Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Reena Ghildyal, Associate Professor in Biomedical Sciences, University of Canberra

You wake up with a runny nose and, come to think of it, you’ve been sneezing more than usual. It feels like the start of a cold but it’s October – the start of hay fever season – so what is the more likely affiliation?

Hay fever and colds are easy to confuse because they share the clinical category of rhinitis, which means irritation and inflammation of the nasal cavity.

The mechanisms share some similarities too, but there are some key differences in symptoms – notably, itchiness and the colour of your snot.

Read more: Health Check: what is the common cold and how do we get it?

Similar mechanisms

The common cold is a viral infection of the upper respiratory tract, usually caused by rhinoviruses. Colds spread easily from one person to the other via coughing, sneezing and touching infected surfaces.

Hay fever, on the other hand, can’t spread from person to person. It’s an allergic response to an environmental irritant such as pollen or dust.

The nasal cavity contains cells that recognise foreign substances such as bugs and pollen. Once the body detects a bug or irritant, it activates an army of T cells that hunt down and destroy the substance. This is known as an immune response.

In hay fever, the irritant triggers the same immune cells as viruses. But it also causes the release of IgE antibodies and histamines to produce an ongoing blocked nose, impaired sense of smell, and nasal inflammation.

How you tell the difference

Both hay fever and the common cold causes sneezing, runny or stuffy nose and coughing.

One of the key differences is the colour of the nasal discharge (your snot): it’s more likely to be yellowish/green in colour in colds, due to secondary bacterial infection; while in hay fever, it’s clear.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why does my snot turn green when I have a cold?

Facial itchiness – especially around the eyes or throat – is a symptom typically only seen with hay fever.

If someone is allergic to a seasonal environmental trigger such as pollen, their symptoms may be restricted to particular seasons of the year. But if you’re allergic to dust or smoke, symptoms may last all year long.

Hay fever, like asthma, is an allergic disease and can sometimes cause similar symptoms, such as coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath.

A sore throat, on the other hand, is generally a precursor to cold. If you have cold-like symptoms and a sore throat or have had one in the last few days, your condition is more likely to be the common cold.

What if you’ve never had hay fever before?

You’re more likely to catch viral infections during winter when more bugs are circulating, but it’s possible to catch a cold any time of the year.

It’s possible to develop hay fever in adulthood. This may be due to genetic predisposition that manifests only when certain other contributing factors are present, such as a high level of airborne pollen. Or it may be due to a major change in lifestyle, such as a move to a different location or change in diet.

Most adults will get two to three colds per year, while hay fever affects nearly one in five Australians.

Around 10-20% of hay fever sufferers grow out of hay fever at some point in their lives and about half find their symptoms get less severe as they get older (which means that for the majority of sufferers, hay fever can last a long time.

How are they treated?

An allergy test, using a skin prick or blood test, for allergen-specific IgE could inform you of the specific irritants that trigger your condition. These tests can be organised through your GP or pharmacist.

Read more: Health Check: what are the options for treating hay fever?

Oral antihistamines are effective in hay fever patients with mild to moderate disease, particularly in those whose main symptoms are palatal itch, sneezing, rhinorrhoea, or eye symptoms hay fever treatments.

Generally, treatment isn’t necessary for a cold but over-the-counter medications such as paracetamol and ibuprofen can help relieve some of the symptoms.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brett Hutchins, Professor of Media and Communications Studies, Monash University

We are two of the researchers affected by Simon Birmingham’s intervention in last year’s Australian Research Council (ARC) funding grants. The title of our application, “Greening Media Sport: The Communication of Environmental Issues and Sustainability in Professional Sport”, was on a list of 11 projects rejected by the then minister for education and training’s office after the ARC had recommended these for funding.

Birmingham’s action has been condemned across the higher education sector and reported extensively. The UK Times Higher Education Supplement noted that this “censoring” of humanities research sits uncomfortably alongside the free speech credentials of the government Birmingham represents.

Read more: Simon Birmingham’s intervention in research funding is not unprecedented, but dangerous

One of the motivations of our project was to try to move beyond needlessly partisan political debate by investigating the capacity of professional sport – arguably the most popular form of media on the planet – to communicate environmental issues and awareness.

The potential for sport in this area is shown by any number of widely publicised examples including the International Olympic Committee’s Sustainability Strategy, the efforts of Formula One racing teams to achieve carbon-neutral status and the Melbourne Cricket Ground’s investment in large-scale waste and water recycling facilities.

Our project seeks to investigate and map a growing range of environmental programs and initiatives around the world, and to help Australia – in the face of serious ecological challenges – capitalise on the fact that it is a sporting nation. It is certainly an objective thought worth pursuing by members of the Sports Environment Alliance, which include the AFL, Tennis Australia, Netball Australia and Cricket Australia.

One cannot help but wonder: did the minister or any of his staff read our application or any of the other ten he chose to reject?

Our decision to speak publicly is to pose necessary questions about what has happened here and why. As professors in the discipline of communications and media studies, we are familiar with the risks and realities of producing research on matters of social, cultural and political significance.

Both of us have, for example, made unexpected appearances in news stories and state and federal parliamentary Hansards at different points in our careers. This speaks to the sometimes contradictory nature of producing university-based research. Depending on the issue at hand, evidence-based research is invoked by political actors and citizens to support a particular position and declared hopelessly arcane and out-of-touch by those who hold a different position. This is precisely why decisions about ARC funding are usually made at arm’s length from government.

We can live with rejection – it is a professional byproduct of producing research. However, the rules through which funding decisions are reached should be transparent and the reasons for rejection should be communicated clearly to researchers and their universities. Neither has occurred on this occasion.

A lack of transparency

Last November, we received the following notification from the ARC about Greening Media Sport, relayed via the Monash Research Office: “This proposal is in the Top 10% of unsuccessful proposals within the discipline panel”.

It was not until last Friday morning, when news of a video posted by Labor Senator Kim Carr to YouTube started to circulate, that the truth of why our project was deemed unsuccessful became apparent.

Given that our project was, in fact, recommended for funding by the ARC and then sent to the minister’s office for sign-off, it turns out that the ARC’s November 2017 statement – in the context of its Humanities and Creative Arts discipline panel – was demonstrably incorrect. Who is ultimately responsible for this misleading statement? The minister? His office? The ARC?

This intervention raises a number of further questions. Why has it taken almost 12 months for information about the exclusion of the 11 grants to be made public? Why was this information not disclosed to the applicants and the universities that employ them? It might have at least stopped many of the researchers, including us, rewriting and resubmitting applications regarded as undeserving of ministerial sign-off.

Researchers should have the right to know if the minister has introduced an additional criterion for funding into the grant system. Birmingham has defended his intervention with confidence on Twitter. Can he further explain why he rejected the applications – and why his actions remained concealed until last week?

Why were the 11 projects targeted by the minister attached to only one panel out of eight: Humanities and Creative Arts? If different rules apply to applications sent to this panel, reviewers, panel members and possibly the ARC itself should be informed of this fact.

Finally, a new round of ARC grants will be announced shortly. Is the current minister for education, Dan Tehan, about to exercise the same discretion as his predecessor in relation to these?

The lives and careers of researchers are negatively affected, sometimes heavily, by funding decisions. This reality needs to be remembered in the midst of political debate about this issue. One applicant in the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award scheme has communicated that he and his family had to move overseas for employment because the minister rejected his application.

We all rely on the transparency, if not fairness, of institutional decision-making in order to accept the legitimacy of the systems that govern our lives. Academics are no different to other citizens and professionals in this respect.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne

The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry released its interim report last month.

This month Rod Sims was re-appointed as chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

The reappointment, the second by a Coalition government after the then Labor treasurer, Wayne Swan, appointed Sims in 2011, will give him an unprecedented third term.

The two events might seem unrelated, but it pays to take a closer look.

Compare the pair

Royal Commissioner Kenneth Hayne’s preliminary diagnosis was that fault lay, at least in part, with the financial system regulators; in particular the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

His chapter on “the regulators” is peppered with comparisons between ASIC and the ACCC. These do not favour ASIC.

ASIC plays too nice

The report charges ASIC with bending over backwards to negotiate agreed outcomes with offenders. Instead of litigating in pursuit of sanctions, too often ASIC has resorted to enforceable undertakings, the terms of which were heavily manipulated by the offending entity, or infringement notices that involved no admission of guilt. The report states:

… ASIC’s starting point appears to have been: How can this be resolved by agreement?

The starting point should be: Why would it not be in the public interest to bring proceedings to penalise the breach?

The agreements focused on remediation measures, which, as Hayne also notes, took far too long to reach. While it is important to compensate victims, it is not a substitute for penalties that punish wrongdoers and deter others.

As Hayne put it:

The regulator must do whatever can be done to ensure that breach of the law is not profitable.

Limited resources are no excuse. Allocation of ASIC’s limited resources is a process of prioritisation. Bringing cases against wrongdoers appears to have been low on its list of priorities.

The ACCC plays tough

The ACCC has the same tools at its disposal as ASIC and makes good use of negotiated agreements. But it is also prepared to escalate its approach from negotiation to litigation.

By contrast, under ASIC oversight, financial institutions have been allowed to think, in Hayne’s words, that they could “decide when and how the law will be obeyed or the consequences of breach remedied”.

Read more: Criminal charges against banking ‘cartels’ show Australia is getting tough on competition law

Comparisons between the volume of proceedings brought by each regulator are difficult given the differences in their responsibilities and the provisions governing them.

However, it is hard to imagine a charge of litigating too little being made against the ACCC.

Enforcement has been at the centre of the ACCC’s mission under Sims, and under Allan Fels before him.

The ACCC takes on the big end of town

Hayne bemoans the fact that 70% of ASIC’s enforcement actions have been against small business. A healthy proportion of the ACCC’s have been against large businesses including the big supermarkets, the airlines, telecommunication companies and banks.

Over the past decade the ACCC has racked up A$366 million in fines for breaches of just one of the many prohibitions that it is responsible for enforcing: the prohibition against cartel conduct.

Read more: Cartel case shows not all corporate misbehaviour goes unpunished

Aided in part by an upward adjustment in the statutory maximum size of the penalty it is able to obtain, its average over the past ten years has been double that of the preceding ten years.

In May this year, the ACCC persuaded the Federal Court to impose Australia’s highest civil penalty for anti-competitive conduct to date – A$46 million. This topped the A$36 million against cardboard giant Visy that had stood as the record for more than 10 years.

The fresh record was an important step in the Sims-led campaign to lift the benchmark for corporate fines.

Read more: Cartels caught ripping off Australian consumers should be hit with bigger fines

Not content with higher civil penalties, Sims also oversaw the first criminal prosecutions for cartel behaviour. The first produced a penalty of A$25 million against a Japanese shipping company, discounted by half for cooperation. Further prosecutions against a regional healthcare company and three major banks swiftly followed.

The value of such litigation goes beyond public denunciation, beyond punishment and beyond deterrence. It strengthens respect for and support for the law.

In an age in which distrust in institutions is verging on acute, it has been one of the ACCC’s most important contributions.

ASIC avoids risks

The report further charges ASIC with failing to take necessary risks in its litigation strategy, by shying away from “strategically important” cases.

When it does go to court, ASIC’s success rate has averaged above 90%.

That “seeming accomplishment”, according to Hayne, “has concerning implications”. It suggests the agency largely picks low-hanging fruit.

Contrast this from Sims in his first major speech on his appointment:

The ACCC’s success rate in first instance litigation stands at almost 100%. This is frankly too high. It may sound strange to say so, but benchmarking against our international counterparts we are sitting at a much higher level of success. Of course I’m happy with the implication that ACCC staff handle cases well, but the flip side is that we have been too risk-averse. We need to take on more cases where we see the wrong but court success is less assured.

The ACCC tests boundaries

For Sims, legal losses are neither a waste of resources nor a stain on the agency’s reputation.

They are an important mechanism for providing the business community with greater certainty about its obligations and a constant reminder that the ACCC will proceed in a way that reflects the seriousness and culpability of the conduct, without fear or favour.

Showcasing its appetite for testing uncharted territory were the cases brought against Coles and Woolworths for unconscionable conduct against their suppliers, a win and a loss respectively.

The ACCC also proceeded quickly to flex its muscles in enforcing the unfair contracts provisions that took effect in 2016.

Hayne went to lengths to compare the ACCC’s boldness to ASIC’s timidity in seeking compliance with these reforms.

The ACCC is prepared to be unpopular

The ACCC has been on the end of its fair share of criticism.

For some, it has been too soft on mergers – banking acquisitions included (although it should be noted these were waved through pre-Sims under then chairman Graeme Samuel).

For others, it has overstepped the mark in its use of the media.

For my own part, the ACCC’s approach to cooperating offenders could be sharpened. It could do more to secure compensation for cartel victims and review its merger decisions after the fact.

But law enforcement is not a popularity contest and, as the indomitable Fels was fond to remark, if there’s criticism, then we must be doing something right.

While ASIC tries to accommodate

Hayne pointedly observed that the major banks could not “find a word of criticism for ASIC”.

The royal commission is still to produce recommendations to deal with the suite of issues exposed to date.

Read more: Banking Royal Commission’s damning report: ‘Things are so bad that new laws might not help’

But clearly Hayne favours more effective enforcement of the laws we have, rather than the creation of new ones.

What’s next?

Hayne says there is a case for a new statutory body to ensure regulators are subject to regular critical review and held to greater account for their performance – a sort of body to watch over the regulators that are supposed to be watching over us.

An alternative would be to ask them to “watch Sims”.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Peterson, Senior Lecturer in Drama, Flinders University

Review: Dancing Grandmothers, Adelaide

“Age and grow fat; dance and grow fat.” This phrase, which appears on a screen midway through Dancing Grandmothers, suggests that we can have our cake and eat it too, that whatever is inevitable, dancing will always bring us great joy. If we come out of the womb dancing, as I’ve always liked to imagine, then we must grow old dancing.

Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn’s Dancing Grandmothers, an Australian premiere which provided a thrilling opening to Adelaide’s 12th OzAsia Festival, shows us how. Ahn has travelled up and down her native land, videotaping older women dancing. In a video sequence embedded in the show we see grannies dancing everywhere, in the most improbable of spaces and while engaging in activities seemingly unsuitable for dance. They dance in parks, fish farms, forests, fields, food stalls, and in impossibly small shops.

But where the grannies truly amaze and delight us is when they appear onstage, following an opening sequence featuring Ahn herself and an energetic troupe of highly-accomplished younger dancers. While the younger dancers thrill us with their energetic twists, twirls, and leaps across the stage in an infinite variety of colourful clothing, it is the amateur troupe of 11 senior women, the eldest being 83, who are the stars of the show.

When the grannies appear they are carefully and delicately danced onto the stage, each paired with a younger dancer. The women are then seated on the floor, facing upstage, clapping to a soul number as two shirtless young men fly across the stage in moves as gymnastic as they are dancerly.

The women are soon up on their feet, with three dancing energetically to a Korean pop song with a 1970s vibe. Their moves are somehow distinctively Korean, perhaps because traditional Korean folk dances involve extensive, graceful use of the arms, a focal point enhanced by costumes with long sleeves that are flicked up and extend the space and expressive range of the body.

But here the women dance in clothes worn by women over 60 on the Seoul subway or while going shopping. These grannies are not afraid of colour or busy floral patterns, polka dots, or bold stripes. And whether wearing blouses and dresses or jackets and pants, the stage is always awash with brightly coloured clothing that demands attention.

Among the standout sequences were the following:

An elegant silver-haired woman in a bright, knit full-length kaftan-style dress, moving slowly with grace and poise to a ballad filled with longing, her expressive arm gestures swirling outward and over her head, dancing in a world of slowly falling snow.

Then dancing to a tango beat, another elegant woman, this one with the ubiquitous highly-permed hair-do of Korean women over 60, in a frilled white blouse and pink dress, is joined by a sexy, dapper young man in a top hat. The couple mirrors one another’s moves and in a moment of infinite connection, the young man picks up the grannie in his arms, dances, then sets her down. She seems embarrassed. Or seems to be so, which only adds to the charm of the moment.

Another solo, this time with another silver-haired woman, resplendent in a deep blue dress, moving with impeccable grace and fluidity while the screen behind her shows images of fish and sea creatures seemingly mirroring her movements in the water. Here the live and the virtual become one in an oddly karaoke-inflected musical and visual world. If karaoke could dance, at this moment it does so.

The final group dance has the grannies enter the stage holding beach-ball sized glitter balls. As smaller versions of these balls fall from above the stage, theirs are linked to hooks and raised aloft, creating a shared space between audience and stage that felt like the biggest disco on the planet since 1979. A bouncy pop song animates the group and disco inferno ensures. Suddenly, the music stops and the lights dim and we hear only the sound of bodies breathing while dancing as we all collectively sink into darkness.

It is a thrilling communal moment to be sure.

But not to end there, those of us sitting on or near the ends of aisles are compelled to join the full company of dancers onstage. I find myself dancing with one of the most graceful of the women and unconsciously I pick up her moves, feeling like we’re sharing some part of our bodies and our souls. Whether we actually dance onstage or not, surely an impossible moment of communion is the gift of the dancing grannies.

Dancing Grandmothers was staged as part of the OzAsia Festival, Adelaide.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

This week’s Newspoll, conducted October 25-28 from a sample of 1,650, gave Labor a 54-46 lead, a one-point gain for Labor since last fortnight. Primary votes were 39% Labor (up one), 36% Coalition (down one), 9% Greens (down two) and 6% One Nation (steady). Rounding probably assisted Labor in this poll.

41% were satisfied with Scott Morrison (down four), and 44% were dissatisfied (up six), for a net approval of -3, down ten points. Bill Shorten’s net approval was up three points to -13. While Shorten’s ratings are poor, this is his best net approval this term. Morrison led Shorten by 43-35 as better PM (45-34 last fortnight).

58% thought Morrison should hold the election when due next year, while 33% thought he should call an early election before the end of this year.

Since Morrison became PM, his net approvals have been +2, +5, +7 and now -3. Turnbull’s first four net approvals were +18, +25, +35 and +32. It took six months for Turnbull to receive his first negative Newspoll net approval, it has taken Morrison just two months.

According to analyst Kevin Bonham, even if Morrison never receives another positive Newspoll net approval, he will still have more positive net approvals than either Tony Abbott (two) or Paul Keating (zero) did as PM.

Morrison’s slump could be caused by the Liberals’ loss of Wentworth, but it could also be due to increasingly bad perceptions of the Coalition over issues such as climate change. The falls in the stock market and house prices are likely to impact consumer confidence, and governments usually perform worse when the economy is not perceived to be doing well.

Essential: 53-47 to Labor

Last week’s Essential poll, mostly taken before the Wentworth byelection, gave Labor a 53-47 lead, unchanged from three weeks ago. Primary votes were also unchanged, with the Coalition on 38%, Labor 37%, the Greens 10% and One Nation 7%. This poll was conducted October 18-21 from a sample of 1,027.

Essential uses the previous election method to assign preferences, assuming One Nation preferences split about 50-50. Since December 2017, Newspoll has assumed One Nation preferences split about 60-40 to the Coalition. If Essential and Newspoll used the same method, there would probably be a two-point gap between the two. Since Morrison became PM, Newspoll has given Labor better two party results than Essential despite the One Nation adjustment.

60% (up nine since April) cited cost-of-living as one of their top three issues, while 37% cited health (up one), 29% housing affordability (steady) and 27% creating jobs (down five). Income and business tax cuts were at the bottom with just 12% and 5% respectively who thought they were important issues.

59% thought the change of PM had made no difference and the Morrison government was still the same government, while 20% thought it was a new government. By 35-28, they preferred Morrison to Turnbull as PM (57-29 among Coalition voters).

63% (down one since September 2017) thought that climate change was caused by human activity, while 25% (up one) thought we were just witnessing a normal fluctuation in the earth’s climate. 56% (steady) thought Australia was not doing enough to address climate change, 23% (up three) thought we were doing enough, and 7% (down one) thought we were doing too much.

37% did not support a separate national day to recognise Indigenous Australians, 36% supported a separate day alongside Australia Day, and just 14% supported a separate day instead of Australia Day.

Massive difference between on-the-day and early voting in Wentworth

With probably fewer than 1,000 postal votes to come before Friday’s deadline for reception, independent Kerryn Phelps won the October 20 Wentworth byelection by a 51.2-48.8 margin over Liberal Dave Sharma, a vote margin of 1,783, and a swing of 18.9% against the Liberals. Primary votes were 43.1% Liberal (down 19.1%), 29.2% Phelps, 11.5% Labor (down 6.2%) and 8.6% Greens (down 6.3%).

Read more: Wentworth byelection called too early for Phelps as Liberals recover in late counting

Early on election night, Wentworth was called for Phelps owing to her strong performance on election-day booths. Pre-poll and postal votes counted by October 21 were much stronger than expected for Sharma, as this tweet from the ABC’s Antony Green shows.

Green also tweeted that there has been a big drop in Sharma’s percentage share of the postals as later batches are counted. Sharma was at 64.4% on postals counted by the morning of October 21, but dropped to just 44.3% in postals counted October 25. Later postals would have been sent closer to the election date.

Later postals tend to be less conservative-friendly than earlier ones, but not to this extent. It is clear from this data that Wentworth voters shifted decisively against the Liberals in the final days.

I think the most important reason for this shift was Coalition senators voting with Pauline Hanson on her “It’s OK to be white” motion. This motion would have absolutely no appeal to an electorate with a high level of educational attainment relative to the overall population.

Victorian Galaxy poll: 53-47 to Labor

The Victorian election will be held on November 24. A Galaxy poll for the Bus Association, conducted last week from an unknown sample, gave Labor a 53-47 lead, unchanged since September. Primary votes were 40% Labor (down two), 39% Coalition (down one) and 12% Greens (up two). This poll was probably close to 54-46 to Labor.

44% approved of Premier Daniel Andrews (up four), and 35% disapproved (down seven), for a net approval of +9, up eleven points. Opposition Leader Matthew Guy’s net approval was up one point to -18.

Since the change in PM, there have been two 53-47 to Labor results from Galaxy, and a 52-48 from ReachTEL. Labor is likely to win the Victorian election, though they could be forced into a minority government if the Greens take inner city seats.

US midterm elections, and far-right wins Brazil presidential election

US midterm elections will be held on November 6. I wrote for The Poll Bludger on Saturday that Democrats are likely to win the House, but Republicans are likely to retain the Senate. Trump’s ratings dropped from highs last seen in March 2017. The recent far-right terrorist events may shift public opinion.

The Brazilian presidential election runoff was held Sunday after no candidate won an outright majority in the first round on October 7. The far-right candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, defeated the left-wing Workers’ Party candidate, Fernando Haddad, by a 55.1-44.9 margin. Bolsonaro has made comments sympathetic to the 1964-85 Brazil military dictatorship. Corruption by the established parties and a recession are key reasons for this result.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute

This week we’re exploring the state of nine different policy areas across Australia’s states, as detailed in Grattan Institute’s State Orange Book 2018. Read the other articles in the series here.

A dangerous fantasy is taking hold in Australia: that government policy can divert population growth from our bulging capital cities to our needy regions. It’s a fantasy because a century of Australian history shows it won’t work. And it’s dangerous because it gives governments an excuse to avoid the hard decisions on planning and transport needed to make housing more affordable and cities more liveable.

Since Federation, state and federal governments have tried to lure people, trade and business away from the capital cities. These efforts have mostly been expensive policy failures.

Despite substantial government spending on regional development aimed at promoting decentralisation, Grattan Institute’s State Orange Book 2018 shows the trend to city-centred growth has accelerated in the past decade. Less than a third of us now live outside the capital cities.

With the exception of Western Australian and Queensland mining regions, capital city economies over ten years have grown faster than regional economies. That’s mainly because their populations have grown faster.

Incomes per capita, on the other hand, have generally grown at about the same pace. Employment participation for women is similar too, although 25-to-64-year-old men in regions are 7% less likely to work than men in cities.

Why do most people choose to live in cities?

These are global trends. Large cities around the world are typically growing much faster than less densely populated areas. Even in Japan, where the national population is declining, Tokyo continues to grow.

The economic advantages of cities over regions appear to be increasing as people spend more of their incomes on services rather than goods. Services businesses often prefer to be close to other services businesses, typically in large cities.

Regional growth programs in Australia have a poor record of trying to push economic water uphill against these trends.

Take for example the New South Wales home buyers’ grant of $7,000 for people who move from cities to regions. Some 10,000 people were expected to take up the offer in the first year. In fact, only 4,800 grants were made over three years. Many of those probably went to people who would have moved anyway – perhaps to retire to “the bush”.

The key problem is that people will only move to regions if there are extra jobs. And policies to encourage more jobs in regional areas also have a poor track record. The money on offer from government is rarely enough to outweigh the economic advantages for a business of locating in a city instead.

Most of the time we don’t even know whether regional development programs work because they are so badly administered. Auditors-general in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and WA have all found substantial regional development money being spent with no business case, or poor documentation, or without reference to application guidelines, and with no evaluation of whether the programs achieved the promised outcomes.

The overwhelming impression is that governments don’t really want programs evaluated because they know all too well what the answers will be.

What if regional population policies did work?

In the unlikely event that government policy actually succeeded in encouraging many more people and employers to move to regional areas, it would probably slow growth in incomes. Cities are more productive, and this is reflected in higher wages.

Cities are important for innovation and economic growth. Cities offer more opportunities to share ideas, which both attracts skilled people and increases their skills once they arrive. Despite the rise of the internet and reduced telecommunication costs, innovation seems to rely on regular face-to-face contact between people in different firms, which therefore tend to aggregate in large cities.

So pushing extra people to regional areas runs the risk of reducing Australia’s productivity growth and per capita incomes.

So what about regional ‘dormitory’ suburbs?

Another strategy, much discussed in Victoria as it heads into a state election campaign, is to encourage the growth of regional towns as dormitory suburbs for people working in cities. Obviously this only works for regional towns that are relatively close to capital cities, with good transport links. Hence the big-spending promises to upgrade regional rail services.

But it is unclear why regional dormitories should be considered better than building suburbs on the city fringe. These fringe suburbs often provide access to more jobs in the other suburbs nearby.

In any case, the transport infrastructure needed to ferry people from homes in regional areas to jobs in the city is not cheap. Far better to relax planning laws to allow higher-density living where people want to live and can be close to a wide range of jobs – that is, in the established middle and inner suburbs of the capital cities.

The danger of distorted spending priorities

The fantasy that governments can divert population growth from cities to regions is also dangerous because it distorts spending priorities in regions. Government services probably improve regional lives more than government spending that is supposed to promote business growth. Government spending on regional arts and sports facilities probably has a much bigger impact per dollar than an extra kilometre of dual-lane highway.

Government spending per person on education and health is in fact already higher in regions than in cities, even if service levels are often lower because they cost more to deliver. But if governments are going to spend more on regional services, the money may need to be spent differently.

Grattan Institute analysis shows that poorer health and educational outcomes in some regional areas are primarily the result of socio-economic status and other risk factors – not remoteness. In health, for example, the substantial gap in mortality between regions and cities appears to result not from more distant hospitals but from people in regions tending to exercise less and have poorer diets.

Economic theory and policy experience, in Australia and other advanced economies, expose the “repopulate the regions” push as wishing thinking. As this series of articles based on Grattan Institute’s State Orange Book 2018 will show, there are better ways for governments to promote a growing Australia.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brad Carter, Professor (Physics), University of Southern Queensland

Curious Kids is a series for children, where we ask experts to answer questions from kids. All questions are welcome: find out how to enter at the bottom. You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

I am 4 and I live in Melbourne, Australia. Is there anything hotter than the sun? – Carys Mae, age 4, Melbourne.

Yes, Carys; there are lots of places in our Universe where it’s much hotter than the Sun.

Our Sun is a giant ball of gas that is 6000 degrees Celsius at the surface and millions of degrees in the centre. That is very hot! A kettle of boiling water is scalding hot and it’s “only” 100 degrees Celsius.

Our Sun gets so hot because the gas inside burns in a special way that turns some of the gas into lots of energy.

The Sun is a star – and the stars of the night sky are Suns a bit like our own. Some stars are much bigger than our Sun (and weigh a lot more too), and are even hotter inside. In some cases it’s hundreds of millions of degrees inside the star!

The only reason stars don’t explode straight away is that they are so heavy that the force of gravity keeps the star together. In the same way, our Sun’s own gravity holds it together in a nice steady way for a very long time – billions of years. Lucky for us.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why is a magpie’s poo black and white?

For stars that are heavier than our Sun, the gas inside burns a lot quicker and can suddenly run out of energy. The inner part of the star falls towards the star’s centre because of gravity. The outer part of the star first falls inwards too, but bounces off into space. This spectacular event is called a supernova, and can produce temperatures of millions of degrees.

When a massive star supernovas, the really dense part leftover can either be what scientists call a neutron star or a dark black hole. These tiny, yet incredibly heavy objects can suck up gas and dust around them, creating a lot of heat – sometimes temperatures in the millions of degrees.

Two neutron stars can fuse together to become one, in an event called a kilonova, and that makes things very hot too – million of degrees.

It’s actually a very good thing that stars are hot places.

Stars shine because they are hot, and so they light up the night sky in a beautiful way. Lots of heat is also made by stars as they shine, and especially when a star dies in a supernova, or a kilonova occurs.

The amazing thing is that this heat also makes new atoms – tiny particles that have made their way long ago from stars to us. Atoms are like building blocks – everything in your life, even your own body, is made of atoms. Lots of different atoms made by far away stars have found their way here, to make up the Earth, Moon, the Sun and you.

So stars don’t just make heat, but have also made the atoms of our bodies and everything we see around us here on Earth.

As the astronomer Carl Sagan said, we are all “star stuff” – and this is because stars are very hot places!

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do flies vomit on their food?

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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jennifer Kent, Research Fellow, University of Sydney

Car sharing arrived on the Australian scene in the early 2000s. These are commercial services that give people access to vehicles they can rent by the hour.

Services in Australia currently include GoGet and Car Next Door. While GoGet has a fleet of vehicles available for rent, Car Next Door supports private vehicle owners renting out their cars to others in the community (kind of like Airbnb).

Car sharing is now an established transport option in most major Australian cities, but it’s faced its fair share of teething problems. Some of these are unique to Australia, with its powerful system of private car dependency. We’re now on track to overcome many of these issues, but more work is required to really make Australian car sharing a success.

Read more: 1,000 cars and no garage – why car-sharing works

Why is car sharing important?

Car sharing is key component of any transition away from a dependence on private cars. Most of us are now aware that using private cars is one of the most carbon intensive and least healthy ways to get around.

To challenge the place of the private car, we need to supply a network of options. The hope is that owning a car will one day become unnecessary in an integrated system of public and active transport options, where shared cars would play a role in more complex or load-carrying trips.

Car sharing is particularly important in a world on the cusp of the arrival of autonomous vehicles (AVs). AVs could herald either “carmageddons” of congestion, where private autonomous vehicles roam the city at the whim of their owners, or a more palatable system, where on-demand AV services seamlessly match trips to riders. Which version of the future we get depends on whether AVs are shared or privately owned.

Here are some key factors that will shape future success of car sharing in Australia.

1. Car sharing is an inner city thing

Heading the list of barriers to increased uptake of car sharing is that it’s currently a service that is generally contained within the inner urban core of our cities.

Commercial options – where companies maintain their own fleet of vehicles – rely on a critical mass of people, the allocation of prized on-street car parking, and a viable public transport system to satisfy the day-to-day mobility needs of their members. These things generally don’t exist outside of the inner city, so neither does commercial car sharing.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) options – where the carsharing company facilitates the sharing process between individuals – offer some hope of a breakthrough in this space. P2P car sharing is more likely to succeed in lower density areas because it does not need the critical mass of users, nor the gift of on-street car parking.

While the slow creep of P2P services into the suburbs is a process bound by the notorious sluggishness of cultural adjustment, we are witnessing some increased suburbanisation of car sharing as a result of P2P services.

2. Australians don’t share

The need for cultural adjustment raises a second key barrier to car sharing in Australia. Anyone living through the recent bike sharing fiasco in Sydney or Melbourne, where bikes were dumped in parks and rivers, will attest to the fact that (some) Australians are not great at respecting property that is shared. In fact, there are indices of national culture that could have easily predicted the vandalism associated with this catastrophe.

And when it comes to our cars, we are a nation particularly attached to the independence, autonomy and privacy of our own vehicle. Sharing – whether it be lending your own car to a stranger, or making use of a car regularly driven by others – challenges these notions.

But parts of our cities are slowly but surely adapting to living in closer proximity to one another – albeit by necessity, not by choice. And as a nation, we are becoming less attached to owning the spaces and objects we depend upon.

This shift away from personal space and private ownership can primarily be seen in changes to residential densities and tenure-types. But it’s also seen in the way we work, play and eat. Think of the rise of hot-desking, the shift from private backyards to public parks, and the move from the family table to the café.

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

3. It’s all too hard

At first, car sharing wasn’t easy. Car sharing parking spaces were few and far between, insurance arrangements were somewhat obtuse, and the platform for sharing enforced rigid time frames and payment structures.

The pioneers of car sharing in Australia – both the business entrepreneurs and the policy makers – have had to navigate some pretty tricky regulatory, legislative and technological territory.

Commercial operations have negotiated with local government for parking space, and P2P ventures have had to work through complex registration and insurance regulations that vary from state to state. Both approaches have had to design and implement technology that allows cars to be booked and accessed seamlessly.

Fortunately, for those doing the sharing, a lot of these barriers have now been broken down. Most metropolitan local councils now maintain a policy for the allocation of car sharing parking spaces. Insurance cover for P2P sharing is now a standard option.

Read more: Cars cost more in the country: here’s some ways around it

The future of car sharing

There are changes on the horizon all designed to make the concept of sharing even easier. One of the most interesting is the imminent arrival of “share ready” cars on the Australian market.

Designed primarily for the P2P market, these are cars that come with an app, which connects owners’ vehicles to their phones, enabling them to list their car for rent on car sharing websites. The sharer will then be able to access and drive the vehicle using their smart phone, entirely negating the need for traditional keys.

Involvement of the auto-industry is always an interesting development in car sharing. It has been proven empirically that people who use car sharing services drive less and own less cars. This implies less business for car manufacturers. Does this mean the car industry is accepting fissures in the dominance of private cars and protecting whatever share of the transport market it can? Or is it another way of keeping cars king in our cities?

Only time will tell. For the time being, car sharing’s survival is one positive sign that a sustainable transport future is possible.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

As Victorians head to the polls in less than four weeks, there is a wider question worth considering than whether or not the Andrews government is likely to be given another term. Do state governments actually matter?

Imre Salusinszky, a former adviser to then- New South Wales premier Mike Baird, recently tweeted: “State government in 2018 is about running four or five businesses. The whole Westminster thing is preposterous. An efficient model would be a six-person executive guided by a People’s Convention meeting biennially for a month. Doesn’t need party politics and chocolate soldiers”.

That seems unlikely, but the idea that state governments have become too municipal to be taken seriously is familiar. For decades, federal politicians with a high opinion of themselves have treated the state government as beneath their notice or contempt.

Read more: Three areas to reform federal-state financial relations

The exposure of the rorting and corruption of a number of state politicians – notoriously Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald during the most recent period of Labor government in New South Wales – has also fuelled a more general contempt for state politics. But the states at least have well-developed integrity systems that have landed a few crooks in prison. It would be mischievous as well as libellous to explore whether their some of their federal counterparts have been cleaner or luckier.

The habit of treating state government as a poor relation might not be recent. Most of the big names in colonial politics headed straight into the Commonwealth parliament in 1901. Later, it is doubtful whether a federal politician would have ridiculed a Jack Lang or Ted Theodore – New South Wales and Queensland Labor premiers respectively – as dealers in triviality. But they, too, eventually headed for national politics.

With their eyes on the growing power and prestige of federal government as it acquired ever stronger control of national finances, historians have underestimated the continuing significance of the states in major policy areas. Land has always been a big one, as it is today in relation to housing affordability and urban development.

In earlier periods, closer settlement, soldier settlement and land taxation were all state matters. There is also mining. When he was Western Australian minister for industrial development in the 1960s, Charles Court was practically running an arm of Australia’s international policy in his negotiations with the Japanese over new iron-ore projects.

Large fields of activity remained predominantly state matters after federation – education, health and hospitals, public transport and roads, local government, and law and order. The capacity of the Commonwealth to act in a range of fields was either untested, or tested and found wanting.

In the area of social security, it was far from clear before the second world war that the Commonwealth would become predominant. The Commonwealth also left some fields to the states even where its authority to act was unquestioned – such as in marriage and divorce law before 1959-61.

For much of the twentieth century, most major public utilities, such as railways, were controlled by the states. Many became massive government bureaucracies and monopolies. On a smaller scale, Queensland had state-owned butcher shops and pubs.

In social, industrial and conservation policy, the New South Wales Labor governments of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s showed that caution was not inconsistent with policy innovation. Rather more adventurously, Don Dunstan’s South Australian Labor governments of the late 1960s and especially the 1970s, provided a blueprint for the social progressivism associated with the Whitlam revolution. Dick Hamer’s progressive Liberal government in Victoria complemented the Whitlam agenda.

The 1980s revealed some of the limits for state governments in economic policy. The Victorian Cain Labor Government’s economic interventionism won the active dislike of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. It ran up against the barrier of national economic policy and, eventually, political turmoil and financial scandal. Other governments were dogged either by corruption, as in the case of Western Australia and Queensland, or financial mismanagement, as in South Australia.

These results pushed the following generation of Labor leaders and governments towards notable caution and probity. By the mid-2000s, the credit ratings agencies were taking on the role of de facto third chamber of the state legislatures.

Still, the Bracks Labor government in Victoria sought use its personnel and resources to influence the national policy debate. It contributed a National Innovation Agenda, which the Rudd Government took up as a starting point for its own efforts in that field.

The nature of the compact John Howard formulated to get his Goods and Services Tax up, which saw revenue going to the states according to an agreed formula, also provides premiers with a captive national audience whenever the issue of tax policy reform arises.

Read more: From ‘Toby Tosspot’ to ‘Mr Harbourside Mansion’, personal insults are an Australian tradition

Where does this leave state government today? In the first place, it shares with federal government control over areas that are among the most controversial and difficult for government. Energy policy is near the top of the list. And no one would regard Victoria’s new euthanasia law as anything other than a matter of high seriousness.

State government’s capacity for innovation and experimentation in fields that matter, and are not dependent on federal control of the purse-strings, remains alive. The Council of Australia Governments, or COAG, offers a forum in which such influence can be exercised. State governments in Victoria and South Australia have been pursuing the idea of a Treaty with Indigenous people, at a time when the issues of constitutional recognition, an Indigenous voice to parliament, and a Treaty or Makarrata have stalled at the national level. At the territory level, it was the ACT government that passed Australia’s first bill of rights law in 2004.

State governments provide Australians with choice and a government that, for most people, will be less physically and spiritually distant from their daily lives than Canberra. There are also the benefits of variety. For some years during the time John Howard was dominating the federal scene, every state and territory government was controlled by Labor.

Today, there is a more even division between the parties. It remains true, however, that in a time of disillusionment and distrust of politicians, state government provides electoral choice, checks on federal government power, and a large array of the services that Australians think of as peculiarly the province of government.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Nicole Sharwood, Injury epidemiologist, University of Sydney

A Sydney playground was closed earlier this year after children and adults suffered a spate of injuries including broken bones, burns and bruises on a giant tube-slide. The Hilltop Playground had been open for less than one month. The injuries were described as “horrific” and the media questioned “how the 30m-long, 14m-tall slide passed safety rules”.

Meanwhile SA Health and KidsafeSA have initiated an awareness campaign calling for certain baby and toddler products, such as walkers and exercise jumpers (known as Jolly Jumpers), to be banned. They’ve claimed these are associated with issues such as developmental delay and stiff muscles in children.

SA Health’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer warned:

Excessive time in walkers and jumpers teaches babies to stand up on their tip-toes, causing calf muscle tightening, affecting their ability to walk, and in some cases requiring treatment with casting or surgery.

Child injury prevention programs may seek to limit risky play. But is the consequence of this a negative impact on children’s physical activity, motor skill development and mental health and well-being?

A review of studies into this question shows greater positive effects of risky outdoor play on health compared with the risks of inactivity in children. Though, as we write today in the Medical Journal of Australia, parents must be aware of the limitations in product safety standards and understand the delicate balance between healthy play, parental or carer surveillance and safety standards.

Read more: What is physical activity in early childhood, and is it really that important?

Who is responsible?

Injury surveillance data are limited in Australia, and likely underestimate the true picture. A recent report shows around 686,409 Australian children were hospitalised following an injury between 2002-2012. Roughly 1,000 children died soon after an injury, more due to transport accidents than other injury causes.

Of the hospitalisations in this report, 8.3% of children were injured in playground and equipment falls. Children under five years suffered the most head injuries. No child deaths were attributed to playground equipment falls, and we’re not aware of any deaths in Australia from non-domestic playground equipment.

The development, application and utility of product standards is poorly understood by the broader community, medical practitioners and parents. When injuries occur while children are at play, the question often asked is “who is responsible?”. There is a misconception that product standards can prevent all injuries. But this is never their intended purpose.

All product standards set minimum design requirements to facilitate consumer safety, contemplating “reasonably foreseeable use” and patterns of “reasonably foreseeable misuse”. They cannot prevent all injuries. Rather, they concentrate on preventing or mitigating more serious injuries based on existing evidence of injury patterns.

Read more: Without mandatory safety standards, indoor trampoline parks are an accident waiting to happen

New information can update our understanding of associated risks, just as our understanding evolved about the risk of cancer caused by cigarettes. New product designs, such as the Hilltop slide, can create new hazards that existing standards didn’t anticipate. Injury surveillance data do not exist yet for these either. So, new designs such as the Hilltop slide ought to have been tested and commissioned prior to opening.

How safety standards work

Australia’s safety standards for playground equipment and surfaces are voluntary, unless the owners or developers of the site require the contractor to abide by them. The standards aim to address both industry governance and injury prevention, but it is vital the community at large (parents and health professionals specifically) understand the limitations and scope of current Australian standards.

Standards Australia is a not-for-profit organisation that develops voluntary Australian standards through expert technical committees. Similar to other product standards in Australia (particularly children’s products), these cover design, installation, product conformity, test methods, labelling and consumer safety.

Only a minority of products in Australia actually have mandatory standards applied to them. Many available play products provide play spaces that offer children containment for safety, while parents attend to other tasks. However, they can have unanticipated risks.

Read more: Yes, car seats protect children. But you need the right restraint, fitted properly

Baby walkers are one product that do have a mandatory standard. This aims to prevent anticipated injury by requiring braking mechanisms to prevent falls down steps or stairs, or any over-balance.

But such design and performance constraints don’t cover recent evidence of developmental delay suffered from too much time in these devices as well as in exercise jumpers known as jolly jumpers.

It’s worth remembering that the evidence shows the benefits of physical activity outweigh the risks of injury. Keeping a child safe involves ensuring parental supervision and safety standards are at work at all times.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sue Cook, Ice Shelf Glaciologist, Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems CRC, University of Tasmania

NASA scientist Jeremy Harbeck was on a surveying flight over the Antarctic Peninsula earlier this month when he spotted an iceberg that looked like no other. It was almost perfectly rectangular, with square sides and a flat top that made it look more human-made than natural.

“I thought this rectangular iceberg was visually interesting and fairly photogenic so, on a lark, I just took a couple photos,” Harbeck said. These photos have since been shared around the globe.

Read more: Volcanoes under the ice: melting Antarctic ice could fight climate change

Despite its eerily perfect shape, this iceberg is completely natural, and in fact not even that unusual. Ice has a crystal structure that means it prefers to break along straight lines. In the northern hemisphere, ice sheets sit on bedrock, and the friction between the ice and the ground means icebergs form in the irregular shapes that most of us picture when thinking of an iceberg.

In contrast, the edges of the Antarctic ice sheet are mainly made of floating ice shelves. These ice slabs are free to break along their natural crystal structure, resulting in icebergs that often have straight edges and smooth tops. We often see icebergs with geometric shapes, although such a perfect rectangle is admittedly unusual.

The walls of this new iceberg are sharp and almost perfectly vertical, suggesting they formed recently. As time goes on, waves will start to erode these edges, creating large arches and caving in its walls. The iceberg will also continue to break and crack, losing chunks of ice around the edge, and possibly even fragmenting into smaller pieces.

The iceberg will also start to travel away from where it formed. As Antarctic icebergs drift, ocean currents move them around the coast. The cold air and sea temperatures mean they melt slowly, and large icebergs can survive for many years. They can even move further north outside Antarctic coastal waters, and are tracked in satellite imagery by the US National Ice Center in case they enter shipping lanes.

The largest iceberg ever observed, named B-15, was released from Antarctica in 2000, and some fragments of it still exist today near the island of South Georgia. Other fragments of B-15 left the Southern Ocean, appearing only 60km off the coast of New Zealand in 2006.

The paths these icebergs take are important to scientists because, as they travel, they release freshwater and micronutrients into the ocean, changing its chemical properties and affecting both local ocean currents and biology.

The reason Iceberg B-15 has survived so long is because of its whopping size: 295km by 35km. Our unique rectangular iceberg is barely more than 1km long and won’t last anywhere near as long. It is likely to move further around the coast, and slowly disintegrate and melt before it leaves Antarctic waters. As it moves it will lose its photogenic shape, with its edges eroding away and losing their perfectly straight lines.

Read more: Short-term changes in Antarctica’s ice shelves are key to predicting their long-term fate

The rectangular iceberg may be small, but it is also part of a bigger story. In July 2017 the nearby Larsen C ice shelf lost an enormous iceberg, leaving it at the smallest extent ever observed. Around Antarctica, other regions have had increasing rates of iceberg production. With so many more icebergs on the move, the chances of seeing more rectangular icebergs in the future may well increase.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole Kalms, Director of XYX Lab + Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University, Monash University

Inequity in cities has a long history. The importance of social and community planning to meet the challenge of creating people-centred cities looms large. While planners, government and designers have long understood the problem, uncovering the many important marginalised stories is an enormous task.

Technology – so often bemoaned – has provided an unexpected and powerful primary tool for designers and makers of cities. Crowd-mapping asks the community to anonymously engage and map their experiences using their smartphones and via a web app. The focus of the new Gender Equality Map launched today in two pilot locations in Melbourne is on equality or inequality in their neighbourhood.

Read more: To design safer parks for women, city planners must listen to their stories

How does it work?

Crowd-mapping generates geolocative data. This is made up of points “dropped” to a precise geographical location. The data can then be analysed and synthesised for insights, tendencies and “hotspots”.

The diversity of its applications shows the adaptability of the method. The digital, community-based method of crowd-mapping has been used across the globe. Under-represented citizens have embraced the opportunity to tell their stories as a way to engage with and change their experience of cities.

CrowdSpot and Monash University have developed the Gender Equality Map with support from the Victorian government. It will enable local government to tackle the issues of socio-cultural exclusion that have proven so elusive. The map will help uncover real experiences of gender inequality in public places, from local sports facilities to public transport, community services and infrastructure, to simply walking down the street.

Read more: Gender makes a world of difference for safety on public transport

How will the data be used?

Melton and Darebin city councils will pilot the project. These councils are committed to engaging with the data in future decision-making with direct impacts on their communities and neighbourhoods.

The map is open to all genders with residence of Darebin and Melton encouraged to use the web app to tell their story. While we expect to see stories from women and men of a range of ages, the Gender Equality Map is also an opportunity to hear about the nuanced experiences of LGBTIQ+ people.

More than a new narrative of city life, the Gender Equality Map and crowd-mapping projects more broadly reflect a shift in how we understand cities, architecture and urban planning. To understand patterns of inclusion and exclusion, to consider individual perceptions of cities – ones that may not align with our own – is one of the greatest challenges place-makers face.

Trained as an architect and landscape architect and as the director of a university research lab, my research is committed to understanding the nexus of urban place and gender inequity. My recent research focuses on the possibilities and power of crowd-mapping as a method for shaping urban space. Recognising that cities need to be gender-sensitive, I seek to understand the stories of gender, equity and identity in cities – not fictional ones but real-life stories of individual people.

Read more: Safe in the City? Girls tell it like it is

Leading to more inclusive urban design

As a democratic process, crowd-mapping can lead to action that helps solve real-world issues. To design “inclusively” is more than a matter of providing community buildings, public transport and amenity. It’s about the determination to seek out the tricky stories of social justice – those of access, equity and diversity – and to actively shape our cities with these goals as our priority.

Considering how communities can advance agendas and unlock many of the complex and diverse needs of cities requires a tactical approach. Feminist architect and activist Lori Brown states:

Design is not a passive act. It is a critical engagement with community and you have to be cognisant of the power that you have and how you use it.

Crowd-mapping engages with community but also brings with it a particularly powerful form of activism – especially when it comes to gender inequity. Projects such as Everyday Sexism in the UK; Safetipin in New Delhi, Jakarta, Bogota and Nairobi; Harassmap in India; and Free to Be in Australia and internationally, have publicly charted the ways women, in particular, experience inequity in cities.

Read more: Sexism and the city: how urban planning has failed women

One obvious advantage is that web-based crowd-sourcing can challenge the historically disproportionate contribution of usually male voices in urban policy and design. One of the reasons crowd-mapping has been successful at engaging with women and girls is that it allows them to report when and where it suits them. What more will we learn about inclusion when we open up the tool to all genders?

The ubiquity of smartphone technology over the past decade has driven exponential growth in the volume of data about cities and their citizens. We have less data, however, about gender and inequity. More data and deeper insights will make these issues central to the design and strategy of local, urban decision-making.

Read more: Mansplaining Australian cities – we can do something about that

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute

This week we’re exploring the state of nine different policy areas across Australia’s states, as detailed in Grattan Institute’s State Orange Book 2018. Read the other articles in the series here.

Election season is looming.

Voters in Victoria go to the polls within weeks; in New South Wales within months.

State policy has rarely been more important. But what should the priorities be, not only for the governments in Australia’s two biggest states, but also for the other states whose elections are further away?

In this series for The Conversation, based on our State Orange Book 2018, the Grattan Institute outlines where state and territory governments should focus to improve Australia.

There are problems a plenty

The problems aren’t hard to find. Per capita income has been flat for five years as the mining boom subsided. Home ownership is falling fast among the young and the poor. Those on low incomes are spending more on housing, and homelessness is rising, particularly in NSW.

Our schools are not keeping up with the best in the world. In most states, people are waiting longer for medical treatments. Electricity prices have increased significantly over the past few years while the climate policy wars rage on.

A new State Scorecard compiled by Grattan Institute compares states and territories on the most important outcomes for each policy area. In many cases, some states are much better than others because their governments have implemented important reforms – often without much fanfare.

Victoria’s hospitals cost less per patient and contribute more to better health than elsewhere. Queensland’s school students learn more in Years 3 to 5, and they are performing much better than they used to. Many Western Australian school outcomes are also much better.

The Australian Capital Territory has started to replace inefficient stamp duties with a much more efficient broad-based property tax. NSW has used the good times to improve its budget position. NSW, Victoria, South Australia and the ACT have all increased the transparency of political decision-making and tightened controls over money in politics.

But each state can learn from the others

Every state and territory can learn from others and do better.

State governments – particularly NSW and Victoria – face population pressures. They need to resist political pressure to wind back planning reforms that have helped to increase housing supply, and instead go further to ensure enough housing is built, particularly in established suburbs, to accommodate rapidly growing populations.

NSW and Victoria should commission work to enable the introduction of time-of-day road and public transport pricing to manage congestion in Sydney and Melbourne.

All states should stop announcing transport projects before they have been analysed rigorously. They should also evaluate completed projects properly.

There’s much states can do

Although the Commonwealth controls many economic levers, there are many others that are primarily state government responsibilities.

Land-use planning policies don’t only affect housing affordability. They are also amongst the biggest policy levers for state governments to boost economic growth.

Geography matters a lot to economic growth. An advanced economy like Australia is dominated by services industries, which often benefit from co-location and tend to concentrate in major cities.

How much businesses can co-locate is affected by planning rules that guide the availability of land both for businesses and the homes of the people who work in them.

Read more: RBA research shows that zoning restrictions are driving up housing prices

Fewer restrictions on land use and subdivision will increase economic growth by enabling more people to access more jobs, while allowing firms to optimise their location.

There are other economic levers. All states should follow the lead of the ACT and replace stamp duties with broad-based property taxes.

States should reform electricity markets to encourage reliability and reduce emissions – whether or not the Commonwealth cooperates.

And much states should not do

States should stop promising to restrict competition in order to increase the sale price of assets like ports.

And they should accept that no amount of regional spending is likely to do much to accelerate regional growth beyond what is going to happen anyway.

The State Orange Book 2018 shows that the states and territories could deliver services better.

Each can be guided by the best

Other states should follow Victoria’s lead and reduce the cost of each procedure in public hospitals, and the variations between them.

And they should develop more community-based prevention programs to reduce the disparity between regional and urban health outcomes.

States should lift progress for all school students by identifying and spreading good teaching practices at the same time as strengthening the evidence base on what works best in the classroom.

They should also invest more in early learning for the most disadvantaged students.

And make their decisions more open

Institutional reforms are needed.

States need more visibility of their long-term budget positions.

While institutional accountability is improving in many states, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory need to limit election spending and make political donations and lobbying more transparent.

Because they matter

State government doesn’t always get as much attention as our federal politics. Often the important things sound a bit boring: the management of hospitals and schools; the rigorous assessment of proposed transport projects; and the minutiae of planning schemes.

But when these things are done well, they make a big difference to people’s lives.

So when people cast their votes in the Victorian and NSW elections, there is a lot at stake.

We hope this series will help voters to understand the key issues, and perhaps help leaders in every state understand the difference they can make.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanika Koosmen, PhD Candidate, University of Newcastle

The werewolf is a staple of supernatural fiction, whether it be film, television, or literature. You might think this snarling creature is a creation of the Medieval and Early Modern periods, a result of the superstitions surrounding magic and witchcraft.

In reality, the werewolf is far older than that. The earliest surviving example of man-to-wolf transformation is found in The Epic of Gilgamesh from around 2,100 BC. However, the werewolf as we now know it first appeared in ancient Greece and Rome, in ethnographic, poetic and philosophical texts.

These stories of the transformed beast are usually mythological, although some have a basis in local histories, religions and cults. In 425 BC, Greek historian Herodotus described the Neuri, a nomadic tribe of magical men who changed into wolf shapes for several days of the year. The Neuri were from Scythia, land that is now part of Russia. Using wolf skins for warmth is not outside the realm of possibility for inhabitants of such a harsh climate: this is likely the reason Herodotus described their practice as “transformation”.

The werewolf myth became integrated with the local history of Arcadia, a region of Greece. Here, Zeus was worshipped as Lycaean Zeus (“Wolf Zeus”). In 380 BC, Greek philosopher Plato told a story in the Republic about the “protector-turned-tyrant” of the shrine of Lycaean Zeus. In this short passage, the character Socrates remarks: “The story goes that he who tastes of the one bit of human entrails minced up with those of other victims is inevitably transformed into a wolf.”

Literary evidence suggests cult members mixed human flesh into their ritual sacrifice to Zeus. Both Pliny the Elder and Pausanias discuss the participation of a young athlete, Damarchus, in the Arcadian sacrifice of an adolescent boy: when Damarchus was compelled to taste the entrails of the young boy, he was transformed into a wolf for nine years. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that human sacrifice may have been practised at this site.

Read more: Friday essay: the female werewolf and her shaggy suffragette sisters

Monsters and men

The most interesting aspect of Plato’s passage concerns the “protector-turned-tyrant”, also known as the mythical king, Lycaon. Expanded further in Latin texts, most notably Hyginus’s Fabulae and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lycaon’s story contains all the elements of a modern werewolf tale: immoral behaviour, murder and cannibalism.

In Fabulae, the sons of Lycaon sacrificed their youngest brother to prove Zeus’s weakness. They served the corpse as a pseudo-feast and attempting to trick the god into eating it. A furious Zeus slayed the sons with a lightning bolt and transformed their father into a wolf. In Ovid’s version, Lycaon murdered and mutilated a protected hostage of Zeus, but suffered the same consequences.

Ovid’s passage is one of the only ancient sources that goes into detail on the act of transformation. His description of the metamorphosis uses haunting language that creates a correlation between Lycaon’s behaviour and the physical manipulation of his body:

…He tried to speak, but his voice broke into
an echoing howl. His ravening soul infected his jaws;
his murderous longings were turned on the cattle; he still was possessed
by bloodlust. His garments were changed to a shaggy coat and his arms
into legs. He was now transformed into a wolf.

Ovid’s Lycaon is the origin of the modern werewolf, as the physical manipulation of his body hinges on his prior immoral behaviour. It is this that has contributed to the establishment of the “monstrous werewolf” trope of modern fiction.

Lycaon’s character defects are physically grafted onto his body, manipulating his human form until he becomes that which his behaviour suggests. And, perhaps most importantly, Lycaon begins the idea that to transform into a werewolf you must first be a monster.

The idea that there was a link between biology (i.e. appearance) and “immoral” behaviour developed fully in the late 20th century. However, minority groups were more often the target than mythical kings. Law enforcement, scientists and the medical community joined forces to find “cures” for socially deviant behaviour such as criminality, violence and even homosexuality. Science and medicine were used as a vehicle through which bigotry and fear could be maintained, as shown by the treatment of HIV-affected men throughout the 1980s.

However, werewolf stories show the idea has ancient origins. For as long as authors have been changing bad men into wolves, we have been looking for the biological link between man and action.