Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Peterson, Associate Professor, Flinders University

Review: Carmen, Adelaide Festival, March 8

Choreographer Johan Inger’s Carmen is one we have never seen: a Carmen turned inside out. In this danced-through reimagining of the world’s most-popular opera, we are pulled into the characters’ inner turmoil. Their dancing gets under our skin, at times deliberately unsettling us.

This is perhaps close to Carmen as it was experienced in 1875, when Bizet’s version of Mérimée’s popular novel shocked its Paris audience with its unbridled sensuality. But Bizet’s world is not ours. At a time in which we have increasingly come to see gender as something socially constructed, and when violence against women by men is openly acknowledged and discussed, another Carmen is required.

As in Bizet’s opera, the women who work in the cigar factory with Carmen appear onstage before she does. They are nearly indistinguishable apart from the colours of their dresses, with their hair pulled back into tight chignons and matching eye makeup. There’s a menacing quality in their sameness, a generic, disengaged sexuality. They exude sexuality, but not sensuality.

Carmen here, played by Ayaha Tsunaki and Suosi Zhu in alternating performances, is no traditional femme fatale. Not the saucy, sexy diva of grand opera displaying generous cleavage, the unrestrained gypsy woman, she is a woman who uses her sexuality as a tool because she appears to have no other choice in a world in which men have all the power.

As in the opera, Don José becomes obsessed with Carmen while guarding her in jail. Jón Vallejo, who played the role in the performance I saw, is lithe and small of stature, a beautiful, fluid mover, well matched with Ayaha Tsunaki’s Carmen. But Carmen teases and taunts Don José, falling into the arms of the super sexy and tall Zúñiga (Gareth Haw) and the glamorous Toreador.

Ayaha Tsunaki and Jón Vallejo were well matched as Carmen and Don José. Ian Whalen

The Toreador (Christian Bauch/Joseph Gray) oozes sex, but as with Carmen, is not particularly sexy. Dressed in a spangly jacket and skintight, shiny pants, he moves alternately like a flamenco dancer and a bull in the ring. When he later dances solo in a small mirror-chamber created by ingeniously shifting vertical panels, we see that his narcissism is an expression of his machismo, that even his swagger is calculated to achieve maximum effect.

Stockholm-born Inger’s choreography reflects his long association with the Nederlands Dans Theatre where he developed his choreographic language. Both the principal dancers and the ensemble are masters of shape shifting, creating non-human movements and silhouettes. With their extended arms and legs occupying space that seems beyond the normal range of human movement, they appear insect-like at times.

This work, originally developed for the Campañía Nacional de Danza in Madrid, is marked by a fierce athleticism, with dancers exhibiting superb control over every muscle of their bodies. Every movement, every gesture, is held only for a micro-moment, never in repose.

The dancers in Johan Inger’s Carmen exhibit a fierce athleticism. Ian Whalen

This lack of resolution creates tension in our bodies as we watch, an uncanny kinesthetic connection with the characters in the drama who are slaves to their passions and the overarching social forces that oppress them.

The men dance powerfully, aggressively, dominating the stage and laying their imprint on every inch of it. It is an aggressive and fluid masculinity, beautiful, but dangerous and unpredictable, containing the seeds of its own destruction. The music driving the dance shifts freely between recognisable strands from Bizet’s opera to a kind of soundscape, with throbbing pulsating percussive beats and plucked strings that build tension and drive the action.

The late Spanish fashion designer David Delfin’s costumes serve both an iconic and dramatic function, with his design for the suited, black-masked, ninja-like characters that intrude into and manipulate the action being particularly striking. These figures, which become more numerous as the drama progresses, direct the inner turmoil, turning it into a visible nightmare world.

David Delfin’s costumes for the ninja-like characters are especially distinctive. Ian Whalen

There is only one brief segment of serenity and happiness in the work, a kind of dream sequence featuring Carmen, Don José, and a young boy, who serves as our point of entry into this otherwise harsh and brutal world. Underscored by one of the most lyrical passages from Bizet’s opera, we see the three together as if on a happy family road trip, laughing, lighthearted.

Bracketing this danced picture of contentment is Don José enraged and unhinged, about to pummel Carmen, a deeply unsettling image of violence shown as a tableau, one that etches itself into the mind’s eye. Though the moment of happiness is illusory, we see and experience the dream that Don José believes he has lost. And it is heartbreaking.

When Don José and Carmen dance their last tragic dance, one that ends in her death at his hands, they twirl around like figures in a music box, exquisite, interlocked, but not of this world.

Carmen sees Don José’s knife emerge, and in one horrible moment, it is over. We are left with the lingering feeling that something difficult and unsettled has entered out bodies, sitting just under our skin. This is perhaps the real Carmen, one that is more brutal than beautiful, more tragic than sexy.

– ref. A brutal, nightmarish Carmen imbues an old story with contemporary resonances – http://theconversation.com/a-brutal-nightmarish-carmen-imbues-an-old-story-with-contemporary-resonances-113354

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tom Sear, Industry Fellow, UNSW Canberra Cyber, Australian Defence Force Academy, UNSW

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

Most people think the internet operates as a kind of global public square. In reality, it’s become a divided arena where conflict between nation states plays out.

Nation states run covert operations on the same platforms we use to post cat videos and exchange gossip. And if we’re not aware of it, we could be unwittingly used as pawns for the wrong side.

How did we get here? It’s complicated, but let’s walk through some of the main elements.

The age of entanglement

On the one hand, we have an information landscape dominated by Western culture and huge multi-national internet platforms run by private companies, such as Google and Facebook. On the other, there are authoritarian regimes such as China, Iran, Turkey and Russia exercising tight control over the internet traffic flowing in and out of their countries.

We are seeing more cyber intrusions into nation state networks, such as the recent hack of the Australian parliamentary network. At the same time, information and influence operations conducted by countries such as Russia and China are flowing through social media into our increasingly shared digital societies.

The result is a global ecosystem perpetually close to the threshold of war.

Because nations use the internet both to assert power and to conduct trade, there are incentives for authoritarian powers to keep their internet traffic open. You can’t maintain rigid digital borders and assert cyberpower influence at the same time, so nations have to “cooperate to compete”.

This is becoming known as “entanglement” – and it affects us all.

Read more: A state actor has targeted Australian political parties – but that shouldn’t surprise us

Data flows in one direction

Authoritarian societies such as China, Russia and Iran aim to create their own separate digital ecosystems where the government can control internet traffic that flows in and out of the country.

The Chinese Communist Party is well known for maintaining a supposedly secure Chinese internet via what is known in the West as the “Great Firewall”. This is a system that can block international internet traffic from entering China according to the whim of the government.

For the majority of the 802 million people online in China, many of the apps we use to produce and share information are not accessible. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter are blocked. Instead, people in China use apps created by Chinese technology companies, such as Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.

Traffic within this ecosystem is monitored and censored in the most sophisticated and comprehensive surveillance state in the world. In 2018, for example, Peppa Pig was banned and the People’s Daily referred to her as a “gangster” after she became iconic of rebelliousness in Chinese youth culture.

Complete blocking of data is impossible

A key objective of this firewall is to to shield Chinese society and politics from external influence, while enabling internal surveillance of the Chinese population.

But the firewall is not technologically independent of the West – its development has been reliant upon US corporations to supply the software, hardware innovation and training to ensure the system functions. And since the internet is an arena where nations compete for economic advantage, it’s not in the interest of either side to destroy cyberspace entirely.

As cyber security expert Greg Austin has observed, the foundations of China’s cyber defences remain weak. There are technical ways to get around the firewall, and Chinese internet users exploit Mandarin homophones and emoji to evade internal censors.

Chinese economic and financial entanglement with the West means complete blocking of data is impossible. Consistent incentives to openness remain. China and the United States are therefore engaged in what Canadian scholar of digital media and global affairs Jon R Lindsay describes as:

chronic and ambiguous intelligence-counter intelligence contests across their networks, even as the internet facilitates productive exchange between them.

That is, a tension exists because they are covertly working against each other on exactly the same digital platforms necessary to promote their individual and mutual interests in areas such as trade, manufacturing, communications and regulation.

Since Russia is less dependent upon the information technology services of the United States and is therefore less entangled than China, it is more able to engage in bilateral negotiation and aggression.

Read more: How digital media blur the border between Australia and China

Different styles of influence

If the internet has become a contest between nation states, one way of winning is to appear to comply with the letter of the law, while abusing its spirit.

In the West, a network of private corporations, including Twitter, Google and Facebook, facilitate an internet system where information and commerce flow freely. Since the West remains open, while powers such as Russia and China exercise control over internet traffic, this creates an imbalance that can be exploited.

Influence operations conducted by China and Russia in countries such as Australia exist within this larger context. And they are being carried out in the digital arena on a scale never before experienced. In the words of the latest US Intelligence Community Worldwide Threat Assessment:

Our adversaries and strategic competitors […] are now becoming more adept at using social media to alter how we think, behave and decide.

The internet is a vast infrastructure of tools that can be used to strategically manipulate behaviour for specific tactical gain, and each nation has its own style of influence.

I have previously written about attempts by China and Russia to influence Australian politics via social media, showing how each nation state utilises different tactics.

China takes a subtle approach, reflecting a long term strategy. It seeks to connect with the Chinese diaspora in a target country, and shape opinion in a manner favourable to the Chinese Communist Party. This is often as much as about ensuring some things aren’t said as it is about shaping what is.

Russia, on the other hand, has used more obvious tactics to infiltrate and disrupt Australian political discourse on social media, exploiting Islamophobia – and the divide between left and right – to undermine social cohesion. This reflects Russia’s primary aim to destabilise the civic culture of the target population.

But there are some similarities between the two approaches, reflecting a growing cooperation between them. As the US Intelligence Community points out:

China and Russia are more aligned than at any point since the mid-1950s.

Read more: We’ve been hacked – so will the data be weaponised to influence election 2019? Here’s what to look for

A strategic alliance between Russia and China

The strategic origins of these shared approaches go back to the early internet itself. The Russian idea of hybrid warfare – also known as the Gerasimov Doctrine – uses information campaigns to undermine a society as part of a wider strategy.

But this concept first originated in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In 1999, Chinese PLA colonels penned a strategy titled Unrestricted Warfare, which outlined how to use media, government, pretty much everything, in the target country not as a tool, but as a weapon.

It recommended not just cyber attacks, but also fake news campaigns – and was the basis for information campaigns that became famous during the 2016 US presidential election.

In June 2016, Russia and China signed a joint declaration on the internet, affirming their shared objectives. In December 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed off on a new Doctrine of Information Security, which establishes how Russia will defend its own population against influence operations.

Observers noted the striking similarity between the Russian document and Chinese internet law.

Russia and China also share a view of the global management of the internet, pursued via the United Nations:

[…] more regulations to clarify how international law applies to cyberspace, with the aim of exercising more sovereignty – and state control – over the internet.

The recent “sovereign internet” bill introduced to the Russian Parliament proposes a Domain Name System (DNS) independent of the wider internet infrastructure.

If the internet is now a site of proxy war, such so-called “balkanization” challenges the dominance of the United States.

Nations are competing for influence, leverage and advantage to secure their own interests. Russia and China don’t want to risk an all out war, and so competition is pursued at a level just below armed conflict.

Technology, especially the internet, has brought this competition to us all.

Read more: Russian trolls targeted Australian voters on Twitter via #auspol and #MH17

We’re entering turbulent waters

Despite its best efforts, China’s leaders remain concerned that the digital border between it and the rest of the world is too porous.

In June 2009, Google was blocked in China. In 2011, Fang Binxing, one of the main designers of the Great Firewall expressed concern Google was still potentially accessible in China, saying:

It’s like the relationship between riverbed and water. Water has no nationality, but riverbeds are sovereign territories, we cannot allow polluted water from other nation states to enter our country.

The water metaphor was deliberate. Water flows and maritime domains define sovereign borders. And water flows are a good analogy for data flows. The internet has pitched democratic politics into the fluid dynamics of turbulence, where algorithms shape attention, tiny clicks measure participation, and personal data is valuable and apt to be manipulated.

While other nations grapple with the best mix of containment, control and openness, ensuring Australia’s democracy remains robust is the best defence. We need to keep an eye on the nature of the political discussion online, which requires a coordinated approach between the government and private sector, defence and security agencies, and an educated public.

The strategies of information warfare we hear so much about these days were conceived in the 1990s – an era when “surfing the web” seemed as refreshing as a dip at your favourite beach. Our immersion in the subsequent waves of the web seem more threatening, but perhaps we can draw upon our cultural traditions to influence Australian security.

As the rip currents of global internet influence operations grow more prevalent, making web surfing more dangerous, Australia would be wise to mark out a safe place to swim between the flags. Successful protection from influence will need many eyes watching from the beach.

– ref. The internet is now an arena for conflict, and we’re all caught up in it – http://theconversation.com/the-internet-is-now-an-arena-for-conflict-and-were-all-caught-up-in-it-101736

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Howard Manns, Lecturer in Linguistics, Monash University

Last month, a US contestant on TV’s The Bachelor faked an Australian accent to stand out. It wasn’t a great accent. Yanks aren’t great at doing Australian English. But to be fair, when it comes to Americans and the Australian accent, we can, and do, draw on the words of “Australia’s nightingale” Dame Nellie Melba: “sing’em muck”.

A steady media diet of Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin types has left them with some funny ideas about how we Aussies talk. Stone the crows, Paul, you want me to throw another “what” on the barbie?

We say it’s time we educate our Yank mates. First step, let’s stop spreading nonsense about how lazy our accents are and all these cultural cringe-tinged myths.

Flies, booze and linguistic turncoats: public figures and our ‘lazy’ accent

In the opening years of the colony, it might surprise you to know that many saw the Aussie accent as a good thing — “pure” in the words of a few observers (and purity here doesn’t mean the absence of “foul language”, but rather the lack of regional characteristics). A Tasmanian correspondent, Sam McBurney, wrote in the Argus in April 1886:

There were no peculiarities in the colonies, but a general tendency to speak a pure English.

Alas, it was also around this time that the commentary started to change — enter those fanciful tales that link our accent to our half-open mouths, the flies, the climate, the pollen, our dental hygiene, alcohol consumption, and even our day-to-day conversations with Chinese migrants.

Sadly, Australian public figures are often the purveyors of these furphies. In the early 20th-century, Dame Nellie Melba lambasted the accent, referring to our “twisted vowels” and “distortions”, and claimed the

…general tendency to dawdle and slouch along … lies at the heart of the Australian accent.

In his 1939 contribution to the book Some Australians Take Stock, T.S. Dorsch suggested the Australian accent might arise from “a species of national sloth”. And at the end of last year, Australian New York Times columnist Julia Baird joined the public chorus lamenting the “laziness” of the accent.

“Lazy” and “slovenly” have long been the go-to adjectives for haters of the Australian accent. Language researcher Janice Reeve found them to be the two most common adjectives used in letters to the ABC Weekly from 1939-1959.

Public figures aren’t helping our image by spreading this nonsense about the Aussie accent overseas. The ideas don’t stand up to scrutiny.

What does it even mean to have a ‘lazy’ accent?

Our views of accents are arbitrary social evaluations rather than intrinsic facts, and we base them on our knowledge and experience of the people who lie behind the accents. So, when you call an accent lazy, what you’re really saying is that someone is lazy. But who? The answer is often racist, classist, sexist, and, well, lazy.

Want proof?

Britons asked to evaluate British accents rated the posh accents (those closer to the Queen’s English) as the most prestigious, and the urban accents as least prestigious. When Americans rated the same accents, the results got confusing.

Among other things, urban dialects no longer came in at the bottom of the list, and Americans in these studies even suggested that a Glasgow English speaker was from Mexico, and a Welsh English speaker was Norwegian.

And what about these sounds often cited as “lazy”? Baird (among others) mentions “t” becoming “d” (“impordant”) and the disappearance of “l” in the iconic “Straya”.

The first thing to point out is that the modification and disappearance of these sounds aren’t distinctively Australian. They’re not even just an English thing but make up the potpourri of linguistic changes that have been going on for centuries — in all languages.

Next, to be technical, the “t” isn’t becoming a “d” but rather a short, rapid touching of the tongue against the bump behind the teeth, known as a “tap”. It’s rather like an “r” sound. This change is widespread in global English, including British and American varieties. If you condemn it, you must also condemn those early English speakers who turned “pottage” into “poddash” and finally into modern English “porridge”.

And don’t these “disappearing” sounds like the “l” get up people’s noses?

They certainly did in the 17th century, when “l” dropped from words like “walk” and “talk”. “Negligentius” is how Wallis described the modern pronunciations “wawk” and “tawk”. He would have written “slovenly” but he chose to write his 1653 book on the grammar of English in Latin because English wasn’t up to the task.

Are such sound deletions “lazy”?

A more honest approach to such “laziness” might see us reinsert the “k” in words like “knight”, “knee” and “knot” (lost sometime during the 17th-century).

But why stop there? We might reinstate “r” throughout Australian English in “word”, “part” and “far”. But then we’d be opening ourselves up to complaints about the Americanisation of Australian English. After all, the Americans maintained the “r” in these words where the British and Australian varieties lost them in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Learning to love the Aussie accent

If you’d like to “improve” the pronunciation of others, research shows this is the wrong way to do it.

In the first instance, it implies people aren’t aware that some accents are more valued than others in different contexts. And it downplays our dynamic ability to change our accents to suit our circumstances and goals. For instance, much gets made of Bob Hawke’s “broad” Australian accent, whereas a closer examination of his accent sees him speaking “general” or even “cultivated” in formal contexts (his Boyer lectures).

In the US, Barack Obama is also a dynamic accent shifter, but his standard English accent has been met with snide observations that he is “well-spoken” (leaving one to wonder, well, why shouldn’t he be?).

In the second instance, openly negative attitudes toward less socially valued accents in the classroom often lead to shame, resentment, and even hostility toward language activities. The outcomes can be catastrophic, with consequences well beyond poor school performance. In fact, this led the Norwegian Ministry of Education to ban classroom attempts to change accents in 1878.

So, there’s no substance to the view the Australian accent is “lazy”. If you’re promoting it, then in the wise words of American “philosopher” Jeffrey Lebowski, “that’s just, like, your opinion, man”.

And it’s an opinion that is neither helping the view of Aussies overseas nor is it helping the people it proposes to help. So let’s learn to love our Aussie accents in 2019 in all forms, posh, broad, ethnic, Aboriginal — and by this we mean love the people who use them.

– ref. Oi! We’re not lazy yarners, so let’s kill the cringe and love our Aussie accent(s) – http://theconversation.com/oi-were-not-lazy-yarners-so-lets-kill-the-cringe-and-love-our-aussie-accent-s-111753

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin Kenardy, Professor of Clinical Psychology; Deputy Director of the Recover Injury Research Centre, The University of Queensland

Panic attacks typically occur when a person is under stress. The stress can be physical, like being run down, or emotional, like a significant life change.

Panic attacks are a relatively common experience with as many as one in seven people experiencing them at least once. A little more than half of those people will have repeated panic attacks.

Our understanding of panic attacks has changed over time, but we’ve now come to a good understanding of what panic attacks are and how we can help those who experience them.

It’s important to understand that panic attacks are a physiological expression of anxiety, and not intrinsically dangerous. The symptoms are the body’s natural way of coping with perceived threats.

Read more: Explainer: what are panic attacks and what’s happening when we have them?

A build-up of stress

Panic attacks are typically experienced as time-limited episodes of intense anxiety.

The effects of stress can accumulate slowly, and a person is unlikely to be aware of the extent of their stress until a panic attack occurs.

Panic attacks often appear to arise for no apparent reason. They can occur anywhere and at any time, including at night, when the person has been asleep.

Panic attacks often have a very abrupt onset and usually resolve over the course of minutes rather than hours.

They are often, but not always, experienced as physical symptoms, such as rapid or skipped heartbeat, difficulty breathing and tightness in the chest, dizziness, muscular tension and sweating.

When someone experiences a panic attack there is also an emotional response which is driven by perceptions of threat or danger. If the person doesn’t know why a panic attack is happening, or perceives it as something more sinister, they are likely to feel more anxious.

Are panic attacks dangerous?

Panic attacks are not dangerous in and of themselves. They are simply intense anxiety, and the symptoms are real expressions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activating and regulating.

An increase in heart rate occurs to improve the delivery of oxygen to our muscles to prepare for action like fight or flight. More oxygen is therefore needed and so breathing rate is increased, resulting in a sense of breathlessness and tightness in the chest.

As oxygen is directed to the core and muscles, supply can proportionately decrease to the head, leading to symptoms of dizziness.

If you’re looking after someone who is having a panic attack, it’s important you remain calm. From shutterstock.com

The expression of these symptoms will self-regulate, so all panic attacks will cease. However, the residual effects of the body’s chemical messengers, adrenaline and noradrenaline, take some time to “wash out”. So it’s likely that after a panic attack the person will still feel some anxiety.

Again, this serves the function of having the body be prepared to reactivate for any other perceived or real threat. It’s also understandable that after this experience the person will feel tired and drained.

So if you have a panic attack, while unpleasant, it isn’t necessarily a sign that you need to seek help. It may be that through reflection you can use the panic attack as a signal to examine what is happening to lead to the physical or emotional stress in your life, and perhaps make some changes.

When should you seek help?

A small portion of people (1.7%) who experience panic attacks may go on to develop a panic disorder.

Panic attacks may become frequent and lead a person to avoid situations they perceive as high risk.

Read more: Australians understand depression, so why don’t we ‘get’ anxiety?

In this case the panic attacks become a panic disorder, and it would be useful to seek expert help from a registered mental health professional, such as a psychologist or psychiatrist.

The most effective treatment for panic disorder is psychological therapy (cognitive behaviour therapy) with or without antidepressants.

What can I do to help a friend?

If you see someone having a panic attack, try not to “feed the fear” by responding with anxiety or fear. Remember and calmly remind the person that while the experience is unpleasant, it is not dangerous and will pass.

Perhaps the most useful thing to do for someone having a panic attack will be to help to re-focus their mind, away from the thoughts that are causing stress.

But you can also give them a sense of control over the physical effects of the attack. This can be done by helping to slow and pace the person’s breathing. There are many variations of this process, but one example is to calmly ask the person to breathe in for four seconds, hold their breath for two seconds, and then breathe out slowly over six seconds.

You can quietly count the seconds with the person and repeat the procedure for a minute or so, or as needed.

Read more: Three reasons to get your stress levels in check this year

– ref. Panic attacks aren’t necessarily a reason to panic: they are your body’s way of responding to stress – http://theconversation.com/panic-attacks-arent-necessarily-a-reason-to-panic-they-are-your-bodys-way-of-responding-to-stress-111174

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christine Schlesinger, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science and Ecology, Charles Darwin University

In January 2019, fires burned across a 100-kilometre length of the iconic Tjoritja National Park in the West MacDonnell Ranges, from Ormiston Gorge nearly to the edge of Alice Springs.

These fires affected an area comparable to the recent Tasmanian fires, but attracted relatively little national attention. This is partly because the fires in Tasmania were so unusual – but we believe the fires in central Australia were just as unexpected.

Read more: Dry lightning has set Tasmania ablaze, and climate change makes it more likely to happen again

In the past, fires of this magnitude have tended to come after heavy rain that powers the growth of native grasses, providing fuel for intense and widespread fires. But our research highlights the new danger posed by buffel grass, a highly invasive foreigner sweeping across inland Australia and able to grow fast without much water.

Far from being pristine, Tjoritja and the Western MacDonnell Ranges are now an invaded landscape under serious threat. Our changing climate and this tenacious invader have transformed fire risk in central Australia, meaning once-rare fires may occur far more often.

Buffel grass in Australia

Buffel grass is tough and fast-growing. First introduced to Australia in the 1870s by Afghan cameleers, the grass was extensively planted in central Australia in the 1960s during a prolonged drought.

Introductions of the drought-resistant plant for cattle feed and dust suppression have continued, and in recent decades buffel grass has become a ubiquitous feature of central Australian landscapes, including Tjoritja.

Buffel grass has now invaded extensive areas in the Northern Territory, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia and is spreading into New South Wales and Victoria. It was legally recognised as a key threat in 2014, but so far only South Australia has prohibited its sale and created statewide zoning to enforce control or destruction.

Buffel grass crowds out other plants, creating effective “monocultures” – landscapes dominated by a single species. In central Australia, where Aboriginal groups retain direct, active and enduring links to Country, buffel grass makes it hard or impossible to carry out important cultural activities like hunt game species, harvest native plant materials or visit significant sites.

Buffel grass impacts on Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara communities in central Australia.

But buffel grass isn’t only a threat to biodiversity and Indigenous cultural practices. In January the Tjoritja fires spread along dry river beds choked with buffel, incinerating many large old-growth trees. Much like the alpine forests of Tasmania, the flora of inland river systems has not adapted to frequent and intense fires.

We believe the ability of the fires to spread through these systems, and their increased intensity and size, can be directly attributed to buffel grass.

Fire and buffel grass

Because of the low average rainfall, widespread fires in central Australia have been rare in the recorded past, only following unusual and exceptionally high rainfall.

This extreme rain promoted significant growth of native grasses, which then provided fuel for large fires. There could be decades between these flood and fire cycles. However, since the Tjoritja (previously West MacDonnell Ranges) National Park was established in the 1990s, there have been three large-scale fires in 2001, 2011 and 2019.

What has changed? The 2001-02 and 2011-12 fires both came after heavy rainfall years. In fact, 2011 saw one of the biggest La Niña events on record.

Climate change predictions suggest that central Australia will experience longer and more frequent heatwaves. And although total annual rainfall may stay the same, it’s predicted to fall in fewer days. In other words, we’ll see heavy storms and rainfall followed by long heatwaves: perfect conditions for grass to grow and then dry, creating abundant fuel for intense fires.

The remains of a corkwood tree after an unplanned bushfire in an area heavily invaded by buffel grass near Simpsons Gap. Very few large old corkwood trees now remain in this area. Author provided

If central Australia, and Tjoritja National Park in particular, were still dominated by a wide variety of native grasses and plants, this might not be such a problem. But buffel grass was introduced because it grows quickly, even without heavy rain.

The fires this year were extraordinary because there was no unusually high rainfall in the preceding months. They are a portent of the new future of fire in these ecosystems, as native desert plant communities are being transformed into dense near-monocultures of introduced grass.

The fuel that buffel grass creates is far more than native plant communities, and after the fire buffel grass can regenerate more quickly than many native species.

So we now have a situation in which fuel loads can accumulate over much shorter times. This makes the risk of fire in invaded areas so high that bushfire might now be considered a perpetual threat.

Changing fire threat

In spinifex grasslands, traditional Aboriginal burning regimes have been used for millennia to renew the landscape and promote growth while effectively breaking up the landscape so old growth areas are protected and large fires are prevented. Current fire management within Tjoritja “combines traditional and scientific practices”.

However, these fire management regimes do not easily translate to river environments invaded by buffel grass. These environments have, to our knowledge, never been targeted for burning by Aboriginal peoples. Since the arrival of buffel grass, there is now an extremely high risk that control burns can spread and become out-of-control bushfires.

Even when control burns are successful, the rapid regrowth of buffel grass means firebreaks may only be effective for a short time before risky follow-up burning is required. And there may no longer be a good time of year to burn.

Read more: How invasive weeds can make wildfires hotter and more frequent

Our research suggests that in areas invaded by buffel grass, slow cool winter burns – typical for control burning – can be just as, or more, damaging for trees than fires in hot, windy conditions that often cause fires to spread.

Without more effective management plans and strategies to manage the changing fire threat in central Australia, we face the prospect of a future Tjoritja in which no old-growth trees will remain. This will have a devastating impact on the unique desert mountain ranges.

We need to acknowledge that invasive buffel grass and a changing climate have changed the face of fire risk in central Australia. We need a coordinated response from Australia’s federal and state governments, or it will be too late to stop the ecological catastrophe unfolding before us.

The authors acknowledge the contribution of Shane Muldoon, Sarah White, Erin Westerhuis, CDU Environmental Science and Management students, and NT Parks and Wildlife staff to the research at experimental sites and ongoing tree monitoring in central Australia.

– ref. The summer bushfires you didn’t hear about, and the invasive species fuelling them – http://theconversation.com/the-summer-bushfires-you-didnt-hear-about-and-the-invasive-species-fuelling-them-112619

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Lesh, University of Melbourne

Since the illegal demolition of the historic Corkman Irish Pub in Melbourne in 2016, debate has raged about the best way forward for this historic place. The state planning minister is pursuing an order, via the Victorian Administrative Appeals Tribunal, for the two-storey pub to be rebuilt. This final legal case is set down to be heard in June 2019.

The site owners were last month fined a record A$1.325 million, plus costs, after pleading guilty to the illegal demolition. If they are also ordered to rebuild, to what extent can this restore the Corkman’s heritage? How do we achieve our collective desire for justice and the best outcome for this prominent site on the doorstep of the University of Melbourne and the CBD?

Click below for an interactive view of the Corkman site in Carlton:

Courtesy of Digital Heritage Australia (with historic photograph from State Library of Victoria).

The Corkman is not an isolated case. Local pubs have become ripe for redevelopment to the frustration of communities from Melbourne to London. After illegal demolitions in London, authorities demanded the rebuilding of Kilburn’s Carlton Tavern and The Carlton in Stepney Green.

People in the heritage field have been dealing with sites that have been unexpectedly destroyed for as long as conservation has been a social concern. Urban environments are living historic palimpsests, made up of physical remnants and collective memories, both equally important and always changing.

More than a building

The Corkman Irish Pub, or Carlton Inn, survived almost 160 years. Completed in 1856 during the gold rush, it was a two-storey brick and bluestone building covered with a white render. Successive owners have altered its interiors and exteriors many times.

For generations of students and local residents, the Corkman was a cherished gathering place. It was one of a shrinking number of live music venues in Melbourne and larger cities more generally.

Instead of waiting for planning authorities to consider their 12-storey apartment proposal, “cowboy developers” Stefce Kutlesovski and Raman Shaqiri sent the bulldozers to work on the weekend of October 15-16 2016. In addition to the A$1.325 million penalty from last month, they had previously received a fine of A$540,000, plus costs, for the illegal dumping of asbestos from the site.

Following this brazen act, politicians and the public called for the Corkman to be rebuilt. Kutlesovski and Shaqiri even agreed at first to return the Corkman to its earlier state but swiftly backtracked, hence the forthcoming hearing in June.

The Corkman Pub/Carlton Inn in 1957, a century after it was built. State Library of Victoria

The pub as heritage place

Pubs are imagined to be welcoming to everybody irrespective of class or identity. Of medieval origin, the pub – a public house, a meeting place, licensed to serve alcohol – is more than the building that houses it. In The Australian Pub, historians Diane Kirkby, Tanja Luckins and Chris McConville write:

From the earliest days of colonisation, pubs have reflected, absorbed and created Australia’s changing ethnic and gender population.

‘The original Ettamogah Pub, based on a cartoonist’s celebration of the Australian pub, at Table Top, Albury, NSW. VirtualSteve/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

The affective heritage value of pubs can be gleaned from the strong emotional outpouring their destruction triggers. A London newspaper headline for Stepney Green’s Carlton pub read: “Anger as 165-year-old East End pub that survived the Blitz is flattened by a developer”. Melbourne writer Jeff Sparrow noted the “widespread horror” at the “trashing [of] the [Corkman] pub”.

Irrespective of their protected status, sites that are treasured by the community can emerge as significant heritage places. Yet, despite their importance to neighbourhoods and communities as a kind of public space, pubs can struggle to gain heritage protection. This is because they tend to be architecturally unremarkable, too ordinary to surpass regulatory thresholds that tend to prioritise aesthetic over social values.

The Corkman was loosely identified in a local heritage overlay, basically because of its age. Had the developer waited for a planning permit, a likely result would have been the retention of the historic facade with a tower set back behind it.

To rebuild or not to rebuild?

The desire to have pubs rebuilt to right a wrong and return the place to the community is understandable. Debates about rebuilding destroyed buildings have occurred since antiquity. In the modern era, reconstruction resurfaced as a conservation approach in the late 17th century, but became especially prominent in the immediate postwar period.

This was the era of the “facsimile”, the technical term for reconstruction in heritage practice. Following the destruction wrought by aerial bombing during the second world war, cities such as Nuremberg and Warsaw rebuilt their historic old towns to an earlier form. The notable example outside Europe was Quebec City, which recreated its historic town in the late 1950s as an expression of Quebecois nationalism.

Old Quebec: a reconstructed World Heritage-listed historic city. Martin St-Amant/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

In each case, the construction of these physical environments was about drawing from the past to reinvigorate a sense of local and national pride. Despite some scattered cases, the field of heritage practice nowadays avoids facsimile. It’s perceived as risking the creation of an inauthentic Disneyfied version of what once existed.

At the Corkman, it is unlikely that sufficient documentation exists to build an accurate facsimile. The slightly lower threshold for reconstruction stipulated by the Australian Burra Charter, for the management of places of cultural heritage significance, is also unlikely to be achieved here.

And to what moment in time should the place be rebuilt? The 1856 version of the Corkman was not what stood on the site in 2016. Sticky carpets, hoppy smells and lingering echoes of conversation are what makes pubs special.

Future heritage

Physically recreating a demolished heritage place might give us comfort but will never undo the damage done nor bring the place back to life. That rebuilding is not currently the heritage norm, however, does not mean it should be entirely ruled out. And to authorise developer profit at this site would be to reward the illegal act and could motivate copycats.

If the local community wants their pub rebuilt, a reconstruction may well be an appropriate response. A possible solution is to implement heritage-inspired planning controls based on the demolished building. Then residents and students could be empowered to direct the future direction, design and use of the Corkman site.

– ref. Once a building is destroyed, can the loss of a place like the Corkman be undone? – http://theconversation.com/once-a-building-is-destroyed-can-the-loss-of-a-place-like-the-corkman-be-undone-112864

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, Senior Lecturer in Tourism Management, University of South Australia

Kangaroo Island, less than 130 kilometres from Adelaide, is one of Australia’s ecological jewels. Tourism Australia describes it as a “pristine wilderness”, with cliffs, beaches, wetlands and dense bushland offering protection to native animals such as penguins, sea lions, pelicans, koalas and, of course, kangaroos.

Kangaroo Island. Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

It is a place “too good to spoil”.

Many who agree fear that new developments will do exactly that. With the state government’s approval, a tourism company wants to build two luxury tourist villages at unspoilt locations on the island’s west coast, within the protected area of the Flinders Chase National Park, the state’s second-oldest national park.

Park volunteers have gone on strike in opposition. Hundreds have rallied before South Australia’s parliament in support of “public parks, not private playgrounds”.

The issue is not unique to Kangaroo Island. Around Australia, and the world, national parks are under threat from the curious paradox of luxury tourism, which demands development in protected wilderness areas to cater for those who want to enjoy the natural environment without any interruption of their lifestyle.

Read more: Earth’s wilderness is vanishing, and just a handful of nations can save it

Death by a thousand cuts

My research has involved studying past development controversies on Kangaroo Island. One is Southern Ocean Lodge, a six-star ecolodge near Flinders Chase developed in the mid-2000s. Another is the Kangaroo Island Surf Music Festival, held in 2011 at Vivonne Bay, on the island’s south coast.

Southern Ocean Lodge, Kangaroo Island, South Australia. Southern Ocean Lodge/AAP

Both cases illuminate the process by which parks authorities are pressured to support commercial tourism enterprises in their protected areas.

Park authorities never have enough funding to pay for conservation. Tourism authorities motivated by growth indicators seek to attract high-yield tourists. Luxury ecotourism is a lucrative niche. As budgets for the environment are cut, the financial incentives dangled by tourism authorities become irresistible.

It is presented as a win-win collaboration. Any single venture can be justified on the grounds that the immediate benefits outweigh the costs. But each development becomes a precedent to allow future incursions, resulting in “death by a thousand cuts”.

Elsewhere in Australia

South Australian authorities are hardly alone in accepting this faustian bargain.

In Tasmania, the federal and state governments are backing plans for a tourism development on an island in the middle of Lake Malbena in the central highlands. The lake is within the Walls of Jerusalem National Park, part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

The plan reportedly involves building three luxury huts and a helipad so six people at a time can fly in for three-night getaways at a cost of about A$4,500 each.

Read more: Green light for Tasmanian wilderness tourism development defied expert advice

In Queensland, the state government has plans to offer 60-year leases to commercial tourism operators in three national parks (the Whitsunday Islands National Park, the Great Sandy National Park and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park). The operators will be allowed to build “eco-lodges” and offer “commercial experiences”.

An insight into what those experiences might involve is provided by The Weekend Australian Magazine, (whose readers have an average income of A$116,495).

The article “Walk this way: adventures in the great outdoors” (published 2-3 March 2019) talks of “fully supported walking experiences” with “luxury accommodations” and “premium food and wines” costing thousands of dollars, and in some cases using helicopters to access remote park sites.

Australian Walking Company

One company keen to snare the Queensland leases is the developer of the Kangaroo Island luxury tourism plan, Australian Walking Company. A director and significant shareholder in the company is Brett Godfrey, the former chief executive of Virgin Australia who is now chairman of Tourism Queensland.

All that glitters: Brett Godfrey strikes a pose to promote Virgin’s Australian operation in 2007. Virgin Australia

Godfrey has addressed his potential conflict of interest by taking advice from the office of the Queensland Integrity Commissioner.

Nonetheless, his dual interests give an insight into the problematic nature of governments and tourism bureaucracies supporting luxury ecotourism developments in conservation areas; particularly when (as former Queensland minister for national parks Steve Dickson said in 2013), they are “looking to make money”.

Private versus public interest

The business strategy of unlocking national parks for luxury eco-tourism development risks undermining the very point of creating such parks in the first place. It pits the private interests of the wealthy against the public interest in environmental and local benefits.

It places no value on the conservation work of “friends of parks” groups, which support these parks primarily as places for conservation and secondly as publicly funded places to enjoy, learn about and connect to nature.

Catering to the luxury eco-tourist is at odds with the “wild” and undeveloped nature that conservationists and local park lovers want. You can’t get away from it all and take it all with you.

Advocates can argue that luxury eco-tourism is more sustainable because it offers high economic yield with fewer numbers. But take that argument to its logical extreme and we’ll end up with situations like that in Indonesia.

Komodo lessons

The governor of the province that includes Komodo National Park, the island home of komodo dragons, wants to increase the park’s entrance fee by 5,000%, from about US$10 to US$500. It would certainly reduce tourist numbers, but also effectively make the park off-limits to most Indonesians.

The governor, Victor Laidkodat, is apparently fine with that. “This is a rare place, only for people with money,” he has reportedly said. “Those who don’t have enough money shouldn’t come because this place is for extraordinary people.”

Read more: A green and happy holiday? You can have it all

This is certainly not what we want for our own national parks, turning them into private playgrounds for the privileged few.

This year is the centenary of Kangaroo Island’s Flinders Chase National Park. It’s a good time to look back and appreciate the vision that led to its establishment in 1919, and to look critically at what our vision is for the next 100 years.

– ref. On Kangaroo Island and elsewhere, beware the lure of the luxury ecotourist – http://theconversation.com/on-kangaroo-island-and-elsewhere-beware-the-lure-of-the-luxury-ecotourist-113044

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caillan Davenport, Senior Lecturer in Roman History, Macquarie University

Sometime in the 9th century AD, a monk in the Benedictine monastery of Fulda in modern Germany copied out an extensive Latin history into Carolingian minuscule, a script promoted by the emperor Charlemagne to aid in the reading and comprehension of great works of literature. It is to this monk that we owe the preservation of the first part of what is arguably the greatest history of imperial Rome, the Annals of P. Cornelius Tacitus.

The Annals tells the story of the Roman empire under the Julio-Claudian dynasty, which ruled Rome from 27 BC to AD 68. It begins with the death of the first emperor Augustus (27 BC-AD 14), and then covers in detail the reigns of his successors, Tiberius (AD 14-37), Caligula (AD 37-41), Claudius (AD 41-54), and Nero (AD 54-68).

The history was originally composed of 18 books, of which 1-6 are preserved in the manuscript from Fulda, and 11-16 in a second manuscript copied in Italy at the monastery of Monte Cassino in the 11th century.

Read more: Guide to the Classics: Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars explores vice and virtue in ancient Rome

The rest of the work, including the entire reign of Caligula, is entirely lost. What remains, however, is a powerful and at times darkly humorous examination of the workings of the Roman imperial monarchy.

Without anger and partiality

Tacitus was a Roman senator, who wrote the Annals in the early second century AD, during the reigns of Trajan (AD 98-117) and Hadrian (AD 117-138). He had previously written a series of minor works, including a biography of his father-in-law Agricola, and a major account of the Flavian dynasty (AD 69-96) called the Histories.

The Annals is a modern title, which only became established in the 16th century. The 9th century manuscript from Fulda instead began with Ab excessu divi Aug(usti), “From the death of the deified Augustus”. The choice of Annals as the conventional title reflects the fact that Tacitus’ history was structured on an annalistic basis, covering events year by year.

Fragment of the funerary inscription of P. Cornelius Tacitus, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome. Kleuske/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The most famous statement of Tacitus’ Annals is his proclamation that he would write sine ira et studio (“without anger and partiality”). Such pronouncements of impartiality were a formulaic part of ancient historiography. In this case, Tacitus’ claim is based on the fact that he did not live under the emperors he was writing about, and thus did not benefit from their patronage. The statement did not mean that he would refrain from advancing any strong opinions – far from it.

Liberty and slavery

The City of Rome from its inception was held by kings; freedom and the consulship were established by L. Brutus.

From this, the first line of the Annals, Tacitus lays his cards on the table with an account of Rome’s changing systems of government. Rome had been a monarchy before, in the age of the kings which lasted for nearly 250 years (753 BC-509 BC). In 509 BC, a senator called L. Brutus expelled the tyrannical last king, Tarquinius Superbus. This ushered in an era of libertas (“freedom”).

Tacitus describes how freedom was guaranteed by a new form of government, the res publica – the Republic – in which sovereign authority lay with the Roman people. In the first century BC, a series of civil wars waged by powerful men such as Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian effectively brought about the end of the Republican system of government.

Roman coin of 54 B.C. celebrating Brutus’ expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus and the new era of freedom in 509 B.C. Wikimedia Commons

In 27 BC, Octavian assumed the name of Augustus (“the revered one”) and became the first emperor. Monarchical rule had returned to Rome. Although the senate still existed, real power now lay with Augustus. Tacitus writes that the people and the senators, grateful for the end to civil wars, offered themselves up in servitium (“servitude”) to Rome’s new leader:

he (sc. Augustus) drew to himself the responsibilities of senate, magistrates, and laws – without a single adversary, since the most defiant had fallen in the battle line or by proscription and the rest of the nobles […] preferred the protection of the present to the perils of old.

The themes of liberty and slavery permeate the Annals. After the death of Augustus, Tacitus writes that senators turned to acknowledge his stepson Tiberius as emperor, a move which he characterises as “a rush into servitude”. This language was particularly resonant to a Roman audience, as Myles Lavan has shown. Servitude was the condition of slaves who answered to a dominus (“master”) – it was not the condition of free men, and especially not of Roman citizens.

Tacitus’ history alternates between civil affairs (concentrating on the emperor, the senate, and the court) and foreign affairs (campaigns and rebellions in the provinces). But each section of his narrative comments on and reflects the themes of the other.

A classic example comes in Book 14. Here Tacitus describes the revolt of Boudicca, queen of the British tribe of the Iceni, against the forces of the emperor Nero in Britain. Before joining battle with the Romans, Boudicca tells her followers that:

[…] she was not, as one sprung from great ancestors, avenging her kingdom and wealth, but as one of the people, her lost freedom, her body battered by beatings, and the abused chastity of her daughters.

To fight and die under the leadership of a woman would enable Britons to avoid slavery under Rome. Boudicca’s speech encourages Tacitus’ readers to reflect on the decadence and depravity of Nero, and the curtailment of freedom under his regime.

Read more: Mythbusting Ancient Rome – the emperor Nero

The monarchy exposed

The Annals is not an anti-monarchical work – when Tacitus was writing in the second century AD, there was no chance of the Roman Republic being restored. In his view, monarchical government should be conducted in an open and transparent manner, with the emperor and senate working together. But the reigns of the Julio-Claudians which he describes in the Annals did not live up to this ideal.

The emperor Tiberius shown on the Grand Camée de France, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Carole Raddato/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Tacitus paints the members of the senate as sycophants, willingly surrendering their authority to their imperial masters. His account of the emperor Tiberius – portrayed as the master of dissimulation who says one thing but does another – features senators turning on one another to curry favour with the emperor, and with his notorious creature, the praetorian prefect Sejanus.

In Tacitus’ picture of the monarchy, the real power lies behind closed doors, where senators jockey for favour with men such as Sejanus, not to mention the emperor’s freedmen, slaves, and female relatives. In Book 11, which covers the reign of Claudius, we see a senator’s trial held in the imperial bedroom in the presence of the emperor and his wife Messalina – rather than in the senate itself.

Claudius’ second wife, his niece Agrippina, ushered in a new form of female tyranny. Tacitus memorably remarks:

[…] there was universal obedience to a female who did not, like Messalina, sport with Roman affairs through recklessness: it was a tightly controlled and (so to speak) manlike servitude.

In producing his account of political intrigues, Tacitus often conducted archival research. In Books two and three he describes the mysterious death of Tiberius’ adopted son Germanicus in Syria after he clashed with the governor of the province, Calpurnius Piso. Tacitus recounts the outpouring of grief for Germanicus in Rome, and the subsequent trial of Piso.

Bronze fragments of a senatorial decree recording the outcome of the trial were discovered in Spain in the 1980s. A comparison of the text of the inscription with the Annals shows that Tacitus used these senatorial records in writing about the death of Germanicus.

Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus by Benjamin West. Wikimedia Commons

But Tacitus does not accept the authorised version of events wholesale. He shapes his narrative of the incident to focus on the dissimulation of the emperor Tiberius and his mother Livia, whom he alleges were secretly happy at the death of the popular prince Germanicus:

Tiberius and Livia refrained from public appearance, deeming it would belittle their sovereignty to lament openly – or lest, with everyone’s eyes examining their demeanour, their falsity be understood.

We cannot know what Tiberius and Livia were really thinking, but Tacitus uses the power of rumour and suggestion to imagine the motives of the parties involved. The historian Werner Eck has drawn parallels between this incident and the aftermath of death of Princess Diana, when popular grief was famously greeted by a prolonged silence from the Queen.

A powerful legacy

Given Tacitus’ gift for laying bare the realities of power, it is somewhat surprising that he was never a popular author in the Roman world. Indeed, Tacitus was little read before the publication of the first editions of the Annals in the 16th century. His history struck a chord with Italian humanists, who found in the Annals a work which helped them to comprehend and critique the monarchical regimes of Europe.

Tacitus’ style influenced Francesco Guicciardini’s History of Italy, which recounted events in the peninsula between 1494-1534, and the relevance of the theme of liberty to contemporary monarchy was brought out in Virgilio Malvezzi’s Discourses on Tacitus (1635). The impact of the Annals was also felt in England, where Tacitus’ words encouraged statesmen to challenge the restrictions placed on them by the Stuart kings, lest they too fall under the thumb of a Tiberius or Nero.

The subsequent influence of Tacitus’ Annals on great thinkers such as Hobbes and Montesquieu has ensured that it has become a paradigmatic text for understanding one-man rule, both in ancient Rome and in the modern world. It encourages us to consider the dangers of accepting and acquiescing to an autocracy which has no checks and balances.

The translations used in this article come from A. J. Woodman, Tacitus: The Annals, Hackett Publishing Company (2004).

– ref. Guide to the classics: Tacitus’ Annals and its enduring portrait of monarchical power – http://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-tacitus-annals-and-its-enduring-portrait-of-monarchical-power-107277

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

Scott Morrison’s government is struggling with a fresh crisis, the combination of a bitter domestic within the Nationals and the conflicting imperatives of pitching to voters in Australia’s north and south on the highly charged issues of energy and climate change.

Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce on Monday turbocharged his push to regain the Nationals leadership with a media blitz.

Obviously the former Nationals leader would like his positions back now (despite saying “we’ve got to go to the polls with the team we’ve got”) but if that’s not possible he’s staking his claim for after the election.

There was a manic edge to Joyce’s Monday interviews, focused on leadership and coal. Explaining why, while he wouldn’t move for a spill, he’d feel no “guilt” about standing if the opportunity came, he described himself as the “elected deputy prime minister of Australia”. That claim was based on occupying the position when the Coalition won the election.

Bizarrely, he also questioned that emissions could be measured. “It is a self-assessment process by the major emitters … And then it’s compiled by the government. So basically, it’s a proposition about a supposition,” he said on the ABC.

Although these days he sounds more over-the-top than ever, Joyce resonates with Queensland Nationals fearing a loss of seats – they have boundless faith in his campaigning power, and are highly critical of the ineffectiveness of party leader Michael McCormack.

One of their key KPIs for McCormack has been that he must successfully pressure Morrison for the government to underwrite coal-fired generation.

But McCormack hasn’t been able to deliver, and that became obvious on Monday, when Morrison indicated the government won’t be nominating a Queensland coal project for underwriting.

“For such a project to proceed, it would require the approval of the Queensland state government,” the Prime Minister said.

“Now, the Queensland state government has no intention of approving any such projects at all. So I tend to work in the area of the practical, the things that actually can happen”.

Annastacia Palaszczuk might derive some wry amusement to find the PM sheltering behind her skirts.

The Queensland rebels are less amused, seeing this as evidence that McCormack has lost the battle (if he ever joined it) and worrying the Prime Minister is “cutting Queensland adrift to sandbag Victoria”.

Morrison certainly knows that to embrace a coal project would be counterproductive for the Liberals in Victoria, where a number of seats are at risk.

Read more: Politics with Michelle Grattan: Ian McAllister on voters and issues in the coming election

But it is not just Victoria, or even just Liberal seats.

A hard-fought election is underway in NSW, and the Nationals have much at stake.

They have several seats on or near the north coast where concern about climate change would top commitment to coal.

Lismore is a case in point, where the Nationals have their member retiring, and polling is showing a strong Green vote.

The regional vote is seen as crucial to the NSW election outcome, and it is very volatile.

The destabilisation in the federal party is the last thing the NSW Nationals need right now. If the state Nationals do badly on March 23, there will be recriminations and that will flow back into the federal backbiting and panic.

Read more: Mark Latham in the upper house? A Coalition minority government? The NSW election is nearly upon us and it’s going to be a wild ride

How McCormack will go managing his rebellious party in the coming weeks is problematic.

He displays poor judgement under pressure, as he did on Monday, after Joyce said the Nationals could pursue policies in their own right because “we are not married to the Liberal Party”.

“I understand when you have a marriage that it’s a two-way relationship,”. McCormack shot back. “You don’t always get what you want, but you have to work together … That’s what I do with the Liberals.”

The man who lacks “cut through” had cut through, in an unfortunate way, to Joyce’s marital failure.

On Monday night, the row over coal took a new turn, threatening a dangerous further escalation.

A batch of moderate Liberals, in a co-ordinated effort, waded into the debate, with public comments opposing taxpayer funds being used to build or pay for any new coal-fired power station.

They included Trevor Evans, Jason Falinski, Tim Wilson (who likes to call himself “modern” rather than “moderate”), Trent Zimmerman, Jane Hume – and Dave Sharma, the candidate for Wentworth.

Their comments were made under the cover of supporting the Prime Minister, but they had been wanting to say their piece for quite a while.

Once again, raging energy and climate wars are burning out of control in government ranks.

– ref. View from The Hill: Coal turns lumpy for Scott Morrison and the Nationals – http://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-coal-turns-lumpy-for-scott-morrison-and-the-nationals-113282

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zhenguo Huang, Senior lecturer, University of Technology Sydney

To mark the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements we’re taking a look at elements and how they’re used in research and the real world.

Hydrogen is the first element on the periodic table. In its pure form hydrogen is a light, colourless gas, but forms a liquid at very low temperatures.

Have you ever watched a space shuttle launch? The fuel used to thrust these enormous structures away from Earth’s gravitational pull is hydrogen.

Hydrogen also holds potential as a source of energy for our daily activities – driving, heating our houses, and maybe more.

Read more: Lightweight of periodic table plays big role in life on Earth

This month the federal coalition government opened public consultation on a national hydrogen strategy. Labor has also pledged to set aside funding to develop clean hydrogen. The COAG Energy Ministers meeting in December 2018 indicated strong support for a hydrogen economy.

But is Australia ready to explore this competitive, low-carbon energy alternative for residential, commercial, industrial and transport sectors?

There are two key aspects to assessing our readiness for a hydrogen economy – technological advancement (can we actually do it?) and societal acceptance (will we use it?).

Filling up a hydrogen car in Dresden, Germany in 2018. Sebastian Kahnert/AAP

Is the technology mature enough?

The hydrogen economy cycle consists of three key steps:

• hydrogen production
• hydrogen storage and delivery
• hydrogen consumption – converting the chemical energy of hydrogen into other forms of energy.

Hydrogen production

For hydrogen to become a major future fuel, water electrolysis is likely the best method of production. In this process, electricity is used to split water molecules into hydrogen (H₂) and oxygen (O₂).

This technology becomes commercially feasible when electricity is produced at relatively low costs by renewable sources such as solar and wind. Costs may drop further in the near future as the production technology becomes more efficient.

Read more: How hydrogen power can help us cut emissions, boost exports, and even drive further between refills

How hydrogen is created and used as a power source.

Hydrogen storage and delivery

Effective storage and delivery are vital for the safe and efficient handling of large amounts of hydrogen.

Because it is very light, hydrogen has conventionally been compressed at high pressure, or liquefied and stored at an extremely low temperature of -253℃. Taking these steps requires an extra energy investment, so efficiency drops by up to 40%. But current hydrogen storage and delivery still rests on these two technologies – compression and liquefaction – as they are proven and supported by well-established infrastructure and experience.

Another option being explored (but needing further development) is to combine hydrogen with other elements, and then release it when required for use.

Currently, most hydrogen fuel cell cars use carbon-fibre reinforced tanks to store highly compressed hydrogen gas. The cost of tanks will need to lower to make this option more economic (currently over a few thousands of US dollars per unit).

Using hydrogen as a fuel

There are two main ways to convert the chemical energy in hydrogen into usable energy (electrical energy or heat energy). Both of these approaches produce water as the by-product.

A primitive and straightforward way of using hydrogen is to burn it to generate heat – just like you use natural gas for cooking and heating in your home.

A trial planned for South Australia aims to generate hydrogen using renewable electricity, and then inject it into the local gas distribution network. This way of “blending” gases can avoid the cost of building costly delivery infrastructure, but will incur expenditures associated with modifications to existing pipelines. Extensive study and testing of this activity are required.

When used in hydrogen fuel cells, energy is produced when hydrogen reacts with oxygen. This is the technology used by NASA and other operators in space missions, and by car manufacturers in hydrogen fuel cell cars. It’s the most advanced method for hydrogen use at the moment.

Turn up the sound for this hydrogen-fuelled launch.

It works, but will we accept it?

Safety considerations

As a fuel, hydrogen has some properties that make it safer to use than the fuels more commonly used today, such as diesel and petrol.

Hydrogen is non-toxic. It is also much lighter than air, allowing for rapid dispersal in case of a leak. This contrasts with the buildup of flammable gases in the case of diesel and petrol leaks, which can cause explosions.

However, hydrogen does burn easily in air, and ignites more readily than gasoline or natural gas. This is why hydrogen cars have such robust carbon fibre tanks – to prevent leakages.

Where hydrogen is used in commercial settings as a fuel, strict regulations and effective measures have been established to prevent and detect leaks, and to vent hydrogen. Household applications of hydrogen fuel would also need to address this issue.

Impact on the environment

From an environmental perspective, the ideal cycle in a hydrogen economy involves:

• hydrogen production through using electrolysis to split water
• hydrogen consumption via reacting it with oxygen in a fuel cell, producing water as a byproduct.

If the electricity for electrolysis is generated from renewable sources, this whole value chain has minimal environment impact and is sustainable.

Read more: The science is clear: we have to start creating our low-carbon future today

Moving closer to a hydrogen economy

Cheap electricity from renewable energy resources is the key in making large-scale hydrogen production via electrolysis a reality in Australia. Internationally it’s already clear – for example, in Germany and Texas – that renewable hydrogen is cost competitive in niche applications, although not yet for industrial-scale supply.

Techniques for storage and delivery need to be improved in terms of cost and efficiency, and manufacturing of hydrogen fuel cells requires advancement.

Hydrogen is a desirable source of energy, since it can be produced in large quantities and stored for a long time without loss of capacity. Because it’s so light, it’s an economical way to transport energy produced by renewables over large distances (including across oceans).

Underpinned by advanced technologies, with strong support by governments, and commitment from many multinational energy and automobile companies, hydrogen fuel links renewable energy with end-users in a clean and sustainable way.

Let’s see if hydrogen takes off.

– ref. Hydrogen fuels rockets, but what about power for daily life? We’re getting closer – http://theconversation.com/hydrogen-fuels-rockets-but-what-about-power-for-daily-life-were-getting-closer-112958

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Holford, Professor of Agricultural Biotechnology, Western Sydney University

Curious Kids is a series for children. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

What happens when fruit gets ripe? – Rachel, age 3, Melbourne.

Hi Rachel. You have asked a very interesting question.

Fruit ripening is all about plants getting animals to eat the seeds that are inside their fruits.

When the animals have finished eating, they move around and drop the seeds in a different place when they do a poo. This helps the plants get their seeds to somewhere new where they can grow into a new plant.

A fruit wants to be eaten but only when the time is right

But plants need to make sure that their fruits are only eaten when their seeds are ready to be spread around.

So before the seeds are ready, the plants make sure that the fruit are not easy to see and are horrible to eat. This means the fruits may stay green and may stay hidden among the leaves, so it’s harder to pick them. They are also very hard and bitter to taste, so animals (including humans) don’t like eating them.

Did you know that tomatoes are fruit? This is what they look like when ripening at each stage. Alena Brozova/shutterstock

Read more: Curious Kids: how do tongues taste food?

When the seeds are ready, the fruit become ripe and good-looking, making animals keen to eat them.

When the fruit are ripe they become brightly coloured. Apples, strawberries and peaches become red, bananas become yellow and, of course, oranges become orange.

Next time you go the supermarket, look at the beautiful colours of the fruit in there and see how many different colours you can find.

Softer, sweeter and nicer to smell

At the same time as fruit change colour, they also become soft. This is because fruit are made from many tiny things called cells.

In plants, each cell has a wall. There is stuff in the cells’ walls that changes to make the fruit soft, and it is this softening that makes them juicy.

Each of these boxes is a cell in an onion. And each cell is separated by a cell wall. UAF Center for Distance Education/flickr, CC BY

I bet the thing you most like about fruit is that they are sweet and yummy to eat. When the fruits ripen, the plant cleverly removes all of the bad-tasting stuff from the fruit and replaces them with sugars. That, of course, makes the fruit sweet and nice to eat.

The last thing that changes when fruit ripen is that they make stuff that helps them smell really nice, which makes animals and people want to eat them.

Different fruits have different stuff in them that makes them smell the way they do. That is why we can tell a pear from a strawberry, just by smell alone.

Read more: Curious Kids: why do spiders have hairy legs?

A tricky gas called ethylene

These changes that happen when fruit ripen (the change in colour, smell, sweetness and softness) all happen at the same time.

To make this happen, many fruit use another special thing called ethylene. This ethylene is helpful.

The bananas you eat come from farms in Queensland. They are picked when they are green and a bit hard. They are picked before they are ripe so they don’t get damaged while they are being taken to shops near your house in Melbourne.

When they arrive in Melbourne, the people in charge of those green bananas will put some ethylene gas near them to ripen them up. Then they are put in shops so we can buy them when they are yellow and ripe to eat.

You can see the difference between unripe bananas (left) and ripe bananas (right) cryptographer/shutterstock

The most important thing about all fruits is that they are very good for us.

The sugars inside them are a great way to get energy that helps us work and play all day.

They are also full of vitamins that help us become big and strong. So it’s important that we eat lots of fruit. But don’t forget your veggies, as they are also very good for us!

Read more: Curious Kids: Do butterflies remember being caterpillars?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au

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Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

– ref. Curious Kids: what happens when fruit gets ripe? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-what-happens-when-fruit-gets-ripe-110797

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

The highly unusual “semi-identical” Australian twins reported last week are the result of a rare event. It’s thought the brother and sister (who have identical genes from their mother but not their father) developed from an egg fertilised by two different sperm at the same moment.

In humans, it’s the sperm that determines whether an embryo is pushed along a male or female development pathway. But in birds, it’s the other way around. Eggs are the deciding factor in bird sex.

Read more: Same same but different: when identical twins are non-identical

There are other fascinating aspects of bird sex that are not shared with humans. Female birds seem to have some capacity to control the sex of their chicks. And occasionally a bird that is female on one side and male on the other is produced – as in recent reports of this cardinal in the United States.

A half-male, half-female cardinal was recently spotted in Pennsylvania.

X and Y, Z and W chromosomes

So what is it about bird chromosomes that makes bird sex so different from human sex?

In humans, cells in females have two copies of a large, gene-rich chromosome called X. Male cells have one X, and a tiny Y chromosome.

Read more: What makes you a man or a woman? Geneticist Jenny Graves explains

Birds also have sex chromosomes, but they act in completely the opposite way. Male birds have two copies of a large, gene-rich chromosome called Z, and females have a single Z and a W chromosome. The tiny W chromosome is all that is left of an original Z, which degenerated over time, much like the human Y.

When cells in the bird ovary undergo the special kind of division (called “meiosis”) that produces eggs with just one set of chromosomes, each egg cell receives either a Z or a W.

Fertilisation with a sperm (all of which bear a Z) produces ZZ male or ZW female chicks.

Birds can control the sex of their chicks

We would expect that, during meiosis, random separation of Z and W should result in half the chicks being male and half female, but birds are tricky. Somehow the female is able to manipulate whether the Z or W chromosome gets into an egg.

Most bird species produce more males than females on average. Some birds, such as kestrels, produce different sex ratios at different times of the year and others respond to environmental conditions or the female’s body condition. For example, when times are tough for zebra finches, more females are produced. Some birds, such as the kookaburra, contrive usually to hatch a male chick first, then a female one.

Read more: I’ve always wondered: can two chickens hatch out of a double-yolk egg?

Why would a bird manipulate the sex of her chicks? We think she is optimising the likelihood of her offspring mating and rearing young (so ensuring the continuation of her genes into future generations).

It makes sense for females in poor condition to hatch more female chicks, because weak male chicks are unlikely to surmount the rigours of courtship and reproduction.

How does the female do it? There is some evidence she can bias the sex ratio by controlling hormones, particularly progesterone.

How male and female birds develop

In humans, we know it’s a gene on the Y chromosome called SRY that kickstarts the development of a testis in the embryo. The embryonic testis makes testosterone, and testosterone pushes the development of male characteristics like genitals, hair and voice.

But in birds a completely different gene (called DMRT1) on the Z but not the W seems to determine sex of an embryo.

In a ZZ embryo, the two copies of DMRT1 induce a ridge of cells (the gonad precursor) to develop into a testis, which produces testosterone; a male bird develops. In a ZW female embryo, the single copy of DMRT1 permits the gonad to develop into an ovary, which makes estrogen and other related hormones; a female bird results.

This kind of sex determination is known as “gene dosage”.

It’s the difference in the number of sex genes that determines sex. Surprisingly, this mechanism is more common in vertebrates than the familiar mammalian system (in which the presence or absence of a Y chromosome bearing the SRY gene determines sex).

Unlike mammals, we never see birds with differences in Z and W chromosome number; there seems to be no bird equivalent to XO women with just a single X chromosome, and men with XXY chromosomes. It may be that such changes are lethal in birds.

Birds that are half-male, half-female

Very occasionally a bird is found with one side male, the other female. The recently sighted cardinal has red male plumage on the right, and beige (female) feathers on the left.

One famous chicken is male on the right and female on the left, with spectacular differences in plumage, comb and fatness.

The most likely origin of such rare mixed animals (called “chimaeras”) is from fusion of separate ZZ and ZW embryos, or from double fertilisation of an abnormal ZW egg.

But why is there such clear 50:50 physical demarcation in half-and-half birds? The protein produced by the sex determining gene DMRT1, as well as sex hormones, travels around the body in the blood so should affect both sides.

Read more: Curious Kids: how can chickens run around after their heads have been chopped off?

There must be another biological pathway, something else on sex chromosomes that fixes sex in the two sides of the body and interprets the same genetic and hormone signals differently.

What genes specify sex differences birds?

Birds may show spectacular sex differences in appearance (such as size, plumage, colour) and behaviour (such as singing). Think of the peacock’s splendid tail, much admired by drab peahens.

You might think the Z chromosome would be a good place for exorbitant male colour genes, and that the W would be a handy place for egg genes. But the W chromosome seems to have no specifically female genes.

Studies of the whole peacock genome show that the genes responsible for the spectacular tail feathers are scattered all over the genome. So they are probably regulated by male and female hormones, and only indirectly the result of sex chromosomes.

– ref. How birds become male or female, and occasionally both – http://theconversation.com/how-birds-become-male-or-female-and-occasionally-both-112061

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Melleuish, Professor, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong

It may come as news to many people living in New South Wales, but there is a state election to be held on March 23. There has been little of the hullabaloo associated with elections, although I have noticed the occasional election poster in the front yards of houses as I walk along the street.

This may have something to do with the fact I live in a safe Labor electorate, or it may reflect the somewhat low key approach to politics taken by Premier Gladys Berejiklian, and the low profile of her rival, Labor leader Michael Daley.

Plus federal politics has been far more exciting, especially as high-level Liberals choose to leave in advance of the upcoming federal election.

This may give the impression the NSW state election is a somewhat mundane affair. Given the relatively robust state of the NSW economy, one might expect the Liberal-National Coalition will be re-elected.

Yes, they have been in office for eight years but, on the surface at least, they appear to have done little to arouse the ire of voters, especially voters in Sydney.

However, there is a good chance that, after the election, NSW will have some sort of minority government, with an outside chance of a Labor government.

This would have enormous ramifications for both the Liberal and the National parties. If, as seems very likely, they lose office in Canberra after the federal election, they could find themselves out of office not only federally but also in Australia’s three largest states.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has kept a reasonably low profile. Jeremy Piper/AAP

In the 2016 federal election, it was the Liberal Party that was battered and lost seats while the National Party held its ground. Similarly, at the 2015 NSW state election, the Liberals lost 14 seats while the Nationals lost only one.

Read more: NSW Coalition wins a thumping victory despite a swing against it

Since 2015, the Coalition has lost two further seats at byelections: Orange (National) to Shooters, Fishers and Farmers and Wagga (Liberal) to an independent.

The current situation in the NSW Legislative Assembly (lower house) is that the Liberals hold 35 seats, the Nationals 16, the ALP 34, the Greens 3, Shooters, Fishers and Farmers 1, and Independents 3. The seat of Wollondilly is currently vacant but the Liberal Party faces a high profile independent.

In 2019, the expectation is that it will be the National Party that primarily will lose seats, thereby putting the NSW Coalition government majority at risk. Should the Coalition lose five seats, the current government will be reduced to minority status (a majority requires 47 seats). The Coalition holds seven seats with a margin of less than 3.5%, five of which are held by the Nationals, while Labor has four such seats.

Read more: Mark Latham in the upper house? A Coalition minority government? The NSW election is nearly upon us and it’s going to be a wild ride

ABC election analyst Antony Green has emphasised, however, it is almost impossible to predict the results of this election on the basis of a uniform swing. This is because electorates and their interests vary widely with regard to age, income, ethnic origin and interests.

The state is far from homogenous, and this is reflected in what policies find favour and where. It’s been reported that in Barwon, in the state’s far west, polls show the primary vote for the National Party has dropped from 49% in 2015 to 35%.

The Coalition government under Mike Baird attempted to implement two extremely unpopular policies in many rural areas: the amalgamation of small councils and the attempt to close down greyhound racing. Both policies may have seemed sensible to city dwellers, but they didn’t resonate with the bush.

Issues such as the demolition of the Allianz stadium don’t matter so much to those living in the bush. Joel Carrett/AAP

In recent days, two issues have come to the fore. The Sydney Cricket Ground Trust and the demolition of Allianz Stadium. Fascinating as such matters may be to Sydney-siders, they are hardly issues of great import to the inhabitants of Dubbo or Grafton.

There has always been a tension between Sydney and the bush but it appears this tension has increased considerably since the 2015 election.

There are a number of reasons for this. In the case of Barwon, there is the impact of the drought and water issues, including the mass death of fish in the Darling River. The provision of health services is a perennial issue in rural NSW – what is just down the road in Sydney can often be a long drive if one lives in a small country town.

There appears to be a growing discontent in the bush, one that can be seen in by-elections over the past few years, including Orange, Murray, Cootamundra and Wagga. The Nationals lost Orange and experienced substantial swings against them in Cootamundra and Murray, while the Liberals lost Wagga to an independent. In 2019, the Nationals will be contesting Wagga on behalf of the Coalition.

Read more: Politics with Michelle Grattan: Michael McCormack on banks and the bush, and the election battle

It’s difficult to pin down this discontent in terms of specific policies – rather, it’s a matter of attitude. Gabrielle Chan’s book Rusted Off provides the best analysis of that attitude. At its root is a feeling of being taken for granted.

Chan, who lives near the town of Harden-Murrumburrah, believes the issue for many country people is that they know that the Nationals will always be the junior partner in a coalition with the Liberal Party.

Country voters are attached to the Nationals by a bond rooted in their identity. Where are they to go if the Nationals fail to deliver and become too subservient to their senior urban partners? By instinct they will not vote Labor.

Country people are, so to speak, caught in a bind. Chan puts it eloquently: “‘make it marginal’ should be the catch-cry of country electorates”.

If country voters are to “make it marginal”, then it will not be by supporting Labor because it goes against the grain. They also value independence. This means they look to independents and parties such as Fishers, Shooters and Farmers.

If Chan is correct, then what might very well determine the outcome of this election will not be disputes over particular policies but a desire to punish the National Party for what is perceived to be its neglect of the bush. It is simply a matter of respect.

– ref. Low-key NSW election likely to reveal a city-country divide – http://theconversation.com/low-key-nsw-election-likely-to-reveal-a-city-country-divide-112968

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hassan Vally, Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology, La Trobe University

For the past three decades or so, the conventional wisdom has been that drinking alcohol at moderate levels is good for us.

The evidence for this has come from many studies that have suggested the death rate for moderate drinkers is lower than that for non-drinkers. In other words, we thought moderate drinkers lived longer than those who didn’t drink at all.

This phenomenon has been communicated with great impact by the J-shaped curve that shows death rates fall as you move from non-drinking to moderate drinking, before rising again as drinking levels increase.

Read more: Did you look forward to last night’s bottle of wine a bit too much? Ladies, you’re not alone

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Most of us embraced these studies with enthusiasm. But the findings were probably too good to be true. The problem has always been the potential mixing of many other variables – called confounding factors – with drinking.

The concern was that non-drinkers as a group in many of these previous studies were different to moderate drinkers in many ways in addition to their drinking. Non-drinkers may have been unhealthier to begin with (hence not taking up drinking in the first place) or they may have included recovering alcoholics with poor health.

These confounding factors may have made moderate drinkers look healthier than they actually were (relative to non-drinkers) and thus have led us to associate moderate drinking with better health.

Read more: Ten reasons some of us should cut back on alcohol

More recent studies have been able to address this challenge of separating out the effect of drinking on health, independent of other confounding factors. And these newer studies tell us moderate drinking is probably not good for us at all.

Instead of the J-shaped curve described previously, the most recent evidence is showing a curve that continues on an upward trajectory.

CC BY-ND

As you increase your level of drinking beyond not drinking at all, for all levels of drinking, your health outcomes worsen. The curve starts off relatively flat, before rising dramatically, indicating much higher rates of early death as drinking levels increase.

So what is the health cost of moderate drinking?

If we look a recent Lancet study that addressed this issue, we can start to make sense of this cost. This suggests that if you drink one alcoholic drink per day you have a 0.5% higher risk of developing one of 23 alcohol-related health conditions.

But risk expressed in this way is difficult to interpret. It’s only when we convert this to an absolute risk that we can begin to understand the actual magnitude of this risk to our health. It translates to four more deaths per 100,000 people due to alcohol, which is actually a pretty small risk (but an increased risk nonetheless).

While the health implications of moderate drinking have been a point of contention, it’s clear drinking excessively isn’t good. From shutterstock.com

This risk estimation assumes several things, including that you drink alcohol every single day, so you would expect the risk to be smaller for those who drink every other day or only occasionally.

The latest evidence suggests the health cost of light to moderate drinking, if there is one, is quite small. What was previously thought to be a marginal benefit of moderate alcohol drinking is now considered a marginal cost to health.

Read more: Think before you drink: alcohol’s calories end up on your waistline

So for you as an individual, what does this new evidence mean?

Maybe it means having to lose the contentedness you have felt as you drink your evening glass of wine, believing it was also improving your health.

Or maybe this new evidence will give you the motivation to reduce your drinking, even if you are only a moderate drinker.

Of course, if you get pleasure from drinking responsibly, and you have no intention of changing your drinking habits, then you will have to consider and accept this potential cost to your health.

But remember, the evidence is still incontrovertible that drinking high levels of alcohol is very bad for you. It will shorten the length of your life and affect the quality of your life and those around you.

– ref. Health check: is moderate drinking good for me? – http://theconversation.com/health-check-is-moderate-drinking-good-for-me-108921

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martine Maron, ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Environmental Management, The University of Queensland

Australia’s high rates of forest loss and weakening land clearing laws are increasing bushfire risk, and undermining our ability to meet national targets aimed at curbing climate change.

This dire situation is why we are among the more than 300 scientists and practitioners who have signed a declaration calling for governments to restore, or better strengthen regulations to protect native vegetation.

Read more: Land clearing on the rise as legal ‘thinning’ proves far from clear-cut

Land clearing laws have been contentious in several states for years. New South Wales relaxed its land clearing controls in 2017, triggering concerns over irreversible environmental damage. Although it is too early to know the impact of those changes, a recent analysis found that land clearing has increased sharply in some areas since the laws changed.

The Queensland Labor government’s 2018 strengthening of land clearing laws came after years of systematic weakening of these protections. Yet the issue has remained politically divisive. While discussing a federal inquiry into the impact of these policies on farmers, federal agriculture minister David Littleproud suggested that the strenthening of regulations may have worsened Queensland’s December bushfires.

We argue such an assertion is at odds with scientific evidence. And, while the conservation issues associated with widespread land clearing are generally well understood by the public, the consequences for farmers and fire risks are much less so.

Tree loss can increase fire risk

During December’s heatwave in northern Queensland, some regions were at “catastrophic” bushfire risk for the first time since ratings began. Even normally wet rainforests, such as at Eungella National Park inland from Mackay, sustained burns in some areas during “unprecedented” fire conditions.

There is no evidence to support the suggestion that 2018’s land clearing law changes contributed to the fires. No changes were made to how vegetation can be managed to reduce fire risk. This is governed under separate laws, which remained unaltered.

In fact, shortly after the fires, Queensland’s land clearing figures were released. They showed that in the three years to June 2018, an area equivalent to roughly 570,000 Melbourne Cricket Grounds (1,138,000 hectares) of bushland was cleared, including 284,000 hectares of remnant (old-growth) ecosystems.

Tree clearing can worsen fire risk in several ways. It can affect the regional climate. In parts of eastern Australia, tree cover reductions are estimated to have increased summer surface temperatures by up to 2℃ and southwest Western Australia by 0.4–0.8℃, reduced rainfall in southeast Australia, and made droughts hotter and longer.

Removing forest vegetation depletes soil moisture. Large, intact areas of forest typically have cooler, wetter microclimates buffered from extreme temperatures. Over time, some forest types can even become fire-resistant, but smaller patches of trees are typically drier and more flammable.

Trees also form a natural windbreak that can slow the spread of bushfires. An analysis of the 2005 Wangary fire in South Australia found that fires spread most rapidly through paddocks, rather than through areas lined with native trees.

Trends from 1978 to 2017 in the annual (July to June) sum of the daily Forest Fire Danger Index, an indicator of the severity of fire weather conditions. Positive trends, shown in the yellow to red colours, indicate increasing length and intensity of the fire weather season. Areas where there are sparse data coverage, such as central parts of Western Australia, are faded. CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology/State of the Climate 2018

Finally, Australia’s increasing risk of bushfire and worsening drought are driven by global climate change, to which land clearing is a major contributor.

Farmers on the frontline of environmental risk

Extensive tree clearing also leads to problems for farmers, including rising salinity, reduced water quality, and soil erosion. Governments and rural communities spend significant money and labour redressing the aftermath of excessive clearing.

Sensible regulation of native vegetation removal does not restrict existing agriculture, but rather seeks to support sustainable production. Retained trees can help deal with many environmental risks that hamper agricultural productivity, including animal health, long-term pasture productivity, risks to the water cycle, pest control, and human well-being.

Rampant tree clearing is undoing climate policy too. Much of the federal government’s A$2.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund has gone towards tree planting. But it would take almost this entire sum just to replace the trees cleared in Queensland since 2012.

Read more: Stopping land clearing and replanting trees could help keep Australia cool in a warmer future

In 2019, Australians might reasonably expect that our relatively wealthy and well-educated country has moved beyond a frontier-style reliance on continued deforestation, and we would do well to better acknowledge and learn lessons from Indigenous Australians with respect to their land management practices.

Yet the periodic weakening of land clearing laws in many parts of Australia has accelerated the problem. The negative impacts on industry, society and wildlife are numerous and well established. They should not be ignored.

– ref. To reduce fire risk and meet climate targets, over 300 scientists call for stronger land clearing laws – http://theconversation.com/to-reduce-fire-risk-and-meet-climate-targets-over-300-scientists-call-for-stronger-land-clearing-laws-113172

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Grimmer, Lecturer in Retail Marketing, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, University of Tasmania

Venture to the local shops and you’ll probably see dogs outside on the footpath waiting for their owners. Perhaps the store has provided a hook for dog leads and a bowl of water for thirsty canines. But travel further from home, into the city centre for example, and you are unlikely to see many dogs, or other pets. The same applies to most parks and beaches, and certainly to cafés, bars, restaurants, department stores, and public transport.

Although Australia is a nation of pet owners and pet lovers, our non-human companions are not welcome in most public spaces in our towns and cities.

Read more: With the rise of apartment living, what’s a nation of pet owners to do?

Pets outnumber people

Some 62% of Australian households have a pet. While these rates are similar to those in the United States (65%), they are much higher than the United Kingdom (40%) and continental Europe (around 40%), where pets are much more visible and tolerated in public places.

The British have a much more tolerant attitude to pets in public places. Almonroth/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

There are 4.8 million pet dogs, 4.2 million pet birds and 3.9 million pet cats in Australia. Of those of us who don’t have a pet, 59% report we would like one in the future. The ratio of pets to people in Australia is 101:100 – there are more animal companions than Homo sapiens.

In fact, more of us live in a house with a cat and/or a dog than with a child. For many people, especially those without children, pets are increasingly being anthropomorphised and replacing human family members.

Pet ownership rates are not rising significantly in Australia, but our spending on pet-related goods and services is increasing substantially. In 2016 we spent A$12.2 billion on pets and pet-related goods and services.

Businesses are responding to the growth of the pet supplies sector by developing and marketing everything from vegetarian pet food to sophisticated smartphone surveillance apps. The market for pet insurance, pet day care, pet taxis, grooming and funeral services is robust, providing many opportunities for entrepreneurs and start-ups to tap into consumer demand for pampered pets.

Read more: As pet owners suffer rental insecurity, perhaps landlords should think again

High-density housing and shrinking yards

At the same time as spending on pets is increasing, our backyards are shrinking, with many of us choosing high-density apartment living. In addition, new housing developments feature larger houses and garages, which dominate the block at the expense of front and back yards. This means there is much less room for our pets at home than ever before.

Historically, the Australian dream was a house on a quarter-acre block with plenty of outside space for pets, but blocks and yard space are shrinking in new housing developments.

New housing developments (this one is in the Newcastle suburb of Fletcher) offer a lot less yard space than they used to. Ben Jeayes/Shutterstock

Read more: Vanishing Australian backyards leave us vulnerable to the stresses of city life

With outdoor living space disappearing, pets and their owners must increasingly turn to public spaces for social activity and interaction.

Pets in public places

Australians face many restrictions on where they can take their pet, even if it’s just for a walk outdoors. leonides ruvalcabar/Unsplash

The problem is that pets are not welcome in many public places. In most local council areas, the presence of domesticated animals is heavily restricted and governed by myriad council by-laws.

Local parks and beaches are mostly off-limits. The fines for non-compliance are hefty.

If you want to take your dog to a local café, you’ll have to sit outside. Even if you go to a “human-friendly” dog or cat café you won’t be served food because most pet cafés aren’t permitted to make or serve human food.

In most cities, pets are not allowed to travel on trains, trams, buses or ferries; travelling with pets is either outlawed altogether or managed with strict guidelines for restraining pets and restricted travelling times.

Read more: Riding in cars with dogs: millions of trips a week tell us transport policy needs to change

Research confirms the many benefits of pet ownership. In terms of general health and well-being, they improve our mental health and often provide the impetus to exercise. These are important issues for our time-poor, fast-paced and stressed-out society.

Pet ownership also allows for interaction with others in social settings and in local communities. The importance of pets in fostering social interaction has been established in a study that found owning a pet is incredibly important for well-being and increasing social connectedness in neighbourhoods. In fact, 60% of participants in the study who owned a dog knew their neighbours better than those without a dog. Even 25% with a different type of pet reported the same.

Read more: Our pets strengthen neighbourhood ties

City planning for pets

There is clearly a need to provide more public places for animals and humans to interact, particularly in settings that allow for greater social interplay. As city planners work towards cities that are “smart”, “green” and “walkable”, the focus should also be on making our towns and cities much more pet-friendly by providing outdoor spaces that encourage and foster interaction between animals and humans.

We need an approach that recognises the benefits of human-animal connection and makes provisions for “animal-friendly” cities by opening up more areas for pets and their owners.

Given Australia’s passion for pets, we should be able to interact with them in public. This will help us strengthen social ties, build local communities, improve our health and reduce social isolation.

Read more: Speaking with: Emma Power and Jennifer Kent about why Australian cities and homes aren’t built for pets

– ref. Australians love their pets, so why don’t more public places welcome them? – http://theconversation.com/australians-love-their-pets-so-why-dont-more-public-places-welcome-them-112062

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cameron Murray, Lecturer in Economics, The University of Queensland

When you want to take back a multibillion-dollar giveaway to the country’s wealthiest, expect them to put up a fight.

The Labor Party’s proposal to reduce the tax advantages of being a landlord by limiting negative gearing to new homes has become the new enemy of the landlord class, who are arming themselves for policy combat.

Luckily, the modern way we fight over resources requires no weapons, nor bloodshed, but it is nevertheless a strategic Game of Homes, with subplots, twists, surprises.

Negative gearers use losses made from investments such as renting out properties to cut their taxable incomes. If they make an eventual profit by selling out of the investment, the capital gains tax rules mean only half of it is taxed.

Labor is promising to:

• allow existing negative gearing arrangements to continue

• restrict new negative gearing to investment income, meaning investors could subtract investment losses from investment income but not wage income

• allow an exemption for investments in newly constructed housing, meaning those losses could still be deducted from wage income as they can at present

• cut the capital gains tax discount from 50% to 25%, meaning three-quarters of each capital gain would be taxed instead of one half as at present

• exempt existing investments from the change, meaning the capital gain on selling them would be only half taxed as at present whenever they were sold.

The changes would allow it to claw back more than A$30 billion over ten years, most of it from the higher earners in a position to take advantage of negative gearing.

Among the weapons being deployed against its plans are untruths. Here are some of them.

Untruth: it’ll cost us our AAA credit rating

No less an authority then the prime minister has claimed Labor’s negative gearing and capital gains tax proposal — that would recoup billions in taxes — would somehow make Australia’s public debt less manageable. It would, for some reason, make rating agencies remove the letter A from rating documents that lenders pay little attention to.

This is untrue on two fronts. First, increasing taxes by A$10 billion per year would make public debt more manageable, not less.

Second, ratings by agencies who proved to be unable to judge risk during the global financial crisis don’t matter much to borrowers. Morrison would be as well served by claiming that he has three fully grown and trained dragons that would roast the grandchildren of people who vote Labor.

How effective it is depends on how much our media has become a clickbait farm rather than a news reporting service.

Hint for journalists: it is not news when a politician repeats untruths. It is newsworthy when one tells the truth. If you have to report untruths, simply write a headline along the lines of “politician lies again”. You will better inform the public.

Untruth: mums, dads, teachers and nurses will suffer

The unspoken rule in Australia is that policy changes cannot hurt “Mums and Dads”. Add in teachers, nurses and police, and there’s an untouchable alliance.

Putting aside for one moment that the claim is misleading (the occupations most likely to negatively gear are surgeons and anaesthetists), the inconvenient truth for those claiming that mums and dads will be hurt is that is that will still be able to negatively gear (new properties) under Labor’s policy.

What’s more shocking about the claim it that rests on the assumption that the government cares about the financial well being of police officers.

It is hard to believe that a government that presided over a two-year pay freeze for the 6,500 staff of the Australian Federal Police, and who recently cut its budget, wants its officers to have more money.

To be part of the Game of Homes you apparently need not just to be a police officer, or a Mum or a Dad, but to be landlord as well.

Untruth: we won’t build more houses

In an unlikely claim, Master Builders Australia has asserted that a policy designed to channel funding into newly built housing won’t help build more houses.

It’s becomes easier to understand when you realise that the association is part of the Game of Homes. Actual builders have been leaving it, in some cases because of concern that it doesn’t represent their interests and in others because of concern that it has ties to the Coalition.

Australia’s largest developer of new homes has been quoted in the Australian Financial Review as saying

the Labor Party’s plan to limit negative gearing tax breaks to new housing would put a rocket under the business of residential developers because demand from investors would surge

Untruth: housing will be cheaper, or more expensive

Opponents of Labor’s proposal have claimed housing will be both cheaper and more expensive, as if each is a bad thing.

Sometimes, as with Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, they claim both in the same speech, in the same sentence:

Under the policy, everyone who owns a home will see it be worth less, and under that policy, everyone who rents a house will end up paying more.

At least he has pulled back somewhat from the claims made by then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull during the last election campaign.

Back then Labor’s plan was going to

It isn’t what the Treasury was telling the government. We now know, from documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, that it had told it

overall, the price changes are likely to be small, though the composition of ownership may shift away from domestic investors

Last year the government asked whether it could at least say the Treasury thought Labor’s plan would reduce house prices.

Treasury replied that it could not, in strikingly blunt terms:

We did not say that the proposed policies “will” reduce house prices. We said that they “could” put downward pressure on house prices in the short-term depending on what else was going on in the market at the time, but in the long-term they were unlikely to have much impact.

There is unlikely to be much impact on rents either. When Labor cut back negative gearing in the mid-1980s in the same way as it plans to now rents rose sharply in Perth and rose somewhat in Sydney. They fell in Adelaide and Brisbane and remained steady in real terms in Melbourne. The Grattan Institute sums up the likely impact this time by saying rents “won’t change much”.

Untuth: the government wants Labor to win the election

Treasurer Frydenberg has implored Labor to

listen to the critics of its policy, cut its losses and abandon the changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax

The lie here is that Frydenberg is trying to help Labor out, that he would want it to cut its “losses”. In political battles, parties generally celebrate the other side’s losses rather than steer them away from them.

As a rule, the more vested interests organise their strategic alliances and myth-making battle plans to stop your policy, the better it is. We saw it the mining super-profit tax, we saw it with gold tax (yes, until 1991 the profits made from mining gold used not to be taxed) we saw it with fringe benefits tax, we saw it with capital gains tax itself.

Stay tuned

I can’t predict what will happen next season on Australia’s Game of Homes, but there’s a chance some of the characters in this story will dramatically meet their demise, perhaps at the election.

Winter is coming.

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

– ref. The Game of Homes: how the vested interests lie about negative gearing – http://theconversation.com/the-game-of-homes-how-the-vested-interests-lie-about-negative-gearing-112222

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Prudence Gibson, Art writer and Tutor, UNSW

In 2014 I rang artist Janet Laurence and suggested I write a book about her art. Not all of it, just the plant-related artworks. This was to be a philosophical musing on our mutual fascination with the crossover between art and the vegetal world. Now, five years later, it is time for a deeper, longer view of the artist’s work. A survey exhibition, with catalogue, is now launched at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney.

Janet Laurence, Heartshock (After Nature), 2008 / 2019, installation view, Janet Laurence: After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2019. Image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jacquie Manning

Many accounts of the artist describe her as a peripatetic traveller, who flits to Japan one week and the Amazon the next – a flighty bowerbird who, in curator Rachel Kent’s words, has to be caught in a butterfly net.

My experience is different: I have only seen a rigorous scholarly approach. Her reading of environmental humanities scholarship, eco-theory and nature philosophy, is always up to date.

She texts me with quotes from the writings of the late ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose or forest expert Suzanne Simard. She sends me images of medieval texts drawn as inverted trees. Her knowledge of animal and plant science exceeds that of most scholars. Her intellectual character flows through each exhibition like a blood supply.

Janet Laurence reminds me of the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, who studied first with Plato and then with Aristotle, who gave him the task of finding connections between animals and plants. What resulted was the first systemisation of the botanical world, the Enquiry into Plants.

Read more: Explainer: what are the environmental humanities?

What Theophrastus endeavoured to find were plants’ character, their differences and their substance. His approach was categorical and observational. This kind of attitude resonates with Janet Laurence’s work. Her plant, fish and animal artworks are uncompromising, enduring, and have a constant scholarly form. She will not rest until her installations are perfectly complete. Her commitment is ferocious.

The second characteristic I associate with Janet Laurence is her political activism. She is an environmentalist, an activist. She deeply cares about the natural world, such as “nature” now is, and her work is a political tool to activate and engage her viewers. It is a cry, a howl, a mournful dirge. Many of us now feel we must use whatever weapons we have to raise the alarm for extinction and ecosystem depletions. Laurence’s new exhibition sounds that warning bell.

Janet Laurence, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (still), 2015–16, various wet specimens, corals, pigment, acrylic bones, laboratory glass, collection of the artist. Image courtesy and © the artist

The final distinguishing character of Laurence’s work is its aesthetic allure. Laurence is mistress of the Wunderkammer, a “cabinet of curiosity” or collection of notable objects. This approach emerged in the 17th century and developed as the collecting of rare objects to suggest imperial power and sovereign superiority.

It is a methodology that Laurence uses in this survey exhibition, especially her new iteration of Deep Breathing, which was previously exhibited at the climate talks in Paris in 2015, at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle.

Janet Laurence, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (detail), 2015–16, installation view, Muséum National D’histoire Naturelle, Paris, 2015, various wet specimens, corals, pigment, acrylic boxes, laboratory glass, collection of the artist. Image courtesy and © the artist

Read more: Here’s looking at: Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef by Janet Laurence

This new version of the undersea hospital is richly bucolic and abundant. Projections on the blue end walls and glittering reflections of the massive Perspex boxes add to a sensation of being down in the watery deep. There are coral, sea creatures, turtles, cephalopods, shellfish.

However, the exquisite wonder is deceptive. This is only a reminder of the past. In fact, Deep Breathing is a hospital – triage, diagnosis and pathology procedures are undertaken here. The red thread that is woven through the white corals and endless vials and medical bottles is a blood transfusion. A desperate attempt to keep species alive.

Janet Laurence, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, 2015–16 / 2019. Image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jacquie Manning

The museum has also commissioned a major new work called Theatre of Trees. This is an epic installation of five metre high concentric-circled fabric drops, mimicking the rings of a trunk.

Janet Laurence, Forest (Theatre of Trees), 2018–19, installation view, Janet Laurence: After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2019. Image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jacquie Manning

On three sides of the illusory and elusive circular structure are three rings, circus-like, which comprise a botanical library (the tree of knowledge), a wonder lab with 19th century specimens from the Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences botanical collection, and an elixir bar for botanical infusion tasting.

The tree rings of silk, gauze and reflective fabric are alive with projected films in black and white. They are animated by screen-printed hand-painted photographic images. The experience of walking through these rings of fabric is ethereal. Time is slowed.

This is vegetal time, longer and deeper than human time. Tree root communication, seasonal changes, leaf nodes emitting chemicals – these are processes that follow a creeping hand of time.

These exquisite experiences, made rich and sensual by Laurence, beg the question: what are the categories of art that intersects with nature studies – known as “nature aesthetics”? How might Theophrastus categorise and document the epoch of art and nature where artists raise awareness for the damaged Great Barrier Reef, the endangered black cockatoo (whose bird song echoes through the museum’s galleries), the mysterious dragon blood tree or the extinct Thylacine.

Perhaps this work marks a new resolution around the idea of “nature aesthetics”, where nature now has new cultural meaning, beyond ideas of pristine landscapes or untouched wilderness. So, what are the criteria that make contemporary “nature aesthetics” work? Some of the contributing elements must be politics, even violence. Other elements must be the ability to change and to evolve.

Still more must retain sensation and beauty, those conventional but wily notions of aesthetic value. Janet Laurence’s nature aesthetic artwork is a mark in history, an historic point in time … to be watched, with care.

Janet Laurence: After Nature is at the Museum of Contemporary Art until 10 June 2019.

– ref. Janet Laurence: After Nature sounds an exquisite warning bell for extinction – http://theconversation.com/janet-laurence-after-nature-sounds-an-exquisite-warning-bell-for-extinction-112942

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

University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini speaks with Michelle Grattan about the week in politics. They discuss the departures of two more cabinet ministers – Steve Ciobo and Chris Pyne; the latest national accounts figures; Bill Shorten’s focus on slow wage growth; and Scott Morrison’s visit to the detention facility on Christmas Island.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on more cabinet departures, national accounts figures and Morrison’s Christmas island visit – http://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-more-cabinet-departures-national-accounts-figures-and-morrisons-christmas-island-visit-113194

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin Glencross, Research Fellow, Southern Cross University

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

When I first came across the kauri pine (Agathis robusta), I certainly wasn’t impressed by their growth. Mixed among other species in a young rainforest plantation, they seemed destined to be left behind by the faster-growing trees (I did think they looked nice, though).

But today I know I judged the kauri unfairly. They can survive for millennia, so they don’t bother doing all their growing in their first couple of decades. But come back 20 years later, and that unassuming tree will be well on its way to being one of the giants of the forest.

Read more: Lord of the forest: New Zealand’s most sacred tree is under threat from disease, but response is slow

The Conversation

Impressive by any measure

By any yardstick, kauri pines are truly unique and impressive. If time is our measure, then the kauri family, Agathis, has endured over epochs, with fossils found in Australia from the early to mid-Jurassic period. Having withstood the rise and fall of the dinosaurs and the evolution and diversification of our flora, 17 species of living fossil trees in the Agathis family remain.

Agathis is an iconic genus of large, ecologically important, and economically valuable conifers that now range over lowland to upper montane rainforests from New Zealand to Sumatra. So, if we judge a plant’s success in terms of its geographical spread or its ability to adapt to a range of conditions, the Kauri family is once again outstanding.

If we measure a plant by appearances, then the tall, robust and handsome Queensland kauri pine remains an impressive – albeit little-known – plant. Reaching up to 50 metres, it emerges above rainforest margins in tropical and subtropical eastern Australia. Its straight, round trunk can grow to 3m in diameter and a combination of smooth mottled bark, coppery new growth and dark green canopy make this tree a world-class ornamental. In parks and gardens across Australia, Kauri pine cuts a fine figure, growing to enormous sizes, even in southern regions.

Read more: Mountain ash has a regal presence: the tallest flowering plant in the world

Our Australian kauri pine, once common in the dry rainforests of Queensland, has become a victim of its own success. A heavy reliance on the highly regarded wood during the earliest stages of the colonial timber industry has left only a few old trees standing, mostly in remote areas or forest reserves. In my role as a research scientist, I have tracked down the kauri’s cousins in the Pacific regions, where the giant pines can now only be found on tops of mountains on remote islands. In New Zealand, the giant kauri that once covered large areas are in danger from the soil-based fungus Phytophora.

Germaine Greer, in her 2014 book White Beech, describes visiting a massive kauri tree on the North Island over 50m tall and 13.5m in diameter that is in danger of succumbing to the fungus after a life measured in millennia.

A useful tree

According to the Gymnosperm Database, Queensland kauri was first reported by Europeans in 1842 by Andrew Petrie, who found it growing in the Mary River country, and reported that the native peoples made their nets from its inner bark. A fine, even texture set this timber apart from the more common Hoop pine.

In the South Pacific, the cousins of the Australian kauri have a strong cultural significance and features in the Maori creation myth. The wood from the Southern Kauri (Agathis australis) was used for water craft, and the gum used in traditional tattoos (moko).

Enthusiastic attempts by the Queensland Forest Service to grow the kauri in plantations were devastated by large stick insects. As a result, kauris are now only grown at a very small scale in mixed species rainforest timber plantations, which is where I stumbled upon them.

Read more: Comic explainer: forest giants house thousands of animals (so why do we keep cutting them down?)

In about 2002, during my PhD study of young (8-15 years old) rainforest plantations, I first measured kauri as a small tree amongst the well-regarded cabinet timber species of mahoganies and white beech. At first glance, the appeal for me of this Jurassic fossil was merely aesthetic. They were not very impressive in terms of early growth in the plantations; so I focused my attention on the rapid, early growing species.

However, having ignored the kauri for about 10 years, I was astonished (upon return to my old study sites) at how rapidly the kauris had progressed. Not only is this species one of the best performers in terms of diameter growth, but it also has excellent form. It produces straight stems free of large branches that indicates excellent quality logs, for those growers who value wood quality.

My regard for the kauri is now much more than aesthetic; or even as quirky relics from deep time. These trees are showing themselves to be extremely resilient and competitive, under challenging climatic conditions, across a very wide range of sites. They have the capacity to withstand severe storms as well as longer term stresses, such as drought.

I now know that, given the kauri pine can live for many centuries, it is not advisable to measure their value according to the first decade or so of growth, but rather their productivity and resilience across their whole lifespan.

Read more: Where the old things are: Australia’s most ancient trees

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. Kauri pines are late-blooming rainforest giants – http://theconversation.com/kauri-pines-are-late-blooming-rainforest-giants-112866

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brenda Midson, Editor, New Zealand Law Journal; Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Waikato

This week, the New Zealand Parliament passed the Crimes Amendment Bill, abolishing the “year and a day” rule. This rule meant that no one could be liable for killing another person unless that person died within a year and a day of the act that caused their death.

This rule was one of the reasons why homicide charges were not laid against anyone for the deaths of 115 people in a building that collapsed in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, even though a Royal Commission of Inquiry found the building did not meet code requirements. No one could be prosecuted for homicide because the earthquake occurred many years after the building was constructed – outside of “a year and a day”.

Doing away with the rule raises some interesting questions, both in relation to any proposed euthanasia laws and homicide more generally.

Read more: How antiquated legal language undermines complainants in cases of sexual assault

Operating and substantial cause of death

For someone to be guilty of homicide – whether it is murder or manslaughter – they must have some intention or fault and their act must be an “operating cause and a substantial cause” of death. This phrase comes from English case law and it essentially means that the original wound must be operating on the victim at the time of their death and be a substantial, if not the only, cause of death. This is not always easy to establish, especially when other events intervene.

Last year in England, Berlinah Wallace was charged with murdering her ex-partner, Mark van Dongen, after she threw sulphuric acid on him. What is unusual about this case is that Van Dongen did not die from the acid. His face and body were severely scarred, he was paralysed from the neck down, lost most of his vision and his lower left leg had to be amputated.

He spent more than a year in hospital and then went to Belgium where he successfully applied for euthanasia. Wallace was acquitted of murder, but she was found guilty of throwing a corrosive substance with intent, and was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 12 years.

In 1996, England and Wales abolished the year and a day rule so the fact that Van Dongen died more than a year after the acid attack did not prevent Wallace being charged. But a central issue in the case was whether her actions were the legal cause of death. The immediate cause of death was the actions of the doctors at the euthanasia clinic, but the jury had to decide whether the doctors’ actions made Wallace’s act of throwing acid legally inoperative as a cause of death.

The fact that she was acquitted of murder suggests the jury was not satisfied her actions were a substantial and operating cause of death, or that it was not reasonably foreseeable that Van Dongen might choose euthanasia as a result of his injuries.

Responsibility for our actions

While the year and a day rule is arbitrary, its repeal does raise some questions about the point at which we stop being responsible for the consequences of our actions. Justice minister Andrew Little said:

advances in medical science and life support machines that may keep victims alive for longer than a year and a day mean there is no longer any justification for this rule.

But from another perspective, this may be precisely why the rule is needed. While people do need to be accountable for harming others, especially if they intend to kill someone, other cases might require some reasonable limits.

Imagine a defendant whose negligent driving caused another person serious injuries, but because of “advances in medical science” the injured person lived for another ten years before finally succumbing to their injuries. Even if death was reasonably foreseeable at the time of the injury, a decade is a long time for a person to be uncertain of potential criminal liability, especially for homicide.

Some difficult questions

Euthanasia also raises some issues. In New Zealand, the Select Committee is due to report back on the End of Life Bill at the end of March. If we go ahead with some form of “assisted dying”, this could also extend the scope of liability beyond current limits.

Read more: The fear that dare not speak its name: how language plays a role in the assisted dying debate

The law generally says that we take our victims as we find them – if they have a particular vulnerability (a weak heart, for example,) that doesn’t affect our liability for harming them. This may be fair enough when it comes to murder, but to what extent should a defendant’s liability for manslaughter depend upon a victim’s voluntary decision to end their own life, even if they do have a susceptibility toward, say, self-harm?

This is a difficult question and I don’t suggest reinstating the year and a day rule is an answer. But its repeal means we may have to rethink the traditional criminal law approach to causation in homicide cases.

– ref. New Zealand’s repeal of “year and a day” rule expands liability for homicide – http://theconversation.com/new-zealands-repeal-of-year-and-a-day-rule-expands-liability-for-homicide-113042

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pani Farvid, Senior Lecturer, Psychology, University of Auckland

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, addressing gender inequality in New Zealand remains a challenge. As the first country to grant women the vote, we have a long way to go to until there’s genuine equality across all genders.

Inequality spans gender-based violence (including sexual violence, intimate partner violence and family violence), women’s participation in public life, women’s representation in leadership roles, the continued gender pay gap, and the deteriorating position of minority and immigrant women.

Research has long indicated that gender inequality exists primarily because of the idea that there are two separate and different genders, with men and women thought to have different skills.

But gender is not biological or “naturally” tied to bodies. It is a product of culture and has varied considerably over time. I argue that we need to teach children about gender as early as possible to prevent sexism before it becomes ingrained.

Read more: Gender equity. The way things are going, we won’t reach true parity until the 22nd century

Sex and gender

Since the enlightenment period, we’ve assumed that women and men are different but “complementary”. This model is problematic because traditional masculine traits (assertiveness, rationality, aggressiveness) are more highly valued and associated with prominent social roles. Traditional feminine traits (nurture, sensitivity, intuitiveness) are associated with submissiveness and less socially valued roles.

It is now accepted that sex and gender are different things. The American Psychological Association has recently stated:

Sex is assigned at birth, refers to one’s biological status as either male or female, and is associated primarily with physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women. These influence the ways that people act, interact, and feel about themselves. While aspects of biological sex are similar across different cultures, aspects of gender may differ.

Read more: Parents can promote gender equality and help prevent violence against women. Here’s how

More similar than different

Multiple reviews and meta-analyses of psychological literature have consistently found men and women are more similar than they are different when it comes to a host of psychological traits and mental functioning. These include cognitive performance, mathematical abilities, personality traits, social behaviours, emotions, aggression and leadership.

There are some biological realities such as pregnancy, child birth and lactation. But social and biological research indicates that outside of these, men and women are equally equipped for parenting and caregiving.

The focus needs to shift from being mostly on women, to changing the nature of gender relations, debunking gender polarity and promoting softer masculinity. Boys and men would also benefit from this, as it offers them more options for how they can be.

To do this, prevention strategies are needed to address the covert and overt sexisms that lead to gender inequality.

Gender equality education in schools

Gender equality education should begin when children enter the education system and continue throughout. This needs to address the history and nature of gender inequality and sexism. It also needs to provide students with the tools to dismantle rigid gender binaries (including sexism) and offer them more options for gender identification and expression.

Read more: Why education about gender and sexuality does belong in the classroom

Based on my own research, the research of others and the gender equality policies of the Swedish government, I make the following recommendations for New Zealand policy makers and educators:

• gender equality education needs to start when children enter the education system and continue throughout
• tenets of a gender equality approach (debunking rigid gender norms and gender polarity) need to be reflected in the school curriculum
• training of teachers needs to incorporate gender theory and gender equality training
• students need to be seen as more than the sum of their gender, but as complex people
• each student needs to be approached as a sophisticated individual who is capable of embodying and desiring several changing gendered identities
• the school curriculum needs to include lessons on the social production of gender, gender roles and gender categories
• schools need to incorporate curricula on global citizenship, which includes an awareness and acceptance of diversity and the promotion of equality for all humans
• schools need to include lessons on ethical sexual and relational practices towards all, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation (including in online communication)
• the education system needs to identify and interrupt hetero-normative, hetero-sexist, and patriarchal practices that are part of society and, at times, part of school culture
• schools need to introduce the use of gender-neutral language that challenges the boy/girl binary
• school should provide gender-inclusive bathrooms for transgender and non-gender conforming students.

To address the ongoing manifestations of gender inequality in New Zealand, we need innovative thinking focused on prevention. Such an intervention would be research-based, aimed at curbing sexism and gender inequality before it occurs.

We know all violence is preventable. But preventing gender-based violence requires changing enduring norms and beliefs about the nature of gender and men’s and women’s roles within relationships and society. Gender equality education and teaching of ethical citizenship is a fresh direction that can redress entrenched patterns of sexism and gender inequality.

– ref. Beyond the binary: how teaching children about gender could help reduce sexism – http://theconversation.com/beyond-the-binary-how-teaching-children-about-gender-could-help-reduce-sexism-113140

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sue Williamson, Senior Lecturer, Human Resource Management, UNSW Canberra, UNSW

We are in the midst of an outpouring of feminist activism kicked off by the pink pussy hat movement in the United States and propelled by #MeToo, which has spread to Australia where a range of luminaries have been named as harassers.

And yet we are also in the midst of a backlash, a concern that gender equality has moved too fast, aided by “gender fatigue”.

Twenty-seven years ago, Susan Faludi created a furore by documenting what she said was a backlash against women. She said it wasn’t new, as evidenced by penalties imposed on childless and unwed women in ancient Rome, and witch burnings of medieval Europe. Each was a response to perceptions that women were gaining ground.

This time it is taking the form of a resurgence of the men’s rights movement, and also in the cries of #notallmen. It is evident in the trolling occurring on feminist websites, negative comments in the media and the rape, violence and death threats inflicted on feminist activists.

That’s in social media and society. What about the workplace?

Backlash in the form of fatigue

It can be as simple as organisational silence and inaction. Even in organisations where managers and workers are committed to the idea of equality, it can take the form of resistance to specific initiatives.

It is aligned to gender fatigue, or seeing further advances in gender equality as a “non-issue”.

My colleagues (Associate Professor Linda Colley, Dr Meraiah Foley and Professor Rae Cooper) and I have examined managers’ and employees’ understanding of gender equality and have often been told “gender is not an issue here”.

It is as if they are tired of hearing about it and want it to be “done”.

While we have found many organisations which are well advanced in their gender equity journey, we have yet to find one in which it is actually done.

What’s worth aiming for

Sometimes women are told that the remaining gender inequality is their own fault. #Metoo has been blamed for men being afraid to mentor women. Women are told to “lean in” – to focus on empowering individuals rather than women in general.

British researchers Hazel Conley and Margaret Page say real change will only be achieved when there is

an understanding of gendered power and its intersections with other forms of inequality, individual commitment to act on this knowledge and the collective organisation to approach gender equality.

That understanding might lead to non-hierarchical organisational structures with different concepts of power. It might subvert the concept of work so that it is no longer regarded as the guiding force of lives. It might mean working to live, not living to work. It might mean that there isn’t paid work and other work, just “work”.

It might make future backlash unnecessary, and gender fatigue redundant.

This article is an edited version a recent address given by Sue Williamson as president of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand.

– ref. Backlash and gender fatigue. Why progress on gender equality has slowed – http://theconversation.com/backlash-and-gender-fatigue-why-progress-on-gender-equality-has-slowed-112706

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Harris Rimmer, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Griffith Law School, Griffith University

This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.

The 2019 federal election, like most before it, is unlikely to be won or lost on foreign policy. Yet diplomacy is increasingly crucial to ensure the everyday well-being of Australians.

Foreign policy is no longer an elite, secret activity that affects only the powerful or political. For an open economy like Australia’s, with mobile citizens in a shifting but interconnected region, it is the stuff of everyday life.

As 2019 began, I outlined the volatile events that lay on the immediate horizon for Australian foreign policy. I dealt with big meetings like APEC in Thailand and the G20 in Japan, and elections for Australia’s partners in some of our most important relationships, like India and Indonesia. I noted the difficulties of implementing big policy ideas like the “Pacific pivot” and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

And, of course, there is the delicate business of crafting independent foreign policy positions while acknowledging the giant panda/bald eagle in the room.

Read more: Australia should brace for a volatile year in foreign policy in 2019

When the then foreign minister, Julie Bishop, commissioned the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, she noted it was designed to help Australian diplomacy be more proactive. She said:

… it’s about looking at the kind of framework that needs to be in place so that we’re not reacting to events, we’re strategically positioned to manage, maybe even shape, events.

Invest in shaping our region’s future

One key election issue should rest on who is most willing to invest in Australian diplomacy. We must increase our capacity to be nimble if we wish to shape events instead of being hostage to American and Chinese fortunes.

It is difficult with limited resources, but we must create as many diplomatic options as possible to reframe problems and create non-military solutions over the next decade. That means heavy engagement in international forums.

Moreover, Australia must become a state that helps the international community solve problems associated with climate change in our region and at home through climate diplomacy. There is simply no more time to waste.

Sophisticated soft power

Australia should invest in a sophisticated soft power strategy, pending the wisdom gained by the DFAT Soft Power Review. Uncertainty in international relations creates opportunities for smart pivotal powers. Now is the time to invest in innovation in public diplomacy and focus on a strategy that harnesses the strengths of our First Australians, our migrants, the business community, universities, charities, creative industries, cities and regions.

Australia needs a sophisticated soft power strategy that connects our well-travelled and outward-facing multicultural citizenry to our nation-branding. We should lead with our values. This approach is certainly not doing New Zealand any harm. Photos and videos of NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Arden addressing the United Nations with her baby created a diplomatic moment in 2018.

We also need to be principled and decent in our international interventions. We need our face to the world to be more diverse and reflect our citizenry.

DFAT should continue to focus on delivering the Gender Strategy and the Women in Leadership Strategy as matters of key importance, as well as consolidating the success of the Ambassador for Women and Girls. Whatever the election result, the foreign minister, Marise Payne, and shadow minister, Penny Wong, are both excellent emblems of Australian commitment to equality on the world stage.

Some ideas to enhance our soft power include:

• DFAT to be more creative in digital diplomacy
• DFAT developing a youth strategy and creating a new thematic ambassador to reflect the youth of our region
• the foreign minister convening a meeting of Australian mayors to map diplomatic activity and coordinate a strategy. More broadly, DFAT should consider the rise of cities as diplomatic actors in our region
• DFAT to support and engage more with international students and diaspora in Australia
• Australian universities to increase their investment in international relations and diplomatic skills, which are useful for many global professionals.

Free and fair trade

The Australian Bureau of Statistics recently released data showing Australia recorded a A$22.2 billion trade surplus in 2018, the highest ever for a calendar year.

Metals, ores and minerals (A$94.9 billion) and coal, coke and briquettes (A$66.7 billion) were our biggest exports, followed by natural gas and rural goods. Service exports are growing, but a transition away from reliance on extractive industries towards services and the digital economy may be a painful one.

Moreover, modern trade deals go deep into standards and consumer services. Most Australians still do not realise the implications for domestic policy raised by the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and other free trade agreements.

The next government should commission a Trade White Paper and think seriously about better ways to involve the community in trade negotiations.

Tell the story

We must increase efforts to explain Australian foreign policy in accessible and transparent ways to all kinds of domestic audiences. Foreign policy must be reframed as a non-elite issue. Bill Shorten noted this in a headland speech designed to connect DFAT more with everyday conversation. He said:

John Curtin and Ben Chifley knew this, they understood the connection between the lives of working Australians and the corridors of international diplomacy.

Read more: Australia should brace for a volatile year in foreign policy in 2019

At the same time, we have to rewrite the current international narrative that Australian democracy has lost its way because the constant changes of PM give the impression of political instability.

I recently saw a tote bag that said “Ban the Single Use Prime Minister”. I have written previously about the idea of reversing some of the churn damage caused by our revolving prime ministers to our foreign policy reputation by using Bishop, Payne, Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull as envoys on particular issues.

Signature ideas – Australian conflict resolution

We need bigger ideas that the Australian public and people around the world can connect with. The time has come to support John Langmore’s idea of a specialised mediation unit in DFAT.

Australia must invest more in preventive diplomacy as volatility increases – perhaps in partnership with New Zealand. Many scholars and practitioners have argued that Australia should build our negotiation and mediation capacity through DFAT. We have the talent – both here and inside the United Nations.

Vote global

DFAT clearly needs more resources to undertake the role Australians need it to accomplish in the next decade. Increased DFAT investment should be coupled to the Defence White Paper investment targets. To shape the future, we need to invest now.

– ref. Next government must find Australia’s place in a turbulent and rapidly changing world – http://theconversation.com/next-government-must-find-australias-place-in-a-turbulent-and-rapidly-changing-world-110794

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Peterson, Associate Professor, Flinders University

Review: A Man of Good Hope, Adelaide Festival

In a world where so many are escaping brutality, war, persecution, and loss of land, is it possible to tell the story of just one displaced person, and in so doing, tell the story of many? With A Man of Good Hope, a theatrical adaptation of a biography of the same name by Jonny Steinberg, the Cape Town-based Isango Ensemble suggests the answer is yes.

An energetic cast of over 20 actor-singer-dancer-musicians are shaped by director Mark Dornford-May’s dynamic and lively staging. They take the audience on a journey alongside the play’s central character, Asad Abdullahi, as he is driven from his home in Somalia and across thousands of kilometres through Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa.

Unfolding over a 22-year period, multiple actors play Asad as a boy, a young man, and as an adult. We first see Asad as a grown man, as Steinberg evidently first encountered him. He is weighed down by life, wearing sadness like a mask.

The performance takes the audience through 22 years of Asad Abdullahi’s life. Keith Pattison

And in the next scene, when we see him as a ten-year old standing in the doorway of his childhood home in Mogadishu, Somalia with his mother, we understand why.

Virtually overnight, his entire clan, one that knows its lineage across 25 generations, is branded the enemy. Soldiers bang on the front door. His mother is unceremoniously shot.

In a moment, Asad becomes a homeless child from a clan slated for extermination. This is a world where men with guns are everywhere, where anyone can be shot or killed at any time by anyone, where a life can be taken on a whim.

After Asad’s mother is murdered, he attaches himself to another survivor, a woman living on the streets. By age 10 he is with her in Kenya at a refugee camp run by the United Nations. There everyone dreams of life in America, a place where “everyone is rich”, “everyone is free” and, in one of the few lines that elicits laughter from the audience, “there are no guns”.

Abandoned a second time by the mother figure he has adopted, he becomes a survivor, a clever street kid, an operator. As he puts it, “I belong to everyone; I belong to no one”.

By the time he’s a young man, he is living in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he falls in love with a Somali woman who has been subjected to female genital mutilation. After paying off people smugglers, the two briefly end up together in South Africa.

Asad trades goods in a remote black township, experiencing more alienation and persecution, causing his wife to flee the country with their child. But he stays, believing, “I have a better chance to change my fate by staying and fighting”.

The play’s rapid-fire action takes place on a steeply raked stage comprised of what look like wooden planks, surrounded by corrugated iron walls, suggesting the world of South African shantytowns.

Props are used sparingly, serve multiple functions, and are sometimes ingeniously transformed, as when, for instance, a door becomes the roof of a crowded bus, held aloft by the passengers underneath, while the boy Asad rides on top in the open air.

A door is used as the roof of bus in A Man of Good Hope. Keith Pattison

This is a show with much singing and dancing, while many of the performers take turns playing the standing, marimba-style instruments on both sides of the stage. As the predominant orchestral sound, the percussive marimba becomes problematic as it always retains a kind of chirpy, upbeat quality and is not able to deliver much nuance or tonal shading.

Song too was integral to the storytelling, and some of the evening’s most powerful moments were when group choral singing created a huge sound, full of luscious, rich harmonies. Less successful were some of the sudden shifts from speech to song, with many short passages consisting of a single phrase or two suddenly sung in the rhythm of ordinary speech or in a kind of operatic style that came across as awkward or forced.

A Man of Good Hope is a show filled with song and dance. Keith Pattison

In terms of storytelling, each new tragedy begat another one equally or more horrible, with most of the play’s scenes ending with some kind of dramatic confrontation. While this is no doubt reflective of the trajectory of Asad’s life and parallel to the structure of the book, on stage it can at times feel plodding, even predictable.

Despite these shortcomings, this is a memorable, challenging, high-octane piece of theatre. A Man of Good Hope is ultimately no tale of triumph over adversity. As the play ends, Asad says goodbye to his writer friend Jonny for the last time, making it clear, despite the well-meaning writer’s protestations, that he has no interest in ever reading his own story.

As Steinberg himself observes in the program notes, “the story is not for him; it is for others”. Ultimately, it can only be for us, those fortunate enough to have had lives not marked by trauma.

A Man of Good Hope is playing as part of the Adelaide Festival until March 11.

– ref. A Man of Good Hope is no tale of triumph over adversity, but it is the story of many – http://theconversation.com/a-man-of-good-hope-is-no-tale-of-triumph-over-adversity-but-it-is-the-story-of-many-113105

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthea Vogl, Lecturer, University of Technology Sydney

This week the Greens announced their refugee policy. It includes allowing private citizens to sponsor refugees as part of its plan to increase Australia’s humanitarian intake by 10,000. In December, Labor also announced plans to increase the existing community sponsored refugee program by up to 5,000 places per year.

Australia’s little-known community support program (CSP) allows individuals, businesses or community organisations to fund and sponsor the travel and resettlement of refugees into Australia from overseas.

But the number of visas allowed under the CSP is part of the overall quota in Australia’s humanitarian program. This means that, for each refugee sponsored privately, one less place is available in the government-funded resettlement program.

The CSP also requires the sponsored refugee to be capable of getting a job quickly and have functional English. Altogether, this suggests the CSP seeks to exploit the goodwill of the community while shifting the cost of resettlement away from the government.

Community sponsorship of refugees in Australia

The history of community involvement in refugee sponsorship dates back to the community refugee resettlement scheme. The program ran from 1979 to 1997 and resettled more than 30,000 refugees, primarily from Vietnam.

Australia’s current program began with the community proposal pilot in 2013. This provided 500 places, again from within Australia’s refugee and humanitarian program (which has a capped quota for each financial year). This meant the overall humanitarian intake didn’t increase under the pilot, but the government did save money. Community sponsors covered the cost of existing resettlement places for the first year as well as paying significant visa fees.

Read more: Private resettlement models offer a way for Australia to lift its refugee intake

The government conducted a public consultation and review of the program in 2015. While it never publicised the findings of that consultation, documents obtained under Freedom of Information show 13 out of 17 respondents recommended the program should operate in addition to the existing refugee and humanitarian program. The responses also showed there was a perception the program was merely a “cost cutting scheme”.

The community support program was introduced in 2017 after the summit on refugees held in New York at the end of 2016. At the summit, then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that

in addition to our existing programs, Australia will… create new pathways for refugees to resettle in Australia through the establishment of 1,000 places under a Community Support Program, where communities and businesses can sponsor applications and support new arrivals, leading to better settlement outcomes.

But rather than being “in addition”, the CSP again takes places from Australia’s existing refugee and humanitarian program, currently capped at 18,750 per year.

The CSP also introduced a number of new requirements. These include that refugees must have “adequate English”, be aged between 18-50 and “have a job offer or skills to enable you to get a job quickly”. Such requirements prioritise the country’s economic priorities over humanitarian need.

The 2017-18 budget promoted the CSP as a way for the government to raise A$26.9 million. This revenue gain comes from the extraordinarily high fees associated with the program. Altogether, the fees amount to more than A$100,000 to sponsor a refugee family of five.

What is the community saying?

Governments all over the world are looking at ways to increase community involvement in resettling refugees. Canada has been running a program that has facilitated the private sponsorship of more than 300,000 refugees since 1978.

Our unpublished research shows that Australian community members are eager to sponsor and support refugees to settle in Australia. But the current program is expensive, restrictive and does not expand Australia’s resettlement numbers. These problems have dissuaded community groups from getting involved.

Read more: FactCheck: is this the greatest period of humanitarian need since WWII?

A coalition of refugee and community organisations has formed the Community Refugee Sponsorship Initiative (CRSI). This calls on the government to develop a new sponsorship model “to enable people to come together to add to, not reduce, Australia’s resettlement places”.

They have collected the names of more than 13,000 community members who would sponsor refugees should the current model be reformed.

The CSP can expand our refugee program

Both the Greens’ and Labor’s policies pledge that the number of people coming to Australia under refugee sponsorship will be in addition to those under the humanitarian program. They also propose to abolish the problematic requirements that undermine the humanitarian principle of refugee resettlement.

To date, the CSP has been largely used by people living in Australia as a form of family reunion. This is because other safe pathways for families to be reunited have been closed off or limited by the government.

More than 90% of the 1,000 refugees resettled through the current CSP have been sponsored by family members, rather than the wider community. The CSP is also limited to refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Bhutan, Syria and Iraq, with a significant majority coming from Syria and Iraq.

Private sponsorship will continue to function as an expensive form of family reunion until better options are made available.

Community sponsorship of refugees has the potential to transform refugee resettlement. It can significantly expand the scale of Australia’s humanitarian migration program, allowing the public to supplement the government-funded humanitarian migration program. This means more refugees finding safety every year, when other resettlement programs (such as that in the US) are shrinking.

When done properly, community sponsorship engages the broader community in the resettlement of refugee arrivals. It can challenge and rewrite government-led narratives about refugees and asylum seekers.

– ref. Community members should be able to sponsor refugees for the right reasons, not to save the government money – http://theconversation.com/community-members-should-be-able-to-sponsor-refugees-for-the-right-reasons-not-to-save-the-government-money-112230

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Duygu Yengin, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Adelaide

International Women’s Day is a good time ask two critical questions about economics: do we have enough women in it, and does it matter?

Women are less likley to take it up than they used to be.

Twenty five years ago around half of the students studying Year 12 economics were female. Today it is only around one third. In universities, only about 20% to 30% of undergraduate economics are female.

In public sector, one third of the economists in senior management roles are women. In academia it is far worse: fewer than 10% of economics professors are women, compared of 20% of professors in science, technology and maths.

Here’s why it matters:

• Around half of the customer base for most businesses are women, and around half of our citizens and voters are women. Government and business decisions can affect women and men differently. If economists are mainly of one gender they are likely to miss things.

• More generally, research finds that diversity among decision makers leads to better decisions.

• Even though the models and methods economists use are gender-neutral (at times inappropriately so), the types of questions economists choose to analyse are not. Greater diversity will lead to a greater diversity in the topics being examined.

There’s little doubt that male and female economists do things differently.

New research finds that female central bankers work with greater independence and deliver lower inflation than male central bankers.

A study of US economists finds that male and female economists differ significantly in their approach to the fields of health, labour markets, taxation, environment, government spending on welfare or military.

Why so few women study economics

It’s partly a function of it being a male-dominated discipline. Study after study finds that when both man and women receive low grades in a discipline dominated by men, it is the women who are the most likely to drop out.

Another study finds that when men and women of equal mathematical ability are asked to rate their ability, women rate it less highly than men.

Their teachers rate them worse too. Letters of recommendation for women tend to be shorter and focus more on personality traits and less on skills or intellect than those for men.

The effects are weaker when women have female teachers. Role models matter.

And women are more likely to study economics when they are told about its real life impact. University outreach can help.

Outreach material. University of Adelaide

Why academia leaks

The gender gap gets worse the higher women attempt to progress.

Some economists think this is not a problem: if there aren’t many women at senior levels in the field, it must be because they’re not very interested or not very productive.

It is a simplistic view that ignores the drivers of apparent productivity. Women are more likely than men to be given teaching and un-promotable administrative duties at the cost of research time.

They find it harder than men to find co-authors to write academic papers.

When they do, it matters less. One study finds that co-authorship for a man has the same impact on tenure as writing a paper a solo, but not for a woman.

And female solo-authored economics papers are held to higher standards than those written by men, delaying publication by as much as six months, and resulting in fewer successful publications.

Student evaluations also suffer from unconscious bias. Students rate online teachers more highly when they they use male names than female names, regardless of the actual gender.

Read more: Unconscious bias is keeping women out of senior roles, but we can get around it

By themselves none of these barriers may amount to much, but combined, they work to slow down the progress of women and disguise true merit.

Why it won’t fix itself

The gender gap in economists will not disappear naturally. Indeed, the progress in closing it has stalled.

True progress won’t be achieved until we agree that there are problems with the system, rather than women.

Women think so. A 2014 study found that more than 50% of female economists believe the profession is set up to favour men. Men do not: more than 75% believed it either favoured neither gender or favoured women.

Research presented by Shelly Lundberg of the University of California, Santa Barbara to a gender economics workshop organised by Australia’s Women in Economics Network in February found that progress in the United States stalled in the mid-2000s. It is unlikely to restart until both genders recognise that the barriers facing women are real.

Read more: Economics needs to get real if we want more young Australians to study it

– ref. Why women in economics have little to celebrate – http://theconversation.com/why-women-in-economics-have-little-to-celebrate-112859

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling

We are but weeks away from an election in New South Wales – polling day is on March 23 – and it will be eagerly watched. Not just for the outcome but for the implications for the looming federal election.

That’s according to Dr Andy Marks, a political scientist from Western Sydney University, who tells us on the podcast today that this state election outcome may give us some clues on how some global political themes are playing out here in Australia.

“It’s not just about state politics. Increasingly the Australian electoral cycles, federally and at the state level, are subject to changes in political dynamics internationally. We’re seeing the erosion of centrist politics around the world […] and that even affects humble New South Wales.”

He predicts a weakened Nationals Party will be facing a strong challenge from the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party and that One Nation’s Mark Latham is almost a sure bet to win a spot in the NSW upper house.

“I do think you’ll see a minority Coalition government returned but the really interesting play is what happens in the upper house. Currently, the Coalition have to deal with two to three independents or minor parties to get stuff over the line,” said Dr Marks.

“I think what we’ll see in the coming parliament is that that the ranks of cross-benchers will expand quite dramatically, up to seven to nine cross-benchers. So that makes negotiations pretty fraught.

“This is really going to be new territory,” he said. “We’ve got One Nation returning to the fold. Mark Latham, their number one ticket holder in the upper house, will get in. But potentially they’ll get two seats in the upper house. You’ll have an emboldened Shooters and Fishers Party.

“So you really have a really broad field and it’s going to mean negotiating the passage of bills will be pretty difficult.”

We also talked about:

• why East Hills (which takes in suburbs like Panania, Condell Park, the Bankstown aerodrome, Padstow, Revesby and others) is the most marginal seat in NSW

• how a plan to demolish and rebuild two stadiums turned into a political headache for NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian

• why Michael Daley, who took over from Luke Foley as NSW Labor leader late last year, is only now just making his mark

• how local issues in rural seats may end up deciding the fate of the state

• what it all means as we head into the May federal election.

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Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks

ABC news report on 2GB interview

2GB interview clip.

Image:

Chris Pavlich/Dean Lewins(AAP)

– ref. Mark Latham in the upper house? A Coalition minority government? The NSW election is nearly upon us and it’s going to be a wild ride – http://theconversation.com/mark-latham-in-the-upper-house-a-coalition-minority-government-the-nsw-election-is-nearly-upon-us-and-its-going-to-be-a-wild-ride-113119

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

This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.

For a generation, politics has been wearying for those of good heart and outright damaging to those targeted in the culture wars unleashed in the 1990s. How this happened, and whether it will continue, are questions pressing hard upon us.

The traditional post-war political struggle pitted class and concerns about inequality, opportunity and redistribution against capital and concerns about profits, property rights and the shoring up of traditional social structures.

Over the past two decades, the moorings of this “left” versus “right” paradigm of political competition have morphed somewhat – in the latter case, drastically.

The “left”, traditionally organised around better pay and conditions for working people, has incorporated post-materialist political concerns around identity (most recently, for example, marriage equality rights) and the environment. The Australian Labor Party has continued to straddle the tensions to which this occasionally gives rise, first evident in the 1970s and increasingly significant in the new millennium. The proposed Adani coal mine provides the latest example of this.

The founding of the Australian Greens in 1992 was a structural expression of this development. The party provided a political home for progressives unwilling to practise a politics involving the trade-offs and compromises necessary to achieve government in its own right. The downside is that the Greens mostly acquire influence but not power.

These two main parties on the “left” mirror the existence of the two main parties – the Liberal Party and National Party – on the “right”. But, unlike the Liberals, who rely on the Nationals to form coalition governments, Labor generally returns enough members at elections to govern without needing another party’s support. The exceptions to this are the ACT and Tasmania, where proportional representation systems deliver more minor party MPs than elsewhere.

Read more: The Morrison government’s biggest economic problem? Climate change denial

Two decades of race-baiting politics

The “right” over the last two decades in Australia has imported the US Republican Party playbook. President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” exploited race in the late 1960s to realign white working-class Democratic Party supporters in the American south with the Republican Party.

In the mid-1990s, the Liberal prime minister, John Howard, followed suit. “Dogwhistling” on race recruited traditional white working-class Labor voters to the Liberal-and-National-Party-voting “Howard’s battlers” camp.

From 2001 Howard used the so-called “war on terror” to heighten racial tensions for political gain more explicitly. His government broke from previously bipartisan migration policies to harness migration to national security concerns well beyond what was necessary to actually address those concerns.

Tampa and the “children overboard” scandal were prominent examples. Recent manifestations include the whipping up of unfounded fears about ethnic gang violence in Melbourne and flagrant accusations about the likely consequences of the “Medevac” bill passed by parliament against the government’s will in February 2019.

Australian politics has been hostage for a generation to the divisive, racialised politics practised by Howard and his Liberal and National Party (LNP) successors, wedging Labor, which struggled to refocus the agenda beyond it.

Right’s strategy looks to be losing its sting

However, 2019 may well be the year this long cycle of race-baiting politics from the “right” in Australia exhausts itself. The Morrison government’s oversight of inhumane practises in offshore immigration detention centres, and the “no bid” tendering of responsibility for some of these to dubious corporate entities, are becoming perceived proxies for incompetent government.

Despite recent efforts to recharge it, the fear factor inculcated by the LNP around migration seems to have dissipated. Several moderate conservatives have been elected to the crossbench who in the pre-Howard era would have stood as Liberal candidates rather than as independents. They are living proof that even many on the “right” have little stomach for playing Nixon-style politics in Australia any more, even as it flourishes anew in the US through President Donald J. Trump.

This shift occurs in the context of the LNP recently being seen to be wrong-footed on several totemic policy issues: the environment, gender equity and gay rights. With saturation support from Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation media outlets and several commercial radio shock jocks, climate change denial, the trivialisation of gender equity issues and refusal of marriage equality for the LGBTQI community were consistent political winners for the LNP – until the moment they were not.

Along with the diminishing dividends of the LNP’s race-baiting for political gain, this hints at the renewal of Australian voters’ better instincts. The LNP tropes of the last two decades seem exhausted.

Are we at a turning point?

The successful plebiscite vote for marriage equality in 2017 may well have been a turning point. The revolt of female Liberal MPs over their treatment at the hands of male colleagues may be another.

Increasingly vocal dissidents within the wider LNP urging action on climate change is a further hopeful sign. Prime-age cabinet ministers like Kelly O’Dwyer, who lamented last year to Liberal colleagues that they were widely seen as “homophobic, anti-women climate deniers”, are voting with their feet and departing parliament at the next election.

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

Together, this points to a possible sea change – a welcome one – in Australian politics after a long, acrid 20-plus years of disrespect, division and denial.

A Labor Party strengthened by rules reinforcing, rather than allowing the undermining of, the leader has arguably been central in this shift. Internecine warfare has been replaced by steady attention to policy issues rather than questions of leadership personnel.

Secure in his position, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten goes to the election confidently advancing some politically risky policies on negative gearing, dividend imputation and humane treatment of refugees. The quality of the Labor frontbench is as strong as at any time since the Hawke-Keating era.

The nascent appetite in the electorate for hope over hate, for forward momentum over susceptibility to artificially stoked fear, favours a change to government capable of decisive action on the big neglected issues, of which climate action is second to none.

The successful reframing of Australian politics from fear to hope is a mighty challenge, one undertaken against the massive dead weight of Australian media influence reinforcing our baser instincts over the past 20 years. It seems to be under way. One can only hope it succeeds.

– ref. After years of vicious culture wars, hope may yet triumph over hate in Australian politics – http://theconversation.com/after-years-of-vicious-culture-wars-hope-may-yet-triumph-over-hate-in-australian-politics-110887

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Porch, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Earth Science, Deakin University

Forget the apes, we live on “The Planet of the Beetles”. Welcome.

With an estimated 387,000 formally described species, beetles (Coleoptera) are the most species-rich of the five mega-diverse groups of insects. The others are wasps, ants and bees (Hymenoptera), flies (Diptera), true bugs (Hemiptera), and butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera).

Read more: The battle against bugs: it’s time to end chemical warfare

Today’s publication of 103 new species of weevils from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is a timely reminder that, after several hundred years of research, we have not even described half of the insect diversity out there. Not even close. Especially in the tropics.

This seems particularly important in light of recent media attention on the global loss of insects (which may or not be an “insectageddon”, depending on how you look at the data).

Knowing what we have

Ideally, before we worry about what we are losing, it would be nice to know what we have.

Guesstimates of the number of beetle species on Earth suggest that only about one quarter of the species out there have been described.

Although most British species were described by the middle of the 19th century, in many parts of the world it is easy to find new species and will be for many decades, providing they hang on that long.

Read more: Curious Kids: If an insect is flying in a car while it is moving, does the insect have to move at the same speed?

And it’s probably best to set aside the notion of cracking a bottle of champagne with every new species discovery. As writer Simon Barnes says, referring — in Ten Million Aliens: A Journey Through the Entire Animal Kingdom — to people who discover new species, “they’d be pissed all day”. If you work on weevils, you’d be comatose.

Welcome weevils

Alexander Riedel, a weevil specialist from Germany, and Indonesian museum curator Raden Pramesa Narakusumo are working on the Asia-Pacific weevil genus Trigonopterus.

These small weevils, mostly several millimetres long, are distributed from Samoa in the Pacific through northern Australia to Sumatra. Australian Trigonopterus (32 described species) are mainly restricted to subtropical and tropical rainforests of the east coast, north from around the Queensland/New South Wales border.

The authors’ latest paper describes 103 new species from Sulawesi (Celebes of old) including several they named after Asterix, Obelix and Idefix – principal characters in the French comic series The Adventures of Asterix.

Asterix and Obelix don’t like the Romans much.

Species names are always lower-case and the genus always begins with a capital: for example “Trigonopterus asterix Riedel”, named after Asterix. Italics are used to show that we are talking about a genus and/or species name. The author or authors primarily responsible for describing the species are traditionally appended to the end of the name.

A small greenish forest-dwelling species is named after Yoda of Star Wars fame, and several others after well-known biologists including Charles Darwin, James Watson and Francis Crick (the latter two identified the structure of DNA).

103 new weevil species from Sulawesi: can you pick the differences between them all? Alexander Riedel

Naming is fun but hard

Naming species in novel ways is more common that you might think. Just this week one of 14 new northern Australian dung beetle species was named Lepanus sauroni Gunter & Weir, after, you guessed it, Sauron of Lord of the Rings fame. Part of the beetle’s abdomen resembles the Eye of Sauron.

Most of the new Trigonopterus (and Lepanus) species are named after the locality where they were discovered, their collector, or distinctive characters they might have.

Read more: Why so many Australian species are yet to be named

You might imagine coming up with 103 new names would be relatively easy, but it’s not that simple. There were already 341 Trigonopterus described (mostly by Riedel and colleagues), and the new names have to be different. The names for new species of this genus described in the future, and there are hundreds more, will have to be different again.

Living in Melbourne, as I do, there are plenty of undescribed invertebrate species including, of course, weevils. If you know what you are doing, many of these are abundant and easy to find. Some may represent charismatic, colourful, fascinating or old evolutionary lineages. Many of these species are known and are preserved in national or international collections awaiting description, but plenty of others are unseen and uncollected.

Who cares? And why?

A widespread lack of enthusiasm for invertebrates translates to a broader lack of knowledge and engagement, and the inevitable “who cares anyway?”.

In Wonderful Life, author Stephen Jay Gould writes:

Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.

Describing species, and revealing what is where, fundamentally underlies major fields of biology like ecology, evolution and biogeography, contributing to a deeper understanding of the complexity of life on Earth.

If we’re to prevent the loss of major parts of our biodiversity to extinction, a deeper understanding of the planet’s numerically dominant invertebrate life is critical. Fortunately, there are those like the authors of these papers who follow their passion, and back it up with a lot of highly skilled work.

– ref. Welcome Asterix, Obelix and Yoda! Finding fun in the serious matter of discovering insects – http://theconversation.com/welcome-asterix-obelix-and-yoda-finding-fun-in-the-serious-matter-of-discovering-insects-113036

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arian Wallach, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Compassionate Conservation, University of Technology Sydney

As a woman working in the environmental sciences, it was always obvious to me that most of my colleagues are men. This tended to focus my attention on surviving in a field in which I automatically contribute to diversity just by being there.

Recently though I stopped to consider what I could do to support diversity. For the first time, I thought seriously about how my own choices were influencing gender balance.

Read more: Gender inequalities in science won’t self-correct: it’s time for action

I decided to take a critical look at the gender representation within my own academic portfolio, paying particular attention to projects I led. These are the ones where I had substantial agency in selecting who would be invited to join a research project.

I then asked a simple question: how many women have I invited to work with me? The answer is: not many.

My CV has a gender bias

My gender-biased CV is, frankly, embarrassing. I can count on a single hand the number of women I have invited to collaborate with me on publications and grants.

Of my peer-reviewed publications in which I was lead author, 96% of my co-authors are men. On publications in which I was co-author, 77% are men.

The first woman I invited to co-author a publication was in 2015, four years after completing my PhD, and eight years after publishing my first manuscript. Since then, I have published with only two other women.

All of the co-investigators on my research grants are men. Yup, I actually haven’t shared a single research dollar with a female colleague.

Read more: Why I joined #500queerscientists

How could this have happened?

The answer, I believe, lies with awareness and concern for others. It simply did not occur to me that I could or should play an active role in shaping my professional community.

My discipline (environment) is clearly male-biased, as is my research field (ecology of large carnivores). A quick search on Google Scholar for the keywords of my research area brings up publications almost exclusively written by men. So it’s no surprise that my immediate community of collaborators are men. To create a more diverse community, I would need to actively reach out.

Gendered network of top co-authors, with women in pink and men in blue. Starting with myself at the centre, and my top-10 co-authors in the first layer; followed by their top ten co-authors; and ending with their single top author in the outer layer. Total population: 24♀ (21%) and 89♂ (79%) (1st layer – 0♀:10♂; 2nd layer – 17♀:52♂; 3rd layer – 6♀:27♂). Data from Research Gate (February 2019). Arian Wallach, Author provided

Making a personal commitment to diversity

Success in science is about more than the individual. Science is a highly collaborative field. Academic careers are made, not only by the projects we lead, but also by the projects we are invited to collaborate on.

In this way, the work of science lends itself to a feminist ethic which appropriately highlights the importance of community and relationships.

I believe in institutional targets and quotas. I also believe in individual commitments.

I am committed to increasing the diversity of my personal academic community. To do this, I have begun the slow journey of bringing more academic women into my community. I am pleased the gender balance in my peer-reviewed publications is starting to show signs of change.

Commitment to increasing gender equity in my peer-reviewed publications is starting to show signs of improvement. Proportion of women co-authors (excluding me) in publications I have led and co-coauthored, and manuscripts expected to be published in the near future. Arian Wallach, Author provided

Of course, there are other important forms of inclusion and diversity to be mindful of, including race, ethnicity, nationality, identity, and religion.

Inviting women, and other underrepresented peoples, to participate in research projects and scholarly activities is something all academics can do, whether as PhD students or professors. As another way to improve diversity, academics based in rich countries can reach out to academics from countries that have less access to research funds, or forge new international relationships.

Read more: Friday essay: what do we want to be when we grow up?

Even in less collaborative fields and projects, we can pay attention to who we are citing in scholarly publications. This is important because citation counts are an important measure of academic success.

Incorporating marginalised peoples in our professional communities may feel risky, particularly for early career researchers. After all, it is often necessary to work with well-established academics to develop, and at this point in time most in this category are men.

In order to enhance diversity in our professional communities we need not exclude existing colleagues and experts, we need only start to actively expand our network to be more inclusive.

A richer scholarly life

The benefits for institutions and for science in having diverse views, experiences, cultures, and backgrounds is well known. It is similarly valuable for individual creativity, critical thinking, and innovation. Teams with more women are collectively smarter.

I cannot say whether my CV is uniquely lacking in diversity. Some areas of science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) are more male-biased than others. But I suspect I am not unusual.

There is a long way to go before science becomes a project that truly belongs to all of humanity. But it seems to me that if we all pay more attention to how we form our professional communities, in a way that is attentive to structural inequities, we can change things a lot more quickly.

– ref. My CV is gender biased. Here’s what I plan to do about it – http://theconversation.com/my-cv-is-gender-biased-heres-what-i-plan-to-do-about-it-112871