate value of these networked efforts, as Resilient Melbourne has proven, is to connect local experiences to international agendas, learn from other cities’ experiences, and access technical and financial inputs. They also support new conversations that involve “communities of practice” across the whole city, linking citizens, resilience practitioners, experts and businesses.

Yet the change of heart at Rockefeller and the relatively sudden shift in support illustrates a very tangible risk of privately funded philanthropic support for international initiatives on cities.

One solution is to diversify the funding mixes at the heart of these networks. Another global city network, C40 Cities, has pursued this in recent years.

Another solution is to allocate greater responsibility for cooperation across national, state and local governments. This should help with longevity, transparency and policy learning in city networks. The Swedish national Viable Cities program provides a model of this.

In the wake of these experiences, a more open and strategic conversation on the role of philanthropy in advancing urban resilience agendas should take place urgently.

– ref. What next after 100 Resilient Cities funding ends? – http://theconversation.com/what-next-after-100-resilient-cities-funding-ends-116734

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Robinson, Senior Research Fellow (Macroeconomics), Melbourne Institute, University of Melbourne

The Australian economy grew by just 0.4% in the March quarter. It was a pick up from 0.2% in the December quarter, but over the year the four quarters taken together amounted to only 1.8%.

It’s the first time Australia’s annual economic growth rate has had a “1” in front of it since 2013, and the lowest annual growth rate since the global financial crisis.

Economic growth begins with ‘1’

1.8% is a big step down from the decade average of 2.6% displayed by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on a chart prepared by his office, and below most estimates of the potential growth rate of the economy.

Real GDP growth

And most of the 1.8% was the result of population growth.

GDP per capita fell marginally in the March quarter after slipping by 0.1% and 0.2% in the previous two quarters.

Growth per person is weak

It means GDP per capita has fallen for three consecutive quarters – the first time that has happened in almost four decades, since the early 1980s recession.

Over the year to March, GDP per person grew just 0.1%, a result that suggests living standards barely grew.

But actual living standards grew by more. The Bureau of Statistics says the best guide is “real net national disposable income per capita,” a measure that takes better account of prices paid and income received.

It grew by a more impressive 1% and 0.5% in the December and March quarters on the back of sharply higher commodity prices, suggesting that, for the moment at least, living standards are not going backwards.

Household spending growth is weak

Household spending climbed only 1.7% over the year, barely more than population growth. The treasurer’s graph shows it was and well below recent average growth of 2.7%.

Household consumption growth accounted for just 0.1 points of the 0.4 points of economic growth over the quarter, which is well down on its usual substantial contribution as it is the largest component of output – around 60%.

Growth in household consumption

Consumption of discretionary items such as restaurant meals and entertainment, fell while consumption of essentials such as electricity, health services and rent, continued to climb.

The treasurer’s chart showed that most of the items on which we cut spending were discretionary.

Growth in consumption by category

Home building is falling

Low wages growth and falling housing prices are factors dampening consumption growth. The downturn in the housing market is also weighing on output growth through falling construction. In the March quarter it declined 2.5%, and was 3.1% lower over the year, a far cry from 10% plus annual growth rates achieved as recently as three years ago.

Growth in dwelling investment

Government spending has surged

By itself the government sector was responsible for half of the economic growth in the quarter, contributing 0.2 of the 0.4 percentage points.

Government spending surged more than 5% over year reflecting growth in spending on the National Disability Insurance Scheme and infrastructure.

Growth in new public final demand

Exports supported growth

Net exports contributed another 0.2 points to the 0.4 points of economic growth, with exports of rural goods, ores and minerals and services increasing.

Imports fell slightly, reflecting a weak economy.

Australia’s terms of trade – the ratio of export to import prices – jumped 3.1% as supply disruptions – including a dam burst in Brazil – boosted the spot price of iron ore.

Investment has flatlined

Although business investment was 1.3% lower over the year, it climbed 0.3% and 0.6% in the December and March quarters, suggesting that the worst of the slide might be over.

Treasurer Frydenberg said it was a tale of two sectors – investment in mining fell 1.8% over the quarter and was down 10.6% over the year as part of the transition from the investment in new facilities to production.

More encouragingly, non-mining investment grew by 2% in the quarter, reflecting commercial construction.

Growth in new business investment

Inflation is weak

Inflation is determined by productivity-adjusted wages (unit labour costs) and import prices.

Unit labour cost growth moderated to be up just 0.3% in the quarter. Labour productivity (GDP per hour) declined 0.5% in the quarter to be down 1% over the year.

Import prices fell slightly, although given the recent depreciation in the Australian dollar means they are likely to increase in the near term. For the moment it adds up to little inflationary pressure.

Households are less optimistic

Consumers’ expectations, as measured by the Westpac-Melbourne Institute Consumer Sentiment Expectations Index, have softened this year, but remain well above the lows reached during the global financial crisis and early 1990s recession.

The index is made up of answers to questions about expectations for family finances over the next 12 months, economic conditions over the next 12 months, and economic conditions over the next five years.

They are presented on a scale where 100 means expectations of improving conditions balance those of worsening conditions and greater than 100 means optimistic responses outweigh the pessimistic.

Westpac Melbourne Institute Consumer Sentiment Expectations Index

Further ahead, the signs aren’t good

Subdued economic growth may well continue for some time. This is suggested by the Westpac Melbourne Institute Leading Index for April which points to below-trend growth for the next 3 to 9 months.

The index combines a selection of economic variables whose movements typically point to movements in gross domestic product, including the S&P/ASX 200 stock index, dwelling approvals, US industrial production, the Reserve Bank Commodity Prices Index, aggregate monthly hours worked, the consumer sentiment expectations index the Westpac-Melbourne Institute Unemployment Expectations Index, and a financial market yield spread.

Westpac Melbourne Institute Leading Index

This week’s Reserve Bank rate cut and those that follow will provide some support. The important question is how much will be needed.

More sluggish world growth due to increased trade tensions is likely to weigh on export growth in the near term. The depreciation in the Australian dollar, however, will provide a buffer.

A positive aspect for the consumption outlook is that there are tentative signs that the pace in decline in house prices is moderating, although what will happen is highly uncertain.

Overall, consumption growth is likely to continue to be soft, with at best only modest improvements in the near term. The downturn in residential construction clearly has further to run, with dwelling approvals in April down 24% on a year ago.

Read more: The Reserve Bank will cut rates again and again, until we lift spending and push up prices

The government sector will have to continue to be an important source of growth in the near term. Whether non-mining investment growth will maintain its recent momentum is uncertain, as subdued consumption growth and the downturn in residential construction might dampen firms’ demand.

A problem faced by the Reserve Bank is that inflation has now undershot its target for so long that may be feeding into inflation expectations, making achieving the target more difficult.

Given the relative health of its budget, and Australia’s infrastructure needs, the government itself is in a position to step up and do more to boost the economy.

Look further ahead, the national accounts make clear that the government will have address Australia’s lacklustre productivity growth. It has been given a lot to work through.

– ref. Expect weak economic growth for quite some time. What Wednesday’s national accounts tell us – http://theconversation.com/expect-weak-economic-growth-for-quite-some-time-what-wednesdays-national-accounts-tell-us-118273

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Blyth, Paediatrician, Infectious Diseases Physician and Clinical Microbiologist, University of Western Australia

A ten-year-old Perth boy is the latest Australian child to die from suspected influenza so far this year. This follows the deaths of three Victorian children, and a teenager in South Australia.

Influenza-associated deaths in childhood are uncommon. Despite this, influenza is the most common cause of vaccine-preventable death – more common than meningococcal disease or pertussis (whooping cough).

On average, between five and ten Australian children are reported to die from influenza each year. Tragically, many flu deaths occur in previously healthy children.

These deaths can frequently be prevented through vaccination: analysis by Australian researchers determined that of the children who died from influenza in New South Wales in the ten years to 2014, none were vaccinated.

Read more: Thinking about getting your child the flu vaccine? Here’s what you need to know

More cases and greater harms

Influenza virus is predominantly spread in droplets created when people with flu cough and sneeze. The virus can also live on objects touched by those with flu, picked up by the hands of others.

Children are more likely to catch and spread influenza: they have large volumes of virus in their nasal secretions and, after infection, shed this for days. They also have poorer hygiene practices, often coughing and spluttering over those closest to them.

For many young children with flu, it is the first time they are exposed to the virus. Their immune system is naïve to influenza and therefore responds more slowly to the infection. This means the influenza virus can cause significant ill-effects before the immune system can bring it under control.

Read more: Flu vaccine won’t definitely stop you from getting the flu, but it’s more important than you think

Thousands of children who contract the flu are hospitalised every year; hospitalisation rates in children are much greater than in older people. Children younger than five years are the age group most likely to be hospitalised.

Although children with underlying medical conditions including chronic disorders of the heart, lungs, nervous and immune system are most susceptible, more than half of children admitted to hospital each year are healthy.

What should you look out for?

Influenza most commonly causes fever, cough, headache, a sore throat and a runny nose. The virus can also infect the lungs, causing pneumonia.

Some children react to the infection by developing vomiting, diarrhoea and muscle aches and pains.

Many parents aren’t aware that influenza can also cause damage to the brain, heart, kidneys and muscles. It is unclear why these complications occur in some children and not others, but they can be severe.

Young children get frequent infections and often develop symptoms that are difficult to distinguish from influenza. Testing on a nose or throat swab can be done to confirm if the illness is caused by influenza virus.

Parents should see medical attention if their child:

• has difficulty breathing (breathing rapidly or drawing in chest or neck muscles)
• is vomiting and refusing to drink
• is more sleepy than normal
• has pain that doesn’t get better with simple pain relief medication.

Most importantly, if you’re worried about your child during the flu season, see a doctor.

How does this year’s season compare?

Australia has had an unusual start to the 2019 influenza season, with higher numbers of cases during the warmer months than expected.

The number of cases of influenza diagnosed each week is currently greater than in 2017 and in the 2009 swine flu pandemic.

In 2017, Australia experienced its worst influenza season on record. More than 220,000 Australians were diagnosed with influenza, with health-care services and hospitals inundated with children, adults and the elderly suffering the effects of influenza.

Read more: Here’s why the 2017 flu season was so bad

The stories of healthy young people succumbing to flu were particularly heartbreaking.

Although it is never possible to predict what will happen in coming months, a number of measures point to a larger than average influenza season in 2019.

How can I protect my children?

Vaccination is recommended for all Australians from six months of age.

It’s free for all children aged from six months to under five years, those with certain medical risk factors including severe asthma and chronic heart, respiratory, neurological and immune conditions, all Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people, pregnant women, and people aged 65 years and over.

Those too young to be vaccinated (children five months and younger) are protected by their mothers being vaccinated during pregnancy.

You can get your family vaccinated at your local general practice, council or community health clinic, or Aboriginal Medical Service.

If you or your child are not eligible for a free flu vaccine, the usual vaccine cost is around A$20.

As the virus is constantly changing, the effectiveness of the vaccine can vary each year. Australian research has shown that the risk of flu is reduced, on average, by 50–60% in children who receive the vaccine.

This can mean that some children who get vaccinated will unfortunately still get the flu. However, some evidence suggests the disease will be milder if you catch it and have been vaccinated.

It’s not possible to predict who will catch the flu or develop complications, but vaccination remains the most effective and safest tool to protect children against influenza.

Read more: Should I get the flu shot if I’m pregnant?

Childhood flu vaccination programs have an added bonus of reducing flu in others in the community who are not vaccinated by reducing the spread of the virus. This is called “herd” or “community” immunity and particularly helps protect vulnerable people who may be at risk of becoming seriously ill with the flu.

– ref. Kids are more vulnerable to the flu – here’s what to look out for this winter – http://theconversation.com/kids-are-more-vulnerable-to-the-flu-heres-what-to-look-out-for-this-winter-117748

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shaun Molloy, Associate research scientist (Ecology), Edith Cowan University

When a threatened species is found only in one small area, conservationists often move some individuals to another suitable habitat. This practice, called “translocation”, makes the whole species less vulnerable to threats.

In the past, this approach has worked really well for some species, but climate change is creating new problems. Will the climate change at that location in the future, and will it remain suitable for the species of interest? On the other hand, some regions might become appropriate for a threatened species.

This fundamental question is important in a rapidly changing climate, yet it has seldom featured when picking new areas for translocations.

Saving the western ground parrot

Our recent research applied climate change modelling to translocation decisions for the critically endangered western ground parrot. This species is now restricted to a single population, with probably fewer than 150 birds, on the south coast of Western Australia.

It is enigmatic, in that it lives and nests entirely on the ground, unlike almost all other parrots except the closely related night parrot. And it is one of the many unique animals that make Australia so distinctive from all other parts of the world. But living on the ground has its drawbacks, as the parrot is very vulnerable to foxes and cats.

Its home near the south coast is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. As southwestern Australia becomes warmer and drier, the risk of fire to the parrot increases.

Understanding potential climate change impacts is essential when selecting reintroduction sites. We developed high-precision species distribution models and used these to investigate the effect of climate change on current and historical distributions, and identify locations that will remain, or become, suitable habitat in the future.

Our findings predict that some of the western ground parrot’s former south coast range will become increasingly unsuitable in the future, so reintroductions there may not be a good idea. Four out of 13 potential release sites are likely to become inhospitable to these threatened birds.

On the other hand, many of the former or future sites are likely to become important refuge habitats as the climate continues to warm, and would make an excellent choice for any translocations or reintroductions.

We have given this information to an expert panel, who will use these predictions identify and prioritise areas for management and translocation.

The parrot in the coal mine

Fire is already a significant threat which, combined with predation by feral cats, may have led to the loss of this species from its former home at Fitzgerald River National Park. Many of these threats act together, so they must all be considered and managed alongside climate change.

What’s more, the western ground parrot may be an important indicator for the fate of many other species it currently (or formerly) shares its range with. These include the western whipbird, noisy scrub-bird, and a carnivorous marsupial, the dibbler.

These species are all likely to face the same threats and may be equally affected by the changing climate. Future studies will attempt to model these species and to assess whether all will benefit from similar management.

Many challenges remain for the western ground parrot, including the possible negative genetic impacts of the current small population size, and the increasing risk of damaging fires in a drying and warming climate.

But locating “future-proofed” sites is giving us some hope we can ensure the long term persistence of this enigmatic species, and the myriad other unusual species that occur in the biodiversity hotspot of southwestern Australia.

The authors would like to thank Allan Burbidge and Sarah Comer from the WA Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions for their invaluable help and guidance in putting together this article.

– ref. How we’re helping the western ground parrot survive climate change – http://theconversation.com/how-were-helping-the-western-ground-parrot-survive-climate-change-117419

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elizabeth Westrupp, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Deakin University

Many parents complain of difficulties in managing clingy children – whether it’s a baby who cries every time the parent is out of sight, a toddler who clings to their parent’s legs at social events, or a primary school kid who doesn’t want their parents to go out for dinner without them.

“Clinginess” refers to a child who has a strong emotional or behavioural reaction to being separated from their parent.

Children can show clingy behaviour at any stage up to late primary school. Infants may cry to let their parents know they don’t like being separated. Toddlers or older children may cry, cling or even have a full-blown meltdown if their parent is leaving them.

In most cases, these reactions are perfectly normal. Parents can help their children through periods of clinginess by acknowledging and accepting the feelings that come with this behaviour.

Why do children get clingy?

A child can show clinginess due to a fear of being away from their parents (separation anxiety) or because of stranger anxiety, where the fear is more about being around people the child doesn’t know.

Children also develop their own sense of self from an early age, as well as a will – the healthy desire to express themselves and impact their world. So, sometimes clingy behaviour isn’t due to children being truly afraid at being left by a parent but is instead about expressing a strong desire for their parent to stay.

And children are socially and biologically programmed to form strong attachments with their parents. Parents usually represent a safe, loving base from which children can explore the world and develop independence.

Clingy behaviour may intensify at certain times of development as children test out new-found independence, such as when they learn to walk, or during transitions such as starting preschool, kindergarten or primary school.

Clingy behaviour becomes less common as children get older but can still be present for primary-school-aged children.

Read more: Infancy and early childhood matter so much because of attachment

A child’s level of clinginess, and the way it is expressed, may be affected by:

• child temperament: some children are more socially shy or introverted; others are reactive and experience emotions intensely

• major events or changes in the child’s family, such as the birth of a new sibling, starting a new school or moving house – it’s normal for children to become more clingy with their parents while they’re getting used to change

• other family factors such as parent separation or divorce, parent stress or mental-health problems. Children can be very sensitive to changes in their parents, so if a parent is going through a hard time, their child may become clingy or show other challenging behaviours.

How can you help your child?

Be a safe base

Many children are clingy in a new situation or with new people. This is developmentally appropriate and has an evolutionary advantage, because children are less likely to run off by themselves in potentially dangerous situations.

But it’s also important for children to learn to separate from their parents and gain confidence in their own abilities.

Parents can help children get used to a new situation by supporting them through it. For example, if a child is starting at a new childcare centre, it may help for the parent to spend some time there with their child, so the child can become accustomed to the new environment with their trusted parent close by.

Acknowledge your child’s feelings

When children are being clingy, they’re communicating their feelings. Resisting the clinginess won’t usually help, because children’s feelings will not disappear if they’re ignored or downplayed.

Instead, research shows it’s important to acknowledge, label and normalise children’s feelings.

Parents may be afraid talking about their child’s feelings will make the situation worse, but this is rarely the case. Talking about feelings usually helps children let them go, by helping children to regulate their emotions.

This will happen in the child’s own time, which may mean accepting a tantrum at separation, or clingy behaviour at a social event, until the child adjusts.

Read more: Let them play! Kids need freedom from play restrictions to develop

Model calm confidence

Parents are important role models for children, which means they become their child’s working example of how to react to particular situations. The way parents respond to their child’s clingy behaviour can shape how children feel about a particular situation.

For example, if a child is clingy when they start primary school and their parent reacts with a high level of concern and anxiety, the child may be unsure of whether the new environment is safe. But if the parent demonstrates calm confidence in their child, that he or she will cope with separation and/or the new situation, the child is more likely to feel comfortable too.

Discuss the plan in advance

Humans are afraid of the unknown, so talking to children about an upcoming change or feared situation will help them cope with it.

For instance, before going to the doctor, it would help to talk about how you’ll prepare (what to take, how you’ll get there, where the doctor’s office is), what might happen when you arrive (report to reception, sit in waiting room with other patients), and what might happen on the visit (what you’ll talk about with the doctor, whether the doctor might need to touch the child).

Even when talking about future events, it’s important to acknowledge feelings and model calm confidence.

Read more: ‘It’s real to them, so adults should listen’: what children want you to know to help them feel safe

But what if my child is just too clingy?

There are a few factors to consider when making a judgment about whether a child’s clingy behaviour is of concern.

First, consider the context. Is the child coping with a significant change in their life, a new environment or new people? Some children are particularly sensitive to change and may need a number of weeks (or months) to adapt. So you may need to provide the child with a little extra support to get them through the transition.

Second, consider the intensity of the behaviour. Is the clingy behaviour interfering with the child’s regular life? For instance, is it interfering with their ability to go to kindergarten or school, or causing your child (and the parents) considerable upset and stress?

Third, consider the time frame. If the behaviour is occurring daily and lasting more than four weeks, and is interfering with the child’s life, it may be helpful to consult with a professional such as a GP, paediatrician, psychologist, or school counsellor.

– ref. Is my child being too clingy and how can I help? – http://theconversation.com/is-my-child-being-too-clingy-and-how-can-i-help-115372

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Lockrey, Senior Lecturer/ Research Fellow, RMIT University

Australian building owners face a bill that could run into billions of dollars to replace combustible cladding of the sort that fuelled the Greenfell tower fire in the UK, which killed 72 people, as well as fires in Australia and overseas. The cost estimate is based on our calculations for Victoria, which has had apartment building cladding fires in 2014 and 2019.

Nearly two years on from the Grenfell disaster, there is ongoing tension between policymakers, the building industry and owners about how to resolve the problem of combustible cladding. And little information is available about the scale of the issue for owners across Australia, particularly those living in apartments.

So what could the costs be? We looked at Victoria as a case study. Our modelling produced cost estimates of between A$250 million and A$1.6 billion. The ultimate figure will depend on the cost-efficiency of any rectification program and the risk level and size of the 629 buildings known to be affected – and many more could yet be identified.

Read more: Cladding fire risks have been known for years. Lives depend on acting now, with no more delays

How were costs estimated?

The 2018 Victorian Cladding Taskforce identified 354 low/moderate-risk buildings and 275 high/extreme-risk buildings in a statewide cladding audit update last October.

There is little data available on dwelling density for Victorian apartment building stock. Melbourne City Council (MCC) records show residential buildings with ten dwellings or more (medium-to-high-density buildings) have an average of 75 dwellings per building in the built-up municipality. Buildings of this density are known to be receiving notices from the Victorian government to act on cladding.

To model costs we have also used real quotes owners have received to rectify their properties, as well as quotes revealed in media reports. These quotes reveal a range of lower costs for low/moderate-risk buildings and higher costs for high/extreme-risk buildings, usually based on the work for varying levels of rectification.

Firstly, we conservatively applied lower rectification cost data, being A$2,500 per dwelling for low/moderate-risk buildings and A$20,000 per dwelling for high/extreme-risk buildings.

Secondly, we applied higher costs found in quotes and media reports. These are $15,000 per dwelling for low/moderate-risk buildings and A$60,000 per dwelling for high/extreme-risk buildings. These figures are still conservative, based on multiple sighted estimates approaching $100,000 per dwelling.

We have calculated costs for two scenarios for all 629 buildings identified by last October:

1. an average of 75 dwellings per building as per MCC data

2. an average of 37 dwellings per building, 50% less than MCC data to account for a higher proportion of lower-density developments affected (based on averages in municipalities significantly affected by the crisis such as Port Phillip, Stonington and Moreland).

Read more: Lacrosse fire ruling sends shudders through building industry consultants and governments

So how high could the bill be?

Our estimates show Victorian owners who are known to be affected may conservatively face a rectification bill of A$250-$500 million, if industry and government work with them to cap costs in economies-of-scale solutions. The bill may be as high as A$1.6 billion, if an inefficient approach is used and we have a higher proportion of larger buildings affected.

Cladding audits are ongoing. The number of identified affected properties is likely to rise. At the 2019 Building Surveyors’ Conference, the Victorian Building Authority appeared to categorise over 1,200 private Victorian buildings as moderately through to extreme risk for combustible cladding.

If this figure is correct, our cost estimates are conservative and will double.

Our estimates do not factor in the apartments yet to be identified or, more broadly, the issues in other states that have also been identified.

Read more: Cladding fires expose gaps in building material safety checks. Here’s a solution

Government and industry shun responsibility

To date, the response of the Victorian government and industry has been to push financial responsibility back onto home owners. A Victorian low-interest loan scheme was launched in October allowing owners to repay amounts over ten years. It has been reported, however, that no loans had been granted as recently as February.

The Victorian government’s May 27 budget papers stated that A$160 million would be spent on the crisis “on public safety grounds”. This including ongoing assessments of private buildings affected by combustible cladding and 15 evaluation projects to manage and improve rectification outcomes.

As yet no funding has been provided to help owners of private dwellings who bought supposedly compliant properties. While billions in revenue is recouped from stamp duty, owners are being told to rectify a problem for which they were not responsible – all at their own cost.

Many owners simply will not be able to pay. Some individual bills sighted are as much as a quarter of the owner’s property value. On top of this, some insurance premiums have quadrupled.

At the vast costs we have estimated, and based on the chain of events leading to the cladding crisis and the lack of support following, is it reasonable that sole responsibility falls on owners to pay? And will such a move not lead to thousands of costly actions through the courts as owners try to recoup costs?

Read more: Housing with buyer protection and no serious faults – is that too much to ask of builders and regulators?

Government and industry should provide substantial financial support to owners to help them recover from mass failures of policy, regulatory policing and industry practice. The UK government has to the tune of £200 million (A$364 million). It is time to support Australian owners in a billion-dollar crisis they were not responsible for creating.

Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Phil Dwyer from Builders Collective of Australia for working with us on the modelling for this article.

– ref. Flammable cladding costs could approach billions for building owners if authorities dither – http://theconversation.com/flammable-cladding-costs-could-approach-billions-for-building-owners-if-authorities-dither-118121

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Heather Goodall, Professor, Social and Political Change Group, University of Technology Sydney

In this series, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.

Like many other Aboriginal kids in 1938, Isabel Flick was denied an education because she was “too black” to be allowed into the segregated public school.

Her father, a returned serviceman, was disrespected by the nation he had fought for. She and her siblings faced the threat of being taken from their family. She was later called a “trouble maker” for demanding justice for Aboriginal women and children and Aboriginal rights to land.

Despite the formidable racism of rural Australia, Isabel, a Gamilaraay and Bigambul woman living in Collarenebri, did not give up on the bush. She returned again and again to the upper Darling River, demanding land for Aboriginal people (who in that area called themselves Murries) and protection of the river from the grazing and cotton industries.

It was an irony that amused Isabel that, in 1991, she was called on to be a spokesperson for the whole town, white and black, in its campaign for safe drinking water and decent river flows for everyone. The town of Collarenebri, which had resisted her calls for justice for most of her life, was now asking her to protect its very existence in the deep drought of the 1990s.

Read more: Hidden women of history: Kathleen McArthur, the wildflower woman who took on Joh Bjelke-Petersen

Born in 1929, Isabel had shown how tenacious she was from a young age – although denied access to the Collarenebri public school, she was determined to teach herself to read and write. And she did. On the veranda of the local manse as a child and then in every place she worked and lived, Isabel grabbed every shred of knowledge and skill she could, determined she would not be defeated by segregation and exclusion.

‘I was terrified when I stood up there’

By the 1950s, as a young mother, Isabel was working as a cleaner in the same school to which she had been denied access as a student. She was trying to hold her family together in the face of uncertainty in the pastoral work her partner did and a precarious existence on the edge of the town.

Murri kids were now allowed to go to the school, but they faced hostility from white students, parents and staff. Isabel used her time there to support them, demonstrating her formidable insight as well as her negotiating skills and keen sense of humour to disarm conflict with teachers and deflect contempt from white parents.

Still, the possibility of her flying under the radar could not last. Indeed it was over children that Isabel decided to take on the town. She and her sister-in-law, Isobelle Walford, had for years been angered by the discrimination their children were facing in the schools and in the main streets. The petty segregation of the town’s cinema, the “Liberty” Picture Show was the last straw.

Watching their kids being herded down to the front seats, where they were roped off and had to crane their necks to see the screen, Isabel and Isobelle made the decision in 1961 to challenge the unspoken rules.

They marched up to the ticket box and demanded seats that had been reserved for whites only. Their action made the women and their families vulnerable to retribution at work and on the streets. But this local activism, which happened much earlier than the celebrated 1965 Freedom Ride led by Charles Perkins, later drew the attention of the university campaigners in north west NSW. As Isabel remembered it:

…I stood in front of the ticket office and I said: ‘I want you to come and fix this. Take these ropes off! What do you think we are? Our money is as good as anyone else’s and we want to sit where we want to sit’ … I was terrified when I stood up there … my poor little heart, I don’t know how it stayed in my chest, but it did. Even though I said it as calmly as I could, I was so sick within myself.

Isobelle joined Isabel and the pair stood their ground in front of the ticket seller.

And then he could see I was just going to stand there and keep standing there. Sometimes I think if he’d waited just a little bit longer, I’d have gone away. But then he said: ‘Oh, alright, you can sit anywhere then!’

Still frustrated by the poor health care and education offered to her people in the bush, Isabel brought her family to Sydney in the late 1960s, hoping to escape the suffocating racism of rural towns. She worked in the kitchen at Prince Alfred Hospital in Newtown while her partner, Aubrey Weatherall, worked in factories, but Sydney offered little relief from the racism.

Read more: Hidden women of history: Mary Jane Cain, land rights activist, matriarch and community builder

What Isabel did find were allies. She got to know Aboriginal people from other places, with similar stories. And she met the city students and activists who were eager to learn about conditions in rural areas and to put their shiny new credentials as lawyers, archaeologists and doctors into effecting social change.

With these people, Isabel fostered strategies that could be put to work in rural areas to support and strengthen Aboriginal communities. And with some, Isabel built warm friendships of trust and confidence which lasted all her life. She had hoped to gain a better education for her children, but in the end, they felt that it had been Isabel who had learned the most from their time in Sydney.

Campaigning for a place of peace

By the time Isabel returned to Collarenebri, she had become a skilled and careful negotiator. After campaigning for Land Rights, she took up a job with Mangankali, the Aboriginal Housing company she helped found.

She was trying to achieve concrete outcomes – better housing, more equitable distribution of resources – but always had a recognition of the importance of the broader, symbolic issues. So, she paid a great deal of attention to the Aboriginal cemetery, in which many of the community had buried their loved ones, old and young.

The town cemetery was segregated – but the Aboriginal community had turned this into a strength, recording their family stories and carefully decorating, washing and caring for the graves in their cemetery over the years.

Many people, like Isabel, saw this tiny pocket of land as symbolic not only of community but of all the land they had lost. But the road to this cemetery was unreliable in wet weather, deepening the pain of loss when burials had to be delayed.

In one of the many extraordinary achievements of her life, Isabel developed a consensus among all the Collarenebri families that they would refuse government funding for any other project until it was available to upgrade this road. With so many families impoverished and suspicious of all government actions, it was terribly hard for Aboriginal people to refuse funds.

Their solid collective refusal to take funds for two funding rounds was astounding, demonstrating how deeply the community felt about the cemetery. The government relented, recognising the importance of the demand for reliable access – not only to this burial site but to this tiny corner of their land. The new and upgraded road was opened in 1983. Said Isabel:

The cemetery is a place where Murries can feel at peace, as we are surrounded by our loved ones in spirit and we are able to strengthen our affinity with our land.

After her retirement from the Land Council largely until her death in 2002, Isabel again took on wider roles, particularly focussing on the campaign to end Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and to recognise the right to safety of Aboriginal women and children. She was recognised in 1986 with an Order of Australia Medal. She was proud of this but her later recognition by the Collarenebri and Brewarrina communities with awards and then an Honorary Doctorate from Tranby, an Indigenous-controlled, post-secondary educational body, meant more to her.

The Order of Australia Medal was certainly useful in her continued campaigning. But when asked what OAM stood for, she would always joke, “It stands for ‘Old Aboriginal Moll’”.

Heather Goodall met Isabel in Sydney in the 1970s and worked with her in collaborative historical projects. Isabel asked Heather to assist in recording her life story, undertaken during the 1990s, then, after Isabel’s death in 2002, Isabel’s book was finished with assistance from her family.

– ref. Hidden women of history: Isabel Flick, the tenacious campaigner who fought segregation in Australia – http://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-isabel-flick-the-tenacious-campaigner-who-fought-segregation-in-australia-114174

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, Senior Lecturer, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland

The Australian Federal Police has this week conducted two high-profile raids on journalists who have exposed government secrets and their sources.

On Tuesday, seven AFP officers spent several hours searching News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst’s Canberra home, her mobile phone and computer. The AFP linked the raid to “the alleged publishing of information classified as an official secret”.

This stemmed from Smethurst’s 2018 article, which contained images of a “top secret” memo and reported that senior government officials were considering moves to empower the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) to covertly monitor Australian citizens for the first time.

Soon after, 2GB Radio Presenter Ben Fordham revealed he had been notified by the Department of Home Affairs that he was the subject of a similar investigation, aimed at identifying the source of classified information he had reported regarding intercepted boat arrivals.

And then on Wednesday, the AFP raided the ABC’s Sydney headquarters. This dramatic development was in connection with the 2017 “Afghan files” report based on “hundreds of pages of secret defence force documents leaked to the ABC”. These documents revealed disturbing allegations of misconduct by Australian special forces.

The reaction to the raids was immediate and widespread.

The New York Times quoted News Corp’s description of the Smethurst raid as “a dangerous act of intimidation towards those committed to telling uncomfortable truths”. The Prime Minister was quick to distance his government from the AFP’s actions, while opposition leader Anthony Albanese condemned the raids.

But to those familiar with the ever-expanding field of Australian national security law, these developments were unlikely to surprise. In particular, enhanced data surveillance powers and a new suite of secrecy offences introduced in late 2018 had sparked widespread concern over the future of public interest journalism in Australia.

The crackdown of the past few days reveals that at least two of the core fears expressed by lawyers and the media industry were well-founded: first, the demise of source confidentiality and, secondly, a chilling effect on public interest journalism.

Source confidentiality

Upon finding out he was the subject of an investigation aimed at uncovering his sources of government information, Ben Fordham declared

The chances of me revealing my sources is zero. Not today, not tomorrow, next week or next month. There is not a hope in hell of that happening.

Source confidentiality is one of journalists’ most central ethical principles. It is recognised by the United Nations and is vital to a functioning democracy and free, independent, robust and effective media.

One of the greatest threats to source confidentiality is Australia’s uniquely broad data surveillance framework. The 2015 metadata retention scheme requires that all metadata (that is, data about a device or communication but not, say, the communication itself) be retained for two years. It may then be covertly accessed by a wide array of government agencies without a warrant. Some reports suggest that by late 2018, some 350,000 requests for access to metadata were being received by telecommunications service providers each year.

Read more: Data retention plan amended for journalists, but is it enough?

The government was not blind to the potential impact of this scheme on source confidentiality. For example, obtaining metadata relating to a journalist’s mobile phone could reveal where they go and who they contact and easily point to their sources.

This led to the introduction of the “Journalist Information Warrant” (JIW). This warrant is required if an agency wishes to access retained metadata for the direct purpose of identifying a professional journalist’s source.

So, access to a professional journalist’s metadata in order to identify a confidential source is permitted, provided the access has a particular criminal investigation or enforcement purpose and the agency can show it is in the public interest and therefore obtain a JIW.

This week’s raids suggest that either JIWs could not be obtained in relation to Smethurst, Fordham or the ABC Journalists, or the journalists’ metadata did not reveal their sources, or the AFP did not attempt to access their metadata.

Alternatively, if metadata had identified the journalists’ sources, it is less clear why these dramatic developments took place.

After 2015, journalists were advised to avoid using their mobile devices in source communications. They were also encouraged, wherever possible, to encrypt communications.

But in 2018, the government went some way to closing down this option when it introduced the complex and highly controversial Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018.

As well as expanding computer access and network access warrants, the Act provided a means for government agencies to co-opt those in the telecommunications industry to assist agencies with their investigations. This could include covertly installing weaknesses and vulnerabilities in specific devices, circumventing passwords or allowing encrypted communications to be decrypted. A warrant would then be required to access the device and communication data.

It is impossible to know whether Australian journalists have been targeted under the Act or had weaknesses or spyware installed on their personal devices. This week’s raids suggest the AFP would be prepared to target journalists under this framework in order to identify journalists’ confidential sources.

However, this could only be done for some purposes, including in the investigation of a secrecy offence.

Secrecy offences

In June 2018, the government introduced a suite of new espionage, foreign interference and secrecy offences. This included an offence of current or former Commonwealth officers communicating information, obtained by virtue of their position, likely to cause harm to Australia’s interests. This offence is punishable by imprisonment for seven years. If the information is security classified or the person held a security classification, then they may have committed an “aggravated offence” and be subject to ten years’ imprisonment.

This week’s raids reveal just how common it is for public interest journalism to rely on secret material and government sources.

Read more: Government needs to slow down on changes to spying and foreign interference laws

But the journalists themselves may also be facing criminal prosecution. The 2018 changes include a “general secrecy offence”, whereby it is an offence (punishable by imprisonment for five years) to communicate classified information obtained from a Commonwealth public servant. Fordham’s radio broadcast about intercepted boat arrivals was, for example, a clear communication of classified information.

Again, journalists are offered some protection. If prosecuted, a journalist can seek to rely on the “journalism defence” by proving that they dealt with the information as a journalist, and that they reasonably believed the communication to be in the public interest. The meaning of “public interest” is unclear and, in this context, untested. However, it will take into account the public interest in national security and government integrity secrecy concerns as well as openness and accountability.

Protecting media freedom

Australia has more national security laws than any other nation. It is also the only liberal democracy lacking a Charter of Human Rights that would protect media freedom through, for example, rights to free speech and privacy.

In this context, journalists are in a precarious position – particularly journalists engaged in public interest journalism. This journalism is vital to government accountability and a vibrant democracy, but has a tense relationship with Australia’s national interests as conceived by government.

National security law has severely undercut source confidentiality by increasing and easing data surveillance. National security laws have also criminalised a wide array of conduct related to the handling of sensitive government information, both by government officers and the general public.

And these laws are just a few parts of a much larger national security framework that includes: control orders, preventative detention orders, ASIO questioning and detention warrants, secret evidence, and offences of espionage, foreign interference, advocating or supporting terrorism, and more.

JIWs, and the inclusion of a journalism defence to the secrecy offence, recognise the importance of a free press. However, each of these protections relies on a public interest test. When government claims of national security and the integrity of classifications is weighed into this balance, it is difficult to see how other interests might provide an effective counterbalance.

One of the most disturbing outcomes is not prosecutions or even the raids themselves, but the chilling of public interest journalism. Sources are less likely to come forward, facing risk to themselves and a high likelihood of identification by government agencies. And journalists are less likely to run stories, knowing the risks posed to their sources and perhaps even to themselves.

Against this background, the calls for a Media Freedom Act, such as by the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, have gained significant traction. It may take this kind of bold statement to cut across the complexities of individual laws and both recognise and protect the basic freedom of the press and the future of public interest journalism in Australia.

– ref. Why the raids on Australian media present a clear threat to democracy – http://theconversation.com/why-the-raids-on-australian-media-present-a-clear-threat-to-democracy-118334

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lacey Schaefer, Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University

The man arrested after a deadly gun attack in Darwin Tuesday night is reported to have been on parole and wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet.

This leads to the same reaction we see following any high-profile crime. How could such a thing happen?

People may speculate that the criminal justice agencies involved have somehow dropped the ball. The offender was on their radar, after all.

Read more: Online tools can help people in disasters, but do they represent everyone?

While this finger-pointing may serve a cathartic function, it is important we also question our expectations before assuming a failure occurred.

We need to understand what electronic monitoring intends to achieve, how it works, and what are its capabilities and limitations.

Electronic tagging

In the context of the corrections system, electronic monitoring refers to the tagging of a person as a form of surveillance, usually in the form of a GPS-enabled ankle bracelet.

In Australia, each state and territory uses electronic monitoring differently, guided by their own legislative frameworks.

Practices vary considerably between jurisdictions. For example, in some places, certain offenders are targeted (high-risk recidivists, those who repeatedly reoffend, for example). In others, specific types of offences are the focus (such as child sex offences).

The application of electronic monitoring even differs between offenders, as the supervising agency uses it for reasons specific to each person.

A police department might use electronic monitoring to ensure a domestic violence perpetrator does not visit the victim before a trial. A probation officer might require an offender to wear a bracelet for 12 months to ensure they are attending treatment and meeting their curfew. A parole officer could place the GPS tracking condition on an offender for the first three months following release from prison to better understand how the parolee spends his or her time.

Each of these experiences will be quite different, as each is intended to fulfil a unique aim.

Ordinarily, electronic monitoring is used as a tool of incapacitation and deterrence.

In the first instance, an offender may be told to follow a particular rule – for example, to be home by 8pm, to stay away from the victim, to attend a treatment program, or not to go within 1km of a school. Electronic monitoring allows authorities to monitor the person’s compliance with such a condition.

In the latter instance, an offender may be deterred from certain behaviour if they believe their actions are likely to be detected through electronic monitoring.

Monitoring actions

When an offender is subject to electronic monitoring, a computer database is updated with information about the rules he or she has been instructed to follow. Each jurisdiction and each agency may have their own database, so where the offender appears in the database will depend on who is supervising the electronic monitoring order.

The database is then monitored by enforcement authorities, although this is sometimes outsourced to private providers or overseas companies. While the data is generally sent from the offender’s GPS device to the monitoring agency in real time, there can be delays in how long it takes for that information to be passed to police or corrective services.

What occurs when an offender breaches one of the rules and a computer alert is generated depends on factors such as legislation and the priority of a case influencing the response. The database includes information about what to do in the event of specific kinds of breaches with specific offenders.

In some cases, an alarm on the device may go off or, very rarely, the police may be immediately notified.

Most often, for routine cases and ordinary breaches, the monitoring agency will notify the offender’s supervisor (such as a parole officer or a local police department), who will then determine how to proceed.

There may be a lag of several days during this process. For example, if a low-risk offender misses their home curfew on Friday night (as determined by the GPS bracelet), the parole officer will not receive notification of this breach until Monday morning.

The pros and cons of tagging

There are a range of benefits and disadvantages to the electronic monitoring of offenders.

It can be effective in holding offenders accountable, protecting victims and enhancing community safety and preventing crimes. These come with important cost savings, particularly when offenders can be safety monitored in the community in lieu of imprisonment or as a mechanism of early release from prison.

But some of the downfalls are that offenders can tamper with their devices, and there can be GPS dead zones – particularly in a geographically vast country such as Australia. There may also be human error in using the systems, such as improper monitoring or unreasonable decision-making after an alert.

Yet collectively, the research evidence highlights that electronic monitoring can be an effective tool for discouraging recidivism. But it is only that: a tool.

The most effective practices for supervising offenders in the community include those that identify and reduce a person’s risks for continued criminal behaviour.

Read more: AI can help in crime prevention, but we still need a human in charge

Electronic monitoring will be most effective when it is used to support supervision that limits a person’s access to chances to commit crime. Such supervision should help them redesign their routines so that any risky settings are avoided and are replaced with more positive influences.

Thus, rather than simply giving offenders a long list of rules for what not to do, effective probation and parole strategies help offenders lead productive lives.

More broadly, it is imperative that correctional authorities provide rehabilitative interventions that address the underlying factors that contribute toward a person’s criminal behaviour. The most effective approaches use cognitive-behavioural techniques to give offenders skills that encourage good decision-making.

Yet electronic monitoring cannot “fix” an offender’s impulsivity, lack of empathy, or any other underlying crime-conducive traits. Thus we should not confuse a technological aid with meaningful treatment.

– ref. Electronic monitoring bracelets are only crime deterrence tools, they can’t ‘fix’ offenders – http://theconversation.com/electronic-monitoring-bracelets-are-only-crime-deterrence-tools-they-cant-fix-offenders-118335

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Dwyer, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney

In his first address to the caucus after Labor’s shock election loss, Bill Shorten pointed to conservative interests

spending unprecedented hundreds of millions of dollars advertising, telling lies, spreading fear … Powerful vested interests campaigned against us through sections of the media itself, and they got what they wanted.

He was, of course, talking about News Corp press and “Sky after dark”, which campaigned heavily against the ALP during the election and have shown no sign of letting up since.

Read more: Outrage, polls and bias: 2019 federal election showed Australian media need better regulation

Experts agree that this campaigning style’s impact is cumulative and broadly agenda-setting, shaping the party-political landscape. Importantly, it also influences political and business elites in shaping the parameters and tone of debates.

In his new book, former prime minister Kevin Rudd argues a royal commission is required to rein in the power abuse and unethical journalism practices at the Murdoch news brands.

What can be done about media bias?

This is more than simply an ethical matter for media. It goes beyond more vigilant application of self-regulatory codes of conduct administered by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and the Australian Press Council (APC), or tightening political advertising rules. It requires tough legal and regulatory measures to prevent further structural damage at a time when media businesses are under threat from US platforms. Rules to stop further media concentration should be a priority for democratic governments.

The ACCC’s final report into Google and Facebook, due at the end of the month, may make some recommendations to assist this situation. Its preliminary report signals the need for stronger regulatory steps, recommending that:

… the regulatory authority could also monitor, investigate and report on the ranking of news and journalistic content by digital platforms and the provision of referral services to news media businesses.

It also recommends a wholesale review of the regulatory frameworks that offer patchwork oversight in relation to news consumption in Australia.

Increasing our understanding of the interaction between new and old media pluralism will require an assessment of the changing online news landscape. It will also need us to look more widely to understand the public mood. For example, the comments below articles and on social media are a neglected avenue for research.

Given the popularity of comment reading – about half of users read them and for longer than the article on average – comments’ potential contribution to pluralism matters.

While adding a new voice, comments onsite and on social media can also invite risk; comments on Chinese social media site WeChat played a key role in spreading misinformation that may have had a significant impact on the federal election. But there is little debate on how these spaces should be regulated.

Media ownership needs reform

The serious structural problem with media diversity in Australia will require more active regulation to avoid further damage to our democratic institutions. The removal of the two-out-of-three rule in 2017 led to the take-over of a major independent media company, Fairfax Media, by Nine Entertainment – a company known more for its tabloid style than independent journalism.

The 2018 merger was widely anticipated when the federal government repealed these anti-concentration laws. News Corp and Nine Entertainment now control the bulk of Australia’s newspaper sector.

Read more: A modern tragedy: Nine-Fairfax merger a disaster for quality media

Astonishingly, going into the federal election, only the Greens had elaborated media policies.

The UK government, through Ofcom, the main media regulator, has recognised that online news access is increasingly important as a news source, and plurality concerns continue in the online world. There is an ongoing debate about how current rules can be extended to online media, including the administration of the mergers public interest test and the national cross-media ownership rule.

In 2015, Ofcom updated its processes for assessing media pluralism. It has been required to review the UK’s ownership rules at least every three years since 2003. The restrictions in place include:

• a rule limiting cross-media ownership of newspapers and TV at a national level to 20% (the “20/20 rule”)

• a rule for administering a media public interest test in relation to mergers.

The secretary of state oversees the UK’s media-specific pluralism test and has the power to stop media mergers found to be against the public interest.

Ofcom is required to undertake a review of ownership patterns every three years. In its most recent statutory review in 2018, Ofcom concluded the rules needed to be retained to protect pluralism.

In response to the review, the key UK reform group MRC noted that media plurality concerns would require ongoing reassessment if the importance of TV news and newspapers continued to decline.

In this new framework, Ofcom has in place a range of indicators that are designed to assess the availability of news sources, their consumption and their impact on users. Australia is yet to even consider this approach, let alone investigate how a local version might be developed.

Keeping up with changing news consumption

As a source of news, Australian online (including social) news consumption now sits at 82%, according to recent research. Taking this changing consumption into account in policy is even more important when we know these platforms are not neutral: their algorithms manipulate what news content people are exposed to.

Under the UK approach, various aggregated metrics are necessary to allow regulatory agencies to track changes in patterns of news consumption and the diversity of available news sources.

Read more: Enough ‘gotcha’ campaign coverage. Here are five ways the media can better cover elections

Although it was an important first step to track the morphing consumption of news sources across platforms, Ofcom’s metric is still arguably incapable of assessing the operation of “real world” power and influence. That’s why regular reviews of shifting media power are so important for making policy.

Responsible policy-making obliges governments to monitor these developments, gathering the information needed to evaluate whether or not the current policy intent remains. Strong regulatory tools (including web traffic analysis software and news data analytics) are needed to do that.

Australia needs to develop a “thermometer” to measure media pluralism via an initial benchmark study followed by periodic reviews. We also need a robust, independent, public interest test that can be applied in merger environments.

– ref. Press, platforms and power: mapping out a stronger Australian media landscape – http://theconversation.com/press-platforms-and-power-mapping-out-a-stronger-australian-media-landscape-117987

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louisa Gordon, Associate Professor – Health Economics, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute

Australia’s Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy will investigate how to better protect patients from doctors charging “really unjustifiable, excessive fees” of up to A$10,000 or more for medical procedures.

Murphy said it was potentially unethical for doctors to charge such high out-of-pocket fees that left families in severe financial pain, and that contrary to some patients’ hopes, paying more didn’t equate to better outcomes.

The call comes as desperate families increasingly turn to crowdfunding, remortgaging their homes and eating into their superannuation to raise tens of thousands of dollars for surgeries and other medical expenses.

Read more: We need more than a website to stop Australians paying exorbitant out-of-pocket health costs

It is perfectly legal for a doctor working in private practice to charge what they believe is fair and reasonable. It’s a private market, so buyers beware.

But that doesn’t mean it’s right, or that it should be allowed to continue.

Not everything is available in the public system

Some patients’ out-of-pocket costs are from the gap between what their private health insurance and/or Medicare will pay for a procedure or treatment.

But some treatments aren’t funded by Medicare or offered in public hospitals because their safety, efficacy and value for money have not yet been demonstrated.

Medical technologies, devices and surgical techniques need to be rigorously tested in clinical trials to demonstrate safety and clinical effectiveness. They will only be widely adopted when they have a strong evidence base.

When the government pays for a health service, value for money is also considered. For really expensive services and medicines that have the potential to greatly benefit patients, the government will try to negotiate prices down, to reduce the impact on the health budget.

While a lack of evidence of a benefit does not necessarily mean the procedure does not benefit patients, the outcomes need to be reviewed and demonstrated to justify its ongoing use.

Sometimes new technologies are adopted prematurely based on weak evidence and strong marketing which can lead to poor investment decisions. This was the case with robotic surgery for prostate cancer, offered early in private practice in Australia, only to find later it was no better than traditional surgery.

If a patient chooses to spend money on a high-risk surgery, is it really anyone’s business?

Sometimes patients will choose to undergo high-risk surgery, not covered under the public system, and are willing to pay out of their own pocket, or raise the funds through crowdsourcing or remortgaging their home.

Some will argue the value is whatever the patient is willing to pay for it and it’s up to the patient’s own risk-benefit preferences.

There are some major problems with this. Patients often make health decisions while distressed, ill and emotional. They may not be able to determine the best course of action or have all the information at hand. They must trust the doctor and his or her superior knowledge and experience.

Read more: Specialists are free to set their fees, but there are ways to ensure patients don’t get ripped off

Health economists call this “asymmetric information”. The doctor has extensive years of training, expertise and qualifications. The patient has Dr Google.

A key reason governments intervene in health care systems is to avoid market failure arising from unequal information and the profiteering of providers.

Our ‘fee-for-service’ system is failing

In the private system, doctors are paid a fee for each service they provide. This creates an incentive for doctors to provide more services: the more services they provide, the more they get paid.

But the high volumes of testing, consultations and fragmented services we’re currently seeing aren’t translating to a better quality of care. As such, economists are calling for major reforms of our fee-for-service private health system and the way that doctors are paid.

This could involve paying doctors for caring for a patient’s medical condition over a set period, rather than each time they see the patient, or charging private patients a “bundled fee” for all the scans, appointments and other costs associated with something like a hip replacement.

Read more: More visits to the doctor doesn’t mean better care – it’s time for a Medicare shake-up

Out-of-pocket costs are very high for some Australians with cancer. A quarter of Queenslanders diagnosed with cancer will pay provider fees of more than A$20,000 in the first two years after diagnosis.

While what constitutes “value” will be in the eye of the beholder, a well-functioning and sustainable health system is one that puts patients’ interests above all others and holds health providers accountable.

Australia’s universal health care system is one of the best in the world and we need to work hard to preserve it. Surgeries costing tens of thousands of dollars will continue unless the government regulates private medical practice or reforms the way doctors are remunerated.

It’s time to cap what physicians can charge for services and provide incentives for specialists to bulk-bill their patients.

Read more: Why do specialists get paid so much and does something need to be done about it?

– ref. It’s perfectly legal for doctors to charge huge amounts for surgery, but should it be allowed? – http://theconversation.com/its-perfectly-legal-for-doctors-to-charge-huge-amounts-for-surgery-but-should-it-be-allowed-118179

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hadeel Al-Alosi, Lecturer, School of Law, Western Sydney University

Contrary to popular belief, crimes against the environment are not “victimless”. They affect many people, animals, plants and landscapes. Crimes against the environment should not be taken lightly.

Broadly defined, environmental crimes are those that harm the environment. This includes acts such as polluting water or air, illegal fishing or trade in wildlife, and water theft. The international Environmental Investigation Agency reports environmental offending is “one of the most profitable forms of criminal activity”.

Australia is currently missing out on a hugely useful tool in the fight against environmental crime: restorative justice. This approach, which has been used successfully in New Zealand, deserves a nationwide commitment.

Read more: Why a narrow view of restorative justice blunts its impact

Restorative justice conferencing

Australia is a world leader in using restorative justice to deal with both adult and young offenders.

Simply defined, restorative justice is a process in which the victim, offender, and other parties affected by a crime come together to discuss the aftermath of the offence and its impact. Each party plays a role in resolving the dispute with the help of an impartial facilitator.

Restorative justice is all about restoring harm, preventing the crime from reoccurring, and fixing (or building) relationships.

Research has found that, compared with the traditional criminal court process, restorative justice can reduce the chances of reoffending, increase victim satisfaction, and prompt offenders to feel more responsibility for their actions.

During a conference, victims can explain the effect a crime had on them, and ask questions – giving them a voice in traditional proceedings. Offenders can give reasons why the crime happened, and apologise. A range of other outcomes may be agreed to in a conference, including compensation and community work.

However, our research reveals that conferencing is underused when it comes to environmental crimes in Australia.

New Zealand leads the way

New Zealand is leading the world in using restorative justice to deal with environmental crimes. This is largely a result of two pieces of legislation passed in 2002. First, the Victims’ Rights Act 2002 says that, if possible, the court (or other representative) must arrange a restorative justice conference at a victim’s request. Second, the Sentencing Act 2002 makes it mandatory for a judge to take into account any outcomes reached in a conference.

While more research focusing on the precise benefits is needed, anecdotal evidence from shows New Zealand’s approach is effective. Several judges, prosecutors and facilitators have praised environmental justice in addressing environmental crime.

Read more: Three rivers are now legally people – but that’s just the start of looking after them

Australia is failing to reap the benefits

Unlike New Zealand, Australian courts have not embraced restorative justice for environmental offending. In fact, Australia has only used restorative justice conferencing in two cases of environmental crime: Williams (2007) and Clarence Valley Council (2018).

Both Williams and Clarence Valley Council involved offending against Aboriginal cultural heritage, in breach of New South Wales’s National Parks and Wildlife Act. The outcomes reached in the conferences went well beyond what a court could have imposed on the offenders.

For example, in Williams, where a mining company built exploratory pits and a private railway siding across areas of Indigenous significance, the maximum penalty at the time was a fine of A$5,500 and 6 months’ imprisonment. The judge suggested the parties engage in a restorative justice conference, during which Craig Williams donated A$32,200 worth of items to the local Aboriginal people.

In Clarence Valley Council, which concerned the council cutting down a protected tree, the council agreed in the conference to donate A$300,000 to the local Aboriginal community to fund research into cultural heritage. The council also agreed to create employment opportunities and youth initiatives for Aboriginal people.

These outcomes are far better in repairing the damage done than a mere fine or prison term.

Complementary to traditional prosecution

Despite these significant benefits, restorative justice conferencing is not a replacement for prosecution. It should be used only after the offender has been assessed as suitable, as in the cases of Williams and Clarence Valley Council.

Restorative justice conferencing can be suitable for all sorts of environmental crime, from water pollution to breaches of planning laws. In the case of offending against Aboriginal cultural heritage, conferencing may be appropriate given its ability to give a voice to members of the Aboriginal community who would otherwise be unable to participate in the formal court process.

The ideal time to integrate conferencing is after conviction but before sentencing, which we refer to as a “back-end model” of conferencing (the method most commonly used in New Zealand).

Typically, a back-end model involves the prosecution bringing charges before the court. The court then considers holding a restorative justice conference and, if appropriate, the proceedings are postponed to allow the conference to occur. The matter is later referred back to the court for sentencing.

This creates an opportunity for the sentencing judge to consider any results from the conference, but maintains a court’s essential oversight role by ensuring the outcomes reached are adequate, achievable and legally binding.

A more environmentally friendly response

Restorative justice conferencing can provide a more effective way of dealing with environmental harms because, according to Trevor Chandler, a facilitator in Canada, “punishment makes people bitter, whereas restorative solutions make people better”.

Of course, conferencing is not without limits. Just as restorative justice may not work for all young people, it may not work for all environmental offenders. Conferencing can require more time, money and energy than traditional court processes. However, this may be an investment well worth making for the environment.

Read more: Restorative justice may not work for all young offenders

It is time for Australia to follow New Zealand’s example by embracing a back-end model of restorative justice.

This would give victims a much-needed voice in the process, and create a better chance to heal ruptured relationships and restore the harm done to the environment as far as possible.

– ref. Australia should give victims a voice in tackling environmental crimes – http://theconversation.com/australia-should-give-victims-a-voice-in-tackling-environmental-crimes-115711

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elizabeth Finkel, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow, La Trobe University

This article is an edited extract from Elizabeth Finkel’s address Gene therapy: cure but at what cost? to the National Press Club June 5 2019.

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

Gene therapy – for so long something that belonged to the future – has just hit the streets.

A couple of weeks back, you might have picked up a headline alerting us to the most expensive drug in history – a one off gene therapy cure for spinal muscular atrophy. Novartis have priced the drug Zolgensma at A$3 million (US$2.1 million).

Traditionally a parent of a baby with spinal muscular atrophy was told: take your baby home and love her or him. Have no false hope, the baby will die paralysed and unable to eat or talk by the age of two.

What’s the narrative going to be now? There is a cure but it costs A$3 million.

I think we are in for some poignant dilemmas.

Read more: Boyer Lectures: gene therapy is still in its infancy but the future looks promising

‘Heads up’ from a mother

The person who gave me a recent “heads up” on the gene therapy revolution was not a scientist. She is the mother of two sick children.

I met Megan Donnell last August 29th at a Melbourne startup conference called “Above All Human”.

Megan Donnell is a person who strikes you with her vibrancy and charisma. What you can’t immediately see is her life’s greatest tragedy and her life’s greatest mission.

Both of her children suffer from the rare genetic illness Sanfilippo syndrome. They lack a gene for breaking down heparin sulphate, a sugar that holds proteins in place in the matrix between cells. The high levels of the sugar poison the organs, particularly the brain. In the normal course of the disease, the children die in their teens, paralysed, unable to talk or eat.

When Megan Donnell’s kids were diagnosed at the ages of four and two, she was told “do not have false hope”. She didn’t listen.

The one time IT business manager started the Sanfilippo Childrens’ Foundation, raised a million dollars and invested in a start-up based in Ohio that was trialling gene therapy to treat the disease. Part of the deal was that the company would conduct trials in Australia as well as in the US and Spain. So far 14 children have been treated worldwide.

I’d missed a revolution

Megan Donnell’s story stunned me.

I’d written two books about coming medical revolutions: one on stem cells, the other on genomics. But when a medical revolution actually arrived, I’d missed it. It was all the more remarkable because for six years I’d been the editor of a popular science magazine – Cosmos.

We scanned the media releases for hot papers each week but gene therapy never came up on our radar.

Probably because we’d been dazzled by CRISPR – the powerful technique that can edit the DNA of everything from mosquitoes to man. But CRISPR has barely entered clinical trials.

Read more: What is CRISPR gene editing, and how does it work?

Meanwhile there are already five gene therapy products on the market. And with 750 working their way through the pipeline, the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) predicts that by 2025 between 10-20 gene therapy treatments will be added to the market each year.

Some of the gene therapies are having incredible effects.

The star example is the Novartis treatment for spinal muscular atrophy. Untreated babies die paralysed by the age of two. But those treated with Zolgensma have now reached the age of four and some are walking and dancing.

In 2017, the FDA approved Luxturna, now marketed by Roche. This gene therapy can restore sight to children suffering from a form of retinal blindness that begins months after birth.

For the first time I can recall, medical researchers are using a four letter word for some diseases: cure.

These treatments appear to have fixed the underlying conditions. Especially when they are given early. Indeed spinal muscular atrophy treatment is being offered to babies a few month old – before their motor neurons have started to wither.

30 years in the making

These gene therapy treatments have been over thirty years in the making. And the saga of their journey to the clinic, I suspect, reveals some common plot lines.

The potential of gene therapy, was obvious as soon Marshall Nirenberg cracked the genetic code back in the 1960s.

The New York Times opined: “The science of biology has reached a new frontier”, leading to “a revolution far greater in its potential significance than the atomic or hydrogen bomb.”

In a 1967 editorial for Science, Nirenberg wrote:

This knowledge will greatly influence man’s future, for man then will have the power to shape his own biological destiny.

But if the end goal was obvious, the pitfalls were not.

What made the dream of gene therapy possible was viruses. They’ve evolved to invade our cells and sneak their DNA in next to our own, so they can be propagated by our cellular machinery.

Throughout the 1980s, genetic engineers learned to splice human DNA into the viruses.

Like tiny space ships, they carried the human DNA as part of their payload.

By 1990, researchers attempted the first gene therapy trial in a human. It was to treat two children with a dysfunctional immune system, a disease known as severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID).

The results were hardly miraculous but they were promising. Researchers raced to bring more potent viruses to the clinic.

Children have died

In 1999, 18 year old Jesse Gelsinger paid the price.

He had volunteered to try gene therapy for his inherited condition: ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency. It meant he couldn’t break down ammonia, a waste product of dietary protein. But his condition was largely under control through medication and watching his diet.

Four days after his treatment at the University of Pennsylvania, Jesse was dead – a result of a massive immune reaction to the trillions of adenovirus particles introduced into his body. These are the same viruses that cause the common cold.

Tragedy struck again in 2003. This one involved so-called “bubble boys”.

They too carried an immune deficiency, X-SCID, which saw them confined to sterile bubble; a common cold can be fatal. This time round the gene therapy appeared far more effective. But within a few years of treatment, five of 20 boys developed leukaemia. The virus (gamma retrovirus) had activated a cancer-causing gene.

The two tragedies set the field back. Many researchers found it very hard to get funding.

But the huge clinical potential kept others going.

The key was to keep re-engineering the viral vectors.

It was a project that reminds me of the evolution of powered flight. From the biplanes that the Wright brothers flew in 1903 to the epic Apollo 11 flight in 1963, took 60 years.

The virus engineers have been a lot faster.

Use engineered viruses

Ten years after the disaster of the leukaemia-causing viruses, researchers had re-engineered so-called lenti viruses not to activate cancer genes. They had also found other viruses that did not provoke catastrophic immune responses.

Instead of the adenovirus, they discovered its mild-mannered partner – known as adeno associated virus (AAV). There’s a whole zoo of these AAVs and some species are particularly good at targeting specific organs.

It is this new generation of vectors that are responsible for the results we are witnessing now. The AAV 9 vector for instance can cross into the brain, and that’s the one used to treat spinal muscular atrophy.

Turning the table on viruses, and hacking into their code: this is the bit that particularly fascinates me in telling the story of gene therapy.

But another intriguing aspect is that, contrary to long held wisdom, we are seeing big pharma galloping in to treat rare diseases.

In the US, the spinal muscular atrophy market is probably around 400 babies per year. Luxturna might treat 2,000 cases of blindness a year.

It’s not the sort of market size that would bring joy to investors. But clearly the companies think it’s worth their while.

For one thing, the FDA has provided incentives for rare, so-called “orphan diseases” – fast-tracking their passage thought the tangled regulatory maze.

And there is a convincing business case. If gene therapy is a one shot cure then it really may end up saving health systems money.

That justifies, they say, some of the most extraordinary prices for a drug you’ve ever heard of.

Of course, all this relies on the treatments being one time cures.

And though the patients seem to be cured, whether or not the treatments last a lifetime remains to be seen.

The situation in Australia

Historically, this country has been a world leader when it comes to bargaining down exorbitantly priced cures.

In 2013 when the drugs for curing Hepatitis C first came out, the price was around A$100,000 for a 12 week course. But in Australia, all 230,000 of those living with Hepatitis C will be treated for the lowest price in the world. Prices are much higher in the US.

Read more: Australia leads the world in hepatitis C treatment – what’s behind its success?

Greg Dore at the Kirby Institute of NSW participated in Australia’s Hepatitis C pricing discussions, and believes our model will work for the new gene therapy drugs – notwithstanding their eye-popping price tags – and the fact that the patient populations for these rare genetic diseases will be tiny.

However, the real reason companies are getting into gene therapy is not just to treat rare disease. It’s because they realise this technology will be a game changer for medicine.

They have already entered the field of cancer with a gene therapy approved for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia – CAR-T cells. Health Minister Greg Hunt announced this year the government will pay the cost (around A$500,000 per treatment).

But after cancer, what then?

If you have a vector than can take a gene to the brain and cure spinal muscular atrophy, what else could you cure. Alzheimer’s disease, strokes?

Australian researchers are jostling to be part of the gene therapy revolution.

Paediatrician Ian Alexander together with virologist Leszek Lisowksi are engineering the next generation of vectors in their labs at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney. They are designing them to home efficiently to specific organs and produce therapeutic levels of proteins.

Curiously it turns out that a major bottleneck is scaling up the production of these exquisitely engineered viruses. Who’d have thought there’d be a problem churning out the most abundant organism on the planet?

Read more: Explainer: how do drugs get from the point of discovery to the pharmacy shelf?

Researcher David Parsons in Adelaide is refining methods to deliver vectors across the viscous mucus of children with cystic fibrosis.

Scientist John Rasco in Sydney is a pioneer when it comes to treating patients with gene therapy, having been a part of international trials treating patients with beta thalassemia.

Medical researcher Elizabeth Rakoczy in Perth is developing a treatment for macular degeneration.

And Alan Trounson, who spent six years at the helm of the world biggest stem cell institute, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, is advancing a technology to develop off the shelf, universally compatible, CAR-T cells, to attack ovarian cancer.

One thing is for sure: medicine is set for a major disruption from the arrival of gene therapy.

As we enter an era, where once incurable diseases become curable; be prepared for some challenging debates about how to pay for gene therapy and the value of a human life.

– ref. The gene therapy revolution is here. Medicine is scrambling to keep pace – http://theconversation.com/the-gene-therapy-revolution-is-here-medicine-is-scrambling-to-keep-pace-118329

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Scarlett Howard, Postdoctoral research fellow, Université de Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier

Most children learn that written numbers represent quantities in pre-school or junior primary school.

Now our new study shows that honeybees too can learn to match symbols and numerosities, much like we humans do with Arabic and Roman numerals.

Read more: Can bees do maths? Yes – new research shows they can add and subtract

Human language and mathematics

Language is the ability to learn and use a system of symbolic representations for communication. This includes a capacity to relate signs to abstract information.

For example, letters grouped together make a word which we can read, and sounded words put together in the correct order allow us to have a conversation. Human language can incorporate spoken, written, visually signed, or tactile forms like braile.

Around the world humans have developed many different spoken and written languages. However, mathematics in particular is often regarded as a “universal language” since the mathematical concepts that describe values and equations do not depend on cultural or other frameworks.

We are interested in the question of whether numerical symbols are truly universal – that is, whether they also work for species that are not human.

The language of honeybees

The honeybee is a super organism for the study of comparative information processing in a brain. In 1973 Karl von Frisch was awarded a Nobel Prize in the field of Physiology and Medicine for his demonstrations that the honeybee can communicate with hive mates via a symbolic dance language.

von Frisch showed that a foraging bee which locates rewarding flowers can fly back to a hive and signal both the direction and distance of the nutritious flowers via a “waggle dance”. Other bees can interpret the dance language to know where to fly to collect nectar.

We wondered if such an impressive communication system meant that honeybees could learn another type of symbolic language, a basic symbolic number system.

Interestingly, chimpanzees, Rhesus monkeys, pigeons, and a single African grey parrot named Alex have demonstrated the skill to learn either Arabic numerals or English names for numbers. This shows us that while no non-human species appear to have developed a symbolic representation of number, it is not because they lack the brain capacity to understand such representations.

Our work has already shown honeybees can learn and apply challenging numerical concepts such as greater vs. lesser items, a quantitative valuation of “zero”, and simple arithmetic.

We took this knowledge a step further with our latest research.

Read more: Bees join an elite group of species that understands the concept of zero as a number

How do bees learn?

To train honeybees to match symbols (called “signs”) and number amounts (called “numerosities”), we used a subset of the symbols previously used to train pigeons on a similar task.

Bees were trained to fly into a Y-shaped maze. Inside the maze the bee would view a stimulus. The bee would then fly into the decision chamber were it would view two options, one correct and one incorrect.

One group of bees was trained to match a sign to a numerosity, while a second group was trained to match a numerosity to a sign.

If bees were learning to match a sign to a numerosity, they would first see the sign and then have the option to choose two or three shapes. If bees were learning to match a numerosity to a sign, they would first see a number of items, such as three squares, and then have the option to choose from two signs.

For example, if a bee viewed an N-shaped sign, she would need to choose a display presenting two items. She would need to be able to do this regardless of the shape, pattern, or colour of the items presented.

If the bee chose correctly she would receive a sugar solution, but if she chose incorrectly, she would taste bitter quinine (which does not hurt the bee but is not pleasant for her). Importantly, neither the quinine nor the sugar can be smelled by the bee, so the only cue for decision making is the visual one.

Matching symbol to number

Bees were trained for 50 trials to match an N-shape sign with the number “two”, and an inverted T-shape sign with the number “three”, and achieved an accuracy of about 75%. This is the first time symbol matching to number has been shown in an invertebrate.

After training was completed bees were tested in several conditions with completely novel patterns, colours and shapes and continued to prefer to match the sign with the numerosity, or the numerosity with the sign.

Interestingly, however, we found bees were unable to reverse their learnt tasks. If a bee had learnt to match a sign to a numerosity, she could not then match a numerosity to a sign, or vice versa. It appears the association between the number and the symbolic representation was only learnt in one direction and was unable to be reversed.

Interestingly, these kinds of learning outcomes – referred to as “operational schemas” – are sometimes applicable to how humans learn too.

What does this mean?

While no other species besides humans has spontaneously developed a language for numbers, our research suggests an insect can understand and learn basic representation of numbers through symbols.

The system we taught to bees was limited in several ways. For example, we trained bees to link just two quantities and two symbols. Also we do not yet know if bees gave quantitative value to the symbols; we simply know that they can link the symbol and quantity together.

Read more: Our ‘bee-eye camera’ helps us support bees, grow food and protect the environment

And yet it is remarkable bees displayed some capacity to understand numbers through symbols.

We’re left wondering whether we as humans are so very special after all – that perhaps the ability to learn mathematics could be universal.

Despite the limitations of the current research, we have demonstrated, to a small extent, symbolic communication with an insect species, which we have been separated from by over 600 million years of evolution.

Our research is laying the foundations for developing a communication system with very different animal species, and shows the differences between human and non-human animals are not as great in some regards as we might previously have thought.

– ref. We taught bees a simple number language – and they got it – http://theconversation.com/we-taught-bees-a-simple-number-language-and-they-got-it-117816

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Ellerton, Lecturer in Critical Thinking; Curriculum Director, UQ Critical Thinking Project, The University of Queensland

Climate change is now climate crisis and a climate sceptic now a climate denier, according to the recently updated style guide of The Guardian news organisation.

The extent to which the scientific community acknowledges climate change is very close to the extent to which it also sees it as a crisis. So the move from “change” to “crisis” recognises that both rest on the same scientific footing.

The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, said:

We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue.

But the move from “sceptic” to “denier” is more interesting.

Read more: Whose word should you respect in any debate on science?

Sceptics need to earn the name

Many people who do not accept the findings of climate science often mark themselves as “sceptics”. It is, in part, an attempt to portray themselves as champions of the Enlightenment: imagining that they refuse to believe something based solely on the word of others, and opt to seek the evidence themselves.

It is true that scepticism is an essential component of science – indeed, one of its most defining characteristics. The motto of the Royal Society, perhaps the world’s oldest scientific institution, is “nullius in verba” or “take nobody’s word for it”.

But scepticism has two imperatives, each buttressing the other. The first is the imperative to doubt, so nicely captured in the above motto. The second is the imperative to follow the evidence, and to give more credibility to claims that are well justified than those which are not.

In other words, it’s fine to ask questions, but you also have to listen to the answers.

Too often, so-called sceptics do not want to have their views challenged (let alone changed) and do not wish to engage with the science. Even worse, they may choose to adopt any number of justifications for rejecting science, not from their own free inquiry but from a ready-made selection provided by commercially or ideologically motivated industries.

This move away from “sceptic” might, therefore, be seen as simply an improvement in accuracy. But the move to “denier” might be seen as derogatory, especially as the term is associated with nefarious stances such as holocaust denial.

But is it, at least, accurate?

Three categories of climate science disbelief

Let’s consider three possible categories of people who do not accept the consensus and consilience of human-induced climate change:

1. those who engage in scholarly disagreement through the literature

2. those who are not engaged with the debate and have no clear view either way

3. those who associate climate science with conspiracy, wilful ignorance or incompetence (or even see in it an unpalatable truth).

The first category is the rarest. Several papers with reliable methodology unchallenged in the literature show an enormous majority of climate scientists agree that the planet is warming and humans are largely responsible.

But contrary positions are not unknown. Some questions regarding the credibility of some aspects of climate models, for example, exist for some working academics.

While these scientists do not necessarily doubt all aspects of climate science, issues of reliability of methodology and validity of conclusions in some areas remain, for them, alive.

Whether they are correct or not (and many have been responded to in the literature), they are at least working within the broad norms of academia. We might call these people “climate sceptics”.

The second category is quite common. Many people are uninterested in science, including climate science, and have no real interest in the debate. This attitude is easy to criticise, but if there are pressing concerns regarding the availability and security of food, health and safety in your life, you may be preoccupied with these things and not marching for action on climate science.

Others may simply not spend much time thinking about it, nor care very much one way or the other — such is the nature of voluntarily participatory democracy. They might not believe in climate science, but that doesn’t mean they have rejected it. We might call these people “climate agnostics”.

The third category is the most problematic and arguably the most high-profile. It could be subdivided into:

• people convinced of the incompetence of scientists and having a naïve view of their own analytical powers (or common sense)

• folks motivated to reject climate science because of its implications for social or economic change, who consequently see climate science as a conspiracy of social or political engineering

• those accepting of climate science but not caring about the consequences and seeking only to maximise their opportunities in any resulting crisis – which may include continuing existing business models based on fossil-fuel technologies (and hence encourage those who reject the science for social reasons).

Let’s call these subdivisions, in order: climate naives, climate conspiracists, and climate opportunists. Certain combinations of the above are also possible and are probably the norm.

The term “contrarian” is also a common one, but since it basically means only to go against public opinion, it seems a bit shallow in this analysis.

What is it to deny?

The definition of denialism is not uniform. In psychology it is to reject a widely accepted claim because the truth of it is psychologically discomforting (to that extent, there are many aspects of reality we all deny, ignore or minimise for the sake of our sanity).

In popular culture, including discussions of history and climate science, it is an active act of rebellion against the consensus and consilience of experts, often motivated by ideological factors. These are quite distinct and it may not pay any persuasive dividend to blur them together.

The latter definition does not seem appropriate for climate sceptics or for climate agnostics. But for the rest of the disbelievers, it does seem to resonate. So let’s try it here for a moment.

Read more: How do you know that what you know is true? That’s epistemology

This taxonomy of disbelief is not built on any psychological model, but is simply descriptive.

In summary, three categories of climate science disbelief are: sceptic, agnostic and denier. Three subdivisions of deniers are: naive, conspiracists and opportunists.

Is The Guardian right to use the blanket term “deniers” instead of any of the above? Arguably, they have a technical case in some instances, but I would say not in others.

What’s wrong with calling someone a climate agnostic instead of a climate denier, if that is a better description of their state of belief?

But for those who are deniers – and let’s be clear, the evidence is bearing down on all humans like a freight train – then a failure to act is more than negligence, it is a failure of moral courage. I would not want to be remembered as someone who denied that.

– ref. Climate sceptic or climate denier? It’s not that simple and here’s why – http://theconversation.com/climate-sceptic-or-climate-denier-its-not-that-simple-and-heres-why-117913

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Keith D. Parry, Senior Lecturer in Sport Management, University of Winchester

It is traditional at major sports events to begin with a rendition of the national anthem. At the State of Origin rugby league clash between New South Wales and Queensland on Wednesday, however, at least four Indigenous rugby league players have vowed to remain silent – a protest against an anthem they feel doesn’t represent them.

It’s the second such protest in recent months. Before a rugby league match between the Indigenous All Stars and the Māori All Stars in February, a number of Australian players chose to remain silent when the anthem was played. One of them, team captain Cody Walker, called for a wider discussion into the anthem’s appropriateness – a feeling echoed by many Aboriginal people.

Afterwards, former Queensland Origin coach and player Mal Meninga called for a referendum on the issue, saying:

We can have a national debate and let the people of Australia have their say. If we have a national anthem that offends our Indigenous people, let’s see what all of Australia thinks.

The Colin Kaepernick effect

A growing number of athletes are using their celebrity status to speak out on social issues. For example, English footballer Raheem Sterling has been praised for tackling racism in the sport, while Australian rugby player David Pocock was a vocal supporter of same-sex marriage.

But such protests can sometimes spark a backlash among fans, particularly when it comes to sensitive issues like the national anthem.

The most famous example of this is the response to American football player Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the US national anthem to protest police violence. The protests mushroomed to envelop the entire league and divide the nation – and Kaepernick soon found himself out of a job.

President Donald Trump (among others) called the national anthem protests “unpatriotic” – a powerful charge that made many teams unwilling to sign Kaepernick. To this day, he remains without a playing contract. And fears that player protests are a threat to the NFL brand and television ratings remain.

Kaepernick’s boycott inspired calls for similar action in Australia. One of the leaders of this effort, Paul Gorrie, a Gunai/Kurnai and Yorta Yorta musician, artist and activist, said a similar protest was necessary here because:

the national anthem is a representation of our colonial history and black deaths in custody are the impacts of our colonial history and the racism that continues to this day.

He and boxer Anthony Mundine called on players to refuse to sing the anthem during the NRL and AFL Grand Finals in 2016, but their plea was met with a mixed response. Despite support from former players, then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said “everyone should sing and everyone should be proud about our country.” Aboriginal AFL player Lance Franklin even described the protest as “pretty stupid”.

Muted criticism of the protest

The silent dignity of players refusing to sing the anthem during this week’s State of Origin match may motivate others to join in. Yet, the Australian anthem protest movement, thus far, has not been as controversial as the one in the US led by Kaepernick – or had the uptake that Gorrie hoped.

To be sure, the NSW and Queensland players have been criticised by some commentators and fans for their stance on the anthem.

Read more: Booing Adam Goodes – racism is in the stitching of the AFL

But the boycott hasn’t attracted the same level of opposition among league officials or, notably, politicians. Indeed, Queensland captain Daly Cherry-Evans has backed the protests, and there has been no team pressure on the players to sing the anthem.

Significantly, the NRL is also offering tacit support to the protest, with no threat of punishment for those choosing not to sing.

This is in marked contrast to AFL player Adam Goodes’ more vocal stance against racism in sport, which was much more confronting to the country’s dominant racial ideologies.

It is unlikely the State of Origin players will be forced out of the game in the same way that Goodes was. But it would also be naïve to assume that racism is not present in rugby league or other sports today. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander athletes continue to be viewed as “Australians when they’re winning, and Aborigines at other times”.

Slow progress on changing the anthem

The lack of a widespread backlash is a good thing. But the lack of dialogue on the anthem issue is not. So far, the hope of a wider discussion of the anthem – and whether it is inclusive of all Australians – has not happened.

As retired Aboriginal player Jonathan Thurston said of the initial reaction to the All Stars protest:

The stand the team took on not singing the national anthem … it was like it was just brushed over.

The National Rugby League, however, has attempted to listen to Indigenous peoples’ concerns about the anthem in the past. For instance, the national anthem has been performed in a number of Aboriginal languages before previous rugby league All Star matches. But the Wurundjeri elders, the traditional inhabitants of the land on which the All Star game was played this year in Melbourne, refused to translate the anthem into the Woiwurrung language.

Read more: Young and free? Why I declined to sing the national anthem at the 2015 AFL Grand Final

The NRL has also played an alternative anthem during the league’s Indigenous rounds with lyrics written by Judith Durham, the lead singer of The Seekers, and Muti Muti singer songwriter Kutcha Edwards. Unlike Advance Australia Fair, this alternative version has received more support from prominent Aboriginal players and officials.

It is time to put Anglo-Celtic sensibilities aside and admit that not all Australians will want to sing an anthem that has associations with the White Australia policy and the country’s colonial past.

In the words of Josh Addo-Carr, another of the State of Origin boycotters:

If it’s not going to stand for my people, why should I sing it?

– ref. Our national anthem is non-inclusive: Indigenous Australians shouldn’t have to sing it – http://theconversation.com/our-national-anthem-is-non-inclusive-indigenous-australians-shouldnt-have-to-sing-it-118177

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Orlando, Researcher: Technology and Learning, Western Sydney University

If your child spends long hours playing video games, you might be worried they’re addicted.

“Gaming disorder” is real, and has now been classified as a disease in the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD). The new ICD will be adopted in 2022.

If you are worried about your child’s gaming, this new classification will help you identify whether they have a problem and if you need professional help.

Gaming disorder is not just for kids – it can be experienced by gamers of all ages: children, teenagers and adults.

The condition isn’t defined by gaming too much, or the number of hours played, but rather it’s when gaming interferes with a person’s daily life.

Read more: I WANT MY iPAD! Are our kids getting addicted to technology?

To be diagnosed, a person will demonstrate all three of the following symptoms for at least 12 months:

• losing control over gaming
• prioritising gaming to the extent that it takes precedence over other activities and interests
• continuing to game despite negative effects on work, school, family life, health, hygiene, relationships, finances or social relationships.

The classified disorder focuses on gaming only, it doesn’t include other digital behaviours such as overuse of the internet, online gambling, social media, or smart phones.

It also relates to gaming on any device, although most people who develop clinically significant gaming problems play primarily on the internet.

Serious health condition

While millions of kids and adults around the world play video games, only a small number are expected to meet the WHO criteria.

Like other diagnosable addictions, gaming disorder is an extreme mental health condition expected to affect only 0.003 to 1% of the population who engage in video-gaming activities [https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/internet-gamin].

This small percentage still however incorporates a lot of people. Drawing from a random sample of 1,234 people of all ages, around 67% of Australians play video games. This would mean that around 5,000-16,500 Aussies could potentially be diagnosed with the disorder.

Not everyone agrees this is a disorder

While it feels like this classification is a fait accompli, the designation of gaming disorder as an addiction remains hotly debated.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is still not convinced. Two things are holding it back.

The first is that problem gaming often occurs alongside other factors such as loneliness, or mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression. The APA argues problematic gaming may be a symptom of these, rather than a unique condition in its own right.

Read more: Could playing Fortnite lead to video game addiction? The World Health Organisation says yes, but others disagree

The second issue for the APA is the lack of strong evidence and research to support gaming disorder as an addiction in its own right.

Other experts have also weighed into this debate suggesting the classification is simply a response to the huge community concern and moral panic about video games.

How gaming disorder should be treated

An important impact of the classification of gaming disorder as an addiction is it lays the path for treatment by health professionals.

But like the classification of the disorder, research-based treatment plans are also in their infancy.

A survey of psychiatrists in Australia and New Zealand found only 16.3% felt confident managing the disorder.

So what should you expect from professional treatment?

The are two common forms of treatment: one focuses on understanding the gamer’s situation; the other focuses on learning new behaviours.

Treatment often includes therapy sessions with an addiction counsellor. The sessions may take the form of individual sessions, group sessions and/or family sessions. Each session dynamic has a different focus. For example, family therapy sessions focus on exploring and addressing issues in the patient’s family that may contribute to the addiction.

The second common treatment is cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). This often takes place in addition to counselling sessions. CBT is based on the premise that thoughts determine feelings and it is used to treat many psychiatric disorders, such as substance use disorders, depression and anxiety. CBT teaches the gamer different ways to think, behave, and respond to stressful situations.

Other medical treatments proving to have some success include art therapy and exercise therapy.

Research on suitable medication is also continuing.

Treatment plans are designed according to the needs of the individual. It may involve a series of CBT sessions, for example, plus individual therapy sessions, plus family therapy sessions. Treatment is tailored to the age of the person, their faith, their professional status or other factor important to their treatment.

At this stage, no treatment can claim a 100% success rate and this is reflective of the need for more research.

Tips to manage your child’s gaming

While most gamers will not be diagnosed with gaming disorder, a child’s gaming habits can cause significant distress for parents. They may be concerned their child is spending too much time on video games, that they resist every time they are asked to get off, or that gaming is leading to an unhealthy or unbalanced lifestyle.

Here are some tips for supporting more healthy approaches to gaming for children include:

• encourage sport and physical activity. This can increase blood levels of serotonin and have a positive effect on mood and symptoms of problematic gaming

• talk to your child about what they enjoy about gaming and why they want to game regularly. Their answer will help you identify if there are others issues they may be experiencing and using gaming as an escape

• when you call your child off their game, ensure they have an activity to shift to, such as a family outing or dinner. This will create a reason to get off

• when calling your child off a game, give them time to finish the game. Continuously being asked to get off mid-game can be frustrating and lead to arguments. Ask them how much longer they will need to finish the game and then ensure they get off when the game is over.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do adults think video games are bad?

With video games such a significant aspect of young people’s lives, it’s important to guide healthy, balanced approaches as young as possible.

Central to this is ensuring you include gaming and any other technology activities in family discussions. This will help keep the lines of communication open and will help identify any problem behaviour early on.

– ref. How to know if your child is addicted to video games and what to do about it – http://theconversation.com/how-to-know-if-your-child-is-addicted-to-video-games-and-what-to-do-about-it-118038

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Moore, Senior Lecturer in Ecology, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University

The koala’s nose is distinctive – it’s a big black leathery rectangle in the middle of a round, grey face that’s surprisingly soft to the touch. And every koala nose is unique.

A study of 108 wild koalas found distinctive patterns of pigmentation around the nostrils allowed observers on the ground to reliably recognise individual animals, even when they’re in the trees.

Read more: A report claims koalas are ‘functionally extinct’ – but what does that mean?

But more importantly for the koala, the nose is an important connection between this iconic marsupial and the world it lives in, from sniffing out toxins to saying hello.

And it starts right at birth. The tiny newborn koala, despite weighing only half a gram, already has the ability to smell and feel its way towards the milky scent of the pouch and its mother’s teats.

A koala’s nose knows how to sniff out toxins

Koalas, famously, spend most of their time sleeping or resting. When they’re not sleeping or resting, they are mostly feeding or moving between trees. In both of these activities – or in other words, for most of their waking hours – they follow their nose.

Koalas nearly always smell their food carefully before eating. So many koala experts were surprised to learn recently that koalas don’t have particularly many genes for olfactory receptors – the receptors found on nerve cells in the nasal cavity for detecting different smells.

Read more: Koalas sniff out juicy leaves and break down eucalypt toxins – it’s in their genome

This matches up with anatomical observations that also suggest that among marsupials, the koala’s sense of smell is probably relatively poor, partly as a result of features associated with conserving water.

Gum leaves are chock full of natural plant toxins and other unpleasant chemicals, and koalas choose trees that minimise their exposure to the worst of these.

But most of the toxins that influence koala feeding are not volatile – they have no smell. It falls to the koala’s sense of taste (and genes for taste receptors are especially abundant in the koala genome) to make a final decision on whether a leaf is safe to eat.

Fortunately for the koala, the only-slightly-toxic compounds called terpenes (the invigorating scent of Eucalyptus oil) are highly volatile and offer a useful cue to the levels of other toxins in a leaf.

And one advantage of being a specialist feeder with a basic diet, is that there are relatively few odour cues to learn. It’s also fortunate the leaves koalas are checking out are right in front of their noses!

The koala’s nose might not only smell plant toxins, it may also play a minor role in detoxifying them.

Read more: A cull could help save koalas from chlamydia, if we allowed it

We know enzymes in our own noses can detoxify certain drugs, and in other specialist herbivores, such as woodrats, many of the same enzymes that detoxify natural plant toxins and drugs in the liver are also expressed in the lining of the nose.

These enzymes likely help stop the nose from becoming overwhelmed by odours and maintain sensitivity. Critically, they also protect the central nervous system, as nasal tissue is the only thing separating inhaled toxins from the brain.

A koala’s nose knows how to make friends

Sniffing out food is important, but it’s not the koala’s biggest forte. So why the big schnoz? The answer may lie with the importance of social communication.

Although the koala genome has relatively few olfactory receptors, it’s rich in vomeronasal receptors, which are expressed in cells in the nasal cavity that are sensitive to moisture-borne molecules like pheromones.

Koalas are generally solitary creatures, but that’s not to say they don’t know their neighbours. Along with the distinctive loud bellowing of male koalas during the breeding season, olfactory communication is what koalas use to find or avoid each other.

Koalas of both sexes often spend considerable time smelling the base and trunk of a tree before they decide whether to climb up or move on elsewhere. When they enter or leave a tree, koalas commonly dribble a stream of urine down the trunk, leaving a trail of chemicals that potentially reveal information about the koala’s sex, identity, dominance, relatedness to other koalas, readiness to mate, disease status and even what they’ve been eating.

But if koala urine is a book written in scent, the secretions of the male koala’s sternal gland are more like a barcode.

This gland is obvious as a yellow-brown stained patch of bare skin in the middle of male koalas’ chests, and offers a straightforward way to tell the sexes apart.

It secretes an oily mixture of fatty acids and other chemicals, which are then transformed into an even more complex chemical mixture by the unique bacterial community occupying each koala’s gland. The end result is a distinctive bouquet and an unmistakable badge of identity for each koala.

Nose kisses from a koala

Aside from these fascinating nasal abilities, there is one more thing that we love about the koala’s nose.

When wild koalas are brought into captivity, they continue to rely on their nose to learn about the strange new world around them – that includes their food and branches, but also the scientists and carers moving around them.

Read more: Drop, bears: chronic stress and habitat loss are flooring koalas

They will pull anything of interest into smelling range, making them one of the few wild animals that will rub noses to say hello with humans and fellow koalas, even when barely acquainted!

But wild koalas are highly sensitive to human handling, which can generate sub-lethal stress through the stress hormone, cortisol.

Without question, the koala’s nose is fascinating and a marvel of evolution, but no matter how strong the temptation to touch it, please leave those koalas in peace!

– ref. What does a koala’s nose know? A bit about food, and a lot about making friends – http://theconversation.com/what-does-a-koalas-nose-know-a-bit-about-food-and-a-lot-about-making-friends-117754

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Edgar Liu, Senior Research Fellow at City Futures Research Centre, UNSW

People’s quality of life, their health and their comfort can suffer when living in poor-quality housing. It can also impose high ongoing costs of maintenance, repairs, heating and cooling. And these problems are more likely to affect low-income households, as our report for Shelter NSW shows. In it, we review the evidence on housing quality problems and consider ways to resolve these, especially for low-income households.

There is extensive evidence of the impacts of poor-quality housing on physical health, mental wellbeing and comfort. For example, poor design and maintenance can lead to the build-up of mould.

Read more: Is this a housing system that cares? That’s the question for Australians and their new government

These negative impacts vary by income groups and tenure. From the recently completed Australian Housing Conditions Dataset we know, for example, that renters on very low incomes (the bottom fifth of households for gross income, about $20,000 a year) are most likely to have unmet repair needs. They also have a harder time staying comfortable during winter and summer, as the table below shows.

What are the reasons for poor-quality housing?

There are several underlying reasons for substandard housing.

Properties may enter the rental market after years in owner-occupation with no formal checks on their state of repair.

Another problem is some private renters do not assert – or feel unable to assert – their legal right to habitable premises in a reasonable state of repair and upkeep. This is often because of the insecurity of their leases and lack of affordable alternative housing.

Read more: Life as an older renter, and what it tells us about the urgent need for tenancy reform

Another issue is “split incentives” – landlords decline to upgrade properties because they would not receive any benefit themselves.

There are also problems in public housing. Disinvestment by governments has both reduced the supply of housing and caused a backlog of maintenance for much of the remaining stock of dwellings.

Read more: Tenants’ calls for safe public housing fall on deaf ears

Housing quality is covered by myriad regulatory regimes. Lately, governments have been focused on questions of how best to regulate construction of new buildings. Less attention is given to the ongoing use of existing buildings.

Recent state and national reviews have highlighted problems in the certification of building design and construction, and in the public agencies that oversee the certifiers. Some state governments have begun to respond. The New South Wales government, for instance, is moving to consolidate the regulation of construction practitioners under a new building commissioner.

We spoke to a range of housing sector stakeholders and the theme from the recent reviews that most struck a chord was inadequate policy governance. There was no comprehensive overview or oversight of the issues of housing quality. As a result, some important issues escape policymakers’ attention.

Many stakeholders indicated that the current focus on problems in new buildings is an example of this. Although that’s plainly an issue in need of attention, other problems in existing buildings and more fundamental solutions are being overlooked – such as increasing social and affordable housing supply.

Read more: Australia needs to triple its social housing by 2036. This is the best way to do it

So what are the solutions?

Empowering tenants and regulators

One way in which the quality of existing housing is regulated is through tenancy laws. This will become more important as rental housing becomes an increasingly common option, particularly for the long term.

Recently, some state governments have amended tenancy laws to specify “minimum standards” for rental housing. Our research participants supported these moves, but said security of tenure also had to be improved to protect renters when they assert their rights. The onus of legal enforcement could also be shifted from tenants to regulators.

Mandating improvements to overcome the split incentive problem

The split incentive problem for housing quality means some landlords are reluctant to pay for upgrades – such as insulation or other energy-efficient features – where tenants are the beneficiaries. As a result, renters, especially those on low incomes, are likely to be living in housing of lower standards or quality.

A potential solution is for governments to take the minimum standards approach and legislate energy efficiency and other improvements as mandatory. This is already commonplace overseas.

One of our workshop participants observed that “energy poverty” was another way of framing the policy issue that had proved compelling in overseas jurisdictions. While this framing had not had the same impact in Australia, this may be changing.

Improving transparency of housing standards

Social housing providers have a role in leading by example. Increased investment in social housing could contribute to improved quality across the housing system.

To this end, social housing landlords – particularly state and territory public housing authorities – need to be more accountable to tenants and the general public. Transparent reporting on property conditions, maintenance and tenant satisfaction, led by the social housing sector, can and should be rolled out as standard practice across the sector.

To do this, however, enough funding must be provided to reverse decades-long underfunding in the sector.

Collectively, these options can deliver more equitable housing outcomes, not only to low-income households but to all. The challenge lies in having the political and industry will to act on them.

Read more: Australia needs to reboot affordable housing funding, not scrap it

– ref. Chilly house? Mouldy rooms? Here’s how to improve low-income renters’ access to decent housing – http://theconversation.com/chilly-house-mouldy-rooms-heres-how-to-improve-low-income-renters-access-to-decent-housing-116749

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tom Murray, Senior Lecturer and former ARC DECRA Fellow in Screen Media, Macquarie University

Germany, 1918. Wünsdorf prisoner-of-war camp, not far from Berlin. An Australian Indigenous POW, Douglas Grant, sits as a model for a portrait bust by a German Jewish sculptor, Rudolf Marcuse.

The completed work is remarkable and of national significance. As Aaron Pegram, senior historian at the Australian War Memorial, recently explained:

It is the only known sculpture of an Indigenous member of the Australian Imperial Force made during the First World War.

But the whereabouts of the bust has remained a mystery for decades – until now.

A few tantalising details of the sculpture were on the public record. An entry in The Australian Dictionary of Biography, for instance, states that Grant “became an object of curiosity to German doctors, scientists and anthropologists” and that Marcuse, who was sent to the camp to sculpt portraits of inmates, modelled Grant’s bust “in ebony”. Other biographies have mentioned a bronze or marble bust. But no-one seemed to know where it was – indeed, some questioned whether it existed at all.

After years spent searching European archives and contacting museums and art dealers, we have now found the bust in a small village in rural Wiltshire, England.

It belongs to a retired accountant, Rupert O’Flynn, who keeps it on a plinth in his sitting room and was delighted to hear of its extraordinary history and significance. Cast in bronze (not carved in ebony or marble as conjectured), it is a good likeness of Grant.

A story of art, war, propaganda and race

The creation of this sculpture is a story of art, war, propaganda, race, and two individuals forced to flee state violence and oppression. Grant’s life is itself remarkable. Born around 1885 in the Australian Indigenous Nations of the tropical Queensland rainforest, he was “rescued” and adopted in 1887 by a Scottish-born couple, Robert and Elizabeth Grant. They later claimed his parents had been killed in a “tribal disturbance”, a commonly used euphemism for massacre at the time.

Raised by his adoptive parents in Sydney, Grant trained and worked as a draughtsman before joining the Australian Imperial Force in 1916. He embarked for Europe the same year as a private with the 13th Battalion. In early 1917, he fought alongside around 6000 Australians in the disastrous First Battle of Bullecourt. Half of them were killed, wounded or taken prisoner.

Grant was among the 1,170 Australians captured. As Pegram puts it, they were

the largest loss of Australians as prisoners of war in a single action until the Fall of Singapore in 1942.

Marcuse, meanwhile, was born in 1878 in Berlin. He studied at the city’s Royal Academy of the Arts and his life-size bronzes and decorative statuettes of public figures were well regarded, with Kaiser Wilhelm II and the King of Siam (now Thailand) among his customers.

When war broke out, the director of Berlin’s National Gallery tasked Marcuse with creating busts and statuettes of the “colourful mixture of peoples amongst our enemies”. The plan was to display them in an Imperial War Museum commemorating Germany’s anticipated victory. Marcuse’s search for “racially genuine types” led him to Wünsdorf, where the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, an organisation created to record the languages and folk songs of “exotic” POWs, was conducting a scientific experiment.

Only a handful of Indigenous Australians were interned in German POW camps. This made Grant “the prize capture”, according to Roy Kinghorn, an AIF colleague and friend from the Australian Museum. Brought up by white foster parents and with only a bookish knowledge of Aboriginal culture, he was, in fact, a disappointment to the cultural anthropologists. But evidently not to Marcuse.

Sadly, neither man wrote in detail about their meeting, but Marcuse’s lively descriptions of other POWs he sculpted show that he was interested in his models as individuals with unique life stories.

Tracking down the bust

The whereabouts of Marcuse’s bust of Grant had been unknown for decades, until we found a published photograph of it on the website of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

The museum has digitised large parts of its collections in recent years, including a portfolio of photographs of Marcuse’s busts and statuettes, published in 1919 under the title “Ethnic Types from the World War”. In this context, the bust of Grant was anonymously described as “Australian Aborigine” and sandwiched between a “Siberian” and a “Somali”.

We then tracked the bust from one art and antiques dealer to the next. Finally, we found a British dealer who remembered a “Negro” sculpture similar to the one in our photograph, and the name of the man who had bought it.

O’Flynn had bought the sculpture from the London Olympia Art & Antiques Fair a few years before we met him in 2016. He was thrilled to hear its story. “It has got a presence to it and it is big and bold,” he told us. “It’s just the sort of thing I like and it has a reality to it – it’s fantastic!”

He also mused on the strange journey this sculpture – a German bronze of an Aboriginal man – had taken. “It’s just bizarre for it to end up with me.”

Of national significance

Both Grant and Marcuse struggled to find a niche in later life. Grant returned to Sydney, was a confidant to Henry Lawson, and campaigned for the rights of Indigenous Australians. But it was a prejudiced era and he had difficulty finding permanent work. He spent most of the 1930s in a “hospital for the insane” and died in 1951, aged about 66.

Marcuse fled Nazi Germany for England in 1936. He had applied to join the British war effort as a freelance artist when he died in Middlesex Hospital in 1940, aged 62.

This sculpture is a unique record of their meeting. Given its national importance, we hope that one day it will find its way back to an Australian institution.

– ref. How we tracked down the only known sculpture of a WWI Indigenous soldier – http://theconversation.com/how-we-tracked-down-the-only-known-sculpture-of-a-wwi-indigenous-soldier-117246

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University

Cardinal George Pell’s appeal against child sexual assault convictions kicks off this week, but when that’s over Pell still has another reckoning to face: the unredacted findings of Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

When the royal commission handed down its massive report in late 2017, several sections were redacted until after any legal proceedings against Cardinal Pell were concluded.

In this episode of Media Files, Matthew Ricketson talks with ABC investgative reporter Louise Milligan – author of Cardinal: the rise and fall of George Pell – about the issues and incidents the royal commission investigated.

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Additional credits

Producer: Andy Hazel.

Theme music: Susie Wilkins.

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David Crosling/AAP

– ref. Media Files: Investigative reporter Louise Milligan on Cardinal Pell and redactions in the Royal Commission’s report – http://theconversation.com/media-files-investigative-reporter-louise-milligan-on-cardinal-pell-and-redactions-in-the-royal-commissions-report-117981

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Patterson, Lecturer, Deakin University

Today it was revealed the Australian National University (ANU) fell victim to a cyber security attack two weeks ago. Stolen was a substantial amount of data dating back 19 years relating to staff, students and visitors.

We don’t know for sure how long the cyber attackers were inside the ANU systems in this case. However, the university revealed details of other attempted attacks last year.

Read more: Hackers cause most data breaches, but accidents by normal people aren’t far behind

The ABC reported that the types of data stolen were “names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, personal email addresses and emergency contact details, tax file numbers, payroll information, bank account details, and passport details. Student academic records were also accessed.”

These are very critical data. Privacy and security are at risk when this sort of information, especially people’s personal and financial details, are hacked.

The question now is what will happen with the stolen data.

There are three likely outcomes:

1. Invitation to pay a ransom

The hackers who stole the data might ask ANU to pay a ransom and they will “erase” the data they stole (or at least say they will). If the ransom is not paid, they will probably release it to the public.

We have seen cases like this before around the world. A recent example involved stolen coding tools.

Another example is an attack on a German IT company, Citycomp, where hackers broke into its systems and stole a lot of critical data. Citycomp was asked to pay a ransom of $5,000 – but did not. The hackers published the data.

2. Free public release of data

The hackers may release the stolen data to the public without asking for any payment. This might happen as a show of strength, to provide evidence of their capabilities, or to cause chaos.

The consequences are still very serious in this case. It could lead to serious breaches of personal privacy, fake identities being created and important intellectual property becoming available to competitors or other hackers.

More broadly, the university may attract fines from the government if it was later found that correct data protection practices were not followed. That said, there is no evidence this is the case here.

3. Sell for profit on the dark web

The hackers may sell the data on the dark web to make a profit. Others could buy the data to create fake identities and as a result fake credit cards.

An example where hackers have stolen data involving up to 150 million users and sold it on the dark web involved Under Armour’s MyFitnessPal app.

The entire stolen data set is reportedly available for an asking price of less than $20,000 in bitcoin – around one year after the breach occurred.

Hackers are hard to stop

What makes this ANU case very interesting is that in 2018 The Guardian reported that ANU had spent many months fighting off a threat to its systems. There were unverified reports this might have come from hackers based in China.

This means the ANU has known it was being targeted for a while now, and was still not able to fend off the data breach revealed today.

You might ask why the university hadn’t bolstered its cyber defences in response. The answer is the ANU probably did, to the best of its abilities.

However, when you are dealing with elite hackers and those using “zero day exploits”, it means your chances of preventing a hack are quite limited. Zero day-based exploits focus on vulnerabilities that are not yet known to anti-malware companies or for which no targeted solutions are available, such as patches or updates.

Read more: From botnet to malware: a guide to decoding cybersecurity buzzwords

This is still a dangerous situation

There are still aspects of this situation that will present concerns to the ANU and its stakeholders.

For example, it’s possible the hackers could still be in the systems, but hidden. They may have user names and passwords for student accounts or hidden backdoors the university has not yet discovered.

It could be worse than we know

Another issue is whether the hackers have stolen even more data than is being reported.

It currently appears data not stolen includes “credit card details, travel information, medical records, police checks, workers’ compensation information, vehicle registration numbers, and some performance records”.

ANU vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt has said: “We have no evidence that research work has been affected. But the university may not yet know for sure. A very concerning aspect for the university will be the potential for intellectual property and unpublished academic works to be accessed. This could be very valuable to sell off online or even to other universities.”

This has happened before: Iranian hackers targeted 76 universities across 14 countries to steal intellectual property from research projects in 2018.

Only time will reveal what happens next. The bad news is that hackers have stolen critical data and it’s in the wind. The outcomes could be minimal or they could be disastrous, depending on the hackers’ intentions.

A big concern will be if the hackers still have access to the university systems, via an established backdoor, and are siphoning off critical data as it emerges.

– ref. 19 years of personal data was stolen from ANU. It could show up on the dark web – http://theconversation.com/19-years-of-personal-data-was-stolen-from-anu-it-could-show-up-on-the-dark-web-118265

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

The Reserve Bank cut interest rates on Tuesday because we aren’t spending or pushing up prices at anything like the rate it would like. And things are even worse than it might have realised.

As the board met in Martin Place in Sydney, in Canberra at 11.30 am the Bureau of Statistics released details of retail spending in April, one month beyond the March quarter figures the bank was using to make its decision.

They show the dollars spent in shops fell in April, slipping 0.1%, notwithstanding weakly growing prices and a more strongly growing population.

The March quarter figures the board was looking at were adjusted for prices. They show that the volume of goods and services bought, but not the amount paid for them, fell in seasonally adjusted terms during the March quarter.

Adjusted for population, the volume bought would have fallen further.

We’ll know more on Wednesday

The Bureau of Statistics will release population-adjusted figures as part of the national accounts on Wednesday.

The figures for the September quarter show that income and spending per person barely grew. The figures for the December quarter show income and spending per person fell.

A second fall in the March quarter will mean two in a row – what some people call a per capita recession.

Even unadjusted for population, economic growth is dismal.

During the September and December quarters the economy grew just 0.3% and 0.2% – an annualised rate of just 1%.

That’s well short of the 2.75% the treasury believes we are capable of, and the lower than normal 2.25% it has forecast for the year to June.

We’ve been doing it by ourselves. As Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe said in announcing the rates decision on Tuesday:

The main domestic uncertainty continues to be the outlook for household consumption, which is being affected by a protracted period of low income growth and declining housing prices.

The bank wants both inflation and employment higher, and it wants us to spend more in order to do it. Lower rates should help, although not for everybody. This cut will free up an extra A$60 a month for a typical mortgage holder. One more cut will free up a total of $120.

It’s not much, and there’s doubt about whether it would do much, but interest rates are about the only tool the Reserve Bank has.

It is required by its agreement with the government to aim for an inflation rate of between 2% and 3%, “on average, over time”.

It is also required to aim for full employment.

It says while employment growth has been strong, of late there have been “little further inroads into the spare capacity in the labour market”.

The underemployment rate suggests it is possible for employers to more fully employ more people, if necessary paying higher wages in order to do it – if only employers were confident enough.

The Bank believes hopes lower rates will give them than confidence, in order to “assist with faster progress in reducing unemployment and achieve more assured progress towards the inflation target”.

If that doesn’t happen, it will cut again. Tuesday’s statement as good as said so:

The board will continue to monitor developments in the labour market closely and adjust monetary policy to support sustainable growth in the economy and the achievement of the inflation target over time.

This cut and the next will take it into uncharted waters, where its so-called cash rate – what it pays to banks to deposit money with it overnight – is close to zero.

As far as can be discerned it has never been that low in the 100+ years the Reserve Bank has been in operation, originally as the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

Reserve Bank cash rate since 1990

Should inflation still not pick up and employment still not fall as far as it believes it could, it will have to effectively cut its cash rate below zero, forcing cash into the hands of banks by aggressively buying government bonds, giving them little choice but to lend it to households and businesses, in a process known as quantitative easing. It has been done in the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom and Japan, and is by now anything but unconventional.

It would prefer the government to pull its weight by cutting tax and spending more, especially on infrastructure. As the governor said in a major speech just after the election, relying on only one policy instrument “has limitations”.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg gets it. He points out that the yet-to-be-approved tax offsets in the budget will give Australians on up to $126,000 a cash bonus of up to $1,080 when they submit this year’s tax return. He said

the combination of the tax cuts and today’s Reserve Bank decision could see a two-income family, for example a teacher and a tradie, each earning $60,000 a year, with a $400,000 mortgage, almost $3,000 a year better off as a household.

His biggest concern, and the biggest concern of the governor, might be that they don’t spend it. Another concern would be that the banks don’t pass the rate cut on.

Already the ANZ has said it will only cut mortgage rates by 0.18 points instead of the full 0.25, a decision Frydenberg said “let down” customers.

Governor Lowe made his own position clear when announcing the cut. He said bank funding costs had “declined further, with money-market spreads having fully reversed the increases that took place last year”.

Read more: Cutting interest rates is just the start. It’s about to become much, much easier to borrow

– ref. The Reserve Bank will cut rates again and again, until we lift spending and push up prices – http://theconversation.com/the-reserve-bank-will-cut-rates-again-and-again-until-we-lift-spending-and-push-up-prices-118263

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

In its much awaited first well-being budget, New Zealand’s coalition government missed a major trick in not making unemployment one of their central well-being priorities.

As of March 2019, New Zealand’s unemployment rate was at 4.4% (not seasonally adjusted). The figure is slightly below the OECD average of 5.2%, and 12 OECD countries have lower rates.

Treasury forecast the rate to decline moderately to 4% this year and then to rise to 4.3% by 2023. While some might trumpet this as success, it is not good by New Zealand’s historical standards.

Between 1956 and 1981, our unemployment was never above 2% and often below 1%. In the mid-1980s, the then 4% rate was considered unacceptably high and offered as a rationale for the economic reforms of the time.

Read more: New Zealand’s ‘well-being budget’: how it hopes to improve people’s lives

Low unemployment is central to well-being

Considerable amounts of research conclusively shows that when people become unemployed, their well-being, measured by their self-assessed life satisfaction, falls sharply. Should they remain without a job, the unemployed do not adapt to this new and traumatising experience. Their well-being remains low until they are re-employed.

The research suggests that the main impact of unemployment on well-being is not through people’s lower income. Rather it likely hits people through the loss of social status, loss of life structure and purpose, and lack of a positive social context.

In addition to being a direct cause of low well-being, unemployment is also strongly connected to other 2019 well-being budget priorities. Parental unemployment is a major cause of child poverty, which is one of five budget priorities. Unemployment is also likely to contribute to mental health problems and alcohol and drug problems, another priority. A third budget priority is reducing income and employment gaps for Māori and Pacific people. Given these two groups are over-represented among the unemployed, lower overall unemployment would also contribute to achieving that priority.

Do nothing approach to unemployment

Treasury’s budget assessment of the unemployment rate at which the economy is stable (strictly speaking their estimate of the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, or the NAIRU) is 4.25%.

Following discussions with Treasury about the range of possible estimates around the 4.25% number, officials indicated they had no direct sense of its softness. But they did suggest that estimating the rate using different statistical models delivered quite different results. They didn’t state the size of these differences.

The Treasury criteria for choosing a specific statistical model behind the budget’s stable unemployment rate was not discussed in budget documents. A cynic might suggest that proximity of the estimated stable rate to the actual current rate of unemployment – which generates a do-nothing policy conclusion – might have been on decision-makers’ minds when selecting the “best” model.

Some indication of how different statistical models can generate quite different stable unemployment rates comes from recent work at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. The bank takes two approaches to estimating the stable unemployment rate – the results can differ at times by more than 2%. Consequently, it is difficult to take the precise 4.25% unemployment estimate, used to justify the do-nothing approach, seriously as a hard policy constraint.

The well-being budget did contain some new but minor unemployment initiatives. But they really amount to fiddling around the micro edges of a macro unemployment problem.

Lower unemployment is achievable

Even in today’s globalised trading economies, much lower unemployment rates than New Zealand’s current 4.4% are achievable. For example, the best OECD performer is currently the Czech Republic, with an unemployment rate of 2.1%. Japan is next at 2.4% and Iceland is at 2.7%.

The questioning of the very notion of a stable unemployment rate, and the suggestion that macro policies can have significant impacts on unemployment, is also attracting serious intellectual consideration internationally. Top US economist Lawrence Summers recently remarked:

[T]he issue that’s preoccupied monetary policy for the generation before the financial crisis – the avoidance of inflation – is no longer the top issue.

Rather, for Summers, that top issue was “getting to full employment”.

The government has missed an opportunity to use macroeconomic tools to test whether we can have a society which once again has low rates of unemployment, as we used to between 1938 and the early 1980s when they were between zero and 2%.

Read more: What is full employment? An economist explains the latest jobs data

From the 1938 Social Security Act on we have had a welfare system designed to work best when high numbers of New Zealanders are in work. Despite all the changes to the working age welfare system since the 1970s, it still functions best when the unemployment rate is considerably lower than what we have settled for today.

Full employment and low rates of unemployment were what economist Wolfgang Rosenberg described in the late 1970s as the fulcrum of our social welfare system. Perhaps much lower unemployment should once again be the fulcrum of what we might now call our social well-being system. To place it in such a position of prominence would be to inaugurate policies considerably more transformational than this coalition government has thus far delivered.

– ref. Why reducing unemployment should have been a focus for NZ’s well-being budget – http://theconversation.com/why-reducing-unemployment-should-have-been-a-focus-for-nzs-well-being-budget-118061

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

In its much awaited first well-being budget, New Zealand’s coalition government missed a major trick in not making unemployment one of their central well-being priorities.

As of March 2019, New Zealand’s unemployment rate was at 4.4% (not seasonally adjusted). The figure is slightly below the OECD average of 5.2%, and 12 OECD countries have lower rates.

Treasury forecast the rate to decline moderately to 4% this year and then to rise to 4.3% by 2023. While some might trumpet this as success, it is not good by New Zealand’s historical standards.

Between 1956 and 1981, our unemployment was never above 2% and often below 1%. In the mid-1980s, the then 4% rate was considered unacceptably high and offered as a rationale for the economic reforms of the time.

Read more: New Zealand’s ‘well-being budget’: how it hopes to improve people’s lives

Low unemployment is central to well-being

Considerable amounts of research conclusively shows that when people become unemployed, their well-being, measured by their self-assessed life satisfaction, falls sharply. Should they remain without a job, the unemployed do not adapt to this new and traumatising experience. Their well-being remains low until they are re-employed.

The research suggests that the main impact of unemployment on well-being is not through people’s lower income. Rather it likely hits people through the loss of social status, loss of life structure and purpose, and lack of a positive social context.

In addition to being a direct cause of low well-being, unemployment is also strongly connected to other 2019 well-being budget priorities. Parental unemployment is a major cause of child poverty, which is one of five budget priorities. Unemployment is also likely to contribute to mental health problems and alcohol and drug problems, another priority. A third budget priority is reducing income and employment gaps for Māori and Pacific people. Given these two groups are over-represented among the unemployed, lower overall unemployment would also contribute to achieving that priority.

Do nothing approach to unemployment

Treasury’s budget assessment of the unemployment rate at which the economy is stable (strictly speaking their estimate of the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, or the NAIRU) is 4.25%.

Following discussions with Treasury about the range of possible estimates around the 4.25% number, officials indicated they had no direct sense of its softness. But they did suggest that estimating the rate using different statistical models delivered quite different results. They didn’t state the size of these differences.

The Treasury criteria for choosing a specific statistical model behind the budget’s stable unemployment rate was not discussed in budget documents. A cynic might suggest that proximity of the estimated stable rate to the actual current rate of unemployment – which generates a do-nothing policy conclusion – might have been on decision-makers’ minds when selecting the “best” model.

Some indication of how different statistical models can generate quite different stable unemployment rates comes from recent work at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. The bank takes two approaches to estimating the stable unemployment rate – the results can differ at times by more than 2%. Consequently, it is difficult to take the precise 4.25% unemployment estimate, used to justify the do-nothing approach, seriously as a hard policy constraint.

The well-being budget did contain some new but minor unemployment initiatives. But they really amount to fiddling around the micro edges of a macro unemployment problem.

Lower unemployment is achievable

Even in today’s globalised trading economies, much lower unemployment rates than New Zealand’s current 4.4% are achievable. For example, the best OECD performer is currently the Czech Republic, with an unemployment rate of 2.1%. Japan is next at 2.4% and Iceland is at 2.7%.

The questioning of the very notion of a stable unemployment rate, and the suggestion that macro policies can have significant impacts on unemployment, is also attracting serious intellectual consideration internationally. Top US economist Lawrence Summers recently remarked:

[T]he issue that’s preoccupied monetary policy for the generation before the financial crisis – the avoidance of inflation – is no longer the top issue.

Rather, for Summers, that top issue was “getting to full employment”.

The government has missed an opportunity to use macroeconomic tools to test whether we can have a society which once again has low rates of unemployment, as we used to between 1938 and the early 1980s when they were between zero and 2%.

Read more: What is full employment? An economist explains the latest jobs data

From the 1938 Social Security Act on we have had a welfare system designed to work best when high numbers of New Zealanders are in work. Despite all the changes to the working age welfare system since the 1970s, it still functions best when the unemployment rate is considerably lower than what we have settled for today.

Full employment and low rates of unemployment were what economist Wolfgang Rosenberg described in the late 1970s as the fulcrum of our social welfare system. Perhaps much lower unemployment should once again be the fulcrum of what we might now call our social well-being system. To place it in such a position of prominence would be to inaugurate policies considerably more transformational than this coalition government has thus far delivered.

– ref. Why NZ’s well-being budget should have focused on lifting employment rates – http://theconversation.com/why-nzs-well-being-budget-should-have-focused-on-lifting-employment-rates-118061

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Belinda Barnet, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology

Have you noticed your Facebook feed looks different lately?

It’s a bit more “zen”, uncluttered and faster. Instagram-like story posts are displayed first, and a separate feed allows you to keep up with the latest activity in your groups.

Someone has assembled a ring of comfy chairs in your lounge room and invited the local mums and bubs group over for hot cocoa and biscuits. Even the hearts are squishier.

According to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it’s “the biggest change to the app and website in the last five years”.

This cosmetic change could represent the first step in Facebook’s “privacy pivot” announced in March 2019. But we’re still waiting to hear exactly what will be happening with our data as part of this gradual change.

Read more: Privacy pivot: Facebook wants to be more like WhatsApp. But details are scarce

Pile on Facebook

Facebook has been under immense pressure from both the Federal Trade Commission in the United States, and governments around the world in the wake of a string of privacy scandals (including Cambridge Analytica).

After live-streamed terrorism in New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern is leading a global charge for regulation and oversight. The recent Christchurch Call meeting resulted in tech companies and world leaders signing an agreement to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.

Everyone is piling on Facebook, even Zuckerberg’s original platform co-founder Chris Hughes.

Hughes said “it’s time to break up Facebook” and “the government must hold Mark accountable”. He was referring to the huge power Zuckerberg holds through controlling the algorithms that keep Facebook – and more recently acquired platforms Instagram and Whatsapp – ticking over. Those algorithms functionalise Facebook’s vast body of user data.

Read more: The ‘Christchurch Call’ is just a start. Now we need to push for systemic change

Putting it lightly

Zuckerberg admits that changes must be made, saying in April:

I know we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly.

Facebook’s business model is built on harvesting platform data about its users, crunching that to generate behavioural inferences like “divorced, male, no children, interested in weight loss”, and then selling this package to advertisers.

Technology scholar Shoshanna Zuboff calls the process of collecting and selling user data “surveillance capitalism”.

Privacy was never part of Facebook’s floor plan.

In its defence, it doesn’t sell identifiable data, and it has clamped down on developer access to its data.

That’s because developers are not the customer – nor are the users who are clicking on like buttons or buying yoga pants. Facebook’s customers are advertisers.

Facebook sells one product: a powerful capacity to personalise and target ads that is unparalleled in any other platform. This turned a profit of US$16 billion in the last quarter of 2018.

It seems reasonable to assume it’s going to do everything it can to protect its ability to keep collecting the raw material for that profit.

But recent questions put to Facebook by US Senator Josh Hawley reveal that Facebook is still not willing or able to share its plans on privacy relating to metadata collection and use.

In response to the senator, Kevin Martin, Vice President of US Public Policy at Facebook said:

[…] there are still many open questions about what metadata we will retain and how it may be used. We’ve committed to consult safety and privacy experts, law enforcement, and governments on the best way forward.

Chat, shop, watch … and wait

At a developer conference last month, Zuckerberg outlined his proposed changes: mainly, change the focus to communities and privacy, make messaging faster and encrypted, and transform the user experience.

The square logo is now a circle. There’s a lot of white space, and someone KonMari’d the title bar.

Shopping within Facebook is prioritised through the Marketplace feed, and you can watch shows and online videos in groups through the Watch function.

Facebook Messenger loads faster, the interface is cleaner and a dating service may soon be available in Australia.

What hasn’t changed is the core product: the capacity for Facebook to collect platform data and generate behavioural inferences for advertisers.

Read more: Why are Australians still using Facebook?

– ref. Facebook is now cleaner, faster and group-focused, but still all about your data – http://theconversation.com/facebook-is-now-cleaner-faster-and-group-focused-but-still-all-about-your-data-118048