Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Director, Health Program, Grattan Institute

The A$1.25 billion Community Health and Hospitals Program Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced this week should be awarded a big policy fail.

The move sets back Commonwealth-state relations by decades – and it’s unclear exactly how much money will actually be provided.

Rather than being based on any coherent policy direction, it appears designed to shore up support in marginal electorates.

Bad for Commonwealth-state relations

One of the complicating factors in providing health care to Australians is the fact that the Commonwealth and states each have leadership roles in different parts of the system: the Commonwealth for primary care; and the states for public hospitals.

Health professionals yearn for the Holy Grail of a single level of government being responsible for all aspects of a patient’s care. That quest has proved illusory. But recent policy direction has at least sought to clarify the roles of the two levels of government.

Read more: Public hospital blame game – here’s how we got into this funding mess

For the past five years, the states have been acknowledged as the “system managers” of the public hospital system. A rational, formula-driven funding framework has been created.

Under this framework, the Commonwealth shares the cost of growth in public hospital activity with the states. This exposes the Commonwealth directly to growing costs of technology-driven needs and giving it an incentive to work with the states to meet needs in the most efficient way.

This framework means there is one level of government to whom all public hospitals are accountable: the state. And it means voters can hold their state government accountable for hospital planning and management.

The proposal would allow the Commonwealth to override state priorities. AAP/Kelly Barnes

The new Morrison proposal tramples all over this policy rationality in the interests of electoral expediency. It replaces state-based planning with submission-based funding, which will enable a politician with a whiteboard in Canberra to override state priorities in favour of projects which have the greatest electoral appeal in targeted marginal seats.

It makes accountability for the overall system more confusing, and it assumes Canberra knows best.

It is a federalism fail.

An opaque policy

Labor ran a devastating campaign in the July federal by-elections, especially in the Queensland seat of Longman, which involved calculating and publicising precisely how much worse off the local hospital was under the Liberal health policy – where the Commonwealth funds 45% of hospital growth – compared with Labor’s 50% sharing policy.

In the Longman case, Labor asserted there was a A$2.9 million cut to Caboolture Hospital based on the decisions taken in the 2014 Abbott/Hockey “slash and burn” budget.

Scott Morrison’s new cash splash is no doubt designed to overcome this political weakness for the Coalition.

Read more: Why scare campaigns like ‘Mediscare’ work – even if voters hate them

However, unlike Labor’s funding, which is ongoing, it’s unclear whether the extra largess the Coalition is offering will continue beyond the budget “forward estimates” (that is, the next four years). It’s unclear how much will be devoured from existing Commonwealth funding agreements, such as the dental agreement, which are coming to an end.

The Commonwealth has responsibility for most aspects of policy to address social determinants of health, particularly employment and income policies. Rational health policy would recognise the importance of considering these issues and balancing the health benefits of, for example, lifting the Newstart allowance, against funding for specific health initiatives. There is no hint this has happened with this announcement.

The announcements sound good but it’s unclear where the funding will end up. AAP/Stefan Postles

New handouts under the Morrison package will be portrayed as being for specific areas of “high political need”. But the reality is funding will eventually be swept into the Grants Commission allocation process and redirected according to the Grants Commission formula.

This may restore some rationality into the health handout, albeit with a lag of a few years. But the actual level of funding to be allocated to specific areas will be shrouded in Grants Commission opacity. Insiders will be able to follow the money, but voters will be kept in dismal ignorance about how much they will benefit in the long-term – after the gloss of a local funding handout has worn off.

This policy is a transparency fail.

Politics versus policy

The Community Health and Hospitals Program lists four feel-good, worthy funding targets:

• specialist hospital services such as cancer treatment, rural health and hospital infrastructure
• drug and alcohol treatment
• preventive health, primary care and chronic disease management, and
• mental health.

Read more: Morrison government promises $1.25 billion for health care

Everyone has a potential place in this funding Nirvana. Lobby your local MP, and your local hospital or community health program might be the lucky health policy lottery winner!

Provided voters don’t see this as a cynical political exercise – and that is a big risk in an electorate which already ranks politicians low on the trustworthiness scale – then the new policy could be smart politics. We won’t know until the votes in next year’s federal election are counted.

In the meantime, given the drubbing the Liberals received in last month’s Victorian state election, the biggest challenge for the Morrison Government might be deciding which electorates are now marginal and worth shoring up.

– ref. Morrison’s health handout is bad policy (but might be good politics) – http://theconversation.com/morrisons-health-handout-is-bad-policy-but-might-be-good-politics-108747

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sebastien Darchen, Senior Lecturer in Planning, The University of Queensland

Thirty years after the landmark Brundtland report, the debate on urban sustainability continues. Urban planners are still grappling with the challenges of making our cities sustainable.

Urban sustainability is an evolving concept. Our edited volume provides planning solutions for eight of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Has the concept of urban sustainability made a difference in planning practice? Our answer is yes.

Read more: Business as usual? The Sustainable Development Goals apply to Australian cities too

Based on Campbell’s planner’s triangle, urban sustainability encompasses three dimensions:

1. social sustainability
2. environmental sustainability
3. economic sustainability.

Sustainability solutions involve trade-offs between these three dimensions. A planning innovation might solve a challenge in terms of social sustainability but be less efficient in regard to the two other dimensions.

The Sustainable City paradigm has been a dominant school of thought since the 1990s. Yet it is still unclear how cities incorporate this paradigm in urban policies.

Influential works on urban policies have emphasised the transfer of urban policies from one context to another – known as mobile urbanism. Our book highlights evidence to the contrary. Planning innovations are generally shaped by local contextual factors and are not imported.

Of the planning innovations presented in 12 case study chapters in our book, we present those most relevant to Australia later in this article.

Key issues facing Australian cities

Australian cities have urgent sustainability issues that require fresh policy initiatives.

Transport use is too reliant on cars. As a result, fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions remain far too high. Large areas of land are given over to road space and parking.

Read more: Driverless vehicles could bring out the best – or worst – in our cities by transforming land use

Read more: Freeing up the huge areas set aside for parking can transform our cities

High car use goes hand in hand with low-density urban sprawl. This requires longer trips to everything, extra resources for longer pipes, wires and roads, more losses of agricultural land and natural vegetation, and more hard surfaces that increase water pollution run-off as well as heat in summer.

And the design of low-density development produces even more unsustainability. Planning controls have forced developers to reduce the size of new housing lots, but house sizes have barely reduced in size. As a result, backyards are disappearing. Lost along with them are trees to cool the air and sequester carbon, and physical activity opportunities for children.

Read more: Size does matter: Australia’s addiction to big houses is blowing the energy budget

Australia’s cities also have major social sustainability issues. Increasing numbers of professional and managerial households have priced poorer residents out of the best areas of the cities.

The result has been heightened spatial polarisation. Lower-income households have been forced to live further out in suburbs with inadequate public transport and jobs. Solutions for creating places in the suburbs were presented in a recent summit organised by UQ Planning.

What’s happening in cities overseas?

The innovative ways that overseas cities have responded to similar sustainability challenges can provide pathways for Australian cities to follow.

Helsinki’s experience suggests one means of overcoming a sticking point in achieving higher-density development: getting around NIMBY opposition and achieving community agreement on where denser development could go. In Helsinki, the public participated in a public participation geographic information system exercise. This mapped their preferences for areas that should not be developed for apartments.

Read more: Becoming more urban: attitudes to medium-density living are changing in Sydney and Melbourne

Well-intended planning controls can hinder higher-density development, even in desirable locations. In Los Angeles’ historic core, old office buildings lay vacant after a new CBD office precinct outside the old core was developed. Residential use requirements for on-site parking and open space and for a building setback from the front property boundary hindered the conversion of the old buildings to residential use. By relaxing these requirements, the city’s 1999 adaptive reuse ordinance was a key to regenerating the old core as a residential area.

The adaptive reuse of historical buildings has helped regenerate downtown Los Angeles. This particular planning innovation involved a regulatory rethink. Sébastien Darchen, Author provided

The challenge of reducing car use without large public outlays remains daunting, but Seville shows one way this can be achieved. There, a complete bicycle network of 180km – 12% of the total road length in the city – has been built since 2007. Separation from car traffic has been achieved through bollards and the like, or by parked cars where the bikeway is built on a footpath.

Cycle trips now make up about 10% of total vehicle trips in Seville, six times the previous share. The driving forces for the network were the formation of a cyclists’ association, public demonstrations and the election of a left-of–centre city government that gave political support.

The demolition of motorways sounds like an extreme way of reducing car use, but the experience of Seoul shows it can have big economic and environmental benefits. The motorway built over a former stream in the central city was demolished in the early 2000s. The stream was restored to a natural state.

This has reduced air pollution and the heat island impact of the former motorway, and created an ecological passage to the main river in Seoul. Recreational and cultural amenities along the restored stream have made it a desirable area and generated new economic activities. New bus services close to the stream have replaced car access.

The strong powers and finances of the city government and a supportive mayor made the Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project possible.

Cheonggyecheon after restoration. Sun Young Rieh/Global Planning Innovations for Urban Sustainability, Author provided

Spatial polarisation in cities results from market forces dominating urban redevelopment.

Read more: Market-driven compaction is no way to build an ecocity

The experience of Vancouver illustrates how inclusionary planning can ameliorate these forces. City-sponsored local resident groups have been at the centre of making strategies to renew the city’s low-income Downtown Eastside area.

Instead of the high-tech-based development originally proposed, priority has been given to developing employment more suited to the low-income residents’ needs, including opportunities in the informal sector. City council-owned sites have been used for social innovation hubs, services to help residents find jobs, and a street market for a street vendors’ collective.

As explained in our book, these planning innovations are mostly the product of local contextual factors. Therefore, planning innovations for Australian cities will require local involvement in shaping sustainability solutions. Incentives such as changes in regulatory frameworks and tax subsidies might also be needed to develop planning innovations.

– ref. Our cities fall short on sustainability, but planning innovations offer local solutions – http://theconversation.com/our-cities-fall-short-on-sustainability-but-planning-innovations-offer-local-solutions-107091

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Warren Hogan, Industry Professor, University of Technology Sydney

An appallingly perfect storm is brewing for the federal budget:

• a government with much more income than expected

• a federal election due within months

• a government well behind in the polls

With the election all but announced for May, next Monday’s Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) will be the effective start of the campaign.

The latest figures put the government’s budget position about A$10 billion better than was expected when it was delivered last May.

The budget has been gifted much higher revenues from corporate income taxes, almost entirely driven by mining companies selling more than they expected (at higher prices than they expected) to China.

Read more: Morrison’s return to surplus built on the back of higher tax – Parliamentary Budget Office

A stronger than expected domestic economy has also helped, producing small upside surprises in various other taxes and cutting the need for government spending.

In the past six months the stars have aligned to hand the government a virtual war chest with which to fight the election.

A full MYEFO, then an election budget

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has laid out the timetable.

MYEFO is due on Monday December 17 and an early Budget will be handed down on Tuesday April 2, days before the government is expected to call the May election.

In announcing it, he promised to deliver a budget surplus in 2019/20.

This tells us two things, firstly, that he has zero interest in bringing that surplus forecast forward to the current financial year, 2018-19; and second, that that surplus is unlikely to be materially different from what Morrison previously forecast (as treasurer) in May.

That will give him room to make some very expensive announcements.

With as much as (or more than) an extra A$10 billion per year to play with, Morrison’s ministers will be rubbing their hands together working out how to get the most electoral bang for the bucks.

Endangering the budget long term

This does not bode well for government finances beyond the next few years.

Highly targeted spending measures aimed at improving election prospects are rarely the best use of public funds.

New spending commitments in the just past few months are set to cost the budget just under A$500 million this year, rising to almost A$1.5 billion next year.

Spending all or most of the extra money that’s pouring into the Treasury coffers risks creating a budget black hole if the sources of that revenue prove to be temporary.

A slowdown in Australia or a drop in China’s demand for raw materials could take a big chunk out of the budget.

The damage to the government’s finances after the global financial crisis was only partly the result of spending aimed at averting a recession.

We now know a big part of the surge in revenues in the years before the crisis were temporary.

Read more: Budget policy check: does Australia need personal income tax cuts?

The increased spending and repeated lower taxes they funded were permanent, creating a structural budget deficit that has taken a decade to repair.

As mentioned, the latest upside surprises on revenue are largely due to strong commodity prices and a rising tax take from mining companies.

They might vanish as quickly as they appeared.

Commodity prices are notoriously volatile and almost entirely dependent on what is happening in China.

Problem: China

Perversely, China is buying more of our commodities because it has upped spending on infrastructure to boost a slowing economy under threat of trade war.

The boost in infrastructure spending won’t last.

Eventually we will see a shift in the drivers of Chinese growth towards domestic consumption and business investment and away from metal-intensive infrastructure spending.

It will curtail the growth of our exports and weaken our corporate income tax take.

Dark clouds are forming at home as well.

Problem: Australia

Bank profitability has stopped growing, and the indications from the Hayne Royal Commission are that bank profits will be challenged over the next few years as remediation costs rise and lending slows.

And then there is housing.

While not a direct source of revenue for the federal government, the fall in house prices could start to bite into economic activity as early as next year.

Read more: Vital Signs: we are witnessing a slowly deflating property bubble, for now

While consumers have so far looked past the lower house values, that is likely to change in 2019 if prices continue to fall.

It’d be wise to hang on to the extra billions

The best economic approach would be for this government to save money and leave it for the next government to use them prudently as needed.

It’s certainly not going to happen.

Centre right governments tend to characterise unexpected bumps in revenue as belonging to the citizenry and to be given back.

Read more: Howard’s end: how the Coalition’s last budget created the ground for the current deficits

They usually do it in the form of income tax cuts. We should prepare for substantial fresh income tax cuts, from as soon as July 1, 2019.

Control of the Treasury is one of the most important weapons available to a political party contesting an election.

Having a prime minister who spent several years as treasurer only enhances the weapon.

The government’s timeline for MYEFO and the April budget suggests they fully intend to use it.

– ref. Monday’s MYEFO will look good, but it will set the budget up for awful trouble down the track – http://theconversation.com/mondays-myefo-will-look-good-but-it-will-set-the-budget-up-for-awful-trouble-down-the-track-107567

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

Anyone who has been to La Guardia airport in New York can attest the dire need in the United States for infrastructure spending.

It’s not just crumbling bridges, pot-holed roads and lousy airports that provide the impetus for infrastructure spending. In recent times Harvard economist Larry Summers has popularised the threat of “secular stagnation” – that near zero real interest rates are becoming the normal condition of the global economy due to lack of demand and profitable investment opportunities. Governments increasing infrastructure spending is a way to combat this.

Read more: This is what policymakers can and can’t do about low wage growth

It is against that backdrop that Australia’s ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, has been pushing the so-called “Australian model” of “asset recycling”.

As Australian treasurer from 2013 to 2015, Hockey championed the idea of the federal government providing incentives to the state government to sell public assets and use the proceeds to build more infrastructure.

The only problem with the idea is that it’s silly.

Its primary purpose is to circumvent arbitrary government accounting rules and pull the wool over the eyes of unsuspecting voters.

A nice idea, in theory

Here’s a hypothetical example of how asset recycling is supposed to work.

Suppose the government owns an airport that generates $300 million a year in profits from fees paid by airlines, car-parking revenue and rent from retailers selling $7 lattes and bad $18 sandwiches.

The government decides to “recycle” that asset by selling it off. How much does it get? Well, it is going to be some multiple of the cash flow and profit that the airport generates.

Perhaps the government gets enough bidders together to get a 14-times multiple, and so receives $4.2 billion. With that money it builds a toll road, then sells that off to another private-sector bidder, and off we go again.

One objection to this racket is the exorbitant parking fees and $7 lattes. That is, airports, toll roads and the like are natural monopolies and their owners have tremendous market power.

The government could, perhaps, try to impose price controls when it sells the asset. But that would depress the sale price meaning less money for other infrastructure. And price controls never work; there will always be a gap in the contract (e.g. it says one can’t charge more than $6 for lattes so the operator only makes flat whites and charges $7).

Reasons to be sceptical

But there is an even more fundamental objection. When the government sells the hypothetical airport it gives up $300 million in revenue every year to get $4.2 billion immediately. Unless the private operator values the cash flow stream more than the government does, or can generate more cash flow, there has been no value created. All that has happened is that the government gets money sooner rather than later, over time.

Since the government ought to be at least as patient as the private sector, and can borrow long term at 3%, it is unlikely the government values future cash flows less than some infrastructure fund.

So the only value that might be created is from a private operator running the airport more efficiently. It’s probably true it will – but by how much? Even if it does, will the government cut a good enough deal to capture a good chunk of that value for the public?

There are reasons to be sceptical of the government’s negotiating prowess in such matters.

An accounting trick

This is not, by the way, a general argument against privatisation. Qantas is a vastly better run and more profitable airline providing better service to its customers than when it was government-owned. There are plenty of other examples.

But the benefits of privatisation flow from factors such as improved access to capital markets, removal of government interference from management decisions, and the motivating power of market-based competition.

Asset recycling involves few if any of these factors.

What’s really going on is that asset recycling enables politicians to circumvent government accounting rules.

Governments don’t do accounting like private companies.

When a private company make a big investment, it does’t offset the full amount against its profits for that year. Instead it “capitalises” it and depreciates the investment over its useful life (“accrual accounting”). So a $1 billion capital expenditure that’s good for 10 years is charged against profits at $100 million a year.

Read more: Highlighting ‘good and bad’ debt will make it harder to fund social programs

Governments tend to take the full $1 billion hit in year one (“cash accounting”). This makes any budget surplus smaller, or deficit larger.

Since voters tend to focus on headline numbers, politicians are more reticent to make big capital expenditures.

Asset recycling is the perfect fix to this accounting problem. The big capital inflow offsets large expenditures on new infrastructure, at the cost of giving up regular annual income.

It’s an accounting trick. A shell game.

So let’s see asset recycling for what it really is – and take it out with the other rubbish.

– ref. Vital Signs: No, Joe, America should not be copying Australia’s ‘asset recycling’ misdirection – http://theconversation.com/vital-signs-no-joe-america-should-not-be-copying-australias-asset-recycling-misdirection-108663

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aileen Marwung Walsh, ARC Laureate Research Scholarship, Rediscovering Deep Human History, Australian National University

Untangling the web that is the history of the stolen generations is a very satisfying process. In October, I went to the Centenary Memorial gathering at Mogumber, on the site of the Moore River Native Settlement, about 130 km north of Perth.

The memorial was a commemoration of a tragedy that is part of the history of apartheid in Australia. The Moore River Native Settlement is a large part of many Aboriginal people’s family histories, all over Western Australia. People were sent there from the Kimberley and the Pilbara, from the Western Desert and the south west. Doris Pilkington’s book Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence is the most well known story of Moore River but there are thousands of others, including that of my grandparents.

The settlement was established in 1918 as a solution to the Aboriginal problem, as perceived by colonists. There were too many Aboriginal people “wandering about” WA, usually on reserves near ration depots where they received flour and blankets. The colonists did not want to see them.

Plus A.O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, had a plan to breed out the black of the Aborigines so they would not be Aboriginal anymore. The full bloods would die out and the half castes would blend in. Neville laid out clearly how he would do this in his book Australia’s Coloured Minority.

Shacks at Moore River Native Settlement, Western Australia, circa 1920, where the author’s grandmother was held. State Library of Western Australia.

Neville issued ministerial warrants to remove Aboriginal people from their homes, Noongars from the Perth area first, but then from all over WA. He closed down ration depots to make it easier to remove people, and women with children were especially vulnerable, so they were sent to Moore River or Carrolup further south.

The average monthly population at Moore River was 193. Between 1915 and 1920, over 500 people were sent to the settlement, many to die away from their country as inmates of one of Australia’s largest concentration camps.

One of the saddest stories was from Laverton, north east of Kalgoorlie, where 17 men women and children had gathered at the police station about 1921, to get their annual blanket and clothing issue. They were put into cells instead, men separated from the women, who were also separated from the children.

The next day they were placed in a cattle truck with a sign on the side, “15 niggers for Mogumber”. The local whites thought blacks being terrified was hilarious and shared the story of the wailing niggers.

Moore River was closed down in 1951 but only to be managed by the Methodist Church who called it Mogumber Mission. It operated until 1980.

Separation

I discovered my grandparents’ story when I received my family’s Native Welfare files in the 1980s. Mum, Violet Newman, was stolen in 1946 and sent to Norseman Mission, between Kalgoorlie and Esperance, and my grandparents were sent to Moore River.

Most Aboriginal people without birth certificates are given the birthday of horses, or the 1st of July, but mum got the day she was put in the mission, 19th of October.

From Moore River my grandfather, Len Newman, ran away and went to look for his daughter. He travelled by foot, he told my mum, because he was afraid of being picked up and sent back to Moore River as so often had happened to others. My grandfather worked around Norseman after he had located mum.

The photo is the children’s choir of the Norseman Mission. The author’s mum is the girl directly under the light shade. The photo is taken in the Norseman Mission chapel. 130491PD: Norseman Mission, 1957 John Portman State Library of Western Australia.

My grandmother’s story was quite different. She never saw her eldest daughter again. And the other daughter she gave birth to, well, we don’t know what happened to her. She was put into Kalgoorlie hospital when my grandmother was sent to Moore River and that is the last we know.

We heard stories about my grandmother when we lived in Newman, in the Pilbara, in the ‘70s because all the Jigalong mob, from two hours east of Newman, had known her.

Apparently, my grandmother had become a local midwife after she left Moore River and lived and travelled between Cundelee, where most of her family had been moved to after Maralinga, and Wiluna and Jigalong, and even down to Mt Barker in the southwest where we also had family.

I have never met nor even seen a photo of my grandmother, Ruby Marwung. However my Auntie Daisy Tinker was raised by her, and she told us a lot about my grandmother when we met my auntie in Newman. When my mum went looking for her mum, she learned that Ruby was dead and buried at Wiluna. She had died in 1972 we think. Mum was shown her grave but it was unmarked and mum didn’t know to look for records. It was just what she’d been told by family.

It’s like the grave of my great grandmother, Clara, the mother of my grandfather Len Newman, another unmarked grave, on the edge of the Norseman reserve. The record of her death is under her second husband’s name, Flynn. Aboriginal women’s names were always unoffocial: no records of birth, or marriage, or births of children. Most often just a death certificate whose history has to be untangled.

My grandparents had been married tribally and my grandfather Len’s decision to stay at Norseman meant that grandmother Ruby was free to marry someone else, and so she married Dungle-Dungle aka Jimmy Stephens. They applied to get married the western way and what is sad is that on the application form they call my mum Gladys. That must have been her name before the native welfare officer named her Violet.

Return

I drove up to Mogumber the day before the gathering, to camp overnight. At the intersection where the Mogumber pub sits, the street sign for the Mogumber mission pointed straight ahead.

Knowing what the local non-Aboriginal people’s attitude would be to the Mogumber reunion I knew that someone would have pointed it in the wrong direction so I turned left instead.

And I was right. The sign was pointing in the wrong direction. When I went past it again the next day someone had changed it to point it the right way.

I couldn’t see any other Noongars so I just kept on driving until I spotted some pulled up at a community hall. I parked next to them and introduced myself. They invited me to camp the night with them and it was a wonderful night of making connections listening to them singing, they were great singers, and watching an amazing moon rise over the trees.

A sign warning of asbestos at the site of the Moore River Native Settlement. The gaol is the gully beyond and there is no asbestos in it. Aileen Marwung Walsh

These were all mostly Yuet Noongars, the people who own the country where Moore River and the New Norcia Mission now sit, so with few connections with me, you’d think, as my family are from the deep south. But no, a couple of my great uncles had moved to the Meekatharra area, in mid west WA, at the beginning of the 20th century and so I met a few uncles and cousins.

And then as well, one of my brothers had died that morning in Perth. His dad was a Narrier, that’s a Noongar family name, and so we all talked about my uncle Joe and my little brother Ronald and I told them all about a conversation I’d had with my uncle Joe decades before; with him wondering where the name Narrier had come from.

I told these local Yuet Noongars how I had tracked the origin of the Narrier name for uncle Joe, that the Narriers weren’t named after a place, like my uncle Joe had thought, but that the place Mt Narryer had been named after their ancestor Ned Narea who had been a Noongar guide for colonists in the 1850s.

I was also able to tell them how Ned Narea, which was later Anglicised to Narrier, died in 1881 and they were upset by that story because Narea and his babbin (special friend) Kalinga had been sent from Roebourne to Perth in chains so tightly and cruelly fastened that at the end of the 28-day voyage they were both dead.

Life in a prison

The next day we all drove to the mission and I made special notice of the country because the photos I had seen of Moore River in the early 20th century showed a place denuded of vegetation, just wooden huts. The landscape is different now. Mogumber Mission was run until 1981 and the missionaries made big changes. There are also pine plantations all around.

I met a man called Lewis Wallam; I’ve known his sister Elaine for a long time, decades, because she lives near my mum in Como, Perth. Lewis took me to the prison, part of the settlement, and that story is very interesting.

The cell where the author’s grandmother was held after she ran away from Moore River. Aileen Marwung Walsh

There are four cells with no windows, just an iron grill above the thick wooden door. There is a small outside area that has strong steel grill for a roof and that was where prisoners were allowed to spend time during the day.

My grandmother Ruby spent time in this prison for running away from Moore River in 1949, she was sentenced to four days. Being in the gaol I was for the first time in the same place that I knew my grandmother had been. In a gaol.

The next time my grandmother ran away she was heavily pregnant and so when the police brought her back she did not go into the goal. She gave birth to a boy a while later and they called him Murray Newman after his grandfather. But he died, one of the many babies buried in the Moore River cemetery.

It was a strange sensation being in the place that is so often described as a hell hole, the whole of the Moore River Native Settlement that is, not just the goal; and as I reflect back on the memory of it, it grows stranger and stranger.

– ref. Friday essay: back to Moore River and finding family – http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-back-to-moore-river-and-finding-family-107522

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

In this week’s Newspoll 55% believed Labor would win next year’s election, compared with just 24% who thought the Coalition would. These are figures to frighten Scott Morrison, and make Bill Shorten just a touch nervous.

If most people think the government is finished, it is hard for Morrison to get their attention – though he is certainly trying hard enough, with his frenetic activity.

On Thursday he had a double-header news conference, with two major, unrelated, announcements – a proposed new federal integrity body, and a plan for a Religious Discrimination Act. In normal times, each would have had its own day in the spotlight.

Shorten might be privately very confident, while doing his best to avoid giving the government evidence to back its accusation he’s measuring those Lodge curtains. But an overwhelming expectation of an ALP victory must also produce niggling fears in Labor ranks: could something derail what appears a relatively straightforward ride ahead?

The strong belief Labor will triumph could have contrary effects on voters. It might encourage some to get behind the likely victors. But the Liberals could also use it to frighten wavering supporters back into the fold.

In the lead up to next week’s ALP national conference, which Shorten needs to run smoothly, the government has been trying to exploit what it sees as a Labor weak point – border protection.

It homed in on the opposition’s support last week for the proposed amendment to facilitate medical transfers from Nauru and Manus. (This was the legislation the government prevented reaching the lower house, because it would have lost the vote.)

Around the edges of asylum seeker-refugee policy there are distinctions between the two sides. But on the central element of border protection – turnbacks – they are at one.

Key Labor left figures including Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek have put aside doubts to ensure the government can’t drive in a wedge.

Another factor is helping Labor against the Coalition’s scare campaign – without boats arriving, the issue has slipped lower with voters. There has been a softening in community views – the public are more open to appeals for compassion towards those on Nauru and Manus.

Whatever vulnerability the ALP has in this area comes from previously allowing the boats to restart. Probably the people smugglers would test a Shorten government early on. But knowing the stakes, and remembering what happened before, it’s a sure bet that government would respond robustly.

The area of greater uncertainty under Labor is a very different one – that is, how much of the unions’ agenda a Shorten government would be willing to embrace.

Notably, the opposition still has to fill in key gaps in its industrial relations policies. Some commitments are clear, including the promise to restore penalty rates. On other matters the detail isn’t there yet – such as how broadly an ALP government would permit the reintroduction of industry-wide bargaining. We only know its priority would be low paid industries.

Workplace relations spokesman Brendan O’Connor addressed the National Press Club this week, but didn’t make announcements. He promised Labor would have “more to say” on multi-employer bargaining, the right to strike, the minimum wage, and addressing the gender pay gap.

Just as the ALP conference will be kept in line by the approaching election, so (at least to a degree) so will the ACTU over coming months. It desperately needs a Labor government.

The trade unions’ resources – money and manpower – will be of huge benefit to Shorten in the election campaign. Harder to predict is how they would operate under and with a Shorten government.

In this context, a useful reference point is the “accord” the Hawke government had with the union movement. That was a highly productive, co-operative association, which enabled the government to make reforms vital to opening the Australian economy.

Shorten said this week he wanted to bring employers, unions and the government together in his first week in office, although there’s no suggestion of any “accord” framework with the unions.

It is hard to imagine ACTU secretary Sally McManus, an industrial radical, having the sort of symbiotic relationship with a Shorten government that then secretary Bill Kelty had with Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.

Morrison tries to demonise Shorten’s union background and links, labelling him “union bred, union fed and union led”.

Common sense and history indicate a union background can be a positive for public policy, as Hawke demonstrated. On the other hand, there are legitimate questions about what influence can be wielded on a prime minister whose power base is in sections of the union movement, including the CFMMEU. Until Labor releases its full industrial relations policy we can’t start to get a grip on how this would likely play out.

Labor has been working for months to manage next week’s conference, to avoid it detracting from the impression of an alternative government fit for office. In contrast the government struggles with its image in a more ad hoc manner.

Monday will be a good day for the government – the budget update will see impressive numbers. But on particular issues, it is another story.

Take Thursday’s announcements. The Commonwealth Integrity Commission isn’t something the government actually thinks is needed or even a good idea. Rather, it is a counter to Labor’s policy and aimed at mollifying the public and the crossbench. But it immediately came under attack as inadequate, and the conditions put on it will be seen as letting politicians off the hook.

The religious freedom measures had their genesis in the unhappiness on the right over same-sex marriage. But many voters will regard them as a side issue or worse; meanwhile the right wing Institute of Public Affairs condemned them as an attempt to “regulate religion” and “a significant threat to the freedom of conscience of all Australians.”

Neutralising negatives is critical for both sides in the run up to an election. At this point, Labor is making a much better fist of it than the government.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Unions likely to be more challenging for a Shorten government than boats – http://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-unions-likely-to-be-more-challenging-for-a-shorten-government-than-boats-108771

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne

Two reports out this week – one into the operations of Facebook and Google, the other into the competitive neutrality of the ABC and SBS – present the federal government with significant policy and political challenges.

The first is by far the more important of the two.

It is the interim report by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission of its Digital Platforms Inquiry, and in a set of 11 preliminary recommendations it proposes far-reaching changes to media regulation.

Of particular interest are its preliminary recommendations for sustaining journalism and news content.

These are based on the premise that there is a symbiotic relationship between news organisations and the big digital platforms. Put simply, the news organisations depend heavily on these platforms to get their news out to their audiences.

The problem, the ACCC says, is that the way news stories are ranked and displayed on the platforms is opaque. All we know – or think we know – is that these decisions are made by algorithms.

Read more: Constant attacks on the ABC will come back to haunt the Coalition government

The ACCC says this lack of transparency causes concerns that the algorithms and other policies of the platform giants may be operating in a way that affects the production of news and journalistic content.

To respond to this concern, the preliminary recommendation is for a new regulatory authority to be established. It would have the power to peer into these algorithms and monitor, investigate and report on how content – including news content – is ranked and displayed.

The purpose would be to identify the effects of the algorithms and other policies on the production of news and journalistic content.

It would also allow the authority to assess the impact on the incentives for news and journalistic content creation, particularly where news organisations have invested a lot of time and money in producing original content.

In this way, the ACCC is clearly trying to protect and promote the production of public-interest journalism, which is expensive but vital to democratic life. It is how the powerful are held to account, how wrongdoing is uncovered, and how the public finds out what is going on inside forums such as the courts and local councils.

So far, the big news media organisations have concentrated on these aspects of the ACCC interim report and have expressed support for them.

However, there are two other aspects of the report on which their response has been muted.

The first of these is the preliminary recommendation that proposes a media regulatory framework that would cover all media content, including news content, on all systems of distribution – print, broadcast and online.

The ACCC recommends that the government commission a separate independent review to design such a framework. The framework would establish underlying principles of accountability, set boundaries around what should be regulated and how, set rules for classifying different types of content, and devise appropriate enforcement mechanisms.

Much of this work has already been attempted by earlier federal government inquiries – the Finkelstein inquiry and the Convergence Review – both of which produced reports for the Gillard Labor government in 2012.

Their proposals for an overarching regulatory regime for all types of media generated a hysterical backlash from the commercial media companies, who accused the authors of acting like Stalin, Mao, or the Kim clan in North Korea.

So if the government adopts this recommendation from the ACCC, the people doing the design work can expect some heavy flak from big commercial media.

The other aspect of the ACCC report that is likely to provoke a backlash from the media is a preliminary recommendation concerning personal privacy.

Here the ACCC proposes that the government adopt a 2014 recommendation of the Australian Law Reform Commission that people be given the right to sue for serious invasions of privacy.

The media have been on notice over privacy invasion for many years. As far back as 2001, the High Court developed a test of privacy in a case involving the ABC and an abattoir company called Lenah Game Meats.

Now, given the impact on privacy of Facebook and Google, the ACCC has come to the view that the time has arrived to revisit this issue.

The ACCC’s interim report is one of the most consequential documents affecting media policy in Australia for many decades.

The same cannot be said of the other media-related report published this week: that of the inquiry into the competitive neutrality of the public-sector broadcasters, the ABC and SBS.

This inquiry was established in May this year to make good on a promise made by Malcolm Turnbull to Pauline Hanson in 2017.

Read more: The politics behind the competitive neutrality inquiry into ABC and SBS

He needed One Nation’s support for the government’s changes to media ownership laws, without which they would not have passed the Senate.

Hanson was not promised any particular focus for the inquiry, so the government dressed it up in the dull raiment of competitive neutrality.

While it had the potential to do real mischief – in particular to the ABC – the report actually gives both public broadcasters a clean bill of health.

There are a couple of minor caveats concerning transparency about how they approach the issue of fair competition, but overall the inquiry finds that the ABC and SBS are operating properly within their charters. Therefore, by definition, they are acting in the public interest.

This has caused pursed lips at News Corp which, along with the rest of the commercial media, took this opportunity to have a free kick at the national broadcasters. But in the present political climate, the issue is likely to vanish without trace.

While the government still has an efficiency review of the ABC to release, it also confronts a political timetable and a set of the opinion polls calculated to discourage it from opening up another row over the ABC.

– ref. A tale of two media reports: one poses challenges for digital media; the other gives ABC and SBS a clean bill of health – http://theconversation.com/a-tale-of-two-media-reports-one-poses-challenges-for-digital-media-the-other-gives-abc-and-sbs-a-clean-bill-of-health-108743

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yee-Fui Ng, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, Monash University

The federal government has announced it will establish a Commonwealth Integrity Commission. This new commission will be the peak body to detect and investigate corrupt and criminal behaviour by Commonwealth employees.

This announcement followed mounting pressure from Labor, the Greens and independent MPs, who argued that a national integrity commission was vital to rebuild trust in Australian democracy.

Read more: Government agrees to national anti-corruption body – with strict limits

On November 26, independent MP Cathy McGowan introduced a private member’s bill for the introduction of a national integrity commission, further increasing the pressure on the government.

All Australian states have anti-corruption commissions, and the federal government is lagging behind in this area.

Why do we need this commission?

The case for a national integrity commission is strong.

Australia has fallen steadily in Transparency International’s global corruption index, from eighth place in 2012 to 13th this year.

More alarming is the fact that one in 20 Australian public servants said in a survey last year that they had seen a colleague acting in a corrupt manner. This figure has doubled in the past three years.

Moreover, a Griffith University survey has found strong public support for a national integrity commission, with two-thirds (67%) of Australians in favour of one.

What will the commission look like?

The commission will be an independent statutory agency led by a commissioner and two deputy commissioners. It will have two divisions: a public sector division and a law enforcement integrity division.

The Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity will be reconstituted as the law enforcement integrity division with an expanded jurisdiction. But its jurisdiction will be limited to certain departments and agencies dealing with law enforcement and those that have coercive powers, such as the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

The public sector integrity division has a broader coverage. It includes public service departments and agencies, parliamentary departments, statutory agencies, Commonwealth companies and corporations, Commonwealth service providers and any subcontractors they engage, as well as parliamentarians and their staff.

Is the proposed model adequate?

The proposed model is a watered-down version of an anti-corruption commission, with limited powers.

The Commonwealth Integrity Commission will have the power to conduct public hearings only through its law enforcement division.

Conversely, the public sector integrity division with the broader remit will not have the power to make public findings of corruption. Instead, it will be tasked with investigating and referring potential criminal conduct to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.

This is a far more limited jurisdiction compared to its equivalent state counterparts, such as the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), which has the ability to conduct public hearings and make findings of corruption in the public sector.

Although it is envisaged that the Commonwealth Integrity Commission will play a role in preventing corruption, this model lacks a dedicated corruption prevention division. This is a pro-integrity function that monitors major corruption risks across all sectors.

Read more: Australians think our politicians are corrupt, but where is the evidence?

There are also other activities that do not amount to corruption, but nevertheless show an undue influence on government. Ideally, a federal anti-corruption commission should sit alongside a broader package of reforms that impose stronger rules on lobbying and political donations, as well as a code of conduct for MPs, policed by an independent commissioner.

This would form an interlocking political integrity system that would keep politicians honest.

The government is taking submissions on the proposed model for the Commonwealth Integrity Commission.

It is commendable that the government is finally taking action on anti-corruption measures. However, it is important to get the model right. The proposed model is an improvement on the status quo of patchwork regulation, but does not go far enough to properly investigate corruption in federal government.

– ref. The proposed National Integrity Commission is a watered-down version of a federal ICAC – http://theconversation.com/the-proposed-national-integrity-commission-is-a-watered-down-version-of-a-federal-icac-108753

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bronwyn Hemsley, Professor of Speech Pathology, University of Technology Sydney

Swallowing food, drink, and saliva is a central part of our lives. It’s something we do about 900 times a day, yet we barely give it a second thought. We’re mostly unaware of the many food decisions we make every day.

But if you have a swallowing disability, the traditional roasted nuts and dried fruits of Christmas fare are a choking risk, and enjoying a festive bite at the markets could mean an emergency trip to the hospital.

Swallowing and eating: how does it work?

Swallowing is a complex, precisely co-ordinated act involving 32 paired muscles and sensory and motor nerves, carried out in a beautifully timed sequence. So it makes perfect sense many different health conditions affecting the brain or the body impact on a person’s ability to swallow.

Swallowing disabilities affect an estimated 8% of the world’s population. Affecting the majority of residents in aged care, swallowing disability also impacts around 80% of children and adults with developmental disability, most people with motor neurone disease or Parkinson’s, and many people with traumatic brain injury, head and neck cancer, and those who have had a stroke.

In the general population, both alcohol and certain medications can impact on a person’s ability to swallow food safely.

It’s hard to fathom the extent of the disability experienced by people who have difficulty swallowing. The meanings we attach to food, and the ways we engage in eating and drinking, are deeply connected to our identity and our most valued activities and experiences. Decisions about food and meals are a key way we organise our day.

Read more: The shocking state of oral health in our nursing homes, and how family members can help

As a result, swallowing disability has many health and social impacts. Fear of embarrassment or of revealing they can’t manage certain foods can prevent people from telling others about their symptoms. They may take longer to eat, avoid foods that are more difficult, eat less, or say they no longer like the foods they previously enjoyed.

Being excluded or unable to participate fully in a meal or a social event can leave people with swallowing disability feeling isolated, depressed, and frustrated.

Swallowing disability can result in unplanned hospital admissions that come with substantial costs. Coughing and choking on food can lead to reduced enjoyment in meals, aspiration pneumonia when food or fluid is inhaled, and choking death.

Managing swallowing disability also impact on family members and home routines. Many family members change the types of foods they eat to ensure the person with swallowing disability is included. But foods on offer in restaurants, at weddings, parties, religious rituals and sporting events might not be safe to eat, and it can be awkward to take your own carefully modified foods.

The stigma of swallowing disability can lead the person and their partner, spouse, or family member to avoid embarrassment and stop going out.

“… when you can’t swallow, all that you get to think about is that you can’t swallow.”

Vital interventions for people with swallowing disability

Speech pathologists often take a lead role in teams of health professionals who provide services to people with swallowing disability. They assess the person’s swallow, make recommendations about modifying food textures, and identify ways to increase the person’s participation, inclusion, and independence at mealtimes. At the same time, they determine ways for the person with disability to communicate with family members and direct support workers about food preferences and mealtime assistance needs.

The treatment for swallowing difficulties depends on the cause. Speech pathologists can teach the person techniques to improve their oral skills, from taking the first bite to moving the food back and chewing it to swallow. They can provide advice on head and neck postures and mealtime behaviours to help prevent choking.

Recently, the National Disability Insurance Agency refused funding of speech pathology services to people with swallowing disability. Not considering the person’s lifelong difficulty in eating and drinking to be a social issue affecting participation and inclusion leaves people and their families at risk of further isolation and exclusion.

People with swallowing disability need more support and want better access to services to adjust to emotional, psychological and social changes as a result of their swallowing difficulties.

The NDIS has withdrawn funding for speech pathologists for people with swallowing disabilities.

Making mealtimes more inclusive

There’s a lot you can do to make your celebrations more welcoming and inclusive of people with swallowing disability and their families. Set your own table with attractive soft food options and puree foods and check if people need assistance or a quiet space to concentrate on eating.

Read more: How 3D food printers could improve mealtimes for people with swallowing disorders

Making these small adjustments to the foods we provide and the mealtime environment might just mean more people with swallowing disability feel welcome and included in the celebrations this year.

Learn the symptoms of choking and how to respond, and in an emergency in Australia dial triple zero 000 for further assistance.

– ref. Many people have a hard time swallowing. Help them to ‘eat, drink and be merry’ this Christmas – http://theconversation.com/many-people-have-a-hard-time-swallowing-help-them-to-eat-drink-and-be-merry-this-christmas-108426

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anja Hilkemeijer, Lecturer in Law, University of Tasmania

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Attorney-General Christian Porter have released both the Ruddock Panel Report on Religious Freedom and the government’s response. Given the panel’s recommendations were leaked to the media some time ago, the full report contains few surprises. But today’s announcement ends months of speculation on how the government intends to move on this issue.

According to the prime minister, most of what the government proposes is mere administrative “tidy up”. However, closer inspection shows that a number of the proposals are of real substance.

Read more: Morrison wants Religious Discrimination Act passed before election

Taking kids out of school

The Ruddock Panel recommended that state and territory education departments develop a policy to allow parents to take children out of classes that address religious or moral subject matter inconsistent with their beliefs. Porter announced that this recommendation will be implemented by the development of Commonwealth model guidelines.

The Ruddock recommendation and the government’s proposal on this issue are controversial and beset with practical difficulties. What constitutes a “religious or moral matter” may not always be clear: for example, discussions on the environment, the treatment of animals or poverty may be considered by many to be of a fundamentally moral nature.

Moreover, allowing parents the right to take their child out of class could be seen as undermining the message of diversity – as recently decided by a Canadian court.

Another government response concerns a proposal to change the Marriage Act to allow religious schools to refuse to make available premises in relation to same-sex weddings. Given strong public support for marriage equality and last year’s parliamentary debates, adding further exemptions to the Marriage Act could be seen as winding back marriage equality.

Religious schools discriminating against LGBTI teachers and students

There has been fierce and ongoing debate in parliament on removing the right of religious schools to discriminate against teachers and students on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

On this issue, the government’s response to the Ruddock review is to consult with states and territories regarding the terms of reference for the Australian Law Reform Commission to consider a possible amendment.

This will set alarms bells off in jurisdictions such as Tasmania that currently have no special exemptions for religious bodies, including schools. The response appears to be a push by the government to abolish the stronger protections that currently exist in some states.

Push for a Religious Discrimination Act

A further key response to the Ruddock review is the proposal to enact a Religious Discrimination Act. But any religious freedom bill will necessarily be difficult to draft without an overall framework of a comprehensive Charter of Rights.

The Labor party has already indicated it cannot support this proposal without seeing the details.

Stand-alone religious discrimination laws are rare. Some examples exist in the United States, where they act as vehicles for individuals to exempt themselves from the general law and to justify discrimination against the LGBTI community in the delivery of goods and services.

The only precedent in Australia is Fred Nile’s private member’s bill currently before the New South Wales parliament, which would allow broad ranging discrimination on the basis of religious belief.

Read more: Ruddock report constrains, not expands, federal religious exemptions

A new religious freedom commissioner

The Ruddock panel concluded that Australia does not need to appoint a religious freedom commissioner. The government disagrees, and has announced announced its intention to establish such a position in the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Interestingly, the Christian legal think tank, Freedom for Faith, strongly advocated for the appointment of a religious freedom commissioner, and estimated that its annual cost would be between A$1.25-1.5 million.

What now?

At a press conference announcing the government’s response, the prime minister said he wanted to introduce legislation to implement these proposals before the next election.

This looks like mission impossible, given the time necessary for a consultation process with the states and territories, and the Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry.

The announcement also does nothing to progress the conflict between those who want a clean removal of the right of religious schools to discriminate and those that want religious schools to retain a special rights to discriminate.

Morrison emphasised that the proposals reflect the importance of people living their lives and raising and educating their children in accordance with their beliefs. But the unanswered question is whether freedom of belief extends to allowing people to discriminate against LGBTI people.

Any changes in the law need to be carefully considered to ensure they are consistent with Australia’s human rights obligations and protect the equal dignity of all.

– ref. In long-awaited response to Ruddock review, the government pushes hard on religious freedom – http://theconversation.com/in-long-awaited-response-to-ruddock-review-the-government-pushes-hard-on-religious-freedom-108750

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

Suburban affluence is the defining image of the good life under capitalism, commonly held up as a model to which all humanity should aspire.

More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities. Yet with the global economy already in gross ecological overshoot, and a world population heading for more than 11 billion, this way of living is neither fair nor sustainable.

To live within our environmental means, the richest nations will need to embrace a planned process of economic “degrowth”. This is not an unplanned recession, but a deliberate downscaling of economic activity and the closely correlated consumption of fossil energy. We don’t argue this is likely, only that it is necessary.

You might naturally assume this will involve pain and sacrifice, but we argue that a “prosperous descent” is possible. Our new book, Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary, envisions how this might unfold in the suburban landscapes that are currently emblematic of overconsumption.

Read more: The ‘simple life’ manifesto and how it could save us

The well-known documentary The End of Suburbia presented a coherent narrative of a post-petroleum future, but got at least one thing wrong. There is not a single end to suburbia; there are many ends of suburbia (as we know it).

Reimagining the suburbs beyond fossil fuels

Suburban catastrophists such as James Kunstler argue that fossil fuel depletion will turn our suburbs into urban wastelands. But we see the suburbs as an ideal place to begin retrofitting our cities.

This won’t involve tearing them down and starting again. Typically, Australia’s built environment is turned over at less than 5% per year. The challenge is to reinhabit, not rebuild, the suburban landscape. Here are some of the key features of this reinvigorated landscape:

• Suburbanites can and should retrofit their homes and develop new energy practices to prepare for an energy descent future.

• Households must be encouraged to downshift consumerism, swapping superfluous “stuff” for more free time and other sources of meaning and well-being. An economics of sufficiency involves borrowing and sharing rather than always buying and upscaling.

• We should reclaim and reimagine areas of the built environment that are misused or underused. The vast areas dedicated to car parking are but one example.

• Finally, and most importantly, we should realise that change must come via grassroots political organisation, rather than waiting for growth-fixated governments to lead the way. This is not to deny the need for “top-down” structural change. Our argument is simply that the necessary action from governments will not arrive until there is an active culture of sufficiency that demands it.

Sharehouse food production. Retrosuburbia.com (with permission)

What social forces might produce this necessary but elusive urban transformation? We think it can be driven by two broad social groups: the disillusioned middle class and the exploited working class. These two groups, which already blur together along a spectrum, can potentially become a cohesive urban social movement of transformative economic and political significance.

The disillusioned middle class: radical downshifters

Our first groups consists of employed professionals, bureaucrats, and tradespeople who have secure housing, earn decent wages, and can direct significant portions of their income to discretionary spending. This sector of society participates, consciously or unconsciously, in what is often called “consumer culture”.

This consumerism often fails to fulfil its promise of a rich and meaningful life. The consumer class has been sold a lie, and many affluent consumers are now developing what social scientist Ronald Inglehart calls “post-materialist” goals and values. This emerging way of life involves seeking purpose and satisfaction in life through things other than material riches, including deeper community engagement, more time to pursue private passions, or even increased political action.

This is significant, for three reasons. First, history shows that social movements tend to be sparked by dissatisfaction with the status quo – otherwise, why would people resist or seek alternatives? The deep disillusionment with materialistic lifestyles provides an incentive to explore alternative, more satisfying ways to live and self-provide.

Second, by withdrawing their spending from the market economy, this emerging social movement can undermine that economy and fast-track its transformation.

Finally, a “radical downshifting” in consumption could allow people to free up their time by working less. This will provide people with more time to participate in building new forms of economy and engaging in collective action for change. The “voluntary simplicity movement” already numbers as many as 200 million people, although its potential depends on more organised and radical expressions.

The exploited working class: economic builders

Radical downshifters will never transform the economy on their own, and this is where our second group comes in. Working-class urbanites, while also drifting into superfluous consumption, are typically characterised as individuals and households who are “battling” to make ends meet.

Again, a growing dissatisfaction with the status quo provides the incentive to seek and participate in fundamental change. We are often told that Australia’s economy has grown uninterrupted for a quarter-century, yet many people feel their personal circumstances have stagnated.

There has indeed been growth, yet almost all the benefits have been siphoned away by the wealthy. Why would the working class owe any allegiance to a system that only benefits the rich? As the battlers realise they are being oppressed and duped by an unjust system, they threaten to become a dynamite class of explosive potential.

As economic crises threaten to intensify in coming years – including the challenge of automation – we maintain that the exploited working class may be driven to explore alternative ways to self-provide. As incomes become more meagre and jobs less secure, more people will need to seek alternative ways of meeting economic needs “beyond the market”.

A suburban home complete with mini market garden means fewer trips to the shops (for your neighbours too). Retrosuburbia.com (with permission)

Whether through necessity or choice, we foresee a growing number of people beginning to participate in informal, non-monetary, and local economies, including the sharing economy. Just as radical middle-class downshifters will help stifle economic growth by withdrawing their discretionary spending, those who are less affluent could begin to lay alternative economic foundations, and provide a post-capitalist social safety net.

Working together

We contend that these two social groups – the disillusioned middle class and the exploited working class – can conceivably form a cohesive movement with similar goals. The capitalist system isn’t working for many people, even those who are “winning” the rat race. Furthermore, historic growth trajectories seem to be coming to an end, due to both financial and ecological constraints.

Read more: Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it

Already, a diverse range of movements are working towards a new urbanity. These include local farmers’ markets and community and home gardens, urban agriculture projects, freecycling groups, sharing communities, and repair cafes. It also includes the growing pool of climate activists, divestment organisers, permaculture groups, transitions towns, and progressive unions.

There is the small but vocal “save our suburbs” network, in which we see the seeds of something more progressive. And it includes the energy frugal households quietly moving towards solar, batteries and increased energy self-suffiency. One by one, these households are undermining the fossil fuel industry and subtly disrupting the status quo.

As financial and ecological crises deepen in coming years, the social consciousness needed to develop new systems of production and cultures of consumption will become compelling. Together these social groups (and others not yet imagined) could form an urban social movement that withdraws support for the existing system and begins building new economies on our suburban streets.

– ref. The suburbs are the spiritual home of overconsumption. But they also hold the key to a better future – http://theconversation.com/the-suburbs-are-the-spiritual-home-of-overconsumption-but-they-also-hold-the-key-to-a-better-future-108496

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter McDonald, Professor of Demography, Centre for Health Policy, University of Melbourne

Australia’s population is among the fastest growing in the OECD with an increase of 1.7 per cent in 2016-17.

In Sydney and Melbourne traffic congestion has become so intolerable many believe a cut to migration would provide time for infrastructure such as roads and trains to catch up.

Net Overseas Migration was 262,000 in 2016-17, one of the highest levels on record.

They are all compelling reasons to cut the size of the migration program, right?

No, not right. Not at all.

Our migration program is no bigger than it was

Including the humanitarian movement, the government migration program has been set at a near-constant level of a little over 200,000 since 2011-12.

In 2017-18, although the level set in the budget remained above 200,000, the actual intake was 179,000, including an unusually large intake of refugees mainly from Syria and Iraq.

The combined Skilled and Family Streams fell short of the levels set in the budget by 28,000. The reasons for this shortfall are unclear.

‘Net overseas migration’ is different to migration

Net Overseas Migration includes the government program but also other movements in to and out of Australia which both add to and subtract from it.

New Zealand citizens are allowed to enter Australia without restriction. Many people such as international students enter Australia on temporary visas.

Permanent and temporary Australian residents are allowed to to leave without restriction.

Read more: FactCheck: is Australia’s population the ‘highest-growing in the world’?

The net effect of all of these movements can change the recorded “net overseas migration” in ways that are inconsistent with what’s been happening to the migration program.

If, for instance, the Australian economy picked up and fewer Australians decided to leave for better prospects overseas, recorded “net overseas migration” would increase even if the migration program hadn’t.

The two have been moving increasingly independently since mid 2006 when the Australian Bureau of Statistics changed its definition of “resident”, making temporary residents more likely to be counted in the population and their movements counted in net overseas migration.

Read more: International students impaled on (illusory) population spike

Over the past five years, the number of international students arriving has increased every year but there have been few international student departures.

Inevitably, the departures of students will increase in future years and recorded net overseas migration will fall sharply again.

So, forget the near-record official net overseas migration figure of 262,000 – the underlying level of net overseas migration is more likely to be around 200,000. The underlying level of population growth is about 1.4%, and falling.

We’ll need strong migration for at least a decade

A new study by Shah and Dixon finds there will be 4.1 million new job openings in Australia over the eight years between 2017 and 2024.

Over two million of these new openings will be due to “replacement demand”, effectively replacing the retirements from the labour force of baby boomers.

There will not be enough younger workers arriving to fill the gap.

Read more: Migration helps balance our ageing population – we don’t need a moratorium

In the absence of international migration and assuming constant age-specific employment rates, the number of workers under the age of 35 will fall by over half a million between 2016 and 2026, essentially because of the small number of births in the 1990s.

It means that without migration Australia would face a labour supply crunch unlike anything it has ever faced before.

Slowing or redirecting it won’t slow congestion

The mismatch of labour demand and supply makes this an extraordinarily bad time to cut migration.

The labour market is at its hottest in Sydney and Melbourne.

Investment contracts involving new employment are signed and the construction of the new transport infrastructure promised in these cities will only increase the demand.

Logic and economic theory tell us that workers move to where the jobs are, and jobs move to where the investors invest.

If, in some way, official migration into Sydney and Melbourne was restricted, the jobs in the Sydney and Melbourne would still have to be filled and would go instead to workers moving from the rest of Australia or New Zealand or temporary skilled migrants.

Read more: Three charts on Australia’s population shift and the big city squeeze

As a result the restriction would do little to reduce population growth in these cities. It would however, strip other states and territories of the workers they need. It would make the flow of the best and brightest from Adelaide and Perth to Melbourne even bigger.

Diverting, say, 15,000 permanent skilled immigrants away from each of Sydney and Melbourne in 2019-20 would have no impact on transport congestion.

Indeed, it might make it harder to build the required infrastructure, making congestion worse.

We’ll need it to ease a painful transition

It would also make it harder for migration to smooth the dramatic and uncomfortable changes in the age structure of our population.

Migrants don’t only do this because they are young; they also do it because, before they themselves grow old, they have had children and grandchildren.

Net overseas migration of 200,000 per annum would give us 6.8 million more people of traditional working age by 2051 than would no net migration, but only 400,000 more people aged 65 years and over.

It would place Australia in a better position to support its aged population than any other country in the OECD.

Read more: Tasmania can’t only rely on a growing population for an economic boost

Official studies by the International Monetary Fund, the Productivity Commission and the Treasury find that migration significantly increases income per capita and the government’s budget position.

It does put pressure on Sydney and Melbourne, but some of it can be relieved through diversion of population and investment to the satellites of these cities.

Read more: Migration is slowing Australia’s rate of ageing, but not necessarily in the regions

This has already been happening in Victoria. Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo have each jumped into the list of Australia’s top ten urban growth centres.

The growth of Wollongong and Newcastle has been more sluggish but the NSW Premier has recently announced that NSW will be pursuing a strategy of better linkages between Sydney and its satellites.

– ref. Why cutting Australia’s migrant intake would do more harm than good, at least for the next decade – http://theconversation.com/why-cutting-australias-migrant-intake-would-do-more-harm-than-good-at-least-for-the-next-decade-108748

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jake Clark, PhD Candidate, University of Southern Queensland

We’re in for a pre-Christmas treat this weekend, as the cosmos entertains us with two equally exciting gifts: the Geminid meteor shower and the interplanetary comet 46P/Wirtanen.

The Geminids are actually an annual event. But the comet is a less frequent visitor, making a very close approach to Earth this year.

So what makes 46P/Wirtanen so special, and when can we see this comet hurtling across our skies?

Comets in orbits

Comets come in a variety of shapes and sizes, with the infamous Hale-Bopp comet roughly 120 kilometres across. Comet 46P/Wirtanen is much smaller: just 1.2km across.

Most comets, predominately made from dust and ices, spend the majority of their life within the Oort cloud. The Oort cloud is a spherical shell of icy objects that surrounds our Solar system, far beyond the orbits of the main planets.

Some comets are in elliptical orbits that periodically bring them closer to the Sun.

But 46P/Wirtanen’s orbit doesn’t extend out to the Oort cloud. It’s known as a Jupiter-orbiting comet, one whose orbit only extends as far as Jupiter’s.

46P/Wirtanen’s home is very different to other comets, residing within the inner-regions of our Solar system. Jake Clark

Having a close-in orbit has its benefits, including a shorter orbit – so 46P/Wirtanen whizzes past Earth every five and a half years. Compare that with Halley’s comet, last seen at close quarters in 1986, and whose next encounter with Earth is scheduled for 2061.

A tale of two tails

Our festive 46P/Wirtanen’s anatomy is no different to any other comet, having a nucleus (the ball of dust and ices), a coma (the fuzzy atmosphere surrounding the nucleus), and the iconic tails residing behind it.

Comets have two distinctively different tails. As comets travel closer towards the Sun, the volatiles (gas, ice with low boiling points) within the comet start to heat up and evaporate, causing these iconic streaming tails to follow behind the comet.

Comet Lovejoy as seen on the International Space Station. The Ion tail is the straighter of the two tails, with the dust tail leaning towards the left in this image. NASA/Dan Burbank

The straighter and bluer tail is caused by energised charged particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind, interacting with gas within the comet’s coma. This interaction causes gas to ionise and be swept away from the sheer force of our Sun’s immense magnetic field.

Because these particles are following the Sun’s magnetic field lines, this tail will always point directly away from the Sun.

Dust from the coma and nucleus can be carried away just by the pressure from the Sun’s radiation, causing the fuzzier and more iconic dust tail streaming behind a glowing comet.

Comet 46P/Wirtanen will be no different this weekend as it streams across our night sky.

A close encounter

Comet 46P/Wirtanen is a periodical comet (that’s where the P in its name comes from) that took almost 12 months to confirm its existence after its discovery on January 17, 1948, by American astronomer Carl Wirtanen.

Even though the comet whizzes pass Earth’s orbit every five and a half years, due to the nature of celestial orbits and geometry, its brightness in the night sky during its closest approach will vary from visit to visit.

This weekend is a real treat, with 46P/Wirtanen making its closest and brightest approach to Earth for years, a mere 11 million kilometres away. It won’t come this close again until 2038.

Where and when to look

Even with its small stature, 46P/Wirtanen’s visible coma will extend near to a million kilometres and can be seen from Earth.

Astronomers have optimistically predicted that the comet might even be bright enough to see in an urban backyard, with an expected magnitude between 4 to 3. For reference, Ginan, the fifth-brightest star in the southern cross (the star just off centre) has a magnitude of 4.

This brightness, however, will be dispersed over an expected area three times the size of the full Moon at its closest point to Earth. Time to dust off your binoculars prior to Saturday’s flyby – these will be the perfect tool to observe 46P/Wirtanen.

Rural and regional Australians are in prime position to witness 46P/Wirtanen, having darker, cleaner skies than those living in cities and suburban hubs. If you can, head out to a dark sky, grab your deckchair and enjoy the celestial displays of our cosmic backyard.

The night sky in regional Queensland at 10pm on December 15. 46P/Wirtanen’s position is shown as the red cross-hairs (above, right) and will be nearing the ecliptic plane between the Plediades star cluster and Aldebaran. Stellarium Team

But, where to look?

Currently 46P/Wirtanen is between the warm giant stars Menkar and the eye of Turaus, Aldebaran – a red giant left of Betelguese. It’ll slowly make its way towards the Pleiades cluster and at its closest approach will be roughly between Pleiades and Aldebaran, nearing the ecliptic.

As a rough guide around Australia, in the late evening (10-11pm) look just east of true north, about 20-35 degrees above the horizon and you’ll find Pleiades (the Seven Sisters) and Aldebaran.

Weekend of cosmic treats

So what of the other celestial event happening in our backyards this weekend? The frail debris from asteroid 3200 Phaethon creates the Geminids meteor shower that can be seen in both the northern and southern hemispheres in early to mid-December each year.

More than 100 meteors an hour can potentially be seen at the showers peak this Friday night and Saturday morning.

The consistent and spectacular Geminids in the early morning sky (Brisbane 4am). Museums Victoria/stellarium

Coincidentally, you won’t need to stray too far from 46P/Wirtanen’s sky location, with, the Geminids radiant being only 30 degrees away from the Orion constellation.

What a truly spectacular way to finish off 2018.

– ref. We have a Christmas comet: how to spot 2018’s interplanetary bauble – http://theconversation.com/we-have-a-christmas-comet-how-to-spot-2018s-interplanetary-bauble-108597

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

The government will introduce a Religious Discrimination Act to protect the rights of people of faith, with Scott Morrison declaring he would like the legislation passed before the election.

Announcing the government’s long-awaited response to the Ruddock inquiry into religious freedom – which the government has had since May – Morrison said some people of faith felt “the walls closing in on them”.

In a range of measures, the government said that as well as making religion a “protected attribute” in the new Religious Discrimination Act, it would also

• establish a statutory position of Freedom of Religion Commissioner in the Australian Human Rights Commission;

• develop a Human Rights Legislation Amendment Bill to bring in a range of amendments recommended by the Ruddock review.

Morrison repeated his offer of a free vote on the legislation before parliament to protect LGBT students in religious schools from discrimination. This legislation was deadlocked with Labor in the last week of sitting.

Read more: Why Australians’ religious freedom is worth protecting

The government is now referring this and the broader issue of discrimination against LGBT teachers and other staff in these schools for discussion with the states, with a potential referral to the Australian Law Reform Commission, which would report in the second half of next year.

Morrison said 70% of Australians identified with some religious belief.

People of faith feel “walls closing in”

Strongly arguing for his proposed changes, he said: “Those who think that Australians of religious faith don’t feel that the walls have been closing in on them for a while” were “clearly not talking to many people in religious communities or multicultural communities in Australia.”

He had had a conversation with a community in Western Sydney who “said they left where they came from to come to Australia because of religious persecution in the countries they were living in – only now, they feel, to be potentially facing the same sort of limitations to how they practice their religion in this country.

Read more: Australia needs a better conversation about religious freedom

“And that made me incredibly sad. That one of the great liberties Australia has always been known for at perception and indeed in their mind, in fact, is being curtailed. I don’t think that’s something I should allow to stand,” Morrison said.

Timing up in the air

On the timing of the legislation, he said: “I’m happy for us to advance a Religious Discrimination Act and also to deal with the other legislative matters before the next election. I would hope they would have the support of the Labor Party”.

There will be consultations over the summer.

Read more: The ‘gay wedding cake’ dilemma: when religious freedom and LGBTI rights intersect

But with only a handful of sitting days before the election, it will seem testing to meet Morrison’s timetable for passage.

The Law Council supported enshrining religious protections but said “the delicate balance between freedom of religion and freedom from discrimination would be better dealt with in comprehensive national anti-discrimination legislation”.

– ref. Morrison wants Religious Discrimination Act passed before election – http://theconversation.com/morrison-wants-religious-discrimination-act-passed-before-election-108755

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shaun Adams, Isotope Bioarchaeologist Research Fellow, Griffith University

The poor health conditions of eight young Aboriginal people who died around the time of early European colonisation have been revealed in their skeletal remains, according to a new study.

The bones provide evidence of the displacement of Indigenous Australians from their traditional lands as a result of European colonisation. We view this as an opportunity to undertake “truth-telling” of our colonial history, as outlined in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The remains were sold as “scientific specimens” to the Australian Museum in Sydney in the early 20th century, but were repatriated in the 1990s to the local community in remote northwest Queensland.

Read more: Oral testimony of an Aboriginal massacre now supported by scientific evidence

A discovery of skeletal remains

In 2015 one of us (Michael) was contacted by the Queensland Police for advice on the skeletal remains of several individuals. They had been found eroding from a floodplain just outside the town of Normanton.

They were identified as Aboriginal but it was obvious they were not from a traditional Aboriginal burial site.

Initial reburial site of the remains, Normanton. Adams et al. 2018, Author provided

The remains appeared to have been reburied together. They were heavily weathered and did not include complete skeletons, just skulls and some long bones.

The state archaeologist Stephen Nichols contacted several museums, and deduced that these individuals had been repatriated in the 1990s from the Australian Museum. At around the same time, local Aboriginal people told police that the remains had been reburied in this location after their repatriation.

It quickly became apparent that these were the remains of eight young people who had died of disease on the colonial frontier in the late 19th century and had been collected by the Aboriginal Protector, Walter Roth.

The collection of Aboriginal skeletal remains (ancestral remains) was common practice in the 19th and much of the 20th century. Today, many thousands of individuals remain in institutions around the world awaiting repatriation.

The Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people from Normanton wanted to find out more about the lives of these people who had been taken from their country. They discussed this after one of us (Michael) attended the site.

The human skeleton provides a unique record of an individual’s life history. Our investigation showed the remains were all young people, with an average age of about 15 years, and some as young as seven.

Reburial of remains in the Aboriginal cemetery, Normanton. Michael Westaway, Author provided

Evidence of stress

The remains told the story of young people who had undergone significant nutritional stress in their formative years. This was evident from linear stress markers recorded as defects in their tooth enamel, referred to as dental enamel hypoplasias.

The teeth also indicated that while traditional foods were still important in their diet they also regularly consumed European foods rich in sugar and carbohydrates. This had created dental caries (cavities) in their teeth, similar to those we see today in many modern populations but which are unknown in pre-contact Aboriginal remains.

Walter Roth wrote about the high frequency of disease in Aboriginal people found barely holding on in the fringe camps around Normanton (reported in 1901). He reported that “about half” of the 176 Aboriginal inhabitants were suffering from introduced venereal diseases.

The remains provide first-hand pathological evidence in the wake of colonisation. In one individual there were signs of a pathological lesion defined as caries sicca, a lesion diagnostic of syphilis.

Syphilis was also evident in two tibiae (lower leg bones) reburied with the crania (skulls minus the jaws) in the form of a condition known as Sabre Shin, where significant bowing of these long bones is evident.

This all provides evidence of the stress that Aboriginal people endured during the early colonial period.

Normanton in 1906. Queensland Police Museum Archive: ehive-PM0940, CC BY-NC-SA

‘Truth telling’ and history

The Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people’s request for help was in the spirit of the Uluru Statement from the Heart where “truth telling” about the colonial past was emphasised as a priority for reconciliation between all Australians.

Research into our shared colonial past plays a fundamental role in this objective. Bioarchaeology can offer new narratives from the historic period that have not been captured in the historic record.

Some archaeologists have called for a post-colonial approach to the discipline, in which we establish, together with Aboriginal people, the types of historic investigations they consider important.

Traditionally this has not included research on the skeletal remains of their ancestors, as this has been a taboo research area for many Aboriginal groups.

Read more: The violent collectors who gathered Indigenous artefacts for the Queensland Museum

But in parts of the country, Indigenous attitudes towards research are changing, with groups such as the Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people wanting to know more about their past.

As one Indigenous leader from this community said:

… these were young people who left behind such a sad story that needs to be told so non-Indigenous people, not just throughout Australia but particularly in our region of northwest Queensland, know and understand that these traumas still impact on our people 120 years later.

These eight young people from Normanton, who died at the end of the 19th century, are not forgotten. They provide tangible evidence of the hardships that Aboriginal people endured through the colonial acquisition of their land and displacement of their way of life.

Susan Burton Phillips, Counsel to the Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people, contributed to this article.

– ref. Poor health in Aboriginal children after European colonisation revealed in their skeletal remains – http://theconversation.com/poor-health-in-aboriginal-children-after-european-colonisation-revealed-in-their-skeletal-remains-106616

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rayner Thwaites, Senior Lecturer, Sydney Law School, University of Sydney

Last month, the federal government introduced a bill into parliament that, if passed, will make it easier to strip an Australian of citizenship by:

• making lesser offences a trigger for deprivation
• dropping the requirement that, to trigger deprivation, a conviction or convictions result in a term of imprisonment of at least six years
• weakening and complicating protections against the creation of statelessness.

These amendments are directly contrary to bipartisan recommendations of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, contained in its report of September 2015. Those recommendations were followed when parliament inserted the current citizenship stripping provisions into the Australian Citizenship Act 2007 in December 2015.

Expanding the scope, and lowering the threshold, for deprivation

The proposed amendments address what an earlier Conversation piece referred to as “conviction-based citizenship deprivation”, one of three mechanisms for deprivation introduced into the Act in 2015.

Read more: The latest citizenship-stripping plan risks statelessness, indefinite detention and constitutional challenge

Of the offences currently listed as potential triggers for deprivation, some are directed at terrorism and some are without that connection (for example sabotage and espionage). All carry a maximum sentence of ten years or more: for example treason (life); espionage (life); directing the activities of a terrorist organisation (ten years) or; membership of a terrorist organisation (ten years).

This enacts the view of the parliamentary committee that ten years served to mark out the offences sufficiently serious to warrant deprivation. Further, the parliamentary committee determined that even when convicted of such an offence:

there will still be degrees of seriousness of conduct and degrees to which conduct demonstrates a repudiation of allegiance to Australia.

The committee also insisted on an additional requirement that the relevant convictions result in a sentence of at least six years imprisonment in total.

These two important existing limitations on the deprivation power are breached by the government’s proposed amendments:

• the offence of “associating with terrorist organisations” has been added to the terrorism offences that trigger deprivation. This is an offence with a maximum sentence of only three years, radically under the ten years previously required

• the requirement that conviction carry a sentence of at least six years has been dropped in relation to all the nominated offences designated “terrorism offences”. However, it remains in place for “other offences” such as espionage, sabotage and foreign incursions

• the new lower standards apply retrospectively to convictions from 12 December 2005 in relation to the relevant terrorism offences.

Weakening, and complicating, protections against statelessness

The proposed amendments also weaken the safeguards on the creation of statelessness. Currently, a person can only be deprived of citizenship under the provision if he or she “is a national or citizen of a country other than Australia” at the time when the minister strips him or her of citizenship. This is to ensure that the minister does not render the person stateless.

The proposed amendments replace that test, instead providing that the minister can deprive a person of Australian citizenship if:

the Minister is satisfied that the person would not […] become a person who is not a national or citizen of any country.

The proposed formulation substitutes the minister’s satisfaction for the facts of the matter. But under Australia’s international law commitments on statelessness, the minister’s opinion is irrelevant. What matters is whether the person is a citizen under the domestic law of the foreign country concerned.

If the minister’s view that a person is a citizen of country X diverges from the view held by the authorities in country X, there is a practical impasse. If country X determines the person is not one of its citizens and accordingly refuses to admit them, and Australia denies the newly minted non-citizen a visa, deprivation may result in the former Australian citizen being held in indefinite immigration detention.

Read more: New laws make loss of citizenship a counter-terrorism tool

And the nature of the inquiry has changed. In context, the word “become” muddies the time at which the person must have another nationality. It invites the possibility that deprivation will render a person stateless, but that, over some unspecified period, they will become the national of another country.

These comments on statelessness should be understood in the context of Australia’s opaque process for determining a person’s foreign nationality or nationalities. In the United Kingdom, for example, a person has a statutory right to appeal a ministerial decision to strip them of citizenship.

In the exercise of these appeal rights, the most frequently litigated issue is whether a person has another nationality (the Pham case is a prominent example). Expert witnesses are called and cross-examined on difficult questions of foreign nationality law.

None of this institutional infrastructure is provided for under the Australian legislation. How these issues are resolved needs attention. If parliament has learned anything in the past few years, it should be that determining whether a person has a foreign citizenship is no simple matter.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security has announced an inquiry into the Bill. Submissions close on January 11, 2019.

– ref. How a proposed new bill would make it easier to strip Australian citizenship – http://theconversation.com/how-a-proposed-new-bill-would-make-it-easier-to-strip-australian-citizenship-108072

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Tiller, Ethical, Legal & Social Adviser – Public Health Genomics, Monash University

A woman recently sued a London hospital for doctors not disclosing that her father had the genetic mutation that causes Huntington disease – a neurodegenerative disorder. The woman was pregnant at the time. She argues doctors should have told her about her risk of also having the mutation and passing it on to her unborn child.

Genetic changes that cause health complications can be hereditary. So, genetic information is relevant not only for an individual but also their blood relatives. The UK case raises the question of whether medical professionals have a duty to disclose a patient’s genetic test result to family members who might be at risk, even without consent.

Read more: Explainer: what are neurogenetic diseases?

This challenges traditional notions of medical privacy and doctor-patient confidentiality. We believe a medical professional does have a duty to consider genetic relatives in making this assessment. But it should not be necessary to go a step further and impose a duty to disclose.

No such legal case has arisen in Australia to date. If it did, there are some laws governing the disclosure of genetic information that could be relied on. But these are inconsistent and information about how often medical professionals do rely on them is lacking.

What laws protect genetic privacy?

Privacy laws in Australia generally prohibit disclosure of personal (including genetic) information without consent, except in certain circumstances such as where it is required by law. But the specific regulations that govern disclosure vary between states and territories, and between the public and private sectors.

Professional ethical obligations protect doctor-patient confidentiality in most circumstances. But if a patient discloses information that may lead to harm for another person, competing ethical obligations to that other person may override doctor-patient confidentiality. For instance, if a patient experiencing severe psychosis expresses a definite plan to harm another person, the doctor will be required to breach confidentiality to protect the intended victim.

Deciding whether to disclose the presence of a genetic mutation to a relative is more complex. This is because a specific genetic mutation may not cause disease in every instance and any harm typically arises in the future.

A specific genetic mutation may not cause disease in every instance and any harm typically arises in the future. from shutterstock.com

Under the Privacy Act 1988, medical professionals can disclose genetic information to at-risk genetic relatives (blood relations) of an individual who refuses to disclose that information themselves. But that disclosure must be

necessary to lessen or prevent a serious threat to the life, health or safety of another individual who is a genetic relative.

This is where it gets tricky, because a particular genetic mutation could cause serious harm to a family member who shares the mutation. However, we don’t understand enough about how likely it is a given mutation causes disease in each individual to pick which individuals will definitely be harmed.

Read more: Why we should test everyone’s genes to predict disease

Comprehensive guidelines have been developed to guide medical professionals in disclosing genetic results appropriately. These include requiring that reasonable steps be taken to try to obtain the patient’s consent before disclosing the genetic information and also, where possible, to avoid disclosing the patient’s identity.

But there is no reporting requirement associated with these guidelines. This creates difficulty in determining how often the regulations are used in practice.

The Privacy Act is federal legislation. This means it applies to Australian government agencies and private institutions, but not to state entities such as public hospitals, which are governed by their own state laws. And it applies only to statutory liability. This protects a disclosure from being in breach of privacy legislation, but does not address the common law duty of confidentiality.

New South Wales recently passed legislation mirroring the relevant Privacy Act provisions, which aligns all the state’s public and private entities with the federal approach. This has not been done nationally, however, creating inconsistency among other states and territories.

In Victoria, for instance, the applicable legislation requires that the threat of harm is both serious and imminent. This restricts its applicability to genetic information as genetic risk is often serious but not imminent.

Is there an ethical duty to disclose?

Even where medical professionals are legally allowed to override patient privacy to disclose results to genetic relatives, Australian law doesn’t obligate them to to do so.

There is a growing recognition of the ethical rationale for disclosing genetic information to individuals who may be at risk where preventive health measures based on that information are available.

On the flip side are other ethical issues – such as knowing your genetic risks can lead to discrimination by insurance companies. But it is difficult to argue against at least offering the information to at-risk individuals in these circumstances.

Read more: Australians can be denied life insurance based on genetic test results, and there is little protection

Genetic and other healthcare professionals routinely counsel patients about communicating genetic information to family members. Most genetics clinics in Australia prepare a “family letter” to help with this. But where an individual refuses to do so, a medical professional must decide how to proceed. Fortunately, these scenarios are the exception rather than the rule.

The Privacy Act regime regarding disclosure to genetic relatives and the guidelines that accompany it are comprehensive. A thorough understanding and consideration of those guidelines by a medical professional should enable an ethically defensible case-by-case assessment of these scenarios.

But a nationally coherent approach must be adopted to effectively modulate this issue. This must be consistent with the federal regime. And it should preferably include a reporting mechanism to capture instances of disclosure.

This article was co-authored by Dr Gemma Bilkey, Office of the Chief Health Officer & Office of Population Health Genomics, Department of Health, Western Australia.

– ref. Can (and should) a doctor tell my biological relative my genetic results without my consent? – http://theconversation.com/can-and-should-a-doctor-tell-my-biological-relative-my-genetic-results-without-my-consent-108165

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jack Pezzey, Senior Fellow, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University

As delegates at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland, discuss the possibility of restraining global warming to 1.5℃, it might sound like a reasonable question to ask how much money it will cost if they fail.

Economists have spent the past 25 years trying – and largely failing – to agree on the “right” answer to this question. It’s an important consideration, because governments are understandably keen to balance the benefits of limiting long-term climate damage with the more immediate costs of reducing greenhouse emissions.

In simple economics terms, we can ask what price would be worth paying today to avoid emitting a tonne of carbon dioxide, given the future damage costs that would avoid.

This mythical figure has been called the “social cost of carbon”, and it could serve as a valuable guide rail for policies such as carbon taxes or fuel efficiency standards. But my recent research suggests this figure is simply too complicated to calculate with confidence, and we should stop waiting for an answer and just get on with it.

Read more: Paul Romer and William Nordhaus – why they won the 2018 ‘economics Nobel’

While some climate economists have put the social cost of carbon at hundreds or even thousands of dollars per tonne of CO₂, one of the most influential analyses, by Yale University economist William Nordhaus, offers a much more modest figure of just over US$30.

Nordhaus won this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, but his analysis has some uncomfortable conclusions for those familiar with the science.

At this level, it will be economically “optimal” for the world to reduce its CO₂ emissions quite slowly, so that global warming peaks at about 4℃ some time next century. But this certainly doesn’t sound optimal from a scientific perspective.

Reconstructed global mean temperature anomalies for 0–2000 CE, and DICE-2016R projections for 2015–2400. CREDIT, Author provided

The impossibility of knowing the social cost of carbon

Calculating this magical economic balancing point is the holy grail of climate economics, and sadly it also seems to be an impossible task, because the question is so complex as to be unanswerable.

Why so? Normally, we gain knowledge via three main methods. The first option is to design an experiment. If that’s impossible, we can look for a similar case to observe and compare. And if that too is impossible, we can design a model that might hopefully answer our questions.

Generally, the laws of physics fall into the first category. It’s pretty straightforward to design an experiment to demonstrate the heat-trapping properties of CO₂ in a lab, for instance.

But we can’t do a simple experiment to assess the global effects of CO₂ emissions, so instead climatologists have to fall back on the second or third options. They can compare today’s conditions with previous fluctuations in atmospheric CO₂ to gauge the likely effects. They also design models to forecast future conditions on the basis of known physical principles.

By contrast, economists trying to put a dollar value on future climate damage face an impossible task. Like scientists, they cannot usefully test or make comparisons, but the economic effects of future climate change on an unprecedented 10 billion people are too fiendishly complex to model with confidence.

Unlike the immutable laws of physics, the laws of economics depend on markets, which in turn rely on trust. This trust could break down in some catastrophic future drought or deluge. So economists’ various rival calculations for the social costs of carbon are all based on unavoidable guesswork about the value of damage from unprecedented future warming.

This view is understandably unpopular with most climate economists. Many new studies claim that recent statistical techniques are steadily improving our estimates of the value of climate damage, based mainly on the local economic effects of short-run temperature and other weather changes in recent decades.

But so far, the world has experienced only about 1℃ of global warming, with at most 0.3℃ from one year to the next. That gives us almost no way of knowing the damage from warming of 3℃ or so; it may turn out to be many times worse than projected from past damage, as various tipping points are breached.

Focus on emission reduction, not damage cost

One reason why economists keep trying to value climate damage is a 1993 US Presidential Executive Order that requires cost-of-carbon estimates for use in US regulations. But my findings support what many other climate economists have been doing anyway. That is to build models that ignore the future dollar cost of climate damage, and instead look at feasible, low-cost ways to cut emissions enough to hit physical targets, such as limiting global warming to 1.5℃ or 2℃, or reaching zero net emissions by 2100.

Once we know these pathways, we don’t need to worry about the future cost of climate damage – all we need to ask is the cost of reducing emissions by a given amount, by a given deadline.

Of course, these costs are still deeply uncertain, because they depend on future developments in renewable energy technologies, and all sorts of other economic factors. But they are not as fiendishly uncertain as trying to pin a dollar value on future climate damage.

Read more: Fresh thinking: the carbon tax that would leave households better off

Focusing on the cost of emissions-reduction pathways allows researchers to put their effort into practical issues, such as how far and fast countries can shift to zero-emission electricity generation. Countries such as Sweden and the UK have already begun implementing this kind of action-oriented climate policies. While far from ideal, they are among the best-ranked major economies in the Climate Change Performance Index. Australia, by contrast, is ranked third worst.

But aren’t trillion-dollar estimates of future warming damage, as featured in the recent US Fourth National Climate Assessment, necessary ammunition for advocates of climate action? Maybe, but it is still important to appreciate that these estimates are founded on a large chunk of guesswork.

Setting climate targets will always be a political question as well as a scientific one. But it’s an undeniably sensible aim to keep climate within the narrow window that has sustained human civilisation for the past 11,000 years. With that window rapidly closing, it makes sense for policymakers just to focus on getting the best bang for their buck in cutting emissions.

– ref. We can’t know the future cost of climate change. Let’s focus on the cost of avoiding it instead – http://theconversation.com/we-cant-know-the-future-cost-of-climate-change-lets-focus-on-the-cost-of-avoiding-it-instead-108051

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Wintle, Professor Conservation Ecology, University of Melbourne

It may not look like a pristine expanse of Amazon rainforest or an African savannah, but the patch of bush at the end of the street could be one of the only places on the planet that harbour a particular species of endangered animal or plant.

Our newly published global study of the conservation value of landscapes in 27 countries across four continents has found these small patches of habitat are critical to the long-term survival of many rare and endangered species.

In Australia, our cities are home to, on average, three times as many threatened species per unit area as rural environments. This means urbanisation is one of the most destructive processes for biodiversity.

It tends to be the smaller patches of vegetation that go first, making way for a housing development, a freeway extension, or power lines. Despite government commitments to enhance the vegetation cover of urban areas and halt species extinctions, the loss of vegetation in Australian cities continues.

Read more: We’re investing heavily in urban greening, so how are our cities doing?

This story plays out all over the world day after day. Of course, it’s not just an urban story. Patches of rural vegetation are continually making way for, say, a new pivot irrigation system or a new mine to provide local jobs.

Remnant salmon gum woodland surrounded by cropland near Bencubbin in Western Australia’s northeast wheatbelt. Mike Griffiths, Author provided

Mostly, policymakers and scientists do not consider these losses to be, on their own, a fatal blow to the biodiversity of a region or country. Small, often isolated patches of vegetation are considered expendable, tradeable, of limited ecological value due to their small size and relatively large amount of “edgy” habitat. Wrong.

Research forces a rethink

Our study analysed the relationship between conservation value of vegetation patches and their size and isolation in landscapes across Europe, Australia, North America and Africa. The findings prompt a rethink of long-held views about the relative importance of small, isolated habitat patches for biodiversity conservation. We show that these patches often have unique ecological and environmental characteristics.

The critically endangered Western Ringtail Possum lives mainly in small habitat patches in or around urban areas near Perth and is under intense pressure from housing development, foxes, cats and dogs. Yokochi K., Bencini R./Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

That’s because they are the last patches left over from extensive clearing of flat, fertile land for agriculture or urban growth close to rivers and bays. They often contain habitats for rare or endangered species that have disappeared from the rest of the landscape. This makes these small, isolated patches of habitat disproportionately important for the survival of many species.

Our study calls for a rethink of urban planning and vegetation management regulations and policies that allow small patches of vegetation to be destroyed with lower (and often zero) scrutiny. We argue that the environment is suffering a death by a thousand cuts. The existence of large conservation reserves doesn’t compensate for the small patches of habitat being destroyed or degraded because those reserves tend to contain different species to the ones being lost.

The combined impact of the loss of many small patches is massive. It’s a significant contributor to our current extinction crisis.

Read more: Let’s get this straight, habitat loss is the number-one threat to Australia’s species

Why are small patches seen as dispensable?

A key variable used in decisions on vegetation-clearing applications is the size of patch being destroyed. Authorities that regulate vegetation management and approve applications are more permissive of destruction of small patches of vegetation.

This is partly due to a large body of ecological theory known as island biogeography theory and subordinate theories from metapopulation ecology and landscape ecology. These theories suggest that species richness and individual species’ population sizes depend on the degree of isolation of the patch, its size and the quality of the habitat it contains.

While it is crucial that we conserve large, intact landscapes and wilderness, the problem with conserving only large and well-connected patches of high-quality vegetation is that not all species will be conserved. This is because some species exist only in small, isolated and partially degraded habitats, such as those characteristic of urban bushlands or remnant bush in agricultural areas.

A remnant wetland is still valuable habitat for species like the Pacific Heron. Wayne Butterworth/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

For this reason, we highlight the importance of protecting and restoring habitats in these small isolated patches. And these areas do tend to be more vulnerable to invasion by weeds or feral animals. If the impacts of invasive species are not managed, they will eventually lead to the destruction of the habitat values and the loss of the species those habitats support.

Small and isolated patches of vegetation on the urban fringe are under enormous pressure from human use, pets, escaped seed of Agapanthus and the many other invasive species we plant in our gardens. These plants spread into local bushland, where they outcompete the native plants.

Communities can make a difference

As well as these perils, being on the urban fringe also brings opportunity. If a remnant patch of vegetation at the end of the street is seen to be of national environmental importance, that presents a great opportunity to channel the energies of community groups into conserving and restoring these patches.

A patch that is actively cared for by the community will provide better habitat for species. It’s also less likely to fall foul of development aspirations or infrastructure projects. The vicious cycle of degradation and neglect of small patches of habitat can be converted into a virtuous cycle when their value is communicated and local communities get behind preserving and managing them.

Volunteer community groups can play a vital role in preserving and enhancing small habitat patches. Robin Clarey, Friends of Edithvale Seaford Wetlands, Author provided

Urban planners and developers can get on board too. Rather than policies that enable the loss of vegetation in urban areas, we should be looking at restoring habitats in places that have lost or are losing them. This is key to designing healthy, liveable cities as well as protecting threatened species.

Biodiversity-sensitive urban design makes more of local vegetation by complementing the natural remnant patches with similar habitat features in the built environment, while delivering health and well-being benefits to residents. Urban development should be seen as an opportunity to enhance biodiversity through restoration, instead of an inevitable driver of species loss.

Read more: Here’s how to design cities where people and nature can both flourish

– ref. The small patch of bush over your back fence might be key to a species’ survival – http://theconversation.com/the-small-patch-of-bush-over-your-back-fence-might-be-key-to-a-species-survival-108672

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Harcourt, J.W. Nevile Fellow in Economics, UNSW

It has been called “the Kylie effect”, after one of Australia’s most famous exports.

It is the path taken by Australians wanting to crack the big time in Britain. Long before pop princess Kylie Minogue hit the stage, indeed, the path was well-worn – including by bands like the Easybeats and AC/DC, and writers like Germaine Greer and Clive James.

Just as with talented Australians, so too with Australian businesses. They set their sights firmly on the British market. London becomes their second home. “The continent” is something that only looks inviting once they’ve made it in Old Blighty. Most of Europe remains largely unexplored territory.

But the slow-moving car crash of Brexit suggests Australian companies need to stop focusing only on topping the British pops and think about Eurovision.

Read more: The Brexit mess could lead to a break-up of a no longer United Kingdom

Historical ties

The Kylie effect – which European officials less charmingly call “Europhobia” or “Channel Fever” – remains glaringly evident in export data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

There were 5,975 companies selling goods to Britain in 2016-17. This compares with 3,040 selling to Germany, 1,764 to the Netherlands, 1,581 to France and 552 to Italy.

This is hardly surprising given Australia’s strong historical ties with Britain. We share a common language and cultural, legal and political traditions. Britain was our number one trading partner until 1966 (when Japan overtook it). It remains among our top 20 partners when most the other spots have been taken by Asian neighbours.

Relations with Europe haven’t been helped by some historical animosity over contentious trade issues like the extravagant agricultural subsidies paid within the European Union. These have been seen as against the interests of Australian farmers. It was once said that for the cost of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy you could send all the French cows around the world business class twice.

One reason for establishing the EU-Australia Leadership Forum (which had its first meeting in June 2017) is to get past these issues and have a broader conversation focused on other promising areas of collaboration.

Scrambled exit

What happens when you impose Brexit on this scenario?

Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union is (as Pascal Lamy, the former director general of the World Trade Organisation, was fond of saying) a bit like separating the yolk from the white after making an omelette.

But the democratic process by which it was decided must be respected, even if increasing numbers of the British public realising how high the divorce bill is going to be.

Right now it appears there appears to be no acceptable divorce deal in place. The British government has negotiated a deal with the EU that prime pinister Theresa May says is “the best deal available”, but it is unacceptable to the majority of Parliament.

So May has to head back to Brussels “cap in hand” to seek a better deal. If that fails, Britain could be headed for an economically disruptive “no deal” Brexit by the end of March 2019.

As a result the British Treasury and the Bank of England fear Britain might be plunged into its deepest recession in nearly a century. The Bank of England has warned the economy could shrink by as much as 8%, with unemployment and inflation soaring.

Read more: The economic cost of Brexit is unavoidable – but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it

European identity

In some ways the European Union is in a dilemma. It wants to make separation hard for British to discourage other countries to follow. At same time it doesn’t want to weaken the British economy as that could also hurt Europe and the global economy.

Nor is Brexit the only issue for the EU to worry about. There are big challenges in Italy, Hungary, Austria and Poland. And then there’s Russia.

The European project began with the best of intentions. It was set up to prevent another war between France and Germany, and to create lasting peace and economic stability in Europe. This has largely been achieved.

But as the project evolved it became a question of how far you take a customs union and expand it to include a common currency, central bank and foreign policy. As much as European unity is desirable, it has it limits. National identity still trumps it. As journalist Mark Kenny once noted, “Australia can enter the Eurovision song contest, but Europe can’t.”

We need double dealing

Though the headlines about Brexit seem pretty grim for Britain, it will continue to remain an obvious market for Australian exporters.

But Europe is clearly becoming more important. Indeed, according to the DHL Export Barometer, which surveys exporters around Australia about conditions affecting their global business prospects) 17% see Europe as their most desirable new territory. In second place is Southeast Asia (15%). Britain ranks with Indonesia and Japan (11% each).

As Australia has a free trade agreement by another name (a Comprehensive Economic Partnership) with Japan, and is about to sign one with Indonesia, there is a strong case now to complete deals with the European Union and Britain.

The true irony might be that Brexit turns our long-standing Europhobia into giving us Eurovision.

– ref. Australia’s Brexit strategy: a little less Britpopulism, a little more Eurovision please – http://theconversation.com/australias-brexit-strategy-a-little-less-britpopulism-a-little-more-eurovision-please-108587

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Phillips, Associate Professor, Centre for Social Research and Methods, Director, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Australian National University

It would be unlikely if our current welfare system gave us the best possible value for the A$120 billion we hand out in benefits each year.

For one thing, we live, work, and arrange families differently to what we did in earlier decades, but the size and nature of the payments has barely changed.

What if we could eliminate more poverty than we do at the moment while spending no more, or what if we could spend less and leave poverty no worse off?

Until now, these have been hard questions to answer.

Read more: Don’t believe what they say about inequality. Some of us are worse off

Examining the impact of up to 20 welfare payments and 55 supplementary payments and concessions with multiple withdrawal rates across a range of family types has been time-consuming to near impossible.

At the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods, we have developed a new algorithm that can calculate it almost instantly.

The first such tool in Australia, we have first used it to work out how to optimise a subset of benefits to get the biggest bang for the bucks.

What matters is the poverty gap

Our target is the poverty gap. The poverty gap is a similar concept to the poverty rate except that it is based not only on whether a household is in poverty, but also how deep in poverty that household is.

The most commonly used standard says a single-person household is in poverty if its income is below about A$450 per week (half the median disposable income).

The less commonly used standard, which we prefer, defines a single-person household as being in poverty if its income is below half the median disposable income net of housing costs, producing a threshold of A$370 per week.

Read more: New evidence suggests we may need to rethink policies aimed at poverty

The poverty gap is the dollar shortfall below these thresholds. A household above them has no poverty gap.

As in real life, our algorithm has a budget constraint. If it didn’t, governments could just give everyone lots of money and there would be no poverty.

It finds that if the aim is to minimise the poverty gap, we need to make quite dramatic changes in how we spend welfare dollars.

We need to raise the rate, big time

To minimise the most commonly used measure of poverty, the Newstart unemployment benefit would have to climb from its current A$551 per fortnight to A$821 – a jump of 50%, and a far bigger hike than the A$150 per fortnight that crossbench Senators are calling for with the backing of the Raise The Rate campaign.

The Age Pension would stay about the same, Family Tax Benefit A for children aged less than 13 years would fall from A$218 per fortnight to A$154, Family Tax Benefit B would fall by a similar proportion, rent assistance would stay about the same, and the parenting payment would fall modestly.

And probably cut the pension

The results are different when we try to minimise poverty as defined by our preferred measure – half of median disposable income, net of housing costs.

To do this, we would have to cut the age pension from A$902 per fortnight to A$836, lift Newstart less substantially to A$751 per fortnight (still an increase of around A$100 per week, and still more than crossbenchers are asking for), lift rent assistance from a maximum rate of A$137 per fortnight to A$161, and leave family payments about where they are.

We could cut poverty by 11%, at no cost

The algorithm suggests that reductions in the poverty gap of as much as 11% could be achieved simply by spending more on Newstart and less on other benefits, without any extra spending on the overall bundle of payments.

Alternatively, we could cut our spending on the bundle by about 7% and leave the poverty gap no worse. Lifting the budget for the bundle could lead to even larger reductions in poverty.

A 10% increase in the budget those benefits could reduce poverty by more than 20%.

The Council of Social Service supports an increase of $150 a fortnight. It should probably be bigger. ACOSS

But there is more to benefits than poverty

There are arguably sound reasons why we pay more to people on long-term benefits such as the pension than to people on short-term benefits such as Newstart, meaning that poverty reduction isn’t the system’s only goal.

However, it should be noted that the difference in indexation arrangements between the two benefits has pushed down Newstart from about 90% of the age pension in the early 1990s to just 60% today, meaning Newstart is highly likely to be genuinely out of whack, whatever the system’s objectives.

ACOSS

Also, our analysis finds that many households in apparent poverty are not on benefits, and so can’t be helped by changes to the bundle of payments.

On the other hand, while some of these households are legitimately in poverty, others are asset-rich. Around 56% of the apparent gap in poverty resides in households whose main source of income is something such as shares, rental income or superanuation, suggesting they might not need as much help as our algorithm suggests.

Read more: It’s not just Newstart. Single parents are $271 per fortnight worse off. Labor needs an overarching welfare review

We believe our new methodology is an Australian first.

It provides a very efficient means of deriving optimal social security payment settings from a variety of policy objectives.

We expect to broaden it to more policy objectives in the future and to a broader range of payments and elements of the social security system, and to include personal income tax.

Read more: New budget standards show just how inadequate the Newstart Allowance has become

Our method is in its infancy.

We have provided one illustration of how it can be used, and the results are striking: the best way to cut poverty when constrained by a budget is to boost Newstart while pushing down either the pension or family benefits by a modest amount.

– ref. Cut the pension, boost Newstart. What our algorithm says is the best way to get value for our welfare dollars – http://theconversation.com/cut-the-pension-boost-newstart-what-our-algorithm-says-is-the-best-way-to-get-value-for-our-welfare-dollars-108417

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Lilley, Professor in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, The University of Queensland

Journalist Stan Grant once compared our Indigenous cultural heritage to the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. Ironically, though Grant pointed to the Lake Mungo site in the Willandra Lakes as an example, Aboriginal people are poorly represented by Australia’s World Heritage sites. Torres Strait Islanders are not represented at all.

Of 19 World Heritage sites across the country, including such wonders as the Great Barrier Reef and the Sydney Opera House, only two, Kakadu and Uluru-Kata Tjuta, recognise the values of “living” Aboriginal culture, alongside the breathtaking natural features in those areas. These are what UNESCO calls “mixed” sites, bringing nature and culture together.

Australia’s two other such sites – the Tasmanian Wilderness, and the Willandra lakes – recognise archaeological records of Aboriginal people, along with natural values, but not contemporary Indigenous rights and associations.

None of Australia’s three sites inscribed purely for cultural values recognises Aboriginal people. They are the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne, and a multi-component listing of convict sites across the country including Port Arthur in Tasmania.

Aboriginal people rightly remain concerned, and often angry, that they were excluded from the original nominations of all of Australia’s World Heritage sites, natural, cultural and mixed. Yet they also remain deeply sceptical about the benefits of such listing.

Some progress

There has been some progress. Australia received enormous international credit for modifying, in 1994, the original Uluru-Kata Tjuta nomination to recognise living Aboriginal culture. But the real turnaround has been when Aboriginal people have directed these processes themselves.

After years of work, Gunditjmara people succeeded in having the site of Budj Bim on Aboriginal land in southwest Victoria, placed on Australia’s Tentative World Heritage List. The site includes a remarkable system of eel traps around Lake Condah. Elements of these traps date back over 6,500 years. This is the first step in the long process of gaining World Heritage recognition.

Remains of a 1,700 year old stone house at Budj Bim, Victoria. denisbin/Flickr, CC BY-ND

Recently the World Heritage Committee established a forum for Indigenous peoples – in the making since the early 2000s. With the issue now so firmly on the international agenda, Australia will come under intense scrutiny to lift its game regarding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander World Heritage. How might that be done?

Indigenous heritage now

World Heritage sites are assessed against ten criteria across natural and cultural values. Originally highly Eurocentric, these criteria have gradually widened to become more inclusive, especially of Indigenous people.

Uluru-Kata Tjuta has long been held up as the paragon of this shift. It was originally listed as World Heritage in 1987, solely for its environmental characteristics. It was relisted in 1994 to include Aboriginal values, recognising the importance of Uluru and Kata Tjuta to the Traditional Owners, the Anangu people. Today, the area is recognised for being one of the most ancient human landscapes in the world, including its spiritual dimensions.

Rock art at Uluru. Shutterstock

Read more: Why we are banning tourists from climbing Uluru

Unlike Uluru-Kata Tjuta, and, later, Kakadu, the Tasmanian Wilderness and Willandra are recognised for their archaeological and rock-art sites, rather than for their living heritage. Willandra, for instance, celebrates archaeological evidence that demonstrates an Aboriginal presence more than 40,000 years ago, in what was then a lush environment quite unlike the present semi-arid conditions.

Such archaeological and rock-art sites are unquestionably important for the extraordinary history they contain, and Aboriginal people have a particular attachment to them as evidence of their ancient and continuing connection with their land. They are actively involved in management of these places for that very reason.

Yet the cultural value of these sites remains defined by non-Aboriginal archaeologists, rather than Aboriginal belief systems or political aspirations.

Researcher Elspeth Hayes with Mark Djandjomerr and traditional owner May Nango at Madjedbebe rock shelter in Kakadu National Park in 2017. Vincent Lamberti

The Tasmanian Wilderness is recognised for being one of the last expanses of temperate rainforest in the world. It also includes evidence in limestone caves of Aboriginal occupation up to 35,000 years ago. Yet the listing fails to identify or formally recognise the relationship between that area – particularly the hand-stencil, rock-art sites – and Tasmanian Aboriginal people today.

Read more: Friday essay: how archaeology helped save the Franklin River

Outdated process

We are investigating what World Heritage might better deliver to Indigenous people. One of our major cases is the popular tourist destination of K’Gari (Fraser Island), given a World Heritage listing for its natural heritage in 1992. Some members of the local Butchulla community want Aboriginal heritage included in the listing.

Many archaeological and Butchulla story sites at K’gari are unquestionably unique to the Butchulla people and have great significance for the community today. Takky Wooroo (Indian Head), the rocky headland that anchors the vast sand island in place, is one well-known example.

Takky Wooroo (Indian Head) anchors the vast sand island of K’Gari (Fraser Island). Shutterstock

However the Butchulla face hurdles in having this heritage recognised. The first is proving that their heritage is “better” than examples of Aboriginal heritage elsewhere. The second is demonstrating a continuous connection to it.

Both of these criteria are central to the World Heritage process, but are legacies of an outdated approach to Aboriginal culture. The process lumps diverse Aboriginal people into one group, when we know that Australia was home to hundreds of different peoples.

While the connection of the Butchulla to their heritage has already been recognised under Native Title, we would never assume that European cultures must remain unchanged since 1700 to be recognised as heritage.

How to do better

Our research is consistently finding that Aboriginal people are deeply sceptical about the benefits of World Heritage listing, despite efforts by State and Commonwealth governments to ensure Aboriginal input.

One concern is that World Heritage is seen as universal, something for all people. But some Aboriginal people see this as diminishing their very particular attachment to places, such as the remains of Mungo Man at the Willandra Lakes, an ancestor of deep personal and community significance.

‘Mungo Man’ was repatriated to the Willandra Lakes, where the remains were found, in 2017. PERRY DUFFIN

What can we do better? It is simple. All future heritage sites should canvass Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander involvement early in the nomination process, even those where there is no obvious Aboriginal link to the site. This process is already retrospectively underway for Australia’s natural sites. and in 2012, it meant the Indigenous heritage values of Queensland’s Wet Tropics were recognised at a national level, which is vital to having them recognised internationally.

We should also support Indigenous people to make their own nominations. This is what’s happening at Budj Bim. While non-Indigenous archaeologists are helping with the nomination, it is being driven by local Aboriginal people. They have linked the archaeological value to both ancestral stories, and to the Gunditjmara’s continuing efforts to maintain and protect their heritage today.

Read more: The detective work behind the Budj Bim eel traps World Heritage bid

What other possible sites are there?

There are a great range of other amazing sites that we know are “out there”. Take the famed “Dreaming tracks” and “songlines” that criss-cross the continent, for instance. Tracing the travels of ancestral beings, they encode the locations of living places and sacred spaces, mapping the disposition of resources across the landscape and through seasonal cycles.

Read more: Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is a must-visit exhibition for all Australians

They encompass some of the nation’s most dramatic natural features as well as camping places, sources of water, food and other resources, art sites and Indigenous sacred places, thus combining natural and cultural, tangible and intangible, and ancestral as well as living heritage.

With suitable protection of secret-sacred information, as well as the routes themselves and the specific sites they incorporate, Aboriginal songlines and the routes of ancestor-heroes in Torres Strait could be a future World Heritage nomination. A number are already on various state government heritage lists.

Similar nominations are appearing in other parts of the world, such as the recently-listed mixed site of Pimachiowin Aki, co-developed by the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) peoples “in the heart of Canada’s boreal forest” – not least because of precedents set by Australia over the years.

– ref. Australia’s problem with Aboriginal World Heritage – http://theconversation.com/australias-problem-with-aboriginal-world-heritage-82912

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

Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese, a senior minister in the last Labor government and briefly deputy prime minister, is preparing to “hit the ground running” if the ALP wins next year’s election.

But meanwhile the opposition is concentrating on staying focused and on message, fully aware that things can always go wrong.

Speaking to The Conversation, Albanese wouldn’t comment on Bill Shorten’s unpopularity with voters, arguing instead that it’s a matter of whether the Labor team is “seen as worthy of election”.

Albanese predicts next week’s ALP national conference will be “very constructive”, dismissing concerns about divisions over boat turnbacks.

The debate is not focused on that, he said – rather the emphasis is on settling people from Nauru and Manus in third countries, dealing with those needing medical assistance, and co-operating in regional processing.

Asked about the ALP last week capitulating to the government over the encryption bill, Albanese said he wasn’t involved in the decision, which was “made by the leadership group”.

Always under pressure from the Greens in his own seat of Grayndler, Albanese predicts a “schism” in the “dysfunctional” party is imminent. A conflict between two tendencies in the NSW Greens could lead to a split “as soon as the March state election … two parties essentially running against each other trying to claim the same ground”.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Anthony Albanese on Labor’s road ahead – http://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-anthony-albanese-on-labors-road-ahead-108687

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ittima Cherastidtham, Fellow, Higher Education Program, Grattan Institute

School leavers across Australia are about to get their ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank). In the coming weeks, they will get a chance to update their university course preferences.

Most students attend university to improve their job prospects. But less than half of surveyed students believe they had enough information when they chose their course.

Here are three things prospective university students should keep in mind when finalising their preferences.

1. Drop-out rates

About one in five school leavers who start university will not complete a degree within nine years – and they generally earn less than their peers who graduate.

A Grattan Institute report released in April showed people who study part-time are much more likely to drop out than full-time students. Course choice is also important. Among students with similar characteristics, those studying health or education are less likely to drop out than those studying IT, engineering, science, or humanities.

Read more: So you’ve got your ATAR, now what? Here are some options

Surveys of people who consider dropping out show engineering and IT students are often dissatisfied with the teaching and cite a lack of interest in their course. Science students are more likely to consider leaving because of poor employment prospects. This is rarely a reason cited by health and education students.

2. Early-career employment

Health and education bachelor-degree graduates have strong employment prospects. A Grattan report released in September found about 80% of health and education graduates were in a full-time jobs four months after finishing university. And they continue to do well during their early career (from their mid-20s to mid-30s). The share of women in this age range in full-time jobs is generally lower than men because many women leave work to have children.

Only 60% of science graduates who were looking for a full-time job found one within four months of finishing their degree. While this is partly because more science graduates continue studying, their poor job prospects persist into their early career. Some 66% of male and 50% of female science graduates in their mid-20s to mid-30s have a full-time job. Employment outcomes for other disciplines are shown below.

Having a job is one thing. Having a job that uses the skills developed at university is another. About 80% of employed early-career engineering and law graduates have a professional or managerial job. The figure for early-career nursing and education graduates is even better.

Getting a professional job is more difficult for graduates in generalist fields – humanities, commerce and science – and their prospects have declined since the Global Financial Crisis. Fewer than 60% of employed early-career male science graduates have a professional job. Female humanities graduates who have a job are more likely to work in sales or services than in professional occupations. Figures for other disciplines are shown below.

3. Lifetime earnings

In terms of pay, commerce graduates typically have a slow start but can expect to earn above-average income over their lifetime – A$2.1 million for women and A$3 million for men.

Because nurses and teachers have flatter pay scales, men in nursing or education have lower-than-average lifetime earnings (about A$2.5 million). But their flexible working conditions make it easier for women with children to work in these fields. The average female nursing or education graduate can expect to earn A$2.1 million over their lifetime – more than the average female graduate.

Law and engineering graduates have much stronger lifetime earnings prospects than humanities and science graduates.

A 2014 Grattan Institute report found graduates of some universities tended to earn more over their lifetime than graduates of others, but the variation between universities was not as large as variation between fields of education.

A final word of advice

Students should look beyond course names to explore course content. That way they may be able to improve their employment prospects while still studying in a field that interests them. This information can be found on each university’s web page.

Read more: Your ATAR isn’t the only thing universities are looking at

For example, students who like science should consider health courses. Health students spend about 25% of their first year studying science subjects – and they have better chances of securing a job that uses their qualification.

While choosing preferences is only one of the many steps students will take in their higher education journey, getting this right is important. The better choices they make now, the sooner students can realise their career goals.

– ref. Three things high school graduates should keep in mind when they have their ATARs – http://theconversation.com/three-things-high-school-graduates-should-keep-in-mind-when-they-have-their-atars-107601

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Wright, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science, Western Sydney University

As the drought drags on, small communities in eastern Australia are turning to emergency water supplies. Often, this means bore water, which has prompted health fears over its high salt content.

As alarming as this is, drinking water right around Australia can have surprisingly high levels of salt. All capital cities have water salinity levels that are within the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines of 500 milligrams per litre (mg/L) – however the guidelines do not regard salinity as a health consideration, but rather as an “aesthetic” guideline, based on taste.

Read more: Why does some tap water taste weird?

But Australians consume too much salt, and many need to reduce salt in their diet, so the sodium component of salt has key health implications. For people following low-sodium diets for health reasons, the salt in their drinking water may be important. It is generally recommended that people on low-sodium diets drink water with less than 20mg of sodium per litre, but Brisbane, Adelaide and most of Perth have saltier water than this.

What salinity means

Water salinity is commonly reported as “total dissolved solids,” which includes all organic and inorganic substances. “Salts” are soluble compounds of sodium, calcium, potassium, magnesium, chloride, sulfate and bicarbonate. Salts enter our waters from everywhere: the ground, the ocean, the air and living creatures.

We investigated drinking water in Australian capital cities, and some regional locations to compare salt content. When data was not publicly available for capitals, we approached water authorities for data on water salinity.

We found four major groupings for the capital cities:

1. The highest salinity water was in some Perth districts
2. The second and third highest were in Adelaide and Brisbane
3. Sydney and some supply districts within Perth (such as Tamworth Hill) have the joint second lowest salinity.
4. Melbourne, Hobart, Darwin and Canberra all share the lowest salinity.

Water can start tasting noticably salty at 180 mg/L. The figure below shows which districts have less than or more than 180 mg/L.

Average salinity (TDS) concentrations for Capital Cities. At more than 180 mg/L drinking water can start to taste salty (shaded yellow) and is shaded green for <180 mg/L. Author provided

Health implications

Generally, we all love salt in our food. But one element of salt has potentially serious consequences for many Australians: sodium. It is recommended we consume less than 2,300mg per day. People with high blood pressure should consume less than 1,600mg per day, but the average Australian consumes twice that.

High levels of sodium in the diet are associated with elevated blood pressure (hypertension), for which a sodium-reduced diet is sometimes recommended. Health care professionals may also recommend low sodium diets for patients with kidney disease and cardiovascular disease.

If you’re following a low sodium diet, you may not have considered water as a potential source. It is generally recommended that people on low sodium diets drink water with less than 20 mg/L of sodium.

Salinity varies a lot

We obtained sodium data that showed water from Darwin, Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart have less than 20 mg/L. However, Perth (most areas), Adelaide and Brisbane have more than 20mg/L of sodium in their water supplies.

However, water supplies can be complex. One district in Perth, Tamworth Hill, has 20mg of sodium per litre, which conforms with the requirements for a low-sodium diet. Another Perth district around 50km away, Mt Yokine, has sodium levels more that six times higher, at 125mg/L.

Average sodium concentration for Capital city water supplies. At more than 20 mg/L people on low-sodium diets need to consider sodium in their drinking water – they should discuss with their doctor/dietician. CREDIT, Author provided

Regional and remote regions of Australia often have water with elevated salinity. Tennant Creek and Alice Springs in Northern Territory and Geraldton in WA are three regional Australian cities with sodium content higher than generally found in Australian capitals.

Horrocks in WA has the highest, based on our review of available public data. It is a very small coastal settlement 500km north of Perth. At 408 mg/L it is more than 130 times higher than Darwin’s average sodium concentration.

What can you do about it?

Where medical health professionals recommend a low sodium diet consumption of sodium through drinking water should be considered. If unsure of the sodium content of your water, and if you are on a low sodium diet, then contact your local water supplier. This could also be a topic to discuss with your doctor or other health care providers.

There are a number of small household water treatment systems that use reverse-osmosis to remove minerals. They can provide treated water with much lower sodium content.

Low-salt bottled water could be an option, but caution is needed. Apart from the expense, some commercial bottled waters also have elevated sodium levels. Check the mineral contents on the bottle label, and if you are on a low-sodium diet make sure that sodium is low.

Hard to find this data

One reason for the over-representation of the Northern Territory and Western Australia is simply that the information is available (we applaud them both). We have not been able to find sodium results for many regional and remote water supplies across Australia.

In many cases, water authorities report compliance with Australia’s Drinking Water Guidelines – as is proper – but currently sodium is not measured as a potential health issue.

We suggest sodium should be treated as a health-related attribute of drinking water. It would therefore be monitored in every water supply, and could be usefully advertised. Most people have too much salt in their diet, and it is true that much of this comes from processed food. But in some locations a surprisingly large amount can be from our drinking water.

– ref. Your drinking water could be saltier than you think (even if you live in a capital) – http://theconversation.com/your-drinking-water-could-be-saltier-than-you-think-even-if-you-live-in-a-capital-106054

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Greste, Professor of Journalism and Communications, The University of Queensland

Time Magazine has just announced its “Person of the Year” for 2018, and for once, it isn’t one person. This time it is four people and a newspaper.

Collectively calling them “The Guardians”, Time has awarded the accolade to the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Filipino journalist Maria Ressa who edits the Rappler news website, two young Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo currently serving seven-year sentences for exposing a massacre in Myanmar, and the staff of The Capital Gazette newspaper in the American town of Annapolis, Maryland, who continued publishing after five of their colleagues were gunned down in an attack in June.

Time’s Person of the Year cover is reserved for those who the magazine judges have had “the greatest impact on the news”, and not always for the better (it famously nominated Adolf Hitler in 1938). Its decision to name a collection of journalists is a marker not just of the impact those individuals have made, but a nod to the wider global crisis of confidence in journalism and “the truth”. The nominees are there partly for what they have done, but also for what they have come to represent.

Khashoggi is undoubtedly the best known of the group. The grim details of his assassination, in which he was lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get documents for his marriage before he was strangled and dismembered with a bone saw, are as compelling as any airport novel. But they also exposed the cynicism of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has tried to present himself as Saudi Arabia’s Western-friendly liberal saviour while ruthlessly and illiberally cracking down on dissenters.

As Khashoggi himself once asked in a Washington Post column:

Must we choose between movie theatres and our rights as citizens to speak out, whether in support of or critical of our government’s actions?

Maria Ressa is less well-known but no less courageous. A former CNN correspondent, she co-founded Rappler seven years ago, building it into one of the most trusted independent sources of news in The Philippines.

Rappler has fearlessly covered President Duterte’s authoritarian edicts, including his war on drugs that has taken an estimated 12,000 lives. In the process, she has weathered a storm of assaults from Duterte himself and his army of online trolls. She now faces up to 10 years in prison on tax evasion charges that seem contrived not to punish financial crimes but silence a vital critical voice.

Read more: Book: In the name of security – secrecy, surveillance and journalism

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo produced one of the most impressive pieces of journalism of 2017, investigating the murder of ten Rohingya Muslim men with forensic attention to detail. They unearthed a series of photographs of the victims and their killers, and were able to piece together a detailed narrative so compelling that the authorities were forced to imprison the soldiers responsible for 10 years. For their work, the Reuters journalists were also arrested for violating the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to seven years. (A police officer testified in court that they framed the journalists.)

And The Capital Gazette? A few hours after a gunman burst into the newspaper’s offices and murdered five staffers, one of its reporters, Chase Cook, tweeted: “I can tell you this. We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow”. The paper did exactly that.

It was not producing the kind of work that might attract a murderous response. It is a local rag that covers council elections and school sports, not autocrats and genocide. And yet the press is now so demonised that a reader felt justified in shooting it up for its reporting of his own court case.

From the local to the global, these examples expose the way one of the most fundamental pillars of a free, liberal society – journalism itself – is under assault.

The digital revolution is partly to blame. It has created a firehose of information that has enabled us to find “news” that confirms whatever we want to believe. In the process, it has eroded trust in the media and enabled anyone who squirms under its spotlight to dismiss it as “fake”. In the process, our capacity to hold informed, rational public debate has been dangerously undermined.

Make no mistake. This is a global crisis that strikes at the foundations of democracy, which is why Time’s decision is so timely and important.

Journalists are not without fault. News is a messy, imperfect human construct, and in the rush to create stories that stand out from the digital noise, standards have slipped. But the verbal and physical assaults on news agencies and their staff fail to acknowledge the professionalism that so many bring to their craft. The difference between fake news and the real thing is that good journalists acknowledge errors and correct them fast.

Read more: How investigative journalists are using social media to uncover the truth

The Time cover also demands a response. If we do nothing, we will end up heading further down a path that nobody but the authoritarians are happy with. Even in Australia, where national security laws have dramatically limited the ability of journalists to keep watch over government, the problems are acute and deteriorating. That is why a group of colleagues and I have set up the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom to advocate for media freedom in the broadest sense – the ability to work free of unnecessarily restrictive laws, in a financial environment that supports independent quality news.

The questions are huge. How do we balance the democratic need for transparency and accountability, with the demands of national security? How do we pay for journalism that is costly and necessary but not always commercially viable? How do we restore trust in an institution that underpins the way our society and our government works?

The AJF has partnered with the University of Queensland, where I am UNESCO Chair in Journalism and Communication, to work on research that tackles some of these most pressing problems.

If we do nothing, we can expect to see a lot more cases like Jamal Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, The Capital Gazette or Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. I suspect that is a world few of us would relish.

– ref. Four journalists, one newspaper: Time Magazine’s Person of the Year recognises the global assault on journalism – http://theconversation.com/four-journalists-one-newspaper-time-magazines-person-of-the-year-recognises-the-global-assault-on-journalism-108669

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Neera Bhatia, Senior Lecturer in Law, Deakin University

Organ transplantation relies on the generosity of a person to volunteer their organs for donation after death, or the generosity of the family to gift or donate the organs of their deceased relative.

But last year, the organs of just 510 deceased donors were transplanted into Australian recipients. This amounts to 20.7 donations per million people and puts Australia down to 17th place for international deceased organ donation.

Last week, a parliamentary committee report on organ donation and trafficking made a number of recommendations for the Australian government, including investigating whether an opt-out system of organ donation could help increase donation rates.

Read more: Here’s what Australia can do to help end the Chinese organ trade

Several countries have recently made the switch from opt-in to opt-out systems. But this hasn’t necessarily increased organ donation rates. One reason is if someone hasn’t actively opted in, their family members will still need to consent to their organs being removed. And where families don’t consent, the donation doesn’t proceed.

Opt-in vs opt-out

In Australia, a person must register to donate their organs or tissues. This is sometimes referred to as an opt-in system of organ donation.

While 69% of Australians believe organ donation is important, only one in three people are registered as organ donors.

In an attempt to boost similarly low donation rates, a number of countries – including Wales, Iceland and now England (by mid-2020) – have switched to opt-out systems.

In an opt-out system, a person is automatically presumed to have given their consent to be a donor before their death unless they had made a specific request not to donate their organs. So, organs may be taken unless people have registered an objection not to be donor, or their family members (next of kin) object. This is known as a “soft opt-out”.

Read more: How we can increase Australia’s organ donation rate

In 2017, France introduced a law that requires doctors to only inform the relatives about which organs are to be procured, and not ask their permission to procure. This is an example of a “hard opt-out” system.

We believe the consent of the family members (next of kin) should always be sought if a person has not registered their consent before death for their organ to be procured.

Historically, Australian governments have been wary of adopting an opt-out system of organ donation.

Despite several states considering reforming the current organ donation system and a 2016 independent review looking at options to boost donation rates, an opt-out system was not considered preferable. We suspect this was because people tend to react negatively when their choice is taken away.

There were just 510 deceased organ donors in Australia last year. Nimon/Shutterstock

Family consent

There is no conclusive evidence opt-out systems of organ donation increase the number of donors available.

An opt-out system is unlikely to increase donation rates without the consent of the family.

In our society, the family have always been responsible for decisions about a burial or cremation of the body of their relative. Arbitrarily violating this right would cause psychological harm and no direct benefit.

You only have to consider the anger and grief of parents in the scandal that broke out in 1999 around the non-consensual harvesting of their children’s organs at a UK hospital. It shows how devastating un-consented procurement of organs of a deceased relative would be.

There are other reasons why non-consensual organ procurement would cut across social expectations. Autopsies are now not performed routinely and if conducted are not without the consent of relatives. This further adds to the notion relatives have decision-making rights.

Are we to have an opt-out system which includes all citizens? Who would dare tell parents their dead child’s organs are to be compulsorily procured? Who would ignore the practices of certain religions which expect the deceased body to be buried intact? These are all insurmountable obstructions to hard opt-out systems.

There is significant variability in how opt-out systems work. Take Spain, for example. It introduced an opt-out system, often referred to as a presumed consent model, in 1979 and it took almost a decade before donation rates increased. Even when they did, Spain’s success was due largely to close consultation with family members, which continues today.

Brazil also introduced a presumed consent system of organ donation but abolished it after a year and a half, in late 1998. This was due to uncertainty, fear and mistrust of the medical profession prematurely declaring people dead to remove organs.

And even under the presumed consent system, the majority of doctors would only remove organs from the deceased after receiving consent from family members.

Gift of life

Opt-out systems of organ donation go against the very concept of gifting or donating. It’s taking organs without consent, as opposed to donation. It presumes consent by the deceased when none exists.

As a society, we need to normalise organ donation and dispel the fears, myths and perhaps sheer ambivalence that surrounds it.

We need to encourage innovative education programs and engagement with individuals and families to promote robust, honest and meaningful conversations about organ donation.

Read more: Organ donation campaigns could be more effective if they focused on feelings rather than facts

It may be difficult to have conversations about organ donation with families after a tragic accident or a sudden death. But, where possible, doctors should engage families in discussions about organ donation early on.

Family members should be encouraged to respect the wishes of the deceased, whether that was via the organ donation register, a prior conversation, or by any other means.

It’s unlikely there will be an adequate supply of organs to meet the demand anytime soon in Australia. There is no simple solution or quick fix to increase organ donation rates, but an opt-out system is not the answer.

Organ donation should continue to be just that – a donation. Based on the generosity and free will of the donor by virtue of a gift, and not based on a default system of taking without consent.

– ref. An opt-out system isn’t the solution to Australia’s low rate of organ donation – http://theconversation.com/an-opt-out-system-isnt-the-solution-to-australias-low-rate-of-organ-donation-108336

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna Olijnyk, Lecturer, Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide

Victorian schools could potentially be without federal funding after 31 December 2018 if the state government refuses to sign up to the Gonski 2.0 funding reforms. In a letter to Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews on Monday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated he was committed to coming to an agreement by today, when the Council of Australian Governments meets. The Victorian government has raised its portion of school funding from 66% to 75%, and is asking that the federal government also raise their share by an additional 5% to 25%.

Another letter, this time written by shadow federal education minister Tanya Plibersek to Andrews, circulated this morning. In the letter, Plibersek promised Labor would backdate any school funding withheld from Victorian students if it wins the May election.

Read more: FactCheck: does Victoria have Australia’s lowest rate of public school funding?

The federal government has responded by saying Victoria isn’t entitled to federal funding after 31 December if the state doesn’t sign on to the reforms. The Victorian government claims it has legal advice that says the state would be entitled to funding come 2019.

In what essentially amounts to a game of political chicken, who wins? The federal government is right that it doesn’t have to fund Victorian schools in 2019 if they don’t sign an agreement. But that would be a poor political move at a time when the Coalition faces mounting criticism in the lead-up to an election.

The Australian constitution, money, and schools

The standoff is underpinned by the financial relationship between state and federal government, established by the Australian constitution. What does the constitution require the governments to do in this situation? Basically, nothing. Neither the state nor the federal government is under any constitutional obligation to fund schools. Nor does the constitution give Victoria an entitlement to federal funding.

Read more: State governments are vital for Australian democracy: here’s why

The constitution leaves responsibility for running schools to state governments. The federal parliament is not given power to make laws about schools. So why does the federal government have anything to do with schools?

The answer lies in a very powerful provision of the constitution: section 96. This section allows the federal government to give money to state governments, on such terms and conditions as the federal Parliament thinks fit. For example, the federal government may give a state money to run schools, on the condition the money is distributed in a certain way, or even that particular teaching methods are adopted.

What can state government do if it doesn’t like the conditions?

There are three options:

1. the state can accept the money on those conditions, even though it doesn’t like them
2. the state can refuse to accept the money at all
3. the state can try to negotiate with the federal government to secure the money on more appealing conditions.

From a constitutional point of view, the states are in a weak position here. The federal government can simply refuse to hand over the money, leaving the states with empty pockets. Australian state governments rely heavily on section 96 grants from the federal government.

The states are unable to collect enough tax to fund crucial government responsibilities (such as education and health). Under the constitution, the federal government has greater ability to collect tax, so the states rely on the federal government for a large chunk of the state budget each year. It’s called a vertical fiscal imbalance.

But what about the politics?

From a political point of view, the playing field is more even. For many years, the federal government has given the states money to pay for schools. There is now a strong public expectation it will continue to do so. If the federal government were to refuse to fund Victorian schools in 2019, this would be rich fodder for the government’s political opponents.

Read more: What kind of prime minister will Scott Morrison be?

Similarly, though, if the Victorian government refuses to accept money on the conditions offered by the federal government, it will be partially responsible if schools don’t have enough funding to operate in 2019.

The constitution leaves both governments with a lot of freedom to choose what to do here. But for either government to be responsible for shutting down Victoria’s schools would be extremely unattractive, politically. There is a strong political incentive on both sides for the Victorian and federal governments to reach agreement very soon – certainly in time for the new school year to proceed as usual.

– ref. What the Victorian government’s decision not to sign on to the Gonski reforms means for schools in the new year – http://theconversation.com/what-the-victorian-governments-decision-not-to-sign-on-to-the-gonski-reforms-means-for-schools-in-the-new-year-108674

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Associate Professor, Art & Design: UNSW Australia. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, UNSW

Alex Seton’s sculpture A Durable Solution? is concentrating the minds of some delegates as they approach this weekend’s ALP national conference in Adelaide. It is the key work in All We Can’t See, an exhibition in the foyer of the Adelaide Convention Centre.

No delegate will be able to avoid this visual response to the Nauru Files, the records of life on that island first exposed by The Guardian. With exquisite timing, the show’s opening reception will be held at the centre on Sunday, the evening before the Labor Party debates its refugee policy.

Seton has a carved series of stark, minimalist memorial plaques, naming the 12 men who have died under our “care” on Nauru and Manus Island. There is no compromise, no gloss. The white Carrara marble, the same material used by Michelangelo, has been pared back, muted. Its surface is bereft of texture, the only incisions are the names of the dead and the dates they died.

Detail from Alex Seton, A Durable Solution?

A Durable Solution? is the third time this relatively young artist has made work that can be described as a collective memorial. Even though each of these sculptural installations commemorate the lives of a specific group of people, they also focus on the individual, to allow private grief. Seton has described his approach to memorials as “capturing those moments that are a test of our humanity”.

Alex Seton: Insert Grievance Here (2011).

He came to memorials via his series of sculptures of flags. Seton is an artist passionate about one material, marble. While this may be the great classic stone for monuments, it is very unfashionable in the 21st century. But his childhood home was near the Wombeyan Caves Marble Quarry, and he was fascinated by those rough blocks of veined rock that could be transformed beyond recognition.

So while studying a Bachelor of Art Theory degree, Seton began to carve. His passion for the precise craft of manufacture melded with his understanding of subtext and symbol. He learnt to carve stone so that it was easily mistaken for fabric. He looked at the ultimate symbolic use of cloth – in flags.

Carving folded flags

Flags may be ironic, but more often they are patriotic. They are the symbols soldiers fight under, and when they are killed a flag will drape their coffin. Seton is the same age as some of the young soldiers who first died in Australia’s longest war in Afghanistan. As part of coming to terms with the deaths from his generation. he began to carve folded Australian flags to honour the dead – one for each soldier.

These are made of pink, pearl marble from Chillagoe in north Queensland. Its flush suggests flesh and blood. Each is “bound” with a cloth halyard, creating confusion as to where the stone may begin. Twenty-three flags were first exhibited in Lismore and Brisbane. More have been added with each death.

Alex Seton, As of Today, marble with halyard. Sullivan + Strumpf

The title of these works, As of Today, reminds the viewer that more deaths may be on the way. The Australian War Memorial purchased the flags, with a commission to add more when necessary. There are now 42. Seton has said,

Initially I thought this work was about us – how easily we forget – but it is not about us at all. It is about those who gave their lives and whose memory we now preserve.

At the same time as the Australian War Memorial was preparing to show his work, Seton was completing a rather different memorial. Dark Heart, at the 2014 Adelaide Biennial, can be described as a dive into the dark night of the national soul. Much of the art was confronting, pricking the national conscience as a Jeremiad against the follies of modern Australia.

Now owned by the Art Gallery of South Australia, Someone Died Trying To Have a Life Like Mine was made in response to a particular incident in the sorry history of the many boat people who have died at sea.

In May 2013, 28 empty lifejackets were found washed ashore on Cocos Island. There is no official record of who the voyagers may have been, but one jacket contained a small amount of Iranian money.

Alex Seton Someone Died Trying to Have a Life Like Mine, Wombeyan marble, polyester webbing, stainless steel, varied dimensions. Adelaide Biennial

Seton began his work to honour these dead, and to give an answer to the question many ask – why set off in an unseaworthy boat across hostile waters? The answer is that these people want what we take for granted, a life like ours.

Each carved jacket manages to quote elements of the western canon of art. One is burst open like Michaelangelo’s Dying Slave. Two are together, as intimate as a quattrocento Madonna and Child. Others are placed in an arc, like flying angels.

The power of Someone Died Trying to Have a Life Like Mine comes from its evocation of empathy, the realisation that the people Seton is commemorating were like us. They wanted to walk in our shoes, so we are drawn to don their lifejackets.

It is this empathetic approach to honouring the dead that gives Alex Seton’s memorials their power. He moves beyond the studied factionalism of party politics and asks the viewer to consider the shared humanity of those who have died.

It does not matter whether they are soldiers or asylum seekers, lost at sea or imprisoned on land. They are us, and we are them.

– ref. Honouring the dead: Alex Seton’s stark, moving protest sculptures carved from marble – http://theconversation.com/honouring-the-dead-alex-setons-stark-moving-protest-sculptures-carved-from-marble-108502

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Hemer, Senior Research Scientist, Oceans and Atmosphere, CSIRO

This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. You can send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au. You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

How does the Moon, being so far away, affect the tides on Earth? – Lachie, age 8, Doreen, Melbourne.

Great question Lachie!

The short answer is that the Moon’s gravity pulls the oceans (and us) towards it. Even though the Moon is so far away, it is large enough that it’s force of gravity is strong enough to do that.

But before we get into how the Moon affects tides, let’s look at what tides are.

Tides are the rise and fall of water level in the oceans (and lakes, and even in your cup of water, but they’re very small).

When the sea level rises to its highest point, we call that high tide. When it falls to its lowest point, that’s called low tide.

The rise and fall of the tides is known as the tide cycle. If there’s one high tide and one low tide a day, like you would see if you went on holiday to Perth, it’s called a diurnal tide cycle. If there are two high tides and two low tides, like you see in Victoria, it’s called a semi-diurnal tide cycle.

The Moon has the most effect on the tides, but it’s not the only factor that affects them. The Sun and the Earth can also affect the tides. We’ll start with the Moon.

Read more: Curious Kids: Are there living things on different galaxies?

Tides and the Moon

The Moon affects the tides because of gravity. You will have noticed that every time you jump, you always land back on the ground. This is because the Earth’s gravity is pulling you back down.

The Earth’s spinning means that another high tide occurs on the opposite side of the Earth to the Moon. Shutterstock

The Moon has gravity of its own, which pulls the oceans (and us) towards it. The Moon’s gravitational pull on us is much weaker than Earth’s, so we don’t really notice it, but we can see the Moon’s effect on the liquid water of the oceans. The oceans are pulled towards the Moon’s gravity slightly, causing a bulge or high tide on the side of the Earth closest to the Moon.

The Earth’s effect

If the Moon causes a high tide on one side of the Earth, what causes the high tide on the other side?

The Earth is spinning, which is why we have night and day. The Earth’s spinning means that another high tide occurs on the opposite side of the Earth to the Moon.

These two high tides draw water away from the rest of the oceans, causing two low tides between the high tides.

Why do we have tides? – Forces of Nature with Brian Cox: Episode 2 – BBC One.

The Sun

The Sun, just like the Moon and the Earth, also has its own gravity which can affect the tides. Although the Sun is much larger than the Moon and has more gravity, it’s also much further away, meaning its pull on the tides is less than half as strong as the Moon’s.

It still does have an effect, though. When the Sun and Moon are in line with the Earth (when a full moon or new moon occur), their combined gravity cause very high tides (and very low tides), known as “spring tides.”

When the Sun and Moon are at right angles to each other (during a waxing or waning moon), the Sun helps to cancel out the pull of gravity from the Moon, causing lower high tides and higher than average low tides, known as “neap tides”.

Lunar and Solar tides diagram. Shutterstock

So the Moon affects the tides because of gravity, but gravity from the Sun and the spinning of the Earth also change how the tides behave.

Best wishes,

Mark Hemer.

Read more: Curious Kids: Is there anything hotter than the Sun?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. You can:

* Email your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
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Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

– ref. Curious Kids: How does the Moon, being so far away, affect the tides on Earth? – http://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-does-the-moon-being-so-far-away-affect-the-tides-on-earth-105371

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Merlin Crossley, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic and Professor of Molecular Biology, 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.

Despite reports that two genetically modified babies have been born in China I don’t think you’ll be seeing designer babies soon.

This is not just because the laws in many countries, and scientific norms in others, prevent this, but for a much simpler reason: genome editing technology has, and will always have, limits. Limits that are related not to the technology itself but to the intrinsic complexity of the human genome.

In addition, the costs and risks of the procedures will outweigh the benefits for the foreseeable future.

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

Some people may doubt this. But remember, making genetically modified mice became routine back in the 1980s and animals have been cloned (genetic “copies” made) since the 1990s. And yet until the announcement of the CRISPR babies – still yet to be confirmed by a peer-reviewed publication – there were no credible attempts to apply genetic technologies to viable human embryos.

There has been talk of designer babies for years but in my view they will remain (as they are now) very, very rare, for quite a while yet.

Baby 007

Let’s look at a hypothetical case study. Imagine you want to start a family, and would like your child to look like the latest James Bond. You ask a fertility doctor if she can conduct a kind of “genetic surgery” to change the genes of your embryo.

Same same, but different: six wax versions of James Bond. from www.shutterstock.com

In simple terms she can’t. You would have to change thousands of genes. Firstly, no one can identify which genes would lead to such an outcome. Secondly, and from a practical point of view, CRISPR only enables researchers to change a handful of genes at a time.

So you think again. Maybe you imagine your baby having the eyes of Jesse Williams, or the hair of Jay-Z? A genetic surgeon still can’t guarantee success. Even just the colour of eyes and hair are the result of complex genetic interactions.

Perhaps you’d rather parent a sporting superstar, like tennis player Karolina Pliskova (1.86m tall). One day it might be possible to “design” a daughter with this height by adjusting genes that control growth hormones. But again, multiple different – background – genes will have an impact, and you can’t be sure of getting the level right.

The risks here are significant. Ethics aside, it would be much simpler to inject hormones to promote growth rather than play with genes and risk your child growing to an unpredictable height (plus other unknown consequences).

Being tall like Karolina Pliskova offers a distinct advantage in many sports. from www.shutterstock.com

Read more: Researcher claims CRISPR-edited twins are born. How will science respond?

Such poor predictability is not due to the limits of genome editing technology – the technology has moved fast to this point, and will no doubt advance further in capability over coming years. Rather, it is due to the interplay between the thousands of genes within our genomes.

On top of that, environmental inputs (the “nurture” part of our development) and epigenetic effects (where subtle chemical modifications, often in response to environmental impacts, influence the expression of certain genes) create further unpredictability.

For these reasons, we simply can’t start ordering physical characteristics off some sort of cosmetic genetic surgeon’s menu – let alone attempt to alter mental traits, like temperament or intelligence.

There is also the problem of trade offs involved in any change. The CRISPR-edited babies reportedly born in China were intended to be resistant to HIV. It is not clear whether they will be – but even if they are, current knowledge suggests that they would also be more susceptible to influenza and West Nile virus. This is due to the many roles that the edited CCR5 gene plays in our immune system.

There are few “free lunches” in human evolution. And few parents would play a game of trial and error with their offspring once they understand the risks.

Preventing genetic disease

Superficial traits aside, even using CRISPR editing to combat serious genetic disease is unlikely to be common.

In many countries genetic counselling is already used to reduce the risk of passing on genetic diseases, like Tay-Sachs (in which the accumulation of fatty substances in nerve cells causes paralysis, dementia, blindness, psychoses, and even death).

Increasingly, in the future, if parents suffering from or carrying genetic mutations, choose to have biological children, they might consider in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and only proceed with unaffected embryos for a pregnancy. In the case of an existing pregnancy, pre-natal diagnosis can give parents information they can use to help them decide whether or not to terminate, or perhaps correct the cells in the embryo as explained below.

During IVF, a single cell can be safely removed from an embryo for genetic testing. from www.shutterstock.com’

It’s possible in the near future that some genetic diseases will be treated at the level of fixing the genes within certain cells in embryos, children or adults, rather than modifying whole embryos. Here, the relevant cells could be taken out of the body, the genes corrected and then the cells injected back in. Blood diseases in which vital oxygen-carrying haemoglobin is defective, such as sickle cell disease and thalassemia, will likely be cured in this way.

In the cases of liver and muscle diseases it may be possible to inject harmless viruses carrying the genome editing agents into these organs.

It’s only in exceptionally rare instances that parents might ask for their embryo to be changed. Sickle cell disease (which leads to anaemia), or cystic fibrosis (that affects the respiratory, digestive and reproductive systems) are examples. Each disease results from two affected copies of the relevant gene coming together: one copy from each parent. If both parents were affected by one of these disorders – which, given these conditions are so rare, is improbable but possible – their only option for having an unaffected biological child would be gene editing.

But one still wouldn’t jump into editing the genome of an embryo, because we have to weigh up not only the benefits but also the risks. The risks are important – because if an unintended genetic change is made, and an unanticipated consequence follows, it could affect not only that child but future generations as well.

At present scientists have generally agreed not to consider modifying human embryos until we know enough about the technology to evaluate the risks, and unless society is on board.

Read more: Tension as scientist at centre of CRISPR outrage speaks at genome editing summit

Society must decide

But it seems this consensus was recently broken. There is concern that in terms of Jiankui He’s work with CRIPSR in human embryos we cannot be sure of either the efficacy of the editing or the consequences of any unintended changes made to the genomes. (Jiankui He has apparently gone missing since his recent appearance at a genome editing summit).

I don’t expect many other scientists to follow his path for now.

In the future there may be rare cases where parents who both carry genes for serious genetic diseases do seek to have an unaffected child via gene editing, and perhaps society would sanction this choice. Where we would draw the line for editing less serious but also well-known genetic variations remains to be determined. In the more distant future actual genetic enhancements may well be contemplated but I think the reactions to Jiankui He’s work make this less rather than more likely.

Read more: Is your genome really your own? The public and forensic value of DNA

For now, CRISPR genome editing remains a revolutionary technology that is transforming biological research and will have many medical and agricultural applications. It’s also clear that different advances associated with genome sequencing, genetic privacy, and discrimination, will present us with many regulatory and ethical challenges in coming years.

But I don’t expect to be debating these issues with designer babies who have grown to adulthood. For the most part, that will remain science fiction.

– ref. ‘Designer’ babies won’t be common anytime soon – despite recent CRISPR twins – http://theconversation.com/designer-babies-wont-be-common-anytime-soon-despite-recent-crispr-twins-108342

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Luke McNamara, Professor of Law, UNSW

With confidence in politicians at an all-time low, it would be easy to assume criminal law-making is only ever about “law and order” bidding and winning elections.

Read more: Historical fall of Liberal seats in Victoria; micros likely to win ten seats in upper house; Labor leads in NSW

For example, when it emerged that Hassan Khalif Shire Ali was on bail when he killed one man and injured two others in Bourke Street, Melbourne, on November 9, the Victorian opposition reiterated its plan for a “one strike and you’re out” bail system.

This was classic law and order politics – though it didn’t produce the result Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy had hoped.

Read more: How a race scare left South Sudanese star basketballers with nowhere to play

All instances of criminal law-making (or promising) deserve scrutiny – especially if they raise concerns that politicians might be politicising the law for electoral advantage. However, it would be a mistake to assume this is the only way criminal laws are made.

We are part of a team of Australian researchers examining how, when and why criminal laws are made. What drivers and processes sit behind the moment when an attorney-general stands up in parliament and introduces a new bill? And how do we assess what makes a good process?

So far, we’ve found there is a stark difference between the careful evidence-based, deliberative and consultative processes associated with the criminal law’s use against some harms – like domestic violence – and the “urgent” non-consultative law-making with others – like terrorists and outlaw motorcycle gangs.

NSW Attorney General Mark Speakman embraces child abuse advocate and survivor Paul Gray after unveiling plans for new laws to jail those who cover up child abuse. Dean Lewins/AAP

Recently in NSW, we saw an interesting variation on the familiar law and order auction. In the second last parliamentary sitting week for 2018, the Berejiklian government launched something of a pre-emptive strike ahead of the state election in March 2019. In the space of three days, the NSW parliament enacted seven major criminal law statutes. Here we highlight some examples illustrating the diversity of ways criminal laws get made.

In the words of NSW Attorney General Mark Speakman, the Community Protection Legislation Amendment Bill 2018:

introduces a number of reforms aimed at keeping the community safe, including from the risk of terrorism and other high-risk offenders, bushfires, child abuse and the supply of drugs causing death.

Here, a diverse range of harms are “knitted” together through a narrative of community fear, anxiety and need for protection. Despite these common themes, the changes to the criminal law made by this bill have different origins.

For example, the introduction of higher penalties for lighting bushfires was influenced by what’s been happening in other states, and a determination to “keep up”. As the attorney-general put it: this will “ensure that the New South Wales penalty is now the equal toughest in the country”.

A mourner places a candle to remember the 173 people who died in the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 in forests on the outskirts of Melbourne and in the city’s hinterland. Julian Smith/AAP

The controversial new homicide offence of drug supply causing death has a different back-story. After two drug-related deaths at the Defqon musical festival in September this year, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian appointed an expert panel to advise the government on what law reform and other strategies could prevent further tragedies. A new offence was one of the panel’s recommendations.

The same bill also increased penalties for the crime of concealing a child abuse offence – a crime introduced in June this year following recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Attorney-General Mark Speakman explained that this amendment, just six months later, was because the government had:

listened to the voices of the more than 13,000 people who signed a petition calling for tougher maximum penalties for the concealment of child abuse offences.

Read more: Luke Foley’s resignation is a disaster for Labor but may not bolster Berejiklian much either

The Crimes (Domestic and Personal) Violence Amendment Bill 2018 expanded the definition of the existing stalking or intimidation offence in NSW to cover “cyberbullying”. The attorney-general told parliament the “bill will be known colloquially as “Dolly’s Law”, in tribute to 14-year-old Amy “Dolly” Everett, who tragically took her own life in January this year following persistent bullying and abuse, including cyberbullying.

He thanked Dolly’s parents who had “worked tirelessly, campaigning and raising awareness about the potentially devastating effects of bullying and cyberbullying”.

The Crimes Legislation Amendment Bill 2018 created a new offence of strangulation. A 2017, NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team report found the offence of choking did not cover all the ways in which domestic violence strangulation can occur. This new offence is an example of change underpinned by careful consideration of the available evidence by an expert body and that can rightly be said to fill a gap in the criminal law.

Read more: The pathologies of populism

When many countries are grappling with political populism, it is timely to reflect on how the community figures in these examples: victims whose loss is the catalyst for change; a collective of persons in need of protection; and law-makers. The NSW attorney-general described some recent criminal law changes as “citizen law that if individual citizens lobby hard enough and speak to politicians they can effect change”. He hoped that “in some small way this will restore some people’s confidence in our democracy and the ability of citizens to effect change”.

The idea of “citizen law” is interesting. Is it the process that most inspires confidence and democratic legitimacy? What is gained (and lost) if a government is more attuned to the voices of regular people, including victims and their families, than to experts, like lawyers and academics?

The answers are not straightforward. Our research suggests it is important to avoid simplistic accounts of what drives criminal law-making. And, as the Victorian election result shows, politicians should be wary of putting all their eggs in the law and order basket.

– ref. Law and order is no get-out-of-jail card for floundering politicians – http://theconversation.com/law-and-order-is-no-get-out-of-jail-card-for-floundering-politicians-107701

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jaithri Ananthapavan, Senior Research Fellow, Health Economics, Deakin University

We don’t often equate the kilojoules we drink in our glass of wine or pint of beer with the weight that accumulates around our middle. But our new study shows increasing the price of alcohol is the most value for money policy option to prevent obesity in Australia.

The study, released today, shows if we increase alcohol taxes by standardising them across different types of alcohol, overall alcohol consumption would go down. This would lead to substantial reductions in the kilojoules Australians consume each day.

In 2016-17, Australians drank 186 million litres of pure alcohol – equivalent to more than nine litres for each person over the age of 15 years.

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

The health and social harms associated with drinking too much are well documented. Our research is among the first to show that policies aimed at reducing alcohol consumption would also have significant impacts on body weight.

Current taxes on alcohol

Australia’s current alcohol taxation system is complex and illogical. Most alcoholic beverages are taxed based on their alcohol content, but different rates of tax are applied to different products.

Beers have the lowest rates, and spirits and ready-to-drink beverages (such as a can of bourbon and cola) have the highest.

Wine is taxed using a different system (the wine equalisation tax) based on its final wholesale price.

Under the current system, the total price (including taxation, in 2013 prices) of a standard drink (equivalent to 10g of alcohol) varies from around A$0.65 for cask wine to A$2.79 for ready-to-drink beverages.

Proposed new tax regime

Public health groups have long advocated for reforms to the current alcohol taxation system in Australia.

Our research group modelled the impact of replacing the current system with a uniform volumetric tax, based on alcohol content.

Read more: Fifty years on, time to call it a day for cheap wine casks

We applied a tax of 84 cents per standard drink across all alcoholic beverages (beers, wines, spirits and ready-to-drink products). This is equivalent to a 10% increase to the rate currently applied to spirits.

This proposed change would have the biggest impact on the price of cask wine, increasing it by more than 120%. The price of beer will increase by 28% on average, bottled wine by around 33%, and ready-to-drink alcoholic beverages by 2.7%.

Deakin University

Impact on health

Increasing the price of alcohol is one of the most effective ways of reducing consumption.

Alcohol is high in kilojoules, with a pint of beer almost on par with a chocolate bar in terms of energy content. So even relatively small levels of alcohol consumption can have a big impact on daily energy intake.

Pint or chocolate bar? They’re just about equal in kiljoules. Seth Weisfeld

Our modelling showed that the proposed new tax regime would, on average, result in a 16% reduction in alcohol consumption across the population. This would lead to average weight loss of around 0.7kg.

When this is modelled over the lifetime of the whole population, the health impact is substantial. It is estimated that this tax change could prevent more than 190,000 cases of diabetes and 16,000 cases of cancer.

In total, the policy change could result in more than 470,000 healthy life years gained for the Australian population.

By preventing obesity-related diseases, this policy would save about A$4.8 billion in health-care costs.

These savings are much higher than the total costs of administering this change to the tax system, at A$31.9 million.

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

The health impacts are in addition to the many other benefits of reduced alcohol consumption. These include the prevention of several chronic diseases (including liver cirrhosis and breast cancer), injuries, road accidents and violence.

The additional revenue collected from this new tax regime compared to the current taxation system would be around A$2.3 billion each year.

We need an obesity prevention strategy

The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Health Council recently committed to develop a national obesity strategy. In addition, the Senate Select Committee into the obesity epidemic in Australia released a report last week that set out a number of recommendations for government. These initiatives recognise that a range of policies are needed to address the current obesity crisis.

In addition to the alcohol tax changes, our study examined the cost-effectiveness of 15 other obesity prevention policies. These included bans on TV advertising for unhealthy foods, a 20% tax on sugary drinks, the Health Star Rating food labelling system, and interventions targeted at schools, workplaces, supermarkets, local communities and private health insurers.

A range of policy measures are needed to reduce rates of obesity. Photobac/Shutterstock

We found that all of the interventions evaluated would result in substantial health benefits for Australia and offer good value for money. There are a broad range of promising policies that can be acted on by a range of decision makers including local, state and federal governments and the private sector.

Even though increasing the price of alcohol is likely to be unpopular, if governments are committed to an effective national obesity strategy then an increase in alcohol taxation should be considered as one part of a comprehensive societal response.

– ref. What’s the most value for money way to tackle obesity? Increase taxes on alcohol – http://theconversation.com/whats-the-most-value-for-money-way-to-tackle-obesity-increase-taxes-on-alcohol-108335

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael O’Neil, Executive Director, SA Centre for Economic Studies, University of Adelaide

Whyalla will be wiped off the map by Julia Gillard’s carbon tax, Whyalla risks becoming a ghost town, an economic wasteland if this carbon tax goes ahead – Then opposition leader Tony Abbott, campaigning against Julia Gillard’s carbon tax in 2011.

Whyalla’s ‘”death notice” has been written a number of times over the past 40 years, beginning with the closure of the shipyards in 1978, continuing with infamous predictions of doom in the leadup to the carbon tax, and most recently, as what was once the BHP steelworks clung to life suffocating in debt and despair under a new owner in 2016.

The revival of the regional city that sits on the western side of South Australia’s Spencer Gulf took a big step forward in July 2017 when British-based industrialist, Sanjeev Gupta, bought the steelworks, and brought hope to the local community of 22,000 people.

Head of GFG Sanjeev Gupta, visits the Arrium Steel plant in Whyalla, South Australia. July, 2017. David Mariuz/AAP

This week that hope turned to optimism when Mr Gupta announced a $600 million upgrade of the existing steelworks, increasing its capacity to 1.8 million tonnes annually.

That announcement, while welcome news to the 2,500 employees, was accompanied by another one, much bigger – a feasibility study of a state-of-the-art plant capable of producing 10 million tonnes of steel for export annually.

If it comes off, it’ll triple Australia’s steel output.

Other potential investments announced on Monday that will define the future of Whyalla include:

• A $145 million horticulture business backed by Chinese investment,
• A $45 million four-star hotel for Whyalla’s foreshore, and
• A $6 million organics recycling business.

Whyalla is relatively remote, a long distance away from both the customers for and many of the raw materials needed to create steel.

But it rich in wind, with Australia’s biggest collection of wind farms nearby, and rich in sun, enjoying an impressive 300 days of sunshine a year.

In a location remote from customers and raw materials, Whyalla appears to be an unlikely place to make steel. Datawrapper

Two major renewable energy projects are either underway or are soon to leave the drawing boards near Port Augusta, 75 kilometres north of Whyalla.

The Bungala photo-voltaic solar farm, which recently completed its commissioning, is the largest in the southern hemisphere with a capacity of 220 megawatts.

The Bungala Solar Farm, near Port Augusta. Australia’s largest operational solar PV plant. Enel Green Power

The Aurora concentrated solar thermal project involves a massive array of mirrors that direct the sun’s energy onto a receptor where molten salt retains the energy and can be released on demand.

The super-hot salt is despatched through a heat exchanger where it produces steam which, in turn, generates electricity with a conventional steam turbine. It has a capacity of 150 megawatts but, importantly, it can store 1,100 megawatt hours of energy, thereby overcoming one of the major shortcomings of renewable energy.

Solar thermal uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a tower that heats molten salt. Facebook: Solar Reserve

As the SA Centre for Economic Studies has previously reported, the availability of cheaper renewable energy will be a competitive advantage for Whyalla and, more generally, the greater Eyre Peninsula region.

This power advantage can be coupled with the region’s other colossal advantage – space. There is abundant land to support low cost, large-scale agricultural and horticultural production, a point implicitly confirmed by Monday’s announcement of a proposed $145 million solar greenhouse.

It’s an outlook that is a far cry from the dark days in 2016 when Arrium, an ofshoot of BHP, went into voluntary administration owing A$4 billion.

The subsequent administration of the steelworks by consulting group KordaMentha was a complex affair with negotiations culminating in workers taking a pay cut and the state and federal governments stepping up with assistance packages that proved critical to the immediate viability of the plant and its eventual sale to Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance.

The State Government contributed A$50 million for a future purchaser to make capital improvements at the steelworks, waived royalties on the magnetite ore that the steelworks were reconfigured to consume, provided $5 million dollars to ensure that Arrium’s creditors could survive, and implemented a range of skills development and training programs.

The federal government also chipped in with a A$20 million for regional training and investment, and sourced steel from Whyalla for a major upgrade of the Tarcoola rail line.

In 2016, our centre published Whyalla Economic Development: A Plan for the Future and said the city needed a serious discussion to plan its future because a narrow view focused on shipbuilding in earlier times, and steel-making more recently, had compromised its economic viability.

Part of that planning had to include decisions on such infrastructure improvements as upgrading the electricity transmission system to give it the capacity to carry growing volumes of renewable energy, which is harder to carry than power from conventional generators.

Read more: At its current rate, Australia is on track for 50% renewable electricity in 2025

Investment in human capital is also required and the Centre was encouraged to see the state government act on our 2016 recommendation and commit $100 million towards construction of a new high school in Whyalla, which is scheduled to open in 2022.

The suite of development proposals announced on Monday came with claims that Whyalla’s population could quadruple to 80,000 people as a consequence. An expansion of that size would itself be a major economic stimulus through all the housing, transport and other services required.

Such growth, complemented by effective promotion and marketing that has been missing in the past, could make Whyalla “the gateway” to the greater Eyre Peninsula and the tourism attractions that lie beyond.

KordaMentha’s partner, Mark Mentha, told the ABC’s Australian Story in September that when he arrived as administrator of Arrium, he saw “vulnerability and fear” in the eyes of steelworkers.

If he went back, he would see hope and optimism.

Written with Peter Gill, business journalist at the South Australian Centre for Economic Studies.

– ref. Not wiped out. Why Whyalla, of all places, now has a sustainable future – http://theconversation.com/not-wiped-out-why-whyalla-of-all-places-now-has-a-sustainable-future-108506

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Turner, PhD student, University of Newcastle

Muscular, bearded and trident-wielding, Jason Momoa’s portrayal of the titular Aquaman in the forthcoming DC film draws on ancient Greek and Roman iconography.

Water gods in Greek mythology are a diverse group. There are human-looking gods such as Poseidon, god of the sea, or Tethys: goddess of freshwater, rainfall, and nurse to the Olympians. Others, such as Tethys’ husband Oceanus, who represents the primordial ocean surrounding the world, are depicted as both human, and/or part-human combined with a fish or serpent.

Ruling Atlantis is a key role associated with sea gods. First mentioned in Plato’s The Republic, Atlantis was the Poseidon-worshipping city state held to be a pinnacle of ethics. According to Plato, Atlantis sunk into the ocean after it lost the favour of the gods due to the inhabitants’ hubris.

A third century mosaic depicting Tethys and Oceanus. Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

While Aquaman is strictly speaking a superhero rather than a sea god, his appearance and powers in the upcoming movie certainly draw on those of maritime divinities.

Aquaman’s abilities to communicate with sea life, control the ocean and swim at superhuman speeds all resemble traits associated with Poseidon. Poseidon is well attested to communicating with (and even creating) sea creatures, and the nereids and oceanids – nymphs of the ocean – by which he is surrounded. In Homer’s Odyssey, Poseidon is a capricious, dangerous deity who delays Odysseus’ return home by ten years.

Aquaman comic book depiction. Crayolamom/flickr

In DC’s original comics, Aquaman, who first appeared in 1941, was most typically an outcast of the Atlantean cities. Depending on the version, Aquaman (also known as Arthur Curry) either grew up on land or was abandoned to die there, as he needed to be in contact with water every hour.

In other comics from the 1950s, Aquaman was depicted as the half-Atlantean son of Queen Atlanna, although in later versions he is depicted as fully Atlantean. A warrior king, he defended Atlantean cities, (and more broadly, the ocean and surface world as a member of the Justice League), from a variety of super-villains, as well as contemporary threats such as pirates and Nazi U-boats.

He does this through masterful skill in melee combat and, as the comics progress, through increasingly supernatural powers (such the ability to create water and dehydrate people).

Read more: Guide to the Classics: Homer’s Odyssey

The trident

Aquaman’s weapon of choice – a trident – has always been associated with Poseidon. Homeric poets noted that Poseidon was gifted his trident by the elder cyclopes, the one-eyed giants of ancient Greece, to help him in the war against the titans – the previous generation of deities.

In the comics, Aquaman’s trident is often referred to as “Poseidon’s trident”, or otherwise a trident known as “Neptune’s trident” is portrayed. (Neptune was the Roman equivalent of Poseidon.) Much like the trident of the Olympian Poseidon, Aquaman’s trident can create water.

Poseidon holding a trident. Corinthian plaque, 550–525 BC. From Penteskouphia. Wikimedia Commons

Sea gods on screen

In the comics, Aquaman is blonde, pale and usually clean shaven. While the green and orange costuming in the film is the same as the comic book character, Mamoa’s tattoos, dark beard and untamed hair are imported from other sea gods on screen.

Aquaman’s tattoos show a deference to the Polynesian god Maui that featured heavily in Moana (2016) and Momoa’s own cultural heritage. Maui, the trickster of Polynesian mythology, is credited with pulling islands from the sea with his hook.

The Atlantis-like city depicted in the promotional material for Aquaman. IMDB

Previous depictions of Greek Gods on screen have featured merman. In Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989), King Triton, (named after Poseidon’s merman son) possesses a golden trident which has many abilities. In Disney’s Hercules: The Animated Series, Poseidon is shown as an anthropomorphous man, who has physical aspects of a fish. And in the game Age of Mythology, Poseidon is shown as a merman.

In contrast, Momoa’s Aquaman, with his beard, trident and dangerous personality, is no part-fish, part-human combination. This is much more in line with ancient sea mythology.

His Aquaman will be a distinct recall to the classical tradition of Poseidon, the “dark haired lord” whose hand “the brazen trident wields”.

– ref. How cinema’s new Aquaman draws on the mythology of ancient sea gods – http://theconversation.com/how-cinemas-new-aquaman-draws-on-the-mythology-of-ancient-sea-gods-105856

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

The November 24 Victorian election will result in an upper house of 18 Labor out of 40 (up four since the 2014 election), 11 Coalition (down five), one Green (down four), three Derryn Hinch Justice, two Liberal Democrats, and one each for Animal Justice, Sustainable Australia, Transport Matters, Fiona Patten and Shooters, Fishers & Farmers.

Overall upper house vote shares were 39.2% Labor (up 5.8% since 2014), 29.4% Coalition (down 6.7%), 9.3% Greens (down 1.5%), 3.8% Hinch Justice, 3.0% Shooters, 2.5% Liberal Democrats, 2.5% Animal Justice and 2.1% Labour DLP. In regions where the DLP and Lib Dems were to the left of Labor and the Liberals respectively on the ballot paper, they had far higher vote shares through name confusion.

Labor won 45% of upper house seats on 39.2% of votes, and the Coalition 27.5% of seats on 29.4% of votes. The Greens won just 2.5% of seats despite 9.3% of votes, while Hinch Justice won 7.5% of seats on 3.8% of votes, and the Lib Dems 5% of seats on 2.5% of votes. Transport Matters and Sustainable Australia combined won 5% of seats on 1.4% of votes. This was not a good advertisement for democracy.

It is deeply disappointing that Labor made no effort during the last term to reform the flawed group voting ticket system.

Although the result is a bad outcome for democracy, Labor will probably be happy. If the Coalition opposes, they need three of 11 crossbenchers to reach the 21 votes needed to pass legislation. The Greens, Animal Justice and Patten are likely to be Labor allies on progressive legislation. In the last parliament, Labor, the Greens and Patten had 20 combined votes.

There are eight regions in Victoria that each return five members. A quota is one-sixth of the vote, or 16.7%.

In the federal Senate, voters are instructed to number at least six boxes above the line, though a single “1” above the line is still formal. Preferences are set by voters, not by parties.

The table below shows the actual results and what I believe the results would have been had the federal Senate system been in place. Under the Senate system, the most likely outcome would be 19 Labor, 14 Coalition, four Greens, two Shooters and one Hinch Justice. The actual results would probably match the federal Senate results in just two of the eight regions

Victorian upper house: actual results compared with results using federal Senate system.

In Eastern Metro, Labor had 2.22 quotas, the Liberals 2.17, the Greens 0.54 and the Lib Dems 0.25. Labor preferences would easily elect the Greens under the Senate system. Instead, Transport Matters won from just 0.62%, or 0.04 quotas.

In Northern Metro, Labor had 2.55 quotas, the Greens 1.00, the Liberals 0.99, the Socialists 0.25, the DLP 0.25 and Fiona Patten 0.20. Labor would win three seats under the Senate system, but lost its third seat to Patten in the actual count.

In South-Eastern Metro, Labor had 3.00 quotas, the Liberals 1.74 and the Greens 0.33. The Liberals would have won the last seat under the Senate system. Instead, the Liberal Democrats, with just 0.84% or 0.05 quotas, won the final seat.

In Southern Metro, the Liberals won 2.30 quotas, Labor 2.07 and the Greens 0.81. The Greens would easily win the last seat under the Senate system. Instead it went to Sustainable Australia, on just 1.32%, or 0.08 quotas.

In Western Metro, Labor won 2.78 quotas, the Liberals 1.28, the Greens 0.52 and Hinch Justice 0.41. With assistance from right-wing preferences, Hinch Justice would probably beat the Greens for the final spot under the Senate system. This is one occasion where the actual result would probably occur under a better system.

In Eastern Victoria, the Coalition won 2.05 quotas, Labor 2.02, the Greens 0.40, the Shooters 0.30, Hinch Justice 0.27 and the Lib Dems 0.24. The Shooters or Hinch Justice could have overtaken the Greens under the Senate system; the Shooters won the final seat, matching a possibility of the Senate system

In Northern Victoria, Labor won 1.91 quotas, the Coalition 1.87, the Shooters 0.47, the Greens 0.39, Hinch Justice 0.29 and the Lib Dems 0.23. If the Senate system applied, the results would be two each for Labor and the Coalition, and one Shooter. Instead, Labor won two, and the Coalition, Hinch Justice and the Lib Dems one each.

In Western Victoria, Labor won 2.29 quotas, the Coalition 1.80, the Greens 0.45, Hinch Justice 0.27, the Shooters 0.27 and Animal Justice 0.17. Under the Senate system, Labor preferences would have helped the Greens win the final seat, with the Coalition certain of a second seat. Instead, Labor won two, and the Coalition, Animal Justice and Hinch Justice one each.

Liberals retain Ripon after recount

In the lower house seat of Ripon, the Liberals trailed Labor by 31 votes on the provisional results, but won after a recount by 15 votes. Final lower house seat totals were 55 Labor out of 88 (up eight since the 2014 election), 27 Coalition (down 11), three Greens (up one) and three independents (up two).

Read more: Historical fall of Liberal seats in Victoria; micros likely to win ten seats in upper house; Labor leads in NSW

Newspoll: 55-45 to federal Labor

This week’s federal Newspoll, conducted December 6-9 from a sample of 1,730, gave Labor its third successive 55-45 lead. Primary votes were 41% Labor (up one since last fortnight), 35% Coalition (up one), 9% Greens (steady) and 7% One Nation (down one). This is the final Newspoll of 2018.

This is the third consecutive Newspoll in which Labor’s primary vote has exceeded 40%. Other than in the immediate aftermath of Malcolm Turnbull’s ousting, Labor’s primary had only reached 40% once since Julia Gillard’s early days as PM. Analyst Kevin Bonham says no government has recovered from such a dire position in aggregate polling to win with five months left.

In the final four Newspolls under Turnbull, the Coalition trailed by just 51-49. In the last three Newspolls, they have trailed 55-45. It appears that ousting Turnbull was a big mistake.

42% were satisfied with Scott Morrison’s performance (down one), and 45% were dissatisfied (up three), for a net approval of -3, down four points. Bill Shorten’s net approval was down two points to -15. Morrison led Shorten by 44-36 as better PM (46-34 last fortnight).

55% thought Labor would win the next election, while just 24% thought the Coalition would win. By 48-30, voters opposed Shorten’s plan to abolish franking credit cash refunds for retirees (50-33 in March).

By 46-40, voters did not think Turnbull was disloyal to the Coalition, though Coalition voters thought Turnbull disloyal by 56-34. By 56-36, voters thought Turnbull should be allowed to speak his mind, rather than keep his thoughts private. By 56-29, voters did not think Turnbull should be expelled from the Liberal party.

I think the Coalition’s best hope of winning the next election is for the economy to be very good, with strong wages growth. However on December 5, the ABS reported that the economy grew just 0.3% in the September quarter, well below expectations.

Essential: 54-46 to Labor

In last week’s Essential poll, conducted November 29 to December 2 from a sample of 1,032, Labor led by 54-46, a two-point gain for Labor since three weeks ago. Primary votes were 39% Labor (up four), 38% Coalition (up one), 10% Greens (down one) and 6% One Nation (down one).

Morrison’s ratings were 42% approve (up one since November) and 34% disapprove (down three), for a net approval of +8. Shorten’s net approval fell two points to -8. Morrison led Shorten by 40-29 as better PM (41-29 in November).

24% thought restricting negative gearing to new homes would lower house prices, 21% thought it would increase house prices, 27% make no difference and 29% didn’t know. 37% thought restricting negative gearing would increase rents, 14% lower them, 24% make no difference and 26% didn’t know.

53% thought Australia was not doing enough to address climate change (down three since October), 24% thought we were doing enough (up one), and 9% doing too much (up two). By 39-30, voters supported ending cash refunds from dividend imputation. The question was long, with information that many voters would not be aware of.

ReachTEL national and seat polls

A ReachTEL national poll for the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, conducted December 4 from a sample of 2,350, gave Labor a 54-46 lead. Primary votes were 38.2% Labor, 37.0% Coalition, 10.6% Greens and 6.9% One Nation. Sky News was commissioning ReachTEL polls once a month until June, but since then the only ReachTEL national polls have been from left-wing sources.

The Poll Bludger has details of ReachTEL polls in the Victorian federal seats of Corangamite and Higgins. The Liberals have no margin after a redistribution in Corangamite, and are trailing 59-41. In Higgins, the Liberals have a 10.3% margin, but are trailing 53-47. Seat polls are unreliable, but these are massive swings to Labor.

Facing heavy defeat, Theresa May postpones Commons vote on Brexit deal

UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal with the European Union was scheduled to be voted on by the House of Commons today. But faced with many defections from both the left and right of her Conservative party, and unhelpful opposition parties, May has pulled the vote.

The problem for May is that there is probably no deal that is agreeable to the European Union that can pass the Commons. Unless a deal passes the Commons, or some other option like a second Brexit referendum passes, the UK will crash out of the European Union on March 29, 2019. Such a “no deal” Brexit is likely to greatly damage both the UK economy and the Conservative party – see my personal website for more.

– ref. Victorian upper house greatly distorted by group voting tickets; federal Labor still dominant in Newspoll – http://theconversation.com/victorian-upper-house-greatly-distorted-by-group-voting-tickets-federal-labor-still-dominant-in-newspoll-108488