Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deb Rawlings, Lecturer in Palliative Care, Flinders University

With continual advances in modern medicine, we’re enjoying longer lives. As the population ages, and particularly as many people are living longer with cancers and chronic diseases, end-of-life care is adapting and changing.

People who are approaching the end of their lives will usually spend some or most of their time at home, requiring care and support to do so. Family members might not always be available to provide this care. When they are, the process can be rewarding, but it can also be challenging and complex, often leading to a severe emotional burden for the carer.

Gaps in our health and social care systems are starting to be filled by death doulas. But beyond providing practical support, families are increasingly seeking the services of death doulas to help navigate the experience of dying. Those nearing the end of their lives, too, may bring in a death doula to ensure they can die the way they want to.

We urgently need a conversation about death doulas and new models of care at the end of life. We are continuing to build an evidence base through research with the death doula community and via consultation with the health services that interface with death doulas.

Read more: Planning for death must happen long before the last few days of life

Defining the death doula

We’ve seen a similar concept in midwifery, where birth doulas have long been providing social, emotional and practical support to help women through the process of childbirth. This has been shown to have positive outcomes for mothers and their babies.

Like birth doulas, death doulas’ roles and functions are non-medical; these can include advocating, supporting (spiritually and sometimes physically), guiding, and providing emotional support to the person and their family, mainly in the home.

We undertook a systematic review of the literature to find available evidence about the death doula role. We found little formal academic literature describing the role, their training, or contribution to individuals, families and the health system.

But what we do know is that each death doula enacts the role differently. They might spend time with the dying person, offering emotional and spiritual support, and sometimes providing physical care. They might support the family carers in the work they are doing. Some death doulas are only present in the last days of life, offering “vigiling” – sitting with the dying person so they are not alone.

Some doulas offer after-death rituals such as helping families prepare the body or keeping the deceased at home.

Some death doulas are paid by families who engage their services. Families have often found their chosen doula online or through word-of-mouth. Other death doulas work voluntarily, in a similar way to a hospice volunteer. But, because there are no formal structures or registers, we don’t know how many death doulas there are.

In Australia and elsewhere, palliative care nurses, social workers and those from the funeral industry work as death doulas. This seems to be a natural progression, but it’s a grey area: they are providing care, but are not registered or supervised.

There is little formal assessment to guide patient and family choice or to inform end-of-life care provided by professionals.

Read more: Assisted dying is one thing, but governments must ensure palliative care is available to all who need it

How can doula care be formalised?

Providing care in homes can be informal. It may be provided by families, friends, or community groups. Care can also be formally negotiated and provided by health services, aged care providers or private agencies.

It’s necessary to understand the implications of the death doula role. For example, they could become part of formal care arrangements such as home care packages or via private health insurance funding.

We also need to look at how these new roles are authorised to represent the dying person, as they are neither a family member nor a qualified health professional. It’s also important that they are appropriately trained and insured (if providing paid services).

Sign up for the newsletter

Sign up to Thrive, a weekly dose of evidence to help you live well.

There are personal, social and cost advantages in enabling care in the home for a dying person. For families, being able to support the person in a familiar environment can be a powerful motivator to engage a death doula to fill the gaps in care provision.

For the health system, care in the home is seen as positive. It can avoid unnecessary hospital use and help spread the costs of caring.

For the dying person who may prefer to die at home, it is a way of achieving this. Importantly, death doulas can improve the dying person’s ability to control their own care.

Read more: What is palliative care? A patient’s journey through the system

The death doula role may well incorporate some of the direct care provided by families and help them to navigate the complex needs and planning required at the end of life. If so, death doulas could represent an important opportunity to improve dying outcomes.

We need to ensure our community is informed, health service provision crosses both hospitals and homes, and that those providing care – regardless of setting – have skills and knowledge appropriate to their role.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Tregear, Honorary Principal Fellow, University of Melbourne

Review, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Melbourne.

Australian productions of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremburg) are rare and for those of us attending the opening night of Opera Australia’s production in Melbourne, it is easy enough to see why.

Die Meistersinger is an extravagantly long, complex, and resource-intensive piece of theatre. But this, in turn, reflects the ambition of the composer to create works that would have an equally grandiose social and political impact on audiences.

For economic reasons alone, co-productions make particular sense, and here Opera Australia has collaborated with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, to mount a production conceived by the Royal Opera’s then house director, Kasper Holten, in 2017.

Holten’s work has typically divided critics, and this production is no exception. When it premiered in London, the Spectator’s Michael Tanner declared, “Nothing could prepare me for so deep an abyss of idiocy”. Others, however, have found Holton’s directorial interventions to be revelatory.

Such a stark division of opinion reflects the nature of so-called Regieoper, a style of production where a director feels licensed, if not obliged, to reinterpret the largely 19th century Western European operatic canon in order to reflect contemporary sensibilities and concerns.

In Holten’s hands (and brilliantly realised through Mia Stensgaard’s stunning set design, Anja Vang Kragh’s costumes, and Jesper Kongshaugh’s lighting design) Wagner’s 16th-century guild of mastersingers become a modern-day men’s club. The whole setting of Act II in changed from a village street scene to that club’s backstage area. Walther von Stolzing, the knight errant (and, eventual prize-winning singer), is dressed to look more like Meat Loaf than a Lancelot.

Wagner’s works are, however, particularly ripe for such treatment because he was himself a pioneering modern dramatist. His operas foreshadow cinematic styles and techniques as well as the themes and interests of symbolist and psychoanalytical drama.

While Die Meistersinger stands apart from Wagner’s other works in being grounded more in historical, rather than mythical, materials (we find here, for instance, no goddesses with winged helmets, nor knights arriving on the backs of swans and the main character, the cobbler and poet Hans Sachs, is based on an actual historical figure), he still ultimately gives this material a mythic frame.

The setting of the opera, the city of Nuremburg, a town in the geographical heart of Teutonic Europe, serves as the embodiment of the spirit of the German people writ-large. The singing competition that lies at the heart of the opera’s plot thus acts as a means for Wagner to proselytize what he considers to be quintessentially German cultural qualities and virtues.

It was no surprise, then, that Die Meistersinger eventually became a favourite work of the opera-loving leader of the Third Reich. The work was performed, for instance, at Adolf Hitler’s formal inauguration in March 1933.

And the character of Sixtus Beckmesser (here brilliantly sung and acted by Warwick Fyfe), the one person in the opera who does not seem to be able to “get” what makes German art great, has more recently been interpreted as an evocation of anti-Semitic tropes. Certainly we know from his own writings that Wagner believed that Jews were a corrupting influence on “true” German culture.

As is so often the case, Wagner’s works (as opposed to Wagner the man), ultimately defy straightforward interpretations. Beckmesser’s role as a comic foil in the opera derives from his musical (and, by extension cultural) conservatism. Yet, despite his eventual public humiliation, by the end of the opera Hans Sachs seems ultimately to support his point of view, declaring that Germans should honour their masters. Even if Germany itself were to disappear as a political entity, he declares, “Still would remain/ Our sacred German Art”.

Gender politics

One of the benefits of Holten’s staging is that what we see and hear at this point, however, is no longer a simple, direct, appeal, but rather a knowing representation of one. Similarly, Holten is also interested in reminding us of the gendered aspect underpinning Wagner’s drama.

At the conclusion of the opera, in defiance not only of her father, and the men-folk of Nurenburg, but in defiance of the opera itself, Eva quite literally walks off stage. She refuses to play her otherwise pre-destined role as a wife and mother, or indeed as Walther von Stolzing’s ‘prize’.

It’s a clever move. But here, too, it does not close the issue. What, then, do we make of Eva’s actions given that she also sincerely loves Walther? Does not her act of freedom come at the price of emotional honesty? Gender politics aside, is it not an uncomfortable truth (for both sexes) that loving another always involves always a degree of personal compromise?

I suspect Wagner himself, however, would not have been upset were we to contemplate such issues, given his own lifelong interest in the struggle we all face to reconcile the competing demands of social and personal integrity. And it is one sign that this, ultimately, is a successful production. It is also terrific to see the full stage of the State Theatre in use. So often Melbourne audiences for Opera Australia productions have had to put up with “cut down” stagings that were designed initially for the much smaller dimensions of the Joan Sutherland Theatre at the Sydney Opera House.

Conductor Pietari Inkinen, already well known to local audiences through his musical direction of Opera Australia’s two seasons of Wagner’s The Ring Cycle, directs Orchestra Victoria in an accomplished reading of Wagner’s complex score. As for the performances on stage, Warwick Fyfe’s outstanding musical and dramatic characterisation of Beckmesser alone makes a ticket worthwhile, other standout cast members are Nicholas Jones (playing Sachs’ apprentice David with youthful aplomb) and Natalie Aroyan as a radiantly sounding Eva.

Hans Sachs was sung beautifully by German bass-baritone Michael Kupfer-Radecky even if he didn’t quite have the vocal gravitas that both role and the venue really required. Vocal presence was certainly not an issue for Stefan Vinke as Walther von Stolzing, but he did not sound comfortable meeting the exceptional technical demands of the role.

The minor principals and chorus, however, all acquitted themselves admirably. Any quibbles aside, this is a great ensemble performance by Opera Australia and well worth a listen and look.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is at the Arts Centre Melbourne, State Theatre, on Sat Nov 17, Mon 19 Nov and Thurs 22 Nov.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Breen, McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Melbourne

This week, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court made a dramatic intervention in the country’s deepening political crisis, a move that may prevent it from sliding further into democratic dysfunction and possible political violence.

The three-judge panel overturned the unilateral action by Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena to illegally dissolve the parliament last week. The ruling means that parliament could reconvene as soon as Wednesday (November 14).

Jubilant supporters of sacked Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe celebrated the decision outside the heavily guarded Supreme Court building in the nation’s capital, Colombo. It is being seen as one of the most significant rulings in Sri Lanka’s history.

How Sri Lanka got to this point

The Supreme Court ruling is the latest twist in a tense political drama that has engulfed the nation since late October, when Sirisena sacked Wickremesinghe and installed civil war strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa in his place. He then called for a snap election on January 5 – an election now in considerable doubt.

Sirisena cited a conspiracy to have him assassinated as a key reason for his actions. But he had no constitutional basis for either the dissolution of parliament or the removal of a sitting prime minister.

Read more: Sri Lanka: as constitutional crisis triggers fears of ‘bloodbath’, concern mounts for minorities

The president’s move to dissolve parliament came just days before it was scheduled to reconvene and vote on which of the two men claiming to be prime minister should be actually recognised as holding the job.

Sirisena and Rajapaksa had tried but failed to induce enough MPs to switch sides. Dissolving parliament, however unconstitutional, became their only path to self-preservation.

So… who is the prime minister?

Sri Lanka has a long democratic tradition dating back to British colonial times. It has seen many ups and downs, including a brutal 25-year civil war that ended in 2009 and the rise of an authoritarian-style leader in Rajapaksa (who served as president from 2005 to 2015).

But never before have Sri Lanka’s constitution and its democratic principles been so undermined.

Since his sacking, Wickremesinghe has continued to claim he is the legitimate prime minister with the support of the majority of parliament.

But Rajapaksa has thus far appeared to have the confidence of the president and key state institutions.

Why was Wickremesinghe sacked?

The possible return of Rajapaksa had ignited deep concerns within Sri Lanka and abroad.

It was only three years ago that his own party split and aligned with the major opposition parties to propose Sirisena as a consensus presidential candidate.

Ironically, Sirisena’s election heralded a new “Yahapalana” coalition government, a term meaning “good governance”. But things did not go according to plan.

Read more: Rajapaksa defeat signals the end of a dynasty in Sri Lanka

Sirisena and Wickremesinghe were unable to work together and none of their key promises were met. Meanwhile, the economy went backwards.

The coalition seemed doomed when local elections in February were dominated by a new party, established by the Rajapaksa family.

The final straw was the alleged assassination plot against Sirisena, apparently involving neighbouring India. The plot was raised in Cabinet, but Sirisena was unhappy with the response and acted by sacking Wickremesinghe, claiming his life was in danger.

It was the policy differences between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe, however, that was really at the heart of the discontent. Sirisena declared that if Wickremesinghe returned, he would “not stay one hour longer”.

So what happens now?

Sirisena initially said he suspended parliament last week to allow his “new government” to appoint a Cabinet and present a budget.

Yet, it was allegedly done to provide enough time for the Rajapaksa camp to bribe MPs to his side. One MP claimed to have recorded Rajapaksa’s henchmen offering him US$2.8 million.

Meanwhile, crowds have taken to the streets in support of each side, while Wickremesinghe has remained holed up in the prime minister’s official residence, surrounded and protected by supporters and fellow parliamentarians. Two people have been killed.

History suggests that Rajapaksa would have succeeded in convincing enough of those who opposed him to switch sides. But this is no ordinary power struggle.

Why is Rajapaksa’s possible return so fraught?

Rajapaksa’s presidency was punctuated by his controversial response to the civil war and abhorrent end of the conflict, which saw tens of thousands of innocent people killed.

His rule was increasingly authoritarian, nepotistic and corrupt. At one point, his family controlled more than half of Sri Lanka’s budget, and he’d succeeded in amending the constitution to grant himself more powers and the prospect of a presidency for life.

And this is leaving aside the geopolitical implications of his presidency and possible return to government. Some commentators have portrayed the current crisis as a power struggle between India and China. And it is certainly true that India would prefer Wickremesinghe, and China, Rajapaksa.

Read more: War is over, but not Sri Lanka’s climate of violence and threats

During his time in office, Rajapaksa sought Chinese investment to build a major port in Sri Lanka, leaving the country in serious debt. Unable to pay back the Chinese loans, Sri Lanka was forced to hand over the port to China on a 99-year lease.

Given this history, it’s not surprising China was the first of only a few countries to recognise the Rajapaksa prime ministership.

But in the end, this is really about domestic politics. And whatever happens, a return to violence is a real possibility. The Supreme Court’s intervention has stopped Sri Lanka’s democracy going over the cliff for now. But it remains on the edge.

Rajapaksa’s strategy will be to delay a confidence vote in parliament for as long as possible, and to redouble efforts to convene a majority. But if he fails, he may be tempted to use force to get his way, and Sri Lanka’s democratic deficit will become a gaping chasm.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Adams, Professor of Corporate Law & Governance, School of Law, Western Sydney University

Very rarely does a judge tear up a multi million dollar penalty signed up to by both the regulator and the alleged perpetrator.

Yet that’s what Federal Court judge Nye Perram did on Tuesday, throwing out a $35 million settlement between Westpac and the the Australian Securities and Investments Commission over its alleged failure to properly assess whether borrowers could meet their repayments before signing them up to mortgages.

Agreed settlements are common

In commercial litigation, as in most litigation, there is an emphasis on trying to settle matters early before they are heard in court.

In criminal law matters the prosecutions encourage early guilty pleas in exchange for lower penalties.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has been increasingly resorting to early settlements as a means of achieving cheaper and quicker outcomes.

The quick win for ASIC, is an enforceable undertaking and a media release. The quick win for the other party is avoiding a drawn out court case and being able to get on with its business.

Courts usually rubber stamp them

Where the alleged breach of the law is serious, necessitating a large penalty, a judge has to formally approve the settlement, in a hearing until now regarded as something of a rubber stamping exercise.

As the Hayne Royal Commission into the Misconduct in Financial Services has pointed out, the downside of such quick settlements can be that the facts aren’t established in court and the law isn’t tested.

Where they are established and the law is tested, as Justice Yates did earlier this year in Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre versus Commonwealth Bank of Australia very big penalties can be handed down – $700 million for more than 50,000 breaches of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism Financing Act.

Read more: Commonwealth Bank’s $700 million fine will end up punishing its customers

Along with it was landmark judgements that establish the scope of the law and tell firms what to avoid in the future.

This time the court said no

On Thursday Justice Perram, in the Federal Court sought the right to do the same.

He rejected the joint application for settlement between ASIC and Westpac Banking Corporation for a penalty of $35 million.

The problem, as he pointed out was that it was not clear from the agreed facts what actual contraventions of the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009 Westpac had been accused of.

He asked ASIC and the Westpac to re-draft the agreed settlement and return to court by 27 November 2018.

In order to establish the law and what happened

The case matters because the Financial Services Royal Commission has been examining the use of computer programs to determine the ability of borrowers to repay loans.

It is possible that many Westpac loans were approved to customers who would have been found to be unable to meet the repayments had their individual circumstances been examined, and it is possible that is in breach of the law.

Read more: Consumers need critical thinking to fend off banks’ bad behaviour

But without a clear judgement or a clear statement of facts for the court to examine, or a clear judgement from the court, it is impossible to tell.

That’s why Justice Perram said no, in order to estabish what the law requires and what Westpac did.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dylan Korczynskyj, Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame Australia

Curious Kids is a series for children in which we ask experts to answer questions from kids. You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

I am wondering: is dew the same as rain? What is dew? Thank you – Leo, age 3.

Great questions, Leo!

I am a plant ecologist, and rain and dew are things I need to understand. Plant ecology is all about learning how plants are affected by the world around them (their environment) in the same way that you are affected by your environment.

For example, if you go outside you might consider putting a hat on so you don’t get burnt by the hot sun. Or you might put a coat on so you don’t get cold or wet. Plants are greatly affected by water, whether it comes from dew or rain. So are rain and dew the same?

Read more: Curious Kids: How do you know that we aren’t in virtual reality right now?

Dew is the water droplets that we find in the morning on leaves and other things outside, and usually in spring or winter when the air is cold. It is similar to rain because it forms from condensing water vapour. I hear you asking, “…but what does condensing water vapour mean?”. I will try to explain.

Water can be a liquid (we drink liquid water), it can also be a solid (think of ice cubes), and it can be a gas, which we call water vapour. When water warms up enough it breaks into small, fast-moving parts, called molecules. It changes from being a liquid to a gas – water vapour – that floats about in the air.

Think about how the steam (which is water vapour) from your hot bath floats about your bathroom.

So, now you understand what water vapour is and how it is made, think about what will happen if the fast moving water vapour cools down: this will help you understand condensation.

As the vapour cools, it slows down. The small parts, the molecules, start to gather together, especially on cold things (like a cool leaf) or in cold areas (like high in the sky). Scientists would say the water condenses.

If enough water molecules gather together (like a little water molecule “meeting”) they form a droplet of liquid water.

This same process (condensation) occurs when the stream from your hot bath condenses on the cold bathroom mirror – have you ever drawn a face on it?

Whether the droplets that form are dew or rain depends on where they formed.

Rain forms from water vapour condensing high in the sky as clouds. If enough water molecules gather together, it will get too heavy to stay in the sky and fall down on your head as rain.

Dew forms from water vapour that condenses on cold surfaces on the ground, like grass or a car on a cool morning (it usually gets a bit cooler early in the morning).

All plants need water and so do we – it is very precious to all life! Most plants get their water from the soil, but this water originally fell as rain and then soaked into the soil.

Some plants and lichen (lichen are like plants) can absorb water from dew. It’s a little bit like they are “drinking” the dew.

I hope this helps.

Read more: Curious Kids: where do clouds come from and why do they have different shapes?

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

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

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jay Sanjayan, Professor, Swinburne University of Technology

Construction is one of the largest industries in the world economy – worth A$10 trillion globally (equivalent to 13% of GDP).

But construction has suffered for decades from remarkably poor productivity compared to other sectors. While agriculture and manufacturing have increased productivity 10-15 times since the 1950s, construction remains stuck at the same level as 80 years ago.

That’s because construction remains largely manual, while manufacturing and other industries have made significant progress in the use of digital, sensing and automation technologies.

We and other research groups see 3D-printed concrete as a possible solution to these problems. The technique will likely also give architects the freedom to inject more creativity into their designs for new structures.

Read more: How to print a building: the science behind 3D printing in construction

Problems facing construction

Our modern civil infrastructure is almost entirely built with concrete. We use more than 20 billion tons of concrete per year. The only material we use more than that is water.

The construction industry is facing a number of serious problems, including low labour efficiency and high accident rates at construction sites. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the construction industry has the highest rate of work-related injuries (59 per 1000 workers).

There are also difficulties in quality control at construction sites, high levels of waste and carbon emissions, cost blow-outs, and challenges in managing large worksites with a vanishing skilled workforce.

Disruptive technologies such as 3D concrete printing can offer solutions.

The benefits of 3D concrete printing

3D construction uses additive manufacturing techniques, which means objects are constructed by adding layers of material.

Conventional approaches to construction involve casting concrete into a mould (known as formwork). But additive construction combines digital technology and new insights from materials technology to allow free-form construction without the use of formwork.

Eliminating the cost of formwork is the major economic driver of 3D concrete printing. Built using materials such as timber, formwork accounts for about 60% of the total cost of concrete construction. It’s also a significant source of waste, given that it is discarded sooner or later. According to a 2011 study, the construction industry generates 80% of total worldwide waste.

Pouring concrete into formwork also limits the creativity of architects to build unique shapes, unless very high costs are paid for bespoke formwork. Free-form additive construction could enhance architectural expression. The cost of producing a structural component would not be tied to the shape, so construction could be freed from the rectangular designs that are so familiar in current building architecture.

Read more: Concrete jungle? We’ll have to do more than plant trees to bring wildlife back to our cities

What we could build

3D concrete printing is being explored for use in the construction of houses, bridges, buildings and even wind turbine towers.

Houses

This 3D-printed concrete house was built in 24 hours during a harsh Russian winter. It was the first such house to be built in a single location.

Bridges

An 8-metre 3D-printed concrete bridge for cyclists was unveiled in the Netherlands last year. The bridge, which was printed by Eindhoven University of Technology, has more than 800 layers and took three months to print.

Intricate structures

3D concrete printing has an advantage over conventional construction methods when it comes to building non-rectilinear shapes, such as curved shapes with intricate details.

It’s still early days

This field of research is still in its infancy.

The biggest hurdle in the development of concrete 3D printing is the concrete itself. Conventional concrete in its current form is not suitable for 3D printing, so new and innovative alternatives need to be developed.

Researchers are exploring various types of concrete. The concrete for 3D printing must not set when it’s inside the printer, but it needs to set and strengthen as soon after it is extruded as possible. This kind of concrete is called “set-on-demand”.

Read more: We could 3D print buildings using robots and drones – here’s how

When it comes to actually printing the concrete, special printers are needed. Typically, the size of the printer needs to be larger than the component being printed. However, researchers are exploring printers or robots that can “climb” on parts of the concrete that are already set in order to print other sections.

International researchers and industry experts will gather at the First International Conference on 3D Construction Printing at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne from November 25-28.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marianna Brungs, Director, Sydney Peace Foundation, University of Sydney

This is the final article in the Reclaiming the Fair Go series, a collaboration between The Conversation, the Sydney Democracy Network and the Sydney Peace Foundation to mark the awarding of the 2018 Sydney Peace Prize to Nobel laureate and economics professor Joseph Stiglitz. These articles reflect on the crisis caused by economic inequality and how we can break the cycle of power and greed to enable all peoples and the planet to flourish. The Sydney Peace Prize will be presented on November 15 (tickets here).

Forida says that if she were paid a little more money, she could one day send her son to school. She could live happily; her family could live a better life.

Forida, 22, lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh, with her infant son and husband. They live in a dark compound built mostly of tin and wood with six other families and just one toilet. It floods and leaks when it rains, and beside the compound is a polluted pond that attracts mosquitoes.

Forida makes clothes bound for Australia as part of the global fashion industry. She earns about 35 cents (AUD) an hour.

Read more: To tackle inequality, we must start in the labour market

Forida’s story is not rare.

Oxfam did a comparison earlier this year of the salaries of top CEOs of large Australian retail clothing brands and the earnings of the women, like Forida, who work in their supplier factories.

We found that the workers’ wages have increased at a snail’s pace, while the CEOs’ pay has shot up by millions. Annual pay for the workers who make their clothes remains appallingly low.

As a case in point, one CEO in a top fashion company in Australia earns up to $2,500 an hour, including returns from shares and bonuses. A garment worker in Bangladesh like Forida should earn at least the legal minimum wage of A$0.39 an hour. At this rate, garment workers earning the minimum wage in Bangladesh would have to work more than 10,000 years to earn what a highly paid CEO in Australia makes in a year.

In December, a new minimum wage – just over 60 cents AUD an hour – will apply to garment workers in Bangladesh. But even with this improvement, the women in these factories will still only earn about half of what they need to live a decent life – enough money for adequate housing and food, health and education for their families.

There is perhaps no starker example of global inequality.

Wealthy men – for it is mostly men – are at the top of global supply chains in which a mostly female workforce toils to bring in ever more revenue. The Australian fashion industry alone was worth about A$27 billion in 2016.

So when our leaders flatly deny the notion that inequality is growing – that it is a real and serious problem that demands action – it is hard not to find this perspective jarring.

It’s certainly not the case for the many women and men at the bottom of Australian-owned global supply chains.

Inequality is on the rise in Australia, too

The evidence is strong that inequality is also on the rise in Australia. If you read some accounts of the recent Productivity Commission report on inequality, you’d be forgiven for thinking inequality isn’t a problem Australia needs to tackle.

But that media coverage hasn’t focused on some of the key trends found in the report, which offers a rather more balanced view, as Peter Whiteford has clearly pointed out.

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

The commission’s report shows, for example, that inequality is a problem for people in lower-income brackets. It explores how generational inequality is entrenched in Australia – while many people move between income brackets over time, the richest and the poorest Australians don’t do this nearly as much. Poorer Australians are more likely to stay trapped in the bottom bracket while, at the top, wealth begets wealth.

And, as Gary Barrett and Stephen Whelan have shown in the first article in this series, income inequality remains a problem in Australia. So does wealth inequality. Today the wealthiest 1% of Australians own more than the poorest 70% combined.

Read more: The fair go is a fading dream, but don’t write it off

The ACOSS Poverty in Australia 2018 report includes data showing that one in eight adults and more than one in six children are living in poverty today.

At the same time, at the global level, organisations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been having an entirely different discussion: they know inequality is continuing to increase. Instead of arguing the reality, they’ve invested in researching and discussing solutions. And, while its own loan program still requires some change to be better aligned with fighting inequality, over the past few years, the IMF and others have been calling on governments to act.

Read more: How rising inequality is stalling economies by crippling demand

Inequality worsens poverty and marginalisation – especially for those who already have less power than others. What Oxfam has seen around the globe is that rising inequality disproportionately impacts women, people of colour, Indigenous people, people with disabilities and LGBTIQ communities – and others who already face challenges when it comes to access to power.

Forida is one of millions of women who are trapped in poverty. They fuel a global economy that lines others’ pockets while they are unable to escape hardship, no matter how hard or how long they work.

That Forida’s home lacks facilities like safe, internal running water and is built beside a polluted pond is linked to this global challenge of rising inequality. Governments in developing countries like Bangladesh are being starved of funds. Of course, these governments also need to make the right choices and invest in health, education and infrastructure – essential things their communities need.

At the same time, the global estimate of the money ripped out of poor countries due to the tax-avoiding practices of wealthy firms sits at more than US$170 billion a year.

This huge amount should rightfully be used to invest in safe water and sound infrastructure for women like Forida in developing countries around the world. These women bear the burden of the lack of investment. Forida looks after her family when they are sick from water-borne diseases and only eats watery rice so her son may eat better when they run out of money at the end of each month.

We must challenge the policies and practices that are fuelling inequality, or women like Forida will continue to be left behind.

We know how to reduce inequality

Engage with the ideas to tackle inequality: there are many. And they are good. Organisations at the forefront of combating inequality, both in Australia and globally, have proposed a whole range of powerful solutions. It is time the government listens and engages.

In Australia, the campaign to raise the rate of Newstart, led by ACOSS, is gaining steam. It has the support of both former Prime Minister John Howard and the Business Council of Australia.

The Close the Gap campaign, which Oxfam helped to launch over 10 years ago, has taken stock in 2018 and produced a range of recommendations for the government to close the Indigenous health gap. And a thorough, national consultation process has culminated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the legitimate call for an Indigenous voice to parliament.

Unions, NGOs and Australians from all walks of life are concerned about flat-lining wages. They want to see cuts to penalty rates reversed – along with a raft of other changes to our industrial system to make it fairer. The union movement’s Change the Rules campaign makes these calls resoundingly clear.

Read more: Why are unions so unhappy? An economic explanation of the Change the Rules campaign

On a global level, Oxfam and civil society organisations have been calling on governments to act not only on rising inequality within their borders but also to help tackle it around the globe.

This means comprehensive action on business supply chains that skirt human rights – which includes paying poverty wages to women like Forida – through national action plans on business and human rights. It also means acting to ensure the tax affairs of large businesses are public – right across the globe – to help stop money being hidden in tax havens and ripped out of both Australia and the developing countries that need this revenue.

The ideas being put forward from across Australia are legitimate. They deserve greater attention. It is time for our dialogue to be about action, rather than arguing whether inequality is a problem at all.

This article was co-authored by Helen Szoke, chief executive of Oxfam Australia.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nic Rawlence, Lecturer in Ancient DNA, University of Otago

Museums are cathedrals of science, but they are under threat worldwide as part of a malaise of undervaluing museum collections and the field of taxonomy, the science of naming biodiversity.

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is the latest example. Te Papa confirmed a restructure in July, following leaked reports. Facing sustained backlash and disquiet in the science community, the museum announced an international review of its collections and has since scaled back its restructure plans.

But jobs remain on the line even though the review panel found the museum didn’t have enough staff to look after all of its collections.

Read more: From Joseph Banks to big data, herbaria bring centuries-old science into the digital age

Taxonomy a keystone of natural history

Taxonomy underpins everything from health to conservation, and biosecurity to the economy.

The international review shows Te Papa is doing a good job in most areas, but needs to improve on several aspects, including access to collections, cataloguing a backlog of specimens and digitisation.

These areas of concern were seriously exacerbated by the panel’s finding that Te Papa is understaffed.

The review panel was not asked to comment on the restructure. At that stage, the proposal was to cut 25 positions, 10 of which were in the collections team. This has now been scaled back to at least five jobs in the collections team.

Staff whose positions may be affected were told only a day before the review recommendations were made public.

Read more: Museum or not? The changing face of curated science, tech, art and culture

Museum collections more than sum of parts

Te Papa’s latest leaked restructure document remains a cause for concern. Curators are no longer in the firing line. However, the five natural history collections managers are gone, to be replaced by three assistant curators and two general technical positions. All of this would appear to fall at a lower pay scale.

I congratulate Te Papa on listening to internal and external feedback and increasing their curatorial expertise in neglected strengths, such as marine mammals and seaweeds. Ironically, in the case of marine mammals, this seems to rectify a mistake in making the previous marine mammal expert redundant in 2013.

A member of the international review panel, Tim White at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, told the public broadcaster RNZ:

Te Papa could use more professional collections staff. If they are going to promote the use of their collections … then they need to think creatively about how they could get more staff.

Taking into account the recently published Decadal Plan for Taxonomy and Biosystematics and the 2015 Royal Society Te Apārangi report on National Taxonomic Collections in New Zealand, this is a good opportunity to increase collections staff rather than, at best, approximate the status quo.

It is my hope that the filling of positions in the proposed structure will not result in a loss of areas of taxonomic expertise. Many of Te Papa’s scientists are leaders in their fields, including in areas where Te Papa leads the way internationally. One should not boost the curatorial team at the expense of collections management.

The bigger picture

As an isolated archipelago with unique flora and fauna, New Zealand needs diverse taxonomic expertise to appropriately handle biosecurity and conservation crises. If Te Papa, or museums in general, shed their taxonomic expertise like an unwanted sloughed-off snake skin, it will be up to other institutions to pick up the slack. If not, our biodiversity will suffer.

There has already been a 10% decline in the taxonomic workforce in Australia in the past 25 years, with declines of around 22% in New Zealand over a similar time period. In both countries, a steadily increasing proportion (currently around a quarter) of taxonomists are unpaid or retired. Let’s not make it any worse.

Undervaluing museum collections and taxonomic expertise is not just limited to New Zealand. The scientific world does not want to see another museum disaster, like the preventable fire that destroyed Brazil’s National Museum.

Whether it is collections under threat or museum libraries being lost in the digital age, or even false assumptions resulting in the closure of a museum, if chief executives and museum boards listen to their scientists and the scientific community, hope remains.

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

Attending a global leaders summit might look easy – all interesting shirts, family-style photos and unusual handshakes – but these occasions can prove extremely difficult for leaders who focus solely on domestic politics or brand new leaders with uncertain electoral prospects.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is both.

Morrison faces a busy week of foreign policy tests in his first big moment on the global stage. He first travels to Singapore for the ASEAN and East Asia Summit, then hosts Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s historic visit to Darwin before jetting off for the APEC Summit in Papua New Guinea on the weekend. This power week will be followed by the G20 Leaders Summit in Buenos Aires at the end of month.

This week, Morrison will have his first meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, US Vice President Mike Pence and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in addition to new (but not so new) Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.

Read more: With Bishop gone, Morrison and Payne face significant challenges on foreign policy

So what can we expect from Morrison’s debut summit season and in particular his meetings with Xi?

Pundits have been speculating whether Morrison might try to use the August leadership spill and appointment of new Foreign Minister Marise Payne as a way of pressing the reset button on relations with China.

Payne’s recent visit to Beijing was viewed by both parties as a success, so Morrison should have a more pleasant meeting with Xi than former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull might have.

But Morrison’s first months in office show a leader who speaks without due care to the reactions of foreign governments – floating the idea of shifting the Australian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is the most glaring example – and a leader with little political capital to spare.

He needs to stick to the script this week.

Danger signs

Morrison has already courted controversy on foreign policy in a short period of time. He skipped the UN General Assembly in September. He also missed the Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru, forcing Payne to reassure Pacific neighbours that he wasn’t “snubbing” them.

Morrison did go straight to Jakarta in his first overseas trip as leader to meet with President Joko Widodo and sign the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with Indonesia.

But he was then accused of playing “straight from Trump’s songbook” when he mused about moving Australia’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem without consulting diplomats or generals beforehand. It was widely seen as a crude attempt to win the Jewish vote in the Wentworth by-election.

One downfall of Australian leaders is they can sometimes look parochial and small-town while on the big stage. For example, then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott made a cringeworthy speech to G20 leaders in Brisbane in 2014 about GP co-payments and stopping the boats. Opposition leader Bill Shorten described it as “weird and graceless”.

In his case, Morrison failed to realise the negative reception his embassy musings would receive in Indonesia. Now, his meetings with Widodo are likely to be frosty, with no plans to sign the free-trade agreement by the end of the year.

Morrison’s meetings with Xi, Putin and Modi

In his recent headland speech, Morrison seemed to adopt a Malcolm Turnbull-style line on taking a middle path with the US and China, noting that a confrontation between the two powers:

risks unimagined damage to economic growth and the global order. Damage where no-one benefits. Lose-lose.

Nevertheless, the speech was strong on values, many of which China does not share.

It is also not clear how Xi will view the recent Pacific push from Morrison, though he seemed to offer the possibility for partnership in the region.

Morrison’s meeting with Putin at the East Asia Summit will likewise be interesting to watch. This is Putin’s first time at the summit, but by no means his first rodeo. His presence is perhaps indicative of Russia’s intention to pivot more attention towards the Indo-Pacific region, taking advantage of Trump’s absence.

Read more: Russia is a rising military power in the Asia-Pacific, and Australia needs to take it seriously

In yet another foreign policy stumble, Abbott once famously vowed to “shirtfront” Putin over the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. Putin enjoys such displays of toxic masculinity; hopefully, Morrison can restrain himself.

Australia wants to enhance its partnership with India, so we should see Morrison make a beeline for Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the ASEAN meeting, hoping for one of Modi’s signature hugs.

Before meeting Modi, Morrison will hopefully have carefully read the India Economic Strategy to 2035, authored by the former high commissioner to India and head of DFAT, Peter Varghese.

Our Pacific family

Last week, Morrison made perhaps his most important foreign policy speech – a major strategic announcement on the Pacific. He said Australia would open five new embassies and launch an infrastructure bank in the region to the tune of A$2 billion, and declared the Pacific “our patch”:

This is our part of the world. This is where we have special responsibilities. We always have, we always will. We have their back, and they have ours. We are more than partners by choice. We are connected as members of a Pacific family.

The announcement came after he signed a deal for a joint naval base in Papua New Guinea. Both this and the infrastructure bank were seen as ways of countering Chinese influence in the Pacific, but Morrison did refrain from using any anti-China rhetoric.

Read more: For Pacific Island nations, rising sea levels are a bigger security concern than rising Chinese influence

This is noteworthy. Tess Newton Cain has pointed out that Australia often misses the right tone of respect and partnership in its announcements to the region.

But despite this new push for Pacific engagement, Australia is still seen as weak on climate policy – a hugely important issue to Pacific leaders. This could result in difficult conversations for Morrison at APEC, as PNG has invited many Pacific nations to attend for the first time.

Sit down, be humble

Even if Morrison puts his best foot forward to overcome his poor start on foreign policy, he will still have difficulty standing out in the crowd.

Even leaders require some political capital to stand out in those big rooms.

The churn in Australian prime ministers means that some foreign leaders may not consider it worth the time or energy to build a relationship of personal trust with Morrison if they view him more like a caretaker. Former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had spent 10 years building up this diplomatic trust and stability in her various roles, but that was severed abruptly.

My advice to Morrison? Stay humble and listen. Read the briefs, listen to the diplomats and do everything Payne and DFAT Secretary Frances Adamson say to do, to the letter.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Bowman, Professor, Pyrogeography and Fire Science, University of Tasmania

California is burning, again. Dozens of peoples have been killed and thousands of buildings destroyed in several fires, the most destructive in the state’s history.

The California fires are just the most recent in a series of major wildfires, including fires in Greece in July this year that killed 99 people, Portugal and Chile in 2017, and Australia.

Why do wildfires seem to be escalating? Despite president Donald Trump’s tweet that the California fires were caused by “gross mismanagement” of forests, the answer is more complex, nuanced, and alarming.

What caused the California fires?

The current California fires reflect a complex mix of climate, social, and ecological factors. Fuels across California are currently highly combustible due to a prolonged drought and associated low humidity and high air temperatures. Indeed, it is so dry fires burn freely through the night. Such extreme weather conditions have the fingerprints of climate change.

Read more: Wildfires in Mediterranean Europe will increase by 40% at 1.5°C warming, say scientists

Compounding the desiccated fuels are the seasonally predictable strong desert winds (the Diablo and Santa Ana) that help fires spread rapidly towards the coast.

Low density housing embedded in flammable vegetation has created an ideal fuel mix for these destructive fires. Having people scattered across the landscape ensures a steady source of ignitions, ranging from powerline faults to carelessness and arson, making fires a near certainty when dangerous weather conditions arise.

Decades of wildfire suppression have created fuel loads that sustain intense fires. That these fuels are burning in late autumn is even more alarming. Under severe fire weather forest fires can engulf entire communities, with fires spreading from house to house, and human communities turning into a unique wildfire “fuel”. Suburbs can burn at the rate of one house per minute .

The standard response to wildfires is to fight them aggressively, using a military-style approach involving small armies of fire fighters combined with aircraft that spread fire retardant and saturate fire-fronts with water. Such approaches are extraordinarily costly. Annual spending on fire fighting has been steadily rising. In the US, annual fire-fighting costs now exceed several billion dollars, with individual fire campaigns costing ten to over a hundred million dollars.

Read more: Spiraling wildfire fighting costs are largely beyond the Forest Service’s control

Although industrial fire-fighting approaches currently enjoy political and social support, the strategy is economically unsustainable. And they are impotent in the face of climate change driven fire disasters such as those currently occurring in California.

A human disaster

Across the fire science community there is growing recognition this “total war” on fire approach has failed. The key to sustainable co-existence with flammable landscapes is instead managing fuels around settlements, and stopping wildfires from starting in the first place.

Spain and Portugal are good examples of why this is so important. In these Mediterranean lands, humans have sustainably co-existed with flammable landscapes for thousands of year. However, the near ubiquitous depopulation of rural lands following the second world war has led to the proliferation of flammable vegetation that had previously been held in check by intensive small-scale subsistence agriculture.

With the loss of this traditional agriculture Mediterranean countries are now experiencing regular fire disasters (such as the 2018 Greek fires and the 2017 Portuguese and Spanish fires). These are equivalent to fires in more recently settled flammable landscapes in the Americas and Australia.

This seems to be the story in most flammable landscapes on earth: the removal of traditional landscape management by colonisation and globalisation has combined with climate change to turn these landscapes into tinderboxes.

But just as it is unrealistic for Australia to faithfully restore Indigenous fire management practices, expecting a return to historical practices in the Mediterranean is not realistic. There is little economic or social reason for people to return to traditional rural lifestyles, and the gravitational pull of the social and economic advantages in urban areas is too great to stem rural depopulation.

Living with fire

But we can adapt traditional practices to help us live with fire. In the Mediterranean, people are already experimenting with different ways to manage landscapes, such as managing forests for cork and bioenergy, combined with prescribed burning and grazing.

This can create picturesque landscapes that are fire-resistant and easy to defend. Similarly, in Australia, the Victorian government has created parkland-like green fire breaks that were used for back burning operations to protect communities during 2009 Black Saturday wildfires.

The Hobart City Council is planning to use similar fire breaks to protect its outer suburbs with dense bushland. Such management could be used on a larger scale to substantially reduce fire risk. The challenge for landscape fuel management is providing financial and regulatory incentives for citizens and local communities to reduce fuel.

Currently, no society is sustainably co-existing with wildfire. Globally, the situation will worsen under a rapidly-warming climate with ballooning firefighting costs, and huge loss of life and destruction of property. This is the bitter lesson of the Californian fires.