Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist), The Conversation

A federal Resolve poll for Nine newspapers, conducted August 17-21 from a sample of 2,011, gave Labor 42% of the primary vote (32.6% at the May federal election), the Coalition 28% (35.7%), the Greens 12% (12.2%), One Nation 5% (5.0%), UAP 2% (4.1%), independents 8% (5.3%) and others 3% (5.2%).

Apart from near elections, Resolve does not give a two party estimate. My calculations using 2022 election preference flows say Labor would lead by 61-39 on this poll (52.1-47.9 at the election).

61% thought Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was doing a good job and 22% a poor job; his +39 net approval is up massively from -8 in the final pre-election Resolve poll. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton had a net approval of -8 (38% bad job, 30% good), and Albanese led Dutton as preferred PM by 55-17.

The huge swing to Labor since the election has carried into issues polling. The Coalition held a ten-point lead over Labor on economic management in the final pre-election poll, but Labor now leads by nine points.

This poll reflects “honeymoon” polling for Labor since the election. At some stage, the government is likely to lose this big boost. Kevin Rudd had a long honeymoon, but did not even make it to the 2010 election as Labor leader after winning the 2007 election. The next election cannot be predicted from this polling.

Last week, it was revealed that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison had several secret ministries. Had this occurred in a science-fiction world with cloning, Morrison could have cloned himself multiple times to take on these ministries.

Read more:
View from The Hill: Morrison reverts to type in an unconvincing defence

Essential: 65-35 support for Indigenous Voice

In an Essential poll, conducted in the days before August 9 from a sample of 1,075, 5% said they had heard a lot about the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament, 29% a fair amount, 32% hardly anything and 33% nothing.

When the Voice was explained, voters were in favour by 65-35. Support was strongest with Greens (81%) and Labor (77%), and weakest with Coalition (53%) federal election voters.

In this poll, Albanese’s ratings continued to slide from a high base since becoming PM. His approval was 55% (down one since July) and his disapproval 28% (up four), for a net approval of +27, down five points.

44% were very concerned about inflation, 40% somewhat concerned and 13% not that concerned. By 60-12, voters would support extending the fuel excise cut beyond September. They would support increasing the JobSeeker Payment for unemployed people by 44-27 and delaying stage three tax cuts by 42-25.

75% thought elected MPs should be required to make the pledge of allegiance to Australia and the Australian people, and just 15% thought this pledge should be made to Queen Elizabeth II.

Morgan poll: 53-47 to Labor

Morgan has been releasing its federal voting intentions in weekly video updates that also include findings on consumer confidence. Labor led by 53-47 in the poll taken August 8-14, a 0.5-point gain for Labor since the previous week. This poll was taken before the revelations of secret ministries.

In August, there have been two voting intentions polls from sources other than Morgan, with Newspoll at 56-44 to Labor and now Resolve. So Morgan currently has the Coalition doing much better than other polls, when their previous form usually had Labor doing better.

Victorian Morgan poll: 60.5-39.5 to Labor

The Victorian election will be held in three months, on November 26. A Morgan SMS poll, conducted August 11-13 from a sample of 1,097, gave Labor a 60.5-39.5 lead, a one point gain for Labor since early July. Primary votes were 40.5% Labor (down three), 27.5% Coalition (down two), 14% Greens (up two), 2% UAP (steady), 5% “teal” independent (up two) and 11% others (up one).

62.5% approved of Labor Premier Daniel Andrews (down one), while 37.5% (up one) disapproved, a net approval of +25, down one point. Andrews led Liberal leader Matthew Guy as better premier by 66-34 (64.5-35.5 in July).

Morgan polls in the past have skewed to Labor, and I wish there had been other recent polls by reputable pollsters for comparison. But Morgan shows a huge lead for Labor, and suggests they will easily be re-elected.

NT Labor holds Fannie Bay at byelection

At Saturday’s byelection for the NT Labor-held seat of Fannie Bay, Labor won by 52.2-47.8, a 7.4% swing to the Country Liberals (CLP) since the 2020 NT election. Primary votes were 41.7% CLP (up 7.0%), 32.6% Labor (down 15.6%), 19.4% Greens (up 9.2%) and 6.3% combined for three independents. The byelection was caused by the resignation of former Labor Chief Minister Michael Gunner.

Far-right likely to win September 25 Italian election

I wrote for The Poll Bludger on August 13 that the right-wing coalition is likely to win a majority of seats at the September 25 Italian election. As the two biggest parties within that coalition are far-right, the female leader of the Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Melloni, is likely to be Italy’s next PM.

Liz Truss is set to be Britain’s next PM when the result of the Conservatives’ postal membership vote is announced on September 5. She leads Rishi Sunak by 69-31 and 61-39 in two recent Conservative membership polls. Boris Johnson, who was ousted by Conservative MPs in July, would trounce either candidate head to head.

Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. First Resolve poll since election has huge Labor lead, and Labor also has massive lead in Victoria – https://theconversation.com/first-resolve-poll-since-election-has-huge-labor-lead-and-labor-also-has-massive-lead-in-victoria-188587

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanya M. Smith, Professor in the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution & Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University

The timing and intensity of the seasons shapes life all around us, including tool use by birds, the evolutionary diversification of giraffes, and the behaviour of our close primate relatives.

Some scientists suggest early humans and their ancestors also evolved due to rapid changes in their environment, but the physical evidence to test this idea has been elusive – until now.

After more than a decade of work, we’ve developed an approach that leverages tooth chemistry and growth to extract information about seasonal rainfall patterns from the jaws of living and fossil primates.

We share our findings in a collaborative study just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Teeth are environmental time machines

During childhood our teeth grow in microscopic layers similar to the growth rings found in trees. Seasonal changes in the world around us, such as droughts and monsoons, influence our body chemistry. The evidence of such changes is recorded in our teeth.

That’s because the oxygen isotope composition of drinking water naturally varies with temperature and precipitation cycles. During warm or dry weather, surface waters accumulate more heavy isotopes of oxygen. During cool or wet periods, lighter isotopes become more common.

These temporal and climatic records remain locked inside fossilised tooth enamel, which can maintain chemical stability for millions of years. But the growth layers are generally so small that most chemical techniques can’t measure them.

To get around this problem, we teamed up with geochemist Ian Williams at the Australian National University, who runs the world-leading Sensitive High Resolution Ion Microprobe (SHRIMP) facilities.

In our study, we collected detailed records of tooth formation and enamel chemistry from slices of more than two dozen wild primate teeth from equatorial Africa.

We also analysed two fossil molars from an unusual large-bodied ape called Afropithecus turkanensis that lived in Kenya 17 million years ago. Diverse groups of apes inhabited Africa during this period, roughly 10 million years before the evolution of our early ancestors, the hominins.

Diving into an ancient African landscape

Several aspects of our research are helpful for understanding the link between environmental patterns and primate evolution.

First, we observe a direct relationship between historic African rainfall patterns and primate tooth chemistry. This is the first test of a highly influential idea in archaeological and earth sciences applied to wild primates: that teeth can record fine details of seasonal environmental change.

We are able to document annual west African rainy seasons and identify the end of east African droughts. In other words, we can “see” the storms and seasons that occur during an individual’s early life.

And this leads into another important aspect. We provide the largest record of primate oxygen isotope measurements collected so far, from diverse environments in Africa that may have resembled those of ancestral hominins.

Lastly, we’ve been able to reconstruct annual and semi-annual climate cycles, and marked environmental variation, from information held within the teeth of the two fossil apes.

Our observations support the hypothesis that Afropithecus developed certain features to adapt to a seasonal climate and challenging landscape. For example, it had specialised dental traits for hard object feeding, as well as a longer period of molar growth compared with earlier apes and monkeys – consistent with the idea that it consumed more seasonally varied foods.

We conclude our work by comparing data from Afropithecus to earlier studies of fossil hominins and monkeys from the same region in Kenya. Our detailed microsampling shows just how sensitive tooth chemistry is to fine-scale climate variation.

Previous studies of more than 100 fossil teeth have missed the most interesting part of oxygen isotope compositions in teeth: the huge seasonal variation on the landscape.

Read more:
What teeth can tell about the lives and environments of ancient humans and Neanderthals

Research potential closer to home

This novel research approach, coupled with our fossil ape findings and modern primate data, will be crucial for future studies of hominin evolution – especially in Kenya’s famous Turkana Basin.

For example, some researchers have suggested that seasonal differences in foraging and stone tool use helped hominins evolve and coexist in Africa. This idea has been hard to prove or disprove, in part because seasonal climatic processes have been hard to tease out of the fossil record.

Our approach could also be extended to animal remains from rural Australia to gain further insight into historic climate conditions, as well as the prehistoric environmental changes that shaped Australia’s unique modern landscapes.

Read more:
Archaeology can help us prepare for climates ahead – not just look back

Tanya M. Smith receives funding from the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Research Council.

Daniel Green receives funding from Columbia University, the Leakey Foundation, the American National Science Foundation, and the Kenyan Turkana Basin Institute.

– ref. Revelations from 17-million-year-old ape teeth could lead to new insights on early human evolution – https://theconversation.com/revelations-from-17-million-year-old-ape-teeth-could-lead-to-new-insights-on-early-human-evolution-187996

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Hill, Professor of Politics, University of Adelaide

Our voting choices are only authentic if our decisions are informed by truthful information. That condition is now increasingly elusive.

In Australia, over two-thirds of adult news consumers report having seen media items they considered to be deceptive. This includes misleading commentary, doctored photographs and serious factual errors.

Political disinformation damages democracies. First, it manipulates voter preferences and distorts election results. This could be seen, for example, in the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum that same year.

It also polarises the electorate, damages trust in government and democratic institutions, and triggers civic withdrawal.

A further harm is that it raises the costs of voting. Electoral legitimacy requires that the costs of participation are not too high; false claims cause information costs to escalate because much more work is required to sift the facts from the false information.

A new and corrosive form of disinformation is political conspiracies of the “stolen elections” variety. This type delegitimises election processes, generates doubt about the authenticity of the declared result and undermines the authority of the electoral victor, who may subsequently experience problems in governing.

It can even lead to serious social conflict such as the storming of the US Capitol in January 2021.

Read more:
Three reasons why disinformation is so pervasive and what we can do about it

A global problem

Election conspiracies also happen in Australia. During the 2022 federal election, the Australian Electoral Commission sought to counter a “dangerous” disinformation campaign waged by minor party candidates baselessly predicting a high degree of electoral fraud and interference with the results.

Examples of such baseless claims included:

• the AEC is “aligned to the Liberal Party”

• Australians who are not vaccinated will not be able to vote

• blank ballots and “donkey votes” are counted for the incumbent.

The media landscape and its political economy have eroded both the media’s willingness to supply “truth” in political discourse, and the consumer’s demand for it.

Social media have decreased barriers to entry into the information marketplace. Meanwhile, many consumers seek out information that confirms their existing prejudices. In some countries there is now a lucrative market in the production of “fake news” solely to meet consumer demand.

To make matters worse, the ability of consumers to distinguish between authentic and fake news is much lower than they realise.

So, there are perverse – and arguably ineradicable – incentives within the information market to produce disinformation. The market is not just failing; it is the source of the problem.

This means disinformation has become what is known as a “collective action problem”. This happens when the actions of market actors create social costs that require state action to clean up or prevent.

Notably, 84% of Australians agree on this need and would like to see truth in political advertising laws in place.

But this is easier said than done. What if, for example, votes and entire elections really are being stolen? We must ensure solutions do not do more harm than good, inadvertently obstructing the free flow of reliable information that is the lifeblood of any democracy.

In our recent book, Max Douglass, Ravi Baltutis and I explore how this might be achieved federally. We propose a cautious approach that draws lessons from laws that have operated successfully in South Australia since 1985.

Read more:
Here’s how disinformation could disrupt the Australian election

7 ideas for reform

1. To avoid chilling political speech – and thereby violating the implied freedom of political communication under the Australian Constitution – truth in political advertising laws will only target identifiable political actors who are authors or authorisers of the material in question. Publishers are therefore exempt, for now at least.

2. Only false statements of fact (rather than opinion) will be subject to the law, as per the provisions under section 113 in SA.

3. To deter vexatious and trivial complaints, the legislation should be limited to false statements that could affect an election outcome to a “material extent”.

4. Laws should cover the entire period between elections, to take in preference allocations.

5. Penalties – which apply only to those who refuse to take down offending material – should be high enough to deter wrongdoing. However, because some political actors will cynically treat the penalty as a routine expense to gain a political advantage, we propose an additional penalty that bars the candidate from standing for one election cycle, as is the case under UK law. This is hardly controversial since section 386 of Australia’s Electoral Act 1918 already disqualifies those who have committed electoral offences such as bribery, undue influence, and interference with political liberty.

6. Regulators should be properly resourced.

7. Electoral candidates could be asked to sign a declaration that they have read and understood what the legislation requires of them.

All of this is feasible, as the South Australian example has shown.

Lisa Hill receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is affiliated with the Centre for Public Integrity, an anti-corruption watchdog, and the Electoral Regulation Research Network.

– ref. Australians are tired of lies in political advertising. Here’s how it can be fixed – https://theconversation.com/australians-are-tired-of-lies-in-political-advertising-heres-how-it-can-be-fixed-189043

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Breadon, Program Director, Health and Aged Care, Grattan Institute

New federal Health Minister Mark Butler says primary care is “in worse shape than it’s been in the entire Medicare era” and has made it his top health priority.

Primary care is any first point of contact with the health system, such as a GP clinic, dentist, or community pharmacy, but the government is likely to focus on GP clinics.

A new taskforce will advise the minister on how to spend A$750 million to improve access, chronic disease management, and affordability. The taskforce has until Christmas to come up with a plan, which is a big ask given where the system is now.

Taking lessons from what’s worked overseas, we’ve identified five key lessons about how Australia should reform general practice funding.

But first, let’s consider what’s gone wrong.

Primary care isn’t set up for the problems of today

Almost half of Australians have a chronic disease, such as heart disease, diabetes, asthma or depression. More than half of Australians over 65 have two or more. Those proportions have been rising fast in recent decades.

To help patients manage these conditions, GPs need ongoing relationships with patients (known as continuity of care), and a team working with them by providing routine care, outreach, coaching, and advice. That lets GPs spend more of their time working with the most complex patients, resulting in better care and outcomes.

But the way GPs are funded – and the way the primary care system is managed – makes this nearly impossible. GPs tell us they aren’t respected, are stressed out, and are set up to fail by a system that is fragmented, rigid, and unsupportive.

After decades of neglect, there are many problems to fix. Clinics often don’t have the right mix of staff, collaborating with specialists and hospitals is difficult, data systems are fragmented, and there are parts of Australia with poor access to care.

Read more:
Labor’s health package won’t ‘strengthen’ Medicare unless it includes these 3 things

One issue the taskforce must consider is how GP clinics are funded. While a simple boost to fees might be welcomed by practices, it can’t deliver the better access, quality, and affordability that Labor has promised. Australia’s approach has outlived it’s used-by date.

Here’s what Australia can learn from other countries that have transformed primary care funding:

1: Blend payments to strike the right balance

Australia is one of a small and shrinking list of countries that still mostly uses fee-for-service funding. There are payments to make care plans, and for working to improve quality measures (such as measuring risk factors or increasing immunisation rates), but the vast bulk still goes on individual GP consultations.

Shorter visits pay more, promoting a focus on speed not need – a poor fit for helping patients with complex needs.

Since the 1990s, many other countries have moved towards a “blended” funding model. After a patient enrols with with a particular doctor or clinic, GPs have ongoing responsibility for their patients and get flexible annual budgets for their care, along with a small fee for each visit.

This supports continuity of care and gives flexibility to provide different types of services, while keeping an incentive for GP consultations. It strikes a good balance between GP visits and other kinds of care, such as check-ins with a practice nurse, medication reviews from a practice pharmacist, or even support that goes beyond health care, such as help with housing or community services.

2: Adjust funding for health and social needs

Australia’s core primary care funding system, the Medicare Benefits Schedule, does little to match funding with a patient’s needs. As shown above, it promotes short consultations, no matter how complex the patient’s health needs. It largely ignores disadvantage, even though people who are poor are likely to be sicker.

Read more:
Poor and elderly Australians let down by ailing primary health system

New Zealand and Ontario (a province in Canada) introduced blended payments in the 1990s. However, they didn’t adjust annual patient budgets for clinical complexity or social need. Clinics received the same funding for treating someone who was healthy and wealthy as someone who was sick and poor.

It worked for practices in well-off areas, but not for those serving poorer communities, resulting in reduced services.

The mismatch of care and need is a big problem in all health systems. Blended funding must be adjusted to level the playing field, otherwise it could make that mismatch even worse.

3. Fund a multi-disciplinary team

The patient budget described above gives clinics flexibility to fund different types of workers, such as mental health nurses, community health workers, or pharmacists. But experience overseas shows this isn’t enough to bring about best-practice multidisciplinary teams.

The United Kingdom and New Zealand also provide direct funding for different kinds of workers. In the UK, the full cost is covered for 13 types of workers, ranging from paramedics and podiatrists to “link workers”, a new role that coaches patients to achieve their health goals, and connects them to social support and community activities.

4: Step in when the market fails

In parts of rural Australia, even the best blended funding model won’t attract GPs. In some cases, the demand from patients is too low or unpredictable to make it worthwhile running a stand-alone clinic.

In these cases of market failure, a different model is needed. Federal and state governments should work together to jointly employ salaried GPs and other primary care staff, giving them roles that might span the primary care clinic and a local hospital.

As the National Rural Health Alliance proposed, this could take the form of non-profit, community-controlled organisations, with similarities to Aboriginal-controlled clinics and community health providers.

5: Recognise that change is hard and will take time

A new funding model will require different workforce roles, reporting and data. Experience shows clinics must have strong support to help them change.

An evaluation of the last major national attempt at primary care reform, Health Care Homes, recommended a change-management team within each practice with adequate training and protected time, as well as skilled external facilitators. In line with assessments in the UK, the evaluation also found that developing trust and peer support was crucial.

All this points to a staged roll-out over several years, with strong support within clinics, between clinics, and from Primary Health Networks, the regional bodies responsible for improving the primary care system.

A long-term plan for change is more complex than a tweak to the Medicare Benefits Schedule. But it will be vital to give a sector under strain enough support to adapt to a funding system that’s better for workers and patients alike.

Read more:
More visits to the doctor doesn’t mean better care – it’s time for a Medicare shake-up

Peter Breadon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. General practices are struggling. Here are 5 lessons from overseas to reform the funding system – https://theconversation.com/general-practices-are-struggling-here-are-5-lessons-from-overseas-to-reform-the-funding-system-188902

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Grant, Senior Lecturer in Finance, University of Sydney

With rising costs of living, including interest rate rises, many people are really worried about their mortgage.

So, what actually happens if you can’t pay your mortgage – and what are your options?

Here’s what you need to know.

Read more:
Vital signs: to fix Australia’s housing affordability crisis, negative gearing must go

Payment deferrals, payment plans or getting fees waived

It’s not particularly rare for a borrower to face a period of temporary financial hardship, often due to circumstances beyond their control.

Job loss, relationship breakdowns, natural disasters, injuries and illnesses all affect the capacity of householders to repay their loan, especially given mortgages tend to run over many years, if not decades.

Banks have “hardship” processes to deal with borrowers who are temporarily unable to repay their loan.

The Banking Code of Practice, to which most banks subscribe, provides guidelines for lenders to help consumers through financial difficulties.

One form of relief is a payment deferral or “holiday”. That’s where a customer is able to postpone repayments until the issue causing hardship is resolved. Many people used this option during COVID lockdowns.

However, a payment holiday sometimes simply “kicks the can down the road” and the customer is still in financial trouble when their temporary payment holiday ends.

Other options include payment plans. This is where you pay back less per month but the mortgage lasts longer overall.

Or, the bank may simply offer advice on how to handle finances until you’re back on your feet.

It is also possible for banks to waive discretionary fees (such as those related to overdue payments).

Banks don’t really want you to default

Banks typically do not want their customers to default on property.

They’re usually protected against losses themselves through lender’s mortgage insurance, but banks see mortgage holders as particularly valuable customers. They have shown they can obtain finance and repay loans.

Usually, it’s easier for the bank to make hardship arrangements with a customer – and build trust along the way – than it is to wind up a mortgage, seize the property and then have to deal with trying to sell it in a flagging market.

What about my credit score?

Recent changes to the credit legislation make it easier to apply for a payment plan without affecting your credit score.

From July 1, 2022, under the terms of a financial hardship arrangement, a customer’s credit report will show they have made on time repayments for the period of the arrangement – providing they have followed the terms of the hardship agreement.

Credit reports will also indicate whether (but not why) a customer is in a financial hardship arrangement.

This information stays on a credit report for one year, then disappears.

Importantly, though, hardship information will be visible to other credit providers, and may affect a customer’s ability to get other loans during the period.

I’m struggling. So what should I do?

Contact your financial institution as early as you can. Your bank may be able to offer payment relief in the form of reduced payments or a holiday from repayments – or a combination of both.

You usually need to provide evidence for the reason for financial hardship, and there’s an expectation you’ll be able to resume repayments when the temporary issue is resolved.

Not every application for hardship will be successful, particularly if you have made promises to repay in the past and not followed through.

Income protection insurance (for those who plan for uncertainties) may help prevent the need for hardship arrangements in the first place.

If you see the issue as ongoing, rather than temporary, consider a different approach.

If you’re ahead on your mortgage (as many Australians were during the pandemic), or you have significant equity in your house, consider refinancing. That’s where you take out a new mortgage to repay an existing loan.

You may be able to get a lower monthly repayment, especially if you have built an equity stake greater than 30%.

It won’t always be an option, especially if you are a recent borrower facing rising interest rates, stagnant or falling house prices, and have limited equity.

In dire circumstances, you may be able to access your superannuation early (which means you may have a lot less to retire on).

If you really do need to sell, it is better to sell the property of your own volition, rather than having a forced sale.

Mortgagee-in-possession (which is where the bank sells the house) can often lead to a lower sales price than a vendor-led campaign, and the time frame may not suit you.

Free help is available. The Australian Retail Credit Association provides information on how hardship processes are reported, while the Financial Rights Legal Centre helps advocate for consumers through the mortgage stress process.

The government’s Moneysmart site also provides information on how to navigate the hardship process.

Read more:
The housing game has changed – interest rate hikes hurt more than before

Andrew Grant is affiliated with the Australian Institute of Credit Management, and has conducted research in the past for Commonwealth Bank and the credit bureau Illion.

– ref. What happens if I can’t pay my mortgage and what are my options? – https://theconversation.com/what-happens-if-i-cant-pay-my-mortgage-and-what-are-my-options-188891

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Welch, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning, University of Auckland

The return this month of the first cruise liner to Auckland’s Waitematā Harbour was accompanied by the sort of fanfare normally reserved for visiting foreign dignitaries: a tug boat decked out in bunting, a circling helicopter, even the mayor on hand to welcome the ship.

Coming after a two year hiatus due to the pandemic and border closures, it was undoubtedly a momentous occasion. But it’s also an opportunity to examine the environmental and economic impacts of these massive ships, and to ask how welcome they really are.

Criticism of the cruise industry is not new, and there have been calls for global monitoring and effective legislation because of its impact on environmental and human health. Climate change has only amplified this.

Individual cruise liners emit more CO₂ than any other kind of ship. Per passenger mile, they produce at least twice the CO₂ emissions of a long-haul flight.

A single ship can use up to 150 tonnes of low-grade heavy fuel oil (HFO) every day of its voyage. Combusted in a ship’s huge engines, this produces particulate matter (PM) – microscopic particles that can be inhaled and lodge in lung tissue or be carried in a bloodstream.

PM is linked to various environmental harms and health problems, including reduced lung function and worsening asthma and heart disease. A single cruise ship can produce the same daily PM emissions as a million cars, with the global cruise fleet producing the emission equivalent of 323 million cars (but with passenger capacity of only about 581,200 single-occupancy cars).

Environmental impact

And it’s not just the oceans the ships cross or the ports where the vessels dock that are affected. A recent study found that standing on the deck of a cruise ship exposed passengers to air quality equivalent to a city like Beijing.

Cruise ship fuel also contains sulphur. When combusted it creates sulphur oxide, a direct contributor to smog at ground level, acid rain at the atmospheric level, and a host of health impacts for those who breathe in the pollutant.

Read more:
Without stricter conditions, NZ should be in no hurry to reopen its border to cruise ships

Pressure from environmentalists and modern technology eventually led to the installation of “scrubbers” on cruise liner smokestacks which remove most sulphur from the ship’s exhaust.

However, some or all of the collected sulphur is often later disposed of into the ocean, potentially harming reefs and marine life, and contributing to ocean acidification.

Cruise ships are also allowed to dump untreated sewage and heavily contaminated grey water. Billions of litres of this wastewater is discharged into the oceans each year.

Industry under scrutiny

There will always be the argument that fuel can be made cleaner, engines more efficient, or older ships replaced with battery and solar-powered vessels. However, even moderate attempts at curbing ship emissions have reportedly been opposed by industry lobbyists.

Meanwhile, the ability to re-flag a vessel to countries with lower environmental standards, access to an abundance of cheap fuel, and the cost of replacing a single ship (upwards of NZ$2.6 billion), all mean the current fleet is probably around for some time.

Read more:
Can the cruise industry really recover from coronavirus?

Environmental impact isn’t the only reason the cruise industry has come under scrutiny in the past. It has been cited for poor labour practices, including low wages and bad conditions, and contributing to over-tourism.

But despite having been responsible for higher rates of disease transmission at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry appears to be bouncing back after reducing vaccination requirements for passengers.

Read more:
Cruise lines promise big payouts, but the tourist money stays at sea

Economic doubts

The common argument, particularly in the case of a port city like Auckland, is that cruise ships bring valuable tourist dollars to a struggling CBD. But past studies of tourist spending behaviour show cruise tourists contribute little to local economies.

Cruise ships typically spend between five and nine hours in a port, giving tourists little time to shop or dine. Rather, they are often whisked away by bus to major tourist destinations. They don’t hire hotel rooms or eat at restaurants.

According to the NZ Cruise Association, 321,590 tourists spent around $368 million nationwide (about $1,144 each) during the last pre-pandemic season from 2018 to 2019. Overall, cruise passengers contributed about 2% of the total $17.5 billion spent that season by international tourists.

Beginning in October, the cruise season will kick into high gear, with ships arriving in Auckland every few days. Given the significant questions around their
environmental and health impacts, and their relatively small contribution to the economy, are lavish welcomes like what we saw earlier this month really justified?

Timothy Welch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Cruise ships are coming back to NZ waters – should we really be welcoming them? – https://theconversation.com/cruise-ships-are-coming-back-to-nz-waters-should-we-really-be-welcoming-them-188974

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amelie Katczynski, Research Assistant, Deakin University

Every year in lutruwita/Tasmania, tens of thousands of people journey to and meander through the island state and take in festivals such as Dark Mofo, Cygnet Folk Festival or Nayri Niara Good Spirit Festival.

Part of the pull of this place and its cultural offerings are the landscapes in which such events are placed: picturesque mountain ranges and deep valleys; vast open paddocks and pristine bushlands; glistening coastlines; quirky city spaces.

As human geographers, we understand that festival landscapes are more than a party backdrop. They are not waiting, ready to greet us like some sort of environmental festival host. They have Deep Time and layers of meaning.

But when they become spaces for creative adventures, these landscapes also have profound effects on how people experience festivals, affecting our sense of place, of ourselves and others.

Festivals come with specific boundaries – dates, gates or fences – and mark a period and place in which we experience some shifting of social norms.

In our research, we wanted to explore how festivals affect people’s sense of place, self and other.

As Grace, an avid festival-goer, told us “social expectations that come with adulthood get removed at a festival.”

I don’t know what happens when you walk through the gate of a festival [..] you leave all that behind and you step into what feels like […] a more authentic version of yourself. Or at least a freer one.

Creating spaces

A lot happens to make a festival landscape.

Teams of staff and volunteers establish campsites, install rows of toilets that often are also composting works of art, build stages, lay kilometres of pipes and power chords and design paths, sculptures and dance floors.

These collective labours create a special atmosphere; serve basic needs for sleep, food, hydration, warmth and sanitation; invite journeying to and from; and foster relationships to places and sites via immersive experiences and hands-on engagements with the landscape itself, for itself.

Travis, a stage-builder and DJ, told us:

if you use what’s already there, then [the stage] blends in with that whole environment and ties in to how people see it and how people feel in it.

Marion, a festival artist, spoke of her desire to show care and respect by creating work that “doesn’t impose and can […] naturally be reabsorbed” into the landscape.

She described how all of the rocks for a labyrinth at one event came from the festival site. Once, the sheep who lived there walked through on their usual path – destroying her installation.

Read more:
The environmental cost of abandoning your tent at a music festival

Transformative experiences

When people attend festivals, they often attach themselves to the landscape and detach from their daily lives: they are looking for transformative experiences.

In lutruwita/Tasmania, festivals such as Fractangular near Buckland and PANAMA in the Lone Star Valley take place in more remote parts of the state.

Grace, from Hobart, told us that being in those landscapes taps into

something that humans have done forever […] gather around sound and nature and just experience that and feel freedom.

Even when festivals are based in urban landscapes, the transformation of these spaces can evoke a sense of freedom.

For Ana, a festival organiser, creating thematic costumes is part of her own transformation.

At festivals she feels freedom to “wear ‘more out there’ things”.

If I was on the street just on a Wednesday I’d have to [explain my outfit] […] Whereas at a [street] festival[it] flies under the radar.

Body memories

Festival landscapes have features conducive for meeting in place (think open spaces, play spaces, food and drink venues) and for separating out (think fences and signs).

Commingling at festivals can literally lead people to bump into each other, reaffirm old bonds and create new connections through shared experiences.

One artist, Marion, told us:

When you go and you camp, you get burnt together, you get wet together, you dance together. [It creates] an embrace for me.

Festivals often linger in people’s memories, entwined with bodily experiences. People we spoke with talked about hearing birdsong and music, seeing the sun rise and fall over the hills and feeling grass under their dancing feet.

While one-off events can be meaningful, revisiting festivals may have an especially powerful effect.

Annual festival pilgrimages become cycles of anticipation, immersion and memory-making. This continuing relationship with a landscape also allows festival goers to observe how the environment is changing.

As festival organiser Lisa said:

since 2013 […] every summer our site just got drier and drier. 2020 was the driest year of all. There was no creek. There was just a stagnant puddle.

Writing new stories

The COVID-19 pandemic led organisers and attendees to rethink engagements with live events. Many were cancelled; some were trialled online.

But after seasons of cancellations, downscaling and online events, some festivals in lutruwita/Tasmania are back, attracting thousands of domestic and interstate visitors.

For those festivals that have disappeared, their traces remain in our countless individual and collective stories of the magic of festival landscapes.

Read more:
Without visiting headliners, can local artists save our festivals?

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘You get burnt together, you get wet together, you dance together’: how festivals transform lives – and landscapes – https://theconversation.com/you-get-burnt-together-you-get-wet-together-you-dance-together-how-festivals-transform-lives-and-landscapes-186558

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julia Scott-Stevenson, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Technology Sydney

Earlier this month, posters started going up around Sydney advertising an event called “In the Ops Room, with Palmer Luckey”. Rather than an album launch or standup gig, this turned out to be a free talk given last week by the chief executive of a high-tech US defence company called Anduril.

The company has set up an Australian arm, and Luckey is in town to entice “brilliant technologists in military engineering” to sign on.

Anduril makes a software system called Lattice, an “autonomous sensemaking and command & control platform” with a strong surveillance focus which is used on the US–Mexico border. The company also produces flying drones and has a deal to produce three robotic submarines for Australia, with capabilities for surveillance, reconnaissance, and warfare.

The PR splash is unusual from the normally secretive world of military technology. But Luckey’s talk opened a window onto the future as seen by a company “transforming US & allied military capabilities with advanced technology”.

From Oculus to Anduril

Unlike most defence tech moguls, Luckey got his start in the world of immersive tech and gaming.

While at college, the Anduril founder had a brief stint at a military-affiliated mixed reality research lab at the University of Southern California, then set up his own virtual reality headset company called Oculus VR. In 2014, at the age of 21, Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook for US$2 billion.

In 2017 Luckey was fired by Facebook for reasons that were never made public. According to some reports, the issue was Luckey’s support for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

Luckey’s next move, with backing from right-wing venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, was to set up Anduril.

Finding new markets

Since Luckey’s departure, Facebook (now known as Meta) has broadened its efforts beyond the virtual and augmented reality market. A forthcoming “mixed reality” headset plays a key role in its plans for a metaverse being pitched to business and industry as well as consumers.

We can see similar pivots from consumers to enterprise across the immersive tech industry. Magic Leap, makers of a much hyped mixed-reality headset, later imploded and re-emerged focusing on healthcare.

Read more:
‘Potential for harm’: Microsoft to make US$22 billion worth of augmented reality headsets for US Army

Microsoft’s mixed-reality headset, the HoloLens, was initially seen at international film festivals. However, the HoloLens 2, released in 2019, was marketed solely to businesses.

Then, in 2021, Microsoft won a ten-year, US$22 billion contract to provide the US Army with 120,000 head-mounted displays. Known as “Integrated Visual Augmentation Systems”, these headsets include a range of technologies such as thermal sensors, a heads-up display and machine learning for training situations.

Fulfilling work?

Speaking to the Sydney audience on Thursday, Luckey framed his own shift to defence not as one of economic necessity, but of personal fulfilment. He described saying “your job is worthless” to new recruits in social media companies making games or augmented reality filters.

That kind of work is fun but ultimately meaningless, he says, whereas working for Anduril would be “professionally fulfilling, spiritually fulfilling, fiscally fulfilling”.

Not all technology workers would agree that defence contracts are spiritually fulfilling. In 2018, Google employees revolted against Project Maven, an AI effort for the Pentagon. Staff at Microsoft and Unity have also expressed consternation over military involvement.

‘Billions of robots’

The first audience question on Thursday asked Luckey about the risks of autonomous AI – weapons run by software that can make its own decisions.

Luckey said he was worried about the potential of autonomy to do “really spooky things”, but much more concerned about “very evil people using very basic AI”. He suggested there was no moral high ground in refusing to work on autonomous weapons, as the alternative was “less principled people” working on them.

Luckey did say Anduril will always have a “human in the loop”: “[The software] is not making any life or death decisions without a person who’s directly responsible for that happening.”

This may be current policy, but it seems at odds with Luckey’s vision of the future of war. Earlier in the evening, he painted a picture:

You’re going to see much larger numbers of systems [in conflicts] … you can’t have, let’s say, billions of robots that are all acting together, if they all have to be individually piloted directly by a person, it’s just not going to work, so autonomy is going to be critical for that.

Read more:
UN fails to agree on ‘killer robot’ ban as nations pour billions into autonomous weapons research

Not everyone is as sanguine about the autonomous weapons arms race as Luckey. Thousands of scientists have pledged not to develop lethal autonomous weapons.

Australian AI expert Toby Walsh, among others, has made the case that “the best time to ban such weapons is before they’re available”.

Choose your future

My own research has explored the potential of immersive media technologies to help us imagine pathways to a future we want to live in.

Luckey seems to argue he wants the same: a use for these incredible technologies beyond augmented reality cat filters and “worthless” games. Unfortunately his vision of that future is in the zero-sum framing of an arms race, with surveillance and AI weapons at the core (and perhaps even “billions of robots acting together”).

During Luckey’s talk, he mentioned that Anduril Australia is working on other projects beyond the robotic subs, but he couldn’t share what these were.

Read more:
Australia’s pursuit of ‘killer robots’ could put the trans-Tasman alliance with New Zealand on shaky ground

Julia Scott-Stevenson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Virtual reality, autonomous weapons and the future of war: military tech startup Anduril comes to Australia – https://theconversation.com/virtual-reality-autonomous-weapons-and-the-future-of-war-military-tech-startup-anduril-comes-to-australia-188983

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Lesh, Lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, Deakin University

It was hard to keep up with all the bad news coming out of the recent Australia State of the Environment report. The dire state of natural places and First Nations heritage rightly attracted attention. However, one important finding was overlooked: the poor state of Australia’s so-called historic heritage

The report found this heritage is at risk on many fronts. It’s under pressure from land development, resource extraction, poorly managed tourism, climate change and inadequate management and protections.

In a familiar framing, the report points the finger at urban development and other changes. However, this mindset itself is actually an obstacle to protecting our urban heritage.

Change in our cities, and to our heritage, is both inevitable and necessary. Our relationships to neighbourhoods and places constantly evolve, as we learnt during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Policy ideas framed by sustainability, such as adaptive management that encourages heritage places to change and evolve, are more sensible. Flexible and creative responses to heritage places should be allowed.

An example of embracing change is the Walsh Bay Arts Precinct in Sydney. The project has reimagined maritime heritage for culture and the arts.

Adopting new perspectives won’t only preserve our historic buildings and places by enabling us to shape them for today’s needs. It will also mean urban heritage can contribute to cities becoming more socially, economically and environmentally sustainable.

Read more:
Sustainable re-use and recycling work for heritage buildings and places too

A problem of definitions

The historic heritage that the report finds is deteriorating refers to places, buildings and structures dating from 1788 onwards. But the very idea of “historic heritage” is out-of-date.

The term originally contrasted colonial built heritage with so-called “pre-history”. Indigenous heritage was generally seen as being in the past rather than continuing into the present or having a future.

A more precise term, “cultural heritage”, embraces the diverse historical and societal values that shape cities and historic environments. It better recognises that our urban cultural heritage is a product of colonisation and dispossession and located on Indigenous Country.

On the ground, we see a few examples of more progressive activities. The deeply researched City of Melbourne Hoddle Grid Review embraced Indigenous perspectives, social values and modern buildings. But this is an unusual case of innovation.

Read more:
Why heritage protection is about how people use places, not just their architecture and history

A problem of knowledge

For heritage to contribute more to social sustainability, by ensuring places reflect and strengthen diverse communities, we need more robust knowledge about existing protections.

We simply lack that data. Australia has no heritage reporting mechanisms across national, state and local heritage jurisdictions.

As a result, the State of the Environment report was unable to provide a fuller picture of the state of urban heritage: what is protected, why and how it is protected, nor its values and condition. The report was not funded for this kind of comprehensive data collection, nor for widespread site visits.

We cannot identify which Australian communities and histories – whether First Nations, colonial or multicultural stories – are represented within heritage lists. The five-year report identifies only six targeted projects exploring gaps in state heritage registers. Only one of these studies foregrounds social value.

Centralising community perspectives in heritage remains a challenge. For example, when the City of Ballarat collaborated with residents to identify places of importance, the insights could not be translated into protections because planning laws don’t adequately recognise community heritage expertise. Work needs to be done to integrate heritage management and social sustainability.

Read more:
How can we meaningfully recognise cities as Indigenous places?

A problem of adaptation

Expanding the scope of urban heritage enables new perspectives on how it can contribute to economic and environmental sustainability. Economic development can threaten heritage, but also rescue it from decay. Leading heritage projects treat existing physical and social spaces as significant but underutilised resources.

The regeneration of Sydney’s Kings Cross, for example, seeks to return glitz and glamour to the area, albeit minus its gritty and subversive character. Heritage and communities are both enhanced and diminished through development and investment.

The report rightly identifies climate change as a threat to heritage places. Yet, across jurisdictions, inadequate emphasis is placed on heritage as a driver of climate adaptation. Reworking existing environments, buildings and structures, whether or not they are heritage-listed, is a sustainability trend.

Indeed, the report encourages the retention of existing buildings for their embodied energy due to the resources that have gone into constructing and maintaining them. But it maintains the premise that development tends to undermines conservation.

This longstanding mindset stands in the way of widespread adaptive reuse.
Adopting broader perspectives and new approaches empowers heritage for sustainability agendas.

Although not heritage-listed, Broadmeadows Town Hall (1964) in Melbourne has been conserved and transformed in a sophisticated and functional way.
At Melbourne’s Southbank, the listed Robur Tea House may soon finally be revitalised. Reworking the 1880s industrial building with a skyscraper above may well be the best way forward.

Read more:
We can’t afford to just build greener. We must build less

What’s stopping us from doing better?

With clear parallels to today, the Inquiry into the National Estate reported in 1974 that Australia’s heritage had been “downgraded, disregarded, and neglected”. The Commonwealth government took dramatic action by establishing the independent and innovative Australian Heritage Commission (1975–2004).

In recent times, however, the Commonwealth has greatly reduced its involvement in conserving urban heritage. Every state and local government now has its own approaches, resulting in fragmented governance arrangements. The lack of national leadership, co-ordination and innovation has led to us falling behind international approaches.

Urban heritage can strengthen communities and help foster an inclusive and democratic society only by engaging with a diversity of places and stories. Widespread adaptation and reuse of both listed and non-listed heritage places can support economic and environmental sustainability.

New and radical perspectives are needed to keep heritage relevant and thriving in cities.

James Lesh’s book Values in Cities: Urban Heritage in Twentieth-Century Australia will be launched at the Robin Boyd Foundation in Melbourne on August 24 2022.

James Lesh has received external research funding from government. He is a member of the Victorian National Trust’s Heritage Advocacy Committee.

– ref. Frozen in time, we’ve become blind to ways to build sustainability into our urban heritage – https://theconversation.com/frozen-in-time-weve-become-blind-to-ways-to-build-sustainability-into-our-urban-heritage-187284

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Waling, ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow in Sex & Sexuality, La Trobe University

How to Build a Sex Room on Netflix follows interior designer Melanie Rose as she uncovers her clients’ sex lives and designs personalised sex rooms based on their desires and needs.

The show focuses on regular people from the suburbs looking to explore their sex lives and the clients include single people, queer and straight couples, and a polyamorous family of seven. It combines the popular reality television genre of home improvement with an exploration of kink culture and a splash of sex education. Think The Block meets Secretary.

In each episode, host Melanie Rose will meet a couple, find out about their sex-lives, introduce them to various aspects of kink and sex education depending on their needs, and then design them a sex room. This ranges from couples already experienced in kink culture who are looking to broaden and deepen their experimentation, to couples who need to revitalise their sex lives or reconnect physically, and are looking for a space to do so. While there is frank discussion and even demonstration of tools and techniques, the show remains relatively inoffensive in terms of what they depict on the screen.

While the show has been praised for bringing kink practices into mainstream TV, kink has a long history across cultures. Historical interpretations vary, but elements of kink can be identified in the worshipping of the goddess Inanna all the way back in ancient Mesopotamia.

Kink is connected to and different from BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and/or sadism/masochism). Many will be familiar with the writings of the Marquis de Sade in the 18th century, who inspired the coining of the word sadism. Modern kink and BDSM have origins in LGBTQ+ communities including 1960s-1970s leather cultures. Leather cultures were a way in which queer people could push back against social norms and build safe, underground communities to explore sexuality.

In general terms, kink refers to sexual practices that are different from current sociocultural norms. This may involve consensual negotiations of power that characterise BDSM and other activities, such as threesomes, orgies, fetish play and Shibari rope play.

Kink in pop culture

Kink, BDSM and sex positivity have infiltrated mainstream pop and social media cultures. Films such as 9½ Weeks (1986) and Basic Instinct (1992) feature bondage, impact play, and dominance and submission dynamics, while television series such as Sex and the City and Bonding have dealt with the complexity of sex, kink and relationships.

Kinksters and BDSM practitioners can connect on social media platforms like Fetlife (the Fetish version of Facebook), and there are plenty of sex-specific meet-up apps such as Feeld among others.

The book and later film series 50 Shades of Grey featuring sado-masochism were global top-sellers. Pop music icons like Rihanna and Justin Timberlake have had best-selling hits featuring lyrics about kink. BDSM gear like leather harnesses are now high fashion, and sex toys such as floggers and paddles have their own section at most online and bricks and mortar sex shops.

Destigmatising sex and desire

The incorporation of kink and sex positivity into shows like How to Build a Sex Room is important for destigmatising diverse sexual practices and desires. It reminds us that sex does not have to be about reproduction and heterosexual marriage. It can and does occur in a variety of romantic and sexual relationships, including queer and polyamorous relationships.

The show tells important stories about sex as forms of play, fun, exploration and intimate connection. It is not surprising that the series has attracted significant social media attention and positive responses from viewers, particularly for its diverse cast across age, gender, race, and sexuality.

Reality TV gets an erotic makeover

However, this diversity does not extend to economic circumstances: all clients in How to Build a Sex Room appear to be working professionals and homeowners. One episode features a camper van renovation for a same-sex couple, but most episodes involve renovating a room in a spacious suburban home, raising questions about who can afford to create a dedicated sex space.

The show sidesteps questions of class and home ownership. Instead, it implies that all you need to spice up your sex life is a luxurious, custom-built play space complete with expensive soft furnishings, an array of (often expensive) sex toys, a tantric chair or sex swing, and a St Andrews cross.

At play here (pun intended) is a consumerist model of relationship transformation that relies on access to financial resources and social capital. As a spin on the home renovation-makeover genre, the show stages a rapid intervention designed to improve people’s sex lives, and enhance their intimate relationships, but these interventions are carefully staged and limited in scope.

Read more:
Friday essay: how the moral panic over ‘sexual sadists’ silenced their victims

Vanilla kink

While How to Build a Sex Room has been credited with demystifying kink and normalising diverse sexual desires, the show produces kink through a specific lens that does not reflect the wider range of kink practices, desires and settings. The mainstreaming of kink runs the risk of normalising some kink practices while re-stigmatising or simply overlooking others.

For example, the show’s emphasis on creating private play-spaces overlooks the importance of kink community and public play. Many kink communities run public play events to share important skills and educate on safe kink practices. Private play-spaces also confine intimacy to affluent, private homes.

Despite featuring diverse sexual practices, How to Build a Sex Room paints a fairly vanilla picture of sex as a private act between people in long-term relationships, living in wealthy homes with a glamorous space decked out exclusively for sex – a far cry from the everyday realities of sex.

Nevertheless, shows like this are good ways to introduce mainstream audiences to the world of kink. A world that can be exciting, pleasurable and sexy.

Andrea Waling receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Commonwealth Department of Health

Jacinthe Flore receives funding from the Australian Research Council and RMIT University.

Kiran Pienaar receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Deakin University.

– ref. Like Grand Designs but naughty: Netflix’s How To Build A Sex Room brings kink and sex positivity into the mainstream – https://theconversation.com/like-grand-designs-but-naughty-netflixs-how-to-build-a-sex-room-brings-kink-and-sex-positivity-into-the-mainstream-188578

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Dickinson, Professor, Public Service Research, UNSW Sydney

Around 4.5 million Australians live with disability but less than 13% of them are covered by the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Getting into the scheme is one thing. But many NDIS participants find using their funding is yet another.

Our research indicates a major issue in terms of the fairness of the scheme is less in the allocation of funding but more about whether people are able to spend their funding.

Some groups – particularly people living in regional or remote areas or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – are less able to use their budgets. But there are ways to make the NDIS more equitable.

Read more:
NDIS fraud reports reveal the scheme’s weakest points

Using an NDIS plan

When accepted onto the NDIS, participants develop a plan that sets out the goals they want to work towards, and the supports needed to achieve them. This comes with an associated budget to spend on different supports.

Most plans last around 12 months before they are reviewed, but they can last as long as three years in some cases.

If the funding associated with a plan is not all spent, the funds don’t roll over into the next plan and are returned to the scheme.

At a subsequent review there will be discussion about why the funds weren’t used. If a person consistently doesn’t use all their funds, they might find future budgets are reduced.

Given the widely reported cuts to NDIS plans, some participants are concerned under-spending might lead to future plan cuts.

Why people don’t spend their allocation

There are a range of reasons why people don’t manage to use all their budget allocation.

The NDIS is complex to navigate, and people may not fully understand their plan or the system. There might not be the providers available to meet a person’s needs or it might be difficult to find and secure appropriate providers. Similar schemes overseas show people are unlikely to use their entire budgets – they might hold some portion back “for a rainy day” or their needs might change or not eventuate as anticipated.

The previous federal government argued the NDIS was inequitable, suggesting those in richer areas were receiving larger budgets than those in poorer areas.

It proposed to reform the scheme by introducing Independent Assessments, which it argued would produce fairer plan amounts by assessing each participant using the same suite of functional assessment tools. But this proposed reform was dropped after backlash from the disability community who believed the tools would not produce the intended effects and that this might be an attempt to cut scheme costs.

Read more:
What the NDIS needs to do to rebuild trust, in the words of the people who use it

Tracking under-use

One way to measure the under-use of NDIS funding is to explore the utilisation rate. This refers to a comparison of the dollar value of individual budgets against the overall amount expended on supports.

Latest NDIS data shows the national average utilisation rate is 75%.

This measure is only an average, and there are many participants with very low utilisation – 32% of participants spend less than 50% of their budgets. People in some areas spend less than others. For example, East Arnhem in the Northern Territory has an average utilisation rate of 47%.

We also see variation in utilisation within budgets. NDIS plans contain three different categories of funding: core supports for everyday activities, capacity building supports to help build independence and skills, and capital supports to purchase equipment and home or vehicle modifications.

While the national average utilisation rate for core supports is 81%, capacity building stands at 59% and capital at 56%. Many people have reported challenges in getting home modifications and high-cost equipment approved even when these are in their plans.

Read more:
People with intellectual disability can be parents and caregivers too – but the NDIS doesn’t support them

Some groups use more than others

As part of ongoing research, we compared groups of NDIS participants to better understand differences in plan allocation and spending. We focused on groups more likely to face inequity in utilisation and where wider social inequities are present.

We looked at plan size and spending separately. We did this because an increase in utilisation could occur if plans are reduced but spending remains the same.

We compared plan size and spending for participants from culturally and linguistic diverse backgrounds, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and according to where people live. We considered factors such as age to ensure comparisons were “like with like”.

We found participants from culturally and linguistic diverse backgrounds backgrounds and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people received larger plans than other NDIS participants. But they spent a similar amount, despite having bigger budgets. This resulted in lower levels of utilisation.

Inequities also vary by disability group. We found spending and utilisation was low across the board for people with psychosocial disability (such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and social anxiety disorders).

In a study of Victorian NDIS data, we found participants living in regional and remote areas receive less funding. They also spend less of their allocated funding compared to people who live in large urban centres. Some of this may be due to challenges of “thin markets”, where insufficient providers are available in an area.

Read more:
Indigenous people with disabilities face racism and ableism. What’s needed is action not another report

What can be done?

One of the election commitments of the Labor government was to increase the number of providers in regional areas. This would address “thin markets” – where there is a gap between participant needs and their use of funded supports. But it should be done in a meaningful way so providers and services are appropriate to their local communities.

Another way to help participants access services is to increase use of NDIS support coordinators. These workers who are funded via the person’s plan can help participants connect with NDIS providers and understand the scheme. This can act as an additional source of help to be able to find suitable providers and to be able to use their plans in buying services.

Our modelling shows increasing the use of support coordinators could increase plan utilisation and reduce inequities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, culturally and linguistically diverse participants, people from low socioeconomic backgrounds and those with psychosocial disabilities.

Helen Dickinson receives funding from Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, Commonwealth government, CYDA and WISE.

George Disney has received funding for commissioned research from the Department of Social Services and the Victorian Department of Families Fairness and Housing.

– ref. ‘Use it or lose it’ – getting NDIS funding is only half the battle for participants – https://theconversation.com/use-it-or-lose-it-getting-ndis-funding-is-only-half-the-battle-for-participants-188530

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bernard Walker, Associate Professor in Organisations and Leadership, University of Canterbury

Last week saw an historic moment as New Zealand’s professional firefighters went on strike, calling for better pay, more staff and increased investment in the fire service. But will industrial action spur the deeper systemic change in New Zealand’s fire service critics call for?

The strike is part of an employment dispute. Strikes can only usually happen within a short time frame, when the collective employment agreement is expiring and the two sides are negotiating a new agreement. The firefighters and Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) reached an impasse in their negotiations, leading to this action.

Traditionally, employment disputes are often called “pay negotiations”, focusing narrowly around remuneration and benefits. But a defining aspect in this current case is the breadth of issues involved, and the far-reaching consequences. The firefighters have described shortfalls across a wide range of areas in their working environment.

Crucially, they have raised questions about whether the country’s fire service can adequately protect the lives and property of everyday New Zealanders. The scope of these issues makes this industrial action relatively unique – and raises the question of whether employment negotiations are the best place to address significant concerns about how a core emergency service functions.

More than pay

For months, firefighters have been highlighting how their vehicles and equipment are often well past their replacement date. Official reports confirm these issues, and firefighters say equipment breakdowns are affecting their ability to deal with emergencies.

The striking workers have also described dangerous over-work situations and burnout, with excessive hours and serious staff shortages. The union representing firefighters has said that at times there are not sufficient staff to operate trucks, leaving some neighbourhoods without a fire crew.

Read more:
The aching red: Firefighters often silently suffer from trauma and job-related stress

Firefighters’ jobs have also changed radically, seeing them often become medical first responders. This expanded and intensified role involves new skill levels and heightened job demands. And working with trauma brings mental health risks that require high levels of wellbeing support for staff.

Firefighters believe those aspects have not been adequately addressed by FENZ, leaving the service lagging behind other comparable agencies such as the police – so much so that their mental and physical health is compromised.

Firefighters are a strongly unionised group. But unlike other organisations, they have not tested cases in the Employment Relations Authority or Employment Court to spell out exactly what makes a safe workplace and safe work practices.

Strikers or whistle blowers?

The strike action therefore draws attention to major concerns about the capability and reliability of a core emergency service.

It could be argued that the firefighters are, in fact, whistle blowers, alerting the public to serious issues affecting the safety and wellbeing of the wider community.

That raises the question of how these matters should be addressed and resolved. Given the issues are so significant and wide ranging, can collective bargaining legally or practically extend to cover this situation?

Normally, serious whistle-blowing claims would shift the focus away from the worker-management relationship and put the spotlight on the organisation’s overall governance.

Read more:
A high-adrenaline job: 5 questions answered about fighting wildfires

Raising governance issues in the context of collective bargaining creates an intriguing precedent. It is part of a wider pattern, with nurses also raising national safety issues in their negotiations.

But the firefighters’ strike introduces an additional complexity. While health funding is directly controlled by government, FENZ is mostly funded from insurance levies. This limits the government’s ability to get involved.

Within the boundaries of NZ law

In terms of what the law permits, the collective bargaining provisions of the Employment Relations Act could be widely interpreted. According to the act, “a collective agreement may contain such provisions as the parties to the agreement mutually agree on”.

Arguably, collective agreements could extend to cover a very broad range of aspects of a working environment, perhaps even the concerns raised in the current firefighters’ negotiations with FENZ.

That, however, is dependent on both parties achieving consensus about the issues. That has not featured in the firefighters’ negotiations, which have already extended over 14 months. And despite mediation assistance, it seems the parties are still miles apart.

A more likely scenario is that the authority will agree to intervene, based on the protracted nature of negotiations or the the danger to “the life, safety, or health of persons”, as outlined by the Act.

The Authority could provide facilitation assistance similar to mediation, but with the option of making recommendations about the process for reaching agreement and/or outlining the actual terms of the employment agreement.

In that scenario, the main question would be whether the Authority will accept the set of issues as part of an employment agreement, or whether it will recommend an independent investigation of the wider assertions.

Ultimately, this will become a test of how a major challenge regarding the adequacy of fire and emergency services is handled.

Those issues have been raised in an employment forum, but a key question will be whether employment negotiations can or should be able to deal with such wide ranging issues – especially when they are so vital to the safety of the community.

Bernard Walker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Striking firefighters are calling for systemic change, but are their demands too hot to handle for NZ employment law? – https://theconversation.com/striking-firefighters-are-calling-for-systemic-change-but-are-their-demands-too-hot-to-handle-for-nz-employment-law-189040

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Toole, Associate Principal Research Fellow, Burnet Institute

Until recently, polio had only been detected in a handful of countries, thanks to global eradication efforts.

But this year’s polio alerts in the United States, United Kingdom and Israel are a reminder that as long as poliovirus is found anywhere, it is a potential problem everywhere.

That could include Australia.

Here’s what the latest polio cases mean for Australia – including under-vaccinated communities and people travelling internationally.

The US case

In July this year, a young man in Rockland County, New York, developed paralysis and was diagnosed with polio, the first US case since 2013.

He had never been vaccinated against polio, which is not uncommon among Orthodox Jewish people in some countries. Rockland County has the highest percentage of Orthodox Jewish people in the US. Currently, only about 60% of children in the county are vaccinated against polio, compared with more than 90% nationally.

As of August 12, poliovirus was still being detected in sewage in New York City and other counties in New York State, indicating the virus is still circulating in the community.

The reason there have been no further cases of paralysis reflects the fact that only around one in 200 people infected by the virus develops paralysis.

Read more:
Polio in New York – an infectious disease doctor explains this exceedingly rare occurrence

A child in Israel

One indirect link to the New York man may be in Jerusalem where, in March 2022, poliovirus was found in sewage and one case of paralysis occurred in an unvaccinated child.

Vaccination rates among Ultra-Orthodox Jewish people in Israel have been historically low, including low uptake of COVID vaccines.

UK ramps up vaccination

In June this year, the UK government reported wastewater surveillance in north and east London between February and May had identified poliovirus on consecutive occasions.

This indicated a provisional “silent” outbreak and prompted health officials to instigate catch-up vaccination campaigns. No cases of paralysis have been reported.

This is reminiscent of an earlier “silent” outbreak of polio in 2013-2014 when, after decades without a case, Israel detected poliovirus in wastewater samples in many areas, mainly in southern regions.

Stool surveys indicated the outbreak was restricted mainly to children under the age of ten in the Bedouin population of southern Israel. The virus originated in Pakistan and arrived in Israel via Cairo and then, probably, through Bedouin communities in Egypt and Israel.

Read more:
Polio vaccine boosters offered to London children – an expert explains what’s going on

Hang on, hasn’t polio been eradicated?

It’s tempting to think polio has been eradicated.

The last case of locally acquired polio in Australia was in 1972. Australia was declared polio-free on October 29, 2000, along with the other 36 countries in the Western Pacific Region of the World Health Organization. The last case reported in Australia was in 2007, when a student contracted the infection in Pakistan.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative, launched in 1988, successfully eliminated wild poliovirus from all but two countries – Pakistan and Afghanistan – where in recent years there have been very few cases.

In Afghanistan, there were four cases last year and one so far this year. In Pakistan, there was one case in 2021 and 14 so far this year.

Read more:
Polio: we’re developing a safer vaccine that uses no genetic material from the virus

The recent cases and wastewater detected polioviruses in the UK, US and Israel are not the wild variety. Instead, they are derived from the oral polio vaccine.

When a child receives a dose of the oral vaccine, they excrete the virus in the stool for several weeks. In very rare cases, the vaccine-derived virus mutates to a form that causes paralysis. This form is called a circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV). This occurs only in populations where polio vaccine coverage is low.

Just recently, cVDPV was reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique and Yemen, as well as in wastewater in five other countries.

Australia, like all high-income countries, does not use the oral polio vaccine. Instead, children receive injectable inactivated polio vaccine, which prevents paralysis but does not prevent transmission of the virus.

This is why so-called silent outbreaks can occur in countries that use the injectable vaccine. This is when the virus spreads from child to child but does not cause paralysis.

What are the implications for Australia?

Given Australia’s open international borders, there is no reason why someone who has recently received the oral polio vaccine wouldn’t enter the country and excrete the virus.

In Australia, at the age of five, about 95% of children are fully vaccinated against polio.

However, there are places with lower vaccine coverage, such as Byron Shire in northern New South Wales, with lower rates of childhood vaccination, including against polio.

This vaccine-hesitant community is vulnerable to the introduction of polio and has had cases of diphtheria, whooping cough, measles and tetanus in recent years.

Unlike some other Orthodox Jewish communities overseas, there is no evidence this community in Australia is more vaccine hesitant than other Australians.

How do we look out for cases?

For years, wastewater monitoring has been routinely implemented in many countries. This acts as an early warning system to identify and rapidly mitigate the spread of many pathogens, including poliovirus, hepatitis viruses and, recently, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID).

At wastewater treatment facilities, sewage from an entire region is combined. This allows scientists to detect pathogens at the population level and before anyone presents with symptoms.

In December 2017, Victoria’s environmental testing program detected a rare type of poliovirus in pre-treated sewage from the Western Treatment Plant in Melbourne.

No cases of paralytic polio were detected but all Victorians up to the age of 19 were offered three doses of vaccine, free of charge, as part of catch-up arrangements.

Australia’s poliovirus infection outbreak response plan focuses on clinical surveillance (where health workers report suspected cases to health authorities) and laboratory investigations of people who present with acute paralysis.

While the plan refers to examples of wastewater surveillance overseas, it does not propose a specific strategy in Australia.

Other than Victoria, it is not clear where wastewater polio surveillance is being conducted in Australia.

Read more:
Sewage surveillance is the next frontier in the fight against polio

What happens next?

Australia is just as vulnerable to importations of poliovirus – both wild and vaccine-derived – as any other country.

Australia should ensure routine wastewater surveillance for poliovirus is conducted, at least in metropolitan areas.

Community-based vaccination campaigns should be sensitively conducted in vaccine-hesitant communities, such as in Byron Shire, to achieve high coverage.

Education should also be provided through GPs to parents planning to travel to Jerusalem, New York City and Rockland County. They should ensure all travelling family members are fully vaccinated against polio. Visitors to Israel may be able to access a dose of oral polio vaccine in that country for their children (which will prevent them being infected) but this is not available in the US.

Poliovirus enters the body through the mouth, usually from hands contaminated with the stool of an infected person. So parents should also pay special attention to their children’s hand hygiene, particularly if travelling overseas to any of the locations mentioned.

Michael Toole receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research council.

– ref. The latest polio cases have put the world on alert. Here’s what this means for Australia and people travelling overseas – https://theconversation.com/the-latest-polio-cases-have-put-the-world-on-alert-heres-what-this-means-for-australia-and-people-travelling-overseas-188989

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Oloruntoba, Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management, Curtin University

China’s sabre-rattling around Taiwan underlines the need for Australia to be prepared for conflict in the South China Sea.

With its growing navy and air force, and the bases it has built throughout the area, China is increasingly capable of disrupting shipping lanes crucial to Australia’s exports and imports.

Of particular concern is our reliance on liquid fuels imported via South China Sea shipping routes. This reliance has become more pronounced over the past few decades as all but two local refineries have closed. So even while we export crude oil, we import about 90% of refined fuels.

Our research team was commissioned by the Department of Defence to analyse threats to Australia’s maritime supply chains throughout the Indo-Pacific region (the South China Sea and East China Sea).

We calculate a major conflict would threaten routes supplying 90% of refined fuel imports, coming from South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Brunei and Vietnam.

Even if the routes between these countries and Australia do not pass through the South China Sea, most of the crude oil these countries import to produce that refined fuel does.

Read more:
Friday essay: if growing US-China rivalry leads to ‘the worst war ever’, what should Australia do?

Previous analyses of vulnerability

Our analysis is the first commissioned by the Department of Defence on the specific threat of prolonged maritime supply chain disruptions due to conflict in the South China and East China seas.

It builds on broader analyses of supply-chain vulnerabilities, such as the Department of Energy and the Environment’s 2019 interim Liquid Fuel Security Review and the Productivity Commission’s 2021 report spurred by import shortages arising from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2019 liquid fuel security review determined Australia imports the equivalent of 90% of its refined fuel needs.

In 2018 just five Asian nations supplied 87% of fuel imports: South Korea (27%), Singapore (26%), Japan (15%) and Malaysia (10%) and Taiwan (9%). The balance came from India (6%), the Middle East (1%) and the rest of the world including Vietnam and Philippines (6%).

Shipping route vulnerabilities

Our analysis involved examining GPS traffic data for tanker and cargo ships throughout the South China Sea and East China Sea region.

It’s not just shipping routes between source countries and Australia that matter. It is where these countries import the crude oil they refine into petrol, diesel, jet fuel, marine fuel and kerosene.

More than 80% of crude oil imports for Singapore, South Korea and Japan come from the Middle East – passing through the narrow Malacca Strait that separates the Malay Peninsula from the Indonesian island of Borneo.

So while export routes from Japan and Korea to Australia can avoid the South China Sea, their import routes can’t.

Any prolonged closure of the South China Sea will force tankers to take alternative routes. With longer routes will come higher freight costs and tanker shortages. Flow-on effects to Australia are inevitable.

Planning and preparedness

As the 2019 liquid fuel security review noted, Australia is a global outlier in its approach to liquid fuel security. Comparable economies manage fuel security as part of their strategic capability.

Australia, by comparison, has chosen to apply minimal regulation or government intervention in pursuit of an efficient market that delivers fuel to Australians as cheaply as possible.

Until now, Australia’s strategic planning for conflict in the South China Sea has largely focused on military requirements. .

With China’s increasing military capability and belligerence, there is no longer room to be complacent about Australia’s lack of energy security.

A 2019 workshop of engineering experts convened for the Department of Defence determined Australia would run out of liquid fuels within two months of a major prolonged import disruption.

This would have cascading effect on all sectors of the economy – crippling transport, harming food security and emergency services. Among other things, the experts warned a lack of diesel for back-up generators in hospitals and other buildings could be catastrophic in the event of a large-scale electricity outage.

Read more:
Why China’s challenges to Australian ships in the South and East China Seas are likely to continue

There are five main options to reduce our vulnerability: diversify import sources; increase local refining capability; reduce dependence on fossil fuels; increase strategic reserves; and educate and prepare the population for possible shortages.

All will require government departments planning together with various industry sectors, including fuel retailers, refineries and import terminals, manufacturing, freight transport, maritime, defence, communities and other relevant stakeholders.

This article is based on the findings from Project Grant 202021-0239, Strategic Policy Grants Program 2021, Australian Department of Defence, Canberra.

Booi Kam together with research collaborators received a 2021 Strategic Policy Defence Grant from the Department of Defence.

This article is based on the findings from Project Grant 202021-0239, Strategic Policy Grants Program 2021, Australian Department of Defence.

This article is based on the findings from Project Grant 202021-0239, Strategic Policy Grants Program 2021, Australian Department of Defence.

Prem Chhetri receives funding from Department of Defence.

Vinh Thai together with research collaborators received a 2021 Strategic Policy Defence Grant from the Defence.

– ref. Conflict in the South China Sea threatens 90% of Australia’s fuel imports: study – https://theconversation.com/conflict-in-the-south-china-sea-threatens-90-of-australias-fuel-imports-study-188148

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sian Troath, Postdoctoral fellow, University of Canterbury

Australia’s recently announced defence review, intended to be the most thorough in almost four decades, will give us a good idea of how Australia sees its role in an increasingly tense strategic environment.

As New Zealand’s only formal military ally, Australia’s defence choices will have significant implications, both for New Zealand and regional geopolitics.

There are several areas of contention in the trans-Tasman relationship. One is Australia’s pursuit of nuclear-powered submarines, which clashes with New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance. Another lies in the two countries’ diverging approaches to autonomous weapons systems (AWS), colloquially known as “killer robots”.

In general, AWS are considered to be “weapons systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further human intervention”. There is, however, no internationally agreed definition.

New Zealand is involved with international attempts to ban and regulate AWS. It seeks a ban on systems that “are not sufficiently predictable or controllable to meet legal or ethical requirements” and advocates for “rules or limits to govern the development and use of AWS”.

If this seems vague to you, it should. This ambiguity in definition makes it difficult to determine which systems New Zealand seeks to ban or regulate.

Australia’s prioritisation of AWS

Australia, meanwhile, has been developing what it more commonly refers to as robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) with gusto. Since 2016, Australia has identified RAS as a priority area of development and substantially increased funding.

Read more:
New Zealand could take a global lead in controlling the development of ‘killer robots’ — so why isn’t it?

The Australian navy, army and defence force (ADF) have each released concept documents since 2018, discussing RAS and their associated benefits, risks, challenges and opportunities.

Key systems Australia is pursuing include the autonomous aircraft Ghost Bat, three different kinds of extra-large underwater autonomous vehicles and autonomous trucks.

Why is Australia seeking to develop these technologies?

The short answer is three-fold: seeking military advantage, saving lives and economics.

Australia and its allies and partners, particularly the US, are fearful of losing the technological superiority they have long held over rivals such as China.

Large military capabilities, like nuclear-powered submarines, take both time and money to acquire. Australia is further limited in what it can do by the size of its defence force. RAS are seen as a way to potentially maintain advantage, and to do more with less.

RAS are also seen as a way to save lives. A survey of Australian military personnel found they considered reduction of harm and injury to defence personnel, allied personnel and civilians among the most important potential benefits of RAS.

Read more:
UN fails to agree on ‘killer robot’ ban as nations pour billions into autonomous weapons research

The Australian Defence Force also believes RAS will be cheaper than large platforms. Inflation means money already committed to defence has less purchasing power. RAS present an opportunity to achieve the same outcomes at a lower cost.

Meanwhile, in 2018, the Australian government outlined its intention to become a top-ten defence exporter. There are keen hopes the Ghost Bat will become a successful defence export.

At the same time, the government is keen to build closer ties between defence, industry and academia. Industry and academia both vie for defence funding, and this drives development of RAS.

Of course, the technology is new. It’s not guaranteed RAS will save lives, save money or achieve military advantage. The extent to which RAS will be used, and what they will be used for, is not foreseeable. It is in this uncertainty that New Zealand must make judgments about AWS and alliance management.

What this means for the trans-Tasman relationship

The nuclear-powered submarines captured attention when Australia’s new AUKUS partnership with the US and UK was announced, but its primary purpose is a much broader partnership that shares defence technology, including RAS.

The most recent statement from the AUKUS working groups says they “will seek opportunities to engage allies and close partners”. Last week, US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman made it clear New Zealand was one such partner.

Australia’s focus on RAS, particularly in the context of AUKUS, may soon bring alliance questions to the fore. Strategic studies expert Robert Ayson has argued AUKUS, combined with increased strategic tension, means that “year by year New Zealand’s alliance commitment to the defence of Australia will carry bigger implications”. AWS will play a role in these implications.

Read more:
Nukes, allies, weapons and cost: 4 big questions NZ’s defence review must address

AWS may seem an insignificant trans-Tasman difference compared to the use of nuclear technologies. But AWS come with a lot more uncertainty and fuzziness than, say, banning nuclear-powered submarines in New Zealand waters. This fuzziness creates ample room for misperceptions and poor communication.

Trust in alliance relationships is easily damaged, and difficult to manage. Clear communication and ensuring a good understanding of each other’s positions is essential. The ambiguity of AWS makes these things difficult.

New Zealand and Australia may need to clarify their respective positions before Australia’s defence review is released next March. Otherwise, they run the risk of fuelling misunderstandings at a delicate moment for trans-Tasman relations.

Sian Troath receives funding from The Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund.

– ref. Australia’s pursuit of ‘killer robots’ could put the trans-Tasman alliance with New Zealand on shaky ground – https://theconversation.com/australias-pursuit-of-killer-robots-could-put-the-trans-tasman-alliance-with-new-zealand-on-shaky-ground-188520

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Griffiths, Deputy Program Director, Grattan Institute

From sports rorts to regional slush funds and commuter carparks, it’s been one scandal after another in Australian politics in recent years. But what can we actually do to stop politicians pork-barrelling?

A new Grattan Institute report, released today, shows the problem isn’t confined to one side of politics: both Coalition and Labor governments, at federal and state levels, use government grants for political purposes. But there is a way to stop them from doing it again.

Pork-barrelling is common

Pork-barrelling is the use of public resources to target certain voters for partisan purposes – for example, by spending public money in particular electorates to try to win more votes rather than spending those funds where they are most needed.

Using grants to buy votes is one of the most visible forms of pork-barrelling. Grants processes often allow substantial ministerial discretion with little transparency, making them what one researcher described as “an ideal vehicle for delivering pork”.

The figures show that pork-barrelling has been blatant in many federal and state government grant programs. More grant money is received by seats held by the government of the day and marginal seats receive disproportionately more funding.

Pork-barrelling has been especially shameless in certain grant programs. For example, the federal Community Development Grants program allocated government-held seats more than four times more per seat, on average, than opposition seats. For the NSW Stronger Communities Fund, the figure was almost six times as much.

Yet some politicians defend pork-barrelling

While pork-barrelling isn’t new, there’s been a worrying trend in recent years towards normalising it. Instead of offering apologies and resignations, some politicians have ramped up their excuses and are now openly defending this misuse of public money. Justifications include: “It’s not unique to our government”; “It’s what the elections are for”; and even that pork-barrelling accompanied by giant cheques featuring government MPs’ faces is “a feature of Australian democracy”.

Revelations of large-scale pork-barrelling should prompt ministerial resignations and government reforms to make it harder to do it again. But state and federal ministers don’t often fall on their swords over pork-barrelling these days, despite evidence that 77% of Australians believe they should.

The decision to brazen it out might be driven by short-term political interests, or it might show our politicians don’t understand or respect the rules and norms on spending public money.

Either way, politicians’ behaviour has drawn attention to the ineffectiveness of Australia’s current rules on pork-barrelling.

How to prevent pork-barrelling

Pork-barrelling, by definition, is not in the public interest. It has real costs.

Channelling taxpayer’s money into projects to benefit friends and supporters, or to win votes, means less money for more valuable projects, and less core spending on health, education and other programs that can improve the lives of all Australians and lift the productive capacity of the economy.

Pork-barrelling also undermines trust in governments, promotes a corrupt culture, and risks entrenching power and skewing elections.

So how can we put a stop to the seemingly irresistible temptation to roll out ever more grants? Let’s start with an open, competitive, merit-based process for allocating government grants that establishes clear guardrails around ministerial discretion.

Ministers should be able to establish grant programs and define the selection criteria, but they should not be involved in choosing grant recipients. Shortlisting and selecting grant recipients is an administrative function for the relevant department or agency. Ministers should have bigger fish to fry.

A multi-party standing parliamentary committee should oversee compliance and interrogate any minister or public official who deviates from the rules. And funding for federal and state auditors-general should be increased to enable wider and more frequent auditing of grant programs.

Read more:
Here’s a simple way to stop governments giving jobs to mates

A strong and well-resourced integrity commission is the last line of defence against pork-barrelling. Better processes and oversight should significantly reduce the opportunities and incentives for governments to engage in pork-barrelling in the first place.

If pork-barrelling continues, an integrity commission may choose to investigate. A recent report from the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption concluded that pork-barrelling “can under certain circumstances involve serious breaches of public trust and conduct that amounts to corrupt conduct”.

It’s time to take the pork off the table. Better processes and oversight of grant funding, alongside the other recommendations in our New Politics series of reports, would lay the foundations for a new way of doing politics in Australia – one that safeguards the public interest from political interests.

The Grattan Institute began with contributions to its endowment of $15 million from each of the Federal and Victorian Governments, $4 million from BHP Billiton, and $1 million from NAB. In order to safeguard its independence, Grattan Institute’s board controls this endowment. The funds are invested and contribute to funding Grattan Institute’s activities. Grattan Institute also receives funding from corporates, foundations, and individuals to support its general activities as disclosed on its website.

Anika Stobart and Danielle Wood do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Pork-barrelling is unfair and wasteful. Here’s a plan to end it – https://theconversation.com/pork-barrelling-is-unfair-and-wasteful-heres-a-plan-to-end-it-188898

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mittul Vahanvati, Lecturer, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

When floods swept the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales earlier this year, scores of people ignored official advice and rescued neighbours and friends from floodwaters using their boats, kayaks and jet skis, while risking their own lives. Now an independent inquiry has recommended communities in high-risk areas receive training and resources to become first responders to a disaster.

The NSW inquiry into the spate of floods in 2022 was released last week. A “community-based first responder training program”, which incorporates Indigenous knowledge, is one of 28 recommendations.

The inquiry recognised that in areas such as Lismore many people – dubbed the “tinnie army” – rescued others when emergency services were overwhelmed by the scale of the floods. In accepting the recommendation, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said while people might not have time to be full-time volunteers, many would want to be trained and contribute though programs like this.

But exactly what’s involved in training community members and relying on them to be first responders when disaster strikes? Will this program help prepare communities and build resilience? Or will it cause more confusion and increase risks?

Communities must already negotiate a complicated landscape of response to and recovery from floods – or fires. While well-meaning, it is unclear whether the benefits of formalising community skills through emergency training program outweigh the risks.

Read more:
Another day, another flood: preparing for more climate disasters means taking more personal responsibility for risk

How would such training benefit communities?

This article draws on our work with regional Australian and urban Pacific communities to reduce disaster risks and build resilience. We have also studied people’s behaviours and communications during emergencies.

Certainly, there are positives associated with this community training program. Research has shown people affected by disaster often become first responders, so the recommendation recognises that reality. People are much more likely to be altruistic in times of crisis (rather than panic and behave in self-serving ways).

Increasing the knowledge and skills of these individuals could help ensure their safety along with the safety of those they assist. There also is a trend in communities that have experienced a number of disasters to self-organise in the face of future disasters. Communities across Australia have come together to develop response plans and procedures, communication strategies and the like.

These communities want to be prepared, especially in case government agencies are unable to respond in time. This desire is a result of having endured experiences where things didn’t go so well.

Other obvious benefits of the program include the ability to draw on community members’ knowledge of local places and people. And when communities can contribute to helping disaster-affected people – whether by assisting with evacuation, managing shelters or providing comfort – that benefits community and individual wellbeing too.

Read more:
Disaster season is here — do you have a Resilience Action Plan? Here’s how the small town of Tarnagulla built theirs

What might the downsides be?

Such a program also has inevitable downsides. Disaster risk reduction and recovery is a joint responsibility of governments and communities. Yet this recommendation seems to place a great deal of responsibility on community alone.

In Australia, national, state and territory governments develop policies on disaster risk management. These are then implemented by local government authorities, state agencies such as Recovery NSW and NSW Reconstruction Authority, voluntary organisations such as Red Cross, specialist organisations, as well as community-based working groups such as the communities of North-East and North-West Queensland. Communities would have to respond to disasters within this structure, with support from such agencies and organisations.

Training community members would strengthen disaster response and recovery efforts only if affected communities are adequately supported. Trouble can arise, however, when these efforts rely too heavily on community members to fill the gaps in lieu of their official counterparts.

Another troubling issue is the failure to act on previous disaster inquiry recommendations, which points to the challenges of implementing the current recommendations. A 2021 NSW Audit Office report said:

“Two-thirds of proposed recommendations in past inquiries could not be verified as being implemented as intended, and in line with the outcomes sought. The audit also found that agencies did not always nominate milestone dates or priority rankings for accepted recommendations, and so could not demonstrate if they were managing or monitoring them effectively.”

These findings are probably the result of a few challenges, including short political cycles, the heavy burden already placed on emergency officials and the struggle to build on their past learnings when implementing previous inquiry recommendations.

Also telling is the frequent restructuring of agencies evident in the changes from the Office of Emergency Management to Resilience NSW to Recovery NSW, with a new NSW Reconstruction Authority to become the lead agency.

The inquiry was critical of the responses by Resilience NSW and the NSW SES to the floods. Its report identified confusion about roles, poor communication and a lack of co-ordination and resources as contributing factors.

This raises questions about whether they have the capacity to properly train communities. Training programs would require agencies to take on extra responsibilities during and after disaster events.

Read more:
Governments love to talk about ‘shared responsibility’ in a disaster – but does anyone know what it means?

Many questions remain

Many questions of responsibility and liability remain to be answered. Issues include:

• How will the responsibilities of the formal and informal volunteers be distinguished?

• Who will be liable if a community responder is injured while assisting others?

• Who will be responsible for ensuring any equipment provided via community-based grant programs is maintained?

• In what capacity may these programs indirectly encourage community members to stay behind in a disaster-affected area, which could put them in harm’s way?

To increase the prospects of success, training programs should build upon any existing community-organised strategies and approaches. And they should be co-designed with those community members, including Indigenous communities, who are most knowledgeable and active in disaster risk management.

Mittul Vahanvati is working with Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal.

Erica Kuligowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘Tinnie army’ leads to NSW flood inquiry call to train community members as first responders. How will that work? – https://theconversation.com/tinnie-army-leads-to-nsw-flood-inquiry-call-to-train-community-members-as-first-responders-how-will-that-work-188900

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne O’Mara, Associate Professor in Education, Deakin University

My phone pings and it’s a message from my brother. Do we have an old white dress my niece could borrow for a Book Week costume for school?

Book Week is upon us once again and all around Australia, family WhatsApp groups are lighting up with similar requests from parents and carers of primary school aged children.

Mothers are staring at cardboard boxes wondering how they can help their child transform into a rainbow fish. Fathers are corralling children down the aisles of Spotlight trying to find the costume section. Carers are asking children about how they want to dress for the Book Week parade, and what’s needed to complete the look.

In the scramble for costumes, which can add to the work of already stressed parents and carers, the point of Book Week – for kids to fall in love with reading – can get lost.

In fact, a vast body of research evidence shows what’s crucial to building a love of reading is allowing children the time and freedom to read what interests them.

Dressing up as a fictional character does have benefits

I’m not saying the Book Week costume is pointless; dressing up as your favourite book character is a great way to celebrate reading, particularly when all students and teachers take part.

In Australia – where most school students wear uniforms – every school day out of uniform has a sense of celebration.

Some children will use their Book Week costume to play around with the fictional character and interact in role.

A child I know revelled in dressing up as Professor Snape from Harry Potter and playfully patrolled the playground in character. He was pursued by a gang of younger Potter fans with their house colours on, yelling out to him in role and giggling when he responded gruffly as Snape.

These children were playing but they were also learning; it was an opportunity to improvise scenes based on a novel they loved to read, and to celebrate this reading across the school.

“Snape” himself had read the novels when he was younger; his love of the text and pleasures of the fictional world spurred him on to read a much more difficult text than he normally would at that age.

What really matters is not the costume, but falling in love with reading

Extensive research shows reading for pleasure improves young people’s overall reading skills, as well as test outcomes.

Creating a culture of reading in school can help children fall in love with reading, where children read books they choose themselves for their own pleasure.

Some schools provide a time and place for silent reading as part of the school day, but sadly this is not always the case.

Providing time for sustained, self-selected reading is important, as many children do not read for pleasure outside school time.

Finding a book they love, with help from another child, a teacher, or librarian, can help a child to develop the habit of reading.

So what would work to help my child fall in love with reading?

Encourage your child’s reading of fiction and let them choose books for themselves.

Facilitate trips to the library if you can, and spend time with them selecting what interests them.

Don’t judge your kids on what they love, and don’t force your kids to read what you deem a “worthy” book.

Too often kids experience what author and teacher Kelly Gallagher calls “readicide”: the “systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices of schools”.

It’s possible to commit readicide in the home if it becomes a forced, systematic chore where your child has no choice over what they are reading.

So, rather than judging, enjoy their pleasures and invite them to share their books with you.

Share your own reading with them, and make it visible to them.

I read novels on my phone, which I love, as I can read in bed with the light off. But it’s not as obvious when I am reading fiction as it would be if I was reading a printed book – so I try to bring up my reading in my conversations with my children.

It’s a small action, but anything you can to do help establish a culture of reading in the family helps establish reading for pleasure as a normalised behaviour.

So this Book Week, don’t stress about the costume, and don’t worry about what the other mums or dads are sewing or buying.

Just let your kid read what they want and enjoy it together.

Joanne O’Mara receives funding from The Australian Research Council and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She is a member of the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English Council.

– ref. Book Week: it’s not the costume that matters, but falling in love with reading – https://theconversation.com/book-week-its-not-the-costume-that-matters-but-falling-in-love-with-reading-188748

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lorina L. Barker, Senior Lecturer, University of New England

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images of deceased people.

Amy Elwood, a Wangkumara/Adnyamathanha Elder and cultural repository of knowledge and grandmother to one of us (Lorina Barker), has inspired an array of creative works about her experience of removal from Country.

In 1938, 130 Aboriginal people including Amy’s family and other Wangkumara families were forcibly removed from Country at Tibooburra to the Brewarrina Aboriginal Station – the old mission.

The community was transported 500 kilometres east to the Baaka Barwon rivers on the back of three gubbie (government) trucks.

In 2006, Lorina had a yarn with her grandmother about her life experiences and memories. This was transformed into a poem titled An Ode to My Grandmother, a short film called Tibooburra: My Grandmother’s Country and touring multimedia exhibition named Looking Through Windows.

That yarn also inspired an immersive theatre performance Trucked Off, and the song An Ode to My Grandmother.

Read more:
Friday essay: histories written in the land – a journey through Adnyamathanha Yarta

Learning from Elders

Oral history is the recorded account of a person’s memories of the past for historical and research purposes. Indigenous oral history is more than a methodology. It is living history, practised for thousands of millennia, intrinsically woven into Aboriginal people’s way of life and culture.

As Aboriginal people, we live it every day: it is a part of who we are, where we come from and who we are related to. It also determines our interconnected relationship and responsibilities to our lands, rivers, seas, skies and to all living and inanimate things in both the natural and spiritual worlds.

In these works, Amy Elwood is able to share her memories and stories and those of her family.

On the mission, life was harsh and regulated. The Wangkumara were not able to speak their language or practice their Culture; Elders worried for Country and many died of broken hearts.

In each development of the story, artists and musicians had to go through a process of decolonising themselves to work in an Aboriginal cultural framework. We were invited by Wangkumara Elders Gwen Barker, Rick Elwood, Rebecca McKellar and Louise Elwood into culturally creative spaces online and on Country where knowledge was transferred into new forms.

With each successive workshop and performance, we learnt more from the Elders through yarning and storytelling. The creative process from the poem to the final performance was developed over many years.

Retelling history

An immersive theatre work, Trucked Off started with the poem. In immersive theatre, the audience are not passive bystanders, they are part of the story.

In Trucked Off, the audience follow the Tibooburra families, walking in their shoes, reliving the journey from Tibooburra to Brewarrina in the far northwest of New South Wales.

On arrival at the mission, the old Brewarrina Station, the audience are told by the mission manager and staff how their lives will be ruled by the ringing of a bell. The number of rings indicates how they will respond: if they are required to assemble for work, obtain rations, or, for children, go to school or to see the nurse for “treatments”.

The penalties are harsh for noncompliance.

Wangkumara Elders, including Lorina’s mother Aunty Gwen Barker, participate as actors in Trucked Off, taking ownership of their story and retelling their history.

The script is dynamic, incorporating themes of grief, loss and trauma that reverberate through the generations, reflecting the continuing impact of colonisation.

This is a theatre of “truth-telling”, embodied and experiential, increasing people’s understanding and memory of this living history.

Stories in song

Another work inspired by the poem was an operatic song. In the Western tradition, the composer has the final say over the music but this process required a new way of working that involved Community and the Wangkumara Elders.

The process ensured cultural protocols were observed and permissions sought to tell the story and to find the correct sound. Wangkumara Elders were able to give us detailed insight into the story and the emotion behind the poem.

The musical sections were mapped out and the Elders wanted the song to have an uplifting ending. This demonstrated the courage and resilience of the people, their connection to Country and to the Mura tracks (Songlines), even after removal. The song ends with a triumphant fanfare and the lyrics “Country knows you”.

While the poem is in English, the Elders added Wangkumara words into the song, including the word Ngamadja, which means “mother”. Wiradjuri soprano Georgina Hall discussed with Elders the many meanings of the words and the exact way to pronounce them while recording the song.

Language and the story of removal finds a new home in classical music and song.

The use of oral histories and archival materials in these creative works allow the family, community, artists and musicians along with the audience to walk in the footsteps of our Elders.

We speak their words and experience for a moment what it was like to be removed from Country, transported, fenced-in and locked up on a mission. The original poem, production and accompanying music also aids in demystifying removal, and not only builds empathy and understanding in audiences – but is also a call to action.

Read more:
Friday essay: ‘I am anxious to have my children home’: recovering letters of love written for Noongar children

Lorina L. Barker receives funding from Australian Research Council and Create NSW

Julie Collins and Paul Smith do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. An Ode To My Grandmother: remaking the past using oral histories, theatre and music – https://theconversation.com/an-ode-to-my-grandmother-remaking-the-past-using-oral-histories-theatre-and-music-180575

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

Anthony Albanese flagged at the weekend he was open to calling an inquiry into the ramifications of Scott Morrison’s power grab, as Barnaby Joyce revealed he feared retribution if he crossed Morrison for overruling a Nationals minister.

Albanese on Monday will release the solicitor-general’s advice on the affair, as the controversy around Morrison’s extraordinary action in wading into multiple portfolios without informing his cabinet runs into its second week.

Asked on Sky whether he would call an inquiry even if (as expected) the solicitor-general found Morrison acted legally, Albanese said, “very clearly there’s a need for proper scrutiny of what occurred here. This was an undermining of our parliamentary democracy.”

He said that separately from the legal side there were questions of whether conventions had been overturned and whether reforms were needed so this could never happen again.

“We’ll examine all of those issues after we receive the solicitor-general’s advice.”

Joyce, interviewed on the ABC, gave a confused account of what he knew and when. He was deputy prime minister when Morrison overruled Nationals resources minister Keith Pitt over the PEP-11 gas exploration off the NSW coast.

Morrison decided to rule out exploration for political reasons, while Pitt, who as minister had the formal decision-making power, had an opposite view. Morrison had ensured he could get his way by becoming resources minister.

Joyce told the ABC he became aware “obliquely” that Morrison had the power to decide the PEP-11 matter.

During discussions on PEP-11 “it became more apparent that the prime minister had greater powers than I initially assumed,” Joyce said.

Joyce said if he had resisted Morrison’s action, the Nationals could have lost the extra ministry place he had obtained for them. As well as the extra spot Joyce said he had negotiated another person on cabinet’s expenditure review committee, and extra staff. And there were billions of dollars for regional areas, as part of the deal Joyce struck for the Nationals signing up to the net zero by 2050 commitment.

“I thought I would ask myself three questions [about Morrison moving into resources]. Is it legal? Under section 64 [of the constitution] he can do that.

“Is there anything I can do to change it back? No.

“Has he got the capacity to re-negotiate my extra minister that I had just dealt into the National party hand? Yes, he could say, ‘Yeah. I will fix your problem, mate. I will take the ministry back off you. Problem fixed for you’. Problem fixed for me. Bad outcome for the National party.”

Joyce said he couldn’t remember exactly when Morrison had told him he could overrule Pitt. Morrison had made himself resources minister in April 2021, while Michael McCormack was still Nationals leader, and Joyce did not know of the arrangement when he ousted McCormack.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Barnaby Joyce says he feared retribution if he crossed Morrison over resources power grab – https://theconversation.com/barnaby-joyce-says-he-feared-retribution-if-he-crossed-morrison-over-resources-power-grab-189112

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vita Pilkington, Research Assistant, PhD Candidate, The University of Melbourne

With the recent sudden death of former rugby league coach and player Paul Green, conversations about the mental health of elite coaching staff are paramount.

Our research in 2020, published in July this year, found more than 40% of coaches from Olympic sports we surveyed reported mental health symptoms at a level that would warrant professional treatment. But fewer than 6% reported seeking treatment at the time.

Despite facing immense pressure in their daily roles, the mental health needs of elite coaches have been largely neglected in public conversation.

Athletes increasingly discussing mental health

In recent years, we have seen many high-profile athletes across several sports talk openly about their mental health struggles. They include Naomi Osaka, Nick Kyrgios, Simone Biles, Michael Phelps, Bailey Smith and Majak Daw.

UFC fighter Paddy Pimblett recently challenged mental health stigma and promoted seeking help in a post-fight interview.

When elite athletes openly discuss mental ill-health, this is often publicly celebrated. This aligns with changing cultural attitudes, moving away from rigid stoicism and towards recognising mental ill-health as a reality rather than a rarity.

Coaches largely neglected

But it’s rarer to see people talking about mental ill-health in elite coaches.

Very few coaches have publicly discussed their experiences, with a small number of notable exceptions in the AFL. Former St Kilda player and Richmond coach Danny Frawley openly discussed experiencing depression and anxiety before his death in September 2019.

Former Essendon player and coach James Hird also described experiencing suicidal thoughts, contacting Beyond Blue for crisis support, and receiving inpatient treatment for depression.

Read more:
Naomi Osaka isn’t the only elite athlete to struggle with mental health – here’s how sport should move forward

However, public recognition of the pressures and mental health challenges experienced by elite coaches remains poor.

Elite coaches experience immense pressure in their daily roles. They are subject to many of the same challenges as the elite athletes they coach. These include performance pressure, public scrutiny, online harassment, role insecurity, extended periods travelling for sport and missing significant life events as a result.

Coaches are also tasked with vast levels of responsibility for club and sporting success. Their role requires them to act as the face of club decisions, performance and injuries – and they’re often exposed to blistering public opinion and scrutiny about such matters.

In 2021, tennis player Naomi Osaka commented on the toll of post-match interviews – but no such discussions have been applied to coaches.

Our research

In 2020, the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) commissioned a survey of the mental health and wellbeing of coaches and support staff across Australian Olympic-level sports (the 2020 Mental Health Audit). Our team at youth mental health organisation Orygen and the University of Melbourne conducted this study, which represents one of the largest surveys of coach and support staff mental health and wellbeing.

We surveyed 78 coaches and 174 support staff from Australia’s elite Olympic sport system. The survey assessed rates of mental health symptoms, psychological distress, sleep disturbance and alcohol use.

We found elite coaches reported mental health symptoms at a similar level to elite athletes.

Signs of mental health stigma were also apparent. For example, 30% thought mental health problems would reflect poorly on them in a sport setting. This suggests coaches may feel unsafe sharing their mental health experiences.

Job security and feeling overworked appear to be major challenges for elite coaches. This is perhaps unsurprising given that, like athletes, their job security depends on performance. Poor performance often leads to speculation about a coach’s job security and, in many cases, to losing their job.

Elite sport is also fast-paced, which frequently presents staff and athletes with new challenges. The dedication required to succeed in such environments often requires sacrifices in other areas of life.

Less than half of the coaches in our study reported being satisfied with their work-life balance. They described the negative impacts that too much work, work-related stress and lacking quality time had on their quality of life and satisfaction with life.

How to support coaches’ mental health

To reduce stigma, we need a cultural shift in sport, media and the general community.

Sporting organisations and the media need to promote the voices of coaches who have experienced mental health challenges.

It’s also crucial to ensure coaches can access appropriate mental health supports. The AIS’s Mental Health Referral Network is a good example. Those who can use this service include current and former athletes, coaches, support staff and staff employed by Australia’s national sporting organisations.

While elite sports are highly demanding environments, coach mental wellbeing should still be prioritised.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Vita Pilkington receives funding through a Melbourne Research Scholarship from the University of Melbourne. She was involved in a recent independent evaluation of the Australian Institute of Sport Mental Health Referral Network.

Courtney Walton receives funding through a McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. He was involved in a recent independent evaluation of the Australian Institute of Sport Mental Health Referral Network.

– ref. More than 40% of elite sport coaches we surveyed suffered mental ill-health. They need our support, not stigma – https://theconversation.com/more-than-40-of-elite-sport-coaches-we-surveyed-suffered-mental-ill-health-they-need-our-support-not-stigma-188728

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Meg Elkins, Senior Lecturer with School of Economics, Finance and Marketing and Behavioural Business Lab Member, RMIT University

With the world is experiencing inflation levels not seen since the 1980s, central banks are caught between warning of the dangers of an 1970s-style inflationary spiral, and contributing to that spiral by talking about it.

It’s a problem in any part of the economy where expectations shape outcomes.

On one hand, central banks including Australia’s Reserve Bank say they fear the return of “inflation psychology” – in which expectations of high inflation drive high inflation.

The Bank of International Settlements (the central bank for national central banks) warned in its 2022 annual economic report:

We may be reaching a tipping point, beyond which an inflationary psychology
spreads and becomes entrenched. This would mean a major paradigm shift.

Such warnings, known as “open mouth operations”, are part of a central banker’s policy toolkit, the hope being that people will heed the threat and moderate their spending, negating the need for the painfully blunt instrument of hiking interest rates even more.

On the other hand, the very notion of inflationary psychology is bound up in people being emotional, and not necessarily susceptible to “rational” persuasion.

Read more:
1970s-style stagflation now playing on central bankers’ minds

As behavioural economists, we can see the dilemma in warning about inflationary psychology, given the very concept is about self-fulfilling prophecies.

The inflation we are facing is real, caused mainly by supply shortages due to COVID and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It is how we respond to them that either fuels or chokes further inflation.

Cognitive illusions

Behavioural economists know that whereas rising prices needn’t be a problem so long as all prices (and wages) are climbing at the same rate, we notice nominal stated prices much more than we notice real (inflation-adjusted) prices.

In the 1920s, US economist Irving Fisher dubbed this “the money illusion”.

Nobel Prize winners Akerlof and Shiller have demonstrated that the phenomenon is widespread.

Even professional decision makers behave as if nominal prices matter most. Loan contracts, for example, are usually not indexed to inflation, meaning the real value of what’s owed usually shrinks.

Selective perceptions

Focusing on nominal rather than real values gets entangled with selective perception. We focus on what matters most to us, so we mainly consider the prices (and wages) we are familiar with.

This is demonstrated by behavioural experiments showing women are more likely to focus on the price of milk and men on the price of beer and fuel.

Another cognitive bias is the availability heuristic – the mental shortcuts we make to assess the probability of future events.

This phenomenon was first identified by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. People tend to exaggerate the likelihood of events they find easy to imagine – such as being killed by a shark.

So much talk about the threat of inflation, and powerful images of hyperinflation – such as people wheeling wheelbarrows full of cash – can similarly influence people’s expectations.

Inflation psychology missing

So far, there’s not much inflation psychology in Australia.

Typically the Melbourne Institute’s survey of inflation expectations has come up with an annual rate of about 4% at times when actual inflation has been about 2%.

Recently, expectations have climbed with actual inflation to peak at 6.7% when actual inflation was 6.1%.

Since then, in July and August, inflation expectations recorded by the survey have declined, to 6.3% in July and 5.9% in August.

Actual inflation versus expectations

Taken literally, this means Australians expect inflation to fall.

More confidently we can say that consumers’ expectations are in line with reality, rather than above it as has traditionally been the case.

The world would be a much easier place for central banks if people were rational.

They are not, but for the moment (based on what they are saying) they don’t seem to be getting carried away.

Read more:
Australia’s inflation rate is to go monthly. Be careful what you wish for

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Inflationary psychology could make things worse, but for now it’s in check – https://theconversation.com/inflationary-psychology-could-make-things-worse-but-for-now-its-in-check-188723

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

On August 20 1977, 45 years ago, an extraordinary spacecraft left this planet on a journey like no other. Voyager 2 was going to show us, for the first time, what the outer solar system planets looked like close-up. It was like sending a fly to New York City and asking it to report back.

Voyager 1 was launched after Voyager 2, on September 5. Attached to the flank of each Voyager was a Golden Record carrying greetings, sounds, images and music from Earth.

The spacecraft were more or less twins, but they had different trajectories and scientific instruments. While both flew by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 then sped onwards to interstellar space. Voyager 2 tarried to make the only visit ever to the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune.

The many-coloured worlds

Arriving at Uranus in 1986, Voyager 2 mapped pale blue-green clouds and a possible “dark spot”, which was later confirmed by the Hubble Space Telescope. There was an unexpected magnetic field, which dragged a corkscrew trail of particles behind the planet as it rolled in its orbit. Ten new moons were discovered, including the grey, cratered Puck, and two new coal-black rings.

Three years later Voyager 2 reached Neptune and sent home images of teal and cobalt clouds swirled by winds up to 18,000 kilometres per hour. A slate-coloured “great dark spot” indicated a storm the diameter of Earth. The largest moon, Triton, was blushed pink from methane ice and spouted geysers of frozen nitrogen.

No spacecraft has been back since.

Messages to the future

Even more than these glimpses of the far icy planets, what fascinates people about the Voyager mission is the famous Golden Records. A committee led by visionary astronomer Carl Sagan worked for over a year to assemble materials to represent planet Earth. The music garners the most attention as the “mix tape for the universe”, but it’s not the only highlight.

One of the sounds of Earth is the manufacture of stone tools, or “knapping”. This is the most durable technology humans and their ancestors have devised, in use from around 3 million years ago to the present day. For most of human existence, the sound of stone striking stone to detach a sharp-edged cutting flake was heard daily in every community.

On the record, you can hear the thuds of stone against the sound of heartbeats.

In one of the 116 images, a Black scientist in a lab coat bends over a microscope, tiered earrings falling gracefully from her ears. The earrings were the subject of some debate: would a future alien viewer recognise the concept of “jewellery”? It was hoped this image, together with the photomicrograph of cells dividing in image 17, would help viewers figure out that the science of microscopy was known on our planet.

People recorded messages in 55 languages. Some are ancient languages, such as Akkadian and Hittite, not heard on Earth for thousands of years. The most common words used are “greetings”, “peace” and “friend”. The Portuguese greeting, spoken by Janet Sternberg, says simply “Peace and happiness to all”.

The long farewell

Finally, in 2018, Voyager 2 joined Voyager 1 beyond the heliopause, where the solar wind is turned back by winds from interstellar space. Our galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, and Voyager 2 is now just under 18 light-hours away from Earth.

Both spacecraft send reedy signals that wend their way between the planets to the three antennas which are still listening: Tidbinbilla, Goldstone and Madrid.

Before they can truly leave, the Voyagers will have to travel through the Oort Cloud, a vast, dark sphere of icy objects surrounding the solar system, for another 20,000 years.

Slowly, Voyager 2’s systems are being shut down to eke out the power as long as possible. But sometime in the 2030s there will be none left.

Even after Voyager 2 stops transmitting, it won’t be completely dead. The half-life of the plutonium-238 in its nuclear power source is 87.7 years, while that of the the small patch of uranium-238 coating on the Golden Record is 4.5 billion years. Both elements are slowly turning into lead.

The radioactive transmutation of the elements is a kind of reverse alchemy at a cosmic time scale. This process of becoming will not end until there is nothing on Voyager 2 left to be transformed.

Cultural significance

Constant bombardment by dust particles will gradually erode the surfaces of Voyager 2, likely at a higher rate than Voyager 1 because it’s travelling through different regions of interstellar space. However, its Golden Record should be at least partially legible after 5 billion years.

The Earth portrayed on the Golden Records will probably be unrecognisable even 100 years from now. The spacecraft and the records will remain as a fragmentary archaeological record for an unknowable future.

While the Golden Records are endlessly fascinating, the true cultural significance of the Voyagers lies in their location. The spacecraft are boundary markers showing the physical extent of human engagement with the universe.

When the Voyagers cease transmission, it will be like losing a sense. Telescopes can only show us so much: there is no substitute for being there.

Who will follow in their path?

Alice Gorman is a member of the Advisory Council of the Space Industry Association of Australia and Co-Chief Investigator of the International Space Station Archaeological Project.

– ref. After 45 years, the 5-billion-year legacy of the Voyager 2 interstellar probe is just beginning – https://theconversation.com/after-45-years-the-5-billion-year-legacy-of-the-voyager-2-interstellar-probe-is-just-beginning-188077

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

University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Associate Professor Caroline Fisher discuss the week in politics.

They dissect the revelation Scott Morrison secretly had himself sworn into multiple ministries without the knowledge of his cabinet. Where does the affair leave his relationship with colleagues, after frontbencher Karen Andrews called for his resignation from parliament? And what will happen next?

They also talk about the role of Governor-General David Hurley and whether the criticism he’s facing is warranted.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. VIDEO: Morrison, Hurley and all those ministries – https://theconversation.com/video-morrison-hurley-and-all-those-ministries-189044

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole Lee, Professor at the National Drug Research Institute (Melbourne), Curtin University

There’s some pretty bad advice out there for families impacted by alcohol and other drug use. Some of it not only doesn’t work but could actually make things worse.

Most people who use alcohol or other drugs never develop a problem with it, and most people who develop problems recover. If you discover someone in your family is using drugs, don’t panic or jump to conclusions. Getting angry or upset may mean they just hide their drug use.

So what can you do and what should you avoid if you discover a family member has an alcohol or other drug problem?

Read more:
Does Alcoholics Anonymous actually work?

‘Tough love’

“Tough love” is treating someone harshly with the intention of reducing unwanted behaviour. For example, refusing to pick them up from a party if they are drunk, locking them out of the house if they don’t go to rehab, or refusing money for food if they are still using.

The problem is tough love doesn’t work for most people and, worse, it can cause more harm than good.

Sometimes it’s a well-intentioned attempt to set boundaries or protect against perceived “manipulation”. But it is often used out of frustration, anger or desperation, or driven by stigma about alcohol or drug use.

The problem is it is humiliating and demeaning, and can lead to feelings of guilt and shame. It can increase stress and sends the message the family’s love is conditional, which can result in more drug use, not less.

It is sometimes a misguided strategy to help someone to hit “rock bottom” so recovery can begin. But the idea someone needs to hit rock bottom before they will change is a myth.

We know from behavioural psychology that punishment and harsh treatment do not lead to long-term change. Motivation to change comes when the benefits of giving up outweigh the benefits of using alcohol or other drugs.

A great piece of advice comes from one of our colleagues who is a carer of someone with a drug problem and also provides support for other families: do what you would do if drugs were not involved. If your child was struggling with another health issue, like a depression or anxiety, would you withhold money, lock them out of the house or refuse to speak to them if they didn’t want to seek help?

‘Enabling’

Families are sometimes accused of “enabling” drug use if they don’t use the tough love approach. Enabling is behaviour that is seen to protect someone from the consequences of their alcohol and other drug use.

The problem is it’s impossible to know what is helpful and what is enabling until the outcome is known.

Families may draw criticism if they take action that is helpful for them, but that outsiders see as enabling. You might remember the criticism levelled at the father of footballer Ben Cousins when he revealed that he went with his son to buy drugs because he was so worried he would die.

Read more:
Alcohol problems aren’t for life, and AA isn’t the only option. 8 things film and TV get wrong about drug and alcohol treatment

When families are criticised for their attempts to help, it increases stress in the family and can make the situation worse.

Enabling is merely a cliche that doesn’t help families work out what is helpful and unhelpful for them.

Staging an ‘intervention’

The “intervention” is a familiar scene in movies and on TV: concerned family and friends ambush their family member to get them to change.

There is some therapeutic basis to this idea. It was originally designed as a caring conversation within the family, coached by a professional facilitator.

There is some evidence that it increases the likelihood of someone going to treatment, but reduces the likelihood they will stay there and increases likelihood of relapse.

When families stage their own intervention, the likely outcome is shame and embarrassment, and relationships can be damaged.

Read more:
Is there really such a thing as an ‘addictive personality’?

Think about desired outcomes

Families tend to intervene for two main reasons: to help the person using alcohol or other drugs to change their behaviour, or to improve wellbeing for the broader family.

Working out which of these is the priority can help the family get on the same page about the best approach.

It can be helpful to think about harm reduction. All or nothing goals, like complete abstinence, may not be achievable in the short term. So focusing on reducing behaviours that are harmful to the individual or the family might be more feasible. What can the family live with, even if it is not a perfect solution?

Agree on acceptable boundaries

When family members disagree about the best approach it can cause additional conflict and stress in the family. Setting realistic boundaries everyone agrees on and that are easy to maintain means they are more likely to be adhered to.

A good start is to think about boundaries that focus on positive action (like providing food) rather than only thinking about boundaries that focus on negative actions (refusing to provide money) or that only come into play when something goes wrong.

Boundaries that aim to reduce the family’s stress are also helpful, no matter how small. For example, putting the phone on “do not disturb” after a certain time so they can get some sleep.

Improving communication

Families with alcohol or other drug problems do better when general communication in the family improves.

Focusing on reducing conflict and improving communication has benefits for both the family and the person using alcohol or other drugs.

Read more:
Viewpoints: is addiction a disease?

Look after yourself

Discovering drug use in the family can be a confusing and upsetting time. It may also come with additional unexpected worries, like care of grandchildren. As a result, families can experience poorer physical and mental health.

Family members need to look after themselves to be in a good position to provide support for the person using alcohol or other drugs and the rest of the family. It’s important to get enough sleep, eat well, and exercise regularly.

Consider the supports the whole family might need. Being around supportive family and friends can be helpful. Support groups provide help from others going through a similar situation. Families might also need professional support from a family therapist to figure out what is and is not working in their current approach and what they might do differently.

If you are worried about your own or someone else’s alcohol or other drug use, contact the National Alcohol and other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015 for free, confidential advice. Family support is available from a number of organisations including APOD Family Support, Family Drug Support and Family Drug Help in Australia, and Family Drug Support in Aotearoa New Zealand

Nicole Lee works as a consultant in the alcohol and other drug sector and a psychologist in private practice. She has previously been awarded funding by Australian and state governments, NHMRC and other bodies for evaluation and research into alcohol and other drug prevention and treatment.

Paula Ross works as as consultant in the alcohol and other drug sector and as a psychologist in private practice.

– ref. From tough love to interventions, what works when a loved one is struggling with addiction? – https://theconversation.com/from-tough-love-to-interventions-what-works-when-a-loved-one-is-struggling-with-addiction-184138

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoe Goodall, Research Associate, Centre for Urban Transitions, Swinburne University of Technology

The Australian documentary Under Cover, premiering at the Melbourne International Film Festival, presents the voices and faces of older women’s housing insecurity. Many of us would have seen the figures: the number of homeless people aged 55 years or above increased 28% between 2011 and 2016. And single women of that age are the fastest-growing homeless group in Australia.

But knowing the statistics is different from witnessing the reality. In Under Cover, filmmaker Sue Thomson depicts the stories of ten older women who have experienced housing insecurity and homelessness. They live in hostels, community housing, their cars, vans, caravan parks.

All have travelled different routes, but leading to each individual experience is a chain of similar factors: taking time off work to care for children, having little or no superannuation, experiencing relationship breakdown that leaves them without money or assets, eviction. For some, additional factors include family violence and the enduring impacts of colonisation.

Read more:
‘I left with the kids and ended up homeless with them’: the nightmare of housing wait lists for people fleeing domestic violence

These women filled the role in society that women are expected to, caring for husbands, elderly parents and children. As one of them points out:

We’ve all done the right things, you know. We got married, we stayed at home, we’ve raised our children.

They feel shock, grief and frustration that, in return for their service, they have ended up here, beyond the edge of poverty. For many, the routine acts of waking and washing, food preparation, seeking an income, maintaining precious belongings, sleeping and staying safe take place in spaces of transience and mobility.

Many of the women say they never thought they would end up homeless; it was something that happened to other people. They are articulate, reflective, everyday women who were blindsided. As one of them says:

I had never ever considered that I would be homeless. Never.

Indeed, in advocating for political change, the film powerfully presents the idea that homelessness can happen to anyone.

Risks are rising with rental and living costs

The pressures that lead to people becoming homeless are increasing. Rental and living costs are soaring.

Anglicare’s Rental Affordability Snapshot shows rents are more unaffordable than ever before, especially for people on low incomes. Nationally, only 0.7% of listed private rental homes were affordable for a single adult on the aged pension. Only 1.4% were affordable for couples on the aged pension.

An Australian property market geared to make profits, rather than provide housing as a basic human right, is having stark long-term impacts. When the next Census homelessness estimates are released in 2023, it’s likely we will see more older women are at risk of homelessness – and more Australians across all age groups and genders with first-hand experience of not having a home.

Read more:
More affordable housing with less homelessness is possible – if only Australia would learn from Nordic nations

Solutions must include more affordable housing

The film highlights some important programs and organisations that are helping homeless women. But, as Margot Robbie’s narration makes clear, non-government organisations cannot do the work without government support.

Currently available social or affordable housing may be located far from women’s social networks and community. They may be given a stable home but at the cost of their sense of belonging.

Significantly more social and affordable housing is needed. This will ensure people have suitable options and don’t have to move long distances to receive shelter. Temporary housing is also necessary but insufficient.

Recent research also assesses innovative housing models for older people. Suggested solutions include co-operative living and shared-equity schemes. These are consistent with the reported aspirations of older Australians who require safe, secure housing to age well. Options include downsizing or “rightsizing” in later life.

Read more:
What sort of housing do older Australians want and where do they want to live?

Having stable, alternative housing available will help older people who cannot stay in the family home, whether because their relationship breaks down or they never owned property.

More broadly, Australian housing policy needs to understand housing as a human right that is fundamental to people’s wellbeing. Housing should be safeguarded as essential social infrastructure.

Read more:
Is social housing essential infrastructure? How we think about it does matter

Broader social policy changes are essential too

Other measures to prevent older women from becoming homeless will require policy beyond housing: better parental leave schemes, pay equality, domestic violence responses, closing the superannuation gender gap. In short, it depends on overcoming gender inequality on all levels and scales. These are big tasks, but they must be undertaken for a fair and just society.

Under Cover makes it clear we cannot continue the way we are, or these problems will continue through to the next generations. Today’s young women will be tomorrow’s older homeless women, wondering how on Earth they ended up here. As one woman in the film says:

I couldn’t believe this was me. I couldn’t believe after all these years that I would be in this situation.

The need for both gender-focused and age-focused housing solutions is urgent.

People experiencing homelessness are often regarded as invisible, as are older women. Homeless older women may be doubly invisible. But by getting into the specifics of their homelessness, Under Cover brings their experiences into the light.

You can’t make policy about something you can’t (or don’t want to) see. With the federal government’s commitment to national co-ordinated housing policy, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s open discussion of being raised by a single mother in public housing, perhaps there is a fairer Australian housing landscape on the horizon.

A sequel to Under Cover that focuses on “how older women’s housing insecurity and homelessness was solved” would be welcome. In the meantime, government action, supported by research that increases understanding of age, gender and other intertwined vulnerabilities, is badly needed. Also critical are the conversations at kitchen tables, in local neighbourhoods, in workplaces, among friends and in news media that Under Cover will provoke.

Under Cover is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival until August 20 and is streaming at MIFF Play until August 28.

Zoe Goodall has received funding from the Victorian Government and the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) and receives an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Margaret Reynolds receives funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) and Housing for the Aged Action Group (HAAG).

Piret Veeroja receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), Housing for the Aged Action Group (HAAG), Kids Under Cover (KUC) and has previously received funding from Victorian Government.

Wendy Stone receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), Housing for the Aged Action Group (HAAG), Kids Under Cover (KUC) and has previously received research funding from the Victorian Government.

– ref. ‘We’ve all done the right things’: in Under Cover, older women tell their stories of becoming homeless – https://theconversation.com/weve-all-done-the-right-things-in-under-cover-older-women-tell-their-stories-of-becoming-homeless-188356

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Kenny, Professor, Australian Studies Institute, Australian National University

As bad as it is, Scott Morrison’s surreptitious circumvention of Australia’s parliamentary and Cabinet processes might have got worse.

Had the former prime minister been re-elected, it is reasonable to assume he would have continued to mislead his Cabinet, the parliament and the public after amassing multiple reserve powers.

He may even have extended his undeclared reach, further weakening a gullible Cabinet that had all but surrendered its judgment to him since the so-called “miracle” election win of 2019.

Fronting reporters on Wednesday, Morrison provided no substantial acceptance of wrong-doing, no viable pretext for his secrecy. He also did not provide a reason for his wilful debasement of the principle of collective Cabinet decision-making.

Many voters will now be deeply concerned that Morrison was not dissuaded from his dangerous fantasy by the governor-general, who gave these novel arrangements his imprimatur.

The cost of Morrison’s excess and the governor-general’s apparent incuriosity is a sharp decline in public confidence.

Questions must now be asked about the durability of time-honoured Westminster conventions, as conservatism – the most successful political brand in Australia electorally speaking – succumbs to the same radical urges as like-minded parties abroad.

À lire aussi :
Morrison’s multiple portfolios: why the law has nothing to do with it

These questions go to the ease with which Morrison side-stepped usual transparency requirements, which are critical in delimiting executive power.

And they go to the special forms of confidence that bind ministers of the Crown to act honourably. This includes an obligation to resign when that confidence has been compromised.

The case of Resources Minister Keith Pitt highlights this cynical fracture. Pitt’s deliberative ministerial power was superseded by the prime minister, who had secretly acquired the joint commission for his resources portfolio.

This aggressive act amounted to a prime ministerial statement of no-confidence. Ordinarily, that would trigger the minister’s immediate resignation.

It is worth noting that had Pitt then resigned, the whole issue of Morrison’s phantom cabinet would presumably have been exposed and dealt with at the time.

According to former Howard government minister Amanda Vanstone, knowledge of Morrison’s secret commissions would have prompted censure of the prime minister and possible dismissal.

Beyond the public governance failures of this bizarre controversy lie the wan political responses on the Coalition side. These we can view on the one hand as questions of ideology, and on the other as tactical matters. The latter being calculations over how to limit brand damage and avoid a difficult byelection.

Governing is inevitably a mix of these influences. But how they are balanced when fundamental values are at stake provides a moral health check of a government.

Internally, considerations range from the shallow, such as how to avoid giving the new Labor government a political boost, to deeper judgments about whether the Coalition parties should be seen to prioritise public confidence in the Constitution, the Crown and the primacy of Parliament over their own short-term popularity.

So far, former ministers, with the notable exception of Karen Andrews, have been loath to fully condemn Morrison’s behaviour.

Driven by quotidian image considerations, this spectacular misreading exposes a pervasive nihilism gripping the centre-right.

It reveals that mutually observed Westminster norms specifically designed to vouchsafe good-faith governance have become, like the duplicated ministries of Morrison’s phantom Cabinet, mere guidelines to be obeyed only when they do not inhibit the pursuit and retention of power.

For a stream of political thought quick to invoke flag and country, this breezy subjugation of the national interest to selfish political equities represents an obvious contradiction.

Australian conservatives are hardly unique in this regard. Across the democratic West, disregard for long-agreed ethical and procedural standards has become commonplace as hyper-partisanship and populism supplant foundational tenets of conservatism. These include honour, respect, due process and an insistence that social change should only ever be gradual.

Contemporary conservativism is now more clearly defined by vulgar whatever-it-takes rule-breakers such as Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Morrison, than by the principled defenders of sober governing norms such as newly disendorsed United States Republican Senator Liz Cheney and Karen Andrews.

Cheney was junked by her Trump-enthralled GOP this week after taking a leading role in the January 6 insurrection hearings. There she declared:

I say this to my Republican colleagues […] there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonour will remain.

Andrews, as one of the ministers secretly duplicated by Morrison, has so far been the only LNP frontbencher to call on Morrison to quit politics, declaring “the Australian people were betrayed”.

I think the actions that he undertook in swearing himself in to numerous portfolios and not disclosing those to the ministers responsible means that he needs to resign and he needs to leave Parliament.

While Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie has also strongly criticised Morrison’s abuse of Westminster standards, other senior Coalition figures have largely stayed mute or sought to apply narrow binaries to his behaviour.

Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce essentially played down the issue. He told Radio National:

Obviously I don’t agree with the prime minister taking on roles here, there and everywhere, I believe in a cabinet system of government […] but Mr Morrison has not broken any law.

The elevation of Morrison’s former political adviser and one-time chief of staff, Phil Gaetjens, to the role of Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet is a symptom of the tendency to put political considerations above due process.

Morrison’s insistence he acted on advice from his department has to be viewed in this light.

While it is unclear what that departmental advice stated, senior public servants, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirm PM&C’s Governance Division would almost certainly have advised publicising any new ministerial commissions to ensure public awareness and parliamentary accountability.

À lire aussi :
Grattan on Friday: The Scott Morrison horror show has a way to run yet

That this advice was either not given or not taken as authoritative is of concern.

Even before the scandal, The Australian’s Greg Sheridan wrote, in a piece headlined “Liberals have lost the plot amid global crisis of the right”, that it had become difficult to know what the Coalition parties believed.

An admirably direct critic of the conservative tradition from within, Sheridan describes an “intellectual vacuum across the Australian political right”, calling it the “greatest long-term threat to the Libs and the Nats”.

As shocking at Morrison’s behaviour was, the reluctance of the Coalition parties to unequivocally condemn it may inflict even greater long-term damage to the conservative cause.

Mark Kenny ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

– ref. Australian conservatism succumbs to the same radical tendency as like-minded parties abroad – https://theconversation.com/australian-conservatism-succumbs-to-the-same-radical-tendency-as-like-minded-parties-abroad-188816

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Luke Barnes, Lecturer in Physics, Western Sydney University

Astronomers at Western Sydney University have discovered one of the biggest black hole jets in the sky.

Spanning more than a million light years from end to end, the jet shoots away from a black hole with enormous energy, and at almost the speed of light. But in the vast expanses of space between galaxies, it doesn’t always get its own way.

Taking a closer look

At a mere 93 million light-years away, the galaxy NGC2663 is in our neighbourhood, cosmically speaking. If our galaxy were a house, NGC2663 would be a suburb or two away.

Looking at its starlight with an ordinary telescope, we see the familiar oval shape of a “typical” elliptical galaxy, with about ten times as many stars as our own Milky Way.

Typical, that is, until we observed NGC2663 with CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) in Western Australia – a network of 36 linked radio dishes forming a single super-telescope.

The radio waves reveal a jet of matter, shot out of the galaxy by a central black hole. This high-powered stream of material is about 50 times larger than the galaxy: if our eyes could see it in the night sky, it would be bigger than the Moon.

While astronomers have found such jets before, the immense size (more than a million light years across) and relative closeness of NGC2663 make these some of the biggest known jets in the sky.

Read more:
Like a spinning top: wobbling jets from a black hole that’s ‘feeding’ on a companion star

Shock diamonds

So, what did we see, when the precision and power of ASKAP got a “close-up” (astronomically speaking!) view of an extragalactic jet?

This research is led by doctoral student Velibor Velović of Western Sydney University, and has been accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (preprint available here). Our Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU)
survey sees evidence of the matter between galaxies pushing back on the sides of the jet.

This process is analogous to an effect seen in jet engines. As the exhaust plume blasts through the atmosphere, it is pushed from the sides by the ambient pressure. This causes the jet to expand and contract, pulsing as it travels.

As the image below shows, we see regular bright spots in the jet, known as “shock diamonds” because of their shape. As the flow compresses, it glows more brightly.

Biggest one yet

As well as in jet engines, shock diamonds have been seen in smaller, galaxy-sized jets. We’ve seen jets slam into dense clouds of gas, lighting them up as they bore through. But jets being constricted from the sides is a more subtle effect, making it harder to observe.

However, until NGC2663, we’ve not seen this effect on such enormous scales.

This tells us there is enough matter in the intergalactic space around NGC2663 to push against the sides of the jet. In turn, the jet heats and pressurises the matter.

This is a feedback loop: intergalactic matter feeds into a galaxy, galaxy makes black hole, black hole launches jet, jet slows supply of intergalactic matter into galaxies.

These jets affect how gas forms into galaxies as the universe evolves. It’s exciting to see such a direct illustration of this interaction.

The EMU survey, which is also responsible for identifying a new type of mysterious astronomical object called an “Odd Radio Circle”, is continuing to scan the sky. This remarkable radio jet will soon be joined by many more discoveries.

As we do, we’ll build up a better understanding of how black holes intimately shape the galaxies forming around them.

Read more:
Observing the invisible: the long journey to the first image of a black hole

Ray Norris is affiliated with CSIRO, who own and operate the ASKAP telescope.

Luke Barnes, Miroslav Filipovic, and Velibor Velović do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Astronomers have detected one of the biggest black hole jets in the sky – https://theconversation.com/astronomers-have-detected-one-of-the-biggest-black-hole-jets-in-the-sky-188357

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig White, Professor and Head, School of Biological Sciences, Monash University

If you think about “unravelling the mysteries of the universe”, you probably think of physics: astronomers peering through telescopes at distant galaxies, or experimenters smashing particles to smithereens at the Large Hadron Collider.

When biologists try to unravel deep mysteries of life, we too tend to reach for physics. But our new research, published in Science, shows physics may not always have the answers to questions of biology.

For centuries scientists have asked why, kilo for kilo, large animals burn less energy and require less food than small ones. Why does a tiny shrew need to consume as much as three times its body weight in food each day, while an enormous baleen whale can get by on a daily diet of just 5-30% of its body weight in krill?

While previous efforts to explain this relationship have relied on physics and geometry, we believe the real answer is evolutionary. This relationship is what maximises an animal’s ability to produce offspring.

How much do physical constraints shape life?

The earliest explanation for the disproportionate relationship between metabolism and size was proposed nearly 200 years ago.

In 1837, French scientists Pierre Sarrus and Jean-François Rameaux argued energy metabolism should scale with surface area, rather than body mass or volume. This is because metabolism produces heat, and the amount of heat an animal can dissipate depends on its surface area.

In the 185 years since Sarrus and Rameaux’s presentation, numerous alternative explanations for the observed scaling of metabolism have been proposed.

Read more:
‘Life hates surprises’: can an ambitious theory unify biology, neuroscience and psychology?

Arguably the most famous of these was published by US researchers Geoff West, Jim Brown and Brian Enquist in 1997. They proposed a model describing the physical transport of essential materials through networks of branching tubes, like the circulatory system.

They argued their model offers “a theoretical, mechanistic basis for understanding the central role of body size in all aspects of biology”.

These two models are philosophically similar. Like numerous other approaches put forward over the past century, they try to explain biological patterns by invoking physical and geometric constraints.

Evolution finds a way

Living organisms cannot defy the laws of physics. Yet evolution has proven to be remarkably good at finding ways to overcome physical and geometric constraints.

In our new research, we decided to see what happened to the relationship between metabolic rate and size if we ignored physical and geometric constraints like these.

So we developed a mathematical model of how animals use energy over their lifetimes. In our model, animals devote energy to growth early in their lives and then in adulthood devote increasing amounts of energy to reproduction.

We used the model to determine what characteristics of animals result in the greatest amount of reproduction over their lifetimes – after all, from an evolutionary point of view reproduction is the main game.

We found that the animals that are predicted to be most successful at reproducing are those that exhibit precisely the kind of disproportionate scaling of metabolism with size that we see in real life!

This finding suggests disproportionate metabolic scaling is not an inevitable consequence of physical or geometric constraints. Instead, natural selection produces this scaling because it is advantageous for lifetime reproduction.

The unexplored wilderness

In the famous words of Russian-American evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, “nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution”.

Our finding that disproportionate scaling of metabolism can arise even without physical constraints suggests we have been looking in the wrong place for explanations.

Read more:
Explainer: Theory of evolution

Physical constraints may be the principal drivers of biological patterns less often than has been thought. The possibilities available to evolution are broader than we appreciate.

Why have we historically been so willing to invoke physical constraints to explain biology? Perhaps because we are more comfortable in the safe refuge of seemingly universal physical explanations than in the relatively unexplored biological wilderness of evolutionary explanations.

Craig White receives funding from The Australian Research Council.

Dustin Marshall receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Why are bigger animals more energy-efficient? A new answer to a centuries-old biological puzzle – https://theconversation.com/why-are-bigger-animals-more-energy-efficient-a-new-answer-to-a-centuries-old-biological-puzzle-188724

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joo-Cheong Tham, Professor, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

Will climate action undermine Australia’s democracy? This question might not be as outlandish as it seems.

A recent investigation details a campaign by the car industry to have its (low) voluntary standards on fuel efficiency legislated into national standards. This campaign fits into a broader pattern of lobbying by the fossil fuel industry to hinder effective climate action and highlights the importance of democratic integrity in addressing the climate crisis as well as the urgent need for robust regulation of lobbying.

The fossil fuel lobby and climate inaction

University of Melbourne professor Ross Garnaut has observed that “(e)missions-intensive industries have invested heavily to influence climate change policy since the early days of discussion of these issues”.

We see the influence of these investments in various ways:

• the resources industry is by far the biggest donor in Australian politics
• the $22 million advertising campaign by mining companies against the Rudd government’s resource super profits tax was such a success that it’s now become routine for industry groups to threaten a “mining tax style campaign” every time they don’t get their way with government
• fossil fuel industry employees and lobbyists have included former Liberal Party, National Party and ALP ministers.

Read more:
Be worried when fossil fuel lobbyists support current environmental laws

Rise of the ‘greenhouse mafia’

Marian Wilkinson’s book The Carbon Club provides a compelling account of how a network of climate-science sceptics, politicians and business leaders brought about decades of climate inaction in Australia.

Under the Howard government, climate change policy was determined by fossil fuel lobbyists who likened themselves to organised crime through a self-styled label — the greenhouse mafia.

The group has contributed to the outsized role the fossil fuels industry has in steering government policy. Perhaps most importantly, fossil fuel companies have played an instrumental role in ousting two out of the six prime ministers Australia has had since 2007; Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull.

The term, “policy capture” is described by the OECD to mean when public decisions over policies are consistently directed away from the public interest towards a specific interest, leading to inequalities and undermining democratic values, economic growth, and trust in government. The use of the phrase in this context has a certain validity.

The lobbying risks of climate action

Paradoxically, the risks associated with fossil fuel lobbying increase with higher levels of climate action.

Effective climate action will mean increased regulation of fossil fuel industries, such as more stringent emission standards for the largest greenhouse emitters under the ALP’s Powering Australia plan. Under the plan, substantial amounts of public funds will go towards climate action.

As a result, the fossil fuel industries and other sections of the community will naturally seek to influence government climate decisions. That in itself is not undemocratic – fossil fuel industries have a legitimate role in influencing government policy.

However, what is undemocratic is their disproportionate influence and how it is often wielded behind closed doors.

Regulatory failures of federal lobbying system

Lobbying regulation in Australia is particularly scant. It currently takes the form of a public lobbyist register and a code of conduct.

The secrecy and lack of integrity around fossil fuel lobbying stems directly from the shortcomings of federal lobbying regulation. This lack of transparency also includes:

• lobbying coverage that has been confined to commercial lobbyists, who only comprise 20% of the lobbyist population, excluding other “repeat players” such as in-house lobbyists
• Dismal disclosure obligations that require only the name and contact details of the lobbyist and the client they are representing. There is a vacuum of knowledge about when lobbyists are contacting government officials and over what issues.

Enforcing violations is also a huge concern. In 2018, the Commonwealth Auditor-General found the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which oversaw the federal lobbyist register, did not take any action against lobbyists despite identifying at least 11 possible breaches.

Read more:
Politicians must mine the divide between coal lobbies and energy companies

The way forward

Three essential reforms will make federal lobbying regulation more effective, while also assisting with effective climate action.

First, coverage under federal lobbying regulation should extend to both commercial lobbyists and in-house lobbyists. Following the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption’s (ICAC) Operation Eclipse, the NSW government will implement lobbying laws that will regulate these two classes of lobbyists (as is done in Canada and the United States).

Second, there should be greater transparency of lobbying activity by requiring:

• lobbyists to disclose every lobbying contact (such as in Queensland, Canada and Scotland)
• ministers, senior ministerial advisers and senior public servants to provide monthly disclosures of who has contacted them and why. Currently, Queensland discloses ministerial diaries, while NSW will disclose diaries of ministers and MPs
• the establishment of an independent regulator or commissioner to regularly monitor and take action in these matters if needed, such as the NSW government has committed to do.

Safeguarding democracy is imperative in the climate crisis and to the functioning of government overall. Robust lobbying regulation is an essential measure to ensure that all are protected.

Joo-Cheong Tham has received funding from the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption for the discussion paper for Operation Eclipse and is a Director of the Centre for Public Integrity. He has also received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, European Trade Union Institute and International IDEA. and is a national councillor and Victorian division assistant secretary (academic staff)-elect of the National Tertiary Education Union.

Yee-Fui Ng has received funding from the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption for writing the discussion paper for Operation Eclipse.

– ref. How to deal with fossil fuel lobbying and its growing influence in Australian politics – https://theconversation.com/how-to-deal-with-fossil-fuel-lobbying-and-its-growing-influence-in-australian-politics-188515

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dominic O’Sullivan, Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology and Professor of Political Science, Charles Sturt University

Crisis is a word often used in politics and the media – the COVID crisis, the housing crisis, the cost of living crisis, and so on. The term usually refers to single events at odds with common ideas of what’s acceptable, fair or good.

But in New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere, Indigenous policy can be portrayed as a different kind of crisis altogether. Indeed, it can often just seem like one crisis after another, one policy failure after another: poor health, poor education, all kinds of poor statistics. A kind of permanent crisis.

Policy success, on the other hand, often doesn’t fit the crisis narrative: record low Māori unemployment, for instance, or the Māori economy being worth NZ$70 billion and forecast to grow 5% annually.

It may be that crisis makes better headlines. But we also need to ask why, and what the deeper implications might be for Indigenous peoples and policy in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia.

Colonialism as crisis

Last month I published a journal article titled “The crisis of policy failure or the moral crisis of an idea: colonial politics in contemporary Australia and New Zealand”. In it I argue that when public services don’t work well for Indigenous peoples, the explanation does not just come down to isolated examples of policy failure.

The solution is not that governments simply get better at making policy. Instead, colonialism itself is what I call “the moral crisis of an idea”.

Read more:
Indigenous recognition is more than a Voice to Government – it’s a matter of political equality

Earlier this year, former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison said that Indigenous policy usually fails because:

[Governments] perpetuated an ingrained way of thinking, passed down over two centuries and more, and it was the belief that we knew better than our Indigenous peoples. We don’t. We also thought we understood their problems better than they did. We don’t. They live them.

Morrison was describing a problem with the way the system ordinarily works. Yet a crisis is supposed to be something out of the ordinary, something that needs fixing. How, then, do we fix an idea?

Listening, reflection and justification

Colonialism presumes a moral hierarchy of human worth. It presumes Indigenous people shouldn’t have the same influence over public decision making as others (for example, ensuring a hospital or school works in their favour).

Addressing this problem is the point of the Māori Health Authority, established in New Zealand last month, and the Māori Education Strategy released in 2020.

Read more:
Racism, exclusion and tokenism: how Māori and Pacific science graduates are still marginalised at university

The democratic theorist John Dryzek says there is a crisis of communication in modern democracy. This is because people understate the importance of listening, reflection and justification in public decision making.

Colonialism, however, doesn’t require listening, reflection or justification. Its essential idea is that some people just aren’t as entitled as others to a meaningful say in public policy.

Entrenching listening, reflection and justification in the workings of democratic politics would support different and non-colonial aspirations. This is something I have called “sharing the sovereign” in my 2021 book of the same name.

Sharing the sovereign

Sharing the sovereign means recognising many sites of decision-making authority. This is the point of the treaties being considered in Victoria, the Northern Territory and Queensland. It’s also the point of Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Te Tiriti affirmed the Māori right to authority (rangatiratanga) over their own affairs. It also conferred on Māori the rights and privileges of British subjects, which continue to evolve as New Zealand citizenship. This was the right to influence the affairs of the new state – the right to be part of the new state in a meaningful way.

Successive Waitangi Tribunal reports show that crisis in Māori policy occurs when these two simple ideas of independent authority and meaningful participation in the state are absent.

In Australia, the Victorian Treaty Assembly says: “Treaty is a chance to address [the] future together as equals”. The idea of an Indigenous voice to parliament, which the new Australian government is supporting, is also a step towards sharing the sovereign among all citizens.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, sharing the sovereign would mean the Crown is not, in the words of the first Maori judge of the Supreme Court, Justice Joe Williams, “Pakeha, English-speaking, and distinct from Māori”.

Political equality then becomes possible because the sovereign is not an ethnically exclusive entity. It’s not an all-powerful authority over which Indigenous people should not expect any real influence.

Read more:
Can colonialism be reversed? The UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provides some answers

Colonialism under permanent scrutiny

Equality through inclusivity is fundamentally different from colonialism and its inherent moral crisis. Equality and inclusivity make different assumptions about what the state is and to whom it belongs.

However, normalising public institutions to work for Indigenous peoples as well as they work for anyone else is still a contested idea. In 2019, for example, the New Zealand cabinet instructed public servants on the questions they should consider when advising ministers on Treaty/Tiriti policy.

On one hand, cabinet affirmed Māori influence in the policy process. On the other, it didn’t consider the possibility that governments might sometimes stand aside entirely in the making of effective and fair public policy. So, cabinet didn’t require advisers to ask questions such as:

• Why is the government presuming to make this decision?

• And why does the decision not belong (partly or entirely) to the sphere of tino rangatiratanga (self-determination, sovereignty)?

Asking these kinds of questions involves sharing the sovereign. They presume listening, reflection and justification to put colonialism, as the moral crisis of an idea, under permanent scrutiny.

Dominic O’Sullivan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Colonial ideas have kept NZ and Australia in a rut of policy failure. We need policy by Indigenous people, for the people – https://theconversation.com/colonial-ideas-have-kept-nz-and-australia-in-a-rut-of-policy-failure-we-need-policy-by-indigenous-people-for-the-people-188583