Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sophie Lewis, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW

You arrive at your local public hospital for treatment. The hospital staff ask for your name, date of birth and address. They ask if you have Medicare and private health insurance. Then they ask if you would like to be admitted as a public or private patient. You’re unsure. You’re left wondering whether this decision will affect the care you receive.

Almost all patients will be asked, either verbally or via a standard admission form, whether they have private health insurance and wish to use it.

In our research projects we’ve spoken to Australians with private health insurance who have received treatment in public hospitals. Many people say they find it difficult to decide whether to be a private or public patient. They are unsure of the benefits and costs, and where to find this information.

Read more: Are private patients in public hospitals a problem?

Public hospitals have recently been criticised for allegedly pressuring vulnerable patients to use their private health insurance.

It’s important to note that opting to go private in a public hospital is solely your decision, and will not affect the quality of care you receive. Public and private patients have the same access to public hospital services.

Under the National Health Reform Agreement, all Medicare cardholders have the right to be treated in public hospitals for free as public patients. The cost of accommodation, meals, health care and other treatment-related fees is covered by Medicare.

Why do public hospitals ask the question?

Public hospitals are treating a growing number of patients every year, with increasingly complex needs and health conditions. In this environment, hospitals are expected to do more with less.

People who use their private health insurance benefit the public hospital because some of the funding needed for care comes from private health insurers, rather than hospitals relying solely on the allocation provided by the government via Medicare.

Hospitals say funding received from privately insured patients goes towards infrastructure, research, specialised equipment and other service improvements.

Public and private patients have the same access to public hospital services. From shutterstock.com

Australians with private health insurance are using their cover when admitted to public hospitals more than they used to. In 2004, an estimated 6.8 per 1,000 admissions to public hospitals were private patients; by 2014, this increased to 22.7 per 1,000.

Meanwhile, insurance companies argue increased use of private health insurance for public hospital care is contributing to rising premiums.

Read more: Do you really need private health insurance? Here’s what you need to know before deciding

Why do people choose to be private patients?

Australians might choose to be a private patient in a public hospital for many reasons.

The excess or co-payments applied by private health insurance providers for treatment in private hospitals may be discounted or exempted by public hospitals. So there may be no out-of-pocket expenses for private patients, depending on the type and length of admission.

As a private patient you may be able to choose your doctor, if they have a “right of private practice” at the hospital where you are admitted.

Patients also indicate that they choose to be admitted as private patients because this is a way of giving back to the public hospital. In our research, patients recounted being asked “would you like to help the hospital out?”; the suggestion being they would be doing so by using their private health insurance.

The idea of helping the hospital is also promoted on hospital websites when information is provided. Some patients said they did not want to take public resources away from those who rely on the public system for care.

Read more: Which are better, public or private hospitals?

Some patients in our research saw supporting the hospital as advantageous to them personally as a future patient: “a benefit to the hospital […] is beneficial to me in the long run,” one respondent said.

People also choose to be a private patient because they believe they will get privileges for doing so. Many hospitals offer expressions of gratitude to private patients such as access to television, coffee vouchers or free parking.

Some offer single rooms to private patients, but priority is given to patients who are very ill or infectious.

Some patients in our research said they were surprised they did not receive quicker or better quality care as private patients: “Being a private patient in a public setting made no difference. The level of care was the same,” one said.

Final things to consider

Publicly accessible information about being a private patient in a public hospital, including information about payments and any potential out-of-pocket costs, varies greatly between hospitals and states, and can be hard to find.

While many public hospitals guarantee there are no costs associated with being a private patient, this is not the case for every public hospital. We advise the following:

1. if you are eligible for Medicare benefits, you are not obligated to use your private health insurance in order to receive the same quality of care provided to all patients – it is your choice

2. check with your private health insurance fund about whether you will be charged for any services received

3. check the hospital website for information about using private health insurance

4. if you are unsure about the costs and benefits of using your private health insurance, say so. Many public hospitals have staff called patient liaison officers who are there to answer your questions.

– ref. If you’ve got private health insurance, the choice to use it in a public hospital is your own – http://theconversation.com/if-youve-got-private-health-insurance-the-choice-to-use-it-in-a-public-hospital-is-your-own-113367

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Betsy Jackes, Adjunct professor, James Cook University

Welcome to Beating Around the Bush, a series that profiles native plants: part gardening column, part dispatches from country, entirely Australian. Read more about the series here or get in touch to pitch a plant at batb@theconversation.edu.au.

I first became interested in guinea flowers when I heard of a plant growing in Queensland’s White Mountains nicknamed “excruciating” by all who handled it, because of the pungent needle-like leaves which attached themselves to fingers and clothes.

This species is a guinea flower, now scientifically named Hibbertia ferox, meaning “fierce”. Guinea flowers grow across Australia, from the rainforest to semi-arid areas.

Read more: Sandpaper figs make food, fire, medicine and a cosy home for wasps

Guinea flowers belong to the genus Hibbertia, which dates back to Gondwana. Members of the genus are easy to recognise, but individual species are hard to tell apart. Their brilliant yellow (or sometimes orange) flowers have petals with a notch at the apex, and they were thought to resemble the appearance of the 18th-century coin known as a golden guinea. As usual there are a couple of exceptions – at least two species have petals that lack a notch.

All too often these small shrubs and woody climbers grow in areas likely to be razed for urban sprawl or mining.

The Conversation

What we know about Hibbertia

English merchant and amateur botanist Henry Charles Andrews named the genus Hibbertia after his friend George Hibbert (1757-1837). Andrews was an artist and engraver as well as a botanist, and the first species he named was based on a plant collected around Port Jackson.

Around 200 species are recognised but there are many unnamed varieties, particularly in tropical areas. Probably the most widespread species and one of the few cultivated is the climbing guinea flower (Hibbertia scandens). It can be grown readily from cuttings but germinates slowly from seeds.

Most species have hairs covering the leaves, which can be critical for identifying a species. Under a good hand lens or a simple microscope their variety and beauty is obvious. In some species the hairs are straight. In others they are branched with arms resembling the spokes on a star, the so-called “stellate hairs”.

Some species have scales – flat, plate-like structures – on their leaves and flowers. Sometimes there are large and small scales on the one surface.

The leaves are also diverse in shape and form: some leaves are shaped like spear and thick, as in Hibbertia banksii of the eastern Cape York area, others are needle-like with margins rolled towards the lower midrib, with a sharp, blood-drawing tip, as in Hibbertia ferox.

A 1795 guinea coin from the reign of George III. Wikipedia

The flowers are usually solitary and roughly 2cm in diameter, but in some of the northern species they grow in spikes roughly 4-5cm across.

Five sepals surround the five petals, which are broadest towards the top. The flowers usually close at night and reopen the next day.

A distinctive feature is the arrangement of the stamens (the male parts). These may be all on one side of the carpels (the structures containing the unfertilised seeds at the centre of the flower) or may form a form a ball in the centre. The number varies between species from fewer than 10 to more than 100.

Hibbertia ferox was nicknamed ‘excruciating’ because of its needle-like leaves. Shutterstock

Floral frolics

For a plant to be involved in sex of a floral kind it needs to offer rewards for services rendered. Sometimes guinea flowers grow sterile stems, which add to the floral display and provide a food source, particularly for beetles. They are messy eaters, chewing on various plant tissues as they wander around the flower’s surface, but they do help to transfer pollen to the stigmas, or female parts (and no doubt are involved in sex with their own kind).

Guinea flowers don’t produce nectar to tempt pollinators, but people have reported them producing weak fragrance. There’s some dispute over how pleasant the smell is, with some describing it as sweet and others insisting it smells like cow dung. There have been only a couple of reports of what this smell resembles, so we need you to go and stick your nose in a freshly open flower. (Make sure to check – is the fragrance there all day or only in the morning?)

However, there is plenty of pollen. If you look closely at the anthers, those yellow sacs on the top of a thin stalk, you will see either an opening or pore at the top, or a slit down the side through which pollen can escape. Whether the marauding bug causes the pollen to spray out through the top or it accidentally falls on the bug through the slit, the bug gets dusted in pollen and then this can get brushed off on the female parts or stigma. Bees and flies are the most common bugs seen around guinea flowers.

The fruit is composed of 2-5 loosely adhering capsule-like follicles, surrounded by the five sepals, which remain and do not fall off.

Hibbertia scandens, a climbing guinea flower, is commonly known as snake vine. Shutterstock

The fruit contains one or two seeds that are covered by a reddish coating or aril. This nutritious tissue is a valuable food source for dispersers such as ants and birds; birds have been recording spreading the seeds of Hibbertia scandens. However, in the drier areas where these plants are commonly found, ants appear to be the common dispersers.

So next time you are in the bush don’t just ignore that small shrubby plant with yellow flowers and notched petals. Stop and admire their beauty.

Read more: Sustainable shopping: your guilt-free guide to flowers this Valentine’s Day

Note if there are any bugs visiting and what they might be doing. Why not record their presence on iNaturalist – an app that lets us record and share your nature encounters – particularly if you are off the beaten track?

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

– ref. Guinea flowers are fierce and golden – http://theconversation.com/guinea-flowers-are-fierce-and-golden-109189

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

University of Canberra Deputy Vice-Chancellor Leigh Sullivan speaks with Michelle Grattan about the week in politics. They discuss Barnaby Joyce signalling interest in the Nationals leadership, the schism between Queensland Nationals MPs and moderate Liberal MPs on coal-fired power stations, the Reserve Bank deputy governor’s climate change address and Labor’s push to make the minimum wage a “living wage”.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the Coalition and coal – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-the-coalition-and-coal-113653

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alastair Blanshard, Paul Eliadis Chair of Classics and Ancient History Deputy Head of School, The University of Queensland

Review: Hydra, Queensland Theatre and State Theatre Company of South Australia

Running through Hydra, the new play by Australian playwright Sue Smith, is the myth of Icarus, the boy who flew so high that his wings melted and he crashed to his death in the sea near the Greek island of Samos.

It is an easy myth to misunderstand. Moralists think it is a story that reinforces the importance of listening to your parents and sticking to the safe middle path – not flying “too close to the sun”. In contrast, artists have always recognised that the appeal of the myth lies in its promise of the freedom to soar with the birds.

The conclusion may be disastrous, but the joy is in that fabulous voyage that precedes it. Any price is worth paying to touch the sky. We don’t need to lament Icarus. The tragic figure is his father Daedalus, too scared to follow his son in his magnificent, glorious, fatal flight.

Hydra tells the story of the Australian husband-and-wife writers George Johnston (Bryan Probets) and Charmian Clift (Anna McGahan), two Icarus-like characters, and the ten years they spent in Greece, primarily on the island of Hydra. Beginning in the mid-1950s, it was a wild time of booze, song, and love-making. Hydra became a hangout for artists, writers, and musicians. A refuge for misfits hiding from the world.

Anna McGahan as Charmian Clift and Bryan Probets as George Johnston in Hydra. Jeff Busby

Sidney Nolan and his wife stayed over a summer. Leonard Cohen sang and played guitar. The actor Peter Finch came to recharge his batteries. Representing this pack of dissolute expatriates in the play is the comical figure Jean-Claude (Ray Chong Nee), a louche painter with a winning smile and professionally French in his equal commitments to infidelity and existentialist philosophy.

Read more: Friday essay: a fresh perspective on Leonard Cohen and the island that inspired him

Ray Chong Nee plays Jean-Claude, a disreputable yet charming painter. Jeff Busby

Out of this raucous environment would come one of the great works of Australian literature, My Brother Jack, written by Johnston, but importantly nursed into existence by Clift in the final years of their life on the island.

The story of their tumultuous relationship is told in the play from the perspective of their son, the poet and novelist Martin Johnston, played with a vulnerable, naïve charm by Nathan O’Keefe.

It takes a degree of monstrous narcissism to think that you could write the “great Australian novel” and the play doesn’t spare its audience any of this unpleasant side of the creative process. In an excruciatingly awkward scene, we watch Johnston and Clift at work, bashing out words with duelling his-and-hers typewriters positioned at either end of a table.

Petulant, hungry for attention and eager for praise, Johnston is childish in his behaviour. Keen to display his virtuosity and indifferent to Clift’s feelings, he rewrites her work to give it more “energy” and can’t understand why she doesn’t respond to his interventions with gratitude and enthusiasm.

The play strongly suggests that My Brother Jack was written at the expense of Clift’s own literary endeavours. In a heart-rendering moment, Clift puts the cover on her typewriter, never again to be removed, so that she can devote herself to editing Johnston’s manuscript.

We possess Clift’s accounts of her time in Greece in the form of the autobiographies Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, but she clearly had a lot more to say had her energy not been so used up in nursing her husband. Anna McGahan’s portrayal brings out both the brittle fragility of Clift and her underlying strength. She sacrifices a lot, but never loses the driving will to write herself into lasting memory, to make herself be seen.

Hydra explores the sacrifices Charmian Clift (Anna McGahan) made while living on the island. Jeff Busby

Acting as a foil to Johnston and Clift are the couple Vic (Hugh Parker) and Ursula (Tiffany Lyndall-Knight), thinly disguised versions of Sidney Nolan and his wife Cynthia Reed. Ursula is a wonderful bit of writing. Deliciously dislikable, she cuts through her scenes like a scythe. At one point, she compares herself to Daedalus and Vic to Icarus.

However, compared to the fiery theatrics of the Johnston-Clifts, both of them look plodding. Vic’s worldly ambitions ultimately hold him back. You can’t reach the heavens and also make it home in time to be guest of honour at posh dinner parties.

There is a great irony that one of the masterpieces of Australian literature should have been written in Hydra. Greece is not a place conducive to new, thoroughly original, distinctive stories. It always threatens to swamp you with its own stories, crushing you with the weight of its mythology. Nolan tried to paint Gallipoli, but could never escape the pull of Troy.

The exact process of how My Brother Jack came into being remains a mystery. The triggers that caused Johnston to turn inwards, away from his island idyll, back to his own life and far-away homeland continue to be elusive.

No one knows where great art comes from. Hydra instead explores the costs associated with the creation of art and the demands placed on anyone who would seek to fly free. It is tragic, comic, heroic, and in that sense thoroughly Greek.

Hydra is playing at Queensland Theatre until April 6.

– ref. Sue Smith’s Hydra: how love, pain and sacrifice produced an Australian classic – http://theconversation.com/sue-smiths-hydra-how-love-pain-and-sacrifice-produced-an-australian-classic-113640

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Malcolm Burt, Amusement academic and disruptive media researcher, Queensland University of Technology

Picture the scene – we’re in ancient times and a group of cave people are gathered around a fire telling stories about their day (there’s evidence of storytelling by way of cave art over 30,000 years ago).

They have no Wi-Fi. There are no fancy gaming consoles or immersive media (or even popcorn for that matter) and yet they are almost certainly crafting tales and enthralling each other.

Thankfully we’re all vastly more evolved now because we have creature comforts and flashy technology – like PlayStations and virtual reality (VR) at our fingertips. Quaint notions of narrative and story shouldn’t matter anymore, right? Not so fast.

Read more: Virtual reality has added a new dimension to theme park rides — so what’s next for thrill-seekers?

My recent research suggests that even with advanced immersive technology, people still hunger to be told stories.

The author on a VR rollercoaster, ready to perhaps not be told a story. @PhotoByJarrod

Rollercoasters, VR and drop rides

I’m researching what consumers want from VR entertainment experiences. I’ve collected original data from multiple VR participants all around the world by way of interviewing them with series of fixed questions as they stepped off VR roller coasters, VR simulators, VR drop rides, VR water slides and VR walkthrough experiences.

These rides and experiences represent some of the most advanced examples of immersive entertainment on the planet. And yet once we analysed the data for trends and themes, what came through loud and clear from participants may have resonated just as well with our cave people: we want story.

Said one participant who had just stepped off a VR roller-coaster experience (that’s a real roller coaster, with a VR headset that shows graphics and animations of something completely different to the physical ride):

I just think it’s flying around and stuff, I don’t think there’s a story. If there is … I don’t know what it is.

Other responses ranged from simple confusion (“I just don’t know what was going on”) and “It felt a little bit like Super Mario: jump and run”, to one consumer who was clearly crying out for even a crumb of narrative:

I mean, you have dwarves and regular human people and then you have a dragon in a cave, but then you have a bat that’s flying around … like, what’s the backstory to the whole situation?

Another participant appears to give a nod to technology at the beginning of their response, with a familiar pivot at the end:

I think they went a lot in depth with a lot more of the graphics. I think they could have put more into the storyline itself.

While a chirpy minority appeared less concerned about the lack of obvious story, they (perhaps inadvertently) underscored the importance of story anyway by admitting it was so essential to their experience that they were forced to make up their own:

A lot of people say you need to have a backstory and all that, but I kind of enjoyed the idea that you don’t really know what’s going on, kind of having to make up your own little story for it.

High-tech = customers, right?

Virtual reality is still seen as flashy technology, so it’s no surprise vendors and theme parks promote their VR experiences technology-first and seem to ignore the lure of “narrative transportation” – a highly desirable state in entertainment experiences where consumers lose track of the real world by being lost in a story.

This enables immersion, which in VR enables escapism, which means we get that much-desired magical moment of forgetting the world and all its problems, just for a moment.

Research suggests that game developers (note that games are often put in the same basket as VR entertainment experiences) are benefiting specifically from pursuing rich storytelling.

The not-at-all-shabby US$131 million success of the recent PlayStation 4 game God of War in its first month of release was attributed to a focus on narrative.

To be fair …

Technology is obviously critical for a successful VR experience (high resolution, spatial audio, low latency – meaning when you look around the digital world responds exactly as you would expect without lagging – just for starters) but it seems participants handsomely reward technology when it is paired with storytelling.

Read more: Careful how you treat today’s AI: it might take revenge in the future

Also, most VR entertainment experiences are short, which does not necessarily allow for in-depth stories to be developed. Additionally, the often wild forces at work on the more aggressive physical rides utilising VR can mean subtle story detail may be difficult to introduce to a narrative, at least in the active ride portion (when you’re being flung around upside down at high speeds, you might not be searching for nuance).

But it seems the current offerings are over-reliant on technology alone as a way to attract participants to these experiences, when it may be that promoting more traditional narratives – a simple story – may be a more effective technique.

While the world has changed enormously since the ancient times, we haven’t, and there’s something sweet, and very human, about that.

– ref. Neanderthals didn’t need Nintendos: why we always choose story over technology – http://theconversation.com/neanderthals-didnt-need-nintendos-why-we-always-choose-story-over-technology-112874

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matt Navarro, Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Western Australia

More than 70% of recreational fishers support no-take marine sanctuaries according to our research, published recently in Marine Policy.

This study contradicts the popular perception that fishers are against establishing no-take marine reserves to protect marine life. In fact, the vast majority of fishers we surveyed agreed that no-take sanctuaries improve marine environmental values, and do not impair their fishing.

Read more: More than 1,200 scientists urge rethink on Australia’s marine park plans

No-take marine sanctuaries, which ban taking or disturbing any marine life, are widely recognised as vital for conservation. However, recent media coverage and policy decisions in Australia suggest recreational fishers are opposed to no-take sanctuary zones created within marine parks.

This perceived opposition has been reinforced by recreational fishing interest groups who aim to represent fishers’ opinions in policy decisions. However, it was unclear whether the opinions expressed by these groups matches those of fishers on-the-ground in established marine parks.

To answer this, we visited ten state-managed marine parks across Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland and New South Wales. We spoke to 778 fishers at boat ramps that were launching or retrieving their boats to investigate their attitudes towards no-take sanctuary zones.

Our findings debunk the myth that recreational fishers oppose marine sanctuaries. We found 72% of active recreational fishers in established marine parks (more than 10 years old) support their no-take marine sanctuaries. Only 9% were opposed, and the remainder were neutral.

We also found that support rapidly increases (and opposition rapidly decreases) after no-take marine sanctuaries are established, suggesting that once fishers have a chance to experience sanctuaries, they come to support them.

Recreational fishers support for marine sanctuaries increases with marine park age.

Fishers in established marine parks were also overwhelmingly positive towards marine sanctuaries. Most thought no-take marine sanctuaries benefited the marine environment (78%) and have no negative impacts on their fishing (73%).

We argue that recreational fishers, much like other Australians, support no-take marine sanctuaries because of the perceived environmental benefits they provide. This is perhaps not surprising, considering that appreciating nature is one of the primary reasons many people go fishing in the first place.

Exploring marine life within an established marine park. Tim Langlois

In the past opposition from recreational fishing groups has been cited in the decision to scrap proposed no-take sanctuaries around Sydney, to open up established no-take sanctuaries to fishing and to reduce sanctuaries within the Australia Marine Parks (formerly the Commonwealth Marine Reserve network).

Our findings suggest that these policy decisions do not reflect the beliefs of the wider recreational fishing community, but instead represent the loud voices of a minority.

We suggest that recreational fishing groups and policy makers should survey grass roots recreational fishing communities (and other people who use marine parks) to gauge the true level of support for no-take marine sanctuaries, before any decisions are made.

Read more: The backflip over Sydney’s marine park is a defiance of science

Despite what headlines may say, no-take marine sanctuaries are unlikely to face long lasting opposition from recreational fishers. Instead, our research suggests no-take marine sanctuaries provide a win-win: protecting marine life whilst fostering long term support within the recreational fishing community.

– ref. Most recreational fishers in Australia support marine sanctuaries – http://theconversation.com/most-recreational-fishers-in-australia-support-marine-sanctuaries-112960

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patsie Frawley, Associate Professor, Deakin University

The draft terms of reference for the royal commission into the abuse and neglect of people with disabilities, released for comment this week, outline the commission’s plan to investigate all forms of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of people with disabilities.

For too long, these acts of violence and abuse, particularly where they occur in support services, have been referred to merely as “incidents” to be covered up and kept out of the public gaze.

It’s important the royal commission uncovers the extent of this violence, and highlights the individual harm it has caused. It must also work to address the systemic issues that fail to adequately respond to – and sometimes cover up – these violations.

Read more: People with disability are more likely to be victims of crime – here’s why

Most importantly, the outcome of the commission needs to ensure people with disabilities have access to the same education, support and justice services available to others in the community that work to prevent violence and abuse and enable appropriate legal and support responses.

This is underpinned by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to which Australia is a signatory. This requires that people with disabilities be afforded the same rights as others to be safe from violence and abuse. It stipulates that people with disabilities are seen as equal before the law, and that health, justice and support services are accessible for all.

What are we likely to hear?

Far from being vulnerable victims without a voice, people with disabilities have long been showing their strength and capabilities by sharing their stories and contributing to research policy and practice.

Some stories of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of people with disabilities have made their way into the public domain through the media.

One story you may have heard recently on the ABC true crime podcast Trace is that of Adam James. Adam has a disability and in 2013 reported that as a child he was abused by a local priest, who has since been linked to the murder of his mother.

Read more: Abuse and neglect of people with disabilities demands zero-tolerance response

Others will have heard the story of Anj Barker, who suffered a traumatic brain injury at the hands of her violent boyfriend. Anj has been a tireless advocate against domestic violence.

Many more stories have not yet been heard, apart from within research and through advocacy by organisations like Women with Disabilities Australia.

Our peer education program Sexual Lives and Respectful Relationships uses the stories of people with an intellectual disability shared in research to explore sexuality rights. Through this research and the program, we hear about the challenges people with intellectual disabilities experience when seeking to have safe, self-determined and fulfilling intimate and social relationships.

The narrators of the stories – peer educators who run the program and program participants – tell stories of taxi drivers, neighbours and fathers sexually abusing them. They tell of intimate partners, family members, and support staff exploiting them financially and emotionally.

They talk about community services taking their babies away from them in the delivery suite, and about being bullied and abused by people in their community, carers and staff who are employed to support them.

Perhaps the royal commission will beam these stories into our loungerooms and remind us of the pervasiveness of abuse against people with disabilities in this country.

People with intellectual disabilities report being financially, sexually and emotionally abused by those who are supposed to be supporting them. Creativa Images/Shutterstock

Access to counselling and legal redress

To ensure people with disabilities have an opportunity to tell their stories, be heard and believed, they need appropriate counselling, family violence support, sexual assault services, and legal assistance. Some important work has been done so far to deliver these services.

In Victoria, the South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault’s Making rights reality program provides easy English information and access to legal advocacy for people with cognitive impairments. Staff are trained and have access to specialist resources for additional support. Clients are then linked into legal services to progress victim of crime applications.

The organisation 1800RESPECT has developed a new app for women with a disability. The “Sunny” safety and support app gives women information about violence and abuse, and opens up referral pathways to them to get immediate help.

Australia’s National Research Organisation on Women’s Safety (ANROWS) has funded research that is informing work by domestic and family violence services to be fully accessible for women with disabilities. This work is also developing opportunities for women with disabilities to inform and shape services.

Access to justice remains a challenge for all victims of violence and abuse. Services such as the Witness and Victims Service of the Victorian Office of Public Prosecutions works to support all victims and witnesses to ensure they know their rights and are supported through the court system. Many of their clients are people with disabilities.

Legal advocacy and representation by community legal services is also bridging the gap for many victims with disabilities, by supporting them to access victims of crime compensation.

But more needs to be done to address the barriers in the court system that make it difficult for people with disabilities to access justice. People with disabilities are sometimes seen as lacking credibility as witnesses, for instance, which is not supported by the evidence.

Finally, people with disabilities need to be listened to and believed by those closest to them so they can be referred to services like these.

The draft terms of reference for the royal commission are open for comment from March 13 to 29. Anyone can comment on them – and if you’ve got something to say, you should. After all, people with disabilities are our neighbours, our fellow public transport travellers, our fellow shoppers, voters and our friends and colleagues.

Read more: Why schools desperately need a royal commission into the abuse of disabled people

– ref. Finally, people with disabilities will have a chance to tell their stories – and be believed – http://theconversation.com/finally-people-with-disabilities-will-have-a-chance-to-tell-their-stories-and-be-believed-113475

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ryan Storr, Lecturer in Sport Development, Western Sydney University

Tennis champion Martina Navratilova recently called the participation of transgender women in elite female sporting competitions “insane” and “cheating”.

And she’s not alone. Several other prominent women athletes have also used social media, mainly Twitter, to voice their concern about the eligibility of transgender women in sport, including former British swimmer Sharron Davies, double Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes, and former long-distance runner Paula Radcliffe.

There is an inherent contempt that lies within these statements, and it impacts more than just trans athletes. It can impact the integrity of public discourse by reducing the debate to be about whether trans women are “real women”, and we need to move past this crude and destructive rhetoric.

Here, I use the term trans as an umbrella term to include all identities within the trans community, such as transgender and transitioned athletes.

What is the debate really about?

So why have we revisited this discussion in recent weeks? We are witnessing a broader movement against the trans community.

Australian gay rights activists Dennis Altman and Jonathan Symons call it the “queer wars” in their book of the same title. They explain how resistance to LGBTI issues across the globe is being used by governments and religious leaders to uphold traditional values, and increased polarisation towards LGBTI rights.

In recent years, we saw bathrooms used as a platform for division in the US. In 2016, North Carolina became the first US state to introduce a law prohibiting transgender people from using the restroom corresponding to their gender.

Read more: The transgender bathroom controversy: Four essential reads

Then, in Australia, the Australian Christian Lobby suggested a “yes” vote for marriage equality would lead to boys wearing dresses to the detriment of society.

And the UK saw backlash against a youth trans charity, called Mermaids, where half a million pounds of funding was disputed.

It seems sport is now being used as yet another tool to incite fear and hatred towards the trans community.

Some male commentators have raised concerns that the integrity of women’s sport is at risk. But where have these so-called male champions of change been in advancing women’s sport in recent years?

Another commonly-cited issue is that men might identify as women to reap rewards in competition. There have been no reported cases of men transitioning to women to earn money and dominate podiums. It is simply a myth.

Do trans polices in sport work?

The introduction of the International Olympic Committee’s policy on trans athletes in 2003 – amended in 2013 to remove surgical requirements and introduce a minimal level of testosterone – has led to no publicly out trans athletes competing at the Olympic games.

At the Commonwealth Games, trans weightlifter Laurel Hubbard qualified, but had to withdraw due to injury.

Weightlifter Laurel Hubbard during for the Women’s +90kg Weightlifting Final at the Commonwealth Games, 2018. Dean Lewins/AAP

Therefore, the perception that trans women are, and will, dominate women’s elite sport is not supported with any clear evidence.

UK research also found, after reviewing a series of trans policies in elite sport:

“the majority of these policies were unfairly discriminating against transgender people, especially transgender females”.

Read more: Israel Folau’s comments remind us homophobia and transphobia are ever present in Australian sport

If we are to start scrutinising the ethics and integrity around cheating and enforcing a level playing field, there are many other places we could start.

Match fixing, illegal gambling markets, substance abuse, and corruption have been found to exist within local grassroots matches in Victoria. Issues around ball tampering, match fixing at various levels of tennis, doping within various sporting codes, and salary cap breaches have also been reported at the elite level.

Particularly in women’s sport, there is a disproportionate allocation of funding and resources compared to men’s sport, a gross lack of media coverage, and women continue to fight for equal pay.

Advancing trans and gender diverse inclusion in sport

New guidelines and policies are being introduced from various sporting codes in the coming year in Australia.

The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission led the way with updated guidelines last year, but the most prominent policy to be released soon will be the Australian Human Rights Commission and Sport Australia’s guidelines for Trans and Gender Diverse Athletes in Sport. This will likely be adopted by most sporting codes in Australia.

But as the debate continues, it is important we hear from trans athletes. No trans person has the same transition experience and there is great diversity among the trans community. We also need to understand the wider impact of negative commentary against this community.

Read more: Being transgender is not a mental illness, and the WHO should acknowledge this

What we have seen so far from the Olympic movement is promising in promoting trans inclusion in sport. The International Olympic Committee released mini documentaries about trans athletes in sport, and Tokyo 2020 is set to have gender neutral bathrooms.

We must remember that sport is a human right, and should be accessible to everybody, regardless of gender identity.

– ref. Elite sport is becoming a platform to target the trans community – http://theconversation.com/elite-sport-is-becoming-a-platform-to-target-the-trans-community-113347

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jamie Freestone, PhD student in literature and science communication, The University of Queensland

Most of us want our lives to have meaning. But what do we mean by meaning? What is meaning?

These sound like spiritual or philosophical questions, but surprisingly science may be able to provide some answers.

It might not seem like the kind of thing that can be tackled using the detached and impersonal methods of science. But by framing the right questions, researchers in language, cognitive science, primatology and artificial intelligence can make some progress.

Read more: Careful how you treat today’s AI: it might take revenge in the future

Questions include:

• how do words or symbols convey meaning?
• how does our brain sort out meaningful information from meaningless information?

These are certainly difficult questions, but they’re not unscientific.

Mind your language

Take human language. What distinguishes it from communication used by other animals such as the sign language we can teach to chimpanzees, bird calls and the pollen dances performed by bees?

One factor is the systems used by other animals are basically linear: the meaning of each symbol is modified only by the one immediately before it or after it.

For example, here’s a phrase in chimpanzee sign language:

give banana eat.

That’s as complicated as phrases get for chimps. The third word is distinct from the first, only joined by the second.

But in a standard sentence from any human language, the words at the end of a sentence can modify the meaning of those back at the start.

Try this:

The banana in the fruit bowl tastes good.

The fruit bowl doesn’t taste good even though those words are adjacent.

We effortlessly sort out the meaning in sentences based on hierarchies, so that phrases can be nested in other phrases and it doesn’t cause any problems (most of the time).

Did you ever have to diagram a sentence while learning grammar in school? A sentence of human language has to be diagrammed in a tree-like structure. This structure reflects the hierarchies embedded in the language.

Simplified tree diagram of an English sentence. Jamie Freestone

Cognitive scientist W. Tecumseh Fitch, an expert in the evolution of human language, says what separates humans from other species is our ability to interpret things in a tree-like structure.

Our brains are built to group things and to arrange them into hierarchies, and not just in grammar. This opens up a whole universe of meanings that we are able to extract from language and other sources of information.

But complex structure isn’t all there is to meaning. If you’ve seen any computer programming you know that computers can also handle this kind of complex grammar. That doesn’t mean computers find it meaningful.

Research into human brains is trying to find out how we find information significant. We attach emotional and semantic weight to the utterances we speak and hear. The neuroscience of working memory may hold some clues.

A memory of that

We need working memory to pay attention to those long sentences that have the complex grammar described above.

Working memory also helps us knit together the experience of waking life, moment to moment. We experience a vivid and comprehensible stream of consciousness, rather than staccato flashes of action.

One of the leading researchers in this area is the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene. In his 2014 book Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts, he advocates what’s known as the global workspace theory

When something really grabs our attention, it’s elevated from being dealt with by unconscious, localised brain processes to the global workspace. This is a metaphorical “space” in the brain, where important signals are broadcast throughout the cortex.

Read more: Working memory: How you keep things ‘in mind’ over the short term

Roughly speaking, if a signal doesn’t get amplified to the global workspace then it stays local and our brains deal with it unconsciously. If information gets to the global workspace then we’re conscious of it.

Information from different sensory inputs — vision, hearing, touch — then gets put together to form an overall interpretation of what’s happening and how it’s meaningful to us.

Working together

Moving beyond an individual’s brain, a lot of work has been done in terms of social cognition. That is, how humans are particularly good at thinking together and cooperating.

Obviously that goes hand in hand with our more complex language. But there are other abilities that seem to have evolved alongside language that are also unique to humans and crucial for cooperation.

Michael Tomasello, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, has been studying chimps side by side with human infants for 25 years.

He emphasises the role of shared intentionality. From about age three, and unlike apes, human infants can easily, even wordlessly, cooperate on simple tasks.

To do so they have to monitor their own actions, the action of others, and both their actions in light of a shared goal or set of expectations.

This might not seem like a staggering result. But Tomasello argues this is essentially the origin of human morality. By adopting the perspective of shared intentionality, humans evolved norms or conventions that shape our shared behaviour.

This perspective allows us to evaluate actions and behaviour in broader terms than simply whether or not it provides some instant reward. Hence we can judge things as meaningful or not according to norms, values, morals.

But what does it all mean?

So complex grammar, working memory and cooperation are just three areas of research out of dozens that are relevant. But researchers from various disciplines are zeroing in on what meaning is at a very fundamental level.

It seems to be about the complexity of information, integrating information over longer periods of time and sharing information with others.

That might sound remote from questions like, “How do I make my life meaningful?” But the science does actually line up with the self-help books on this score.

Read more: Having a sense of meaning in life is good for you – so how do you get one?

The gurus say that if you can find some alignment in your past, present and future selves (integrating information over time) you’ll feel your life has meaning.

They also tell you it’s very important to be socially connected rather than isolated. Translation: share information and cooperate with others.

It’s not that science can tell us what the meaning of life is. But it can tell us how our brains find things meaningful and why we evolved to do so.

– ref. What do we mean by meaning? Science can help with that – http://theconversation.com/what-do-we-mean-by-meaning-science-can-help-with-that-113269

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

When former Trade Minister Andrew Robb took to the ABC’s AM program to sound off about a “toxic” relationship between Australia and China, he exposed a rippling debate about how to manage an increasingly comlex foreign and security policy challenge.

Long gone are the days of the John Howard formula that Australia did not have to choose between its history, meaning America, and its geography, meaning China. Choices are no longer binary.

While the Robb word “toxic” may be an exaggeration, stresses in Australia-China relations are such it is clear we have entered a new and more challenging phase.

For a start, China is undergoing what is, arguably, the most testing moment of an economic transformation that began in 1978 at the third plenary of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. This is when Deng Xiaoping re-emerged to initiate one of the more remarkable economic shifts of the modern era.

Apart from a hiatus caused by the Tienanmen uprising in 1989, and an economic soft-landing in the mid-1990s, China has bounded ahead economically, and has seemed unstoppable – until now.

China’s economy and political system has encountered the sort of difficulties that were inevitable. Put simply, an investment driven – as opposed to consumer-led – model is running its course, piling up massive government and bank debt in the process.

China risks becoming caught in a “middle income trap” in which a developing country, having enacted the easier reforms, gets stuck in second gear in its effort to push ahead with its economic transformation.

You can only build so many road, bridges, fast trains, airports, ports and housing developments. Many of the latter have become “ghost cities”.

At this month’s National People’s Congress, the annual session of China’s “parliament”, Premier Li Keqiang gave what was, by Chinese standards for these sort of cheerleading events, an unusually downbeat assessment of challenges ahead.

China, Li said, faces difficulties “of a kind rarely seen in many years”.

What is undeniable is that China’s economy is faltering, its ability to create millions of new jobs annually to employ a restless population is being stretched, and its management of a continuing economic transformation has come under unusual stress. US-China trade tensions are not helping.

In counterpoint to the need for a more dynamic economic environment, its leadership, under President Xi Jinping, is asserting even tighter political controls when it should be giving freer rein to its entrepreneurial class.

This is the central contradiction of a model that has delivered what is the most extraordinary event in world economic history since the industrial revolution. But that model clearly has its limitations compared with those, say, of neighbouring Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

From an Australian perspective, a slowing and, perhaps more to the point, anxious China is not good news. While economists might argue that a slowdown and thus the need for Beijing to stimulate its economy by ramping up infrastructure projects will benefit iron ore and coal exporters, economic pressures more generally should be concerning.

A Chinese regime that feels itself under stress from within and without may prove to be more cantankerous, and unpredictable. Australian policymakers should be mindful of the consequences of China getting through this difficult stage without mishap.

Of course, forests have been felled publishing predictions China would be unable to maintain its remarkable transformation since early glimmers of an opening to the outside world appeared in 1978, two years after Mao Zedong’s death.

This brings us back to Andrew Robb’s observation about a “toxic” relationship between Beijing and Canberra. Referring to the shelving of a plan to develop a health precinct in China to match that of the Texas Medical Centre – the world’s largest medical facility – Robb said central government officials had kyboshed the arrangement due to ongoing tensions with Australia.

Australian medical professionals would have helped establish the facility. Robb said Landbridge (the company for which Robb was consulting) was

told in no uncertain terms by the seniors officials that unfortunately the relationship between Australia and China had become so toxic that this would be put in the bin.

Leaving aside Robb’s own chagrin at losing a lucrative consultancy, what is the fair judgement about the state of Australia-China relations?

And, what of Robb’s criticism of sections of the Australian security establishment, notably the Australian Strategic Policy Institute? He accused ASPI, a hothouse of China negativity, of being “a mouthpiece of the US security agencies and its defence industry”.

Given ASPI’s hawkish views on China more generally, Robb has a point.

His assessment is correct that China-Australia relations were off-track when the decision was made to scupper the Landbridge-proposed medical facility. But it is also the true that by the end of last year the relationship had been “reset”.

Read more: Australia and China push the ‘reset’ button on an important relationship

Foreign Minister Marise Payne went to China in November for what was described as a cordial exchange. This followed a two-year freeze in relations during which no senior Australian official was welcomed in Beijing.

China had made no secret of its displeasure over speeches delivered over time by both then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and then Foreign Minister Julie Bishop in which they had criticised Beijing’s expansionist activities in the South China Sea, and, in Bishop’s case, China’s political model.

Turnbull compounded the situation when he misappropriated an expression attributed to Mao in proclaiming the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949. Australia had “stood up”, Turnbull said, when unveiling laws designed to curb foreign interference in Australian domestic affairs.

Read more: Australia needs to reset the relationship with China and stay cool

Next day, Turnbull made things worse by repeating Mao’s words in Mandarin in his description of legislation that was clearly aimed at Chinese influence.

Since then, whatever toxicity existed between Canberra and Beijing seems to have dissipated somewhat. However, real risks remain in management of what is Australia’s most challenging relationship.

It is no good pretending otherwise. China is not a benign power. It will seek to get away with what it can. It resists abiding by a roadmap for a rules-based international order, as we understand it. It will use cyber technology ruthlessly to advance its interests by dubious means, on occasions. It will “disappear” foreign nationals of those countries which incur its displeasure. It will invest in agents of influence in the Australian system. This includes universities.

All this requires a level of vigilance on the part of the security agencies, and, possibly, a new White Paper aimed specifically at just how Australia might manage a complex relationship that is likely to become, more, not less, complicated.

Bear in mind one in three export dollarsdepends on a functioning relationship with China.

This is an unsatisfactory situation, but it is the reality.

On the other hand, no purpose is served by yielding to a Canberra security establishment whose machinations risk chilling a relationship that needs to be warmed up, not cooled down.

Former ambassador to China, Stephen Fitzgerald, proffered some good advice this week when he said in a newspaper interview that Australia needed to deepen its engagement with China rather than draw back, since, unlike the US, we are “living in a Chinese world”.

That, whether we like it or not, is the case.

– ref. Chinese-Australia relations may not be ‘toxic’, but they do need to keep warming up – http://theconversation.com/chinese-australia-relations-may-not-be-toxic-but-they-do-need-to-keep-warming-up-113545

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kelsey Hegarty, Professor of Family Violence Prevention, Royal Women’s Hospital and the Department of General Practice, University of Melbourne

Domestic violence creates an unhealthy and toxic family environment that devastates the lives of all members of the family.

Domestic violence not only causes physical injury, it can also contribute to a range of mental health issues, including anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

For children, the trauma of witnessing or experiencing violence can accumulate over time. This can contribute to severe social, behavioural, emotional and cognitive problems, which persist into adulthood.

Read more: How domestic violence affects women’s mental health

Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently announced A$328 million to combat domestic violence. The investment is focused on housing solutions and front-line services for women and children.

While this investment is very welcome, we also need to stop violence occurring. This means also focusing on perpetrators, who are most commonly men.

We need to engage and motivate men to reduce unhealthy behaviours, seek help early, and stop using violence in their intimate relationships.

What do behaviour change programs do?

Men who use domestic violence are likely also to experience alcohol and other drug issues, depression, suicidal thoughts, stress, anxiety and low self-esteem.

In Australia, the preferred referral pathway for men who use domestic violence in their intimate relationships is men’s behaviour change programs. Most men are referred to these programs from courts or lawyers.

Men’s behaviour change programs are usually educational and therapeutic, including weekly group therapy. The topics covered include masculinity, intimate partnerships, conflict resolution, anger management, fatherhood, alcohol and drug use, trauma, stress, sexual health, oppression and spirituality.

Men’s behaviour change programs often include weekly group therapy sessions. Photographee.eu/Shutterstock

One model, the Duluth behaviour change model, focuses on exposing beliefs that reinforce abuse. It encourages accountability and taking responsibility for behaviours.

Another model, based on cognitive behavioural therapy, challenges dysfunctional beliefs and helps men develop effective strategies to regulate their emotions. It also focuses on enhancing communication skills.

But the use of these programs in Australia is plagued by a major issue: men are often mandated into a program only once their behaviour becomes so severe that they’ve been charged with an offence.

Instead, we need to engage men earlier by increasing their awareness and motivation to seek help for their violent behaviour.

Read more: To stop domestic violence, we need to change perpetrators’ behaviour

A key challenge for men’s behaviour change programs is participants’ lack of readiness to change. This is because most men who use domestic violence are ordered into treatment by courts, or forced to seek treatment by their partners or child services.

But men who volunteer to participate in behaviour change programs are more likely to alter their behaviours in the longer term than those who have little choice but to take part.

First, men need to identify their actions

Many men who use abuse don’t realise their controlling and intimidating behaviour constitutes domestic violence.

Helping men identify their abusive actions as domestic violence is an important first step towards changing behaviours. Some men are so conditioned to violence that they can struggle to recognise the harm of what they’re doing and its negative impact on their families. This conditioning often occurs as a result of their own upbringings, and either witnessing or experiencing domestic violence.

Friends, family, general practitioners – even barbers – could potentially be trained to identify domestic violence and hand out referral options.

New technologies and social media can play an important role. As part of our research, we have engaged men to develop their digital stories to motivate others about seeking help early. Here is one example:

We have also worked with men who use violence and with the organisation No to Violence, the peak body for services, to develop an early intervention for men to reach out for help to change their use of violence.

The resulting Better Man website helps men identify their behaviour as domestic violence and develop and motivate a greater readiness to change and seek help early.

Better Man has three modules: Better Values, Better Relationship, Better Communication. It engages men in the community and provides them with awareness and motivation to seek help for their violent behaviour – before the justice system intervenes.

The No To Violence website asks men, ‘Is your behaviour causing problems for your relationships or family?’ and uses these questions as prompts. No to Violence

All men are prompted to contact the Men’s Referral Service and other services, if they are using abusive, violent or controlling behaviours in their relationships.

As an initial pilot trial over four weeks, we recruited over 120 culturally diverse male volunteers aged 18-50 who live in Tasmania, New South Wales or Victoria to try out Better Man. It will be available more widely later this year and will be studied closely to assess its effectiveness.

Going forward, we need a greater focus and investment in reaching all members of the family, pivoting to the perpetrators and intervening early for a sustainable pathway to create safer families.

Read more: After a deadly month for domestic violence, the message doesn’t appear to be getting through

– ref. How can we make families safer? Get men to change their violent behaviour – http://theconversation.com/how-can-we-make-families-safer-get-men-to-change-their-violent-behaviour-113451

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Blanche Verlie, Associate Lecturer, RMIT University

Today, at least 50 rallies planned across Australia are expected to draw thousands of students who are walking out of school to protest climate change inaction.

These Australian students join children from over 82 countries who are striking to highlight systemic failure to address climate change.

Read more: Climate change: young people striking from school see it for the life-threatening issue it is

But the strikes represent more than frustration and resistance. They are evidence of an even bigger process of transformation. My research investigates how young people’s sense of self, identity, and existence is being fundamentally altered by climate change.

Young people all over the world have taken to the streets to call on world leaders to lower greenhouse emissions. Omer Messinger/AAP

Canaries in the coalmine

Striking children are experiencing “existential whiplash”, caught between two forces. One is a dominant culture driven by fossil fuel consumption that emphasises individual success, encapsulated by Resources Minister Matt Canavan’s remarks that striking students will never get a “real job”:

The best thing you’ll learn about going to a protest is how to join the dole queue. Because that’s what your future life will look like […] not actually taking charge for your life and getting a real job.

On the other hand is the mounting evidence that climate change will make parts of the planet inhospitable to human (and other) life, and fundamentally change our way of life in the future.

Children are up to date with the facts: The Earth is currently experiencing its 6th mass extinction; Australia has just had its hottest summer on record; and experts warn we have just 11 years left to ensure we avoid the misery of exceeding 1.5 degrees of planetary warming.

Read more: New UN report outlines ‘urgent, transformational’ change needed to hold global warming to 1.5°C

Meanwhile many Australian adults have been living what sociologist Kari Norgaard terms a “double reality”: explicitly acknowledging that climate change is real, while continuing to live as though it is not. But as climatic changes intensify and interrupt our business-as-usual lifestyles, many more Australians are likely to experience the climate trauma that school strikers are grappling with.

Greta Thunberg’s speech to UN Climate Change COP24 conference.

Climate challenged culture

Confronting the realities of climate change can lead to overwhelming anxiety and grief, and of course, for those of us in high carbon societies, guilt. This can be extremely uncomfortable. These feelings arise partly because climate change challenges our dominant cultural narratives, assumptions and values, and thus, our sense of self and identity. Climate change challenges the beliefs that:

• humans are, or can be, separate from the non-human world
• individual humans have significant control over the world and their lives
• if you work hard, you will have a bright future
• your elected representatives care about you
• adults generally have children’s best interests at heart and can or will act in accordance with that
• if you want to be a “good person” you as an individual can simply choose to act ethically.

Faced with these challenges, it can seem easier in the short term to turn away than to try to respond. But the short term is not an option for young people.

Young people around the world are demanding action. Gustave Deghilage/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

A sign of the times

Striking students are calling out that simply standing by means being complicit in climate change. The school strikers, and those who support them, are deeply anguished about what a business-as-usual future might hold for them and others.

Striking students’ signs proclaim “no graduation on a dead planet” and “we won’t die of old age, we will die from climate change”. This is not hyperbole but a genuine engagement with what climate change means for their lives, as well as their deaths.

Young people are worried about their lives on a dying planet. GEORGIOS KEFALAS/AAP

Notably, they are openly discussing and promoting engagement with climate distress as a means of inspiring action. As Greta Thunberg — who started the school strikes for climate — said in January:

I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

They know certain possibilities have already been stolen from them by the older generations. Rather than trying to hold onto dominant cultural narratives about their future, striking students are letting them go and crafting alternatives. They are enduring the pain of the climate crisis, while labouring to generate desirable and possible, though always uncertain, futures.

By connecting with other concerned young people across the world, this movement is creating a more collective and ecologically attuned identity.

Thousands of students marched in Germany in early March. EPA/FOCKE STRANGMANN

They are both more ambitious and humble than our dominant (non)responses to climate change. This is palpable in signs like “Mother Nature does not need us; We need Mother Nature” and “Seas are rising, so are we”.

What will eventually happen – in terms of both cultural and climatic change – is of course, unknowable. But it is promising that children are already forging new identities and cultures that may have a chance of survival on our finite blue planet.

Read more: Career guidance for kids is our best hope for climate change

As adults, we would do well to recognise the necessity of facing up to the most grotesque elements of climate change. Perhaps then we too may step up to the challenge of cultural transformation.

– ref. The terror of climate change is transforming young people’s identity – http://theconversation.com/the-terror-of-climate-change-is-transforming-young-peoples-identity-113355

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

What a backdown.

On Tuesday, with all the grace he could muster, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg declared that he wouldn’t be implementing as many of the banking royal commission recommendations as he had said he would.

As he put it:

Following consultation with the mortgage broking industry and smaller lenders, the Coalition Government has decided to not prohibit trail commissions on new loans, but rather review their operation in three years’ time.

Trail commissions are the small annual payments lenders make to mortgage brokers to reward them for loans they have arranged, typically between 0.165% and 0.275% of the amount outstanding per year.

They are paid in addition to the upfront commission, which is typically between 0.65% and 0.7% of the amount lent.

On a loan of A$500,000 they could amount to A$1000 per year, a payment which, in the words of Royal Commissioner Kenneth Hayne is “money for nothing”.

Hayne recommended that the borrower, not the lender, pay the mortgage broker a fee. Trail commissions would be axed straight away, and after a period of two or three years upfront commissions would go too.

In responding to the report on Day 1, Frydenberg more or less endorsed Hayne’s recommendation.

From July 1, 2020, the government would outlaw trail commissions on new loans.

It would ask the Council of Financial Regulators and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to review the impact of the changes and implications of moving to complete borrower-pays remuneration in three years time.

The backdown means trail commissions are also safe for three years, which, given the likelihood of another lobbying campaign from brokers in three years time, means they are probably safe forever.

There’s a case against commissions

Anyone who has seen the movie “The Big Short” has seen a dramatic and only somewhat fictional representation of what can go wrong in the mortgage broking industry.

In that rendition, a bunch of highly incentivised, all care and no responsibility brokers help borrowers get loans they have no reasonable ability to repay. The brokers make out like bandits and the world economy is brought to the brink of total collapse.

We can all agree that was a bad outcome. According to Hayne, the problem with commissions is that they make brokers act in their own interests, rather than those of their customers.

But commissions are common…

It’s a legitimate concern, but let’s not forget that a range of actors in the economy act in their own interests all the time. Consumers buying everything from orange juice to health insurance to television sets act in their own interests. And firms selling them do too. Many pay their sales staff commissions.

Deferred commissions are common too. For executives, they ensure that they have something at risk after their term of services. For mortgage brokers, they create an incentive to recommend loans their customers won’t later switch out of.

Hayne thought that wouldn’t be needed. He recommended (and the government agreed) that the law be amended to require mortgage brokers to act in the best interests of borrowers.

It’s a nice idea, but tricky to police. It might be better to properly align the incentives to ensure the interests of the broker and borrower coincide, which is the position the government has belatedly adopted.

If it keeps commissions, as it now seems determined to do, it might need to apply some latitude to the term “best interests”. It is hard to require brokers to act in the literal best interests of their clients when the best loans for many of them will be the cheapest – mortgages from lenders that don’t pay commissions.

…and so is politics

The politics are complicated. Mortgage brokers account for more than half of all new mortgages written.

Notwithstanding the desire to look tough and adopt all of the Hayne recommendations, both sides of politics are aware that brokers are typically small(ish) business people of the kind they usually court aggressively, and that many would not survive having to charge upfront fees.

If the old adage is right, that the most dangerous place is between a politician and a camera, then another fairly hazardous spot is between a voter and property.

Mortgage brokers play an important role. At their best they help borrowers get better terms and inject some competition into an otherwise very concentrated banking market.

But if their incentives are not well-aligned then things can go awry, Big Short style.

We’ll have to wait

The best solution might be to make sure brokers get paid for getting their clients a good mortgage, rather than just a big mortgage.

This could involve “bands” of commissions based on mortgage size, rather than a bigger commission for every extra dollar borrowed.

And it could involve “skin in the game” where the size of the repayment is related to the commission.

Doing nothing would be a bad idea. So too might be doing something radical as Hayne has proposed.

But nothing might be exactly what we’ll get. The Coalition appears to have put off designing a proper commission structure for the next three years in order to buy some peace.

– ref. Vital signs. It’s one thing to back down on Hayne’s recommendation about mortgage brokers, it’s another to offer nothing in its place – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-its-one-thing-to-back-down-on-haynes-recommendation-about-mortgage-brokers-its-another-to-offer-nothing-in-its-place-113544

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laurence Troy, Research Fellow, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW

Not long ago Australia’s housing boom was in full swing. Investors were betting on rising property values, which rose by 13% in Sydney and 15% in Melbourne in the year to mid-2017. Now the withdrawal of overseas buyers and prudential restrictions on loose lending to local investors have revealed how hollow the boom was.

Throughout the boom, politicians and property pundits consistently claimed the supply being delivered would improve affordability. As we are now seeing, when the price a property can fetch drops, so too does the desire to build it. It was rampant price growth that underpinned developers’ pleas to add supply, not a desire to make housing more affordable.

Read more: Affordable housing policy failure still being fuelled by flawed analysis

We are now seeing rapid declines in approvals and building starts as speculative investor demand, and the money it brought to the market, has fallen away.

Ironically, falling prices will not improve affordability for people locked out of the market. Banks are tightening lending practices and stagnant wage growth limits the buying capacity of those trapped in the low-income economy. True, falling prices are welcome for some first home buyers who now find a purchase possible. But the rapid inflation of house prices long ago far outstripped the capacity of most lower-income households to buy a home.

Our analysis for the NSW Community Housing Industry Association (CHIA NSW) and Homelessness NSW, building on recent AHURI research, shows that the market cannot meet around 12% of all households’ needs. Only one-third of those are housed outside the market in public or community housing. The rest are in overcrowded homes, rental stress or even homeless.

Read more: Why falling house prices do less to improve affordability than you might think

In the face of a housing market downturn, those same property pundits are now sternly warning against action that would further dampen speculative investment in housing. However, this is precisely the moment to tackle the problems that have been building over many years and to set the dynamics of the housing system on a more affordable track.

Winding back speculative activity by cutting negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts, cracking down on inappropriate lending practices, and increasing regulation on unacceptable building practices should all be followed through in earnest across all levels of government.

Read more: Vital Signs: why now is the right time to clamp down on negative gearing

Delivering the housing we need

The bigger question that remains then is: what is the future of the housing supply system across Australia?

History has shown us private sector investment alone cannot provide the needed housing, especially for the most vulnerable. Neither can it produce consistent supply through its boom-and-bust cycles. So now is also the moment for a renewed conversation about how to deliver the housing that’s most needed, and who ought to do it, especially for those facing chronic rental stress.

Markets have never delivered housing affordable to those on low incomes without subsidy from governments. In fact, a mountain of subsidies and tax breaks have been thrown at the private market to support such an aim. These range from Commonwealth Rent Assistance to support private rental and grants to first time buyers, to negative gearing and capital gains tax relief for investors and home owners, but have had no discernible effect on affordability.

Faith in the markets has prevailed for the past 30 years. As a result, alternatives have been ruled out of play.

Investing directly in social housing is more cost-effective for government than private sector finance or subsidies. Joel Carrett/AAP

To cover the backlog of unmet need and future need, our new research commissioned by CHIA NSW and Homelessness NSW predicts that, over the next 20 years, two in ten new homes would need to be for social housing and a further one in ten for affordable housing. Just shifting this third of construction to not-for-profit housing providers, either the community sector or government, would reduce delivery costs – by losing the 20% developer markup at a stroke.

More broadly, the funds needed to support a sustainable affordable housing program could easily be offset by the savings from scrapping current inefficient and inflationary tax subsidises to private investors.

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

The challenge of such a task cannot be underestimated. Yet this presents a considerable opportunity to resolve a range of interrelated problems with how housing is provided in Australia. Here are four of the biggest.

1. Stabilise the construction labour market

Social and affordable housing development would underwrite the construction industry with a steady stream of funding for building homes over the long term. Building industries mobilise considerable workforces. Stable streams of work would smooth out the dramatic drop in employment that comes with housing downturns.

Recent reports have noted the accelerated decline in the construction industry. The Reserve Bank is warning that shocks to wages and employment present a threat to the economy.

2. Support planning for a predictable supply

The planning system would benefit from having a large portion of projected housing needs met and supplied more predictably. The uncertainty of boom-bust housing cycles makes it near impossible to plan sensibly for population growth and implement strategic planning objectives across our cities and regions.

Planning for major infrastructure, such as hospitals, schools and transport, relies on new housing arriving in a timely manner. Blanket inclusionary zoning policies and discounted public land sales to support land supply for affordable homes need to be prerequisites.

Read more: England expects 40% of new housing developments will be affordable, why can’t Australia?

3. The benefit of investing in affordable housing

If government spending on housing can be invested in the assets themselves (for example, through an equity share in the development), the expenditure will be retained both for an enduring social purpose and as a positive contribution to the accumulated asset base of government.

A properly designed, large-scale, not-for-profit program could mean investing in new housing becomes a positive for state and national balance sheets. This requires a shift in behaviour and mindsets of some Treasury officials who often see social housing as a liability.

4. Drive broad productivity dividends

Other recent research for CHIA NSW shows investment in suitably located social and affordable housing has much wider economic benefits. These include travel time savings for lower-income workers currently pushed into the outer suburbs, as well as human capital uplift resulting from long-term positive impacts on household incomes.

Read more: Key workers like nurses and teachers are being squeezed out of Sydney. This is what we can do about it

Similarly, government budgets benefit from reducing demand on social services.

In short, the evidence-based economic case for government investment in social and affordable housing is strong. Given the impending fallout of a property bust following the largest property boom in Australian history, now is the time to act and reshape the nation’s housing system for the long term.

But do we have governments capable of conceiving of the necessary policy shifts or with the courage to enact them? Time, and the next election, will tell.

– ref. Build social and affordable housing to get us off the boom-and-bust roller coaster – http://theconversation.com/build-social-and-affordable-housing-to-get-us-off-the-boom-and-bust-roller-coaster-113113

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Duncan Maclennan, Professorial Research Fellow in Urban Economics, UNSW; Professor of Strategic Urban Management and Finance, University of St Andrews; Professor in Public Policy, University of Glasgow

Federal and state elections in coming weeks provide a timely moment for Australians to reflect on the increasingly obvious failure of governments to manage the triple crises of inflated property prices, lack of affordable housing for people on low to moderate incomes, and property market volatility. The likely prominence of housing in the federal poll at least, if not in New South Wales, perhaps signals welcome political recognition that decades of complacency and inaction are to blame for housing system under-performance. And it’s costing the country dearly.

There’s a growing sense that core aspects of the governmental mindset that have underpinned housing policy since the 1980s are long overdue for a rethink. And not just in Australia. Our recent knowledge transfer project, involving academics, policymakers and professionals in Australia, Britain and Canada (the “ABC countries”), tapped into these debates.

Read more: Home ownership foundations are being shaken, and the impacts will be felt far and wide

A misplaced faith in markets

Our Shaping Futures report identifies important common housing features across the ABC countries. These include their overarching “liberal market” approach (for example, relatively light regulation of private rental housing) and the challenges of managing population-driven growth in cities.

In all three countries, a similar set of foundational beliefs has dominated housing policy for decades. One is an increasingly misplaced faith that housing markets are well-functioning systems. Another is that issues of poor housing and high housing costs are seen purely in terms of redistributive welfare. The impacts on growth and productivity are largely ignored.

Governments of the ABC countries have increasingly delegated responsibilities for coping with national and global pressures on housing. At the same time, they have provided little more autonomy and limited resources for cities and regions to respond to these pressures.

All three nations have seen falling home ownership rates for young adults and long-term declines in home ownership affordability – among the most severe in the OECD. Household debt rates are close to the highest in the OECD.

Inflated demand is increasing stress in private rental markets. It’s coming from growing numbers of frustrated middle-income aspirant homebuyers and from low-income tenants denied access to social housing by a proportionately smaller supply.

In Sydney in 2017, moderate-earning and low-earning tenants paid, on average, more than A$6,000 a year in rent over and above 30% of their incomes. And that still didn’t spare them the growing costs and lost productivity of commutes commonly exceeding 90 minutes.

Research in Sydney, Vancouver and London demonstrates that to quantify the real burdens of city housing shortages we need integrated analysis of housing and transport outcomes.

Housing failures have broader consequences

Housing outcomes, including quality, price and location, have significant impacts on the “big goals” of governments.

Regressive subsidies (such as tax concessions for property owners) have worsened rather than offset the effects of rising rents and house prices on income inequality and wealth distribution. In all three countries inequality indices have increased over the last two decades. And in the UK, at least, social mobility is lower than in other developed countries. Housing systems have been at the heart of these changes.

Read more: How the housing boom has driven rising inequality

We should aim to boost economic productivity by enhancing human capital – that is, maximising people’s opportunities and capabilities. Instead, there is an emerging sense that growth dividends have been sunk into raising housing and land prices, through investor speculation. This rentier-driven, rather than entrepreneur-led, economic growth has reduced the housing market’s resilience to cyclical instability.

Piecemeal policies aren’t enough

At least until very recently, longstanding systemic housing problems have generally failed to evoke major policy responses. When interventions have been considered necessary, these have tended to be restricted to homelessness and to helping marginal homebuyers. This has often been done in ways that have proved counterproductive by pumping up demand.

With the possible exception of the UK devolved nations, government housing policymaking capacity has been largely emasculated across all three ABC countries over the past 10-20 years. Housing ministries and agencies have been abolished or “integrated” into human services departments.

Likewise, Shaping Futures stakeholders were unimpressed with recycled policy proposals. One example is suggestions that income allowances for individuals should replace direct supports for housing supply. Another is that planning is the prime cause of supply-side “stickiness” that holds up the delivery of new housing.

Read more: Affordable housing policy failure still being fuelled by flawed analysis

One response would be to join some of our academic colleagues in attributing such shortcomings to a misguided faith in managed markets. We might even echo calls to restore pre-1980s housing policy instruments such as big public housing, deep rent controls, tied subsidies and the like.

However, the reality is that markets are likely to remain a preferred basis for our housing systems. The above diagnoses and prescriptions also overlook the possibility that some post-1980s innovations have produced significant policy progress. The emergence – particularly in the UK – of regulated not-for-profit organisational models is an important case in point.

Nevertheless, minor tinkering will resolve none of the major housing system problems that have become all too apparent in the ABC countries since the turn of the century, and especially since the GFC.

Key features of a solution

As well as a commitment to housing as a higher priority for government spending, a new understanding of how housing systems operate and what housing outcomes achieve is urgently needed. In particular:

• The housing sector needs to make stronger economic cases for support, while treasury and finance ministries must improve their comprehension of housing markets. Advocates need to voice the productivity case for housing; policymakers need to take it seriously.

• As failed economic thinking for housing policies has generated unstable and expensive housing outcomes, the conventional wisdom finds easy scapegoats in the regulatory planning system. Yes, unduly tight regulation will hinder supply, but no more so than failure to invest adequately in infrastructure and, indeed, shortages of construction labour and materials. Again, the challenge for treasuries is to resist the simplistic “economics 101” analysis that fails to recognise the special qualities of housing and land markets.

Read more: Facts sink glib housing supply mantra – the focus must be on affordable rental

• Far from further downgrading its influence, planning needs to be cast in a more central role to extract infrastructure-and-planning-induced gains. Critical here is the recognition that “inclusionary zoning” essentially taxes “scarcity rents”. And – unlike tax-funded housing expenditure – it creates no drag on growth and productivity.

• Governments in Australia and Canada need to fully recognise the potential of non-profits to deliver not just low-income housing but mixes of renting, owning and shared ownership. This creates opportunities for younger households as well as better neighbourhoods.

• Governments must reshape young adult routes into home ownership. At the same time, they must avoid over-reliance on crudely designed central bank policies on deposit limits and lending ratios uniformly applied across diverse local housing markets.

Reforms to ensure better housing outcomes in the ABC countries are possible. Significant modernisation of private rental regulation in Scotland, Victoria and British Columbia provides recent cases in point.

Read more: An open letter on rental housing reform

Most such steps will depend, however, on governments providing additional or redirected resources. Even more, they require housing systems to be administered at regional and local level with evidence-based understanding and commitment.

Many of the housing problems that distress urban communities across the ABC countries stem from “a veil of ignorance”. There’s an official disregard for evidence and mistaken adherence to simplistic narratives that play down significant market failures.

Households, communities and cities deserve better futures. Shaping them is feasible.

A convincing pitch to do so could well prove critical in swinging young voters’ allegiance and, as a result, the results of Australia’s imminent elections.

Read more: Ten lessons from cities that have risen to the affordable housing challenge

– ref. Housing policy reset is overdue, and not only in Australia – http://theconversation.com/housing-policy-reset-is-overdue-and-not-only-in-australia-112835

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Cothren, PhD Candidate, Flinders University

About a year ago, a Daily Telegraph journalist rang one of us (let’s call him Robert for convenience). She was writing a story about how political correctness was killing comedy and wanted an academic to support the argument. Now “Robert” feels that he is paid, in part, out of government coffers to express views in his area of expertise when asked, so he held forth at length about how this was a silly way to look at the issue.

He went unquoted in the printed story (which announced that political correctness is killing comedy), so he probably got his point across. For political correctness very clearly isn’t killing comedy in Australia.

If quantity is your guide, there’s more of it than ever there was in any imagined glory days of the past – satirical newspapers, comedy TV channels, radio hosts (arguably including Alan Jones), comedy festivals, over a quarter of the acts in this year’s Adelaide Fringe, pub gigs; then there’s the vast sea of allegedly hilarious YouTube videos and the rest of online humour. If it’s quality you are after, what could be more PC and more brilliant than Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette?

So nothing to see here. Move along.

And yet, much of the current comic flood often feels rather bland. It’s not that there’s a germ of truth in the anti-PC rant, but maybe it is like a piece of grit around which a pearl of better understanding might form. A lot of current comedy seems preachy when it seeks to make a satirical point – sincere, addressed to the converted in their just anger, but hardly disconcerting.

Stand-up and the modes derived from it seem particularly righteous, seldom risky. Charlie Pickering may be a witty and intelligent young man, but he’s too reassuring a presence compared to surveyors of the edge of chaos like Norman Gunston, the Doug Anthony Allstars, or the Chaser gang in their pre-avuncular phase.

Garry McDonald in The Norman Gunston Show (1975). Seven Network/ABC

If this is so, what might be causing it?

The viral curse

The one real recent change in the covenant between comedians and their audience is the advent of social media, especially the ambition of going viral. We think that may be one reason why so much current comedy and satire tends to be safe, and obviously preaching to the converted.

The current king of viral satire is the American John Oliver; his Last Week Tonight is ostensibly an HBO TV show, but it has a vibrant second life chopped up in shareable YouTube chunks. Oliver rants about topical issues using a plethora of news clips and pop culture jokes, in a style popularised by The Daily Show.

It is impossible to deny both the humour and investigative depth of Oliver’s segments, which have even achieved real social and legislative results. Indeed, his political force has led some to question whether he is a journalist first and a satirist second. Like an op-ed piece in a traditional hard news publication, Oliver’s opinion on a topic is always clear and obvious from the get-go. Sadly, due to our increasingly polarized politics and the echo chamber effect of social media, this also means Oliver’s satire is easy to ignore for those who don’t agree with his arguments.

Australian television satire largely follows in the footsteps of Oliver and Last Week Tonight. Shows like Charlie Pickering’s The Weekly, Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell, and Tom Ballard’s, now defunct, Tonightly all feature a (white, male) host “going-off” on the news of the day, usually via clips documenting the latest crime against logic committed by Andrew Bolt or the nitwits on Sunrise.

Tonightly versus Sunrise on ‘a second stolen generation’.

Although they lack the writerly polish of Last Week Tonight, these Australian shows have similarly agreeable progressive politics and a vague goal of informing whilst entertaining. They also each have Facebook and YouTube pages full of digestible videos waiting to be shared, though it’s unlikely anything here will move anyone’s partisan needle.

Maybe this is an unreasonable expectation, as satire seldom changes minds no matter how conclusive those who already agree with it find the critique. But the tendency to confirmation bias seems particularly strong in this moment and mode. As Ben Neutze has written in his critique of The Weekly:

The editorials presented by their hosts are meant to set an agenda and become viral content — the kind that people who share the same opinion can point to on social media and say: ‘That’s what I mean! That’s my argument!’

Is this the best Australian satire can hope for in the online age, to be the funnier rendition of an opinion someone already holds? Not necessarily. There is still some inventive and even unsettling satire being produced and shared online in this country.

Edgier fare

One example of edgier online material is The Honest Government Ads. Produced by Juice Media, a small Melbourne-based film company, these short, satirical videos co-opt the upbeat tone, corporate muzak, and smiling spokespersons of actual Australian government campaign videos, all whilst taking aim at the body politic’s complacency on a wide range of social issues.

Parody and irony are classic tools of satire and their powers are amplified here by the way Honest Government Ads are disseminated through social media sites like Facebook. A lack of context means your unsuspecting, conservative uncle is free to stumble upon a posted video and start nodding in agreement to the idea of making it “mandatory to only have fun on January 26”.

Whether or not anyone could really miss the irony in a video that joyfully refers to Australia Day as “Amnesia Day” is debatable. Still, there is plenty of research to suggest even blunt irony will not always get between the audience and its preconceptions. A great study from 2009 that surveyed liberal and conservative students who watched the satirical TV show The Colbert Report, found that:

there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

Perhaps that is why Colbert took to fronting a “straight” tonight show?

Anyway, the federal government was certainly worried enough about the possibility of people misunderstanding the Honest Government ads to send Juice Media a “cease and desist” letter regarding its use of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms. Apparently the average Aussie can’t be trusted to know that the real coat of arms doesn’t feature an alien skull, or that “Australien” is not the usual spelling.

Honest Government Ads video, complete with mispelt, faux coat of arms.

The Honest Government Ads new coat of arms now has a proud motto “not the real logo” front and centre in a meta-video that digs into the “shit-c..nts” at Juice Media who have “tricked millions of hard working Australians into believing their government is honest”.

This video is featured on Juice Media’s Facebook page, where it has a garnered just over 400,000 views. This is nowhere near Last Week Tonight’s regular seven-figure viewer numbers, but still a significant achievement for a small-scale operation with no platform other than the “click and share” of social media.

It’s the sort of work that makes one cheerfully speculative about satire’s possibilities in an age when Facebook is the main news source for millennials and the main “fake news” source for everyone else. Even if there are legitimate worries about the hazy border between satire and fake news, the prospect of independent artists like Juice Media continuing to lob clever, irony-grenades into our daily scroll is still enticing.

Nonetheless, this type of satirical comedy is still predominantly preaching to the converted (and the odd humourless bureaucrat or ministerial aid); it’s just clever enough to do so in a way that tricks its enemies into participating in the sermon. If anything, the ironic humour of the Honest Government Ads probably serves to strengthen the online echo chamber, creating a divide between those who “get it” and those who don’t. And since no-one really feels sorry for the government as a bureaucratic rule enforcer, there’s a clever point being made here, but nothing really dangerous.

The truly challenging

Truly challenging satire discomforts even those who “get” it. For example, Get Krack!n’s deadpan takedown of Sunrise et al. frequently straddles the border of bad taste in a way that makes its viewers complicit just for laughing.

Or consider any one of a number of sketches from ABC’s Black Comedy, whose three seasons have been giving humorous voice to a genuinely under-represented and often oppressed group.

Our “favourite” – really the one that made us feel most vertiginously and unanswerably undermined as white Australians – is a skit where a sick Indigenous girl is granted a wish by the “Ultimate Dream Foundation” and simply asks for her people’s land back.

Using sick kids to make a point is seriously un-PC, and it’s especially risky in the wake of the Chaser’s Make-A-Wish controversy, where they were driven to apologise. But the payoff for Black Comedy is equal parts hilarious and disconcerting.

The dark irony of the charity workers’ bewildered response – “well we either give the Aboriginal people their land back … or we cure cancer” – is far more powerful than Tom Ballard calling a politician a dirty word, and trumps even the “gotcha” trickery of the Honest Governments Ads.

There is no exit for even the most progressive and well-meaning non-Indigenous viewer here; no pat on the back for “getting it”. Whilst an Indigenous person already knows the scale of deprivation, the colonial viewer can either confront their guilt or bury it even deeper.

Sadly for such brilliant, searing satire, the video’s roughly 5,000 views on YouTube suggest it hasn’t gone anywhere near viral — more evidence that the internet can be stupid. Perhaps the skit’s failure to neatly encapsulate a partisan talking point or offer any sort of redemptive action hampers its shareability. You can cut your progressive identity to shreds on the ironies in this skit, and maybe it’s not cool to extend that risk to your social media friends.

After all, despite our grumbling about filter bubbles and personalised algorithms, research suggests that our own choices about what to share are as responsible for social media echo chambers as anything else.

We build the house of comedy we live in, and at the moment it is designed for tickling our confirmation bias and not much else. So the next time something uncomfortable manages to sneak past security, something that traps the laughter in your throat, for the love of comedy: share it.

– ref. Friday essay: why is Australian satire so rarely risky? – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-why-is-australian-satire-so-rarely-risky-112689

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

Sydney shock jock Ray Hadley was apoplectic. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, one of Hadley’s favourites, who has a regular spot on his program, had just committed blasphemy.

Dutton said he didn’t believe in the government building a new coal-fired power station. Hadley couldn’t credit what he was hearing. “You’re toeing the [Morrison] company line”, he said accusingly.

It’s another story with Dutton’s cabinet colleague and fellow Queenslander, Resources Minister Matt Canavan, who is part of the Queensland Nationals’ push for support for a new power station in that state.

“Studies have come back always saying that a HELE [high-efficiency, low-emissions] or a new coal-fired power station would make a lot of sense in North Queensland,” Canavan said this week.

The two ministers’ divergent views are not surprising on the basis of where they come from. In Brisbane people tend to share similar opinions on climate change and coal to those in the southern capitals – it’s the regions where support for coal is stronger.

What’s surprising is how the rifts at the government’s highest levels are being exposed. In these desperate days, it is every minister, every government backbencher, and each part, or sub-part, of the Coalition for themselves.

Never mind cabinet solidarity, or Coalition unity.

The most spectacular outbreak came this week from Barnaby Joyce, declaring himself the “elected deputy prime minister” and pressing the government for a strongly pro-coal stand.

It was a slap at besieged Nationals leader Michael McCormack, after rumourmongering that McCormack might be replaced even before the election. Predictably, the NSW Nationals, fighting a difficult state election, were furious.

The Joyce outbreak was further evidence that the federal Nationals are a mess, over leadership and electorally. They have a party room of 22 – there are fears they could lose up to four House of Representatives seats as well as going down two in the Senate.

Read more: View from The Hill: Coal turns lumpy for Scott Morrison and the Nationals

(However it’s not all gloom in the Nationals – at the election they will gain three high-profile women, two in the Senate – Susan McDonald from Queensland and Sam McMahon from the Northern Territory – and Anne Webster in the Victorian seat of Mallee. Whatever happens to the party’s numbers overall, the women will go from two to four or five, depending on the fate of Michelle Landry, who holds the marginal seat of Capricornia. The Nationals’ NSW Senate candidate is also a woman but is unlikely to be elected.)

By mid week Joyce was back in his box, stressing that McCormack would take the party to the election. But he was still in the coal advocacy vanguard.

The coal debate and the assertiveness of the Queensland Nationals smoked out a clutch of Liberal moderates, who question spending government money on coal projects (although there is some confusion between building power stations and underwriting ventures).

Read more: Queensland Nationals Barry O’Sullivan challenges Morrison over coal

The government’s policy is for underwriting “firm power” projects, on a technology-neutral basis, if they stack up commercially.

The marauding Nationals were derisive of moderate Liberals trying to protect their seats. “Trendy inner-city Liberals who want to oppose coal and the jobs it creates should consider joining the Greens,” Queensland National George Christensen said tartly on Facebook.

It was a rare appearance by the moderates, who have made a poor showing over the last few years, True, some were crucial in achieving the same-sex marriage reform. But in general they’ve failed to push back against the right’s tightening ideological grip on the Liberal party, and the government has suffered as a result.

The week highlighted, yet again, that instead of a credible energy policy, the government has only confusion and black holes.

With his recent announcements, Morrison has been trying to show he’s heard the electorate on climate change. But actually, these were mostly extensions of what had been done or proposed.

The Abbott government’s emissions reduction fund (renamed) is getting an injection, given it would soon be close to exhausted. And the Snowy pumped hydro scheme, announced by Malcolm Turnbull, has received the go-ahead. Didn’t we expect that? There was also modest support for a new inter-connector to transmit Tasmanian hydro power to Victoria.

The government can’t get its “big stick” legislation – aimed at recalcitrant power companies – through parliament. It will take it to the election. But who knows what its future would be in the unlikely event of a re-elected Coalition government? It would face Senate hurdles and anyway “free market” Liberals don’t like it.

And then we come to the underwriting initiative. The government has 66 submissions seeking support, 10 of which have “identified coal as a source of generation”.

Sources say it is hoped to announce backing for some projects before the election. But this will be fraught, internally and externally, for the government.

One source hinted one project might involve coal. Even if this is true, it won’t satisfy the Coalition’s coal spruikers, deeply unhappy that Morrison has flagged there won’t be support for a Queensland coal-fired power station. (The Queenslanders liken Morrison’s cooling on coal to Kevin Rudd’s 2010 back off from his emissions trading scheme.)

On the other hand, underwriting of any coal project would alarm Liberals in the so-called “leafy-suburbs” electorates.

Given the proximity to the election, the government could do little more than give promises to particular projects. There is also the risk of blow back from those whose bids are unsuccessful.

There would be no obligation on a Labor government to honour any commitments, because formal agreements would not have been finalised.

Meanwhile the government is trying to promote a scare against Labor’s climate policy, still to be fully outlined, which includes reducing emissions by an ambitious 45% by 2030 (compared with the government’s pledge of 26-28%).

But unlike, for example, the scare over the ALP’s franking credits policy (dubbed by the government a “retirement tax”), this scare is much harder to run, except in specific regional areas.

The zeitgeist is in Labor’s favour on the climate issue, not least after sweltering summer days and bushfires.

The public have a great deal of faith in renewables – in focus groups people don’t just like them, they romanticise them.

It seems the government can’t take a trick on climate and energy policy – even the school children are reminding it of that.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: The Coalition is trapped in its coal minefield – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-the-coalition-is-trapped-in-its-coal-minefield-113577

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chrystal Zhang, Senior Lecturer in Aviation, Swinburne University of Technology

With investigations under way into two crashes of Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 aircraft, the US manufacturer has caved to pressure and grounded the entire global fleet totalling 371 planes. That includes both model 8 and 9 versions of the aircraft.

The company issued a statement saying this occurred:

… out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft’s safety.

Read more: Flights suspended and vital questions remain after second Boeing 737 MAX 8 crash within five months

But the impact on passengers and air travel could last for months as airlines try to reschedule flights and seek other aircraft to meet demands. While things are still evolving, what should you anticipate as a traveller?

Everybody down

US President Donald Trump’s order on Wednesday prompted the Federal Aviation Authority to ground all 737 MAX aircraft flying in and out of the US.

While it is legitimate for a government to issue regulatory orders to intervene in an airline’s operation due to safety or security concerns, it is unprecedented that such a large number of countries are taking action.

At least 45 International Civil Aviation Organisation member states had already either ordered their airlines to ground 737 MAX aircraft, or suspended entry of such planes into enter their airspaces.

Countries affected include China, Indonesia, Germany, UK, France, the Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and now the US.

While investigations into the two crashes could last for months or even years before any conclusion is drawn, the length of suspension is also unknown at this stage.

Yet holiday seasons such as Easter and school vacations are approaching, and many of us will no doubt be looking to fly away for a break.

Expect disruption

Airlines face disruption almost every day: airline operation is a complex system. Disruption can be caused by unforeseeable weather conditions, unexpected technical or mechanical issues of an aircraft, or associated safety hazards or security concerns.

Airlines therefore have strategies in place to manage or at least mitigate the effect of the disruption and reduce any potential delays. This could include but is not limited to:

• changing or swapping an aircraft type

• combining two or three flights into one operation

• arranging alternative flights for travellers

• moving travellers to other airlines if their tickets have been issued.

With only 371 Boeing 737 MAX family jets in operation, this is a small percentage of the total of more than 6,000 of the previous model and gives airlines the ability to use other jets in their fleet as a replacement.

A snapshot of Boeing 737 models in flight at 7:52am UTC Thursday (6:52pm AEDT) shows 1,500 aircraft. Not a 737 MAX in sight. Courtesy of Flightradar24.com

But the current suspension will present significant challenges for some airlines.

Subject to their fleet size, the scope of their network, and other resources and capacity available, big airlines with multiple types of aircraft in their fleet are more capable of managing such disruption.

For example, Air China, China Eastern, China Southern, American Airlines and Southwest will have more resources to arrange for travellers to fly to their destinations.

In contrast, low-cost or regional carriers will be limited in their capacity to manage the disruption.

For instance, SilkAir and Fiji Airways have six and two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in their respective fleets. Grounding the model means that both carriers will lose 16% of their total capacity.

Fares could go up

While airlines are making every effort to minimise the disruption, all these arrangements come at a cost.

Airlines might have difficulties in sourcing capacity to replace the aircraft, resulting in inevitable delays or cancellations. And delays and cancellations also result in additional cost to airlines operation.

Travellers could soon see an increase in airfares. The rising fuel cost and shortage of pilots have already put global airlines under pressure to manage operational costs.

Impact on Boeing

Boeing and Airbus are a duopoly, said to dominate 99% of the global large aircraft orders, which make up more than 90% of the total aircraft market.

Over the past few decades, Boeing has weathered problems before and maintained an exceptional reputation for its reliable and efficient aircraft design, manufacturing and service.

In 2018 , Boeing received US$60 billion for 806 aircraft deliveries, comparing to Airbus’s US$54 billion for 800 aircraft deliveries.

Of all the aircraft sales, the Boeing 737 MAX series – designed to replace the current 737 family – was becoming one of the most popular airliners, despite being only introduced to the market in May 2017.

But the two recent crashes have raised concerns about reliability of the 737 MAX 8 autopilot system, the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System.

Some pilots have complained about a lack of training for the MAX 8. Others have complained of problems.

The aircraft represents a significant change from its predecessor models, including new engines, new avionics and different aerodynamic characteristics.

Potential risks

The risk for Boeing now is the potential consequences flowing from any investigation into the aircraft crashes. These could include:

• complete or partial cancellation of orders placed by global airlines yet to be delivered

• litigation by the affected airlines and the victims of the ill-fated aircraft, seeking damages caused by any product defect (if proof of any defect could be established)

• new opportunities for its rivals to promote their aircraft; this could allow, for example, China’s state-owned aircraft manufacturer, COMAC, to make new waves in the industry.

Regardless, Boeing could face enormous financial losses and devastating economic consequences.

Boeing’s shares dropped after the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday, but have started to recover.

While Boeing surely carries enough insurance coverage for losses, it is inevitable the damage to its brand is more far-reaching in the medium to long term. This will affect the confidence of aircraft operators and the general public.

Even if any technical defects discovered are quick to fix, a damaged brand tends to require more time and much more significant efforts to recover.

Is it safe?

Of course there is a question everyone wants answered: is it safe to fly?

The answer is definitely. Statistically speaking, flying on a commercial passenger airliner is the safest mode of transportation.

A recent study of US census data puts the odds of dying as a plane passenger at 1 in 188,364. That compares with odds of 1 in 4,047 for a cyclist, 1 in 1,117 for drowning and 1 in 103 for a car crash.

Globally, 2017 was the safest year in aviation history with no passenger jet crashes recorded.

The most advanced technology used in aircraft design and manufacturing, and in air traffic control management, and the comprehensive, efficient pilot training and management are aimed at a safe flight.

So the decision of Boeing to suspend flights of its 737 MAX aircraft is welcomed, for now. But, pending the findings of the investigations, the questions as to how long the suspension will be in effect and how Boeing will address the issue remain unanswered.

– ref. All Boeing 737 MAX flights grounded – and travellers could feel it in the hip pocket – http://theconversation.com/all-boeing-737-max-flights-grounded-and-travellers-could-feel-it-in-the-hip-pocket-113456

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Supriya Singh, Professor, Sociology of Communications, Graduate School of Business & Law, RMIT University

Rina’s marriage problems began two days before her wedding, when her fiance’s parents demanded gold and a car. Her parents agreed to part of the demands to ensure the planned marriage went ahead.

But the 27-year-old Indian woman’s marriage to a man in Melbourne would last just eight months, as abusive behaviour by her husband and new in-laws escalated.

Dowries – where the bride’s parents are forced to give valuable gifts to the husband’s parents – have been officially banned for decades in India. But dowry traditions continue to live on throughout South Asia and in the Middle East.

Read more: When gold prices go up, so does the cost of a dowry – and baby girl survival rates in India fall

As Rina’s story shows, it has also been imported into expatriate communities in Australia.

To what extent remains unknown. The Senate inquiry into Dowry and Dowry Abuse was asked to report on the prevalence of dowry in Australia. But its final report, published last month, says there is insufficient data to do so, with the available evidence on dowry abuse “largely anecdotal”.

The inquiry decided not to recommend a specific law against dowry. It has instead recommended that “economic abuse” be included as a form of family violence in the Family Law Act, and that dowry abuse be included in a “non-exhaustive list” of examples of economic abuse.

This seems to me the right approach, based on the stories Rina and others told me as part of my research into financial and domestic abuse. Of 17 stories from Indian migrants, only Rina’s involved dowry abuse.

Rather than focusing on specific cultural practices, with the danger of demonising specific minority communities, we need to concentrate on economic abuse in whatever form it takes.

Rina’s story

I heard Rina’s story as part of the comparative research I did with Marg Liddell and Jasvinder Sidhu on money, gender and family violence. We listened to 17 Indian migrants, 13 Anglo-Celtic women and 17 community leaders, service providers and leaders of faith communities. We found our interviewees through professional, personal and community networks.

Their stories demonstrated that economic abuse was not limited by culture. Dowry abuse was just one example of many different forms of economic abuse.

Read more: When care becomes control – financial abuse cuts across cultures

What is economic abuse? It is any type of economic control or exploitation. It might involve preventing a partner from getting work, so as to control how much money they have. It might include determining what they can spend money on. It might involve insisting on access to bank accounts or controlling other assets.

In Rina’s case, most of her jewellery was kept in a bank locker under her father-in-law’s name in India (her in-laws nonetheless remained dissatisfied with the dowry they had received). With no job or money or bank account of her own, she was completely dependent on handouts from her husband. In her first six months in Australia, she said, he gave her just $100 in spending money.

He was jealous and controlling in other ways, too. Though her only social activity was attending the Sikh temple each week, this didn’t stop him accusing her of having a relationship with every man she spoke with, she told me.

He demanded to know if she had given the man her mobile phone number, and would “snatch my phone, saying that he pays the bill so I have no right to talk to anybody”.

Three months into the marriage his jealousy escalated into physical abuse. Rina’s father sent her a ticket, and she returned to India. After two months she came back to Melbourne to give him another chance. But almost immediately, her husband’s behaviour left her fearing for her life. “I felt if I stayed there another night,” she said, “I would be found dead the next day.”

Broader economic abuse

Rina, clearly, was subjected to abuse that went way beyond dowry abuse.

We heard other stories of economic abuse involving no dowry.

In Asha’s case, her husband wanted to control the money she earned, dictating how she spent it and preventing her from sending any to help her family in India.

She had originally come to Australia to study. Her husband was a fellow Indian student. Before and after they got married, she was the principal income earner.

Once they were married, she said, he wanted to control all the money. “You should be giving all your money to me,” she says he told her. “You are now a member of my family.” While he failed to pay an equal share of their bills, she recalls him criticising her for overspending on a $2 bag of papadums.

About six months into their marriage, he kicked her in the stomach. “I could take the emotional abuse,” she said. “I could take the verbal abuse, but I could not comprehend a man beating me.”

Such controlling behaviour is by no means a feature of one culture.

One of our Anglo-Celtic stories involved Carol. A teacher in her late 60s, she put her savings of $60,000 and her salary into a joint account with her second husband. Though she was the main and only reliable earner, he questioned every item of expenditure, every gift she wanted to give.

“He took it all,” Carol said. As their relationship deteriorated she increasingly feared physical violence. She recalled one occasion where she hid in a walk-in wardrobe for three hours: “I’d nearly gone crazy.”

Such stories show it would make little sense for social policy or law makers to focus on one narrow, culturally specific manifestation of economic abuse.

Coercive control

Coercive control underlies economic abuse as with other dimensions of family violence.

It works through “malevolent” conduct over time to instil fear and isolate the women. Its tactics lead to women feeling they are poor mothers, wives, home makers and sexual partners. It has a devastating effect on women from all backgrounds and walks of life across Australia.

Changing the Family Law Act to recognise economic abuse as a form of domestic violence (and dowry abuse as a form of economic abuse) is a good start.

But we would do well to go further, and have a conversation about criminalising the coercive and controlling behaviour behind economic abuse.

Read more: Australia should be cautious about introducing laws on coercive control to stem domestic violence

This has been done in England and Wales (2015), Scotland (2018) and Ireland (2018). These new laws have drawn attention to the need to think of family violence as more than separate incidents of physical assault.

The emphasis on coercive control requires a different type of policing. It looks at a pattern of behaviour that is corrosive, involving emotional, economic, sexual and physical abuse. It’s this pattern of controlling and coercive behaviour that is criminalised.

Nothing ever happened to the abusers of Rina, Asha and Carol. Criminalising coercive control would have ensured they were properly held to account.

– ref. Dowry abuse does exist, but let’s focus on the wider issues of economic abuse and coercive control – http://theconversation.com/dowry-abuse-does-exist-but-lets-focus-on-the-wider-issues-of-economic-abuse-and-coercive-control-112288

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karena Menzie-Ballantyne, Lecturer in Education, CQUniversity Australia

On March 15 2019 thousands of students across Australia will skip school and join the global strike for climate action. This is the second time students have taken to the streets to demand more government action on climate change. Last time they did so, in November 2018, the federal resources minister, Matt Canavan, told them:

The best thing you’ll learn about going to a protest is how to join the dole queue. Because that’s what your future life will look like, up in a line asking for a handout, not actually taking charge for your life and getting a real job.

Politicians are up in arms about tomorrow’s protest too. New South Wales is just over a week away from a state election where climate change is a key issue. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has slammed as “appalling” comments made by Opposition Leader Michael Daley in support of the strike.

Such attitudes do worse than just dismissing the students’ voices and their message of urgency. They fly in the face of international research and the aims of Australia’s own curriculum.

By seeking to understand a global issue such as climate change, taking action and clearly articulating their perspective, the students are demonstrating the skills, values and attitudes the curriculum states should constitute the aim of education. These are also the attributes employers look for.

Confident individuals, informed citizens

The Australian curriculum is based on the Melbourne Declaration on Goals for Young Australians, signed in 2008 by all state and territory ministers. Its second goal is to graduate students who are “successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens”.

To help achieve this, the Australian curriculum includes a civics and citizenship strand in its humanities and social science subject. This encourages an inquiry-based approach, presenting students with multiple perspectives and empowering them to reach their own conclusions.

Read more: The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians: what it is and why it needs updating

The curriculum also has three cross-curriculum priorities, which address contemporary issues such as sustainability, and seven general capabilities. The Australian curriculum shape paper describes the general capabilities as “21st-century skills”, designed to foster critical and creative thinking, ethical understanding and personal and social capability.

A 2014 review of the Australian curriculum concluded with overwhelming support to not only keep but further develop general capabilities that reflect 21st-century skills.

Canavan’s dole-queue comments also contradict research that identifies these general capabilities, sometimes described as “soft skills”, as the desired graduate attributes sought by employers in Australia and across the world. These skills are also acknowledged as equipping students for contemporary, transitory career patterns that require high levels of communication, mobility and critical and ethical thinking.

Addressing global sustainability goals

When the students marched in 2018, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said they should be doing “more learning in schools and less activism”. But international research clearly shows that, by preparing for and participating in this strike, students are learning the skills of active citizenship, which they will carry into their adult life.

They are learning how to be the type of citizen we need to achieve the global sustainability goals. They are learning how to work together to effect change.

Read more: Young voters may hold the key to the NSW state election: here’s why

Australian students joining the movement, started by 16-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg, also reflects research showing young people have no faith in politicians and the political system. This is why they are taking direct, grassroots approaches to political, social and environmental issues.

The students’ website, rallying the support of their peers, explains their reasoning for walking out of their classrooms:

In Australia, education is viewed as immensely important, and a key way to make a difference in the world. But simply going to school isn’t doing anything about climate change. And it doesn’t seem that our politicians are doing anything.

By making this choice, students are demonstrating their worldview and understanding of contemporary global issues, their ability to think critically and examine problems, to manage complexity, to communicate and work effectively with others, as well as values and attitudes that focus on the common good beyond their own self-interest. And they are taking action.

In other words, they are displaying all the elements of global competence, as identified by UNESCO and the OECD. In doing so they are fulfilling the Melbourne Declaration’s goal and acting as “active and informed citizens” of both their local and global communities.

– ref. Students striking for climate action are showing the exact skills employers look for – http://theconversation.com/students-striking-for-climate-action-are-showing-the-exact-skills-employers-look-for-113546